13. Neighbors
13
NEIGHBORS
The proof that a poor has been well loved during his life is his having a crowded funeral.
— MARIA EDGEWORTH, CASTLE RACKRENT
I awoke with another painful gasp, drenched with sweat even though all of my blankets had fallen to the floor. Hair was stuck to my brow and cheeks like I’d been caught in a rainstorm.
My hand found my chest, willing my heart to calm. Outside, it was still dark, and a part of me wondered if it was the sky or the shadow that had chased me. The streams of moonlight. Focus on them. The way they bathed the room in a tranquil blue, not unlike water.
My phone rang on the nightstand, and I answered, still half in my dream. Reina, clearly having reached out and Seen my dream—or at least that my thoughts were in distress in my sleep.
“What are you doing up?” I asked. “It’s”—I checked my watch—“six in the morning.”
“I’ve been up for hours, babycakes. Rounds start in thirty minutes. Are you okay? That was some dream. I only got the aftershocks when you were almost conscious, but it seemed bad.”
I flopped backward onto my pillow and stared up at wood-paneled walls, where the moonlight was making the shadows from the cedar outside my window play in a breeze. “You’re watching my dreams now too, Rein?”
“Just checking in. I’m worried about you, out there all alone.”
I sighed. There was nothing to say to that. I didn’t like being here by myself any more than she did. The house had been thankfully quiet when I’d come back from the morgue, and I hadn’t looked for it to tell me anything as I sained everywhere, showered, and went to bed without going anywhere near the kitchen.
“It’s all right,” I told her. “It was just a dream.”
Of course, I didn’t believe that. No seer ever truly did. But what else would we say?
Someone called Reina’s name followed by some tell-tale alarms from a hospital ward. “I have to go. Call me if you need anything, okay?”
“Of course.”
I stayed in my childhood bed, gradually coming back to the present as my heartbeat slowed to its normal pace.
There were the cobwebs that always stretched between the ancient wood rafters.
There was my dad’s old patchwork quilt I’d slept with as a girl for the way pieces of him clung to its fraying edges.
There was the salal that wound around the base of the cedar tree like a scarf.
Manzanita. I was home. And alone, no matter what voices might whisper otherwise.
I murmured an incantation Gran had taught me to ward away nightmares, then took the glass of water on my nightstand, flicked a few drops into the room for good measure, and gulped down the rest. My throat felt tight from the imagined constriction. But my dream lessened.
The room was quiet. My room, with posters of my favorite bands still decorating the walls, the sheets with purple daisies rumpled over the wrought iron bed, bright red pendant lamp hanging from the vaulted ceilings. Reina and I had done a good job cleansing this space—enough that I was able to fall asleep last night. But voices still murmured in the rafters, calling me from the kitchen with unfinished business. Voices I knew would also lurk there somewhere, along with the memory of a man in a black fedora whose hands had squeezed the life from someone I loved.
There was only one way to get rid of him completely, and I wasn’t sure I could do it.
Not yet.
Maybe not ever, no matter what Penny would say.
I could almost hear him mumbling even now outside my bedroom door. When I returned from the morgue, Mexican food in hand, his insidious whisper greeted me as soon as I stepped over the threshold.
I had eaten on the deck in the peace of a light winter drizzle.
Eventually the sky grew lighter through the blinds, and I managed to heave myself up, a glass of water in my hand as I excited the safety of my room.
Where is it I need the ssssssec ? —
“Oh, shut up,” I snapped, then dipped my hand into the glass and flicked the water out toward the sound as I entered the hallway.
To my surprise, it did.
Well, sort of.
As I walked through the house, the murmurs faded, blending into the dampened chorus of the house’s long history.
That, I could deal with. I had been for fifteen years.
“That’s better,” I said, heading for the kitchen. First, I needed tea. Then I would see what needed to be done before I went back to Boston at the end of next week.
Houses are like sponges. They borrow energy and moods from the beings that reside in them. This house held the energy of everyone who had ever lived or even visited here since Gran had first built the place sometime in the late sixties. Most of the energy was recognizably hers, my mother’s, or mine. My father flitted through the rooms, but his memories seemed as eager to leave in death as he had been in life. The occasional repair person or neighbor, but their interactions here had been so infrequent and largely meaningless that I hardly felt them at all.
But the energy left by the women who raised me wasn’t necessarily comforting. Sibyl and I had never gotten along, of course, and Gran’s and my relationship wasn’t particularly light-hearted. Penny Monroe was a serious woman, always pensive, careful, and observant, and she had taught me to be the same.
Her thoughts were markedly more closed than anyone I’d ever known, fae or plain. I Saw very little when she touched me unless it was something she chose to share. Her lessons, too, were just as opaque. When I asked her about shielding, she informed me that it was a critical skill, but not one I was ready to learn. My job as a young seer was to remain open to others but close myself off as much as I could later in life.
