Chapter Eighteen
Ethan
“I thought you agreed with me that it was worth trying to deal with my unfinished drama so that I can pass on,” the ghost of Adam Sloan whined at ass o’clock the next morning.
Ethan looked at the time on the alarm clock next to the bed, disappointed to see that it wasn’t as early as he’d thought, he was just sleeping in. If he were a decent person he wouldn’t yell at the ghost for waking him up.
It had been a tense, sleepless night while he tried to force his brain to shut the fuck off and power down before Pat came upstairs, and made worse when the wolf didn’t come to bed, leaving him to wonder if he’d left the house again or if he’d done something tragically martyrish and slept on the couch.
By the look of the wadded up blanket and indented cushions, sleeping on the couch was precisely what Patrick had done.
Ethan scrubbed the sleep out of his eyes and stumbled around the kitchen, not fully awake until the first sip of caffeine hit his system.
“But did it work?” he mumbled to himself, glancing around for signs of haunting.
“Obviously not,” Adam snapped, imposing himself in Ethan’s line of vision.
“Not you.”
“You said you’d help me figure out who killed me.”
Ethan let out a world-weary sigh that rattled his chest and said, “Fine, right. I did.”
“How quickly he forgets.”
“You know, I do have other things on my mind than just you.”
Adam wrinkled his nose. “What you do with Pat is your own business. I don’t watch that stuff.”
“Stop talking, please,” Ethan groaned, holding up a hand. “Is he gone?”
“Left at the crack of dawn. You should have gone with him last night.”
“Why, where did he go?”
“I don’t know, but I’m sure it was more useful than that,” Adam said gesturing expansively at the remains of Ethan’s banishment spell littering the floor.
Even though he’d slept downstairs, it didn’t look as though Pat had touched any of the magic paraphernalia, so maybe he wasn’t a total lost cause even if he had terrible timing and didn’t know better than to smudge a boundary line.
An hour later, Ethan slipped inside the Three Sisters Magic Shoppe, the bell over the door jangling cheerfully at him in greeting. It was an unusually sunny morning, though still brisk. Ethan blinked at the abrupt change in light, the interior of the shop bathed in cool darkness thanks to the heavy velvet curtains that covered the front windows—only the narrow panes of warped glass along the east wall, set high up near the ceiling, let in shafts of light to play havoc with the dimensions of the room. He could hear a machine humming somewhere out of sight and a door closing upstairs in the apartment that Edie and Lailana shared.
He waited, certain that one of the sisters would appear in due course, but while he waited, it wouldn’t hurt to try his newfound magical ability out on the stock of books for sale which dominated the entire west wall.
“Ethan?” a soft voice asked some time later, tearing him away from the book on ghosts he had, in fact, been able to summon off the shelf with little more effort than it had taken to sort through his mother’s collection.
“Oh, hey,” he shot Edie a grin. “How much is this?” he asked holding up the tome.
Edie cocked her head, crossing to his side on silent feet. She held her mouth in a pinched line, but she took in the cover and said, “I don’t think that one will help you.”
“I don’t know, the way Burgess describes ghosts visiting him in dreams seems pretty accurate.”
She studied him while he touched the edge of the yellowed pages.
“No,” she said and took the book out of his hands, returning it to its place on the shelf without looking, she did not let go of his left hand. Ethan felt a tingle in his fingertips, Edie’s skin cool against his. She led him away from the books, to the counter where he sat on his familiar barstool. Edie held up one finger before she disappeared into the back. The sound of machinery—a vacuum, he realized—cut off and Lailana stepped into the front room, a fine mist of dirt covering the front of her overalls, hair in disarray, and face shining lightly with sweat.
“G’morning,” she greeted him with a quick smile.
“Busy morning?”
“Prepping the beds to start seedlings. The year has gotten away from me.”
Edie joined them bearing a silver tea tray and service. She poured three cups while Lailana knocked dirt out of her hair and climbed onto the seat next to Ethan.
“What can we do for you?” the blonde asked, taking a cup from her sister and inhaling the steam.
“Well, I thought I’d see if you had any books on getting rid of ghosts, but your sister seems to think that won’t help me.”
From the corner of his eye, he could see Adam exploring the magic shop with a look of polite curiosity. Edie’s eyes slid across to Adam’s side of the room as well, and Ethan wondered if she could see him too. Edie could see more than anyone he’d ever met. The past, the present, the future sometimes, straight into your heart and soul, no skull too thick that she couldn’t glean the thoughts right out of your head—even the ones you didn’t realize you were thinking. How hard could it be for her to see his ghosts? Besides the metaphorical ones, Ethan thought wryly.
