Chapter 3

Somethingcoldwassliding over my body in soft waves. It felt nice against the backdrop of total shit I was currently feeling. Nausea barreled through me, and I rolled onto my side, trying to remember where the hell I was. There didn"t seem to be any concerned citizens or a frantic roommate hovering nearby. I swallowed back bile and forced myself to sit up, blinking in confusion at the ornately carved antique table leg that filled my vision.

Something flickered in my periphery, a misty presence that seemed to be the source of the cool, comforting sensation against my skin. "Andy? Oh, thank heaven above, you"re awake!" The ghost"s voice penetrated my brain fog and events started trickling back in.

Right. I was at the ancestral home, not my nice, human apartment with my flighty roommate who would at least know to have turned me on my side so I didn"t drown in my own vomit and gotten me some medical attention. My only assistance was a dead guy who could maybe poltergeist an ashtray or something. Cool.

I looked around the room for the murderous fae, only to find it empty of fair folk at the moment. The sudden movement made my head throb, but I ignored it. "Where"d she go?" I muttered intelligently. It always took a while for the brain to come back online after a hypoglycemic episode, and this one had been a fucking doozy. The spell magic took its "price" right out of my damned body. That was always the risk with strong magic. But…hadn"t I been about to get shot or something? I glanced down, patting my body with clumsy hands, looking for wounds. No gushing blood. No pain. Huh.

Elijah was hovering back and forth, doing the ghost version of hand-wringing—pressing his fingers together until they merged into one smoky ball, then pulling them apart and reforming them again. His probably-handsome-if-he-was-solid face drew into a frown at my question. "Niamh? She"s gone. After I deflected her arrow, she actually listened to me long enough for me to tell her you had freed her. She said it looked like you were dying anyway, without any help from her arrows." He shrugged one barely-there shoulder. "Then she left. I would assume back to her people." He hiked a misty thumb toward the shattered stained-glass window on the other side of the room.

"She jumped out a second story window?" I asked in surprise. Then I held up a shaky hand. "Wait. You know what? Never mind. I don"t care, as long as she"s gone and not trying to jab me full of holes."

I grabbed the edge of the solid table made from magic-infused, old-growth wood and hauled my ass up into a somewhat upright position. My legs felt all wobbly and my head ached, but I"d live.

"What was all that?" Elijah asked. When I stood, the empty glucagon pen rolled across the floor and the ghost hovered over to look at it, floating in this weird-assed horizontal position with his one arm going through the floor as he tried to read the label on the pen.

I sighed and went to retrieve the thing from the floor. "Emergency injectable," I said tiredly, tossing the thing in the nearest dusty, needlessly decorative trashcan. "The spell made my blood sugar drop to fatal levels. The shot brought it back up." I paused and bent over the trashcan as a wave of nausea hit me, a side effect of sending your blood sugar skyrocketing after a near-fatal low.

When the sensation passed, I shuffled around the workroom, looking for enough ingredients to make some sort of charm to make me stop feeling like a left-over dogshit sandwich. Elijah came to hover closer, one cool, misty hand stroking along my arm in that almost-there way of his. His face was probably expressing concern, but it lost a bit in translation, what with the deep, shadowy eye sockets filled with eerily glowing blue aura energy. "You are…." He seemed to be searching for the right words, and I had to wonder just how long the guy had been a ghost, if diabetes was an unusual word for him. "Diabetic? Is that the term?"

I nodded, and he shook his head vehemently. "No. No Lovell witch could have such a human disease."

I sighed and took down some dried cardamom and ginger root, glad I"d had the foresight to stock a few things in this creepy old house just in case. Yarrow maybe? I took a second to evaluate my headache. Wouldn"t hurt to treat that too. I tossed things into a fairly clean mortar—one of mine, that hadn"t been used for evil rituals—and avoided looking at my ghostly busy-body. He was right. Usually, witches had just enough magic running through their blood to give them immunity to most diseases. We weren"t as impervious as fully supernatural races, since we did tend to have more human ancestors—but chronic diseases were rare. And even more so if one came from a strong family line, one laced with extra powerful magic. Like the ancient Lovell line.