I couldn’t for the life of me fathom how to do one without mastering the other.
Not yet .
It was the chorus of my life with Gran.
When I’d wanted to learn more spells.
When I’d asked to have friends over.
When I’d begged to leave Manzanita and see more of the world than just the solemn seascapes of the Oregon Coast.
“Not yet,” she had said sadly before kissing me on the cheek as I waited for the bus to Portland. The one that would take me to college, and eventually to Boston. “But you’ll do.”
Not yet had become never.
I made a cup of Irish breakfast from the good tea Gran still had sent from Dublin, and then I turned to the house, now bathed in light reflecting off the ocean, even beneath the gray-white clouds.
“All right,” I announced. “I’m ready. What have you got to tell me?”
Slowly, I walked around the living room, oriented around the big copper fireplace at its center. I drifted my bare hand over the tops of the furniture, pressing my toes into the cedar floors and faded rag rugs. Tension rose everywhere, like muscles that hadn’t been used for a long time.
It didn’t make sense. Yesterday, the place had been ready to scream. Now, beyond a few blinking visions of Gran knitting by the firelight or bundling juniper twigs, there was nothing.
I frowned. Had the house been strangled too?
I walked through the rest of it, through all three of the back bedrooms and the mudroom off the side entrance, opening the shades to spread light and get the house to relax. Sun caught on the crystals hanging from the eaves, dancing rainbows over the dark wood floor and the antique furniture.
It was pretty. But I wasn’t Seeing a damn thing.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said once I returned to the living room. “Ten minutes you wouldn’t stop whispering. And now mum’s the word?”
I slapped my hand on the big copper chimney and closed my eyes, willing the space to talk to me.
But there was nothing but silence and blank spaces in my mind. My Sight was completely barren.
I scowled. “Fine. I’m going out for supplies. But when I get back, you and I are getting real.”
As if in response, the house creaked against a particularly strong gust of wind.
I couldn’t tell if it was a taunt or a warning.
I decided to jog into town, where I would be able to get some breakfast and pick up a few groceries before trying the house again. If things went better, maybe I could even surf this afternoon, the surest way I knew of clearing my head.
The run from the house to Manzanita took a little under fifteen minutes at a good clip. The general store wouldn’t open for another hour, so I walked into News and Espresso, the old house turned cafe with walls covered in magazines, the way old newsstands used to have before the advent of the internet.
“Hello, there. What can I get for you?”
Andy Jacobs, the paunchy, fifty-something owner who had been a consistent buyer of Gran’s sweaters over the years, greeted me from behind the counter with a bright smile. I recognized the one he was wearing immediately—Gran had complained about how hard it was to make the feather pattern over the chest.
“Hi Andy,” I said. “How’ve you been?”
Andy nodded with the same friendly, if vacant expression he’d always had. “Not bad, not bad at all. Good to see you.”
He reached a hand out to shake mine, but I demurred.
“Sweaty,” I said, gesturing feebly up and down my body. I was, in fact, sweaty, but the running gloves I wore were not.
“Of course.” Andy bobbed his head as if he completely understood what I was thinking. “Well, what can I get you today?”
“I’ll have a café au lait, please. And…that pecan bun right there. Oh, and I’ll take a copy of The New Yorker, too.”
“Coming right up. Just nine for the magazine—the rest is on the house.”
I looked up. “What? But it’s winter.” I looked around at the few other customers. While the cafe often had a line out the door during the summer tourist season, most of the shops in town were only open a few days a week at most during the winter because of how slow everything was.
Andy just shook his head. “Happy to have a fresh face around here. Come again, will you?”
I dropped five dollars into the tip jar instead, wondering what exactly he meant by that. “Thanks, Andy. I appreciate it.”
“Anytime, honey. Here’s that au lait for you.”
For the first time since arriving last night, it felt nice to be home. Though I never admitted it to Gran (steadfastly ignoring her ability to read my thoughts regardless), I missed the slower pace of Manzanita and the ease people had with each other in a small town. So warm, despite the clouds. So different from Boston or even Portland.
I found a small table near a window where I could read my magazine and watch people on their walks down the main street. Most of them were over sixty, so I supposed it wasn’t surprising when Hannah and Marvin, the old tea house owners, didn’t seem to recognize me when I waved.
The New Yorker had a review of Rachel Cardy’s newest book, and I was just getting into it when I suddenly felt as if someone had poured ice water down my shirt and turned on the AC. It was a strange, completely new sensation, but one that still felt uncannily familiar.
I turned, expecting to see Lou, an elderly sorcerer and doctor who was the only other fae in town. Perhaps he had brushed my hair and I hadn’t realized it. Normally I’d be sensing his thoughts along with his raspy grumbles, but my Sight had been off lately.
But instead of the friendly old physician, a pair of sharp, familiar green eyes peered at me from the table across from me.
I choked on my coffee with a burned tongue. “You have got to be kidding me.”