PRICED TO SELL
The only house on the street without a sign in front of it was mine.
“Oh, how nice,” I said. “We’ll have new neighbors.” I didn’t mention out loud my next thought, which was that I hoped I wouldn’t have to mediate any of the non-compliant deceased relatives those new neighbors might bring along. This was always a problem. “Hang on, let me try these.”
I pulled off my second-best pair of boots and tugged on the new ones. They fit perfectly, and of course looked great. The heel was sexily stacked and gave me a lot of height, while at the same time being easy to walk on. When I got out of the car and stood up, my eyes were almost level with Jesse’s.
“Ah,” he said with the lopsided grin. “Now I remember why you liked them so much.”
“Right?” I didn’t have to stand on tiptoe to kiss him on the lips, only tilt my head. His mouth tasted of fresh mint. Whatever he’d been doing since he’d been released from jail, he’d cleaned up nicely. I took him by the hand. “Thank you. Now let’s go see where we’re going to raise our own demon spawn.”
treinta y seis
It smelled the same. A combination of old wood and the faint scent of something CeeCee had always referred to as “books.”
“You’re crazy,” I’d told her the first time she’d said it. “We have books, but not that many.”
“No,” she’d insisted. “Your house smells great. Just like old books, in a library.”
I hadn’t wanted to tell her that the odor she was mistaking for books was actually old souls. There are always a few of them roaming the halls of older buildings, especially libraries. The supernatural don’t have an unpleasant odor. If you can smell them at all—and you mostly can’t, unless you’re extremely perceptive, like CeeCee—it really is remarkably (and comfortingly, if you’re a reader) like old books, or vanilla.
Instead I’d said to her, “I think the word you’re looking for is mildew. The source of it can be traced to Brad’s feet.”
When I flung open the front door to 99 Pine Crest Road, I was shocked to be hit in the face with the exact same odor—not of Brad, but of Jesse, before I returned his soul to his body.
I glanced back at him in surprise, speechless.
“What?” he asked. He couldn’t smell it, of course. You can’t smell yourself. Or the way you smelled back when you were a ghost, anyway.
“Nothing,” I said.
It was irritating how right Paul had been. And also how bloodthirsty. Imagine if he’d achieved his goal, and torn the place down. What would have happened to Jesse? What would have happened to me? To the girls? To everyone I knew and loved?
I shuddered, shoving the thought resolutely away. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that I’d won.
It was startling to see the walls looking so empty without the framed photos that had always hung there, of my mom and Andy on their wedding day, and my stepbrothers and me at various celebrations; the windows so naked without curtains or shades; the rooms so bare of furniture; the wooden floors so polished (they’d always been scuffed when we’d lived there, thanks to my stepbrothers’ skateboards and Max’s claws).
The realty company that had staged the home for my mom and Andy while they’d been trying to sell it had changed nothing structurally. It was a house that had been built in the mid-1800s, after all, back when they’d known how to make things that lasted. Life on the frontier had been fraught with very different perils than life in the twenty-first century.
“Look,” I said, touching the single defect in the molding in one wall of the front parlor. “They didn’t even fill in the bullet hole.”
Jesse gave me a tolerant smile. “I thought you hated that bullet hole.”
“Well,” I said with a shrug, swinging on the newel—it needed tightening, I noted—as I headed up the stairs. “It started to grow on me over the years.”
The midday light was shining through the stained-glass window at the top of the staircase, making a blue, red, and yellow pattern on the floor of the hallway outside my old bedroom. I stepped around it, noticing through the open doors to my stepbrothers’ old rooms that they’d been left relatively unchanged, except that this was the cleanest I’d ever seen them.
The door to my old room—the room that sat above the front parlor, the only bedroom in the house with an ocean view, the room in which I’d first met Jesse, and changed my life forever—was open, as well.
I stepped across the threshold.