Wisteria Wyverns Read online

  Her expression gradually relaxed. “This is nice,” she said. “How is Zinnia these days? She looks well, from what I’ve seen.”

  “Your little sister? She’s fine.”

  There was a trolley sound in the hallway outside the door. Both of us looked at the door expectantly. Where were those sundaes? The trolley rolled away again.

  My mother looked down at her nails and pushed back her cuticles absently. “Your aunt always was a loner. It’s a shame she never had any children. I do worry about her.”

  “Zinnia can hold her own.” I lifted my chin, feeling protective of my aunt. “She’s plenty busy.”

  My mother moved on to the cuticles on her second hand. My own nail beds ached in sympathy pain for how rough she was with the thin layer of skin.

  “Yes, well, being busy and being a busybody are two entirely different things.”

  “Ouch,” I said. She’d rarely said positive things about her sister, but that seemed needlessly cruel.

  “The truth is the truth.”

  “Go easy on Zinnia,” I said. “She lost a friend recently. Tansy Wick. Did you know her?”

  My mother shook her head. “Not personally. By reputation only.”

  She’d finished with her cuticles and was now looking at my hands with an eagerness that I found unsettling. I hid my hands behind my back. My mother and her desire to annihilate cuticles was the reason I got the heebie-jeebies whenever a well-meaning friend suggested we get manicures together.

  “At least Tansy Wick died doing what she loved,” she said.

  “Mom.” I gave her a wide-eyed look of incredulity. “Nobody loves being eaten by a carnivorous plant.”

  She shrugged. “Live and let live. To each their own. That’s my new philosophy, anyway.” Her hazel eyes twinkled. “You might be surprised to discover the many ways in which your dear mother has changed.”

  “Besides getting yourself down to zero percent body fat? Why are you so skinny, anyway? I thought brains were dense in calories.”

  She gave me a dead-eyed stare. She’d always been good at the dead-eyed stare, even before becoming a creature of the grave. She uncrossed and recrossed her legs. She wasn’t quite as skinny as I was making her out to be. Only about the same as she’d been after one of her juice cleanses. Even so, her knees cut sharp angles under the thin material of the tan slacks.

  “Never mind about my changes,” she said. “You’ll find out soon enough.”

  “Sounds ominous.”

  “How about you? I’m sorry to see you haven’t been feeling up to putting any effort into your appearance.”

  I looked down at my clothing. She wasn’t wrong about how I looked. My jeans were frayed, and the shirt was one that kept getting a stay of execution on closet-purging days because I imagined that if I ever took up pottery—a hobby I assumed was inevitable—I’d need clothes that could get messy.

  “It’s my day off,” I said defensively. “When I left the house, it was just for a drive to…”

  I trailed off, staring at something strange on the floor. The something strange was halfway between my feet and my mother’s satin house slippers. The something strange was a hand. How had I not noticed a hand lying on the floor until now?

  “Finish your sentence,” my mother said. “If you insist on speaking before you’ve worked out what you’re going to say, at least make an effort to finish.”

  “Sorry,” I said reflexively. “Do you see a hand on the floor?” I pointed. “Right there. The fingers just moved.”

  “Please, not another zombie jab,” she said bitterly. “Honestly, Zarabella, I can only take so much abuse from you about my condition.”

  “Zoey, look!”

  Zoey-Fox scanned the room and then blinked up at me. The hand remained where it was, lying on the floor, looking strange.

  “Neither of you see that hand?”

  Zoey-Fox jumped down off the sofa and walked to the area I was pointing to. Her paws passed through the hand as though it weren’t there.

  It’s a ghost’s hand, I realized. But where was the rest of the ghost?

  No sooner had I wondered the question than I got the answer. The hand floated upward, bringing a body along with it. The spirit had her back to me, but I could see it was that of a young, dark-haired woman. Was it the countess? On the way to the castle, Zoey and I had joked about my Spirit Charmed powers attracting the long-dead eccentric countess who’d had the castle brought over stone-by-stone from Europe. As fun as it sounded to be possessed by a countess, this time I was going to be in control. If my body was a night club, and my breath was the doorway, I would act as my own bouncer.

