I ran through a thousand scenarios as to how it could have gotten down here. Maybe I dropped it upstairs when Kora’s death metal scream freaked me out, and she’d for some reason brought it down here. I had a text from an unknown number, but it looked like gibberish—just a string of random numbers and letters that made no sense, like a toddler had gotten their hands on it.
Above me, Kora howled like a coyote. I slipped my phone in my pocket and left the basement. If the phone did apport, then I guessed I wasn’t supposed to worry about it because by the time Kora left, my house would be clear of that scary shit. Which was what I wanted. But I also experienced a flash of regret, and forced myself to analyze that.
I was a grieving son with a haunted house, so on some level, I’d wanted it to be my mother as much as Jasper did. I wanted it to be her moving my cell phone around and opening my cupboards. On some level, deep in that primal place inside, I was a little boy who wanted his mommy back. But the adult Kurt knew that whatever had infiltrated my home was not Donna Varley. It was not my mother. I knew this instinctively. Whatever was in my house knocking things over and shattering lightbulbs, it didn’t feel like her.
Despite my inner childhood longings, logically, I was glad the entity in my home was not my mother. Because if there was an afterlife, I wanted my mother to be somewhere good. Somewhere blissful and beautiful. Not lurking around my stupid house, watching her son sit around drinking too much and pondering why he suddenly wanted a dick in his mouth.
Orion was stepping out of the pool as I returned, just in time to wrap a towel around his wet body. “Thanks, you didn’t have to get me a towel.”
“I got you two towels,” I said, draping one over his head and playfully drying his hair. “Nice swim?”
“Amazing.” When I released him, he wrapped one towel over his shoulders, and dried his legs with the other. He then secured that one around his waist, and suddenly his wet briefs were on the ground, and he was stepping out of them. When he saw my raised eyebrows, he chuckled. “Don’t worry, towel stays on while I dress. Not gonna start walking around naked and causing a scandal in the neighborhood. I just don’t want wet underwear on under my jeans.”
“I’m not complaining either way,” I said. While Orion went about putting his clothes back on, I checked my phone, noting a text message from Paul Bassock, my friendly neighborhood cop buddy, asking if we were still on for tomorrow night.
I’d nearly forgotten I was going to the beach club with Paul. And that I’d be seeing Orion and his troupe of fire dancers. Yikes. I hadn’t been in a public place with Orion since…since things happened between us. But hell, if I could look my father in the eye and tell him I had a crush on Orion, I could handle anything. Not that I’d blab about our ‘dalliance’ or make it obvious at the club. I’d leave it up to Orion to decide how much, if any, contact he wanted at the venue, and I’d follow his lead. It was his place of work, so I would bow to however he wanted to handle it, even if that entailed him ignoring me completely.
I wasn’t going there for him, after all. It was going to be a night out with an old friend. A night that would just happen to entail watching my new male love interest dancing half-naked with fire batons as the entertainment.
May you live in interesting times, I thought, just as a loud, female scream sounded from inside my house.
Orion and I both jolted. He’d just finished tugging his boots on, fully dressed again with his damp hair tied into a loose bun. Now he stood and stared up at the house. “Was that Kora?” I asked. It wasn’t like the weird death metal howl I’d heard her make in the house; this was a full on, blood-curdling scream.
Orion began running for the house, so I followed, figuring if he was alarmed, there must be cause. “Is that not a normal noise for her?”
“Nope,” was all Orion said, and kept running.
We’d almost reached the house when we were both hit with a gust of wind so powerful my patio chairs went tipping end over end into the yard. Orion paused, dodging a chair. We exchanged a glance as the wind died down, then both continued on to the house, darting in through the kitchen. “Kora!” Orion shouted. “Where you at?”
It took some time running from room to room, Orion shouting Kora’s name, until we realized she wasn’t there. At some point while we were outside, she’d wandered over to the garage again.
We found her inside on the floor, hunched over. Orion ran to her and crouched down. “You okay?”
“Yes,” she croaked, rising to her knees with a heavy breath. “I’m okay.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.” She wore only pink underpants and a white bra, her short black hair wet and a sheen of sweat covering her skin. “Blocked up the holes in the house. It was fairly easy, not a very dense cluster. But then when I got out here, I got rushed. By something else.”
Orion looked up at me. “Could you get her some water?”
I grabbed one of the bottled waters I kept in the guesthouse kitchen. When I returned, she was sitting up leaning against the wall just inside the door. I handed her the water and she uncapped it and drank half of it down. “Orion, can you get my glasses? They’re in the bathroom on the second floor over there.”
“Sure. Be right back.”
I felt awkward standing there while this young girl was in her underwear, but I promptly put my dad hat on and pushed any discomfort aside. “Are you all right?” I asked. “Can I get you anything else?”
She shook her head, taking another long drink of water. Swiping a hand across her forehead, she said, “Sorry about this. Doesn’t usually take me down this way.”
“It was bad then? My…haunting?”
“Oh, no, not really,” she said. “Getting rushed at the end, took me by surprise. But in general, your house was a piece of cake. Especially by Hillock Beach standards. Everything gets amplified in this town.”
“Orion said something about that. Told him I lived here my whole life and never had anything weird happen. Until now.”
“Oh, it’s true.” She took a sip of water. “About Hillock Beach. This one place I cleansed? The guy had brought an exterminator in like three times for mice.”
“And it wasn’t mice?”
“No, he had them, initially. Exterminator got rid of them the first round. But he kept calling him back. Insisted he still had a problem. He’d seen them. Heard them. They were knocking things over. But the exterminator kept insisting there were no more mice, that he’d gotten them all the first time.”
“What was it? Spites?”
“No.” She chuckled. “Not Spites. It was the residual energy of the mice he’d had exterminated.”
I wrinkled my nose. “Ghost mice?”
She nodded. “Fucking ghost mice, man. Welcome to Hillock Beach. I got rid of them for him. Never seen a man so happy, he was practically crying, poor bastard.”
“Well, yes, I can see how that would be stressful. Can I ask what happened here? Why were you screaming?”
“First, have you met my foster brother, Chapel? He’s a medium.”
“Um…yeah. Burly redhead with tattoos.”
She chuckled. “That’s him.”