"And was anyone in the bas.e.m.e.nt when you went to hide there?"
"No, it was empty then. But a little later, there were voices, so I hid even farther behind the furnace."
Kaaaarma. The wind seemed to speak my name, another chill wisping past my back.
"What were they...Are you all right?"
I looked up as Adam interrupted himself. "Yes, sorry. I"m just tired, and there"s some sort of draft that"s. .h.i.tting me the wrong way."
He frowned for a second before turning back to Amanita. "What were the men saying, do you remember?"
She repeated the conversation she"d told us about earlier.
"Kaaarmaaaa." The skin on my arms and back crawled at the voice. I wasn"t imagining it.
"Oh, G.o.ddess! It"s Spider!" Savannah cried.
"Karma, darling wife-"
I jumped up at the voice, too vague to be identifiable, but eerie enough to cause me to knock my coffee over. There were a horrible burning smell and a bright blue flash, then the house was thrown into darkness.
"Dear G.o.ddess, he"s come!" Savannah shrieked, her voice high and frightened.
Ma.s.s pandemonium followed. Amanita squeaked, a rush of air pa.s.sing me indicating she was running for a hiding spot. Dad and Pixie both shouted as Adam pushed the table back slightly. Meredith demanded to know what was going on. Adam"s spirits were calling for each other from the dining room and the kitchen. The imps, which had been sleeping at my feet, woke up and started eek ing in a confused manner.
"Everyone stay put!" Adam bellowed over the cacophony of confusion.
"It"s probably just the fuses."
"It"s my fault," I said loudly, feeling my way along the walls to follow Adam. "I knocked my coffee over onto a frayed lamp cord. It"s nothing to get excited about."
The imps clung to my feet as I shuffled toward the hallway.
"Watch where you"re going," Meredith snapped as I inadvertently b.u.mped into him.
"Sorry. I"m just going to help Adam with the fuse box."
I felt my way blindly down the hall, then froze when someone whizzed past me. There were only three people in the house who had the combination of excellent night vision and speed needed to zip around in the darkness, and one of them had already gone ahead. "Dad?" I whispered. "Pixie?"
There was no answer. I cursed the fact that I didn"t inherit the polter ability to see in the dark. My cursing became more p.r.o.nounced as my shins took a beating running into various pieces of furniture. I finally gave up and limped painfully back toward the living room. A whisper of air that pa.s.sed me indicated that someone had beaten me back. The lights came on just as I entered the room, its occupants providing a tableau of startled faces.
Pixie and my father were both seated at the table. "What were you just up to?" I asked Dad in Poltern.
His eyebrows rose. "What do you mean, what was I up to? I"m just sitting here."
"Uh-huh." I turned to Pixie. She had her iPod fired up again, her head nodding in time to the music. One of them had taken a quick trip out of the room, but I had no idea which. I shrugged it off, telling myself I was making too much of nothing.
"It was the fuse, nothing more," Adam said as he entered the room. "The wiring needs badly to be updated. It"s on my list of things to do this summer.
Nita? You can come out now. We"re almost done."
"I"ve lost contact with Spider," Savannah said, her voice reflecting the frustrated expression on her face. She sat back down at her seat, frowning at the table. "I"m not sure I can get him again."
"I think that someone here doesn"t want Spider to talk," Meredith said.
His eyes narrowed as he looked at Adam.
Amanita shot Meredith a nasty look as she walked over to us.
"You"re not going to start that again, I hope," I said, too tired to temper my words.
"You"re sitting there so high-and-mighty, like you"re above it all," he snapped back at me. "You"re just protecting your boyfriend there. Everyone knows how much Adam wanted to get his house back. He threatened to sue the bank, for G.o.d"s sake! And Spider told me that Adam made all sorts of wild threats to him on the phone. So it"s no use, you trying to cover it up; we all know who the real murderer is here."
"Yes, and his name is Meredith Bane," my father said, sallying. I smiled at him.
"You freaks all band together, don"t you?" Meredith answered. "I wouldn"t be surprised if you were the one who killed Spider. He"s hated you long enough; I"m sure the feeling was mutual."
"Please, Meredith, this isn"t doing any good," Savannah said with a hand to her head.
"You stay out of it. This is between me and the freak cop over there." He pointed at Adam. "He"s trying to railroad me into a murder charge, but it won"t work. I have no reason for wanting Spider dead! He was my partner!"
