Claimed by Angels & Demons: Book 1
Table of Contents
Claimed by Angels and Demons: Book One
Copyright © 2014 Ava Blake
All rights reserved.
Chapter One
"I don't see why you cant just live here," Kat said, looking at me from across the table with her big, sad, manipulative eyes, "you were away at school for eight months and you didn't come home once. You've only been home for a couple days and I've barely even seen you, and now you're just going to leave again?"
I flipped the page of the newspaper, scanning down the list of rental units available. "I just cant be here for another summer, it's too much, I need to live somewhere else."
"Aren't you trying to save money for tuition and books and all that?"
"I'll save money by not living way out here in the middle of nowhere," I said. "I can let the insurance expire on my car and take the bus."
Kat scoffed, "really, you would rather take the bus than live here?"
"The bus isn't so bad." In fact it was worse than bad. Nobody took the bus, not unless you wanted to be drooled on by a homeless person, but if that was the price I had to pay to not live at home for the summer then I was willing to pay it. Anything would be better than living in this house for one more summer, living under the same roof as Tim for one more summer.
"What's the real reason you don't want to live here?"
"I just... don't. Okay?" I looked up again at Kat, saw the pain on her face. "Look it's not you, I just need my own space okay? It's really not anything about you."
"I don't see why we cant be a family for just a little longer," Kat said.
"Come on Kat, we haven't been a family for a long time. Mom left, Tim is barely ever here and he's not our real father anyway, he's just stuck with us until we turn eighteen. He's probably counting the days until you move out too, so he can marry some waitress from the bar and forget all about us. You need to stop trying to hold this mess together and start thinking about getting the hell out of here. Like me."
Kat didn't say anything and I went back to scanning the classifieds.
"Whatever," Kat muttered, and got up.
"Kat wait," I said, immediately feeling terrible for what I'd said. She was the only person that could ever make me feel bad for all the shitty things I said. I got up to follow her but the phone started ringing. I picked up the receiver, "hello?" I said as I watched Kat go upstairs.
"Hello," an ancient voice said, "this is Henrietta Fielding from Spiritual Dispersion Services. I'm looking for Molly Rowan, is this she?"
"No," I said, "she's not here. What's this about?" It had been years since anyone had called for Mom, years since I had awkwardly explained that she was missing, maybe dead, probably just a shitty parent. Once I had even used that ridiculous cliché about her going out for milk four years ago and how I expected her back any minute, but it hadn't been nearly as funny as I thought it would.
"She did some freelance work for us some years ago and we're a bit short-handed at the moment, so we were hoping to offer her a job."
Perfect, Mom had been gone for four years now and she was still getting job offers, and the only work I could find was filling out fast food applications. "Sorry what was your business again?"
"Oh well, to whom am I speaking?"
"Layla. I'm Molly's daughter."
"Oh very good. Well we provide ghost dispersion services to clients looking to rid their property of spiritual menaces."
Did I hear that right, was Mom some sort of hack clairvoyant on the side? Bizarre. "When was this? When did she work for you?"
"Oh let me see here," the old woman said, and I could hear some shuffling sounds on the other end of the phone, "here we are. She first worked for us back in two-thousand-and-one, and the last time she worked for us was two-thousand-and-ten."
Two-thousand-and-ten, the year she went missing. Left. Died. Something. After the years I spent searching for her, on the very day when I was trying to get my own place and move the hell on with my life,
this
dropped right in my lap. What did it mean?
"Will she be back soon?" Henrietta said.
"Uh, no she's out of town. And she has a job." For all I knew she really was out of town, and she really did have a job.
"Oh that's a shame. Well I don't suppose
you
want a job?" the old woman asked.
"Me?"
"You are Molly's biological daughter are you not?"
"Yea...," I said.
"And have you turned eighteen yet?"
"I'm twenty?"
"Then you are perfectly qualified to work for us."
That made approximately zero sense, but I wasn't going to question it. "Right. Of course." I thought it over for a second, "wait, so you're telling me the job is to go to people's houses and cast spells and scare away ghosts? You would be paying me to do that?" I couldn't believe what I was hearing. It was a job that perfectly utilized two of my strongest talents: lying to strangers and keeping a straight face while doing it.
"Yes dear, that is the job. I know it isn't the glamorous kind of work that a young lady such as yourself might look for, but we do pay a respectable wage."
It was a good thing we weren't on Skype or something, because I was grinning from ear to ear and doing my best not to laugh out loud. "And when does this job start?"
"Well, I suppose you could start today."
I looked at the table, at the fast food applications that I had spent all morning filling out. "Yea, I can start today. What's the address?"
"Oh that's wonderful news. We're located at thirty-eight Paper street. Do you need directions?"
"No I'll just Google it."
"Oh, what's Google?"
"It's... never mind, I'll be there soon as I can."
"Very well dear, I look forward to meeting you."
"You too," I said, and hung up the phone. Find a job, check. Wow, this was going to be so much better than standing over a deep fryer for minimum wage for the entire summer. I couldn't believe my luck.
~~~
An hour later I pulled up in front of an old warehouse in a deserted industrial part of town that looked like a movie set for a third world country. Surely this couldn't be the place. I felt like I should have a can of pepper spray in my purse just to get out of my car in this neighborhood. Amazingly there were a few other cars pulled up in front of the building, so
someone
was here.
