by Amy Lane
“You?” he mouthed, and Angel nodded, not sure if it was possible to feel heat prickling up and down his skin. He may have had a certain way with electronics and phone messages, but he really didn’t have a corporeal body.
Still, Tucker kept that sweet smile, and Angel fought the temptation to hold his incorporeal hand to his incorporeal face to check.
“Thank you,” Tucker said. The naked gratitude on his face did something fierce and unprecedented to the center of Angel’s being, where humans maintained the heart sat, regulating emotion. The twisting, swelling sensation where Angel’s chest would have been, had he had a corporeal form, was both unpleasant and exhilarating, and it shook him to the marrow of his invisible bones. As he watched Tucker walk down to take the crate of groceries and sandwiches from the delivery boy, he felt the slightest flicker in the projection he’d chosen to show Tucker for their acquaintance, and he thought frantically, trying to figure out what he’d changed.
Tucker was smiling to himself as he walked back up the porch steps, and he looked at Angel to share the smile and stopped abruptly.
“Man, that is some shirt!”
Angel looked down, and in place of the plain white T-shirt—which, it had seemed, every human had been comfortable in for at least the last fifty years—he was wearing a button-front Hawaiian shirt that looked like the victim of a tie-dye grenade.
“Oh my God,” he said, heedless of the blasphemy. “What in the—”
“You got puked on by a rainbow!” Tucker chortled, his good will apparently easy to earn with food and bright colors. “Dang, ghost guy, I don’t know what made that happen, but if you keep doing stuff like that, you might be useful to have around after all.”
“Useful?” Angel sputtered, embarrassed. “Useful? Do you have any idea who I am?”
“No,” Tucker said. He set the groceries down on the porch and reached into his pocket. “Yes! I knew I had the key.” He put his hand on the doorknob to unlock Daisy Place and let out a low moan.
“Oh hells!” Angel muttered. “Tucker, let go—”
“Stop.” Tucker fell to his knees, his hand still locked around the handle. “Oh God, make it stop.”
Dammit! All those spirits, all of that cold energy locked in the house for weeks. Of course the cold iron of the doorknob would be where that energy was stored. Oh Jesus. Poor Tucker. He convulsed, moaning, his hand locked on the doorknob like it contained an electric current.
He couldn’t let go, and his deathlock on the doorknob was hurting him.
Angel needed to make it stop. Oh, Angel hated to do this. Ruth hadn’t talked to him for a week the first time he’d done it to her.
“I’m sorry, Tucker,” he murmured, hoping Tucker would forgive him, and then placed his hands over Tucker’s and pushed until the cold iron of the doorknob burned against his palms. Tucker groaned and crumpled to the porch, sobbing.
“What in the hell?”
Angel sighed and sat cross-legged, running phantom fingers through Tucker’s hair, watching as the strands were disturbed by the breeze of his movements.
“That’s what I was going to tell you,” he said in the silence that followed. “You need me. I’m your contact for the things in this place—sort of a psychic filter, really. There are too many souls here in Daisy Place, their stories locked inside by silence. Once they tell you their stories, they’re free to move on. It’s… well, your aunt called it a catharsis exorcism. You’re an empath, right?”
Tucker grunted, still shaking in pain. “Yes, I’ve been cursed by the fucking karma gods. What do they want now?”
Angel didn’t know how to answer that. “Ghosts speak to you, right?”
“Sometimes. Usually, it’s… something else,” Tucker muttered. “But yeah, I see ghosts all the time. They’re not usually that talkative.” He gave Angel a sour look before closing his eyes again. “With one exception.”
Angel sighed because, while he didn’t remember the details, he assumed this was how he’d come to be trapped here himself. “This entire house is the exception,” he said. “The ghosts here are trapped—they need to talk. This house was built on a foundation of iron.” How did one explain supernatural metallurgical alchemy to a man who was barely conscious? “And there’s an iron track that circles the entire property, with just enough gold, silver, platinum, and lead mixed in. It attracts souls—some who died here, some who just stayed here, and some who….” He thought about all the things he couldn’t remember about himself. “Some who wander in. They get stuck here in the silence of all the metals. They can’t go up or down by themselves. It’s like, all the metal here, it freezes them in place. So they need an empath, someone with abilities, to see their stories, give them just enough humanity to set them free.”
