I needed to have a chat with my Aunt Maritza. She was a witch and professor of necromantic studies. Her magic also centered around threads, only she used real threads, like the cotton and silk kinds you could buy on spools. Surely, she’d have insight into the whys of my special gift.
I pressed my forehead to the terrycloth robe hanging from the hook on the inside of the bathroom door. I was ready to collapse after a hellacious day. Sleeping standing up was not a viable option. First, I had to let the ghostly manifestations attached to my sides finish their fussing. My dad pointed out I had missed the topmost closure. My mom nudged him away and straightened the silver charms on my necklace.
Because they were ghosts, my parents’ touch was light, like clouds brushing my skin. They’d been missing from my life for so long I enjoyed standing still while they pinched the fold of my collar and tucked my hair behind my ears. Once they deemed me presentable, I felt them lose interest and slink toward the floor. I looked down. Misty, amorphous shapes pooled near my feet and glimmered in the narrow band of muted light coming in through the space at the bottom of the door.
“See you soon,” I whispered, wiggling my toes in their brand-new socks. Laszlo, my mate—my mate, yet another line item on my list of Things for Clementine to Get Used To—had bought these to replace the ones I’d lost during the morning’s melee at a local quarry. I’d been in and out of cold water for a good part of the past twenty-four hours. My bones felt brittle.
I took fistfuls of the bathrobe and squeezed, drawing the thick, sound-absorbing fabric to my chest. Most of what was left of my living family was waiting for me outside this door and in one or two other rooms in the hotel. We—my sisters and my aunt—were going to have dinner together. The men in our lives were adamant we needed to eat.
I needed…uff. I needed to scream. Seven years ago, when I got the news of my mother’s death, I was twenty-one and a recent college graduate just beginning to get my feet under me. Stunned by the sudden loss and lacking guidance, I’d read books and gone to online forums dedicated to coping with grief. I checked off each stage as I left it behind and grew used to not having a mother around.
I tensed my leg muscles to keep me upright and wiggled my toes again. I’d turned the overhead lights off deliberately once I had showered and dressed. Darkness, and soft things like cashmere socks, was easier on my fractured nervous system than the overly bright lights that highlighted every misstep of this day.
My sisters and I were gutted by the chaotic events surrounding our father’s death, and I for one kept thinking I could have stopped the fae who killed him if only I’d been a little less exhausted, a little more alert, a little less focused on hogging a bar of chocolate. I was pretty sure Alderose, my oldest sister, was feeling pretty much the same things.
My father’s ghost re-entered the bathroom. He passed his hands over the sides of my head. He let me know he was…happy. At peace.
I tried to take comfort from his reassurance.
After seven years of trying to cross over on the anniversary of my mother’s death, and being thwarted each time, he was finally reunited with his beloved wife and they were ready to be off on whatever kind of adventures ghosts got up to. Before my dad slipped beneath the bathroom door to rejoin my mom, I made him promise they would return to Northampton once my sisters were ready to see them. First, Alderose, Beryl, and I needed time to mourn individually and collectively. Death changed a lot of things, including relationship dynamics. That much I remembered from my Intro to Psych class.
On the other side of the bathroom door, Laszlo and my aunt were talking, their voices low and conversational. The terrycloth clutched in my hands absorbed a few stray tears, and the timbre of Laszlo’s voice soothed my rising anxiety. I would join them soon.
I just needed a little more time, a little more dark, before I would be ready.
I breathed out. Every exhalation loosened my hold on my former life. The one where I was a single witch on the cusp of her twenty-eighth birthday, blessed with a dog, no job, and no permanent address.
I breathed in. Every inhalation became one more breath planting me in my new reality. I was still almost twenty-eight, still blessed with a dog. But now there was a romantic partner in my life, three lines of work queued up for my consideration, and the possibility I would be residing in both the human and demon realms.
My mother’s former shop, Needles and Sins, was situated on the ground floor of a building a couple blocks away from the hotel. My parents’ apartment took up the entire second floor and mom’s workshop was on the third. Before the weekend, none of us had known about the third-floor workroom, where she created magic-imbued objects, couture-quality clothes and accessories, and met with clients seeking to hire her to find them a suitable mate.
Mom also had a potions lab, something else she kept secret. Hidden in the cellar, the laboratory was only accessible via the elevator located inside the shop’s tiny bathroom. A calcified portal tree was embedded in the wall of a room in another area of the cellar.
Turns out my mother was a master at keeping secrets. I still didn’t understand why. It’s not like she had non-magical progeny; my sisters and I all had powers. I for one chose not to use mine all that much. Truth be told, that was mostly because I didn’t fully understand how to
