Page 47 of Woods of the Raven

“Is he?” Lorne asked, and I heard it in his voice, that he didn’t think so at all.

“Are you listening to yourself?”

“You’re not you, Jim,” he husked, his eyes narrowing. “You’re like a ghost haunting this house.”

“That’s not true,” James argued. “I’m getting better and—”

“You’re not,” I interrupted, and lifted my hand. There was fire in my palm, just as there had been earlier in the day. “But you will be.”

James scrambled backward, tripping over the edge of the rug, falling back onto the couch, but Lorne… Lorne stood his ground, and watching him made me go weak in the knees. No doubt about it, his heart and internal fortitude were quite impressive. It would take a lot to rock him.

“So when you said you were a witch, you weren’t fucking around,” Lorne said, and amazingly, smiled at me.

I was overwhelmed with him, with his capacity for acceptance and ability to see the humor in something that should have sent him off screaming into the night. All I could do was smile back.

“But I kinda figured that out from earlier today,” he said wryly, and the wink nearly undid me.

“I knew you did,” I said with a sigh.

“Okay, so what’s going on in my house?”

“Lor, your home is utterly brimming with regret and pain and sick, sticky dark energy that needs to go.”

“Yes,” he agreed without hesitation.

“We need to fill it with light and positive energy, and it needs to be protected and blessed so that you, Cass, and James can thrive here.”

“And how do we do that?”

“First, I’m going to need you to take this,” I said, passing him one of the rosemary cleansing bundles I’d brought in from his car, “and second, you’ll need to light that, get some thick smoke going, then start in the basement and go up to the top floor and repeat the phrase love and light, light and love over and over as you go. Eventually, you’ll pass by Cass, who is doing the cleansing part to the blessing piece you’ll be doing. Each of you will go over where the other has just been. The house needs to get done, and this is the best way.”

“And what you mean by that is it’s best for us to do it instead of you.”

“Yes, that’s right,” I replied, so pleased with him for intuitively knowing that.

“It’s because we live here, not you.”

I was probably beaming at him like a simpleton, but I didn’t care. He really was quite extraordinary, and I needed to stop moving him back and forth in my mind from good guy to irritating guy. He needed to stay where he was, squarely in the amazing category. All things considered, it was time to trust him. “We’re also going to thank the house for sheltering all of you, but it’s got to be clean first before you can make friends. Do you understand?”

“No,” he replied honestly, giving me a lazy grin that made my stomach flip over. “But I don’t think I need to.”

Oh, how I appreciated his willingness to trust me as he used the lighter on the wand. It was smoking in seconds. “I need you to get every corner of every room, high and low.”

He nodded, then left me and his brother alone.

Closing my fist, extinguishing the fire, I took a seat on the coffee table and faced James.

“How come you need a lighter if you have fire in your hand?” he asked logically.

“That’s sacred fire, illuminating fire,” I explained. “I can use it to light my way, draw things from the darkness, but I can’t incinerate something with it. It’s not a fireball out of the movies to be hurled at my enemies, nor is it a Zippo lighter.”

He chuckled. “I’m losing my mind, right?” he asked sincerely, smiling and shaking his head. “I figured I’ve been going crazy for a while, and I finally—”

“No. What you’ve been doing is grieving, which I one hundred percent understand. You love and miss your wife. My grandfather was the same.”

He nodded.

“But do you know where you and my grandfather diverge in your grieving?”