I sighed and put on a sarcastically cheerful voice. "Normally, you"d be correct, my fine non-corporeal friend. But you know how it is, curses have a way of making life inconvenient."

I felt him hovering closer again, brushing against my aura in a way that was…disturbingly pleasant. Wow. I really needed to get out more, get some real human interaction or something. "You"re cursed?" His ethereal voice was even softer than usual. Full of pity.

"Eh," I said, as if it was nothing, starting in on grinding up the herbs, adding a few other things as I went. "People hate my family. I"m lucky it"s not a killing curse. At least, not the immediate kind. Though, today was a bit too close for comfort."

The ghost peeked over my shoulder to watch me work, which was just freaking weird, since I could feel him right there but also…not…at the same time. If I turned my head, I could see through him. He was ever so slightly shimmery, which made the rest of the room look like I was looking through cloudy silver water. And his shoulder was partially inside mine. "Why haven"t you just had the curse removed?" he asked, as if that was just a simple thing.

I rolled my eyes. "Oh! I never thought of that. Thank you for that stunning advice. I"ll just pop out and have that fixed right now, shall I?"

He made a noise that I"m sure would have been an unimpressed snort, if he had the right physical tissues for it. As it was, it was kind of a stuttering exhale. "Well, with some people, it is necessary to state the obvious."

I waved a hand over the mortar full of powder, infusing it with a bit of magic to enhance the anti-nausea and anti-headache properties of the herbs, careful not to use too much energy. Goddess knew, I should lay off the magic for a while after that last little adventure. And…fuck, that meant no portals for a while. Which meant I was stuck here in purgatory with the tainted energies of the ancestral home. I tucked the mortar and pestle under my arm and scooped up the damned bestiary, then headed downstairs to the kitchen. It was the one place I had actually cleaned up and kept somewhat useable for my brief trips here to Horror Land. The ghost floated along behind me as I relented and explained.

"The curse was cast by someone powerful, and it was meant to affect my entire family line. Clever, really. It makes the Lovells prone to life-threatening conditions that would normally be considered "natural causes." Takes the possibility of blame right out of the equation. Less chance of the person who cast it getting caught. And, you know, probably really satisfying in some sick way, to know your enemy"s entire family line will eventually die out early. It"s woven into my DNA."

He made a hissing sound beside me as he drifted along, keeping pace outside the banister, hovering in thin air. "That complicates things."

I reached the first floor and headed toward the back of the house, to the over-sized kitchen. "Yep. I"m sure as shit not messing with it on my own. And I could hire someone to try to break it, but things have the potential of going very wrong if they fail." Messing with unweaving something from a person"s DNA could result in fucking up every bit of genetic material in your body. Which, you know, could mean anything from slow deterioration to instantaneous melting, depending on how bad you fucked up. And most of the people powerful enough to pull it off would probably be happy if the last remaining Lovell melted into a puddle. So…no. I"d just live with type one diabetes like a large portion of the human population, thank you very much. Technologies for the disease were rapidly advancing. It wasn"t the death sentence it had probably been back when Elijah was actually alive. And I could augment things with magic and witch potions. No big deal.

You know, unless working a powerful spell caused the universe to balance things out by sucking out your energy stores. But whatever. I guess next time I"d need to carb load before I tried to release a mythical beast from a cursed grimoire.

But then again, there was nothing to say the price would be the same the second time around. Magic was finicky that way.

I set the book on a fairly dust-free marble countertop and got out the things to make tea from the powder I"d just created. Elijah hovered silently. I tried—and failed—as usual not to focus on how I always ended up paying for my fucked-up family"s wrongs. The Lovells deserved to be cursed. They were, by and large, horrible people. But for fuck"s sake, I hadn"t done anything evil—unless you count stealing wi-fi from my neighbor for a while. Geesh. I hardly thought that warranted a curse on my genetic makeup.

