Hellsinger 01 - Fish and Ghosts (P) (MM) (22 page)

“So that’s how you knew about the sugar? Because they taught you?” Tristan’s head was reeling. While his own family had a few screws loose—most notably his Uncle Mortimer—Tristan always felt they were
normal
. What Wolf was describing seemed like a trip through a cracked mirror.

“Sugar… salt… really anything granular and faceted at some level would work. I told you my cousin uses mica. I think one of them likes ground quartz, but shit, that’s expensive. Mirrors would work too. The surfaces… their reflective nature… repel spirits. I can’t remember if they’re afraid they’ll be trapped or if it turns them away.” Wolf shrugged. “Either way, it works.”

“Anything else you need to let me know?” Tristan’s own voice sounded shaky in his ears but the downcast sweep of Wolf’s eyes concerned him more. “Anything? Should I be worried about you growing fangs on the full moon or something?”

“No, babe. At least that would be useful.” Wolf’s mouth quirked to a silly grin. “The only thing I’ve got to tell you, Pryce, is that I don’t know what the fuck to do in all of this. I never wanted to be… a Kincaid. Not like the rest of them. I went to school. Actual school. With books and homework. Instead of memorizing what kind of rock formation I could find hematite in, I was learning how to do advanced calculus. I’m shit at this ghost stuff. I
look
for them. I
prove
they’re not there. So now, in this crappy duck shoot we’re in, I’m fucking useless. I only hope my mother’s got something to help us out, or I’m afraid you’re going to have to give up the Grange, and I know… deep inside of me… that’ll straight-out kill you.”

T
HE
REST
of the night was spent in Tristan’s apartment with Wolf prowling the doors’ line of rock salt and sugar every few hours. Settling Gidget and Matt into the library on a Murphy bed hidden in one of the walls, he’d paced off the time, waiting and watching for any sign of the ghost. By the time a waterlogged sun rose to cut through the drizzle outside, he’d collapsed into a nerveless heap on the bed beside his lover, too exhausted to do more than wrap an arm around Tristan’s waist and snore into the hollow of the man’s shoulder blades.

And when he finally woke, his arms were empty, his bladder was full, and there was an enormous furry weight sprawled out over his back and legs.

“Boris, get off.” The dog couldn’t possibly have heard him. Not through its own sonorous gurgles, although it was more likely because Wolf’s face was pressed down into a pillow.

The dog ignored him, and if anything, his snuffling growls grew louder, and one of his paws dug into Wolf’s shin in an act of canine defiance.

“Great.”

It took him nearly five minutes to get out from under the slumbering Irish wolfhound, and by the time he tumbled to the floor, Wolf was soaked with sweat. That was how Tristan found him, stretched out on an area rug and panting heavily with a glee that could only come from having space in his lungs for air.

“Why are you on the floor?” The furrow between Tristan’s brows angled his eyes up at the edges.

“Your dog was using me to practice for his
luche libre
career,” he replied in a coughing fit. “I think he’s got the pinning part down, but he’s shit on the acrobatics.”

“I see.” Tristan’s words rolled with mocking humor. “Your phone rang, so I answered it. Your mother said she’s going to be here in about twenty minutes and for you to get your ass in gear so you’ll be ready to help her out.”

“Ah, the maternal element of my DNA.” Wolf heard his hips pop as he stood, and the crick in his neck flared up, throbbing to remind him he’d slept funny. “Let me take a shower. What time is it?”

“It’s the middle of the afternoon. The children are downstairs playing with their electronics. Something about capturing waves of light on video. They’re very excited.” Tristan shrugged. “I’m not sure how I feel about that. What are you guys going to do with all of that? Because I don’t want—”

“You don’t want any of that published for people to see,” Wolf finished for him. “You’ll have ghost hunters parked out on your lawn and pissing on your life. None of that’s going to happen, Pryce. I’m going to give your uncle his money back, and when that’s done, you’re going to give me a dollar for our work here. That way, you’ll own everything we’ve got in the can. I can’t promise you I’m not going to study it, but it’ll be confidential. It won’t ever leave Hellsinger’s. Okay?”

