Ghost of a Chance (23 page)

“Oh, really? You know what they’d say? You
haven’t been a polter long enough to be considered a real citizen,
and thus aren’t eligible for protection.”

She froze, her pupils dilating slightly.
“What?”

“Just how long have you been a polter?” I
asked, crossing my arms in an attempt to look as intimidating as
possible.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The expression on her face might be stubborn, but she couldn’t look
me in the eye when she spoke.

I relaxed slightly as another piece of the
puzzle clicked into place. “Let’s go over the facts, and I’ll see
if I can’t make myself a little clearer. First, there’s the matter
of your name.”

“What about it?” She peeked up at me from
under her dense overhang of bangs.

“Names have power. Everyone in the
Otherworld knows that. People here don’t change their names at the
drop of a hat.”

She said nothing.

“That can possibly be explained away by your
youth and desire to blend into the Goth lifestyle. What can’t be
explained is the fact that you don’t know who Nephthys is.”

Her head snapped up, her eyes mutinous. “Are
you calling me stupid?”

“No, I’m not. The tale of Nephthys is
something that is taught to every polter child, from a very early
age. For you to be ignorant of it says you weren’t raised in a
polter home… which leads me to your wanting to summon and command a
demon.”

“What, is it like a crime to summon a
demon?”

“No, it’s not a crime,” I said quietly,
eyeing the stormy, troubled girl in front of me and wondering who
she really was. “It is, however, quite impossible for a polter to
summon a minion of a demon lord. Everyone knows that. Everyone who
was raised in the Otherworld, that is.”

Her gaze faltered and dropped, her shoulders
slumping. She swayed for a moment, and I put a hand out to steady
her, but she jerked backward, stumbling over to the window seat.
“Leave me alone. Just leave me alone.”

I squatted down next to her while she curled
up into a ball of misery. “What happened, Pixie? Why were you made
a polter?”

She mumbled something that sounded like
“Stupid demon lord.”

“Pixie, I’m sorry I have to ask you to tell
me about something that’s obviously very painful. But I need to
know the truth.”

“Why?” she asked sullenly.

It took me a few seconds to sort through
what I wanted to say. “Protection, mostly. I’m… We’re not going to
be together much longer, but I will do everything I can to protect
you until the seal is lifted. After that—well, things are going to
be a bit dicey, but I will talk to the League home and make sure
they understand that you have to be protected.”

She raised her head enough to ask, “Protect
me from what?”

“From the mundane world. And from situations
in our world. What happened to you?”

“You won’t understand.” She wrapped both
arms around herself, burrowing next to the wall and turning her
face to look out the window.

“You’d be surprised what I can
understand.”

“Oh, that’s right, you’re a murderer. Maybe
you
will
understand.”

I didn’t even flinch at the accusation.
“What happened?”

“
Deus!
You’re not going to leave me
alone, are you? You’re going to keep picking on me until I tell
you!”

“Persistence, thy name is Karma,” I
agreed.

She heaved a martyred sigh and traced a
protection-ward symbol on the glass. I wondered where she’d learned
to draw wards. “I borrowed a ring from my stepsister, OK? She
cursed me. Or had a demon lord do it. I don’t remember much about
it. All I know is I borrowed it and she had me turned into a
polter.”

“I see.”

“No, you don’t see,” she suddenly snapped,
turning an agonized face to me. “You were born this way. You
weren’t born normal, then turned into this, and kicked out of your
family and school, and all your friends wouldn’t have freaked if
they’d seen what you really were. You don’t know what it’s like to
be me!”

“Just because I haven’t lived your life
doesn’t mean I can’t empathize,” I said, handing her a box of
tissues from the table next to me. She snatched it from me and
angrily scrubbed at her wet cheeks. “Although I’m puzzled why your
stepsister took such an extreme action for so minor a
situation.”

“She was a Follower.”

“Ah. Which demon lord was she bound to?”

“Bael.”

