Chapter 20
He let out a relieved breath, the smoke from the sage embers in the small stone bowl pushed away from him by the force of the exhaled air.
“Let’s never do that again,” Beck said, and when he turned to look at her, her eyes were wide and there were actual hairs out of place on her forehead. That, if nothing else, was testament to how absolutely hellish this banishment had been.
“Agreed,” he replied, using the long end of his sleeve to wipe sweat off his own face. He could feel the deep not-quite-ache of exhaustion in his body, and he was looking forward to going home and going to bed. After eating a giant plate of whatever Mason was cooking.
I resisted the urge to go back farther, to find out what or who it was that had made both Beck and Ward tired. I definitely didn’t want to encounter a spirit—or spirits, I supposed—that had the capacity to make both Beck and Ward sweat.
I set the small stone bowl—about which I had been curious as to its use—into a giant rubbermaid bin.
It was the Friday just before Halloween—two days before—and we had a gig that had been giving Raj nightmares all week. Literally.
I’d had to pull him out of two of them.
All of us were on edge.
I knew we were hoping that the size of the party and the large police presence would keep things from getting too out of hand, but even I suspected that going through with this gig was probably stupid.
Ward was refusing to cancel on principle, and part of me wondered if he wasn’t making a bad decision just to spite the fact that Raj had asked him not to.
It was a Dance with the Dead block party, and they’d booked both Beck and Ward.
They would also be getting me, for whatever that was worth.
Vi had also insisted on coming with us. Last year, Mason had come, too, but this year, he was staying home with the kids, because if things went badly, one parent had to still be safe and able to take care of them, and Mason couldn’t contact the dead.
I almost suggested that he and Raj should spend the evening together, but then realized that compounding their collective worries probably wouldn’t actually be productive.
So we all gritted our teeth and went about doing our jobs.
I’d left my car at Mason and Ward’s house in order to swap it out for Mason’s Tacoma, and Vi and I were working on loading up the bins to put in it—lots of party favors, lots of business cards, some precautionary measures, just in case things went wrong because there were too many dead people or some of the dead people were hostile.
It wasn’t likely, but you don’t prepare only for what is likely in our line of business.
I paused.
“What?” Vi asked.
I shrugged, then kept packing. “Nothing, really,” I answered. “I just was thinking about being prepared in our line of business,” I told her. “And it struck me that this is my line of business.”
“Yeah?” she said, confused. “So?”
“It feels like this is what I do,” I explained. “Not as something to do because I don’t know what else to do, or something I’m doing while I finish college, but what I actually do.”
“Like your career, you mean?” she asked.
“Yes,” I agreed. “Like that.”
“Good,” Ward said, rolling into the inventory room.
I felt my face flush. “I was just…” Except I didn’t quite know how to finish that sentence without sounding arrogant or entitled.
“Rayn,” he interrupted. “We want you to stay here, and to do more than just work the desk—not because you aren’t good at that, but because you do have skills that we can absolutely use.”
I frowned now. “For Lost Lineage, you mean?” Yesterday, someone had come in to see Mason and had brought a brooch from their grandmother, and she’d said it belonged to her grandmother’s grandmother, but there had been a dispute about that. Mason had asked me to see what I could find out from it.
The brooch had been far more pleasant than anything I’d been touching for the FBI, and I’d been more than happy to lose myself in it—until Mason had shaken me out two hours later. I was still a little drained from that.
It had, for the record, belonged to the client’s great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, just…
not the one she was expecting. Her four-times-great grandmother had been an enslaved girl, the illegitimate daughter of the plantation owner’s son.
She’d stolen the brooch from her grandmother in a rage after having been beaten for an infraction she hadn’t been guilty of.
So that had been interesting.
“Sure, for Lost Lineage,” Ward answered. “But also for the RPD or any other clients who might come in, including the FBI as needed.” He grinned at me. “Also, you can talk to the dead as well as I can.”
“I can’t summon them,” I pointed out. At least not reliably. I could pull someone nearby, or someone I knew, like Sylvia or Archie, but I couldn’t summon someone with a name like Ward could.
“I bet you could, if you had bone,” he replied. “Or a body, but they don’t usually have to come to us with that.”
