She smiled at me in great relief, like she’d worried we wouldn’t find each other. “Hey, Allie. It’s good to see you.”
I folded my own legs to mirror her position. We had spent hundreds of nights like this in our teens, discussing homework and boys and our futures. Despite all those hours of speculation, neither of us had ever guessed that Sam would die young from a werewolf attack and I would become the witch that other witches feared.
A big part of me longed to talk to her about Quinn, about my fears for our relationship, but that seemed like a selfish use of our limited time together. “Did I call you, or did you call me?” I asked.
Her smile faded, replaced by a small frown. “A little of both, I think. Strange things are afoot at the circle K, babe.”
“What do you mean? Have you been following this thing with the murdered werewolves?”
“I have, and it’s not—” she began, then tilted her head for a moment, like she was listening to a voice I couldn’t hear. I waited, unsurprised. Sam and I were on opposite sides of a bridge; there were things she could see that I couldn’t, and she wasn’t supposed to tell me about all of them. As I understood it, she could advise me a little, point me in certain directions, but she wasn’t allowed to give away too much, especially about the future.
Although all that was pretty much just a guess, since explaining it would fall under the things Lex is not allowed to know heading.
Sam tried again. “A lot is getting stirred up right now, babe. Old grudges. Old hurts.”
I rolled my eyes. “Yes, I know that much, Captain Cryptic. Is there anything you can tell me that will help?”
She met my eyes. “It’s bigger than you’re going to think it is, Lex.”
Bigger than . . . ? For some reason my thoughts flashed to Maven’s recent preoccupation. What wasn’t she telling me?
“Sam, what the hell’s going on?”
Her lips were pressed in a tight line. It was her I want to tell you but I can’t face. There was something in her eyes that I hadn’t seen since we’d begun talking together in this space, shortly after I came into my powers: worry. Sam, who was dead and well beyond such things, was actually worried. She hadn’t even looked like this when Charlie was kidnapped, because she was so certain I’d be able to save her.
“What is it?” I asked, alarmed. “Charlie? Is something going to happen to Charlie?”
She gave a little headshake. “All I can tell you is, this thing you’ve got going on, the bigger thing? A lot depends on how you handle it. The decisions you make on this one are going to create some big-ass ripples, and not just in Boulder.”
I sighed. “That’s not very helpful, Samantha.”
She gave me a pointed look. “Think about everything you’ve done in the last couple of days. There’s a question you should ask me.”
I stopped myself from pointing out that she could just tell me the answer. I knew how much her restrictions were probably driving her nuts. Instead, I nodded and took a slow breath, in and out, thinking about everything that had happened since the werewolves showed up at my door. Wait, no. Sam had suggested I think about everything I’d done, not everything that had happened. I tried to trace my steps backward. Tracy . . . the werewolves . . . Dunn’s car on the bridge . . . the sand dunes . . .
The ghosts. I opened my eyes. Once I saw it, I felt like an idiot for not considering it sooner. I sat up straight. “Sammy,” I said, trying to choose my words carefully, “when vampires and werewolves die, can they leave ghosts behind?”
She slumped her shoulders a tiny bit in relief. I was on the right track. “It’s rare,” she said calmly, “especially for the older ones. When they reach a certain age, they start to expect a violent death, maybe even welcome it.”
“But it’s possible.”
“Yes.”
“I’ve met ghosts that died of suicide,” I pointed out. “They also welcomed their deaths, but it still made a psychic imprint.”
Sam shrugged. “Ghost-leaving isn’t a science—it’s a complex set of emotional reverberations. It involves gravitational magic, but it can also be affected by the witch magic you’re used to.” She still had an expectant look. I was missing something.
I thought about that for a second. “But when vampires or werewolves die, the magic leaves their bodies. The corpse becomes just an empty physical shell, like any human’s. So why would they be any more or less likely to leave a ghost?”
Sam chewed on the inside of her cheek for a second. I knew my sister’s expressions well enough to know that I wasn’t taking the conversation in the exact direction she wanted. “What?” I said, frustrated.
“Look, do you remember what Maven said when she first told you about the wraiths?”
I searched my memory. “She said there are as many types of ghosts as there are witches.”
“Right. You and your friends have been categorizing ghosts, but you’ve been focused on humans, and especially on places. Ghosts aren’t only tethered to places.”
I’d never considered it like that, but she was right: all the ghosts I’d laid to rest in Boulder had been tethered to a specific location. “What do you mean?” I asked. “How are there ghosts that don’t tie to a place?”
“You have to ask—” Sam began, but she was cut off. Tilting her head again, she began to argue with someone I couldn’t see. “But she’s going to use them against her, and I just want her to be prepared—”
My alarm went off.
