“Yes, actually. You don’t sound like you’re talking through cotton gauze left over from a dental procedure.”
Some people just don’t appreciate the hands-free experience. “Can you cover my first tour?”
“Woof. Woof.” She paused for dramatic effect. “Hear that? That’s the sound of my dogs barking.”
Walking an average of ten miles on a good night was enough to make anyone’s feet howl.
“How about this? Swing the tour by the house.” I studied the sigil burnt into my skin, twitchy to get moving. “Do that, and I’ll guarantee you get tipped like a cow tonight.”
“Not sure what that means, but okay.” Glee rang through the line. “I’m in.”
Woolworth House wasn’t part of any regular tour by design. Exclusivity increased the old house’s cachet. Once or twice, when money got tighter than my loaner corset, I allowed the supernaturally devout to pay me obscene amounts of cash to sleep in one of my spare bedrooms. I did nothing to enhance the experience, but a lucky few had encountered Woolly’s sense of humor, and that was enough to ignite fervor among the masses.
And more than enough to label me as a pariah among my own kind. Not that I hadn’t already been branded.
Liar. Thief. Murderer.
“Grier?”
Closing my eyes, I sucked in a long breath that whistled past my front teeth, then I let it out slowly.
“Still here.” I padded across the front yard barefoot, the plush lawn tickling the soles of my feet. The low wrought iron gate leading into the backyard opened under my hand, and I followed the flagstone path under four connected archways dripping with fragrant jasmine blossoms and lush purple wisteria clusters. On the other end sat the carriage house, a scaled-down replica of the main house. “Buy me three hours, and I’ll take your last tour.”
“Done deal.” A rowdy cheer rose in the background. “Oh. Gotta run. My victims have arrived.”
Unlike the personable main house, the carriage house was simply an outbuilding that had once been responsible for storing horse-drawn carriages and tack. Maud had converted the wide-open space into a two-bedroom, two-bath guesthouse, but that had been a lifetime ago.
Not once during the three weeks since my return had I stepped foot out there. Truth be told, I didn’t want to be standing here right now. But I didn’t have a choice. Not while my palm throbbed with the reminder of an old promise.
All the what-might-have-beens gathered on the fringes of my memory, tightening my throat until a ragged cough sounding too close to a sob broke free. I blamed the dust and choked down the burning ache before it consumed me, fisted my hand and let the burnt flesh sharpen my focus.
The overstuffed couches and reclaimed wood tables had been pushed against the walls to make room for thirteen oak and iron steamer trunks teeming with necromantic paraphernalia. Stacked in rows three high and four wide, they dominated the hand-braided rag rug in the center of the room. Each must have weighed a hundred pounds or more. Only lucky thirteen, the runt of the litter, sat all alone.
Boaz had done this for me, packed up all Maud’s things and stashed them out here after…
After it all went so very wrong.
Once I could breathe again, I extended my burnt palm toward the stacks, and, like a dowser in search of precious water, followed the persistent tug of magic to its source, tensing when the faint energy ebbing above that final trunk nipped at my fingertips.
“Here goes nothing.”
After crossing to the nearest window, I rose on my tiptoes and smoothed my fingers along the top of the frame until they brushed against lukewarm metal. I palmed the magicked skeleton key, right where Amelie had promised it would be, fit its teeth into the mouth of the lock, and twisted until the latch sprang free. I had to throw my shoulder into forcing up the cumbersome lid, and it yawned open on a breath perfumed with rosewater and thyme. Scents that still haunted Woolworth House.
Maud.
The trunk held one item that could be seen with the naked eye, an old-fashioned doctor’s bag the color of midnight and filled with things even darker. Vials clinked within when I hauled it out onto the rug. That was the easy part. The trunk’s lid refused to shut until I sat on it, and the lock fought me for possession of the key until I pricked my fingertip and let it taste me. Satisfied with a few drops, it twisted itself then fell out onto my palm. The bloodthirsty scrap of brass had been forged to obey Maud, but it tolerated me, so there was no point in hiding what no one else could use. But I did anyway. This time in a better place than above the window.
I doubted anyone could breach the wards surrounding Woolworth House, but the carriage house and the garage weren’t as well fortified. Since I lacked the power for composing new sigils, the best I could do was direct the existing ones into a quicker tempo, more allegro than adagio.
The leather bag creaked when I gripped its carved-bone handle with bloodless fingers, its weight both a comfort and a painful reminder that Maud would never restock the depleted supplies within again. I exited the carriage house and gardens before the tears blurring my vision spilled over my cheeks. I hadn’t cried since the night the door clanged shut on my cell, and I wasn’t going to start now.
Retracing my steps up the stone path, I cut across the wide lawn in the opposite direction, powering down my phone so Amelie couldn’t have second thoughts. I also didn’t want the neighbors, her parents, to hear my ringtone and come investigate. The last thing I needed was to add more charges to an already robust arrest record.
Palm extended like a compass needle pointing true north, a pulse of magic guided me across the property line I shared with the Pritchard family. Elaborate flowerbeds created a maze behind their modest house, and I lost myself in its twists until my feet planted themselves at the edge of a bed teeming with drowsy-headed begonias. I knelt on the soft mulch, and dewdrops burst under my weight, soaking my jeans.
Spring had arrived a week ago, tossing clouds of yellow pollen like confetti at its own welcome back party, but the night air still held a bite even if the daytime temps caused me to break a sweat.
“I can do this,” I murmured, placing the bag next to me. “Just like riding a bike.”
Chunks of white gravel borrowed from the driveway formed a rectangular border the size of a shoebox on the mulch. I gathered each one and mounded them near my ankle. A fist-sized, black river rock crowned the design. Written in blue sidewalk chalk on the makeshift tombstone was the word Twitter. Cute name for a parakeet. Not terribly original, but not bad for the social-media-aware seven-year-old who had adopted Keet after my incarceration.
Back when the deceased had been mine, Maud had named him Keet Richards. I was five when she became my legal guardian, and I’m embarrassed to admit how long it took me to unravel the pun. I might still be clueless about Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones fame had I not stumbled across her vinyl collection while searching for monkey bones in the attic one summer.
Holding my breath, I plunged my hands into the rich soil. The soggy edges of a buried shoebox stood up to my fondling despite the dampness from this evening’s thunderstorms. It helped that the deceased hadn’t been buried long. A half hour at most. Longer than that and Mrs. Pritchard would have had a coronary by now considering how her youngest son had rezoned her bed full of prize-winning perennials as a pet cemetery.