Page 26 of The Fantastic Fluke

I stabbed the meat with my fork and picked it up, pausing with it held in front of my lips. “But you know what, Iris? We outlived them. And now we get to live for ourselves. Maybe now is when we take a page from Mom’s book and make our own way.”

Her smile in return made her look decades younger.

Chapter Eight

It was strange to think I might have liked to stay longer, but after dinner, I had to get home to foxy. Also a hot dead gunslinger who thought I was the übermage, but I wasn’t going to mention him to my grandmother.

She told me I should bring my familiar next time. Looking at Rufus, who had been with her for over sixty years, it occurred to me that someday in the not so distant future, I was going to have to answer for lying about foxy being my familiar. If something had happened to his mage and that was why he was running around loose, he probably wasn’t going to live another sixty or seventy years the way a mediocre mage like me might. If he was a hyperintelligent regular fox, he wouldn’t live more than a handful of years.

Still, in the short term, Iris had invited me to bring foxy next time I came for dinner. Rufus loved company, she told me, and while he’d never met a fox that she knew of, he was particularly fond of cats.

Her driver, Wayne, dropped me off at the house with a wave and a friendly, “See you soon, Mr. McKinley.”

I wanted to tell him to call me Sage, but the man was just too damned efficient for me. He was already pulling away from the curb by the time I turned back to say it.

The house was dark, and I was annoyed with myself for not turning a light on for foxy and Gideon. I’d have to set something up for foxy, so he could turn on lights when I wasn’t home. Except I didn’t want to leave him at home alone at all, so maybe not.

The smell when I opened the front door was awful, and not the kind of awful I might have expected.

I’d worried he might pee in the house because, well, a guy’s gotta pee sometimes, and he didn’t exactly have a place for that or a way out. I’d accepted it as my punishment for leaving him alone for three hours like a jerk.

The smell in the entryway wasn’t that, though. It was dark and earthy with a hint of ashtray.

A long, low whine came from somewhere in the living room as I closed the front door and flipped on the entryway light.

“It was an accident,” Gideon told me from where he stood in the middle of the room, his tone worried. About me or foxy, I wasn’t sure.

Scattered across the entryway around the overturned table and empty box, were my father’s ashes. I started to take a deep, calming breath, and choked on... on Dad. Gross.

I looked up at him, hands spread wide. I don’t know what showed on my face, but it couldn’t have been good, since Gideon grimaced. “Blame it on me. He had to go. He figured he could open the door, and I was trying to get him to go in the bathroom instead. I distracted him. He knocked the table over.”

The whine came again, from under the couch. How the hell had he fit himself under there?

No, it didn’t matter. First things first, I had to clean up the mess. I sidestepped the worst of it and hoped I wasn’t tracking ash through the house, then hoped that if there was a bad place in the afterlife, I didn’t end up there for what I was about to do.

I came back brandishing the Dustbuster.

“This is a little loud, but it’s okay,” I said, aiming my words at the couch, trying to keep them as calm and even as possible.

Sure enough, the sound of the tiny hand vacuum resulted in more whining from foxy. It took three times filling it up and dumping the result into the box to make the entryway passable. The box was more full than it had started, and I tried not to think about how much of Dad was actual dust now.

There was still a fine layer of grime on the whole entry, so I grabbed a rag, wet it, and wiped down every surface I could.

Frankly, the sparkling result was as clean as the entryway had been in decades.

I took the box with Dad in it and found a new spot, on the mantel, for it to reside temporarily.

Just one problem left.

I pulled out my phone, wallet, and everything else in my pockets to set on the righted, cleaned entryway table. That was when I got a look at the card the woman from the shop had given me. Dr. Aliyah Almasi, dead mage. Available for classes, speaking, and containment of the dead.

She’d been offering to banish Dad.

That was when something occurred to me. I dug through my wallet for where I’d put the card from Mr. Emery at the funeral home. Same phone number.

Memorial services and banishment. Apparently the doctor was a full-service dead mage. It did make more sense for a dead mage to see ghosts than a social one like me.

I’d just been thinking about asking Beez if Mal could help, and this dropped into my lap; it was like serendipity. Like foxy coming into my life right when I needed someone.

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