Okay. Strange. I expected a home like this to be locked up tight. On the other hand, who would be crazy enough to come here? Just me apparently. And Jack of course.
I stepped inside the backyard, following the walkway along the side of the house. There was a dead tree to my right and overgrown weeds everywhere. I continued on, my skin prickly with fear. What would I find back here? Piles of dead bodies? Some sort of monster? Anything was possible.
I turned the corner, getting a full view of the back of the house and yard. What the hell? Fallen tree limbs cluttered the ground, most of the windows were broken, and rotting wet leaves covered everything. Old rusted-out lawn furniture sat on the patio next to several dead birds and flooded planters. It was like two different worlds. The front of the home was pristine. The back looked like a war zone.
In an instant, the rain turned from a healthy shower to a gusty wet windstorm. My coat flapped in the wind, and my duffel bag was getting soaked and heavy.
I hurried to the back door, which had French-style windows. Many of the squares were popped out. I dug out my phone and shined the flashlight inside. Rat droppings covered the hardwood floor, which was warped and stained from rain. But other than the rodents, there were no signs of life.
Okay, so the place looked like a haunted crack house, and no sane person would want to live here, but what had Jack seen? It couldn’t have been the dirt or rat shit that got to him.
Wanting to take a closer look, I reached for the handle. “Ouch!” I snapped my hand away. The door felt hot.
Faulty wiring? Something more? Either way, I wasn’t getting inside, and I’d reached my tolerance for shivering. It was time to snap off a bunch of photos. I would take a better look later, somewhere dry and warm, and try to figure out what had unsettled a man who defied the laws of nature.
I hurried back toward the gate, anxious to get the hell away from this place. The moment my foot touched the street, the air warmed fifty degrees.
Dear God. Whatever that house was, or whatever had been done to it, the owner did not want visitors. What had the crazy blonde woman called it? Warded. She’d said my house had been warded, too, to keep her off the property. Was this the same thing? Some sort of…magic?
Magic. I hated that word. It sounded silly, like something a child would say when talking about their favorite fairy tale. This was not whimsical or fun.
I headed down the hill to order a ride. The farther away from this cursed place, the better.
Once at the corner, I pulled up one of the pictures on my phone, using my coat to shield the screen.
Other than a run-down house, I saw nothing alarming in the photos. Broken windows around the door handle in the back. A dead lawn. Piles of dead weeds. It looked like there might’ve been a pool back there once, but it had turned into a sludge pond.
The only thing surprising was that the neighbors hadn’t complained about the state of the house. On the other hand, I doubted anyone was brave enough to snoop over the fence. The only reason I’d gone for a look was because I had to. I had to find out what Jack was hiding.
With that in mind, I went through my photos one more time.
Wait. What’s that? I zoomed in on a picture of the back door. One of the intact windowpanes had words etched into the glass. It took several tries, messing with the photo settings to get the contrast right, but there it was: Property of Ten Club.
Ten Club? What was that?
“Hey, is there a good café around here?” I asked the Uber driver who’d rescued me from the rain. I’d programmed in the library’s address for my ride, but I needed to eat. Some caffeine would be awesome, too.
The driver recommended a place by the marina.
“Thanks.” I updated my destination and started searching the words Ten Club on my phone. Fifteen minutes later, we arrived at the Monochrome Café—all black walls with poems and quotes from famous people painted in white—and I was still searching without any hits.
Thirty minutes after that, I’d downed a cup of black coffee and a carrot muffin, still nowhere near finding any information. Also, my cell battery was getting low.
Okay, so the house had to be owned by someone, and ownership required a paper trail.
I quickly looked up the county recorder’s site. There was a searchable database. I typed in the address of the creepy house and finished off my second cup of coffee while my phone loaded the info.
No records found? I set down my cup and typed in the address again. Maybe I’d entered it incorrectly.
Nothing. Weird. I went to the parcel map and found the street, but the lot where the home sat was all grayed out. When I pressed my finger on the square, to pull up the parcel number like I could on the lots beside it, nothing happened.
Okay. This is suspicious. The land was not imaginary. The house was not imaginary. How were there no records?
My next stop would have to be the library. Perhaps I could find something in their archives.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
By the time the library closed, I had gone through almost a century’s worth of old newspapers from the pre-internet era.
The only thing that came up on the house was a very old photo of what it used to look like in the early 1900s. From the black-and-white picture, I couldn’t tell what color it had been, but it was definitely the same house, owned by a merchant named Draco Minos, who bought the property from a wealthy politician. Of course, I found nothing about Draco Minos.
“Great.” So the house was a ghost. The owners were ghosts. Ten Club didn’t exist either.
I packed up my stuff and decided my only option was to head back to Jack’s hotel. It was about ten blocks away, so I would walk to save money.
I grabbed my still damp duffel bag and went outside. The rain had finally stopped, but a thick fog hung in the air like a bad omen, blocking out the final rays of daylight.
As I walked down the steep hill lined with house after house, business after business, all tightly packed in together like dominos, I thought about what I’d say to Jack.
I didn’t know how to articulate my thoughts because there wasn’t any clarity inside my mind. I just knew I felt something for him. Or for his presence in my life? It wasn’t a need exactly. It definitely wasn’t love. It was more like…a pull. Because while he terrified me, I couldn’t get him out of my mind. His darkness, his beauty, his deep seductive voice. I could blame my obsession on his body, with endless ropes of powerful muscles set on a tall masculine frame, but what I felt wasn’t physical. Yet, it sorta was. Whatever or whoever Jack was, he affected me right down to my bones.
That kiss, for example. I’d kissed boys before. I’d kissed men, too, when I got older. College was pretty typical, in that I’d had a few superficial flings, but mostly, I kept to myself. Still, despite my limited experience, I’d never had such an intimate kiss like I’d had with Jack, which only made things more confusing. And, sadly, I wasn’t getting closer to the answers. The best I could settle for was telling him how I felt and hoping he wouldn’t abandon me in the midst of my existential crisis. After I came clean, I would give him the cuff, let the pieces fall.
I turned the corner onto the street of Jack’s hotel and spotted him walking in the opposite direction.
“Jack!” I yelled right as a bus passed. He didn’t hear me.