Chapter Nine
Ethan
He was in the shower the next day when his Uncle Eoin called. Ethan called back right away.
“Hey,” he said, suddenly feeling awkward all over again.
They hadn’t spoken since everything went down with—with Ali and the boat and her attempt to resurrect their— Ethan buried that line of thought and refocused on what Eoin was saying: nothing. His uncle was quiet on the other end of the phone.
“So, how are you?”
“Ethan,” Eoin said, his voice low and rough almost as though they were speaking over a bad connection, but then he cleared his voice so that his next words came through loud and clear. “I’m fine. How are you?”
“Oh, you know, fucking brilliant. What’s a little fratricide after you’ve spent a couple of months on the run from your father’s hired guns?”
“If I had known…”
“So, you didn’t? You didn’t know that mom had a daughter? Really?”
“We weren’t especially close the last couples of years before she died. She never let on that… No. I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t call to blame you.”
“I’m glad that you did call, all the same,” Eoin replied. “I’ve been meaning to get in touch with you. I just wasn’t sure if you’d want to hear from me.”
“It’s not your fault that she tried to kill me. Or for anything else she did while trying to resurrect mom.”
And wasn’t that just another kick in the nuts? That he’d run away, from Seattle but more importantly from his father, all in an effort to keep his mother’s bloodstone out of that bastard’s hands, and the entire time he’d had nothing more than a fake. That the real bloodstone had already been in his psychotic half-sister’s hands; that she’d used it to kill five innocent people in an effort to bring their dead witch-mother back to life. And instead of being around to deal with that insanity, to stop it, even, he’d been halfway around the world putting Patrick in harm’s way instead.
“It’s not your fault either,” his uncle said after a strained pause.
Ethan snorted. “So, now that we’ve covered all the pleasantries, what do we do?”
“There’s something I meant to give you. Though I’m not sure you’ll want it. It’s your mother’s estate. Since I realized her connection with that—young woman—I’ve found some of her things that I didn’t know about.”
“Oh, great, got another crazy powerful magical artifact you want me to store?”
“No, it’s a house.”
Ethan sat down heavily on a kitchen stool and leaned his forehead against the counter.
“A whole house.”
“Snoqualmie police contacted me about a week ago. They think that Ali was using it as a home base while she…”
“Killed all those people.”
“Some of them, yes. Since they and the Seattle PD have determined that she was working alone, they released the property to me. If you don’t want anything to do with it I would understand, but I wanted to give you the option first before I did anything.”
Ethan blew out a long breath.
“If you want to take a couple days to think about it…there’s really no rush. The mortgage is paid; it’s just been sitting there. It’s not going to go anywhere else. If you want to tear it down even…” Eoin cleared his throat. “Ethan?”
“No, I want to see it. I need to see it.”
Eoin rattled off an address.
“The keys are still with the Snoqualmie police. I’ll let them know to expect you?”
“Yeah.”
“If you want I can go out there with you?”
“No, I think this is something I should do on my own.”
Of course, the last thing he wanted was to have a conversation about this latest development with Patrick.
Ethan sat on the address to his mother’s secret valley escape for eighteen hours before the curiosity—he called it curiosity, but really it was closer akin to a nightmare, after he woke up from another dream starring Ali—compelled him to grab a taxi over to his apartment. He didn’t go upstairs, instead he walked two blocks to where Eoin had put his Audi back into long term parking. He was relieved to find the sweet little car unmolested in its parking stall.
He took I-5 to Highway 90, driving east towards Snoqualmie. With traffic, he spent an hour on the road and then after he swung through the Sheriff’s stations for keys, another twenty minutes driving around to the far side of Borst Lake where Deirdre Ellison had bought a little house tucked away from the road. Down the wooded slope, through the spindly Evergreen trees, he could just make out the rusted stackhouse marking the abandoned Weyerhaeuser Mill.
He’d parked in the gravel clearing in front of what looked like an innocuous log cabin, but as he walked around the side of the house, taking in the sweeping single story construction, he realized that the expression “log cabin” hardly did this place any justice. It had a tall slope-facing back wall made entirely of glass that came to a tall point beneath an acute A-frame roof, all exaggerated angles that suggested a Frank Lloyd Wright inspiration in the design.
The windows were all dark, of course, but beneath the exaggerated roof, he could imagine that the sprawling back porch would have made a cozy place to hang out on a summer’s evening while one watched the sun set across the lake, which he could also just catch a glimmer of beyond the old remains of the Mill.
Picturesque, that was the word he was searching for.
