CHAPTER SIXTEEN
MOIRA
David wasn’t the most hopeless student Moira had ever had, but he was close.
David was powered entirely by flat whites, hubris, and a pathological need to push himself beyond his limits. Moira had never met someone who slept so little or worked so hard and looked so effortless doing it. She wasn’t sure which seemed more exhausting, constructing two parallel high-pressure careers or maintaining the image around them. Although that seemed to be getting increasingly difficult as his condition progressed. Every time she saw him, he seemed a little more diminished, a little more rubbed raw. He didn’t need to say it out loud for her to know the blackouts hadn’t let up.
She was just going to have to convince him to loosen his death grip around productivity to get him to accept them, even if that meant breaking a few fingers.
“If you don’t close your damn eyes, I’m going to blindfold you,” Moira said.
David was sitting in a circle of amethyst, rose quartz, and selenite crystal in the second story hallway of his father’s home. Rhys had banished them both from the study, claiming that their bickering was making it impossible to get any work done. Moira indulged his snippy attitude, since he was cross-referencing fourteen texts in three languages. Listening to your wife and your ex debate the magical properties of various crystals probably wasn’t conducive to research.
“I don’t see why that part is necessary,” David said. He was dressed for work, and he did look a little ridiculous sitting cross-legged on the ground in Brooks Brothers slacks. Good. He needed to stop taking himself so seriously.
“You know why. It’s about focus. It’s about surrender.”
“Gross,” David muttered, but he closed his eyes all the same. He took a deep breath, and Moira nodded her approval. She was sitting just outside the circle, across from him, within grasp if necessary.
Moira trailed her fingers over the spiky contours of her favorite amethyst geode, lovingly transported all the way from Jamaica Plain. She had built this crystal grid to emanate and magnify feelings of deep peace, healing, and self-compassion, exactly the sort of re-charge a drained psychic would need after a long day of work. And David’s life, it seemed, had been nothing but a series of those.
“How does that feel?”
“Like dunking myself in warm bathwater.”
“Not so bad, is it?”
“I hate baths. They’re inefficient.”
Moira made an offended sound, but then she realized that David was grinning, doing his best to hold back laughter.
“I’m kidding,” he said. “You have to learn when I’m teasing you.”
“Well, you’re on the record as a genuine asshole, so that might take a while.”
“Noted.”
“Back to the task at hand; are you getting anything?”
David shrugged. “Not really. The energy isn’t uncomfortable, but none of that love and light you promised is getting through.”
Moira chewed on her lip. Should she have incorporated more clear quartz to boost the properties of the other crystals? Had she leaned too heavily on selenite, which could be soporific if overutilized? Her eyes landed on the labradorite on his left hand.
“Give me your ring,” she said. “I’ve got a suspicion it’s cancelling everything out.”
“This?” David asked, covering his ring with his hand. His eyes were still closed, a concerned expression creasing his brow. “I never take it off.”
“Exactly. I’ve got you sitting in a ring of downers while you’re wearing an upper. Hand it over.”
David grimaced but unscrewed his ring and dropped it into Moira’s hand. The moment the skin-warmed crystal hit her palm, a rush of energy flowed through her. She felt wide awake and revved up, strong enough to face down any challenge. It hit her like espresso on an empty stomach and left her feeling similarly queasy.
“This is how you feel all the time?” she asked, slipping the ring onto her thumb for safekeeping. “I feel like I could fight a catamount. Or pull a twelve-hour shift.”
David absentmindedly rubbed the pale band of skin where his ring had been. “I’m getting a little spinny,” he said. “Could I have my ring back, please?”
“Not yet. Ground like I taught you. You can handle this by yourself.”
David pressed his palms into the wood on either side of him, leaning into the point of contact. In a few minutes, the concerned lines between his eyes smoothed over, and he was breathing evenly again.
“How does that feel?” Moira asked.
“Good. I think. Quiet. Soft, sort of. Warmth, right through here.” David pressed splayed fingers to his sternum. “But weird. I don’t know what to do with myself.”
“You don’t have to do anything. You just have to receive. That’s the point.”
Just as David was about to reply, there was a deafening crash from down the hall, loud enough to shake the floorboards. Moira yelped and her go-go boots kicked over a couple crystals, breaking the circle. David’s eyes flew open.
“Rhys–” Moira began breathlessly.
“That wasn’t Rhys,” David said with a glower. He pushed himself to his feet and stepped out of the circle, staring down to the other end of the hallway. “Wrong wing.”