I flinched. Bael was the premier prince of
Abaddon, the ruler of all the demon lords. If Pixie’s stepsister
had sworn to serve him, it was entirely possible she wielded a lot
of power through him. I’d run into only one Follower in my time,
but the aura of dark power that surrounded him had given me the
willies. I would have liked to question Pixie more about her past,
but I’d been intrusive enough. I contented myself with patting her
on the leg and saying, “I don’t understand why the League felt they
had to conceal your origins, but that’s neither here nor there. Now
that I know you’re a neophyte, I can help you over possible
stumbling blocks.”

“I’m not a neophyte, whatever that is,” she
grumbled, but her dark scowl eased a little.

“You certainly won’t be for long.” I glanced
at the closed door to the dining room, getting to my feet with a
sigh. “I’d better make sure my father isn’t being obnoxious to
Savannah.”

“Karma…” Pixie bit her lip and looked out
the window again.

“Hmm?”

Her thin shoulders twitched in wordless
emotion. “You said I can’t stay with you. Is it because I’m a
freak?”

Sadness tinged my smile. “You aren’t a freak
in any way.”

“Then why can’t I stay with you?” she asked,
her eyes dark with pain.

“Spider… ,” I said, and choked to a stop.
“Spider’s death has changed things, I’m afraid. If the situation
was different, I’d be happy to have you stay with me; I truly
would. But sometimes life just doesn’t work out the way you would
like it to, and regrettably, this is one of those times.”

“That’s just lame,” she said, turning her
face away from me.

The condemnation lay heavily on me, but
there was nothing I could do to deny it. “Yeah. Life sucks
sometimes, doesn’t it?” I said, forcing down a painful lump in my
throat as I left the room to check on my father.

“You’re sure they won’t break anything?”

I closed the door gently on the sound of
imps cooing with happiness as they splashed around in a couple of
inches of water in the bathtub, and smiled at the worried look on
Adam’s face. “They’re not that sort of imp. They get into things
and sometimes make a mess, but they aren’t destructive. Besides,
they love water. They’ll be quite happy to play in the tub for a
couple of hours, especially since Jules donated his devil
ducky.”

Adam gave me a long look. “You are one of
the oddest people it’s been my pleasure to meet.”

“Thank you. I think. Shall we tackle
Meredith again? Dad is Pixie-watching for me.”

Adam waited for me to precede him up the
stairs. “Does she need a babysitter?”

“Not in the normal sense of the word, no.
But I don’t want her disappearing again.” I stopped in front of the
door to Meredith’s room and took a deep breath. “Do you want to be
the good cop or the bad cop?”

“Don’t be ridiculous; we don’t do that
anymore.” Adam gave a couple of curt knocks and tried the door
handle. “Dammit, he’s locked it. Meredith? Open up. We want to talk
to you.”

It took a minute, but at last Meredith
opened the door a smidgen. “Where the hell’s my wife with my
breakfast?”

“She’s a bit busy now,” I told him. “If
you’re absolutely starving, I suppose something could be brought up
for you.”

The look he gave me could have stripped
paint. “And be poisoned again? No, thank you. Tell Savannah to get
off her ass and bring me some food. Some
safe
food.”

“I don’t think your wife is inclined to do
you any favors,” Adam told him. “I believe her words were ‘Let the
bastard suffer,’ weren’t they, Karma?”

“Yup. It would seem she has washed her hands
of you.”

Meredith swore with colorful, if impossible,
creativity. “That stupid bitch. Parading around like her shit don’t
stink, demanding money from me all the time for her crackpot
schemes, telling me how she’s going to use those damned machines to
get what’s rightfully hers. You want to know what’s rightfully
hers? Jack shit, that’s what!” Meredith shoved his enraged face
toward us, his eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep. The whiskey on
his stale breath made my nose wrinkle. “She’d have nothing without
me, nothing! Those machines are worthless without me. And you can
tell her that!”

The door slammed in our faces before Adam
and I had time to do more than blink in confusion.

“Machines?” Adam asked.

“What’s rightfully hers, I wonder?” I said
at the same time.

He pursed his lips for a moment. “I think we
need to have another talk with Madam Savannah.”

“I think you’re absolutely right.”

We arrived at the dining room, which was now
bare of breakfast, to find the table covered in papers.

