Page 44 of Demon and the Raven

“Listen, I don’t wanna stay here while you go home to get smoke wands,” he informed me. “Because again, this house is creepy as fuck.”

“Not as much as you think,” I asserted because I’d felt the house respond to having people who loved each other on the premises. “I mean yes, there’s something more than heavy, sticky energy that’s never been purged, but whatever is in here with us is not corporeal. It’s still made of shadows, nothing tangible.”

“So what’re you gonna do?”

“We’re gonna go to the kitchen.”

“Which is where?” A flame was suddenly at his shoulder, answering him, as my magic was compelled to do. “Okay, show me,” he directed.

Always amazing when Lorne took my magic in stride.

As the flame left, he took hold of my hand, and the two of us followed it out of the sitting room, through a large living room, and down a short hall to a massive kitchen. Once there, I started looking through cupboards for spices.

“I’m gonna go get the doors open while you get whatever you need in here.”

“Promise me there’s nothing outside that can hurt you.”

“There’s not. I swear. Just an owl, some bats, and a seriously overgrown backyard.”

“Oh really?”

“Yeah,” he said with a grimace. “The front looks great, but the back is giving big-time horror-movie vibes.”

I snickered.

“It’s a total metaphor for life,” he commented.

“In what way?”

“In the way that what people can see is manicured perfection, but what they can’t see is wasting away behind the facade.”

“Huh.”

“I’ll stop now. This lesson on outward appearances is lost on Lynette anyway, since she’s passed out.”

“Then hurry up and get the doors open, Chief MacBain.”

He grunted and left me in the dark kitchen, not helped at all by the fact that it was painted black, with black marble floors and black quartz countertops.

I suspected that some of the ambience of the house would be destroyed once I cleansed it, but I had no choice. Lynette had lingering pain and sadness that had basically absorbed into the walls, now made manifest by whatever else had either slithered into her home or been placed there on purpose. This was what came of never doing anything as simple as airing the place out, as well as not being vigilant with wards if you gave séances. Either way, I would purge the house of the persistent gloom that had probably sunk down into the earth itself. I had to wonder, if I communed with it, what it would say.

When Lorne came back, the scent of rain, of petrichor, came with him. Underneath that, there was some kind of musk that I breathed in deeply.

“What’re you doing?”

“You smell good.”

He shook his head at me.

“Help me find basil and fennel seed,” I ordered, grinning at him.

He started searching through the cabinets to the right of the sink, and I checked the ones to the left.

“Got it,” he announced. “What else?”

“I need lavender, seeds or dried flowers, whatever you can find, as well as rosemary, yarrow, and marjoram.”

Not long after, we had them all lined up, and I cupped my hands together and had Lorne dump out half the contents of each of the small bottles into them.