“I was startled,” he said.
“You were scared,” I said. “Becauseit was a ghost.”
“Alchemy laws state that when you die, your energy rejoins the universe. A ghost would mean that your energy could exist separate from your physical self?—”
I held up a hand. “Save me the alchemy lecture. Let’s find it, and then you can have your existential crisis.”
There was no magical trace that told me where the poltergeist had gone, but after seeing the ghost, I had a feeling I knew her name already. Opening the pantry, I grabbed the round container of salt and found another saltshaker next to the stove. Tossing it to King, I gestured with my head for him to follow me.
“You know much San Amaro history?” I asked as I moved back to the entryway. Before I started the case, I’d done a bit of research. Obviously not enough. But some.
“No,” King said, the word clipped.
Richmond was an unhealthy shade of gray, but his chest was rising and falling, his breathing audible. King bent to reach through his barrier and check that Richmond didn’t have something stuck in his mouth. When he stood, his face was grim.
“You think this is the fae?” King asked.
“No,” I said. The fae were San Amaro’s claim to fame, but this wasn’t fae magic. “I think it’s a poltergeist, but I knowwhoshe was, which means we can trap her.”
“Who was she?” King asked.
I started climbing the stairs. “Back in the 1800s, there was a medium who lived here. She was known for doing seances, personal readings, the whole charlatan bag of tricks. When it came out that all of her spooky sounds and evidence of spirits were just special effects her assistant was doing from behind a curtain, she lost everything except her house.”
“This house,” King surmised, looking around.
The renovated interior looked nothing like the photos from when she’d done seances here, but the layout was still there. I nodded.
“Died here a few years later, leaving behind a mass of debt and a lot of her old spiritualist gear.”
“See? Ghosts are just tricks,” King said. “This is just someone who heard about her and wants to scare some people.”
We’d reached the master bedroom, and I looked around. The newspapers at the time had said she’d died here, and this was where the first cold spots had appeared.
“We need to create a binding circle. You want to do it the alchemist way or the witch way?” I asked.
Making a face, King said, “If it’ll prove to you it’s not a ghost, we can do it your way.”
“Witchcraft it is,” I said. “Are they going to take away your alchemist card if you help perform a spell?”
“I’ll get a fine,” he said, raising an eyebrow. “Maybe even censured by my teachers.”
I couldn’t tell if he was serious, given how at odds witchcraft and alchemy were. He shook his head, a half laugh bouncing on his words when he said, “I’m not going to be doing any actual witchcraft, so it’ll be fine. They’ll just make me write sentences on a blackboard. ‘I will not associate with Warlocks.’”
“Must really crimp your dating life,” I said.
“I’m only limited magically,” he said, examining the room. I thought I saw a hint of a flush on his cheeks. “Not socially.”
Smirking, I pushed aside the storage box at the bottom of the bed and made space for some spellwork. My foster mom had trained me as a Warlock because that was all she’d known, but it didn’t fit my magic. It was like surviving only on a smoothie made of water and spinach. I could do it, but not for long and it wouldn’t be pleasant.
Witchcraft didn’t need circles the same way that alchemy did, but this was a binding spell, so I needed lines that would keep the ghost contained. I decided on a triangle, because it was less drawing and would use less magic than a circle.
Shaking out a piece of chalk from a side pocket on my satchel, I bent and sketched a triangle large enough to fit the ghost and give me some room to draw the symbols I needed. I pulled Laurel’s ghost book out of the bag and flipped to the pages on containing the spirit. Before I called the poltergeist, I needed to make sure the spell was airtight.
The spell would only hurt a ghost if she couldn’t feed off her remains anymore. There had to be something of her left in thehouse to keep her here. A lock of hair, a finger, something was keeping her trapped here, in the house she died in.
It couldn’t be her whole corpse. They had to have put that in the cemetery. I hoped.
Either way, once I cut her off from whatever was anchoring her to the mortal realm, she’d fade away. There wouldn’t be enough magic to sustain her. I drew binding symbols in the three corners and pressed some of my magic into them.
