He couldn’t let go, and his deathlock on the doorknob was hurting him.
Angel needed to make it stop. Oh, Angel hated to do this. Ruth hadn’t talked to him for a week the first time he’d done it to her.
“I’m sorry, Tucker,” he murmured, hoping Tucker would forgive him, and then placed his hands over Tucker’s and pushed until the cold iron of the doorknob burned against his palms. Tucker groaned and crumpled to the porch, sobbing.
“What in the hell?”
Angel sighed and sat cross-legged, running phantom fingers through Tucker’s hair, watching as the strands were disturbed by the breeze of his movements.
“That’s what I was going to tell you,” he said in the silence that followed. “You need me. I’m your contact for the things in this place—sort of a psychic filter, really. There are too many souls here in Daisy Place, their stories locked inside by silence. Once they tell you their stories, they’re free to move on. It’s… well, your aunt called it a catharsis exorcism. You’re an empath, right?”
Tucker grunted, still shaking in pain. “Yes, I’ve been cursed by the fucking karma gods. What do they want now?”
Angel didn’t know how to answer that. “Ghosts speak to you, right?”
“Sometimes. Usually, it’s… something else,” Tucker muttered. “But yeah, I see ghosts all the time. They’re not usually that talkative.” He gave Angel a sour look before closing his eyes again. “With one exception.”
Angel sighed because, while he didn’t remember the details, he assumed this was how he’d come to be trapped here himself. “This entire house is the exception,” he said. “The ghosts here are trapped—they need to talk. This house was built on a foundation of iron.” How did one explain supernatural metallurgical alchemy to a man who was barely conscious? “And there’s an iron track that circles the entire property, with just enough gold, silver, platinum, and lead mixed in. It attracts souls—some who died here, some who just stayed here, and some who….” He thought about all the things he couldn’t remember about himself. “Some who wander in. They get stuck here in the silence of all the metals. They can’t go up or down by themselves. It’s like, all the metal here, it freezes them in place. So they need an empath, someone with abilities, to see their stories, give them just enough humanity to set them free.”
Tucker groaned, rubbing his face. “You need someone to make them human by telling their stories?” he asked, his voice clogging.
“Otherwise they’re trapped,” Angel tried to explain. This was a terrible burden—he knew it. He’d known it when he’d presented it to a teenage Ruth. Explaining it to Tucker, a grown man, should have been easier, but he was assailed by the vulnerability he’d sensed underneath Tucker’s prickly exterior.
The bitterness was apparently hard-earned.
“Isn’t it enough?” Tucker snarled. “Isn’t what I do enough? Do the gods really have to fuck with me this badly?”
“Why?” Angel asked, confused. “What else do you do?”
Tucker struggled to sit up and wiped his face with his palm. “Nothing. Not a damned thing. Don’t mind me. I get tired of fucking my way through life. What’s your job in all of this?”
“I’m a witness, mostly,” Angel said. “It’s like the spirits need someone to live their catharsis moments, and someone to see what hurt them and give them absolution.” Angel’s one clear memory after his arrival at Daisy Place was of Ruth touching an old coin she’d found in an empty room. He’d been there to see her live through the guilt of a businessman not giving the quarter to someone who’d been desperately hungry. She’d been shaken, sobbing with the intensity of the sadness, and Angel had felt the freedom of the soul released. But in the years that followed, they’d realized that wasn’t Angel’s only function.
“I’m also a… filter,” Angel simplified. “I keep… well, if you’d have let me touch the doorknob first, I would have bled some of the worst of that away.” He grimaced. “Ruth actually kept gloves nearby at all times, and I’d sort of give her a priority list of what to look at that wouldn’t hurt her, or when she’d have to use the gloves.”
Tucker nodded, looking numb, like he had nowhere to go with that information. “There’s milk in that box,” he said after a moment. “We should put it in the fridge.”
And Angel really had to admire him then, because the man hauled himself onto unsteady feet and used his T-shirt to grab the doorknob while he unlocked the door. He propped the solid slab of oak open for a moment, and Angel sensed it first.
“Get back!” he ordered, and Tucker must have been far more sensitive than his great aunt because he was already in motion, sidestepping so he was out of the doorway before the massive rush of psychic energy left him a sobbing, quivering mass of pain on the porch again.
“And that was?” he asked through gritted teeth once the last of the energy trickled out.
Angel shrugged, feeling sheepish and defensive. “Well, the entire property is usually their playground. The real estate agent locked up the house, and they were sort of confined inside.”
Tucker rolled his eyes as though bored, then stuck his head in the door. “It is thirty degrees colder in here than it is outside,” he announced as he returned for the crate of groceries. “Please, please tell me that’s a perk.”
Angel brightened. “Actually, yes. It’s hellish in the winter, though, but most of the time, the house is just naturally cold.”
“I shall learn to knit,” Tucker said grandly, and then he swept into his inheritance like it hadn’t just tried to kill him.
Twice.
TUCKER SEEMED to be in a better mood after the sandwiches—both of which he’d eaten in quick succession.
“Have you been lumberjacking?” Angel asked in amazement. “Running? Doing push-ups all morning?”
“Nope, nope, and nope,” Tucker replied, wiping his mouth delicately with a paper napkin and getting rid of the mayo on his upper lip. Then yawning. “It’s been a high-energy day, though. And I metabolize everything faster when I’m working.”
“Working?”
“That little thing I did where I passed out and almost wet my pants—do you think that just happens?”
Angel gaped at him. He seemed to remember Ruth having a healthy appetite, but nothing like this.
Tucker rolled his eyes and kept on eating. “So,” he said at last, delicately licking his fingers and then wiping them on a napkin. “This is the catch, right?”
“The catch?”
“Free room, free board, Aunt Ruth’s inheritance—I just have to live here for the rest of my life and touch shit and faint?”
“You have to tell their stories,” Angel said firmly. “Even if it’s just to me.” He shrugged. “And since you’re an empath, I see them when you touch objects or intercept ghosts, so ‘telling me’ is more a matter of living them yourself.”
Tucker looked at him skeptically. “So given that, it’s always ‘just to you’?”