Bright spots flickered in my vision, stars filling my eyes, blinding me with their proximity. “Heart attack.”
“Heart attacks are clean, quiet affairs. My grandfather died from one after eating Thanksgiving dinner four years ago. Everyone thought he was asleep until he didn’t get out of his chair for pie.”
A hazy swirl of memory clouded my thoughts.
He has a new girlfriend. His third one this week. Just as mundane as all the rest.
Why not me? Why won’t he ask me? I would say yes. He knows I would say yes. Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe I should play hard to get. Maybe then he would see we were meant to…
The carpet squishes under my feet, and cold slime seeps between my toes. I shiver, confused, my anger at Boaz forgotten. The smell hits me then, copper and rose water and thyme.
Maud.
“Ms. Woolworth?” Russo palmed my left shoulder with enough crushing force to keep me from sliding off Jolene onto the pavement. “You’re in no shape to drive.” She turned all solicitous. “You can sit in my car until you get your head on straight.”
“No.” I tried wetting my lips, but my tongue was too thick and too dry. “I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine.” Her right hand locked around my forearm. “You’re white as a sheet.”
The panicked bird trapped in my chest smashed its skull against the bars of its cage. “Let me go.”
“I only want to talk,” she soothed, but that hunger for truth lingered around her mouth.
Made claustrophobic by the pinch of her steely fingers, I flowed into a move Taz had shown me. Turning my palm over so it faced me, I made a fist as I brought my arm up, almost like I wanted to tap myself on the shoulder, then struck high with my elbow. Her hold broke, and she stepped back. “Am I under arrest?”
Her eyes narrowed, reassessing me. “No.”
“Then I’m going home.”
I didn’t wait for permission. I cranked Jolene and blazed a path for Woolly.
Jittery after my confrontation with Russo, I stashed Jolene in the garage and locked it for the day. I was too exhausted to search for tools, and I wasn’t convinced I’d need them after tonight. As I trudged across the yard, I questioned the bright idea to join a demo team. The whole reason I had wanted to stay employed in the human world was to keep my feet on the ground, and they were certainly dragging now. But working for Cricket had set me in Russo’s path, and that wasn’t a place I wanted to be.
The more aches presented themselves, the less motivated I became to return to the Cora Ann.
At least until I recalled the pain etching Marit’s face. The poltergeist had to be handled. Cricket might think haunted cruises were a great idea, and I had to agree there, but people wouldn’t pay to get maimed. She would fail in this venture unless someone knocked Timmy down a few notches before some unlucky human lost their life.
With that cheerful thought in mind, I shoved through the garden gate, walked up to the carriage house and knocked on the door. Linus answered after a small pause wearing a gray dress shirt held closed by a single button at his navel. Hints of dark ink and pale skin drew my eye before he gathered the halves of his shirt in a tight fist. A mechanical buzzing filled my ears, and an antiseptic scent made the air taste stringent.
“Am I interrupting?” I kept my eyes glued to his face.
“No.” He stepped back and gestured me in. “I was just thinking about you, actually.”
More like he had been pondering new tortures to inflict upon me. “Oh?”
Papers scattered across the kitchen table, each covered in ornate sigils. A few of the designs niggled at forgotten memories, but all of them were lovely. Linus claimed his work was standardized. From where I stood, it looked like I wasn’t the only one who had trouble recognizing their own talent for flourish.
“Tell me you weren’t holed up designing pop quizzes,” I pleaded. “Is one on the agenda for tomorrow?”
“Again,” he said on a soft laugh, “they wouldn’t be pop quizzes if I warned you about them.”
“Right.” I shook my head. “It’s been a long night.”
“You’re not dressed for work.” He noted my clothes, my mussed hair. “Where did you go?” The final detail, the dried blood on my hands, earned me an arched eyebrow. “What happened?”
I weighed his reaction and determined it to be genuine. “You mean Cletus didn’t tell you?”
“I had plans tonight.” His gaze dipped to his ink-stained fingers. “I set the wraith to follow you but gave explicit instructions not to interfere unless you were in danger.”
Between one blink and the next, the wraith clouded his eyes, an alien sentience that made him appear timeless, ageless, immortal. His forehead wrinkled into neat rows, and he nodded to himself a few times as though listening to a conversation beyond my hearing. All the while, his midnight gaze never left mine.
Funny how my hands hadn’t itched until he mentioned them. Now the skin pulled beneath the dried blood, and I wanted nothing more than to scrub away the reminder of what happened to Marit. About the time I decided I had overstayed my welcome, his vision cleared, and he was simply Linus once more.
“You boarded a riverboat,” he said, confirming my theory he’d been communing with Cletus. “The wraith couldn’t follow.”
“The river.” Water disrupted magic, and moving water negated its power entirely. Not all supernatural creatures could cross even stagnant water. Others shied from currents and still more avoided oceans and their salt. I hadn’t, until this moment, realized wraiths were averse, but the current was strong, and the Atlantic Ocean was eighteen miles away. “I didn’t give it a second thought.”
He scratched his thumbnail on his shirt button. “What were you doing on the Cora Ann?”
“First things first.” I presented my hands. “Blood doesn’t bother me, obviously, but this belongs to a friend.” Or someone who had, until the lights dimmed, the potential of becoming one. “Do you mind if I use your sink?”
The absence of potential in human blood was unsettling. Marit’s coated my hands, about as magic as red paint.
“Help yourself.” He gestured toward the kitchen and followed me in there. “Will you tell me what happened?”
“Have you heard about the Cora Ann haunting?” I cranked the water up hot and poured soap, some fancy brand he’d bought that might as well have been named Cha-Ching, in my palm and started scrubbing. “Apparently it’s been all over the news.”
“I don’t watch television.” He took out his phone and performed a quick search. “Ah. I see. This Cricket person you work for purchased shares in the company?”
“More like she’s bought the right to use the Cora Ann at night for haunted cruises. She doesn’t care about the other boats. If things go well, she might mix it up to include some of the daytime history tours we do too.”
“The injured woman was human?”
“Yes.” I did a double take before thinking through how much the wraith must have seen from its spot on the docks. “The owner’s daughter. I was assigned to help her in the dining room, where the most activity has been logged. Marit told me the ghost boy never bothered her, so my presence must have agitated the spirit.”
“Poltergeist,” he murmured. “It’s escalated to causing physical harm.”
Ever the teacher, he made the correction automatically. It had been a slip of the tongue on my part, but I didn’t want him thinking I was making excuses. Plus, poltergeist was a mouthful. Odds were good I would keep calling him ghost boy regardless of his actual state of existence.
“Will the Society get involved?” He would know better than I. “Their policy is usually to sit back and let these things resolve themselves, but it’s an aggressive haunting. People are getting hurt.”
“I’m not sure.” His lips pulled to one side in the beginnings of a sly grin. “I can call Mother if you’d like.”
I failed to conceal my grimace before it registered, and it amused him all the more. “Sorry.”