“What do you mean?”
David stood frozen for a long minute, flexing and unflexing his hands at his sides. Then he came to some sort of conclusion and hoisted Moira up by a strong grasp on her wrist.
“Come with me,” he said.
Moira bristled, tugging her hand free. He hadn’t hurt her, but she wasn’t used to being touched by him. And she definitely wasn’t used to being ordered around.
“What for?”
David stared at the floor, gripping one of his hands in the other as though he couldn’t trust them not to act of their own accord. “Please just come with me,” he said quietly.
She could barely hear him, and after a moment of total bafflement, she realized that he wasn’t ordering. He was begging.
Moira wrapped her fringed shawl tight around her shoulders. She had chosen a suede miniskirt that morning because the sun was back in Boston with a vengeance, but she always caught chills in this house.
“I’ll go with you. But you don’t look so hot.”
“I don’t feel it. But I have to handle this now. Or I’m never going to.”
Moira wasn’t entirely sure what he was talking about, but she nodded. David led her down a dark corridor she had not yet explored, the one that led to the majority of the home’s bedrooms. He made his way through the dim space like a man walking to the guillotine, mouth set in a resigned line. Moira shivered as the temperature slid further downwards.
David swung open one of the heavy oak doors, and Moira stepped inside a bedroom that was perfectly pristine except for the contained chaos of a toppled armoire. It must have been beautiful once, and heavy, but now it lay in a heap of splintered wood and shattered glass.
Moira looked back at David, who stood in the doorway with palms braced on either side of the doorframe. He was white as a sheet.
“I wasn’t allowed in this room,” he said. “It’s just strange, is all. To see you there.”
“Whose room is this?”
“Evgeni’s.”
David stepped through the threshold, his loafers sinking into plush, forest-green carpet. The room favored deep greens: emerald and juniper and matte pine scattered among the wood furnishings. It was probably supposed to feel elegant, or evoke some fir-strewn countryside she had never visited. But all the green struck Moira more serpentine than anything, like a snake coiling around their legs right where they stood.
David yanked the sheet off one of the huge oil portraits hanging off the wall, sending a shower of dust sparkling through the air. A man who could only be Evgeni scowled imperiously out from the frame, with a judgmental gleam in eyes as hooded and green as David’s.
“Ms Delacroix,” David said, as though he were introducing her at a society ball. “My father, Evgeni Aristarkhov: occultist, millionaire, hardass, and son of a bitch extraordinaire.”
Moira took a curious few steps towards the painting, eyes fixed on the unblinking visage. Even in death and captured behind a gilded frame, he raised her hackles. She felt like she was being weighed and measured, evaluated as deficient in some way. She decided immediately that she hated that man, and hatred had never been an easy thing for her to muster.
“Was he always like that?”
“Pretty much. Still is.”
Moira turned to face David, a question on her lips. Then, the penny dropped.
Moira gave a little gasp. “Oh my God. I’m such a fool, I should have seen it. The house–”
“Still his.” David gave a wiggle of his fingers that could only be called congratulatory. “Now you know why I hate it here so much. That, and the Addams Family vibes. Would it have killed the designers to put in some subway tile or an open plan kitchen? Jesus Christ, it’s gloomy.”
She all but scurried across the room to him, wanting to get as far away as possible from the shattered furniture. She had lived in a haunted house before, during the terrible few months when she and Rhys had been terrorized by a tulpa of their own making. It wasn’t an experience she ever wanted to go through again, even if this ghost wasn’t hers to put back in the ground.
“Your dad’s still hanging around here, isn’t he?”
“Parts of him. The nasty parts. So, most of him.”
“That’s why I can never get warm in here, and why I’m getting headaches all the time. How can you stand to set foot in this place?”
“Necessity. And the knowledge that it pisses him off.”
He was being glib, but spiting his father couldn’t be worth the memories. It wasn’t worth walking into halls that his father still roamed freely, never sure whether something was going to shatter, just to put him back in his place.
Moira reached out to cover his hand with her own, but he withdrew from her touch.
“Listen Ms Delacroix, I mean this in the kindest way, but I’m really not a guy who gets into his feelings with other people, okay?”
“And if you ask me, that’s half your problem. Have you ever attempted an exorcism? Or tried talking to the ghost?”
“Whenever I try, it’s more of a one-way shouting match than a conversation.”
