Bone Crossed

6

NEITHER OF THE TWO MEN WHO ENTERED THE HOUSE was handsome. The shorter man was slightly balding, with plump hands that had three thick gold rings on them. His suit was off-the-rack, but the rack had been expensive. His eyes were pale, pale blue, almost as pale as Samuel’s wolf eyes. The resemblance made me want to like him. He stood by almost shyly as the other man hugged Amber.

“Hey, sweetie,” Amber’s husband said and, to my surprise, there was honest warmth in his voice. “Thank you for fixing dinner for us on such short notice.”

Corban Wharton was striking rather than good-looking. His nose was too long for his broad face. His eyes were dark and wide-set—and smiling. There was something solid and reassuring about him. He was the kind of person that you’d want beside you in a courtroom. When he looked at me, he frowned briefly, as if trying to place who I was.

“You must be Mercedes Thompson,” he said, holding out his hand.

He had a good handshake, a politician’s handshake—firm and dry.

“Call me Mercy,” I said. “Everyone does.”

He nodded. “Mercy, this is my friend and client Jim Blackwood. Jim—Mercy Thompson, my wife’s friend who is visiting us this week.”

Jim was talking to Amber and took just an instant to turn his attention back to Corban and me.

Jim Blackwood. James Blackwood. How many James Blackwoods were there in Spokane, I wondered in dumb panic. Five or six? But I knew—even though the strong cologne he wore kept me from scenting vampire—I knew I wasn’t going to be lucky.

He’d think I smelled like I had dogs, Bran had assured me. And even if he didn’t, even if he knew what I was—I was just visiting. He couldn’t take offense at that, right?

I knew better. Vampires could take offense at anything they liked.

“Mr. Blackwood,” I greeted him, when he looked away from Amber. Keep it simple. I didn’t know if vampires could sense lies like the wolves could, but I wasn’t going to say, “It’s very good to meet you,” or something similar when I was wishing myself a hundred miles away.

I did my best to keep a social smile on my face while stupid thoughts began to pile up. How was he going to eat with us? Vampires didn’t. Not that I’d ever seen. What were the chances of a vampire’s showing up and it not being some plot of Marsilia’s?

Blackwood hadn’t sounded like a vampire who would do anyone’s bidding.

“Call me Jim,” he told me, just a hint of a British accent shading his voice. “I’m sorry to intrude on your visit, but we had some urgent business this afternoon, and Corban insisted on bringing me home.”

His round face was merry, and his handshake was even more practiced than Corban’s had been. If it weren’t for that little talk I’d had with Bran, I’d never have known what he was.

“Shall we go eat now?” Amber suggested, calm and in control now that the preparations were finished. “It’s ready and not going to get better if it sits around. I’m afraid I kept it simple.”

Simple was pepper steak over rice with salads and fresh rolls followed by homemade apple pie. Somehow, the food disappeared from the vampire’s plate. I never saw him eat or touch his plate—though I kept half an eye on it with morbid fascination. Maybe a little hope. If I’d seen even a single bite go in his mouth, then I’d have believed him to be just what he seemed.

I stayed quiet while the men talked business—mostly contract language and 401(k)s—and I was very happy to stay unnoticed. Amber slipped in a sentence here and there, just enough to keep the conversation going. I heard Chad sneak by the dining room and into the kitchen. After a while he left again.

“Very good meal as always,” the vampire told Amber. “Beautiful, charming—and a fine cook. As I keep telling Corban, I am going to steal you one of these days.” I felt a chill go down my spine—he wasn’t lying—but Corban and Amber just laughed as if it were an old joke. Just then, he looked at me. “You’ve been awfully quiet tonight. Corban tells me you went to school with Amber and you’re from Kennewick. What is it you do there?”

“I fix things,” I mumbled to my plate.

“Things?” He sounded intrigued, just the opposite of what I’d hoped.