His blond nearly sagged in relief, and Tristan’s face softened with a sweet smile. “Thanks.”

“Good.” Wolf stretched and yawned. “Let me scrape off my filth and maybe run a razor over my face. I want to look good when my crazy mother gets here. Just a word of warning, okay? Don’t let her near the kitchen, and sure as fuck don’t eat anything she cooks. I’m pretty sure I had an older brother or sister and her turnip casserole killed it off. Made me glad I found out she couldn’t breast-feed, and we all had to survive on formula. The woman’s a menace.”

W
OLF
WOULDN
’
T
have admitted he missed his mother. Certainly not since she lived only a relatively short distance away, as far as Californians measured distance. But there was something odd fluttering in his belly when he heard the familiar cough and rattle of a VW bus trundling up the Grange’s long driveway, and he couldn’t fight the smile creeping over his face as he headed to the front door.

“What’s she like?” he heard Tristan whisper over to Gidget and Matt.

“Like Willy Wonka and Gaia fucked and had a kid,” his technician murmured back, her voice tinted with awe. “But in a good way.”

The skies must have been kinder to his mother than they were for him, because the rain had dialed itself down to a drizzle by the time her exhaust-popping sleeper-bus crested the final rise. It lumbered, rolling back and forth on its suspension, but its familiar rounded shape brought with it a burst of rainbow colors to the dreary gray day. Standing under one of the Grange’s side porticos, Wolf noted the bus sported a new paint job, a blend of dragonflies and flowers over a base coat of night-sky blue and deep purples. The sleeper top looked as if it had been replaced as well. Probably something his brother, Bach, insisted she do since the old one leaked.

It was a piece of his childhood arriving to save the day.

And while he hated having to call her to help clean up his mess, Wolf was damned glad to see the lushly curved woman who crawled out of the VW bus and threw her arms open for a hug.

Somewhere in Haight-Ashbury there was a portrait of an eighteen-year-old woman with a toddler on her hip and her belly rounded with another life. Wolf was certain it was there—in that painting or photo—that his mother aged, because other than a few lines at the edges of her enormous blue eyes, she looked exactly the same as she did the day he graduated from high school.

“Wolfgang Starfox!” His mom’s voice was a trilling rumble of high notes and baritone dips, curling around his name in a joyous dance, and he took the stairs two at a time, catching up her full-figured body in his arms so he could spin her around a few times in a tight embrace before setting her back down on the wet driveway. Taking a step back, she studied him carefully, taking in any minute changes since she’d seen him last. “Stand there. Let me take a look at you.”

“Mom—”

“Hush and let me see you.” Her eyes grew unfocused, and Wolf grinned, knowing his mother was dropping into a semitrance to feel out the edges of her son’s aura. “Ahhhhh.”

Like the van, she’d gotten a small paint job. Her long, curly hair had been dyed a vibrant merlot, so very different from the sun-sparkled chestnut he’d seen her with the last time, but other than that, she looked achingly, familiarly Meegan Ocean-Kincaid.

Her feet were bare because she hated driving with shoes, and her toes bristled with silver and gold rings, each dotted with gems or embellished with carvings. A pair of loose red harem pants hung low on her broad hips, and she wore a gold-and-green belly dancer’s vest over a buttercup T-shirt that strained to hold in her generous chest. Her hands were as decorated as her toes, sparkling with metal and stones, and a single pendant hung from her neck, a leather thong strung with rows of glass beads he’d made when he was six at a commune they’d traveled to.

She was nearly too bright to look at, iced with a brilliant-white smile made imperfect by a small chip in her front tooth and a spray of freckles over her snub nose, but she was definitely and most emphatically his mother.

And he smiled when she shook her head at him and sighed heavily.

“Oh, you are in love.”

“Like you couldn’t have guessed that from me asking you to bring condoms?” He snorted. “Or maybe when Tristan answered my phone and you grilled him?”