"It"s unfair," Elijah said, his ghostly voice startling me out of my pity party, even if his words did echo my own thoughts. "You carry the burden of your family"s transgressions, even now, years after they were all wiped from this plane of existence." His glowing eye orbs met my gaze, and for a second there I got a more solid glimpse of his perfect, chiseled features. He shook his head, reaching out a ghostly hand toward me, as if he would squeeze my shoulder. But of course, the touch just slid through me, making me shudder. "I"m sorry this has happened to you, Oleander. You seem to be the one shining pearl in the ocean of blackness that is the Lovell line."

He glanced away, taking in the kitchen, with all the ridiculously kitschy human touches I had added over the years just to chip away at the snooty, cold feel of the place. His ghostly lips quirked upward in amusement, and he nodded toward the cookie jar that I never used but just had to buy with the hopes my family were turning in their graves. "I like your…cow."

I grinned. "Thanks. It moos."

He let out a breathy sound that I supposed must be ghost laughter. "Of course it does. Your grand matriarch would have hated it. Nice choice."

I leaned against the counter and sipped my tea. "I know." The concoction was slightly fucking awful. But I was too tired and too lazy to so anything about the taste. I just tipped my head back and chugged.

Elijah stared at me, ever the spook critic. "Is that how they take tea in the human world these days?"

I shrugged and rinsed my cup out before setting it in the sink. "That didn"t qualify as tea, dude. It tasted like a snail"s arsehole."

He continued to stare.

"What?" I said defensively.

He poofed out of existence momentarily, then re-formed. "Your…way of speaking…is unlike any aristocrat I"ve ever met."

That was definitely an attempt at being diplomatic. I winked. "Thank fuck for that." Then I stretched and glanced out the window at the slowly sinking sun. It wasn"t getting dark yet, and I hated the idea of staying the night in this house. But I was exhausted and shaky, and I couldn"t reliably portal until my magic reserves built back up. I could go into town and pay for a portal home. But that would mean enduring the stares and whispered gossip. And I was in no fucking mood for that if I could avoid it. So, sleepover at the asylum it was.

"I"m going to bed," I informed my new companion. "Feel free to…I don"t know, go wherever dead people go when they aren"t busy spying on the living." The ghost made a face that was oddly sad, and I suddenly recalled what he"d said earlier about the fae. "And thanks for deflecting that arrow. I"m not really a piercing kind of girl."

He wavered, and I thought maybe the ghost was tired too. It had to take energy to affect solid matter, even to a small degree. And spirits typically didn"t have much energy to spare. "Rest well, mistress witch," he said with a semi-sarcastic head tilt. "Open the book and call my name if you need me." His expression lost all levity. "It may take me a while to return on my own otherwise."

Then, he was gone, swirling into a shimmery fog that flowed into the bestiary, leaving nothing behind.

I sighed. Ghosts always made me sad, even though my mediumship abilities meant I had lots of exposure to them. There was just something so…poignant…about interacting with the shade of what had once been and never would be again, even if most ghosts were just shallow remnants.

I tested my blood sugar with one of the test kits I kept stashed everywhere. Sighing, I pulled an insulin pen out of my back pocket and attempted to correct the now high blood sugar that came from the glucagon. Standard procedure was to go to the hospital after using one of those things. But I was a witch. I did have some enhancedresilience. I"d be fine. Probably.

I made my way to my old bedroom with dragging feet. All traces of anything childlike had long ago been removed, but I passed another room—probably a guest suite, since I was an only child—that was fully decked out in bows and hearts and little girl pink. It was eerie as fuck. If I was ever planning on living here—which I was absolutely not—the first thing I"d do was get rid of that crap. I flicked my wrist, using a bit of my remaining magic to shut that door so I didn"t have to look at it. Creepy fucking house.

When I reached my room, I flopped face-first onto a slightly dusty, but humanly peasant-level, mundane bedspread, and passed out. Maybe I"d wake up and realize this whole pain-in-the-ass day had been nothing more than a bad dream.

I slept like the dead. For a while.

Bad dreams weren"t unusual for me, particularly when I"d spent the day immersed in the dark miasma that hung around the Lovell mansion. But I didn"t usually wake up in terror.

I kept my eyes closed and my breathing even as I tried to figure out what had woken me. I wasn"t a complete newbie. I had set wards and protections and done a thorough cleansing on the rooms I used, including this bedroom. So there shouldn"t be anything evil lurking here.