“Cars. Meet Mercedes the VW mechanic,” said Amber with a touch of the sharpness that had been her trademark in the old days. “But I bet I can still get her going on the royal families of Europe or the name of Hitler’s German shepherd.” She smiled at James Blackwood, the Monster who kept his territory free of vampires or anything else that might challenge him. A coyote wouldn’t be much of a challenge.

Amber chatted on ... almost nervously. Maybe she thought I’d jump up and tell her husband’s valuable client that they’d brought me over to catch a ghost in the act. She wouldn’t be worried about it if she knew what he was. “You’d have thought with her background—she’s half-Blackfoot ... or is that Blackfeet? ... Anyway, she never studied Native American history, just the European stuff.”

“I don’t like wallowing in tragedy,” I told her, trying desperately to sound uninteresting. “And that’s what Native American history is mostly. But now I just fix cars.”

“Blondi,” said Corban, “was the name of the dog.”

“Someone told me she was named after the comic strip Blondie,” I added. That supposition had led to many arguments among the Nazi trivia buffs I knew. I was hoping the conversation would devolve to Hitler. He was dead and could do no more harm—unlike the dead man in the room.

“You are Native American?” asked the vampire. Had he tried to catch my eyes?

I was very good at keeping my gaze from meeting other people’s unless it was on purpose—a useful skill around the wolves. I looked at his jaw, and said, “Half. My father. I never knew him, though.”

He shook his head. “I’m very sorry.”

“Old news,” I said. Deciding that if Hitler wasn’t going to distract him from me, maybe business would. It always worked with my stepfather. “I take it Corban is keeping your company safely out of the courts?”

“He’s very good at his job,” said the vampire with a pleased and possessive smile. “With him beside me, Blackwood Industries will stay afloat for a few more months, eh?”

Corban gave a hearty, and heartfelt, laugh. “Oh, I think a few months at the least.”

“To making money,” said Amber, holding up her glass. “Lots of it.”

I pretended to sip the wine with the rest of them and was pretty sure that my idea of making money was several orders of magnitude less than theirs.

HE LEFT AT LAST IT HADN’T BEEN AS HORRIBLE AS I’D feared. The Monster was charming and, I hoped, unaware that I was anything except a not-very-interesting VW mechanic. Except for that one moment, I’d mostly avoided notice.

Almost euphoric at my near escape, I didn’t worry about ghosts at all while I changed. Then I went back downstairs to help Amber with the cleanup.

She must have been worried or something, too, because she was nearly as giddy as I was. We had an impromptu water fight in the kitchen that ended in a draw when her husband stuck his head in the doorway to see what the noise was all about, and nearly got a sponge in the face for his trouble.

Discretion suggested that having escaped detection once, I should head home in the morning. But Amber was a little drunk, so I decided that conversation could wait until later. Dishes clean, clothes wet and soapy, I left Amber necking with her husband in the kitchen.

I opened the bedroom door to find Chad in the middle of my bed, his arms crossed over his chest. I could smell his fear from the doorway.

I closed the door behind me and took a good look around the room. “Ghost?” I mouthed.

He glanced around the room, too, then shook his head.

“Not here? In your room?”

He gave me a cautious nod.

“How about we go in your room, then.”

Terror breathing out of every pore, he slipped off the bed and followed me to his room: brave kid. He opened his bedroom door cautiously—and then pushed it open, being very careful to keep his feet in the hallway.

“I assume you don’t usually keep that bookcase facedown on the floor,” I told him.

He gave me a dirty look, but he lost some of his fear.

I shrugged. “Hey, my boyfriend has a daughter”—boyfriend was such an inadequate word—“and I had a pair of little sisters. None of them keeps a clean room. I had to ask.”

Except for the bookcase, it was hard to tell what part of the mess was a normal boy’s habitat and how much the ghost had caused. But the bookcase, one of those half-sized things people put in kids’ rooms, was easy to fix. I squeezed past Chad and into the room. The bookcase was even lighter than I’d thought.