Under the weak December morning sun, muted by the ever present grey overhanging clouds, the place stood dark and imposing. He climbed the porched and unlocked the door. It swung open on its own with a ponderous noise, loud enough to make Ethan’s hair stand on end.
He wasn’t sure what he expected to find here. Not answers though, Ethan was fairly certain those didn’t exist for him. But he was still surprised when he flicked on the lights to reveal an ordinary looking living room. Large and spacious to be sure, complete with exposed honey colored cedar beams and a vaulted ceiling to match the two-story wall of windows, leather furniture, and cute little side tables that looked like they’d been painted as part of a DIY project. Even a wall of bookcases running along the north side of the room, again floor to ceiling and complete with a tall ladder on a rolling rail. Maybe a little dusty, but nothing jumped out at him as belonging to a murderer.
Of all the things his—that Ali had been, it struck him all over again that she’d been a serial killer last. Mallory had put together a file on her, had offered to let him read it the one other time they’d bumped into each other since his return, but he hadn’t had the stomach to take her up on the offer. Now, he wondered if he should have. If reading Mallory’s cool, succinct description of Ali’s action while he was out of the country would somehow give him a lens through which to examine his surroundings now.
Somehow, he doubted it would help. Nothing could help this.
He passed through the rooms of the house as though stepping through a dream, only here the walls remained stubbornly attached to the floor. He had almost given up the trip as a wash—there were precious few personal items to be found in any of the bedrooms, as though the place had never been used for more than a weekend retreat—when a flicker of movement grabbed his attention.
Ethan frozen in the scrap of hallway that branched from where the kitchen melted into the living room and swung a careful look over his shoulder. He held his breath, digging his blunt nails into the palms of his hands until the skin stung, just to make certain that he was awake. It hurt; the sting was a relief. But still he was afraid of moving too quickly, of whipping his head around to find Ali standing there smirking at him or nothing at all. He wasn’t sure which would be worse.
He wasn’t expecting to dart a glance out from under his lashes and find a young man standing in front of the wall of windows with his back to Ethan, head tilted back in contemplation of the view.
As he stared, Ethan had to squint his eyes against the strange refraction of the light around the figure. He did not cast a shadow, and his body seemed somehow gray, almost anemic to Ethan, difficult to see when the mage stared straight at him.
He must have made a noise, his throat felt rough with it, and the young man turned, brown eyes meeting Ethan’s; they grew huge in his pale face and he took a step forward, wavering around the edges, opened his mouth, though no words came out. Ethan blinked and there was no one else in the room with him.
He shook, a damp nervous sweat under his arms and the collar of his borrowed sweater making him shiver.
Ethan cleared his throat and uncurled his fists.
“Hello?” his voice broke at first, and he repeated the question, louder this time, trying to put some fucking authority into it. “Hello?”
Nothing. Silence but for the ticking of a clock on one of the bookshelves. The time on its display read an hour ahead.
Hands shaking despite himself, Ethan shoved up the sleeves of his sweater to expose his bare skin to the air, kicked off his boots, ripped off his socks until he could flex bare toes against the stinging cold floors. He flicked off the overhead lights and waited, listening, trying to steady his heartbeat and just feel the world around him. He’d come here looking for a ghost, maybe not a young male ghost, but a ghost all the same.
“Hello? Are you still there?” he whispered.
The ticking of the clock grew loud and his muscles ached from being held so still long before Ethan felt a cool brush of air over the back of his neck. His eyes by that point were burning from his staring for so long at the bright grey-white windows and the sky outside had darkened until the clouds also gave up and began to rain.
“Dude, I can’t believe you saw me!”
Ethan, very carefully, did not allow himself to jump.
“Who are you?” he asked without looking this time.
A heavy pause greeted his question, and then: “Shit, you heard that? You are good.”
“Yes, I can hear you.” Though in truth it was like listening to the wind carry the voice to him, faint even while it felt and sounded as though the ghost were speaking just behind him. “But you didn’t answer my question.”
“Adam. My name is Adam—”
Lightning lit up the sky, very close, the crash of thunder rumbling close on its heels to drown out the rest of the ghost’s words, and when Ethan dared to look over his shoulder there was nothing to see.
Adam. He couldn’t remember knowing any Adams—and while it was entirely possible he’d known, biblically, a few men by that name and simply forgotten, Ethan’s mind skipped ahead to another answer, one that left him conflicted.
He hadn’t known any Adams, but Patrick had.
He waited, he paced the unlit room, rolled his shoulders and said, “Hello?” until his voice went hoarse but the ghost did not show himself again, and if he responded then Ethan couldn’t hear it.
