“I wish I could make you forget and put your mind at ease,” I said.
“I don’t want to forget! That was my grandfather. I have many good memories of the house and garden, and I just…I don’t know why I came all this way and got so upset at you. You did buy it fair and square, but…” He turned around, pacing, hands in his pockets. He kicked the bumper of his BMW.
“Hey! Hey. Graham. Look, I hate to see a man who is disciplined enough to order salmon at a greasy spoon just unravel this way. I actually tried to call your office this morning.”
“Why?” He turned back to me and I was freshly struck by how some part of me responded to everything in him that seemed familiar and safe to me. Wealth and power were my family’s brand. I didn’t want it but I couldn’t stop feeling comfortable around it.
“I wanted to talk to you about some things. But I’m still getting my tile.”
He glanced at his hands and rubbed them together. I would bet he was feeling a little after-buzz from the spell he cast to stop my truck. Maybe he’d never had that feeling before, or more likely, this wasn’t the first odd thing that had ever happened to him. He was probably starting to wonder.
“Do you want to ride with me?” I said. “Pull your car over up ahead at the abandoned farm stand.”
He gave me a long, penetrating look, and then he quickly straightened my collar. It was sort of messed up from him grabbing me. “All right,” he said. “I’ll ride with you. And I hope you’ll be honest with me.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
HELENA
I COULD ALREADY TELL that Graham was a guy who had spent his whole life trying to project an image of success, to hold it together and be the perfect combination of public citizen and strong man. He had it all going on. He looked annoyed with himself for being here. So I knew I couldn’t just start grilling him outright about his grandfather’s belongings and dump the whole magic thing on him. I’d already seen that he would get defensive and temperamental.
He had already pulled himself back together by the time he got in my driver’s seat. “So the house is coming along?”
“Oh yes,” I said.
“You’re redoing the bathroom?”
“And adding a bathroom downstairs.”
“It definitely needed it, but it’s hard for me to imagine that anyone would buy a 3500 square foot house with only two bathrooms nowadays.”
“Wizards aren’t as—“ I stopped myself. So much for waiting to dump the magic thing on him.
“Wizards?”
“Uh—yeah—you know. There are some homesteader types who call themselves wizards.”
“You believe in wizards,” he said. “Actual wizards. And ghosts, too, probably.”
“If I believe in wizards, obviously I believe in ghosts,” I said witheringly. “Okay, fine. I was going to try to protect your fragile human sphere of knowledge, since it was clearly what your family wanted for you, and I respect the dead, but, you already know your grandfather had some weird stuff going on. He was a warlock.”
“A warlock.” Graham scoffed. “And you are, what, a witch?”
“Yes. And you—“
His brow furrowed. “I’m part warlock? Is that what you’re going to say?”
“Worse.”
“So you’re in the same cult he was in.” Graham looked out the window with a disgruntled noise you might make if you realized you had gotten a bus ticket next to a very talkative Jehovah’s Witness. He was attractive when he was disgruntled, with his eyelids lowering imperiously.
“I know you have to go through the disbelief and acceptance cycle,” I said. “But you used magic to stop me from driving away. Actual magic that defies the laws of the Fixed Plane, which you can only do if you have true wizard blood and the will to use it.”
“Christ,” he said, kneading his forehead. “You seemed so normal during the date.”
“Graham, if you don’t believe me, I will have to summon a talking bat into this car, but I want to make sure you won’t shit yourself.”
“A talking bat,” he said dryly. “I have never…shat myself, and I don’t think I’m about to start, so please. By all means.”
“Bevan!”
Bevan appeared on the dashboard of the car and Graham stared at him. To his credit, he did not appear to shit himself, but he had this look as if he was staring into the endless void of the universe. “How did you do that?”
“This is my familiar,” I said. “He connects me to the magical plane.”
Bevan glared at me. He was annoyed I was using him to put on a show of proof.
“Bevan, can you just say hi to Graham real fast?”
Bevan lifted his wings in sort of an angry gesture and poofed away.
“Did that bat just do an Italian fuck-you shrug? At this point I must be hallucinating. I miss Grandpa more than I expected, and I’m hallucinating.” His expression turned intense, his breath quickening, and some new resolve swept over him, shading his green eyes darker and setting his jaw. It was getting me a little hot and bothered. “Or maybe it’s all true,” he said. “It would explain more if it was true, than if it’s a lie…”
“It’s true,” I said. “It’s why I bought the house. It has a lot of special magical features, and a family of wizards will want to buy it. But did you mean to leave photo albums behind? And…well, I have some serious questions about your family that I need
