Shadows Fall (27 page)

I nodded, hiding my smile behind my mug of coffee. Somehow, I considered his butchering of my native language incredibly cute even when I was terrified.

“That’s the theory. Hester is one, and her father’s mother was one.”

“Does it always skip a generation?”

I shrugged one shoulder. It was almost absurd how he was focusing on these tiny little details, seemingly ignoring the elephant in the room. “Don’t know. There’s not really an accurate record of our
vitsa’s
geneology—
vitsa
is like… tribe. Many of the folks older than my parents don’t know how to read or write, like Hester. I’m sure it’s not an exact science.

“So anyway, I paid to have a witch cleanse and ward the shop against the
mule
—that’s the
Romanes
word for unsettled spirits—and that at least keeps them out of my place of business—”

“Wait, wait, wait… witch? There are witches?”

I rolled my eyes. I didn’t have time to teach Paranormal 101 For The Uninitiated. “Yes, but that’s not an important part of the story. So, I also did a hack job of trying to ward the townhouse myself, but it worked okay. Until I called them.”

“Who? The ghosts?”

“Yeah. These few have been showing up everywhere I am for several weeks now so, as much as I
don’t
want to know, I felt like I should try to figure out what they want. I used my homemade EMF generator and some magickal objects to try and let them in.”

“EMF… magickal… Let them
in?
”

I ignored his—Exasperated? Disbelieving? Frustrated?—reaction in favor of continuing the story. He wasn’t going to believe it anyway. “Yes. I wanted to know why they were following me. I still want that.”

“Okay.” He paused, confusion clouding his face. “Go back to Hester. You said the fact that you see the ghosts everywhere was why you called her.”

“Oh yeah, got off track.” I nudged his socked foot with mine in a desperate attempt to break the tension. “Stop interrupting me and that won’t happen.”

“Sorry. You were saying?”

“You know I told you I was agoraphobic or something, and that’s why I can’t go outside without my headphones?”

“Yeah.”

“That wasn’t entirely the truth. Imagine… as many people as there are in the city in any given area, there are half again as many spirits hanging around, and they
all
want to talk to me because they know I can hear them. That plus the noise of day to day life? It’s deafening. It’s insanity, like you said.

“I wore the headphones to keep the voices out when I went places that haven’t been warded. Some, mainly the ones who’ve been following me, can get past them. They speak inside my head.”

“That sounds kinda horrible,” Charlie said.

“You have
no
idea.”

“Where does Hester fit in?”

“Getting there. When my attempt to let the
mule
in failed—sort of—I wrote to Hester. I felt like I needed to find out what they wanted, and I knew she could help me. I also needed to learn how to control my ability before it drove me literally insane. Hester was shocked when I told her what I went through. Apparently, it’s not normal. There are simple things a
chovihano
can do to control the signal, so to speak, to close the window and open it at will.”

“How?” Charlie asked, seemingly paying rapt attention. Whether he believed a word I was saying remained to be seen.

I stretched out my arm and turned it so he could see the
sapaśaṭāzho
tattoo. “This isn’t just a ‘family thing’ like I told you. It’s a
chovihani
thing. This breaks the connection. I can still see them all, they just can’t force me to listen to them.”

Reaching into the one remaining intact pocket of my sweats, I pulled out the necklace Hester had given me and showed it to him. “This opens the window back up—at least until I learn to do it on my own, without a talisman.”

“Is that possible?”

“Hester does it. I’m hoping she can teach me.”

Charlie lapsed into silence again, slowly leaning back in his seat. “Okay,” he said after what felt like a few minutes.

“Okay? Just
okay?
You believe me?”

He stared at me until I started squirming, then his face softened. He opened his arms to me. “Let’s put that aside for a moment. Come here.”

Since the first moment I’d met Charlie, I’d been powerless against him. Those strong, welcoming arms drew me in like a magnet. I scooted across the couch and turned so that he could pull me against his chest. I could feel his steady heartbeat at my back, and it calmed my jittering nerves.

He rested his chin on the top of my head and sighed, his breath stirring my hair. “It must have been hard for you, dealing with something like that by yourself. I’m sorry no one was there to help you.”

A knot formed in my throat that I had to swallow down. The unexpected sympathy in the face of this insane story caused tears to prick my eyelids. “Thanks,” I said in a rough voice. I rested my hand on his thigh and then squeezed lightly. “I still need to know if you’re going to lock me up.”

His arms, which he’d wrapped around my chest, tightened and squeezed a small yelp out of me. “No one is going to lock you up,” he said again.

We stayed that way for a while, just breathing into the silence. It was nice while it lasted, but the anticipation became more than I could bear. “Seriously, do you believe me?” I probed.

“Are you asking if I think you’re telling me what you know to be the truth? Or are you asking if I believe in ghosts?”

“Both, I guess.”

“Well then it’s my turn to tell
you
a story.”

“Okay.” I snuggled deeper into his embrace, turning my head slightly so that I could hear him better—although the rumbling of his voice in his chest had felt nice against the side of my face. “I’m listening.”

“When I was a kid, my family lived a few miles north of here, close to the lake. I think I was around eleven or twelve when my parents decided to build a new house in one of the developments being installed around the town. It wasn’t ready by the time we had to be out of our old house, so they rented this little house on the water for us to stay in for a couple of months.

