Ghost Light

I covered Ceff with a blanket and turned away from the bed.  I grabbed my gear and an armful of clothes and tiptoed into the bathroom.  I showered and dressed quickly, eager to get today’s errands out of the way.

I pulled on jeans and a long-sleeved thermal top with sewn in thumb holes that kept my sleeves safely tucked inside my gloves.  After Melusine’s pet snake managed to slither against my naked wrist, I’d decided to order more shirts with the added thumb hole as insurance against unwanted visions.  I added a black hoodie, leather jacket, and gloves.  I immediately started to sweat, but figured the added protection outweighed the discomfort.

Next, I pulled on my boots, strapped on both throwing knives, and added a dagger in my boot.  I tied my hair back out of my face and stuck a polished, wooden stake into the messy bun.

I looked fierce.  I wasn’t exactly dressed for a mother-daughter reunion, but the weapons and armor set me at ease.  At the moment, staying calm was more important than impressing my mother.  If I started glowing on the way to her house, I’d risk execution.

Tugging the hood up over my head, I slipped out of the apartment.  I didn’t have a lot of options for getting out to the burbs.  I don’t drive and taxis give me the willies, so it was either take the bus or walk.  With a fresh lamia bite in my side, I chose the bus.

I caught the Route 7 metro bus at a stop on Congress Street.  At this time of the morning the outgoing bus was nearly empty.  Commuters were pouring into the city on their way to work.  No one except me and the bus driver were headed out to the suburbs.

I hunched down in the front seat and watched the city slip away.  Brick, stone, and concrete were replaced with trees and picket fences.  On the outskirts of town, I got off the bus and walked the mile to the house I’d grown up in.

I stopped on the street outside the familiar gray and white house with gingerbread trim.  I shoved my hands into my jacket pockets and scanned the property for hints of the loving place I’d seen in my unlocked memories.

This was the place where it all began.  My parents, my real mother and father, had been happy here once upon a time.  But my father had made a deal with the devil, and lost.  Burdened with carrying a cursed lantern, my father had bespelled both me and my mother in an effort to keep us safe.

I just hoped she still remembered him.

The spell cast on my mind had chained my memories, keeping my father’s existence a secret.  But that spell had begun to fall apart, exposing my past.  Kaye speculated that this was due to the fact that memory spells are more effective on child minds.  As I grew into adulthood, the spell began to unravel and the memories surfaced.

Kaye suspected that any memory spell cast on my mother would only have been temporary.  My witch friend claimed that a geis had likely been placed on my mother forbidding her from ever speaking of my father.  If that was true, I’d have to get creative if I wanted answers to my questions.

I set my jaw and walked steadily toward the house.  My boots crunched as I strode up the gravel drive.  My stepfather’s car was gone, but my mother’s car was parked beside his tool shed.  The shed, and the garbage cans lined up against it, raised gooseflesh on my arms.  This was the place I’d had my first vision.  Taking the lid off the Pandora’s Box of my psychic gift hadn’t been pretty.  That moment when my psychic gift reared its ugly head was akin to an earthquake; it shook my world apart.  Even now, long after the dust has settled, I’m rocked by the aftershocks of that day.

I swallowed hard and gave the shed a wide berth.  I didn’t need to start glowing in front of the neighbors.  I climbed the front steps of the house and onto the wooden porch.  I took a calming breath and pressed the doorbell with a gloved finger.  I still had a key to the front door, but letting myself in didn’t feel right.  This hadn’t been my home in a long time.

Footsteps sounded inside and my mother opened the door, blinking in the morning sun.

“Ivy?” she asked.

“Hi, mom,” I said.  “Um, can I come in?”

“Of course, come inside,” she said.  “I was just making a second pot of coffee.”

My mother drank thick, black coffee like the stuff was ambrosia.  In fact, it was the one thing we’d had in common all these years.  I followed her down the hallway to the kitchen at the back of the house.

My mother looked thinner than I remembered and I made a mental note to invite her over for dinner.  I didn’t usually have guests over, had never invited anyone up to the loft until Ceff, but I’d make an exception for my mother.  Seeing the sharp jut of her collarbone and the bony points of her shoulders through her cardigan made my throat tighten.