When I started reshelving his books, he knelt beside me and helped. He read a little of everything—and not entirely limited to things I’d think a kid would read: Jurassic Park, Interview with the Vampire, and H. P. Lovecraft sat next to Harry Potter and Naruto manga numbers one through fifteen. We worked for about twenty minutes to put everything to rights, and by the time we finished, he wasn’t scared anymore.

I could smell it, though. It was watching us.

I dusted my hands off and looked around. “You usually keep your room this neat, kid?”

He nodded solemnly.

I shook my head. “You need help. Just like your mom. My little sister kept fossilized lunches under her bed for the dust bunnies she raised there.”

I picked up a game from the neat stack. “Want to play some Battleship?” I wasn’t leaving him alone with that thing in there.

Chad armed himself with a notebook, and we went to war. Historically, war has often been used as a distraction for problems at home.

Both of us lay on our bellies on the floor facing each other and fired our missiles. Adam called, and I told him he’d have to wait—battle must take precedence over romance. He laughed, wished me good night and good luck, just like that old war correspondent.

Chad’s two-point boat was devilishly well hidden, and he destroyed my navy while I hunted it fruitlessly.

“Argh!” I cried with feeling. “You sank my battleship!”

Chad’s face lit with laughter, and someone knocked at the door. I supposed I hadn’t needed to make so much noise since Chad couldn’t hear me anyway.

“Come in,” I said. Reading my lips, Chad looked suddenly horrified, and I reached over and patted his shoulder.

The door popped open, and I rolled halfway over and looked back over my feet as if to see who it was. Most people would have needed to look, so I did, but I’d heard him coming—and Amber had never stalked angrily in her life. Stomp, yes. Stalk, no. Trust me—any predator knows the difference.

“Isn’t it after bedtime?” Corban said. He was wearing a pair of sweats and an old Seattle Seahawks shirt. His hair was rumpled as if he’d been to bed. I supposed I’d woken him up.

“Nope,” I told him. “We’re playing games and waiting for the ghost to show up. Want to join us?”

“There isn’t a ghost,” he said to his son, out loud and in sign.

I’d started to like Corban over dinner, he had seemed like a decent guy. But he was being a bully now.

I rolled up until I was facing him. “Isn’t there?”

He frowned at me. “There are no such things as ghosts. I am very happy you’ve come here to visit, but I don’t approve of encouraging nonsense. If you tell them there isn’t one here, they’ll believe you. Chad has enough to deal with without everyone thinking he’s crazy.” He’d continued to sign, even though he was talking to me. I didn’t know if he left out the bit where I was supposed to tell Chad and Amber there weren’t any ghosts.

“He’s a damn fine naval commander,” I told Corban. “And I think he’s too smart to make up ghosts.”

He signed my reply, too. Then he said, “He just wants attention.”

“He gets attention,” I said. “He wants to stop being scared because someone he can’t see or hear is making a mess in his room. I thought you were the one who suggested I come check it out. Why did you do that if you don’t believe in ghosts?”

There was a loud bang as the car on the top of Chad’s chest of drawers made a suicide run off its perch, zoomed three feet across the room to hit the bookcase, and fell onto the floor. I’d been watching it roll back and forth, just a little bit, out of the corner of my eye for the last fifteen minutes, so I didn’t jump. Chad couldn’t hear it, so he didn’t jump. But Corban did.

I got up and picked the car up. “Can you do that again?” I asked, setting the car back on the top of the bookcase.

I knelt beside Chad and looked at him so he could see my mouth. “It just made that car fall off. We’re all going to watch and see if it can do it again.”

Silenced by the car’s fall, Corban sat down next to Chad and put a hand on his shoulder—and we all watched the car turn slowly in place then fall off the back of the bookcase.

Then the bookcase fell facedown on the floor, right on top of Chad’s plastic ocean fleet. I caught a glimpse of someone standing there, hands up, then nothing—and the sweet-salt smell of blood that I’d been smelling since I first entered the room faded away.

I stayed where I was while Corban checked the bookcase and the car for devices or strings or something. Finally, he looked back at Chad.