“It was the oldest house we’d ever lived in, and was really small for the four of us, but I didn’t mind. I was sort of a jumpy little kid back then, didn’t like to be alone, so it didn’t bother me that we were always on top of each other. One day my sister and her best friend were babysitting me while our parents ran errands. They’d just watched some scary movie the night before—
Poltergeist
or something—and decided it would be a great idea if we had a séance.”

I snorted behind my hand, trying to play it off as a cough, but Charlie heard me and smiled.

“Yeah, that was kind of my reaction too. I was scared, though I didn’t want to admit it, but I was even more scared to be by myself in some other room while they were doing it. At first I hid under the covers on Michelle’s bed, while she and Sarah lit some candles and danced around the room, chanting nonsense that they made up.

“I was about to call bullshit when I heard an irritating blast of noise, and then the girls screaming. I popped my head out and saw that all of the electronics—the television, the stereo, the clock radio—had all spontaneously turned on at the same time. I was sure the girls were just messing with me at first, but then I realized that there were only two of them; they couldn’t have turned everything on all at once.”

“Maybe they rigged something,” I suggested.

“You have to realize that this was the early nineties and they were just teenagers. Their tech savvy was limited. I was skeptical too, though, so they repeated the whole thing, again with me hiding. The second time, everything turned back off.

“At that point we were scared, but it was almost like a science experiment. How could we disprove the hypothesis that our phony séance was actually working? So the girls covered all the electronics with towels and I sat up on the bed. I’d finally worked up the courage to watch. They danced around and chanted again, almost like they were doing a damn rain dance. That time all of the towels slid off like they’d been yanked down by unseen hands, and all the shit turned back on again.

“We were really freaked out at that point; I was begging for them to stop because I was
thoroughly
convinced that they’d summoned some evil spirit. But the girls wanted to have one more go at it. After just a few seconds of chanting, the devices turned back off and the rickety old shutters over the windows started rattling like a plane was landing in the yard—it was like whatever was brought up by that séance was trying to tell them to
shut the fuck up
. All three of us screamed bloody murder and ran the hell out the front door just as Mom was pulling into the driveway.”

I was a little creeped out by the story, despite my familiarity with the paranormal, but I was also fascinated. “What did your mom say?”

“That’s one of the weird things about it. I’ll never forget what happened in my sister’s room that day but I don’t remember anything after it, and none of us ever brought it up again. My sister stopped being friends with Sarah their senior year, so she was never around to ask either.”

“How can you be sure it really happened?”

Charlie’s face hardened, and I found myself realizing how formidable he might seem to someone on the receiving end of his anger; it’d never been me before.

“How can you be sure any of that shit you just said really happened?”

I wasn’t offended. He was right. My mouth quirked up into a half smile. “Touché, detective.”

Just like that, his face and posture relaxed, all was forgiven. “That’s not even the worst thing that happened in that house. I’m glad my parents chose not to tell me about the second thing until we’d moved,” he said.

“What was it?”

“Well, I went to my grandparents’ house for the weekend this one time. My mom told me a few months later that she’d gone out and when she came back home, she found a butcher knife buried in the basement wall.”

I gasped. “Oh my
god!
Did they call the police? Were there signs of a break-in? I mean it’s creepy as all hell, but hardly paranormal.”

“Yeah, but see, it was a foot-and-a-half thick brick wall and they never found any indication that anyone else had been in the house.”

I blinked at him for several seconds, feeling an ominous chill creep up the back of my neck. I shivered, rubbed my arms, and tossed a look around the room for some unseen threat. “Jesus, Charlie, I would have been scared out of my mind, and I’m used to weird shit.” I felt him nod against me.

“So again, if you were asking me if I believe in ghosts, then my answer is, hell yes.”

I didn’t know why that relieved me so fucking much, but it did. That was one hurdle, at least, that we didn’t have to cross.

“I believe you, Titus. I can’t begin to understand or explain you, but I believe you. The question is what does all of this have to do with the Queen City Slayer and Brandon Meyers? Why are you all mixed up in my murder case?”

I’d gotten so caught up in Charlie’s non-reaction, the fact that he hadn’t broken out any torches or pitchforks, I’d completely forgotten the actual reason for the discussion. Even if he believed me about the seeing ghosts part, would it be possible for him to fathom the idea that these
mule
were the ones he was investigating?
Ugh
…

“Oh, that…” I hedged. “Well, the reason I went into that abandoned building that night, the reason I found Brandon Meyers, was that Brandon Meyers made me.”

“He made you.”

“Yes. Before the last few weeks, I made it a point to try to ignore their voices. There was nothing I could do for them. So when Brandon blocked my path on the sidewalk that night, I went around him. Then he passed through me, something that’s happened before, but this time it was so painful that it brought me to my knees. It felt like he’d killed me.

“When he was standing over me and pointing the way into that old building, that’s when I saw his neck and the scratches. He didn’t really give me a choice—if I didn’t want to keep getting internally molested by a ghost—so I went inside. The rest you know.”

Charlie huffed out a silent laugh. “Yeah, I guess it was a good call not giving that story initially.”

“Hey!” I elbowed him in the ribs, and he grunted. “You said you knew I was of sound mind!”

This time his laugh came out full-bodied and loud. It soothed me to know that he was comfortable joking after the conversation we’d had.

“Hey, hey, hey, I still think that. I’m just saying… you gotta admit that it
sounds
fucking crazy.”

“Well,
duh
. Why do you think I was trying so hard
not
to tell you people.” I broke off and sighed heavily. “There’s more.”