Moira sighed. “Fair enough. It might be worth trying again, but not today. You look like you’re on death’s door. Let’s get out of this drafty old room and go find Rhys.”
David turned towards the door, but he had no sooner taken a single step than the bedroom door swung shut with a slam. Hard enough to send a cold gust of air over Moira’s face. She yelped and almost toppled to the ground, but David hauled her up by the wrist again.
The distant sirens of panic started wailing in the back of her mind, growing louder and louder. It was impossible to tell if the terror was coming from her, or David, or both of them.
“David, let me go. I need to think straight.”
“Really wish I could,” he said, fingers still wrapped tight around her wrist. He was standing close behind her, his blind fear feeding into her at the point of contact.
One of the paintings, a dreary wind-lashed landscape, began to rattle. It shook violently, as though caught up in an earthquake, and then crashed to the floor. Moira squealed as the frame shattered, and David pulled her in tighter. He was beyond scared, he was paralyzed, wracked by the sort of mind-numbing fear only experienced by children cowering from monstrous parents. The sensation reminded her of one summer when she had almost been drowned by the younger girl she was trying to save from floundering in the pool. If he didn’t let her go, they were both going to be swallowed alive.
“You need to let me go,” she said.
“If I let you go, I’m going to have a panic attack,” he said through gritted teeth.
“And if you keep holding on, you’re gonna drain me of all my sense and then neither of us will be calm.”
“We’re getting out of here. Coming here was stupid; I don’t want you in a room with him.”
“For God’s sake, he’s haunting your house! You can’t just keep on ignoring him. We’re both here now, aren’t we?”
David spun her around, never breaking contact, and slid his hands up to clutch her shoulders. “Listen to me. You see this?” David ran his tongue over his teeth and tapped with his thumbnail on an incisor one shade whiter than the rest. “Fake. The real one got knocked out when I got smart with a client whose husband was cheating on her. My dad hit me so hard I concussed myself on the tile floor. He made me clean up the blood while he called our orthodontist. You do not want to piss him off.”
Moira pried his hands off her shoulders and latticed their fingers together, squeezing tightly. “I hear you. That’s an awful thing to do to a child, and I think it’s a miracle you lasted eighteen years living under that man’s thumb. But he’s your father, not mine. I’m not afraid of him. He doesn’t have any power over me.”
“I don’t want you getting hurt.”
Moira weakly tried for a joke, if only to lighten the mood. “Since when do you care about little old me?”
“You know damn well I care,” David bit out, and Moira was shocked to find that there was no lie in the energy thrumming from his palms.
She took a step into the center of the room. A porcelain and gold clock flew petulantly from the bedside table and shattered at her feet. David rattled the doorknob, but it wouldn’t give way.
“This is my problem,” he said, voice rising in irritation. “I need to handle it myself.”
“Just let somebody help you!” Moira snapped, surprised at her own venom. She had handled him diplomatically for so long, but this was not the time to be delicate.
David sagged against the doorframe and covered his mouth with his hands. There were beads of sweat pooling on his forehead.
“He’s going to kill me,” David moaned. “I am never going to get rid of that bastard; I’m going to die in this godforsaken house just like he did.”
“No,” Moira said. “No one is dying today, do you understand me? Now I need you to pull yourself together, indigo child, because I can’t handle him and take care of you at the same time.”
David swallowed hard and nodded, still pressed flush against the door. He looked half-wild and anemic, but he was upright, and she had nipped the fatalism in the bud before it spiraled out of control.
She took a few more steps into the center of the room, kicking aside debris.
“I’ve had it up to here with your antics. You’re trying to get a rise out of us, is that it?” She did her best to sound confident, even though her voice was shaking. “What are you doing, still hanging around here? Nobody wants you, so you better get on gone to where you’re going. I don’t care where, but you can’t stay here.”
Three coils of wallpaper were ripped ceiling to floor by an unseen hand. Left behind in the exposed, jagged wood beneath were what looked like claw marks.
“Jesus Christ, Moira,” David said hoarsely, rushing forward. He stuck an arm in front of her, preventing her from moving forward without actually touching her. “You’re gonna provoke him.”
“Good! You said yourself he was a bastard.”
“He could murder you.”
“Well, I don’t like bullies.” She balled up her fists and raised her voice. “You hear that? I don’t like you! What kind of sick person goes around terrorizing babies? You beat your own son! Look at him, he’s a mess.”
“Thanks,” David huffed under his breath. He was still pale, but some of his will to live seemed to be returning.