I sat in my car for a moment, looking at the place and wondering what the hell I was doing here. The twenty minutes spent driving there had given me plenty of time to become reacquainted with my obsession over finding Mom. Her disappearance had traumatized me in so many different ways, and I could feel myself slipping back in to that role of a desperate child looking for her parent like a wheel slipping in to a well worn rut. It had taken me years to escape that rut and grow up, and now I was going to dive back in by following right along in her footsteps. I could leave it all behind though, just turn the car back on and move on with my life. Just find some minimum wage job and grind out the summer.
"Shit," I muttered to myself, and opened the door. I wasn't going to let the mere memory of my mother ruin this opportunity for me. She was done ruining my life. I had moved on, and I was going to prove it right now. I made sure to lock my car, then started walking towards the only door I could see, which looked like it was about to fall off the hinges. I opened it gingerly, and it squealed in protest. I walked in and saw four people look up in unison.
"Oh you must be Layla," an old woman came hobbling over, all smiles, "I'm Henrietta dear, it's so wonderful to meet you."
"Yea," I said, smiling, "nice to meet you too."
Henrietta didn't stop though, she kept right on coming and gave me a full on hug, like a grandmother greeting a grandchild that didn't come around quite enough. "Oh okay," I said, and hugged her back. "Nice place you've got here." The inside wasn't much better than the outside. There were a few desks around the cavernous interior of the warehouse, arranged in no particular order, each of them overflowing with stacks of paper. And all the other employees looked just as ancient as Henrietta. I couldn't see a computer anywhere. No wonder she didn't know what Google was, they were living in a whole different century in this place.
"Yes it isn't anything fancy but it has a certain charm," Henrietta said, without a hint of sarcasm. It had a certain smell of mold, a certain damp clamminess, but not what I would call charm.
"Would you like a cup of tea dear?"
But before I could politely decline someone else piped up, "who's this then?" a man Henrietta's age said from the little cluster of desks.
"Thomas this is Layla, Molly's daughter. I told you about her."
"Hmm," Thomas looked me up and down, "well what does she want?"
"She's the new hire Thomas," and then in a lower, confiding voice, "bless his heart, he doesn't have the greatest memory these days. You'll have to be patient with him."
"She doesn't look old enough," Thomas said.
"Of course she's old enough," Henrietta said, then looked at me, "you're old enough, aren't you dear? You're older than eighteen?"
Hadn't we had this conversation already on the phone? Maybe Thomas wasn't the only one losing his memory. "I'm twenty," I said, hoping that would do for an answer. I still didn't see how my age mattered, but I wanted the job so I was willing to play along.
"You see," Henrietta said, "twenty, plenty old enough."
"Hmm," Thomas said, "well then," and he went back to shuffling papers, apparently satisfied.
"Come over here to my desk," Henrietta said, taking me by the arm, "and we'll have a little chat."
Henrietta settled herself behind the vacant desk, and I found a wooden chair that looked like it had been whittled by hand and sat in it, perching on top of it to make sure that it wouldn't collapse under me, before settling in.
"Well isn't this something," Henrietta said, "two generations of Rowan women working for us, aren't we lucky. You know your mother was one of my favorites. So good at her job, not one complaint in all the years she worked for us."
"It's funny, she never talked about working here," I said. "Do you know why she quit?" I had promised myself I wasn't going to waste one more minute thinking about or looking for Mom, and already I was slipping back in to my old, self-appointed role of chief investigator.
"Oh my, let me think. Well, I don't think she ever did quit really. Just stopped coming to work one day."
That sounded about right. I nodded, "do you know why?" I really couldn't help myself. I was just a glutton for emotional punishment.
"I think...," Henrietta drifted off, and the moment began to stretch on, to the point where I thought maybe she had fallen asleep, "she had some problems, towards the end. I do remember that now. It's not unheard of in our line of work, but it did worry me at the time." Henrietta started sorting through a stack of papers and then stopped, "because she was such a lovely woman, before that. So lovely. And then... well how is she now?"
"She's good," I said, smiling to help sell the lie. "She works at a hotel."
"Oh isn't that nice. The life of a practicing witch can be hard on some people, sometimes it's best to get a normal job and leave all this craziness behind. I know when you're young it's all so exciting and glamorous, but believe me it can really wear on you."
Did she just say witch? But if she was going to claim that she was exterminating ghosts from people's houses then why not call herself a witch too. How had Mom ever gotten involved with these people? "But do you know what happened, to give her problems? It's just that Mom never talks about any of this. I'm curious."
Henrietta shook her head, "no no, and I didn't ask, I'm not one to pry in to anyone's business," she stopped sorting through the paper again, "but if I had to guess, I would say she got herself mixed up in something. We operate completely above the board here at Spiritual Dispersion Services of course, there's a serious tolerance policy for any funny business, but I probably don't need to tell you that in our world there are plenty of people who don't mind getting their hands dirty in all kinds of distasteful things. I wonder what this world is coming to sometimes, I really do." Henrietta shook her head and gave me a look like she was going to start in on rap music and skirts that showed too much ankle.
"I see," I said, suddenly seeing my mother in a whole new light. Maybe she
had
gotten mixed up in something weird here with these crazies. They could be in to all kinds of strange and very possibly illegal things if they were insane enough to go around calling themselves witches with a straight face.
