Interlude
The medium was small. A joke, that. He remembered as much.
But this one was small: short, thin, with a little triangle of a face and close-bobbed black hair.
Her eyes, comparatively large, were very dark blue.
Ligat had only seen her up close for a moment, but he remembered her fearful, determined gaze more clearly than half of the ethereal landscapes he traveled.
The lady moved fast—in every meaning of the phrase.
Fueled by terror, she’d dodged and struck like a serpent in Chapman’s room.
She’d acted swiftly and decisively in the hospital and with the car clerk, she’d flashed down to her friend’s farm and back, and once she’d learned that she needed to move, she’d selected a new place, paid, and packed within half a week.
Where the ethereal was concerned, those days were a peaceful reprieve.
Perthrux had tested its power in the first two hauntings, then thrown it against the druid’s wards, and assaulted the Lewis woman’s defenses without managing more than a burst light bulb and a flickering face in the mirror at night.
So Perthrux had stalked or sulked off to its lair to recover its strength, Chapman had presumably found some tedious way of occupying himself, and Hazel Lewis had bought a decrepit house maybe fifty miles away from the druid.
Her employer, who’d lent her the cash for it, came over to help put the contents of her apartment in boxes.
There were maybe ten at the end: books, clothes, occult supplies, and a small selection of mismatched kitchen implements.
The medium sold her furniture to a series of strangers through the internet, fit all the other physical elements of her life neatly in the back of her small car, and drove down to her new old house on a thoroughly depressing, rainy day.
She was a woman without tethers, Ligat thought.
He revised that opinion as she weeded out her belongings.
She was a woman who selected each connection carefully and pruned them to the shape she wanted.
It left her without many, and almost none of those that remained went very deep, though Summer might have been an exception.
Watching her from the shadows of the ethereal, he spotted no family photographs or sentimental keepsakes.
He saw no evidence that she had a lover, either, which he found annoyingly pleasant.
It certainly wouldn’t have been for lack of offers, unless the world was full of more fools than he remembered.
Even the old clothes she wore to pack and move didn’t conceal the supple lines of her figure, which caught Ligat’s eye even as he stayed at a careful distance, or the decisive grace of her movements.
He couldn’t imagine he was the first to notice them, and mortals would have acted.
He found himself speculating as the days went by, amusing himself by trying to guess the cause of her celibacy.
Despite her contact with the ethereal, or perhaps because of it, the medium didn’t seem to follow the sort of religion that frowned on carnal pleasures.
Of course, she might simply not have been inclined.
She might have found the local talent lacking.
Ligat, observing the people she dealt with, could certainly have understood that.
Over the decades, Ligat’s duties had exposed him more than occasionally to mortals.
Most of the ones he’d actually met had been unpleasant.
The rest had been unremarkable, blurring in time to become a mass of shifting fashions and politics.
None had stood out, not until Chapman’s chosen sacrifice had tried to talk him down, then stabbed Ligat in the shoulder and actually managed to get away.
The shoulder still ached at times, the first lasting injury he could really remember, and the static had jarred his entire self when Hazel Lewis had struck the television.
He’d almost welcomed both. He was sure that was for the novelty of them, not for any murkier reasons that he might almost recognize late at night.
He hadn’t expected Hazel. She continued to surprise him.
Ligat could almost find it in himself to regret her fate.