Shifting Shadows: Stories from the World of Mercy Thompson(139)

Rick and Lisa joined us. Rick had a good-sized wound on his hand, and they both had a few cuts that looked nasty. They’d be feeling them for a few days—but they’d survive. If a big chunk of glass falling from the second story had caught one of them wrong, it could have killed them.

Ghosts are seldom truly dangerous.

The key word is “seldom.”

“If I told you that I think your mother killed herself in a ritual that would put her essence in some object and is, from that object, influencing your wife’s ghost—tried to scare Lisa away because Lisa loves you, and your mother wants to keep you to herself—what object comes immediately to mind?” I asked Rick.

He looked at me.

“That one,” I said. “The one that puts that look in your eyes.”

“But it wasn’t hers,” he said.

“What wasn’t hers?”

“A jade pendant. My father died in a car accident right before I was acquitted. He drove off a cliff with his latest girlfriend—she was seventeen. When I was going through the bag the morgue gave me, I found it. I don’t ever remember seeing him wear it. But I liked it, so I kept it.” He reached up, then looked puzzled. “I still wear it most days.”

“Not when you come outside to work with me,” said Lisa positively. “I’ve never seen you wear any jewelry.”

His face went slack with realization. “This is going to sound weird.” He looked back at the house, where the curtains were fluttering through the broken window. “Okay, not as weird as today has been. But weird enough. I didn’t want to wear it around you, Lisa. It never felt right. I haven’t worn it since you came inside the house—and I always wear it.”

“Love,” observed Zack quietly, “is a good antidote to a lot of foul magic. Leastwise that has been my experience.”

“So,” Lisa asked, her na**d face turned to Rick. “What do we do next?”

I walked over to my van and popped open the back hatch. Inside, I found a nice steel pry bar. “I find the pendant and break it—according to my expert friend.”

“What she said,” Zack reminded me because he’d overheard both sides of the call, “was that breaking it usually stopped the problem—but that there could be a backlash when the item broke.”

“Where is it?” I asked Rick, ignoring Zack for the moment.

“In my bedroom.” He glanced up at the broken window. “Up there.”

•   •   •

I talked Rick and Lisa into staying outside. Rick wasn’t happy about it but conceded that unless he did, Lisa wasn’t going to stay outside. And Lisa, I thought, was the one in real danger.

Zack and I, pry bar in hand, walked back in the front door—and nothing happened. No weird effects, no weird sounds. No dead women. Nothing.

By the time we walked up the stairs, everything felt pretty anticlimactic. I was basing my whole plan of attack on the smell of bubble gum and ozone—and the intuition of a fae-gifted man who thought his mother had killed his wife.

Zack made me let him walk into the room first. When nothing happened, I followed him in. The room was huge, with a walk-in closet beside the door and a bathroom on the far wall. A king-sized four-poster bed dominated the room in dark splendor. Beside it, the nightstand held nothing but an alarm clock that was blinking twelve.

“It was supposed to be on the nightstand, right?” Zack asked.

And all hell broke loose.

“Are you okay?” I asked Zack as I crouched beneath a library table along one wall. It was one of the few pieces of furniture that hadn’t started attacking us.

Zack had grabbed a silver tea tray and was using it as a shield and baseball bat. It beat my table because it was metal and more solid—and he could move without losing his protection.

The corner of a drawer managed to hit him in the shoulder pretty good, despite his mad tray-wielding skills.

“Tired of this,” he said, shaking out his shoulder. “Finding anything in this mess is going to take an act of God.”

Abruptly, the flurry of thrown objects subsided.

I rolled out from under the table, and Zack walked in front of me, tray at the ready.

“I’ve got an idea,” I said, thoughtfully. “Let’s walk around the room and see what happens.”

“I have a better idea,” Zack said. “We both go outside. Call Elizaveta and set her on this problem.”

I shook my head. “I don’t want to owe the witch any favors.” She worried me, truth be told. Witches aren’t my favorite people to deal with—and Elizaveta raised my hackles.

“She is being paid,” Zack pointed out.

“For pack matters. This has nothing to do with the pack,” I told him. “If this doesn’t work, we’ll rethink.”

“All right,” he said reluctantly. “Shall we try near the bed first?”

He took two steps toward the bed, and a paperweight flew at him. He caught it—and I got hit by a candlestick I hadn’t seen coming because I was watching Zack. It hit me in the ribs with brutal force.

Luckily, Zack was distracted and hadn’t seen it fly at me. I grabbed it as it fell and held it casually in the hand that wasn’t holding the pry bar—as if I’d just picked it up so I would have a weapon in both hands. I tried not to make a sound because if Zack knew I was hurt, he’d grab me and take me outside to wait with the other two, and I had a strong feeling that I was going to have to be the one who confronted the dead woman.