“I did
not
grill him.” She lifted her chin and looked down at him, an impressive feat since she only came up to his shoulder. “I merely spoke to him about the haunting. I can’t trust you to be objective.”

“I am the most objective person you know,” Wolf pointed out, turning to reach into the bus to get her things. As usual, she’d packed up a steamer truck of clothes and supplies, another relic from his younger days of tramping through the wilds of America’s highways.

“You are the most cynical person I know,” she corrected with a laugh. “I swear, even covered in my blood, you took one look at me and harrumphed.”

“I was probably trying to get the taste out of my mouth.” The trunk luckily had wheels, and he was wise to the wonky nature of the upper left caster. Mounting the stairs, he looked up and found Tristan standing at the Grange’s threshold, his changeable gaze wary at the sight of the woman standing barefooted in the rain.

Reaching Tristan’s side, he gave the man a kiss, then turned, watching his mother come up behind him. Meegan took one look at Tristan and squealed, running up the rest of the way to launch herself at the slender artist. Wrapping her arms around him, she squeezed, and Wolf heard Tristan grunt in shock at her strength.

“Tris, meet my mother, Meegan Ocean-Kincaid, medium and bane of grilled cheese sandwiches everywhere.” Wolf pronounced his mother’s name carefully, emphasizing its
mee
syllable. “Mom, the man you’re assaulting is Tristan Pryce, owner and resident proprietor of Hoxne Grange, an inn for passing spirits.”

“And your lover,” Meegan gushed. “Oh, Wolf. He is so beautiful. I am so happy for you. Oh, the things he can
see
. It’s like he’s a Kincaid already.”

Another gushing squeeze and Tristan nearly turned blue from her embrace. Wild-eyed, he struggled against the small woman’s hold, but she held fast, her face buried into his chest, and Wolf heard her taking a deep sniff of Tristan’s scent, anchoring him to her senses as she’d done to nearly every friend he’d ever dragged home to meet the circus he’d grown up in.

“Wolf, tell her to let me go,” Tristan gulped as he wormed in his mother’s grasp. “I think you’ve got Rainsong from the Wolfriders for a mother. I can’t—”

“Yeah, whatever that means.” Wolf shrugged and grabbed the trunk’s one remaining leather handle. Wheeling it around his lover and mother, he called out behind him, “I’ll be waiting in the ballroom with the others. When the two of you are done getting acquainted, we can talk about how to get rid of this bitch that’s moved in. That is if you can separate yourself from your new son there, Mom.”

Chapter 13

M
EEGAN
O
CEAN
-K
INCAID
took one look at the bank of beeping panels and flickering monitors set up in the Grange’s ballroom and sniffed.

Loudly.

Tristan wasn’t certain exactly what flavor her sniff would be defined as. He was leaning toward derision when Wolf cleared his throat.

“Mom, science isn’t evil. Technology is our friend. Don’t go hating on my job.” Wolf clasped his hands on his mother’s shoulders and led her away from his equipment, aiming toward the set of comfortable furniture Matt had arranged around a low table. “Here, have a seat and I’ll get you some tea. Then we can get started.”

It was surreal sitting around one of his tables and being served a mug of coffee by a grinning Gidget. Boris flopped down on his feet, letting out a sigh of contentment when Meegan leaned over and scratched his belly, his left leg thumping on the area rug Matt spread out to warm up the floor. Gidget and Matt returned to their equipment, seemingly recording a few findings on a laptop as they shut off a noisy array of sensors. Caught between Wolf and his mother, Tristan wasn’t sure who he should be paying more attention to, Meegan or her son.

Even more bizarre was the woman next to him and her touch on his arm. He couldn’t recall his own mother touching him as often in one lifetime as Meegan brushed his hand with hers and pressed her arm on his shoulders when she sat down on the loveseat next to him.

“Wolf, why don’t you go into the kitchen and see if you can’t find us something to eat?” Meegan grinned up at her son. “I want to take some time and get to know Tristan here.”