Not that he would breathe one word of complaint, but Linus must feel the same way. His title and duties were as much a burden as mine. Just this once, we had wanted to jet off and go on an adventure for two. Backup was always smart, given the targets painted on our backs at any given moment, but I wanted Linus to myself for a change.
Still, I understood why the folks back home, who had probably received copies of our itinerary, might have concerns.
The wraith shook his head once then drifted through the closed door into the hall. Linus opened it, and we found Cletus posted outside our room in a forbidding black cloud of menace.
“Fine,” I grumbled half-heartedly for show. “You can stay.”
With a sigil to give Linus and me privacy, I could live with it. As long as Cletus stayed out here, I doubted Linus would mind either. He tended toward overprotectiveness, and we were hunting a violent spirit.
Cletus trailed his icy fingers across my cheek, and I leaned into his touch.
Down deep, he embodied what remained of Maud. I couldn’t take offense at Cletus wanting to watch over me, over us, but no one wanted to bring their mom along on their honeymoon.
The romance of the moment had spluttered and died a sexually frustrating death, so I gave up on manhandling my new husband in favor of getting us unpacked. Just in case anyone slipped in, either to maul us or perform maid services, I wanted to get anything questionable locked behind wards.
Linus joined me after shutting out Cletus, and we finished the job together. All domestic-like.
“You brought your full kit,” I commented on the contents at the bottom of his suitcase. Everything he might need for any number of supernatural emergencies was right there.
Trailing his fingers over the ratty backpack in mine, the seventh or eighth I’d purchased since accepting the title of Potentate of Savannah, he smiled. “You also brought yours.”
“Yeah, well.” I swatted away his hand. “The guy who trained me was a real stickler.”
The truth was, I had fallen into the routine of protecting my city day in and day out, and I felt naked without the tools of my trade.
And the city? I missed her with a bone-deep ache. The bond between us stretched too taut to vibrate, and the stillness within left me twitchy. Empty in a way I hadn’t been since bonding with her.
But this was my honeymoon, and even potentates deserved a week off now and again.
Not even a week. Barely a long weekend. And that included the travel here and back.
It was the longest either of us could afford to spend away from our respective duties.
Savannah would just have to understand. Too bad I couldn’t bring her back a My Potentate Honeymooned in a Haunted House and All I Got was This Lousy Shirt tee to smooth things over, but the city was a bit large to tarp in cotton.
Making a production of dusting my hands, I surveyed the room. “Now what?”
A mischievous smile curved his lips as he palmed the rental car key fob. “You’ll see.”
Three
The library closed at five according to the sun-bleached sign taped to the corrugated siding. Library was a noble title for the sagging heap before us. A singlewide trailer the size of a shipping container leaned away from crumbling red concrete stairs leading to a door that might have been the same color before water damage caused the paint to flake. The poor thing had been parked in a graveled lot overgrown with weeds and forgotten by the looks of it.
The only recent signs of life were across the street where a bright yellow backhoe huddled next to three blue dump trucks as if afraid of the dark. The parcel where they sat must have been a quarry, but the sign at the road was too faded to read the details. Only the gaping holes left in the earth behind them spoke to the nature of the business.
“I enjoy bedtime reading as much as the next girl, but what are we doing here?”
“We’re going to check the archives.” He walked up the steps without tottering, even when they rocked beneath him on the uneven ground. “The librarian was polite when I called, but Ms. Ayer blames the internet for the decline of the library system.” He used a sigil to pop the lock with the ease of a seasoned breaker-and-enterer. “She refused to email me copies of the articles pertaining to Oliphant House.”
“Ah.”
Noticing my confusion, he explained, “The town paper shared a building with the library.”
“Ah,” I said again, meaning it this time. “That’s where the archives come in. Gotcha.”
After he switched on the light, I followed him into a cramped and musty space plastered in vintage book posters. Shelves lined all the walls, and they sagged beneath the weight of their burdens and a healthy coating of dust.
The lone computer hulked on a tattered desk at the rear of the building. The monitor was yellowed with age, and it would have taken both of us to lift it. The keyboard was clunky, the letters rubbed away, and the mouse anchored to a cord the width of a number two pencil.
Linus aimed straight for it, sat in the child-sized chair, and booted up the computer.
