“You can see ghosts, right?” I scrambled forward and dropped to my knees in front of her. “You can see me?”
She sighed, which came out a bit hiss-like, and finally looked at me. “Yeah? So?”
“Have you seen a blonde woman? She’d look younger than me. It’s my mother. She died when I was a kid.”
Instead of answering me, she bowed her head and then proceeded to hack up a hairball. It was gross and disturbing.
She sniffed the brown ball disdainfully, then got to her feet. “No. I haven’t seen a blonde ghost. Are we done?” Without waiting for me to reply, she sauntered away.
“Argh,” I muttered. I couldn’t follow her, not when Wallie was parking the truck right by the front door.
Owen and Alfred came out the front door, smiling at Wallie and Zoey, but then the four of us turned and walked closer. When the rest of our family noticed us, their collective jaws dropped.
Larry came hurrying out of the house, his gaze glued to the little tiger ghoul. “Zoey! I’m so happy you’re ba—” At that point, he also noticed us. “Ah, my holy shit. Are you guys dead?”
We all rushed forward, denying his question. “No,” I called. “We’re just stuck here!”
Wallie ran full tilt around the truck. “Mom, what happened?” He looked panicked.
“Don’t worry,” I said as I rushed toward my son. “I’m not dead, I swear!”
“Then what’s going on?” Zoey asked. Larry had descended the stairs and they held hands as they walked toward us with Owen to get the whole story.
“Where is Wade?” I asked. “And what took you guys so long to get here?”
Wallie shook his head. “No, no. You guys first.”
“Ah, yeah, we somehow got on this ghost train,” Drew said. “And we’re still stuck on the ghostly plane.”
I very carefully didn’t look at Drew, but Olivia noticed me as I purposefully didn’t notice Drew. Her eyes narrowed. I rushed forward and grabbed Wallie’s arm. “Where is Wade?” I asked, pushing the subject of how we got into the ghost world to the side.
“We got a flat,” Wallie said. He pointed to the truck. “That’s the spare. Full-size spare, luckily. But it put us behind. When the sky started to lighten, we were still a good hour away, so we put Wade in the trailer. He’s under a blanket and out cold. We’ll have to leave him there until it gets dark.”
That was unfortunate. Poor Wade. He was going to wake with a stiff neck.
Chortling, I got my own inner joke. Stiff. Cause he was dead. As a vampire. I was a hoot.
“Come on in the house,” Owen said. “Alfred made breakfast.”
Olivia and I exchanged a glance. “Can we even eat?” I asked.
She shrugged. “We can try. But I doubt it.”
We traipsed into the house. It was nice to be home, but everything was still so subdued. Like looking at it all through a smokescreen. I wanted to actually be home. To go to bed for like a week in my Shipton bed. In Winston, as weird as that sounded.
“Okay, so what’s the plan for Wade?” I asked. “Where can we put him?” We’d pretty much run out of rooms.
“I guess I’ll give up my office,” I said. I hated to do that. The only way I got anything written was to lock myself in there and put on music and completely ignore the rest of the insanity I called home.
“No, Mom, you can’t do that,” Wallie said. “I’ll just give him my room. I’m not here all the time, anyway.”
We sat for a minute as Olivia, and I tried to pick up cups of tea Alfred had set in front of each of us.
Didn’t work.
With a sigh of exasperation and a grumble from my stomach, I gave up and sat back. “I want to echo Drew’s earlier question. How can I sit in this chair but not fall through it, yet can’t grab the teacup?”
Nobody answered.
“We could convert the living room into a bedroom,” Olivia said. She didn’t live here, but she was here often enough to think she had a vote.
Heck, I didn’t mind her voting. “That could work. We can entertain in the kitchen.”
Owen shook his head. “No, we need somewhere to hold coven meetings.”
Drew held up a finger. “Won’t he need somewhere light tight?”
Oh, darn. We lapsed into silence, trying to figure it out. “Maybe we can rent a house nearby?” I asked.
Wallie snapped his finger. “The basement! We’ll renovate it. I mean, we have magic. We can even dig out and give him his own entrance so it’s like a little apartment down there.”
Nodding, I grinned at my son. “I love that idea.”
Everyone seemed in agreement, so I slapped my hand down on the table. It went right through the wood. “It’s agreed. We’ll renovate the basement.”
The house began to rumble under our feet. Everyone jumped up and looked around in a bit of a panic. “Is that an earthquake?” I asked.
But then the wall behind the table began to… There was no other way to explain it. It grew.
“What is happening?” Drew asked, his voice shaking from the vibrations in the house. The shaking intensified, nearly taking me off my feet. Drew threw his arms around me and helped steady me. “Thanks,” I whispered as the rumbling quieted.
We all took stock of the room. “This room is bigger.” I studied the wall. “And looks kind of great. Where else?”
“I’ll look downstairs,” Sam said.
Wallie pointed upstairs. “I’ll check up.”
I peeked out and studied the deck. It was definitely a lot longer. When I turned around, Sam was emerging from the basement stairs. “Uh, it’s exactly like we described it.” He scratched his head. “With the walkout and everything. Winston even dug out a little dirt path leading up to the basement door.”
Wallie bounded down the stairs. “There’s an extra bedroom upstairs on either side of the hall!”
Larry grinned broadly. “Yes! Finally, I can stop sharing with Alfred.”
As we exchanged amazed glances, Lucy ambled in the open back door. “Hey, you were asking about a blonde ghost?”
I nodded. “Yeah?”
She stopped and licked her paw four times before licking her lips, then speaking. “She’s out back.”
Chapter Twenty
We bolted out the back door. Everyone let me go first, but I got the sense that they were all fighting behind me, each of them trying to get out first. It occurred to me that Sam, Olivia, and Drew could just go through the walls, but I didn’t wait to see what they did. I just kept going.
As soon as I hit the deck, I saw her. She stood out by the cliffs, staring at the ocean with her blonde hair billowing on the breeze. “Mom,” I whispered.
She was too far away to have heard me, yet she turned to face me when I said her name. I ran as fast as I could toward her.
The ghost world, the in-between, whatever it was called, didn’t save me from being a little too heavy and a little too old to be running full tilt. I was going to regret these shin splints later. As I hurried across the grass, I lamented the fact that I couldn’t heal myself. Stupid obscure magical rule I didn’t understand. Zoey had healed me while in tiger form. Maybe that would work again.