“This isn’t your house anymore, Evgeni Aristarkhov,” Moira pronounced. She was cribbing from the way she heard Rhys talk to his demons, clipped, authoritative, every syllable a nail in the coffin of their free will. “It’s David’s by right. And you aren’t alive anymore. You’re rotting in the ground somewhere far away from here. And if you don’t take your claws out of this house and go on to wherever you’re going, I’ll light a fire under you so hot you’ll wish you were already in hell.”
Every stick of furniture in the room rattled a threat back. Priceless trinkets skittered off surfaces and crashed to the ground. There would be nothing left of this room by the time Evgeni was done with it.
“She’s right,” David said, voice still a little unsteady. “There’s nothing left for you here. You need to leave.”
A drawer went flying out of the dresser, almost taking David out at the knees. He stooped to catch it with a huff, then hurled it against the wall. Moira jumped at the sound of splintering wood.
“You can’t keep this up forever!” David shouted. “You took up enough of my life when I was a kid, and now it’s time for you to fucking leave. There’s nothing left for you here. Nobody misses you, nobody is looking for you! It’s just me now, living a life that would make you sick. Leave me to it.”
The sheets tore themselves off the bed as more paintings crashed to the ground. The room was a minefield of falling objects and ruined finery, and Moira yelped at every new crash.
“Go to the door,” David told her, ushering her behind him and off towards the hallway. “Keep working on that thing until it opens up. We’re three stories up; there’s no climbing out the window.”
Moira rattled the doorknob with all her might, even gave the wood a few sound bangs as she hollered for help. It was impossible to say whether Rhys couldn’t hear them on the other side of the house, or if the ghost was dampening the noise with some kind of supernatural trick. Rhys had once wandered out of his study after a summoning session babbling that he had been locked in there for hours, calling her name.
David stepped across the ripped silk and shards of china, crushing them underfoot. He stood in the center of the room and addressed his father, heedless of the flying projectiles.
“I don’t belong to you anymore,” David snarled. His face was beautiful and terrible, a sneering imperial bust carved from marble. “And neither does this place. This house belongs to me.”
Immediately, the pillows and bits of broken furniture flying through the air came thudding to the ground. All the rattling and creaking subsided, until all Moira could hear was her own gasping breaths echoing through the room.
“The door,” David said hoarsely.
Moira tried it again, and this time it gave way so easily she nearly tumbled out onto the hallway. David followed close behind and slammed the door shut on the room.
Forever, probably.
He stared at her for a moment, looking almost pained. Then he took a step forward and pulled her into a tight hug.
Moira was so shocked she almost lost her breath. His aquatic cologne stung her nose with unpleasant notes of lemon oil and sea salt, and she couldn’t help the instinctive suspicion that this was some kind of trap, but it quickly became apparent the gesture was genuine.
She tentatively lifted her arms and slid them around his shoulders. Moira could feel the rabbit-quick heartbeat in his neck pressed against the sensitive skin of her inner arm, and she held him until it slowed. Gratitude, the kind that would probably tie David up in knots to speak aloud, flowed between their flush bodies and wrapped Moira up in a heady daze. It felt like warm summer rain, dousing her to the skin.
“Now I know why he calls you a goddess,” he said, with more sincerity than she thought he was capable of. “Thank you.”
“No trouble,” she said quietly. “Is he, uh… is he gone, do you think?”
David drew away and stuffed his hands into his pockets, as though suddenly abashed. “For now, at least. Maybe for good.”
“Good. Fuck him.” Moira liked to avoid the coarser swear words unless they were absolutely necessary, but she couldn’t think of a more fitting occasion.
David smiled at her, crooked and boyish. “Fuck him,” he said.
A wave of bone-deep weariness went through her. That would be the exorcism catching up with her. “I’d like to go find Rhys now, I think.”
“Me too. Let’s go.”
He led her back down the narrow, dark hallways of the house until they came once again to her wrecked crystal grid. Moira stooped to gather the toppled crystals, cradling a cracked rose quartz point to her chest.
“I’m sorry about that,” David said. “I’ll help you clean them up later.”
Moira handed him a crystal fragment, jagged as a broken promise, and he turned the gleaming pink stone between his fingers.
“Keep it,” she said. “It’s a gift.”
For a moment, she thought he was going to give her one of his breezy lectures about not really being into crystals, especially not rose quartz, but then he pocketed the stone without protest.
“Let’s go see if Rhys made any headway.”