  I took a deep breath then clamped my mouth shut and used my fingers to pinch my nostrils closed. With my free hand, I gestured for my purse to come out from wherever I’d left it. My purse lifted up into my field of view, above where I’d dropped it by the door on my way in. I didn’t need the purse itself, but the purple goop my aunt had given me for just such an occasion. The magical ointment smelled like concentrated halitosis, which was why I didn’t use it all day every day, but if I could get it into my nostrils, it would serve as a barrier to keep this dark-haired woman from infiltrating me.

  Silently, I cast a spell for the purse to fly over to me.

  The pink leather bag sailed over my zombie mother’s shoulder.

  Suddenly, moving with bone-snapping speed, my mother whipped out her arm and batted the flying purse. If it had been a baseball, she would have scored a home run. My poor, defenseless bag smashed into the upper part of the wall. It hung there for an instant before sliding down.

  Before my purse reached the ground, the ghost standing before me spun around to face me. Her face contorted with rage as we made eye contact.

  Josephine Pressman!

  I knew her, and by the malevolence in her eyes, she recognized me.

  My purse hit the ground with both a thud and the sad tinkle of broken glass. The bottle containing the spirit-blocking paste was likely broken. But if I acted quickly, I might still salvage enough to prevent infiltration.

  The ghost girl grabbed at my forearm with both hands. Her ghostly fingers passed through my arm repeatedly, but she kept trying. She seemed to know that the only way into me was through my nostrils.

  Dimly, I was aware of my mother and my daughter asking each other what was going on. My mother spoke in English, her tone getting higher as panic set in. My daughter was yipping in fox sounds while circling my legs protectively. Neither of them could see the ghost before me, but both sensed my panic.

  I worked my spell again, calling for my purse and its contents. A heaviness filled me. I could feel the power draining from me rapidly, as though my purse weighed five hundred pounds instead of five. Something was sucking away my energy. The ghost? My arm felt icy where she was still clawing at it.

  Josephine wasn’t giving up easily. She was a determined young woman. I had to admire her. And once I got the barrier in place, I would.

  The icy patch on my arm stung as though on fire. Something was gripping me.

  Josephine and I looked into each other’s eyes, equally shocked. Her ghostly hands had found purchase on my forearm. A grin spread from one side of her face to the other. She jerked my arm, snapping my fingers away from my nose.

  She compressed into a tiny spark of light.

  She flashed brightly and zoomed up my unprotected nostril. I felt her ping against the back of my skull, from the inside. If you think that would feel unpleasant, you would not be wrong.

  Chapter 3

  The last time I’d seen Josephine Pressman, she’d been at a convenience store near the library where I work, buying organic yogurt and fashion magazines. We’d made eye contact for only a few seconds before I’d ducked my head, feigning a sudden interest in the store’s dusty selection of herbal cough lozenges.

  Ever since Project Erasure came to its dramatic conclusion in Perry Pressman’s attic, I’d been avoiding his daughter, which is a difficul
t thing to do in a small town. There were rumors floating around, and if I’d heard them, surely she had, too. The official story about that night was that her father’s “printing press” invention had caused a gas leak and explosion. The truth, however, was much more strange. Poor Josephine hadn’t even been in control of her body that night. Her body had been taken over by Dorothy Tibbits, a.k.a. Wisteria’s Worst Realtor, a.k.a. the first person I ever had charged with homicide.

  Nobody had walked out of that attic without injury. Chet Moore, my friend and next-door neighbor, had charged in woefully unprepared and gotten himself embedded in a gooey flesh-clockwork-hybrid monster known as the Erasure Machine. His coworkers, Knox and Rob, were shot in the leg and impaled with glass, respectively. And I died that night. Just long enough for some unidentified evildoer to hijack my body. Nobody escaped that attic unscathed, least of all Josephine Pressman. Her own father had been killed, by her hand, albeit controlled by someone else at the time.