Tucker groaned, rubbing his face. “You need someone to make them human by telling their stories?” he asked, his voice clogging.
“Otherwise they’re trapped,” Angel tried to explain. This was a terrible burden—he knew it. He’d known it when he’d presented it to a teenage Ruth. Explaining it to Tucker, a grown man, should have been easier, but he was assailed by the vulnerability he’d sensed underneath Tucker’s prickly exterior.
The bitterness was apparently hard-earned.
“Isn’t it enough?” Tucker snarled. “Isn’t what I do enough? Do the gods really have to fuck with me this badly?”
“Why?” Angel asked, confused. “What else do you do?”
Tucker struggled to sit up and wiped his face with his palm. “Nothing. Not a damned thing. Don’t mind me. I get tired of fucking my way through life. What’s your job in all of this?”
“I’m a witness, mostly,” Angel said. “It’s like the spirits need someone to live their catharsis moments, and someone to see what hurt them and give them absolution.” Angel’s one clear memory after his arrival at Daisy Place was of Ruth touching an old coin she’d found in an empty room. He’d been there to see her live through the guilt of a businessman not giving the quarter to someone who’d been desperately hungry. She’d been shaken, sobbing with the intensity of the sadness, and Angel had felt the freedom of the soul released. But in the years that followed, they’d realized that wasn’t Angel’s only function.
“I’m also a… filter,” Angel simplified. “I keep… well, if you’d have let me touch the doorknob first, I would have bled some of the worst of that away.” He grimaced. “Ruth actually kept gloves nearby at all times, and I’d sort of give her a priority list of what to look at that wouldn’t hurt her, or when she’d have to use the gloves.”
Tucker nodded, looking numb, like he had nowhere to go with that information. “There’s milk in that box,” he said after a moment. “We should put it in the fridge.”
And Angel really had to admire him then, because the man hauled himself onto unsteady feet and used his T-shirt to grab the doorknob while he unlocked the door. He propped the solid slab of oak open for a moment, and Angel sensed it first.
“Get back!” he ordered, and Tucker must have been far more sensitive than his great aunt because he was already in motion, sidestepping so he was out of the doorway before the massive rush of psychic energy left him a sobbing, quivering mass of pain on the porch again.
“And that was?” he asked through gritted teeth once the last of the energy trickled out.
Angel shrugged, feeling sheepish and defensive. “Well, the entire property is usually their playground. The real estate agent locked up the house, and they were sort of confined inside.”
Tucker rolled his eyes as though bored, then stuck his head in the door. “It is thirty degrees colder in here than it is outside,” he announced as he returned for the crate of groceries. “Please, please tell me that’s a perk.”
Angel brightened. “Actually, yes. It’s hellish in the winter, though, but most of the time, the house is just naturally cold.”
“I shall learn to knit,” Tucker said grandly, and then he swept into his inheritance like it hadn’t just tr
ied to kill him.
Twice.
TUCKER SEEMED to be in a better mood after the sandwiches—both of which he’d eaten in quick succession.
“Have you been lumberjacking?” Angel asked in amazement. “Running? Doing push-ups all morning?”
“Nope, nope, and nope,” Tucker replied, wiping his mouth delicately with a paper napkin and getting rid of the mayo on his upper lip. Then yawning. “It’s been a high-energy day, though. And I metabolize everything faster when I’m working.”
“Working?”
“That little thing I did where I passed out and almost wet my pants—do you think that just happens?”
Angel gaped at him. He seemed to remember Ruth having a healthy appetite, but nothing like this.
Tucker rolled his eyes and kept on eating. “So,” he said at last, delicately licking his fingers and then wiping them on a napkin. “This is the catch, right?”