“Are you all right sleeping in here?”

“It’s gone,” I told them both, and Corban obliged me by signing it.

Chad nodded, and his hands flew. At the end of it, Corban grinned. “I guess that’s true.” He looked at me. “He told me the ghost hasn’t killed him yet.”

Corban hefted the bookcase upright again, and I looked down at the mess of books and game pieces.

I waited until Chad glanced my way. Then I pointed at his two-hole destroyer, plainly visible, surrounded by white, useless missile pegs. “So that’s where you hid it, you little sneak.”

He grinned. Not a full-fledged grin, but enough that I knew he’d be fine. Tough kid.

I left them to their manly nighttime rituals and went back to my room, all thoughts of going home tomorrow shelved. I wasn’t going to abandon Chad to the ghost. I still had no idea how to get rid of it, but maybe I could help him live with it instead. He was already halfway there.

Corban knocked at my door a few minutes later, then cracked it open.

“I don’t need to come in,” he said. He stared at me grimly. “Tell me you didn’t engineer that somehow. I checked for wires and magnets.”

I raised my eyebrow at him. “I didn’t engineer anything. Congratulations. Your house is haunted.”

He frowned. “I’m pretty good at sniffing out lies.”

“Good for you,” I told him sincerely. “Now I’m tired, and I need to go to sleep.”

He backed away from my doorway and started down the hall. But he hadn’t gotten two steps before he turned back. “If it is a ghost, is Chad safe?”

I shrugged. Truthfully, the smell of blood bothered me. Ghosts, in my experience, tend to smell like themselves. Mrs. Hanna, who used to visit my shop sometimes—both when she was alive and after she died—smelled like her laundry soap, her favorite perfume, and the cats who shared her home with her. I didn’t think the blood was a good sign.

Still, I gave him the truth as I knew it. “I’ve never been hurt by a ghost, and I only know of a few stories where someone was hurt, mostly only bruises. The Bell Witch supposedly killed a man named John Bell in Tennessee a couple of centuries ago—but it was probably something other than a ghost. And old John died of poison that the Witch was supposed to have put in his medicine, something more mundane hands could have done as well.”

He stared at me, and I returned it.

“You date a werewolf,” he said.

“That’s right.”

“And you say there are ghosts.”

“And fae,” I told him. “I work with one. After werewolves and fae, ghosts aren’t such a leap now, are they?”

I shut my door and went to bed. After a few long minutes, he retreated to his bedroom.

I usually have a hard time sleeping in strange places, but it was very late (or really early), and I hadn’t gotten a full night’s sleep the night before either. I slept like a baby.

When I woke up the next morning there were two puncture marks, complete with a nifty purple bruise, on my neck. They were a lovely addition to the stitches in my chin. And my lamb necklace was gone.

I stared at the bite in the bathroom mirror and heard Samuel tell me that I shouldn’t count upon Stefan still being my friend ... and Stefan making it clear that he needed to feed in order to avoid detection. I knew there were consequences to being bitten, but I wasn’t sure what they were.

Of course I’d met another vampire last night. For a moment I hoped it was him. That Stefan hadn’t bitten me while I slept. Then I really thought about being bitten by James Blackwood, who scared the things that scared me. And I hoped it was Stefan.

Stefan would have needed an invitation into the house, though. Had I asked him in, and he’d somehow erased the memory? I hoped so. It seemed the lesser of two evils.

The bathroom door popped open—I’d just come in to brush my teeth, so it wasn’t locked. Chad stared at my neck, then looked at me, eyes wide.

And I hoped it was Stefan, because I was going to stay here until I helped ... somehow.

“No,” I told Chad casually, “I wasn’t lying about the vampires.” I thought I wouldn’t mention I’d received it last night if he didn’t think of that himself. He didn’t need to be worrying about vampires as well as ghosts.

“I shouldn’t have told you about it,” I said. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell your folks. The vampires like it better if no one knows they’re around. And they take measures to ensure that is true.”