When he’d worn himself out a little, he planted himself in front of the bookcase and took a closer look at the collection, and what a fucking collection it turned out to be. Ethan hadn’t seen anything so replete with ancient texts and first editions since he’d been a boy in his father’s house.
A part of him had come here expecting to find the detritus of a life, clothes and toiletries, the odds and ends that he could sweep into the garbage or just walk away from altogether. He didn’t want to hang onto a place like this; a place that those two women had inhabited. It set his teeth on edge just to be here for an afternoon. But staring up at Deirdre’s collection, he realized that he’d be an idiot to walk away from a resource like this one. He couldn’t walk away from it, couldn’t sell it the house and everything in it—well, he could and make a nice profit off of it, in fact—without first going through what was here. To do so would have been akin to cutting off his nose just to spite his face.
He found a small toolset in the garage and a package of spare lightbulbs, but nothing to help transport the book collection back to Seattle.
It was a six minute drive to the city of Snoqualmie around the Lake. He found a small local mercantile store that sold him a stack of cardboard moving boxes at an outrageous premium, and then he drove back to the house. Ethan knew that he had to get everything packed in one trip, that he wasn’t going to want to come back another day to finish up, and there was no way in hell he was willing to sleep there overnight to finish in the morning. With that in mind, he assembled the boxes, shrugged off Pat’s sweater, and got to work.
Dust layered everything and set his eyes and nose to watering. Ethan weighed and discarded the idea of trying to sort through the works. There was too great a chance that the further along he got the more likely he’d be to skip something rare and powerful. That was the other thing weighing on his mind: there was no telling what kind of dark tomes lurked on these shelves. His mother had possessed an intact Medusa’s curl, a powerful arcane object, utterly priceless and irreplaceable. It seemed to form that her library could hold other such rare—and fucking dangerous—gems.
With that in mind he pulled everything off the shelves without much more than a cursory examination except to judge each items dimensions relative to what had already gone in the boxes. It was full dark by the time he was finished.
Ethan’s back screamed protests from all the bending and lifting, he felt drenched in sweat despite the December chill and the fact that he hadn’t stopped to find the thermostat, and his legs shook with exhaustion. He’d never been a gym rat, but their months traveling, spending so much time on the ocean, and then after his retreat into himself at Pat’s house had done nothing for his physical stamina. He was grossly out of shape and every muscle in his body was more than ready and willing to tell him in graphic distress just how they felt about all of this unexpected labor.
He sat in a sea of boxes, slowly leaning back until he could stretch out full length across the floor, listening to his knees pop like they belonged to an old man—what do you think you are?—and winced when he remembered that he still had to carry everything to the car. Hopefully they’d all fit inside the Audi. It wasn’t the most spacious interior.
“Hecate, help me,” he grumbled, digging his fingers into irritated eye sockets.
If he stopped for too long, Ethan worried he wouldn’t be able to get up again, so he rolled over and used the boxes to claw his way back to his feet. Locking his knees, he muttered a grim litany of: “Just do it, just get them in the car,” under his breath while he began hauling the boxes outside.
It was a tight fit, unsurprisingly, and the living room looked like an explosive charge had detonated there, leaving a grim hole in the universe where books should have lived, but Ethan felt a weird, almost sickly satisfaction when he looked at that empty space.
A cool breath made him shiver. He pulled his sweater back, did a final check to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything, made a second check for any wayward ghosts—but wherever Adam had fucked off to, he seemed to still be gone or at least beyond Ethan’s vision—locked everything up and drove off. The key to the house rattled in the coffee cup holder between the seats.
By the time Ethan made it back to the Seattle city limits he’d decided that he’d put the damn key in an envelope and drop it in the post for Eoin.
The dash clock told him it was just after 1 AM by the time he pulled up in front of the McClanahan Pack townhouse and his eyes felt like sandpaper from all of the dust and then the glare of headlights on the Interstate for an hour driving back. He parked in the empty side of the double car driveway, next to Pat’s Camero, and got out, slamming the door behind him. He jumped when the front door burst open, yellow light illuminating a broad figure standing on the porch with arms crossed: Pat, obviously.
“Hey,” he called softly, raising one hand in greeting. He was shocked when the wolf crossed the space between them faster than a human could have moved, and got up in his personal space. A dangerous rumble curled up out of the werewolf’s chest and across Ethan’s skin as he looked up into Pat’s scowling face.
“Where the hell have you been?” he demanded in a grim voice, and grabbed him by the shoulders, tight until Ethan felt his bones grind together.