“The catch?”
“Free room, free board, Aunt Ruth’s inheritance—I just have to live here for the rest of my life and touch shit and faint?”
“You have to tell their stories,” Angel said firmly. “Even if it’s just to me.” He shrugged. “And since you’re an empath, I see them when you touch objects or intercept ghosts, so ‘telling me’ is more a matter of living them yourself.”
Tucker looked at him skeptically. “So given that, it’s always ‘just to you’?”
And this was the awkward part. “Uh, no. Some of the more recent ones, if there’s a living participant or a descendant or—”
“So one touch, one ghost?” Tucker’s glance took in the entirety of the house and grounds. “Because that seems easy enough. I know this place was a hotel for quite some time, but Ruth should have taken care of them all.”
Angel blew out a breath. “Well, it’s more complicated than that. You have to… to read their entire story. Sometimes the thing that got them stuck here wasn’t in just one coin or one brush up against a doorknob, or even one visit. Ruth once had to tell the story of secret lovers who met here at least ten times in the course of their life. It’s detective work, really.”
Tucker groaned for a moment and buried his face in his hands. “You know, there’s a fairy hill about fifteen minutes away. Even the humans have to know it’s there. Wouldn’t they have an empath you could use?”
Angel took a deep breath in spite of his incorporeal form. “We don’t talk about that,” he said with dignity. “Ever.”
Tucker peeked through his fingers. “That’s… uh, absolute.”
But Angel dug in his heels. “Please, don’t mention them. They’re not even supposed to exist.” Angel had no idea where this knowledge came from, but it seemed certain, like something he’d known from the beginning of his existence.
Whenever that had been.
Tucker’s bitter laugh rattled through the kitchen. “Look—from what I’ve seen, those folks don’t give a shit if they’re supposed to exist or not. They’re sort of here. I mean, right here.”
Oh no—Angel was not about to let himself be distracted. “Even if they did exist,” he said, throwing arrogance around his shoulders like a cape, “they can’t come here. This place has cold iron, pure silver, and soft gold in its foundation. That pretty much repels any of the, uh… well, the people we don’t talk about and pretend don’t exist.”
“Oh.” Tucker’s shoulders slumped. “That’s too bad. I saw a lot of them in Sacramento. They were like ghosts—they were everywhere. They were nice people. I liked the werecreatures especially.”
“I told you,” Angel snapped, “they don’t exist!”
“Fine! Fine! They don’t exist.” Tucker huffed and stood up to put the groceries away. “And thank you, by the way, for the groceries, and for keeping the electricity on. Was that you?”
Angel nodded, relieved. Apparently Tucker’s temper didn’t last long. “I’m afraid I couldn’t keep the dust out,” he said apologetically. “But I’m rather good with electronics.” Angel gave his best, most winning smile, because Tucker still seemed irritated about the fairy hill, which absolutely did not exist. “I did have a cleaning service come in and clean up the old—Ruth’s bedroom, and the guest room next to it.”
“And whatever the hell that was didn’t knock them on their asses?” he asked. It was true—he did have a right to be frustrated.
“They came in through the side door. That one there.” Angel gestured. “It was added when Ruth updated the kitchen, so most of the ghosts don’t use it. They prefer the french doors to the back porch or the front door.” Angel shrugged. “That’s one of the rules of ghosts, I guess—”
“They respect thresholds,” Tucker said. “Yes, I know. I got my college education in folklore, religions, and old languages.”
“There’s a degree for that?” Angel asked, eyes wide because that could mean his next hunt for an empath might not be nearly so desperate.
“There is now that I’ve graduated,” Tucker said grimly. “So where do I stay?”
“Well, like I said, I had two rooms cleared out—your aunt Ruth’s and her live-in nurse’s. Do you have a preference?”
Tucker stared at him blankly, closing the refrigerator behind him. “Preferably a place where nobody I know has died.”
