CHAPTER 8
Astunned silence followed, and then everyone started speaking at once, which was overwhelming and difficult to follow.
“This is ridiculous, Dad,” my mum said as though Grandad were still in the room to hear her.
“To Taliesin?” Lettie said. “Only to Taliesin?”
“Let it not be said he didn’t play favorites.” Marlowe chuckled, as though he found this darkly amusing.
“The toilet screams when you flush it,” Amelia warned me. “Pretty sure it’s haunted.”
“Wait,” I said. “What about the spa?”
“He shouldn’t have it all to himself, surely,” Lettie said, ignoring me.
But Marlowe didn’t. “Nobody’s told you?” When I shook my head, his amusement shriveled up. “He sold it years ago.”
“To who?”
“Westley Warwick.”
I didn’t have time to process the strangeness of that or ask why before Lettie returned to the issue of the house.
“It’s ridiculous. No offense meant, Tal, but you don’t even live in Shearwater.”
“He can’t,” my mum agreed.
“Then he sells it and we get nothing?”
I didn’t want it. Not the clocks, not the house. I did want a home, but a home was more than four walls, brick and mortar. Homes were built by love, and I wouldn’t find enough here for the foundations.
When Laurelie and I were small—no older than seven—my mum had been going through her old jewelry box, showing us heirlooms and trinkets and gifts from Dad, passed down from family. Laurelie had asked if she could have the engagement ring passed down from Grandma to our dad when he’d proposed.
Mum had said, “Sorry, dear, that will be for Tal when he proposes to his future wife.”
I had said, “I don’t want it because I’ll have a husband. Give it to Laurelie.”
I’d been the favorite, but I didn’t realize it until I wasn’t anymore.
After that, Laurelie got to go on special trips for ice cream instead of me, had her artwork hung over top of mine on the refrigerator, was enrolled in competitive gymnastics while Fae and I made our own games in the garden and the woods.
It wasn’t that Mum was homophobic. We had lesbian neighbors whom she’d invited over for tea and sent Christmas cards to. She didn’t have a problem with Fae being non-binary and Sapphic, or me being gay. I’d slighted her somehow by saying I didn’t want the engagement ring.
I’d always wondered why it mattered so much. Turned over the various reasons Mum might hold something so small against a seven-year-old. I never came up with a reasonable answer, and privately knew that none would be good enough.
The shouting and bickering was too much. Grandad was dead, and instead of grieving him like normal, we were fighting over inheritances.
I got up. Everyone quieted down except Lettie, whom Marlowe hushed.
I said, “I don’t want the house. I’ll just sell it and we can split the money if it matters so much. In the meantime, I thought you should know I saw the healer at the spa today, but he can’t help me, so I’ll be going. See you all at the next funeral.”
I hadn’t meant for that last part to sound so ominous, but the ticking clocks and their stunned expressions were making my skin feel too tight, so I left without another word.
I took a big gulp of the summer air once the door to 37 Culpepper Avenue slammed shut behind me, but the quiet was interrupted at once by Amelia catching up.
She didn’t say anything at first. She sat on the front porch step, lit a cigarette, and mumbled with it between her lips. “Family, huh?”
“How am I supposed to fit a decade’s worth of dead clocks in a camper van?” It was somehow the first thing out of my mouth, the absurdity of the situation more glaring in the light of a summer’s day.
She snorted. “That’s the part you’re bothered about?”
“Not the only part. Why did he sell the spa to Warwick?” It had been in our family for generations. He’d devoted so much of his time and energy to it. I couldn’t fathom why he’d sell it, particularly since the spring’s magic had returned.
“Because he’s a bad judge of character?”
“You don’t like Warwick?”
“Nobody in Shearwater with a copper’s worth of sense likes him.”
I hadn’t gotten the best impression either, but still asked, “Why?”
“The way my dad tells it, at the time Warwick came to Shearwater, the spring was in a bad way.
Not much magic left in it, which meant not many tourists.
It was looking like Grandad would have to declare bankruptcy.
So Warwick swoops in and offers to buy the spa off him, keeping us all on as employees and giving Grandad some meaningless chair on the board of directors.
“Then, after the strid … Well, you know. People moved away, even people who’d been here a few generations.
Afraid they’d be next, or they lost someone and didn’t want the reminder.
Can’t blame ’em, but Warwick bought up their places for a rotten steal and flipped all them nice, old houses.
Now they’re nice on the outside, white boxes on the inside.
Conveniently, the spring got its magic back after two dozen people drowned in it, so tourism spiked.
Warwick rents all those places he’s got as bed-and-breakfasts for evil prices.
At this point he owns half the high street.
” She shrugged. “Tale as old as time, right?”
“When did Grandad sell it?”
“Barely a year before you left? He didn’t tell any of us. My dad found out years later. He was proper devastated. Always fancied carrying on the family tradition, sprucing the place up.”
“And the fact the strid happened to devour two dozen people, and the spring got its magic back after, is just a coincidence?”
Amelia’s lips twisted, making the cigarette’s ember bob. “You’re not saying anything we didn’t think ourselves, but there’s no proof Warwick did something as malicious as playing the Pied Piper and drowning twenty-four people just to make the spa profitable again.”
“No proof. But you think he might have?”
She shrugged.
The timing of it all gave me pause. Perhaps it was overly convenient to pin the greatest tragedy of my life on the man who benefited most from it, but it would be nice to have a villain. A person to blame. Someone with a dastardly plan whose defeat would revert my life back to normal.
Amelia rose and stomped out her cigarette butt with her toe. “Anyway. I didn’t come out here to whinge about Westley fucking Warwick.”
