“I don’t know,” he said, his voice loud and frustrated. “If I knew, I don’t remember. I didn’t know there was going to be a fucking test! I just wanted tohelpher. I didn’t know I’d have to track her down.”
His voice cracked again, and this time he couldn’t force the tears back. Luke hunched over and turned his head away, one hand up to cover his face as the night tore out of him on ragged, uneven sobs.
Jonah let him cry. It was all he could do. Comfort wasn’t something that had been modeled for him at home. Grandma had made sure they weren’t going to die of whatever ailed them, but after that, she’d been a strong proponent of walk it off or punch it out. After an awkward minute, Jonah got up and pulled the hoodie out of Luke’s hands.
“Go have a shower, then try and sleep it off,” he said as he patted Luke’s shoulder awkwardly. “We can talk tomorrow.”
Luke sniffed and wiped his face on the back of his hand.
“Sleep. How the fuck am I supposed to sleep?” he asked. “It’s still out there. What if it finds me? I don’t want… I don’t want to die.”
“No one does,” Jonah said. “Being awake won’t help if the hag finds out, though. So try and rest. Let your subconscious try and dig something up.”
It wasn’t the most compelling argument, but it worked. Luke levered himself up off the couch and stood there for a second.
“All I think is that stupid convention story,” he said tiredly. “She told it every time, like one day someone would ask if Arlene was hot.”
He trailed off, as if he’d expected that to be funny but couldn’t muster up any enthusiasm now. Instead, he just took a deep breath and headed off to get that shower.
Jonah waited until he heard the shower start, and then he went to check out the front. He reached up to touch the hex sign he’d hung up over the lintel, a cool disc of painted wood under his fingers, and then opened the door to look out.
“It smelled like grandad’s whiskey,” he said aloud. “Old bastard.”
There probably wasn’t enough of Ram left to really understand why Jonah had come out here. He was still all that Jonah had. The ghost sat on the porch, forever seventeen and an asshole, and glanced over his shoulder.
One day I'll piss on your grave, he said, the old malice faded down to a tint.
Jonah didn’t know what else he’d expected.
“Good talking to you,” he said tiredly. “Always fun.” He left Ram there on guard and went back inside.
For a moment, Jonah stood outside the bathroom door and listened to the sound of running water as he wondered if he should… do something. He raised his hand to knock on the door, his knuckles almost close enough to touch the wood, but changed his mind. If there was anything that would make tonight better for Luke, it wasn’t going to be found in Jonah. He knew that from experience.
He went down the hall to bed. The smell clung to him despite his own best efforts to chase it off with mint and a scrub. As he dozed off, it followed him down into his dreams. It made him small and scared, in a house that seemed much bigger than he knew it was.
Big enough for all the Carrow family secrets, at least.
He woke up to the smell of food.
That was new. Jonah would have put money on the only food in the fridge being takeout. He threw the blankets back and swung his legs out of bed. For a minute, he sat where he was, feet on the floor and hands braced behind him on the bed. He took stock.
The windows were uncurtained. Jonah had taken them down when he moved in. If the neighbors objected to the occasional glimpse of his ass, they’d yet to bring it up. Garlic, salt, and iron all worked, but the sun was the best antiseptic that the “normal” world had.
The sun undid most hexes if they were exposed to it. It banished ghosts back to the nearest grave—whether it was their own or not—and all that was left was the chaff they’d shed.
So Jonah made sure the sun could reach all the corners and kept the bed propped up on bricks so there were no shadows under it. He’d not hung up his hex hat just to let some half-assed curse rot his new life out from under him.
He got up and went over to the window. Ram was gone. Not far. It didn’t take him long to reappear once the sun started to set—or a storm rolled in. Jonah didn’t want to know the details. That meant the hag was gone too.
She’d be back.
Jonah could still smell the faint aroma of whiskey on the air, faded but unmistakable. Like cologne left on a pillow or a bookmark left to find the page.
The alarm went off. Jonah muted the chirp on his phone and grabbed his jeans. There was a T-shirt slung over the foot of the bed. It was either clean or—Jonah shook it out and gave it a quick sniff—clean enough. He slung it over his shoulder and headed to the bathroom.
Hexes and hags could wait. The beers he’d downed the night before could not.
“Scrambled eggs, leftover taco meat, and there was a couple of slices of bread in the freezer,” Luke said. He was cheerful in a breathless, determined way that wasn’t about to let anything get in its path. “Not exactly gourmet, but the best I could do.”