An odd sort of shame swept him, and Angel had to fight to keep his expression calm. He was asking this man to sacrifice his future for this house, and he could offer him no suitable place to live. “I’m sorry, Tucker. Like you said, this place started as a hotel—one of the few in this relatively uninhabited place for over one hundred years. It only closed down when your aunt was a very young girl. There’s a lot of history here. Someone has died in pretty much every room of the house.” He gave a sheepish smile. “Usually more than one someone. And sometimes it’s not just dying that keeps spirits here. If something life-changing happened here—heartbreak or falling in love or losing a loved one—that soul will stick around too. But your aunt was the only person who died in her room for a good seventy-five years.”
“Ooookay? So I can face the psychic residue of total strangers or the psychic residue of a poor woman who was lonely and bitter and pissed off that she was locked up in this mausoleum with no company and no help. Which one ever shall I choose?”
Ouch. “How do you know she was lonely and bitter and pissed off?” Angel asked plaintively. He liked to think they’d achieved a certain rapport in the later years, a certain job satisfaction, as it were. He’d certainly missed her when she’d passed. He’d even mourned her passing, although he seemed to exist with the certainty that she was much happier now.
“Because I’m lonely, bitter, and pissed off already,” Tucker snapped. “And I just got here.”
“Well, not too lonely,” Angel sneered, wishing he could get that vision of Tucker, sleepy and sex-sated, out of his mind, but it kept playing back on a loop. There was a certain… touchability to Tucker’s body, although Angel had no memories of ever being able to touch.
Tucker leveled a flat gaze at him. “You go ahead and think that’s what you saw,” he said, no inflection in his voice whatsoever. “In the meantime, show me to my room. I’ll take the one without Aunt Ruth, thank you very much.”
“Of course,” Angel mumbled, feeling shamed for no good reason at all.
Tucker grunted. “Do you have a name?” he asked after a moment.
“Angel,” he said, brightening. “That… that is my name.” Because that’s what Ruth had called him, right?
“You don’t sound too sure,” Tucker said suspiciously, and Angel fought the urge to just disappear.
“Your aunt called me Angel for fifty years,” he said with dignity. “You may call me Angel too.”
Tucker grunted. “Of course,” he muttered, and Angel had to fight the impulse to thunk his head against a wall. For one thing, his head would probably go through the wall again, and Tucker had made it clear he’d had enough of that.
Don’t Touch That, Dammit!
T
UCKER WAS exhausted.
Sex for epiphanies usually did that to him—it was one of the reasons he’d been so dependent on his aunt Ruth’s generosity and his parents’ inheritance. Besides never knowing when he’d have to duck out on work, there was the fact that his sex life would literally kill him if he didn’t take a day to rest.
Between that and the damned doorknob, he felt like he’d dragged his ass after his annoyingly obtuse guide through at least three miles of dark, psychically burdened tunnels in a tour of the old hotel. Finally they ended up back near the kitchen in order to find the one room that was not filigreed, curlicued, paisleyed, or cabbage-rosed to goddamned death.
“What?” Tucker asked grumpily, taking in the plain twin bed with a wooden frame, a single blanket, and hospital-white bedsheets. “Are these the maid’s quarters or something?”
“The live-in nurse’s,” Angel said, apparently not getting the irony. “Ruth had cleansed the entire room the year before, so she stripped it down and ordered the furniture. The nurse cleaned out everything before she left, and she seemed like a happy girl….”
Tucker set his suitcases down, ran his fingers over the top of the clothes bureau, and closed his eyes. “She’s off to get married,” he said, smiling because weddings still made him happy. “And she loved Aunt Ruth, even if she thought the old bat was looney tunes.” He grimaced. “Abi the nurse’s words, not mine. But yeah. She was innocuous enough. I’ll be fine here.” Being an empath had its uses sometimes—getting a reading like that was one of them.
The room really was stripped down—the wallpaper had been removed and wood paneling installed, and the floor had been sanded to boards and then stained. Plain wood, spartan and unfettered with tragedy.