  After the smoke cleared, the “good guys” at the Department of Water and Magic assured me Josephine Pressman would be fine. They promised she would remember nothing, and would carry on with her civilian life, grieving her father’s death from a “freak gas explosion.” The funny thing was, they didn’t even wipe her memory themselves. The bookwyrm who’d died a hero’s death that night had blackened Josephine’s face as well as her memories. The horrors had been effectively redacted. Or so the DWM assured me.

  But on the day our eyes had met across that convenience-store checkout line, I’d glimpsed something in Josephine’s eyes. Hatred. And then, when I faced her again in my mother’s luxury suite, I’d seen the hatred even more clearly. She must have remembered seeing my face in the attic. Even if she couldn’t comprehend all the details, she blamed me for what happened. And maybe she was right to be angry with me. If I’d done a better job with her father’s disembodied spirit, the whole bloodbath might have been avoided.

  Whether I deserved it or not, Josephine Pressman hated my guts. And now she was haunting my guts.

  I couldn’t get her out, so I did the best I could to maintain control over my body. I mentally swept her spirit toward the darkest corner of my mind, the broom closet of my consciousness. She went without a fight. For now.

  Meanwhile, back in the physical world, I found myself crumpled in a heap on the floor. Two cool hands slipped under my armpits and righted me. My awareness of the land of the living returned, along with gravity. I ached all over, and my throat was burning hot.

  My mother asked Zoey, “Does she faint like this all the time?”

  Zoey, who’d shifted back into her redheaded teenaged human form, said, “I think she loses consciousness whenever she gets Spirit Charmed.”

  “Spirit Cursed,” my mother corrected. “There’s nothing charming about being possessed.”

  I croaked in agreement. Possession wasn’t charming. And now there was this new side effect of my throat being on fire.

  Together, they guided me over to the sofa. My voice was hoarse as I muttered, “Give me a minute, and I’ll tell you everything. Spoiler alert: Yes, I got ghosted.”

  “You got ghosted,” my mother repeated. “Surely there’s a better way to phrase that.”

  I rubbed my feverish neck and I licked my lips. “Where’s that ice cream you ordered?”

  There was a knock at the door. Room service had arrived with our sundaes. As if by magic! Except it wasn’t magic. Just the inevitability of all things happening sooner or later.

  My mother opened the door and fixed me with a behave-yourself stare as she waved in the resort’s staff member, a young man about Zoey’s age.

  “Sorry it took so long,” the boy said.

  Zoey sprang up from her seat. “Let me help you with that!” She took the other end of the rolling cart and steered it over to the coffee table.

  My mother shot me a disapproving look. My daughter was practically tripping over herself to help the young man, who just happened to be of the attractive variety. His cute dimples were utterly wasted on my mother, who regarded servants and staff as lesser beings.

  “Perfect timing,” I said to the young man. “Having to wait a few minutes will only make us appreciate our ice cream more.”

  He slumped as though scolded. “Sorry. We’re short-staffed this afternoon.”

  “Oh?” I’d barely been possessed a full minute, and here was my chance to begin the investigation. “Has there been any sort of trouble here at the resort today?” I cast one of my bread-and-butter spells, the bluffing spell I used for convincing people to open up to me. It would increase my charisma as well as the subject's gullibility. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught my mother’s lips moving almost imperceptibly. She’d joined me in casting the spell in Witch Tongue, though I detected no magic emanating from her.

  “Trouble?” The boy wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his white jacket and gave all three of us a guilty look, one at a time. When he reached Zoey, he blushed.

  “You can tell us,” I purred, my convincing magic tightening around him like a noose. “We’re all very good listeners.”

  “It’s Josephine,” he said.

  “Josephine,” I repeated, giving the other Riddles a raised eyebrow and meaningful look to let them know this was pertinent. They both tilted their heads up, acknowledging that they understood this was the name of the ghost who’d emerged from the floor and infiltrated me. “And what sort of trouble has Josephine gotten herself into?”