He looked at me for a moment. Then he zipped an imaginary zipper across his lips, locked an invisible lock, and threw the key behind his back: some things are universal.

“Thank you.” I put the cap on my toothbrush and packed up my bathroom kit. “Any more trouble last night?”

He shook his head and wiped a wrist across his forehead to wipe off imaginary sweat.

“Good. Do you get much activity from your ghost during the day?”

He shrugged, waited a moment, then nodded.

“So I’ll talk to your mom and maybe go for a jog.” No running in coyote form in the city, especially when my efforts to stay out of James Blackwood’s way had already failed so spectacularly. But if I didn’t run most days, I started to get cranky. “And then we can stake out your room for a while. Is there anywhere else the ghost visits?”

He nodded and mimed eating and cooking.

“Just the kitchen, or the dining room, too?”

He held up two fingers.

“Fine.” I checked my watch. “Meet you here at eight sharp.” I went back to my room, but I didn’t catch Stefan’s scent or anything out of the ordinary. Nor was there any sign of my necklace. Without it, I had no protection against vampires. Not that it had done me much good last night.

RUNNING IN THE CITY IS NOT MY FAVORITE THING. STILL, the sun was shining, making it unlikely that I’d run into a vampire for a while. I ran for about a half hour, then made a beeline for Amber’s house.

Her car was gone from the driveway. She had things to do, she’d told me—a hair appointment, errands to run, and some shopping. I’d told her Chad and I would amuse ourselves on our own. Still, I’d expected her to wait for me to return. I wasn’t sure I’d have left my ten-year-old son alone in a haunted house. However, he seemed unfazed when he met me at the bathroom door just as my watch read 8:00 A.M.

We explored the whole of the old house, starting with the bottom and working our way up. Not that it was necessary or important to explore, but I like old houses and I didn’t have any better plan than waiting for the ghost to manifest. Come to think of it, I didn’t have any better plan after it manifested. Banishing ghosts was not something I’d ever tried, and everything I’d read about it over the years (not much) seemed to indicate that doing it wrong was worse than not doing it at all.

The cellar had been redone at some point, but behind a smallish old-fashioned door, there was a room with a dirt floor filled with old wooden milk crates and junk stored down there by some long-ago person. Whatever its original purpose, it was now the perfect habitat for black widows.

“Wow.” I pointed at the far corner of the ceiling with my borrowed flashlight. “Look at the size of that spider. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen one that big.”

Chad tapped me and I looked at his circle of light, centered on a broken ladder-back chair.

“Yep,” I agreed. “That one’s bigger. I think we’ll just back out of here and look elsewhere—at least until we have a nice can of spider spray.” I shut the door a little more firmly than I might have. I don’t mind spiders, and a black widow is one of the beauties of its kind ... but they bite if you get in their way. Just like vampires. I rubbed my neck to make sure the collar of my shirt and my hair were still covering my own bite. This afternoon I’d go shopping. I needed to pick up a scarf or high-necked shirt for better concealment before Amber or Corban saw it. Maybe I could find another lamb necklace.

The rest of the basement was surprisingly clean of junk, dust, and spiders. Maybe Amber hadn’t been as intimidated by the widows as I’d been.

“We’re not trying to find out who the ghost is,” I told him. “Though we could do that if you wanted to, I suppose. I’m just looking around to see what I can see. If this turns out to be a trick someone is playing, I don’t want to be taken in.”

He slashed his hands down in a way that needed no translation, his eyes bright with anger.

“No. I don’t think you’re doing it.” I told him firmly. “If that was faked last night, it was beyond any amateur fiddling. Maybe someone has a bone to pick with your dad and is using you to do it.” I hesitated. “But I don’t think it was faked.” Why would someone plant the smell of fresh blood too faint for a human nose, for instance. Still, I felt obligated to be as certain as I could that no one was playing tricks.

He thought about that for a while, then gave me a solemn nod and pointed out things of interest. A small, empty room behind a very thick door that might have been a cold room. The old coal chute with a box of old blankets placed near the end. I stuck my head in the metal tunnel and sniffed, but only to confirm my suspicions : Chad had been sliding down the coal chute for fun.