As I lay there not moving, the bed shifted as if a weight was pressing down on the mattress. Fear skittered over my skin, giving me goosebumps. Goddess, this had better not be another ghost. I was so fucking not in the mood for playing intermediary with the spirit world at dark-o-clock in the morning after the night I"d had. Especially with a spirt strong enough to poltergeist. But sometimes they were insistent.

I gathered my power to me, happy to find that it was replenishing nicely after my tea and most of a night"s sleep. It might be witching hour, but I had gone to bed early. I"d take it.

The weight on the bed shifted and I felt a foreign magic rise in reaction to my own. "Oh, no, little witch," a rich feminine voice purred, magic-laced and flowing over my aura like a caress. "None of that."

Strong, slender fingers were wrapped around my neck before I even had time to react. I pulled my hands up and planted them on the person"s body, sending pure, raw energy at them through the contact. It would be like getting hit by lightning. But of course, fae have magic of their own—deeper magic, older magic than witches. My spell dispersed, fizzling out without any effect.

I tried to bring my knees up to ram them into the lithe, powerful body that was pinning me to the bed, but of course that didn"t work either. Fae were hunters by nature, fully capable of taking down large prey. I was so fucked. "What the hell do you want?" I managed to grunt out between gasping breaths. Apparently, she wasn"t going to immediately choke me to death. So, yay, bonus!

She growled, low and dangerous, then shifted with all the sudden grace of a jungle cat, the strong hand releasing my throat to grip my hair and drag me from the bed.

"Ow!" I yelped. "Son of a bitch. What the fuck?" I hit the floor with a thump and half a dozen fey willow-the-whisp lights danced into existence, lighting the place with an eerie glow that made me want to follow them anywhere—even right off a cliff to my death. "Oh, cut the damned theatrics," I snapped, gripping my hair at the roots to counter her grip and keep her from ripping it out.

The fae snarled something in a language that was incomprehensible to anyone but the fair folk. Then she yanked me to my feet and shoved me into a nearby antique wing-backed chair. "Theatrics?" she hissed, the depth of rage in her voice making the hair on my arms stand on end. "You," she said, gripping my chin in her strong fingers and tilting my head back. Her leaf green eyes reflected light in the darkness, like the eyes of an animal. "Your ancestor bound me in a grimoire and used my powers against my will for untold years of torture. Then I am ripped from the pages by a bumbling witch with no finesse or talent, only to find myself disoriented and inundated with the vile energies of suffering and darkness that suffuse this place." She narrowed her eyes at me, showing fang, the eerie whisp lights glinting off her sharp-pronged antlers. "Then I escape. Return to my people. To my family. And what do I find?"

I swallowed, narrowing my eyes in return. "I don"t know. A bunch of naked satyrs doing the dirty with the local deer population? Nice antlers, by the way."

She squeezed my face so hard I knew I"d have bruises. "I find them all gone. Dead. Murdered in a war that I slept through! Most at the hands of your people."

I sighed. "Story of my life, bro. Wanna punish me for shit I didn"t do? Cool. Get in line."

I reached out a foot, kicking the nightstand as hard as I could. The fae just watched me in confusion, but it did the job. The bestiary teetered and fell to the floor, the pages flopping open. "Elijah!" I yelled. "Wake the fuck up and help me out here or something, you useless ball of smoke."

I wasn"t really sure how to summon a captive spirit from the book for use. Hadn"t thought I"d need to, for fuck"s sake.

The fae kicked the book farther away from us with a look of disgust on her face, as if she couldn"t stand to be near the thing. Not that I blamed her, really.

Elijah slowly materialized, shimmering in and out of existence until he took in what was going on. "Niamh!" he gasped in his misty way, shooting forward to try to insert himself between me and the psychotic deer lady. "Stop! Don"t harm her!"

She released my face and took a step back, but her hand still rested on the rustic-looking, hand-crafted dagger at her belt. "Ghost. Why do you defend this monster?"