I must have looked alarmed at that.
“Come on, that would be cool!” Vi said, bumping my shoulder with hers.
“I don’t think I want to touch a human corpse,” I replied.
Ward let out a sound that might have been a laugh, but had an edge of something else. “No, you probably don’t,” he replied. “I never do.”
But I knew that meant he did it anyway. And so would I, if someone asked me to.
I was pushing down on the lid for a bin when the front door bells jangled, and Vi stood from her squat to go see who had arrived and what they needed.
I looked up at Ward. “How worried is Mason?” I asked him.
He let out a half-laugh, half-huff. “Losing his fucking mind,” he admitted. “How’s Raj?”
The fact that he laughed—more of a laugh, anyway—told me he’d accurately read my expression.
“Um. Guys?” It was Vi. Dan Maza was standing behind her.
“Dan,” Ward said, spinning his chair around to look up at the detective. “What’s going on?”
I really hoped there hadn’t been another hit-and-run murder. Or a different murder. Any murder would be bad.
“I’m your escort for the evening,” Maza replied.
I’m sure all three of us looked surprised at that. “Escort?” I repeated.
Maza nodded. “With everything going on, the RPD is on high alert.” His lips pressed together, dark eyes serious. “As are the feds.”
I scowled. “So Raj called you,” I guessed, annoyed.
“Hart texted,” Maza replied. “But honestly, we were already planning on a full barricade down there.” He grimaced.
“The fact that they were given a goddamn permit to protest the Dead Dance”—I resisted the urge to correct the event’s name, knowing that it both wasn’t the point and that it would likely be seen as rude.
—“is a travesty to begin with,” he grumbled.
“It’s asking for this to go to hell, and quickly. ”
“Do you think they’ll throw bricks again?” Vi asked.
Maza pinned her with a serious gaze. “We’ll be lucky if that’s the worst thing they come up with,” he replied darkly.
“We’ll stay well away from the riot line,” Ward told her. “We’re supposed to be pretty far in the back, on the other side of the event from the protest zone.”
I refrained from pointing out that designated zones weren’t going to stop anyone who was already planning on breaking the law by committing assault, causing property damage, or inciting an actual riot.
Maybe I should have.
I was having a difficult time thinking, it was so loud. To judge by the glazed-over look on Ward’s face, he was having a similar problem.
Vi looked like she was having the time of her life.
Ward was dressed in what he called his ‘classic medium’ outfit—black leather pants, a billowy-sleeved black tunic-style top open at the throat to show a silver ankh, dangling crystal earrings, labradorite studs higher in his ears, and a sparkling purple amethyst in his nose.
There were a couple heavy rings on his fingers in addition to the wedding band he always wore, with a silver-studded leather bracelet around each wrist. We were outside, but it was crowded enough that all of us were still masked, and Ward’s was a gauzy gaiter-style mask that he could pull up and down as he needed.
Vi and I were both in black jeans—Violette’s much tighter and more stylish than mine—and black t-shirts with the company name and logo on them.
Vi had been slightly disappointed that we couldn’t go in costume, but I much preferred this.
We also both had on black masks—Vi’s had a skull, mine had little dark grey cartoon ghosts.
There was dance music—albeit from a pretty wide variety of decades and genres—being played by a professional DJ installed at a tent and rolling across the shouting, laughing crowd from massive speakers.
Ward had offered me a pair of earplugs, and while I’d taken them, they were still in their little plastic case in my pocket, since I thought it might be more important to tolerate the noise in order to make sure I didn’t miss anything Ward or Vi said.
Violette was dancing to the music, even as she helped to usher people to and fro, fetching objects as Ward requested them, and so on. I’d never really been interested in dancing, although I did enjoy music when it wasn’t making me feel as though blood might come dripping out of my ears.
Of course, she was only hearing part of what Ward and I were.
Because the whole point of a Dance with the Dead party was to dance with the dead.
Part of what we were here for was pulling the dead into the party—people weren’t coming to Ward for ordinary séances, but to ask him to pull specific people back across the veil.
Most of them were friends or family, but some people had requested celebrities and historical figures.
Ward trying to explain to George Washington’s ghost why, exactly, he’d been summoned would be a memory I would hold onto for a long time.