Thorn Queen (Dark Swan, #2)(2)

"Um, well," I said, "that's a ghost."

It swooped toward me, mouth open in a terrible screech.  I yelled for the others to get down and jerked a silver-bladed athame out of my belt.  A knife might seem useless against spirits, but they needed to take on a substantial form to inflict any real damage.  Once solid, they were susceptible to silver.

This spirit bore a female shape - a very young female shape, actually.  Long pale hair trailed in her wake like a cloak, and her eyes were large and empty.  Whether it was a lack of experience or simply some inherent trait of hers, her attack proved floundering and uncoordinated.  Even as she screamed at the first bites of the athame, I had my crystal studded wand out in my other hand.

Now that I'd regained my bearings, I could do a banishing like this in my sleep.  Speaking the usual words, I drew from my internal strength and sent my own spirit beyond the boundaries of this world.  Touching the gates of the Underworld, I ensnared the female spirit and sent her over.  Monsters and gentry I tended to send back to the Otherworld, the limbo they lived in.  A ghost like this needed to move on to the land of death.  She disappeared.

Mrs. Hall and Polly stared at me.  Suddenly, in her first show of emotion, the girl leapt up and glared at me.

"You just killed my best friend!"

I opened my mouth to respond and decided nothing I had to say would be adequate.

"Good heavens, what are you talking about?" exclaimed her mother.

Polly's face twisted with anger, her eyes bright with tears.  "Trixie.  She was my best friend.  We told each other everything."

"Trixie?" Mrs. Hall and I asked in unison.

"I can't believe you did that.  She was so cool."  Polly's voice turned a little wistful.  "I just wish we could have gone shopping together, but she couldn't leave the house.  So I just had to bring her Vogue and Glamour."

I turned to Mrs. Hall.  "My original advice still stands.  Therapy.  Lots of it."

I headed home after that, wondering for the hundredth time why I'd chosen this mercenary shaman profession.  Surely there were other jobs that were a lot less trouble than interacting with evil supernatural beings.  Accounting.  Advertising.  Law.  Well, maybe not that last one.

About an hour later, I arrived back home and was immediately assaulted by two medium-sized dogs when I cleared the door.  They were mutts, one solid black and one solid white.  Their names were Yin and Yang, but I could never remember who was who.

"Back off," I warned as they sniffed me, tails wagging frantically.  The white one tried to lick my hand.  Pushing past them, I entered my kitchen and nearly tripped over a tabby cat sprawled on the floor in a patch of sun.  Grumbling, I tossed my bag onto the kitchen table.  "Tim?  Are you here?"

My housemate, Tim Warkoski, stuck his head in.  He wore a tee shirt with silhouettes of Native Americans that said Homeland Security: Fighting Terrorism since 1492.  I appreciated the cleverness, but it lost something since Tim wasn't actually an American Indian.  He merely played one on TV, or rather, he played one in local bars and tourist circles, using his tanned skin and black hair to elude his Polish heritage.  It had gotten him into trouble with a lot of the local tribes.

With a garbage bag in one hand and a cat scoop in the other, he gave me a dark look.  "Do you know how many boxes of litter I've had to change today?"

I poured a glass of milk and sat down at the table.  "Kiyo says we need one box for every cat and then an extra one."

"Yeah, I can count, Eugenie.  That's six boxes.  Six boxes in a house with 1500 square feet.  You think your deadbeat boyfriend's ever going to show back up and help out with this?"

I shifted uncomfortably.  It was a good question.  After three months of dating between Tucson and Phoenix, my boyfriend Kiyo had decided to take a job here to save the hour and a half commute.  We'd had a long discussion and decided we were ready to have him simply move in with me.  Unfortunately, with Kiyo came his menagerie: five cats and two dogs.  It was one of the woes of dating a veterinarian.  He couldn't help but adopt every animal he found.  I couldn't remember the cats' names any better than the dogs'.  Four of them were named after the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and all I could really recall was that Famine ironically weighed about 30 pounds.

Another problem was that Kiyo was a fox - both literally and figuratively.  His mother was a kitsune, a sort of Japanese fox spirit.  He'd inherited all of her traits, including amazing strength and speed, as well as the ability to transform into an actual fox.  As a result, he frequently got 'the call of the wild,' making him yearn to run around in his animal form.  Since he had downtime between jobs now, he'd left me to take a sort of wild vacation.  I accepted this, but after a week of not seeing him, I was starting to get restless.

"He'll be back soon," I said vaguely, not meeting Tim's eyes.  "Besides, you can get out of chores if you want to start paying rent."  That was our deal.  Free lodging in exchange for food and housework.

He wasn't deterred.  "Your choice in men is questionable.  You know that, right?"

I didn't really want to ponder that too much.  I abandoned him for my room, seeking the comfort of a jigsaw puzzle depicting a photograph of Zurich.  It sat on my desk, as did one of the cats.  I think he was Mr. Whiskers, the non-Apocalyptic one.  I shooed him off the puzzle.  Doing so took about half the puzzle pieces with him.