He held up his hands in a placating gesture, as if a see-through dude could really stop the fae from murdering me. I slid sideways out of my chair and stood, getting a good connection to my magic. They both ignored me. "Niamh, she is the key to our freedom. She isn"t like the rest. She freed you—and almost died in the process—for no reason other than that it was the right thing to do."

The fae started prowling, pacing back and forth with this lean, silent grace that at any other time I might have found sexy. Apparently, my brain was still a bit fried from recent events. Because…what? She wants to murder you, Andy. Not the time to ask for a quickie.

"What am I to do?" the fae bit out, waving a hand at Elijah. "My clan is gone. My life is gone. The world as I knew it is irrevocable changed."

Elijah let out a long, hollow sigh. "I"m sorry. I admit we didn"t think of that. We only thought to release you from your prison so we can destroy the book."

I edged slowly toward the door an inch at a time to avoid notice, while the ghost defended me and the fae hunter paced. Cowardly? Maybe. But I wasn"t keen on dying tonight, and no one took on a fae hunter and lived. Well…except apparently my evil ancestor. But who knows what kind of underhanded tricks great Granny Wolfsbane had used? Old Wolfie probably knew all kinds of nasty little spells and traps. I was shit out of luck on that front.

I had almost made it to the door when the fae rounded on me.

I squared my shoulders and straightened my spine as death bore down on me, her lithe form outlined by dancing willow-the-whisps. Huh. At least I"d die with twinkle lights. Festive.

The fae halted in front of me and crossed her arms. "As the current owner of the bestiary and a Lovell witch, you are responsible for the crimes of your bloodline."

I rolled my eyes. "I"m really not."

But she ignored me. I was beginning to think that was going to be a thing—if I lived long enough. "You will take responsibility."

I sighed. "Yeah, sure, fine. Whatever. All my fault. I"m responsible. All better now?"

She tilted her head, her narrowed green eyes sharp and calculating. "Yes. You will provide for my needs until such time as I call your blood debt fulfilled. Beginning with food and shelter."

I gaped at her. "What? You want me to…keep you? Take care of you like a…a…pet, or a kid, or something? No fucking way. Get out." I pointed at the window, since it looked like that was where she"d come in. The repair people were going to have so many questions. Or maybe not. Maybe they"d just assume I had thrown someone out the window to their death and accept that as typical Lovell behavior. I was tempted to let them think that just for fun. If I lived that long.

Elijah let out a resigned sigh from behind the fae. The woman—Niamh, or whatever—just smiled, slow and wicked. "You already agreed to take responsibility. A bargain has been struck. You can"t refuse now." She shrugged. "You should have set more specific terms." She bared her pointed teeth at me. "And I am not a pet or a child."

I put my face in my hands and just…breathed for a minute or two. I was so fucking stupid. Everyone knew you had to be ridiculously careful what you said around the fae. Their damned magic just latched right onto things like bargains, and agreements, and debts.

I lifted my head to meet a pair of angry but triumphant green eyes. "Cool," I said in a flat voice. "You"re stuck with me now. You"re just gonna love it, I promise." My voice dripped with sarcasm. If she wanted to hang around while I bumbled through my boring, fucked up life, more power to her. She"d get her damned room and board too—but she never specified her terms either, so she was getting dollar-store cup noodles and the old, rotted doghouse behind my rental in the human world. We"d see how long she stuck around after that.

"Well," I said, wiping my hands on my jeans. "Since I"m up now, I might as well be productive." I brushed past the fae woman and flipped on an actual light, then picked up the bestiary. "Make yourself useful, deer-head, and help me figure out how to free a…" I flipped to the next section of the book. "Jinn? Yeah. Okay, a Jinn." Fuck me sideways with a rusty mace. "Help me figure out how to free a pissed off Jinn from this thing and keep it from murdering me."

Elijah did something with his face that might have been an eye roll, you know, if he had eyes. "You"re sure you want to attempt him next?"

I shrugged, as if I was absolutely cool with unleashing a being of fire who could control minds and shit. Why not?

My beautiful, deadly new fae shadow just smiled that evil smile, a hint of fang showing, probably relishing all the ways this would end with my guts on the outside or something. Woo-hoo.