As though she’d been listening to this as well, Edie flicked a nebulous smile at him, distracted in a way that was different from her usual distraction, turning again almost immediately to stare at the far wall. Adam had moved on to the rows of display shelves that filled the middle of the sales floor and contained common spell ingredients. The Three Sisters wasn’t a hobbyist’s magic shop, it was the real deal, stocking herbs that Lailana mostly grew herself as well as dried animal parts, candles, and chalk to be sure, but also bits of blood and bone and animal hairs hailing from all four corners of the globe, anything a practitioner might need for a variety of arts.
“You have a ghost problem?” Lailana asked politely.
“Every where I turn.”
Edie shot him a sharp look. Her fingers drummed an unsettling rhythm against the desk. He’d never seen her fidget before, and it left him feeling unsettled.
“I find that often a ghost just wants someone to talk to. Have you tried listening?” Lailana asked.
Ethan thought about that for a second before he nodded. “More or less.”
Behind him, Adam scoffed under his breath; Ethan shook him a dark look. He noticed that Edie didn’t look in the ghost’s direction though she still had a pensive air about her.
“Is this for a case?”
“He’s taken a sabbatical, remember, dear?” Edie prompted her sister.
“Oh, that’s right. How has the tea been working?”
“It works more or less. Helps me sleep at least.”
Lailana gave him a concerned look. “Are you sure? You look tired.” She turned and asked for Edie’s opinion.
“He does. The wolf has been keeping you up at nights?” Edie asked.
Someone else might have blushed at the implication, but Ethan had never been shy about sex, and he suspected that she wasn’t asking about their—Ethan’s mentally shuddered at the term love life, but he suspected that’s how Pat thought of it—sex life.
“Work has him on edge.”
The dark haired woman nodded, flicking another look across the shop but not at where Adam stood staring into jars of animal eyes floating in preservatives. Without warning she reached across the counter and clasped his hand in both of hers, arresting his attention. Pale eyes bored into his, cool hands squeezed his fingers.
“You’ll be careful, won’t you, darling?”
Her intensity made his heart pick up speed, a curl of fear wandering through him. He’d never seen this look in Edie’s eyes before, and he’d seen her perform a fair few unsettling feats. She looked almost…concerned. Afraid even. And that in turn made him afraid as well.
“Why?”
She shook her head.
“Edie,” her sister said in a low voice.
She shook her head again, more violently, and dug her nails into the back of his hand before letting go. She stood up and left the room without another word. Lailana cleared her throat and patted him on the shoulder.
“Do you need anything replenished?”
Disquiet made Ethan grab the book on ghosts Edie had told him to leave alone. “Just this.”
Lailana considered the book. “She’s right, I don’t think that will help you. You don’t want to hear this Ethan, but sometimes you’re not a very good listener, especially when you have other goals in mind.”
He huffed a sigh and pushed away from the counter. “Right. Come on,” he snapped at Adam and left the shop.
“She’s right,” the apparition told him as they climbed into the car.
“Fine,” he snapped. “Then you tell me where to go. What’s going to make you feel at peace? What about your damage is something that we can possibly fix? And it better not involve stalking Pat’s little sister because I happen to like Mallory.”
“You hardly know her.”
“I still like her more than I like you.”
Adam pressed a hand to his chest in mock affront. “That hurts, dude.”
“Not enough to kill you.”
“Oh, now with the ghost jokes. Need I remind you what I said earlier about you and your lack of a—”
“Adam! You wanted me to listen, then tell me something useful.”
The ghost huffed, the edges of his body shimmering in and out of focus as he visibly struggled with corporality. Ethan expected him to vanish again but after a minute the shimmering stopped and the ghost remained.
“It’s not that easy,” he complained. “I can’t just… It’s like the visibility thing. Sometimes it just slips away, and I don’t know how to hold onto it.”
“What, your memory?”
“Yes?” he said, giving Ethan a sheepish look.
“Great. So, what do you want to do?”
“What if we go back to places that are familiar to me? It might help me remember better.”
“I don’t suppose your address is one of the things you do remember?”
Adam thought about it for a second before he grimaced. “I lived in the city. Not that far away from the station, because I don’t think I owned a car. Pat always did the driving.”
“That’s no indication of car ownership; Pat just likes to hog the driver’s seat with that damn antique of his.”
“The Camero,” Adam mused, nodding in agreement.