His eyes peered worriedly out from under his too-long hair. It didn’t look dangerous to me—it looked fun. More fun if no one else knew, I’d had a few places like that when I was his age. So I didn’t say anything.

I showed him the old bare copper electrical wires, no longer in use but still present, and the quarry marks on the granite stone blocks used to wall in the basement. We checked out the basement ceiling below the kitchen and dining room. Since I didn’t know exactly what had been happening in the kitchen and dining room, I didn’t know what to look for. But it stood to reason that it would have been put in shortly before the haunting started—which was just a few months ago. Everything in that part of the basement looked as though it was older than I was.

The next two floors weren’t nearly as interesting as the basement—no black widows. Someone had thoroughly modernized them and left not so much as a trace of an old servants’ stairway or dumb-waiter. The woodwork was nice, but pine rather than hardwood—the craftsmanship good but not extraordinary. The house had been built by someone of the upper middle class, I judged, and not by one of the truly wealthy. My trailer had been built for the truly poor, so I was a good judge of such things.

The ghost hadn’t been to Chad’s room since last night—everything was neatly in place. As Corban had said, there were no signs of wires or strings or anything that could have made the car shoot across the room. I supposed it could have been done with magic—I didn’t know a lot about magic. But I hadn’t felt any, and I usually can tell if someone’s using magic near me.

I looked at Chad. “Unless we find something really odd in the floor above your room, I’m pretty convinced this is the real deal.”

In my room, my brush was on the floor, but I couldn’t swear I hadn’t left it there. Under Chad’s gimlet eye, I made my bed and stuffed the clothes I’d scattered all over the floor into my suitcase.

“The real problem is,” I told him as I tidied my mess and he sat on the bed, “that I don’t know how to get the ghost to leave you alone. I can see it better than you, I think—you didn’t see anything yesterday except the things moving around?”

He shook his head.

“I did. Nothing clear, but I could see it. But I don’t know how to make it go away. It’s not a repeater—a ghost that just repeats certain actions over and over. There’s intelligence behind what it does—” I had to say it twice for him to get it all.

When he did, Chad’s face twisted in a snarl, and he hissed.

I nodded. “It’s angry. Maybe if we can figure out what it’s angry about, we can—”

Something made a huge crashing noise. My reaction must have given it away because Chad stood up and touched my shoulder.

“Something downstairs,” I told him.

We found it in the kitchen. The fridge hung open and the wall opposite it was dented and smeared with a wet and sticky substance that was probably orange juice. A container of it lay open on the floor along with half a dozen bottles of various condiments. The faucet was on full force. The sink was stoppered and rapidly filling with hot water.

While Chad turned the water off, I looked around the room. When Chad touched my arm, I shook my head. “I don’t see it.”

Heaving a sigh, I started cleanup. I seemed to be doing that a lot here. I scrubbed the wall, and Chad mopped the floor. There was nothing I could do about the dents in the wall—and looking at them, I thought maybe some of them were old.

Once everything was as good as it would get, I fixed sandwiches and chips for lunch. Thus fortified, we continued our explorations by going up to the attic.

There were actually two attics. The one above Chad’s room was accessible by a narrow stairway hidden in a hall closet (maybe the last remnant of a servants’ stair). I half expected dust and storage boxes, but the attic held only a modern office with a professional-looking computer set up on a cherry desk. There were skylights for an open, airy feeling to offset the walls of cherry barrister’s book-cases weighed down by leather-bound legal tomes. The only whimsical feature was a lacy pillow on the narrow window seat in front of the only window.

“You said there was another one?” I asked, standing on the stairs because entering the room seemed intrusive.

Chad led the way to the other side of the second floor and into his parent’s bedroom. I wondered why the office had been personalized and charming while the bedroom suite, professionally decorated until it would have been as equally comfortable in a department store as it was in the old house, was impersonal and cold.