  The young man scratched his head, ruffling his sand-toned, surfer-dude curls. “Gotten into? No, it’s more like she is the trouble.” His dimples played hide-and-seek as his facial expressions changed.

  “Is she a guest here?”

  He snorted. “In her dreams. No, she started working here a couple weeks ago.”

  “And she’s been causing trouble? How?”

  He looked down and kicked at the carpet with the toe of his shoe. “This and that. She’s a bad influence. A bad girl.” He picked up the sundaes from the trolley and started handing them out, Zoey first.

  “Josephine was a bad girl?”

  He seemed reluctant to answer. “Uh… the staff isn’t supposed to be in the guest rooms, except to deliver food or clean.”

  “Was she caught stealing from the guests?” I asked. “Or consorting with them?”

  Despite my spell, the young man’s attention drifted away from me and over to Zoey.

  My daughter plucked the cherry off her sundae and dropped it on her tongue in a move that seemed tailor-made to break the effectiveness of my spell. The surfer-haired young man made a low, guttural noise as he watched her lick ice cream from her lips.

  I glanced over at my mother, whose expression turned from one of horror to one of smug satisfaction when she saw I was looking her way. She came over and whispered to me, her voice barely audible, “She reminds me of you at that age. I hope you two have had The Talk.”

  I fought the urge to roll my eyes, focusing instead on refreshing the spell on the young man. His name tag identified him as Oberon. It was an unusual name, but then again, he did work in a castle.

  “Oberon,” I said, ripping his gaze away from my daughter through sheer witchcraft. “Was there a particular guest whose room Josephine would go into?”

  “In particular? Uh, there were a couple of guys. One of them kept asking me about her. I think he’s in a band or something. He’s got guitars in his room.”

  That made sense. Josephine had been tangled up with a rock star in New York, which was what had caused her father to finally power up his invention—by plugging it into himself—in order to get some money to bail out his daughter.

  “Oberon, did this make you jealous?” I asked. “Did you have feelings for Josephine?”

  “Not interested.” He shook his head vigorously. “My elders taught me to stay away from girls like her. They always tell me, Oberon, you must never cheapen yourself.”

  “Good,” I said, though hearing him say t
he word elders gave me an unsettled feeling. “So, is Josephine supposed to be working a shift right now?”

  His eyes bugged out. “Yeah! She should have brought you these sundaes. I saw her about an hour ago, and she told me I had to cover for her while she did something important.”

  Something important that got her killed, I thought. Another clue.

  He checked the watch on his wrist in a gesture that seemed quaintly old-fashioned for someone of his generation. “She should have been back by now. Maybe she’s on drugs. She’s been acting funny lately.”

  “How funny?”

  He shrugged again. “I dunno. Like she’s not herself.” He jerked his head up, eyes on the window, and muttered as if to himself, “What’s he doing out in the middle of the day like this?”

  I turned to follow his gaze. This time, I caught a glimpse of the creature at the window before it disappeared. Whatever it was, it was darker and bigger than a blue jay. The other Riddles didn’t turn to look until after it was gone.

  I asked the young man, “What was that?”

  “A bat,” Oberon said, his eyes wide. “Just a bat. A big, annoying one.” He pulled the trolley toward him with a squeak. “Please don’t hesitate to call the front desk if you need anything else.” He kept his gaze on Zoey as he backed toward the door.

  My mother gave him a generous tip before sending him on his way. Zoey stared after him with longing. I’d never seen her stare that way at anything that wasn’t food.

  Once he was gone, I said to Zoey, “He did have a nice butt.”

  She blushed furiously and focused on her ice cream.

  My mother poked at her own sundae while looking at mine. “Your spellwork is sloppy.”

  “Thanks,” I said flatly. “That means a lot coming from someone who renounced witchcraft and gave up all of her powers.”

  She swirled her spoon through her sundae and took a tiny bite, as though ingesting medicine. After swallowing and patting her lips with a napkin, she said, “Despite your sloppiness, you did an adequate job of questioning that young man.” More lip patting. “I wish I could be of more help to you, but I can’t recall anyone named Josephine.”