“What did you come out for?”
“Really, Tal? I came to say goodbye.”
Before I could protest, she dragged me into a hug. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a proper hug, and it showed. I moved stiffly, like a robot learning how to love, then tightened my grip.
Amelia didn’t comment on it.
She said, “I wish you didn’t have to go. It’s nice having one more semi-sane person in the family.”
I wanted to pull back, then. She hadn’t said anything wrong, quite the contrary. She was saying everything right, and it was making it so much harder to leave, to say goodbye for good.
Maybe I’d been wrong about there not being enough love here from which to build a home, but I couldn’t afford to find out.
I was so lost in thought that when she did pull away, I forgot to let go. I released her a second too late. She gave me a knowing look and said, “Come on. I’ll give you a lift back.”
In the spa’s car park, Lunaris waited for me. She greeted me by playing a comforting tune on the radio, something you’d only hear at a speakeasy, crooned by a woman with oiled curls and a long-stemmed cigarette in one hand.
I’d come up with a plan on the way. First, shower with a decontamination spell, because the touch of the spring made my skin crawl, and I didn’t trust that it hadn’t left some trace upon me.
Second, stock up on sandwiches and snacks to keep me on my trip.
Third, choose a destination many miles away from Shearwater and drive until it got dark.
I only got through the first of my tasks before a knock came at the door. I’d just thrown on my housecoat when Lunaris flung the door open on my behalf.
Kessian, on the other side, jumped.
I hadn’t expected to see him yet again, and couldn’t fathom what he wanted from me. I doubted it was round two. The deadly visions from the spring were a mood killer.
But when his eyes roamed my body in nothing but a bathrobe, I second-guessed that assessment.
“Hello,” he said absently.
“What are you doing here?” I cringed. “Sorry, that came out wrong. I just didn’t expect you.”
“No, no, that’s understandable after the visions this morning. I came to say sorry. For not helping you.”
“You don’t need to apologize for that.”
“I know. But I wanted to catch you before you left, because maybe there’s another way I can help.”
My hopes didn’t stir, too accustomed to disappointment, but my curiosity did. I might have feared remaining in Shearwater any length of time, but in the vision we’d been dressed for Fae’s wedding, so I wasn’t overly concerned the both of us would drown until then.
That didn’t make the invitation without its own dangers. I liked spending time with Kessian, and the longer I did, the more I liked him. It wouldn’t be good for my heart to linger long.
Lunaris pointedly put the kettle on to boil.
“All right. Come in for a cup of tea.”
I prepared to forgo any myself since I only had the one mug, but I opened the cupboard to find a second.
Lunaris’s magic was of the wild variety.
It wasn’t limitless, but it also wasn’t fueled by tithes like mine.
I might have dismissed her conjuring a cup for Kessian and not Fae by telling myself I’d been feeling too sick to my stomach for tea at the time, having just seen the wraith outside Kessian’s bedroom window, but Lunaris had a way of conveying her intentions, and I would only be half correct.
The cup was dainty, blue, with a galaxy of stars painted inside like a smattering of Kessian’s freckles. She even fluffed the dining booth’s cushions to make him feel more welcome.
Kessian watched all this wide-eyed before accepting the mug floating in front of him. “Er, thank you, Lunaris! What a charming host.”
She flicked her curtains at him flirtatiously.
“I did see in your visions that your familiar became your camper van, but I didn’t realize she could do all this.”
“She’s trying to make you feel welcome because I’m bad at it.”
“Not bad at it. More, unprepared. You could say I have bad timing.” His eyes dropped down to the opening of my house coat, sticking to my chest hair. “Though from where I’m sitting, it’s very good timing.”
I’d managed to flirt back smoothly that first night I’d met him, but then I’d been three whiskeys deep, and I hadn’t known him long enough to develop fluttery feelings.
I was having fluttery feelings.
“Let me go get dressed,” I said.
“If, and only if, you insist.”
I rushed down the short hall, hoping Kessian didn’t notice how my bedroom door was painted the same color as his, because I didn’t need him to know that night had left such an impression on me that my familiar redecorated because of it.
In my room, Lunaris immediately flung an outfit suggestion onto the bed for me.
It was just a shark-fang necklace I’d gotten at the beach when I’d first left home. I’d bought it because I liked running my finger over the serrated edge.
“Be serious,” I said.
She pulled out my gray sweatpants. No underwear.
“Lunaris.”
If it was possible for a sentient camper van to throw down an alternate outfit in a huffy manner, Lunaris managed it, but this one at least made me decent.
I emerged in the best-fitting pair of jeans I owned, and an oversized cable-knit cream jumper that could fit both Kessian and I comfortably inside it.
I wasn’t trying to look good for the boy in my living room, but I wasn’t not trying to look good for him. A double negative that irritated my brain, but felt appropriate when Kessian made me feel two brain cells short of a fruit fly.
“That jumper looks so cozy,” Kessian said, feet kicked up on the poof Lunaris conjured for him.
“I think it’s alpaca wool,” I said.
“Neat. So! Speaking of neat, I have a proposition for you.”
I hesitated with my tea halfway to my lips.
“Not that sort of proposition. Well, not that I’d say no. Your rain check still stands. But it has more to do with your situation. Not being able to stay anywhere for long. I think I know a place where you could. Stay, I mean. For longer than a few days or a week. Forever.”
I couldn’t conceive of such a place. Thus far, anywhere I went, the wraith followed, peeking out of the shadows and into my nightmares whenever I lingered long enough to make a connection, whether they be friend or lover.
I didn’t cave to hope, but I still had to ask. “Where’s that?”
“A place called Coill Darragh.”