“… and keep my mind a blank. I’m totally
unaware of what my hand is writing. As you can see, I don’t even
have my eyes open,” Savannah was saying to an audience that
consisted of my father, Pixie, and the two spirits. “Now, dear, if
you would just replace the paper… perfect. That way, you see, my
hand can continue to write without stopping.”

Pixie looked from the piece of paper she
held to the others littering the table. They contained nothing but
random loops and waves. “What’s it mean?”

“Not every page shows actual writing.
Sometimes it takes a bit to get to a communication from a spirit.
We can help it by asking specific questions, but in a situation
such as this, I prefer to just let whatever entity who wishes to
make contact do so without pressure. So I just keep my mind blank,
and let my hand move as it will.”

“I thought with the house sealed, no spirits
could get through to anyone here,” Pixie said, pulling another
sheet of gibberish from Savannah as she reached the end of the
page.

I picked up a couple of the topmost sheets
of paper. As I’d suspected, there was no communication on those,
either, only random waves and swoops.

“That’s true, but as we found out with the
séance, there are dormant spirits in the house. Who knows what else
may be residing here? And I have high hopes that we’ll make contact
again with Spider.”

“If you wake my grandfather up again… ,”
Adam said warningly.

“I can’t control who uses me at all,”
Savannah murmured, her eyes closed as she swayed ever so slightly
with the movement of her hand over the sheet of paper. “I’m a blank
manuscript, waiting to be written.”

“Sounds stupid,” Pixie muttered.

Tony suddenly sat up straight. “Oh, my dear,
no! It works, it really does! One of Adam’s old girlfriends tried
it with us that time we went underground—When was that, Julie?”

“The 1950s,” Jules answered with a shudder.
Both ghosts were barely visible, in what I thought of as a low-watt
mode.

“Those shoulder pads!” Tony answered with a
similar shudder before pulling himself to the present. “That was
such a grim time, Julie and I thought we’d take a little rest, only
somehow, we forgot to tell Adam. So his girlfriend, a really lovely
woman once you got past the fact that she was a Moravian, did some
automatic writing to contact us.”

Jules cackled to himself. “She was ever so
startled when she woke up Tony and he started dictating the most
risqué limericks. What was it, now?”

“There was a young man from Perth, whose
cods were the finest on Earth—,” Tony started to recite.

“I think that’s enough of a trip down memory
lane,” Adam interrupted with a glance toward Pixie. “Karma and I
would like to have a word with Savannah, if you don’t mind.
Alone.”

“We want to see who comes through,” Tony
protested. “This is the most excitement we’ve had for years!”

“I don’t care. Go rest up. We may need you
later,” Adam said, making shooing motions with his hands.

I turned to my father and cocked an
eyebrow.

He heaved a martyred sigh and pushed himself
up from the table, holding out a hand for Pixie. “Looks like we’re
de trop, my girl. Shall we go check on the imps?”

“I am not a
child
! I don’t
have
to be gotten out of the way!” she said with an
indignant look tossed in my direction.

“Of course you’re not. But there are times
when three is company, and seven is a crowd.”

“Lame excuse. What’s a Moravian?”

“Another word for vampire.” Dad gently
pushed her through the door, pausing to say in Poltern before he
left, “I want to hear the full details when you’re done.”

“What’s all this about?” Savannah asked in a
dreamy voice, cracking one eye open briefly to shove aside a filled
paper and start on a new one. “Karma, would you mind taking over
page duty? It’s distracting for me to have to keep track of it, and
the more distracted I am, the less entities can use me to write for
them.”

“We had a little chat with your husband,”
Adam said, standing in what I’d mentally termed his confrontational
pose: arms crossed over his chest, weight balanced on the balls of
his feet, eyes glittering with icy blue intent.

“I can’t be distracted with such negative
thoughts as that man spawns,” she answered without opening her
eyes. “Page, Karma.”

“Oh, sorry.” I obediently whipped away yet
another page, giving Adam a meaningful look.

“I regret having to distract you, but we
need to talk. This is important.”

Savannah was silent for a few seconds before
heaving an exaggerated sigh. She set down her pen, laced her
fingers together, and opened her eyes. “I only hope that when
you’re done I’ll be able to attain the state of mental awareness I
just had. What is it you wished to discuss with me?”