“Goddammit!” I yelled before I’d even fully opened my eyes. I turned off the alarm on my phone and rolled over onto my back, looking at the dogs crowded around me on the bed. They had all lifted their heads and were staring at me with confusion.
“Yeah, I know. Getting pissed won’t change anything,” I said, scratching Pongo’s head. I heaved a sigh, lay there for one more minute so I could sulk, then hauled my ass out of bed.
I had set my alarm for ten thirty, which wasn’t nearly enough sleep, but it gave me time to take the big dogs for a run, feed and water all the animals, and shower. I had to admit, I felt miles better than the day before. The swelling on my forehead had gone down, and although my muscles were still sore from the hike through the dunes, it was nothing I couldn’t handle with a couple of ibuprofen.
I was still toweling off my hair when the dogs, always thrilled to have something to get worked up about, abruptly ran for the front door, barking enthusiastically. I followed them, tossing the towel in the laundry room on the way. Through the door glass I saw John pulling my four-year-old niece out of her car seat, and the dogs’ barks changed to a delighted whining accompanied by bruising tail wags. Charlie was a great favorite of theirs, mostly because she was usually sticky with some kind of food, and whatever she had left she was happy to share. Unfortunately, this meant they had a tendency to crowd her—even knocking her down a few times.
John and Charlie came up the front steps hand in hand, Charlie chatting about something with great animation. “Be cool, guys,” I warned the dogs as I reached for the doorknob.
The dogs were not cool.
John, who was used to this routine, simply picked Charlie up and carried her inside, while four mutts did their best to jump up to her level—all except Dopey, who was in the opposite doorway, toward my bedroom, turning in tight, happy circles. John saw this and laughed. “That dog should be studied,” he said, leaning down to kiss my cheek. “Hey, Lex.”
“You got an owie,” Charlie said as her dad set her on a stool. She pointed at my forehead.
“That’s true, I did,” I agreed. I’d expected the question. “I was picking up something on the floor in front of the door when the big dogs crashed through it.”
Charlie wrinkled her nose. “Ouch.” She rubbed her own forehead in solidarity. “I have an owie too, look.” She pulled up her pant leg to show me the tiniest little red mark on one shin. Her face was very grave. “See? It hurted a lot. I couldn’t even walk on it, but now my body is healing it all by itself.”
“Makes perfect sense,” I told her, suppressing a smile.
Charlie let her pant leg fall down again, and John looked at me, a little nervous now. “You ready to do this?”
I nodded.
“Daddy says I get to watch Jack Skellington,” Charlie announced, looking at me eagerly. “And if Aunt Lex has popcorn I get to eat it all up!”
I smiled. “You sure do. But before we do that, would you come help me wake up my friend? She’s fast asleep downstairs.”
Her eyes widened. Charlie wasn’t usually allowed to go in the basement, because the stairs were old and there was nothing down there but exercise equipment and laundry machines. Oh, and a vampire hideout. “I go downstairs?”
“Yes, you can, Charlie-bug.” I stood up and held out my hand, which she took happily.
With her dad just behind us, Charlie happily tromped down the steps, chatting continuously about why triceratops had three horns. Well, “chatting” implies a two-way conversation; this was more like a long, adorable lecture.
“Ooh,” Charlie said when we got to the bottom of the steps and I turned on the basement lights. “It’s like a cave for aminals.”
Well, kind of. “My friend is over there,” I said, pointing to the long, boxy protrusion in the back corner of the basement. Quinn had built it by nailing two-by-fours at right angles and attaching the resulting structure to the wall in the corner. Thick plywood boards were added to the top and side to form a tunnel, and caulk and sealant made it lightproof. Finally, he’d painted it the same color as the concrete walls, so it looked like a part of the building, as though it had been added on to hide a cumbersome water heater or electrical works.
A door wasn’t really required, since the basement’s high windows were angled wrong for the sun to ever reach the opening, but he’d used a nail gun to add a thick leather flap over the entrance.
One nice thing about hanging out with little kids is that benignly odd things don’t really faze them. It never occurred to Charlie to question why my friend might be sleeping in a horizontal closet in the cold basement instead of one of my two guest bedrooms. Instead, she was delighted. “It’s a cave! It’s a wolf den!” She gave a little wolfish howl to the basement rafters, and despite my current werewolf troubles, I couldn’t help but laugh, and John was smiling too.
“You’re right. I think we should call it a den from now on,” I told her.
“Can I climb on the top?” she asked.
I hesitated, but I knew how solidly Quinn had reinforced the top of the hideout. I doubted the tunnel would collapse if the whole house fell down on top of it. “Sure.”
I helped Charlie climb up, so she was sitting more or less above Opal’s midsection. With John hovering behind me, I crouched at the opening and said, “Opal? Can you wake up?”