She fought me. My magic is invisible, which is apparently abnormal, so I couldn’t see her struggle, but I imagine a scene right out of Looney Toons with Bugs in a sack carried by Elmer Fudd. Or maybe Elmer in a sack carried by Bugs. Probably that.
I imagined Aunt Mitzi kicking and screaming about getting those little varmints. It felt like she was throwing a tantrum anyhow.
“What’s happened? Are you all right?” Lindsey, Rhi, and Lorel had come running at my shout and now stood watching me with worried looks.
“You’ve got a ghost,” I said, examining my arm. The bite was definitely human and she hadn’t held back. Blood had begun to trickle from where the teeth had cut through. The damned thing was going to bruise badly, too. Did I need a rabies shot?
Their eyes widened as they saw the wound.
“A ghost?” Lorel echoed, trying to sound surprised, her gaze riveted on the bite.
I couldn’t help rolling my eyes. Was this really the way they were going to play it? All innocence and naiveté? Not a fucking chance. I glared. “You can’t be surprised. You’re the ones who said the place was odd. You even hinted that your aunt was haunting the place.”
“Are you okay? That looks awful. Maybe we should take you to the hospital,” Rhi said, totally ignoring what I’d said.
Nope. Not going to let the subject change. “I’m fine.” I grabbed a silk scarf off a nearby rack and pressed it to my wound. Aunt Mitzi was still fighting my hold and I tightened my grip, wondering if I could squish her and if I cared if I did. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”
And why, of all their choices, had they picked me to sell the estate? My stellar reputation? Or because I was a witch? And if the latter, how the fuck did they know that? Because it wasn’t exactly public information, and all the ways I could imagine them figuring it out weren’t exactly healthy for me. I wasn’t exactly hiding it, but I wasn’t flaunting it, either.
Rhi and Lorel looked at Lindsey, who flushed and averted her gaze. She chewed her lip. I waited, but my patience quickly thinned to fumes.
“I’m kind of psychic,” she murmured finally.
“Congratulations. What does that have to do with me?”
All three of the other women stared. I guess they were expecting me to laugh at such a ridiculous assertion, or maybe they’d thought I’d freak out.
“The night Aunt Mitzi died, I started having visions. Of you. Your face. They came on strong and overwhelmed me. I’d pass out. It took me days to recover from one. Worse, I had no idea who you were. The visions grew stronger and more frequent. I couldn’t sleep, and I lost track of everything.”
“She went delirious sometimes,” Rhi said. “We wrote down all she said, but not a lot made sense.”
“It was scary,” Lorel added, reaching out to grip Lindsey’s hand. “We’d never seen her experience anything like it and there wasn’t anything we could do.”
So much for the horrible arthritis Lindsey claimed she had. She probably just didn’t want to randomly touch people and have an accidental vision, though I had no idea what I was talking about.
“How did you figure out it was me?” My tone didn’t thaw, but I could hear their sincerity, which went a little way to making up for the bite.
Lindsey sighed. “I’m not a very good psychic. I’ve never been able to control it. It just...happens.” She shook her head. “I’ve also never experienced visions so debilitating.”
“We were afraid she was going to stroke out,” Lorel said. “Rhi and I went over all her ravings. Lindsey helped when she was coherent. We finally realized she had to be talking about the shop, so we came here. We thought it would get better if we came.”
“But as soon as we walked in, an ocean of images crashed over me,” Lindsey said, picking up the story again. “Only this time it wasn’t just images. I got sounds and smells and even taste. Everything was sharp and clear, but it all came at me so fast that my brain couldn’t process it all.”
“She dropped like a rock,” Lorel said and tears seeped down her face. “She wouldn’t wake up.”
“And then the whole place started rattling. Everything danced like it was going to fly off the shelves and walls. The displays, the racks, the chandeliers—it was all rocking and spinning and thumping and the noise was so loud.” Rhi shuddered, her shoulders hunching. “We dragged Lindsey out to the courtyard and then took her home. We couldn’t wake her for two days. We just about took her to the hospital.”
“Still doesn’t explain why me,” I said.
“When I woke up, I knew your name and I knew what you did and how to find you. I thought the visions made sense, given the shop and what we needed to do.” Lindsey shrugged and went back to chewing her lip.
And I chewed on her words. I had a lot fewer questions than I would have expected from the confession. It all made sense in a fucked up way. My whole life had been fucked up, so this didn’t exactly rise to the level of shocking.
“Assuming Aunt Mitzi was responsible for the whole poltergeist thing when you walked in, why did she let you come in today, or any other day for that matter?”
“We don’t know,” Rhi said slowly.
“But you have a guess,” I said.