When the ghost failed to remember anything useful, Ethan drove them to the station where he slipped in the back and took the elevator down to the first sub basement level. The dim corridors interlacing the foundation of the South Precinct were quiet, thankfully, and he made it to the IT department without running into another officer. It was generous to call the closet office containing a single desk covered in computer parts and a bank of servers humming away under dimmed fluorescent lights a department.
He knocked on the half-open door and gave Lauren Beck a furtive wave, hesitant about stepping inside. For one thing, she might try to gut him if he did and for another, Ethan didn’t want to start an accidental electrical fire or blow out the station’s entire server station.
Lauren scowled when she saw him, leaping up to block the door.
“What do you want?” she demanded.
“Information. It won’t take you long, and then I’ll be out of your hair.”
“Fine, what?”
He gave her Adam’s name and badge number—that the ghost could remember but not his own home address—and waited for her to poke at one of her computers. She scribbled a couple lines onto a bright pink post-it note and shoved it into his hands, then hesitated over a short stack of printouts waiting in her Outbox.
“I’ve also got these Chamber of Commerce reports for Detective Mallory—don’t suppose you could pass them along to her?”
“Uh.”
“She’s working with you and Clanahan, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Great, save me the trip of going upstairs,” Lauren said, pressing them into his hands. “Now, kindly fuck off before you cause a reset.”
“Thanks.”
“That was easy,” Adam said, following him back to the car.
“It helps when everyone wants you around even less than you want to be there.” He glanced at the reports Lauren had intended for Mallory—each page had the name and address of what sounded like a bar or club, as well as a list of names…owners maybe? Or employees. It was hard to tell except if they came from the Chambers, his money was on owners. Ethan folded the stack in half and stuck it into the center console, he’d look at them after he visited Adam’s house.
“Wow, grim. I’m sure they don’t all feel that way about you.”
“What are you, my biggest fan now?” Ethan said, punching the address into the second hand Garmin that spent most of its life under the front seat. It didn’t always work, but it was still more reliably resistant to his magical interference than the Audi’s on-board system, which liked to get stuck in a repetitive loop telling him to drive into Lake Union.
“No,” Adam snorted, “that would be Pat.”
Ethan ignored him and followed the directions to a little rundown block of townhouses all squished in together between newer apartment renovations.
“Recognize anything?”
Rather than answering, the ghost disappeared. Ethan swore under his breath, but as long as he was already here he figured he could do a little poking around.
He tried knocking on the door to No. 4, but there was no answer. The mailbox overflowed with junk mail all addressed to “Current Resident.” The lawn was littered with dead leaves and brown, dying grass while weeds withered in the unplanted garden beds. He peered into the dark front room, no sign of an occupant or furniture for that matter. It didn’t look like anyone lived there anymore.
“Well, if no one’s going to mind,” he muttered, rubbing his fingers together to warm them up as he stepped up to the front door. It was the work of a thought to turn the tumblers into place, and the door swung open on creaky hinges, a far cry from the sort of brute force he’d used on Pat’s apartment the other day; just another way his magic seemed to be evolving. If it weren’t so damn useful he’d be unsettled, but there was nothing useful about looking a gift horse in the mouth.
Inside, his suspicions were confirmed by a series of empty rooms covered in dust, nothing personal in sight except for a bit of stray paper garbage littering the upstairs bedroom.
The townhouse was even tinier than it had appeared from the street: a living room, kitchen, cubby for a stacked washer and dryer, one bathroom with a shower stall instead of a tub, and a single bedroom upstairs. The walls were all painted white and showed signs of neglect, now tinged grey. Bare bulbs in the ceiling where someone had taken the fixtures with them. No curtains on any of the windows, just grimy blinds.
“I think I had a cat,” Adam said quietly.
Ethan glanced over and found the ghost standing next to him again, looking around the bedroom with a drawn look on his face.
“Do you recognize this?”
He nodded.
“I wonder what happened to her.”
“Cats are resilient.”
“I don’t know. She was a ragdoll. She used to follow me around when I was home.”
Ethan watched the ghost run one hand over a wall, fingers passing through the matted strands of a destroyed spider web without disturbing them. He felt bad for Adam all of a sudden. What would he do if he were the dead one? If he was the one stuck at the mercy of a stranger’s good will? What business would Ethan want to finish if he never saw tomorrow?
“What was her name?” he asked, surprising himself. He doubted he’d be able to find out a random cat’s fate after two years, but if talking about her helped Adam then he could do what Lailana had suggested and listen.