Inside the walk-in closet, there was a large rectangular door in the ceiling. We had to get a chair and pull it under the door before I could reach the latched hand pull, but the door turned out to be a folding staircase. Once we pulled the chair away, the stairs dropped all the way to the floor.

Flashlights in hand, we intrepid explorers climbed into the attic more suited to a house like this than the previous one had been. Structurally, it was the mirror image of the office minus the skylights and gorgeous view. Light battled through the coating of white paint that covered the only window, flickering on the motes of dust we had disturbed with our presence.

Four old steamer trunks were lined up against the wall next to a pedal sewing machine with SINGER scrawled in elaborate gold lettering over the scratched wooden side of the cabinet. There were more empty milk crates here, but in the attic, at least, someone had found a way to keep the spiders out. I didn’t see any creepy-crawlies at all. Or even very much dust. Trust Amber to dust her attic.

The trunks were locked. But the look of disappointment on Chad’s face had me digging out my pocketknife. A little wiggling, a little jiggling with the otherwise-useless toothpick, and the slimmest of the blades had the first trunk open before you could sing three verses of “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer.” I know because I hum when I pick locks—it’s a bad habit. Since I have no desire to become a professional thief, though, I haven’t bothered to try to break myself of it.

Yellowed linens with tatting around the edges and embroidered spring baskets, or flowers, or some other appropriately feminine imagery filled the first trunk, but the second was more interesting. House plans (which we took out), deeds, old diplomas for people whose names were unfamiliar to Chad, and a handful of newspaper articles dating back to the 1920s about people with the same last name as the people in the diplomas and deeds. Mostly death, birth, and marriage notices. None of the death notices were about people who had died violently or too young, I noticed.

While Chad was poring over the house plans he’d spread over the closed lid of the first trunk, I stopped to read about the life of Ermalinda Gaye Holfenster McGinnis Curtis Albright, intrigued by the excessive last name. She’d died at age seventy-four in 1939. Her father had been a captain on the wrong side of the Civil War, had taken his family west, finding his fortune in timber and railroads. Ermalinda had eight children, four of whom had survived her and had a huge number of children themselves. Twice a widow, she’d married a third man fifteen years before her death. He’d been—reading between the lines—far younger than she.

“You go, girl,” I told her admiringly—and the stairway closed up and slammed shut so hard that the resultant vibration from the floor had Chad looking up from his plans. He wouldn’t have heard the snick of the lock, though.

I dove for the door—too late, of course. When I put my nose to it, I didn’t smell anyone. I couldn’t think of any reason anyone would lock us in the attic, anyway. It wasn’t as if we were going to perish up here ... unless someone set the whole house on fire or something.

I pushed that helpful thought out of my head and decided it was probably our ghost. I’d read about ghosts who set houses on fire. Wasn’t Hans Holzer’s Borley Rectory supposedly burned down by its ghosts? But then I was pretty sure that Hans Holzer had been proved a fraud at some point ...

“Well,” I told Chad, “that tells us that our ghost is vindictive and intelligent, anyway.” He looked pretty shook-up, clutching the plans in a way that would make any historian cringe at the way the fragile paper was wrinkling. “We might as well keep exploring, don’t you think?”

When he still looked scared, I told him, “Your mother will be home sooner or later. When she comes upstairs, we can have her let us out.” Then I had an idea. I slipped my phone out of my front pocket, but when I called the number I’d saved for Amber, I could hear the phone in her bedroom ring.

“Does your mom have a cell phone?” She did. He punched the number in, and I listened to her cell phone tell me she wasn’t available. So I told her where we were and what had happened.

“When she gets the message, she’ll come let us out,” I told Chad when I was finished. “If she doesn’t, we’ll call your dad. Want to see what’s in the last trunk?”

He wasn’t happy about it, but he leaned on my shoulder while I finagled the last lock.

We both stared at the treasure revealed when the last trunk opened.

“Wow,” I said. “I wonder if your parents know this is up here.” I paused. “I wonder if this is worth anything?”

