Asil’s Fourth Date Dating Terrors #5
Asil decided not to argue with her determination to push him away from whatever she’d originally wanted from him.
His experience in the past three dates indicated he did not need to force matters—disaster would come in its own time.
He braced himself for the rebellion of his wolf at his decision to be patient—and it did not come.
The wolf agreed with his assessment. Asil was intrigued by the strangeness of sharing his skin with a reasonable being.
Today’s date was only minutes long, and already it was shaping into something at least as interesting as his last three dates had been.
He followed Ruby and Alan into the mansion and found himself in a large, lightly furnished room that was mostly a showcase for the massive oak stairway, heavily carved with small animals, flowers, and leaves.
The room was awash in colored light filtering down from two gigantic Tiffany stained-glass windows that dominated the first landing of the stairway.
The effect of elegant opulence was diluted somewhat by the sound of someone in the distant heights of the building swearing like a sailor.
Alan and Ruby exchanged a look. Alan said, “Someone needs to keep Terry from killing Peg. If you two will excuse me?” He didn’t wait for a reply before running lightly up the stairs.
Ruby watched Alan leave as if he were a life buoy sliding out of her reach. Asil’s wolf wanted to go grab Alan and stand him back beside Ruby so she wouldn’t be unhappy—but, and this was the amazing part, did not make any effort to make that happen.
When Alan disappeared above them, Ruby swallowed. Then she turned to Asil with the bright fake smile he was already tired of. “Okay, Mr. Moreno—”
“Asil,” he told her silkily. “Please.”
“Asil,” she said without dropping her smile a single watt or making it a degree more real. “Every ghost hunting team I’ve ever spoken to has a routine they follow when they are looking for hauntings. We start with a walk-through—”
“For psychic impressions,” Asil said, not quite interrupting her but disturbing her rhythm, pushing at her in a way that was not quite flirtatious. But not quite not flirtatious, either.
She gave him a wary look. “Yes.” At least the plastic had gone out of her expression.
“I’m not a psychic,” he told her.
“No,” she agreed dryly, “it wasn’t on your profile.”
He almost grinned at the bite in her voice. There she was—the real person beneath the plastic mask and the roil of fear and uncertainty.
“I cannot apologize for the profile,” he said, a purr in his voice that caused a flush of something she almost controlled. “I didn’t write it.”
Arousal, his wolf assured him. The binding spell she wears sometimes hides things from our sense of smell, but look at the darkening of her eyes and the warmth of her skin.
If the ground had rolled under his feet, he would not have been more startled than he was at hearing his wolf speak to him in words.
He hadn’t spoken to his wolf this way since his mate had last walked beside him.
The only other werewolf he knew who spoke to his wolf like this was Charles—one of the myriad of things that made Asil dislike the Marrok’s son.
Asil was not above admitting to jealousy.
Ruby drew in a deep breath. “Alan’s wife and I did a preliminary walk-through of this place a couple of weeks ago when they first asked us for help.”
She paused as if she were waiting for him to throw her off her game again. But he was too busy trying to regroup. He let her proceed unhindered, even though it irritated him when she dropped back behind the safety of her tour-guide mask.
“We come prepared with the history of the house,” she continued briskly.
“Some of that we get from the owners, but we do record searches, too. Mostly we don’t find anything very useful that isn’t already well-known to the owners.
It’s not necessary to have a complete history with names and dates to help the spirits, but sometimes it has proven useful. ”
“Help them?” he asked.
“That’s what we do,” she said. “Help trapped spirits.”
Because you can’t free yourself, he thought, understanding why she would feel driven to take up such a hobby. But he didn’t say that aloud.
She had paused as if she were waiting for him to say something, but when he kept silent, she shrugged and led him into a smaller room off the entryway.
“This house was built in 1898 and was restored in the eighties by the grandmother of the current owner. There are plans to turn it into a bed-and-breakfast, but those plans are on hold until they can deal with a restless spirit or two. This is the reception room—where the original owner, one Eben Mercanter Benson, welcomed important guests.”
Asil looked around the octagonal room. It was a fine example of its type—a room designed to impress guests with the wealth and power of the homeowner while also being cozier than the grand entrance hall with its impressive staircase.
