Page 40 of A Winding Wave of Magic
I could almost hear him mumbling even now outside my bedroom door. When I returned from the morgue, Mexican food in hand, his insidious whisper greeted me as soon as I stepped over the threshold.
I had eaten on the deck in the peace of a light winter drizzle.
Eventually the sky grew lighter through the blinds, and I managed to heave myself up, a glass of water in my hand as I excited the safety of my room.
Where is it I need the ssssssec?—
“Oh, shut up,” I snapped, then dipped my hand into the glass and flicked the water out toward the sound as I entered the hallway.
To my surprise, it did.
Well, sort of.
As I walked through the house, the murmurs faded, blending into the dampened chorus of the house’s long history.
That, I could deal with. I had been for fifteen years.
“That’s better,” I said, heading for the kitchen. First, I needed tea. Then I would see what needed to be done before I went back to Boston at the end of next week.
Houses are like sponges. They borrow energy and moods from the beings that reside in them. This house held the energy of everyone who had ever lived or even visited here since Gran had first built the place sometime in the late sixties. Most of the energy was recognizably hers, my mother’s, or mine. My father flitted through the rooms, but his memories seemed as eager to leave in death as he had been in life. The occasional repair person or neighbor, but their interactions here had been so infrequent and largely meaningless that I hardly felt them at all.
But the energy left by the women who raised me wasn’t necessarily comforting. Sibyl and I had never gotten along, of course, and Gran’s and my relationship wasn’t particularly light-hearted. Penny Monroe was a serious woman, always pensive, careful, and observant, and she had taught me to be the same.
Her thoughts were markedly more closed than anyone I’d ever known, fae or plain. I Saw very little when she touched me unless it was something she chose to share. Her lessons, too, were just as opaque. When I asked her about shielding, she informed me that it was a critical skill, but not one I was ready to learn. My job as a young seer was to remain open to others but close myself off as much as I could later in life.
I couldn’t for the life of me fathom how to do one without mastering the other.
Not yet.
It was the chorus of my life with Gran.
When I’d wanted to learn more spells.
When I’d asked to have friends over.
When I’d begged to leave Manzanita and see more of the world than just the solemn seascapes of the Oregon Coast.
“Not yet,” she had said sadly before kissing me on the cheek as I waited for the bus to Portland. The one that would take me to college, and eventually to Boston. “But you’ll do.”
Not yet had become never.
I made a cup of Irish breakfast from the good tea Gran still had sent from Dublin, and then I turned to the house, now bathed in light reflecting off the ocean, even beneath the gray-white clouds.
“All right,” I announced. “I’m ready. What have you got to tell me?”
Slowly, I walked around the living room, oriented around the big copper fireplace at its center. I drifted my bare hand over the tops of the furniture, pressing my toes into the cedar floors and faded rag rugs. Tension rose everywhere, like muscles that hadn’t been used for a long time.
It didn’t make sense. Yesterday, the place had been ready to scream. Now, beyond a few blinking visions of Gran knitting by the firelight or bundling juniper twigs, there was nothing.
I frowned. Had the house been strangled too?
I walked through the rest of it, through all three of the back bedrooms and the mudroom off the side entrance, opening the shades to spread light and get the house to relax. Sun caught on the crystals hanging from the eaves, dancing rainbows over the dark wood floor and the antique furniture.
It was pretty. But I wasn’t Seeing a damn thing.
“You’vegotto be kidding me,” I said once I returned to the living room. “Ten minutes you wouldn’t stop whispering. And now mum’s the word?”
I slapped my hand on the big copper chimney and closed my eyes, willing the space to talk to me.