“You said shared. Past tense.” I stood behind him. “What happened? Did the paper give the library the boot?”
“Arson.” He leaned forward when the screen flickered with its first sign of life. “The building burned to the ground eighteen years ago.” He began typing at the prompt. “What you see is all that remains of the library’s original inventory plus donations and whatever else they were able to purchase with the remainder of the small grant they received to buy this trailer.”
The floors squished underfoot when I shifted my weight. “They never rebuilt?”
“There was no money for it in the town budget.”
“What happened to the newspaper?”
“The family took the insurance money and moved to Florida.” He clicked around until he found what we came to retrieve. “All that remains of their one-hundred-and-thirty-eight-year run is on this computer.”
That was roughly four or five anniversaries’ worth of information. “How did those records survive?”
“The great-great-grandson of the paper’s founder had begun a project to preserve the family’s legacy two years prior to the fire. He transferred all the microfiche and surviving paper copies from the library to his basement, where he scanned them into a database. He donated a duplicate of that information to the library since they shared such a long history with the paper, but he kept the originals.”
“Lucky.”
“I’m sure Ms. Ayer would disagree.”
“You know what I mean.” I pushed his shoulder. “Smarty-pants.”
Once upon a time, he would have flinched away from the gentle tease, but he had toughened up after enduring my twisted sense of humor for so long.
“Can you turn on the printer?” Linus sank back into his research. “I’ve located the files we need, but there’s nowhere to insert the thumb drive I brought.”
On a file cabinet behind the librarian’s desk, I spotted a printer as wide as a pizza box.
“Copies are twenty-five cents per page. That’s pretty steep.” I flipped the switch, and it screeched with annoyance at having been woken in the middle of the night. “Can you afford it?”
“Do you accept credit or debit cards?”
“Nope.” I rubbed my fingertips together. “This is a cash-only establishment.”
“Then perhaps my wife will loan me the money.”
“You’re cute and all, but I can’t afford to go around making loans willy-nilly.” I gave him a stern look I ruined bending over to fish my emergency twenty from beneath the insole in my right sneaker. “You’re going to have to work this off.”
“I appreciate your generosity.”
“I expect you to.” I winked. “Later.”
A flush spread across his cheeks, turning them red beneath his freckles, and I struggled against the desire to gather his face between my palms and kiss him until neither of us could breathe.
Someday it would get old. Maybe. Knowing I wasn’t alone in the world anymore. But I hoped the day was long in coming when I no longer experienced that giddy thrill each time he slid on his glasses or smiled at me with his eyes over their rims.
I wanted us to stay this way forever, not long at all.
Linus straightened from his hunched position and studied the door. “Do you hear that?”
“Over this?” The printer at my hip rattled, thumped, and shook. “Nope.”
As I dismissed it, the building swayed and then fell still. I checked to make sure I hadn’t leaned against the counter, that the printer wasn’t playing tricks on me, but I hadn’t, and it wasn’t.
Rising slowly, Linus crept to the door and gripped its dented knob.
He twisted it, threw his shoulder into it, then faced me with a line carved between his brows.
“That is not your happy face.” I scooped up the warm pages as the printer wheezed into silence, an easy task since it was the perforated type you had to tear at the top and bottom to separate. “What’s going on out there?”
“I’m not sure.” He took a step back, and black swallowed his eyes from corner to corner. The room dimmed as my vision did the same. “The door is wedged shut.”
Cletus lent us his vision as he materialized in the parking lot with an air of I told you so.
The yellow backhoe had been driven across the road, and its arm extended against the door. That’s what pinned us in. The driver was dressed in black from head to toe and wore a mask that left only the slits of their eyes visible. The wannabe arsonist also held two Molotov cocktails primed and ready to go.
“What are you waiting for?” I gave Cletus a panicked jolt. “Take them down.”
The wraith didn’t give them time to work on their aim. He knocked the bottles from their hands with an effort of will, and the glass shattered on the gravel. Fire whooshed out, devoured the fuel, then spluttered and died.
Spinning a quick circle, the figure searched for their assailant. Almost falling when they spotted Cletus, they gasped a panicked noise then sprinted down the road to where they must have parked their getaway vehicle.