Abruptly the shrieking cut off. My stomach curled. That couldn’t be good.
“What’s happening?” Rhi asked in a shaky voice.
I flicked a glance at her. She had gone a pale shade of gray and stared wide-eyed at the hovering mass of crap. A cloud of junk. Made me think of the garbage patch in the ocean.
“I don’t know,” Lorel replied softly.
“It’s got to be Aunt Mitzi. What’s she trying to do?” Lindsey, this time.
“She’s trying to kill you, and still would be if I let her,” I said a little more acerbically than I intended. Bet they believed I was a witch now. I resisted the urge to sayI told you so. Barely. Instead, I said, “you’re welcome and shut up. This is only a temporary fix. I need to figure out how to send her to hell where she clearly belongs.”
I didn’t bother checking their reactions. I didn’t have the bandwidth for them. Mitzi had begun pulverizing everything inside my trap. It didn’t do her any good. The more she made confetti, the more my bubble condensed, making her trap smaller. Unless that was the point. Maybe she wanted it smaller? I couldn’t see any reason why, but then I wasn’t a poltergeist with control issues and an anger management problem.
“Mitzi! What exactly is your problem? You’re dead. You’ve been voted off the island. Time to go, or I’ll have to make you go.”
She shrieked again, louder, and it actually hurt my ears and made my eyeballs vibrate in my head.
“Well I would let you go, but you’re a menace, not to mention batshit crazy. I mean, you were trying to murder your own daughters, not to mention your niece, who, I might add, is trying to follow your will to its last shitty letter. You ought to be grateful to her, instead of throwing a murder tantrum.”
As I spoke, an idea began to gel, but I didn’t have a handle on how to get it done.
Then Mitzi went quiet. Too quiet.
“So you’re ghosting us now,” I said. “Irony notwithstanding, we appreciate the quiet and feel free to leave.”
She didn’t respond. Lindsey let out a low moan and crumpled to her knees, holding her head. She tipped sideways and curled into the fetal position.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
Both Rhi and Lorel had dropped to their knees beside their cousin, but refrained from touching her.
“She’s having a vision,” Rhi said when I repeated my question. She sounded worried.
“Is she going to be alright?”
“Yes.”
I couldn’t tell if that was certainty or wishful thinking. I decided I couldn’t worry about her and Mitzi at the same time, and Mitzi required my attention.
What I wanted to do was send her off to wherever she belonged, but I didn’t know where that was, and I probably couldn’t do it anyhow. That left containing her as best I could. I decided to go with binding her to some object. If I could limit how far she could wander or affect the world around her, that would be enough. Then I could stick her in a safety deposit box, or maybe throw her in the ocean.
I sighed, remembering that magic didn’t hold up to the elements, and I was pretty sure that ocean water would be fastest at eroding it. Not a chance I was willing to take.
I looked around for something I could use. Metal would probably be best. More durable than any of my other choices, unless I could find a rock. My eye caught on the tall amethyst cathedrals that Mitzi hadn’t bothered with. Beside them were shelves that had held rocks and minerals. My gaze slid to a spear of pink quartz that had fallen on the floor and broke in two. One piece was about an inch by two inches, with one rough end and one pointed end.
Ghosts had no mass, so size shouldn’t matter. I picked up the smaller chunk of quartz and rubbed my fingers over it, thinking.
Lindsey started talking, but I couldn’t understand what she was saying. I blocked her out and concentrated on solving my Mitzi problem.
Once again, I realized I was overthinking, and I needed to do what I did best. Decide what to do and do it. I had to have full confidence in my abilities. Damon would call it cockiness. He’d warn me not to be rash, that I had to pay attention to potential consequences and hedge against them.
I drew a breath and let it out. Fuck all that. I knew my magic and I knew how to use it. Sure, it wasn’t conventional, but it worked for me.
“I can do this,” I muttered, though whether to reassure myself or the absent Damon. “I’m damned wellgoingto do this.”
With that, I went to work. Mitzi had been caught inside my bubble. Now I just needed to extract her and bind her to the quartz. I formed a new bubble just inside the old one. This one was to allow anything to pass through it except Mitzi. Sticky anemone-style arms covered the interior, helping to immobilize her once she was caught.
I contracted the interior bubble. It passed easily over the debris, reducing it down to a tiny ball of energy, no larger than a marble. I pulled it down to land in my empty palm. My magic was invisible, but Mitzi was a swirling drop of black, blue, and yellow. The colors twisted around themselves but didn’t mix.