A ghost of a smile flicked over the ghost’s face. “Luna. Total cliche I know. I didn’t name her. My step sister did. She was supposed to be Kate’s cat, but she didn’t know she was allergic when she adopted her. They wouldn’t have been able to take Luna back after I…”
Ethan didn’t have any family left to worry about if he died. If there was any justice in the world, which wasn’t something he believed in personally, his father was dead by now—he’d been close enough to it when Ethan left him in Colombia. His mother was long dead and staying that way. And then there was his Uncle Eoin, but they barely knew one another.
Ethan supposed that it might be easier for Eoin if he knocked off. One last thing for the older man to worry about.
As for friends… Well, there was Christophe, but they’d both worked to burn the bridge between them, and it would be a relief to never see Christophe’s pretty, traitorous face again. And a string of one night stands didn’t count as friends. Ethan had rarely felt the desire to fuck the same stranger more than once since his move to Seattle, which had led him to making a number of connections of the flesh that never led to anything more. In fact, now that he was thinking about it, Ethan realized that he could count the number of relationships he’d had on one hand with fingers to spare—and that was if you counted the month he’d spent unknowingly seduced by his half-sister as a relationship. Just thinking about it soured his mood.
Ethan cleared his throat, startling the ghost—and wasn’t that just priceless—and said, “Well? Unless your unfinished business was worrying about a cat you’ve never mentioned before this minute, we did come here for a reason.”
“Forgive a dead guy for taking a moment to wallow. I haven’t forgotten why we’re here.”
“And?”
Adam made an impatient cutting motion with his hand, frowning, and started to move around the bedroom with a little more purpose.
Ethan sneezed from all of the dust and pinched the bridge of his nose. He looked up when Adam made a contemplative noise. The ghost stared down at a seemingly random piece of floor. Ethan went over to see what had caught his attention, but it didn’t look different to him, the wooden boards as scuffed and worn from countless footsteps. Maybe a little squeakier, but then…
“Ah. Secret cache?” he asked, kneeling so that he could feel for the loose board.
“I think so.”
“Any idea what you hid?”
“I—no.”
“In the case.” Ethan reached down into the well of his magic and felt it respond to the call, surging up and spreading over the skin of his left hand as a small flickering blue flame. He heard the ghost suck in a surprised breath.
“Don’t burn the place down.”
“Not going to.” Ethan grimaced and tried to imagine the magic as less of wildfire and more as a force, narrowing down the flames into a flickering edge of heat as he ran his finger down the seam between two boards. They split, the glue disintegrating into acrid smoke that tickled his nose. He loosened a one foot square section, and then had to take a minute to will the magic to recede.
“Come on, dude,” Adam urged him, kneeling down as he tried to get a look at what was under the floor.
Ethan shushed him and reached into the dark, down through the soft, whispery feeling of spiderwebs that made a shiver crawl over his scalp before finally his fingers brushed crinkling plastic. Ethan grabbed a plastic bag and pulled it out to find it full of newspaper clippings.
“There’s more,” he muttered, reaching in again.
Altogether there were five over-sized evidence bags, each of them full of—well, he assumed Adam’s research, that’s what it looked like at least. Newspaper clippings, a couple of official looking case files, notes, post-its, worn composition notebooks in one, and pictures in another, all of it organized by type, with the seals taped over and dated in spidery handwriting the same way they did it with evidence.
“You must have been worried about someone going through your shit,” he said. “This is your handwriting, right?”
Adam squinted at the bags. “I guess?”
Loud banging on the street tore Ethan’s attention away from the evidence. He peeked out one of the dingy front facing windows; there were cars parked lining both sides of the street, making it appear narrower as a large garbage truck—the source of the noise—made its way down their side of the street. Two men worked in tandem to sift through the green city mandated bins. Ethan shook his head at himself, he was acting needlessly paranoid, but who would blame him when he had all of this staring at him? This being some two year old cold investigation courtesy of a dead man who had been worried about someone else finding his information. If Ethan were being paranoid, he consoled himself with the knowledge that he hadn’t been the first.
“Anywhere else we should look?” he asked the ghost.
Adam shrugged, winked out, and then appeared in the doorway looking confused.
“Ethan?” he whispered.
“What’s going on?”
The ghost shook his head and disappeared again. This time he stayed gone.
Ethan huffed and gathered the evidence bags, he shrugged out of his rain jacket and wrapped the files in the fabric so that he could carry it all over one arm without anyone seeing that he carried something other than the coat.
“Has he never heard of a laptop?” he grumbled as he tripped over a loose board at the top of the stairs, lost his hold on the bundle, and felt his wet rain boots slide out from under his weight.