“If that’s the case, why aren’t there millions of them roaming the earth?” Hudson asked. Good question, and one I was about to ask.
Dayna presses her lips together. “They stay with the body and are therefore normally scattered with the ashes or buried in the earth. They sometimes break free, often during violent deaths, or when the body hasn’t undergone the typical burial ceremonies. These souls are responsible for hauntings and poltergeist activity. They can, when they are most sentient, reenact their final moments on this earth, leaving us with many death echo legends. Occasionally, some dark magic practitionerdabbles with reanimation, but all that does is push the body soul back in its meat sack. It’s rarely done.”
“Because it’s too hard?” Dave asked.
“No, because they stink,” Dayna said, with a look that questioned his intelligence.
“Zombies. You are actually talking about zombies,” Sebastian said with a shiver.
“What is unusual is the amount of them that are here in one place, and the fact they seem to be keyed into emotion. I don’t know how intelligent they are beyond that.”
“Can we get rid of them?” Hudson asked. “Because for once, I agree with the vampire. Zombies are a hard limit for me.”
I rolled my eyes. “You are both being ridiculous.” They scowled at me.
“A simple cleansing should sort it,” Dayna said as she looked at Rockhard. “Did you bring it?”
Rockhard nodded as he opened his satchel and pulled out bundles of sage. He handed one to each of us, then lit his own.
Dave held it away from his body and sneezed. “What do we do with it?”
“Just wave it around. We need to get the smoke into every nook and cranny.”
“No hocus pocus?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Leave the hocus pocus to us.”
We set our bunches alight and began walking around the room. I kept my focus on the shadowy remnants slithering on the floor. They recoiled from the smoke, which was a good sign. Perhaps our supernatural shenanigans were going to be relatively uneventful for once. Of course, we needed to figure out why they were here, but we could do that after we sent them packing.
My aunts began chanting, and I followed suit, with Lenson and Rockhard joining us. Harry blinked at the smoke and recoiled.
“Best wait outside,” I muttered to him. He nodded and zipped off out of The Pit. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, but the remnants shrank and disintegrated, and we slowly cleared the room of them.
The last words of the cleansing were uttered, and the final bits of sage burned. We opened the windows and let out the smoke and any remaining negativity, leaving The Pit a clean space once more. Okay, so not clean, but cleansed of supernatural bullshit. I glanced around at my family and friends. The ghosts were gone, and that was what mattered.
“That was easy,” Sebastian said, making us all groan. “What? It was,” he added, doubling down.Wonderful.
“You just jinxed it,” I told him as I went to find Karen and tell her the happy news.
“I don’t believe in that mumbo jumbo.”
“How?” Aunt Dayna asked. “You are literally the mumbo jumbo.”
“Jumbo, yes.”
I rapped my knuckles on the office door, and Karen yanked it open. “Are they gone?”
“Yup.”
“That was easy.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose and stalked back into the bar. Now that we’d put it out there twice, it would be a goddamn miracle to receive backlash now. Not goddamn—oh hell. No, not hell. Jesus, I couldn’t catch a break. Wait… forget it. If God was going to smite me, I’d go out in flames.
“Cora?” my Aunt Dayna asked.
“Yes?”
“You doing okay? You’re mumbling a lot.”