The last trunk was completely full of old records, mostly the thick black vinyl kind labeled 78 rpm. There was a method to the storage, I discovered. One pile was all children’s entertainment—The Story of Hiawatha, various children’s songs. And a treasure, Snow White complete with a storybook in the album cover that looked as though it had been made about the same time as the movie. Chad turned up his nose at Snow White, so I put it back in the correct pile.

My cell phone rang and I checked the number. “Not your mom,” I told Chad. I flipped open the phone. “Hey, Adam. Did you ever listen to the Mello-Kings?”

There was a little pause, and Adam sang in a passable bass, “Chip, chip, chip went the little bird ... and something, something, something went my heart. I assume there’s a reason you asked?”

“Chad and I are going though a box of old records,” I told him.

“Chad?” His voice was carefully neutral.

“Amber’s ten-year-old son. I have in my own two hands a 1957 record by the Mello-Kings. I think it might be the newest one in here—nope. Chad just found a Beatles album ... uhm, cover. It looks like the record is missing. So the Mello-Kings are probably the newest thing here.”

“I see. No luck hunting ghosts?”

“Some.” I looked ruefully at the closed door that was keeping us prisoner. “What about you? How’re negotiations with the Mistress?”

“Warren and Darryl are to meet with a pair of her vampires tonight.”

“Which ones?”

“Bernard and Wulfe.”

“Tell them to be careful,” I told him. “Wulfe is something more than just a vampire.” I’d only met Bernard once, and he hadn’t impressed me—or maybe I was just remembering Stefan’s reaction to him.

“Go teach your granny to suck eggs,” said Adam calmly. “Don’t worry. Have you seen Stefan?”

I touched my fingers to my neck. How to answer that. “I don’t know, he might have bitten me last night,” somehow didn’t seem the right thing to say. “He has been making himself scarce so far. Maybe tonight he’ll stop in to talk.”

I heard the door open downstairs. “I need to go now, Amber’s back.”

“All right. I’ll call you tonight.” And he hung up.

Someone ran up the stairs and into the bedroom. “Your mother’s home,” I told Chad, and began replacing the records. They were heavy. I couldn’t imagine what the whole trunk might weigh. Maybe they packed the trunk when it was already in the attic—or had eight strapping werewolves to carry it.

“It’s locked,” I told Amber, as she rattled the door. “I think there’s some kind of a catch on your side.”

She was breathing hard as she pulled the stairs down.

Her attention was all for Chad, and she didn’t bother with speech as her hands danced.

“We’re fine,” I interrupted her. “You have some neat records here. Have you had them valued?”

She turned to stare at me, as if she’d forgotten I was there. Her pupils were ... odd. Too large, I decided, even for the dim attic.

“The records? I think Corban found them when we bought this house. Yes, he checked them out. They’re nothing special. Just old.”

“Did you have a good time shopping?”

She looked at me blankly. “Shopping?”

“Amber, are you all right?”

She blinked, then smiled. It was so full of sweetness and light that it gave me cold chills. Amber was many things, but she wasn’t sweet. There was something wrong with her.

“Yes. I bought a sweater and a couple of early Christmas presents.” She waved it away. “How did you get stuck here?”

I shrugged, replacing the last records and pulling the trunk shut. “Unless you have someone breaking into your house to play nasty practical jokes, I’d say it was the ghost.”

I stood up and started past her to the opened door. And I smelled vampire. Could Stefan be staying here? I paused to look around while Chad thundered down the attic stairs leaving his mother and me alone with the smell of vampire and fresh blood.

“What’s wrong?” Amber said, taking a step forward.

She smelled of sweat, sex, and a vampire who was not Stefan.

“Was shopping all you were doing?” I asked.

“What? I had my hair done, paid a few bills—that’s it. Are you all right?”

She wasn’t lying. She didn’t know she’d been a snack for a vampire. Today.

I looked at the daylight streaming through the windows and knew I desperately needed to talk to Stefan.