“Let’s do this!”
She let out a cackle, Ryan answered with a whoop, and they had the best time of their lives. Or so she was told.
Two
“Why is it that everyone likes to schedule things in the morning?”
Kelly huffed out a hard breath and sipped the dregs of mud-thick coffee from a paper cup. Sure, she had shouted it, but the windows were closed so nobody could hear her. She figured that counted as privacy, regardless of the family in the car next to her at the stoplight.
Offering up that same innocent smile at their bewildered faces, she raised her fingers in a wave. They may not have liked it, but Kelly still felt like it was a legitimate question. When she had peeled open her sticky, hungover eyes that morning to find an envelope under the door to her dorm room, she’d smelled trouble.
At least it wasn’t a summons from the dean…or the witches’ council. Again. Maybe she hadn’t done anything the night before that she would regret now that she was sober. Ish.
“Dammit.”
It was hard to read the tiny address on the envelope, particularly through her best pair of hangover sunglasses. While driving. But she figured she was a can-do kinda gal, so it was worth the effort. Even if everyone else felt the need to honk at her, she was determined to keep living her best life.
That was until she looked up to see what a fresh round of vehicular outrage was about. Turns out she was steering headlong into moving traffic, and right about to jump the median in the process. You know what? It was time to pull over. Her car may have been a complete heap, but at least it ran and it was paid for. Wrecking it was not an option.
Swerving just in time to dodge a very nice-looking sports car, she banked over the curb and slid to a halt in the parking lot of a filling station. She even managed to land perfectly between the lines.
Nailed it! she smirked to herself, then shook out the letter to take a closer look. It was from someone named Louie Walthrop, the executor of her parents’ estate. Even seeing their names in the formal legalese raised a knot in her throat. Ducking a finger under her shades, she swiped away the threat of a tear. Which, weirdly, made her feel silly.
She'd been five when they died, so Kelly actually had precious few memories of them. There was the hazy image of a vivacious, towering bombshell of a woman who scooped her up and covered her with kisses. And the rich rumble in her father’s chest as he hummed her to sleep at night. Those were the best ones, tucked amid a smattering of others.
She’d been too young to remember them in any significant way, but also too old to suddenly become an orphan. The rocky start may have been a reason for her wild, high-living nature, but between being late and the hangover, Kelly wasn’t really in the mood to psychoanalyze her past.
The letter got off to a rather terse start. Apparently, Mr. Louie Walthrop, a member in good standing of the Holloway coven, was pretty miffed that she hadn’t answered his numerous phone calls, so he'd resorted to hunting her down and sliding a letter under her door. She had to give him points for being resourceful. Even if it was just a touch stalker-y.
In the end, the long and the short of the letter was that she had inherited the family home, Hollow House. After all the grumbling she’d done over still being a ward to the witches’ council until twenty-six, they had at least done her one favor. With the arrival of this news, she was granted permission to move out of the dorms and into the estate.
It was all right there in the letter. The Elders' permission, the names of her parents, even the scolding over not picking up the phone. If I had just answered sooner, she thought, I could have been partying in my ancestral home.
Oh, well. After quadruple-checking the address, she headed off for the street she’d already checked more than once that morning.
Coming around the corner of the same street for the third time, she saw a slightly paunchy, balding man in a cheap suit leaning against his car with his arms folded. He looked pretty pissed. Given that Kelly was over twenty minutes late for their appointment, it was a pretty fair bet that he was her guy. His furrowed brow was a look she was oddly used to.
“Sorry,” she called before she was even out of her car. “You wouldn’t believe the morning I’ve had…”
She adjusted her sunglasses, hoping the cloudy sky wouldn’t give away the queasy twinge the night before had left behind her eyes. Overcast days could be bright too, right?
“I’m sure it’s nothing on the morning I’ve had, Miss Holloway.”
The brusque clip of his words settled uneasily into her already sour stomach. This was probably going to be a bad one.
“Look,” she said with a guilty sigh. “I get it…”
“Oh, so you remember this place?”
That got her attention. Maybe it wasn’t about her being late after all. For once, someone’s frustration might not directly be her fault.
“What about it?” She kept her tone cautious, lest this badger in a suit decide to make breakfast out of her after all.
Louie straightened his glasses as he clenched a portfolio under his arm. “So you don't know,” he said with a heavy sigh. “Hollow House is one of just a handful of sentient structures within Othercross.”
“Sentient? You mean haunted?”
He sighed again. “No, Miss Holloway, not haunted. Sentient. Meaning, the house itself has a sort of…consciousness.”
That was news to Kelly. “How is that even possible?” she asked, looking up at the dark, foreboding building with new appreciation.
“No one fully understands it, but the general idea is that the house has absorbed small amounts of magic from the centuries' worth of witches who've lived in it. Over the years, it’s collected this magic and is able to use it as its own for its own purposes.”
“Cool,” she breathed. “So can it, like, talk and stuff?”
“No, it can't talk, Miss Holloway. It's still just a house.”
“Then how do you know it’s sentient?”
Louie snorted. “The house has its ways of letting its feelings be known. For example, I've been here for over an hour and it won't let me inside. It wouldn't even let me sit on the front steps to wait for you.”
Kelly was immensely curious how the house had stopped him, but he clearly wasn't as amused by the situation as she was, and she didn't want to piss off the man about to hand her the keys to her own home.
“Well,” she said as brightly as she could. “Let’s see what we can do. It’s not going to keep me out, is it?”
Before Louie could answer, Kelly flipped her hair and trotted over to the front steps. The place was pretty ramshackle-looking, all told. The fading gables sported large, dark windows which frowned down on the sidewalk, looking even more forbidding in the light of an overcast morning.
The place was badly in need of a paint job, and in places the timbers sagged. Still, as her foot settled on the first step with a satisfying creak, she knew she’d already made it farther than this bookish little executor had managed. Shooting a pixyish grin over her shoulder, she nodded her head in invitation. With an exaggerated sigh, he fell in step beside her.
“That wasn’t so bad,” she said as they arrived on the broad, leaf-speckled porch.