He counted six kinds of wood in the ornate floor, and the oak fireplace mantel made seven.
Arching high ceilings were adorned with painted Italianate scenes.
The fireplace had been converted to gas sometime in the past but still had the original surround.
With a little smile, he touched a sparrow carved into the corner of the mantelpiece—it was a charming creature.
Our kind of space, said his wolf. Beautiful and skillfully wrought—as we are.
Asil thought a question at his wolf—a wordless, infinite question encompassing the utter strangeness of speaking to each other once again, the change from broken beast to coherent thought. What had changed?
I don’t know, the wolf answered. But it has something to do with her.
Asil realized abruptly that Ruby had quit talking, and he turned his gaze from the sparrow. She was watching him with an odd look in her eyes. He gathered the things she had been saying when he had been listening and came up with a cogent question.
“Are not ghosts an asset in the world of bed-and-breakfasts?” he asked. “Were you asked here to prove it is haunted? And if you free the trapped spirits here, won’t you be making their enterprise less successful?”
She smiled and relaxed a little.
Appreciating that we are letting her keep her distance, observed his wolf. But we are patient hunters.
Yes, agreed Asil, not at all certain he wanted to take this hunt to the same place his wolf did. But he wasn’t certain he didn’t, either.
This was a date, no? He was careful not to smile at Ruby just then; she might notice his sharp white teeth.
“Well-behaved ghosts are welcome,” Ruby told him.
“But apparitions who won’t allow guests to sleep are more problematic.
This house is supposed to have a troublesome poltergeist—a spirit who throws things.
My team and I aren’t here to provide proof of ghosts.
We look specifically for trapped spirits and we find a way to let them rest.”
“So why the cameras and microphones if you don’t intend to prove anything?” He nodded toward the camera in the corner of the room.
“Ghosts aren’t like a mouse infestation,” she told him.
“They aren’t always present. We’re going to try to contact something today, but we’ll also leave the cameras in here for a couple of days.
If we find a particularly active spot, we’ll come back for a second try.
We are looking, in this case, for a spirit who sobs brokenly or screams in the middle of the night.
And whatever likes to throw sharp things like scissors and kitchen knives.
A former owner claimed something threw a hammer at him. ”
As they strolled through the old, empty house, visiting formal and informal dining rooms, bathrooms, a billiard room and a modern kitchen, a laundry and an old-fashioned butler’s pantry, she continued to educate him about what she and her team did.
Not much of it was unknown to him. He disliked being ignorant and had spent a few days researching ghost hunting, watching several television shows, because apparently this was a thriving hobby.
But while she told him about this thing she loved to do, her body relaxed, her voice softened, and she forgot to keep him at a distance. She also forgot to be afraid of whatever it was Alan Choo had gone to great effort—and personal risk—to save her from.
While she talked of EVP (electronic voice phenomena), EMF detectors, and other alphabet soup devices, he took in details of the house.
He’d always had a fondness for Victorian architecture—it was as excessively gorgeous as he.
This particular house was a grand example of its kind.
Every room, including the bathrooms, had a transom window over the top of the door filled with etched amber or ruby glass.
Plaster walls were worked into patterns covered with bronze leaf.
Ceilings were painted or frescoed. Everywhere one looked, there was attention to detail.
“Our team has a ghost box,” she was saying as they started up the narrow servant stairs in the back of the kitchen. “But we don’t use it much. We have better luck with dowsing rods and EVP. And all the static hurts Alan’s ears.”
She looked at him and then away, as if mention of Alan reminded her Asil was a werewolf, too.
On the first floor…ah, he was in America…
on the second floor, the excesses of the lavish ground floor gave way to common sense.
There were two more bathrooms, one modern and one charmingly original, with an odd, spiral-shaped pipe that created a surround shower with rudimentary showerheads placed more or less at random all over the pipe.
A person showering in such a contraption would find themselves uncomfortably deluged by water.
A ridiculous thing—something he’d never encountered, for all he’d lived through the years when it had been built.
Perhaps it had been invented for this house. The thought pleased him.