"Don"t partners often make legal arrangements so any business a.s.sets are given directly to the surviving partner in case of death?" I asked. "One that guaranteed if he died, you"d get it all ... and vice versa?"
The sneer on Meredith"s face was not a pleasant thing to behold. "You"d like that, wouldn"t you? Sorry, Karma, Spider owned his a.s.sets outright. We didn"t have any sort of a survivor clause in our agreement." He paused for a moment, a speculative look in his eye. "Something I"m willing to bet you knew.
Which gives you, Miss High and Mighty, the perfect motive for killing your husband."
I frowned at him. "What on earth are you talking about?"
"You"re sooo innocent, aren"t you? You pretended you didn"t know anything about the Fun House, but I"m not buying that innocent act. Spider was more excited about the brothel than anything else we"d worked on. He must have told you how much money we were going to make on it, and you decided you wanted it all for yourself, didn"t you?"
"Brothel?" Savannah gasped, half rising from her chair.
"Oh, sit down," her husband snarled. "Like you give a d.a.m.n where I get the money you"re always demanding for your crackpot hobbies."
She threw a startled look at him, an outraged "Crackpot! Oh!" quickly following.
"Are you saying that this Fun House place you mentioned is a brothel?" I asked, unwilling to believe Spider would have anything to do with a project like that, but knowing it was entirely too possible.
"Don"t act like you don"t know what it was. Spider told you."
So that was why this house meant so much to Spider, why he wanted so badly for it to be cleaned, and why it was important enough to agree to not fight a divorce. "No, wait, that doesn"t make sense," I said, shaking my head at the confused thoughts chasing themselves around and around. "Why this place?
What"s so special about Adam"s house? I believe your statement that Spider was excited about a brothel-he had no morals that I knew of, so it doesn"t surprise me that he"d happily take on the role of pimp-but it doesn"t explain why he wanted this house so bad."
"Oh, for G.o.d"s sake, are you so stupid you think this innocent act is fooling anyone?" Meredith said, a disgusted look on his face.
"Stop speaking to her that way!" To my surprise, Savannah jumped up and stood behind me, glaring at her husband.
"I"ll speak any way I want. Shut your mouth and sit down!" he yelled back at her.
Savannah wasn"t having any of it. She reminded me of an angry Chihuahua taking on a mastiff. "That"s it! I have had it with you! You are being rude and unfeeling, and downright insulting to these good people!"
"They aren"t people," he answered with yet another sneer. "They"re not human."
"Hmm." Adam ignored the argument between the husband and the wife, his gaze blank as he clearly tried to work out the puzzle of the house.
"They are so! Just look at them! Well, all right, I admit the extra arms are a bit...different...but they are human in every other respect! And Karma and Adam look one hundred percent human!"
"You should have seen Adam before he finally lost that third arm," Jules said as he drifted past us, carrying a coffeepot. "He went through h.e.l.l trying to hide it. I thought he would rot his brain with all the glamours he used to look mortal. That was before he got a job in the mundane world, of course. Anyone want a refresh?"
Savannah turned distraught eyes to me. "Tell him you"re human."
"I"m half human," I said slowly, not wanting to upset her any more than she already was. The situation was volatile enough without anyone else freaking out. "Polters aren"t really the same as mortal humans. It"s more than just the extra arms; they have several other traits inherent to the species, one of which is a life span about four times that of a mortal."
"Four times ..." Her eyebrows rose. "How old are you?"
"Late thirties," I said with a little smile.
"I"m eighty-one," my father said with pride. "I"m told I don"t look a day older than fifty."
I patted Savannah"s hand as she slumped back into her chair. "Adam is over a hundred. Polters age much slower than mortals, so it really doesn"t do to pay too much attention to the number of years lived."
"They"re freaks, Savannah," her husband yelled. "Freaks! And if you hang around with them, you"ll be a freak, too."
"There"s only one freak here, and he"s not a polter," Pixie said in a soft voice.
Meredith snarled something rude at her, leaped up from the table, and stomped over to the fireplace. I glanced back at Adam, who was still apparently deep in thought.
"Your family hasn"t harmed Spider in some way, have they?" I asked him.
"You know, something someone did a while ago that would make him seek revenge on you now?"
"No. I"m sure-" Enlightenment dawned in his eyes. "My family..."
A chill skittered down my back. My father gasped as the thought struck him, as well.
"What is it?" Savannah asked, looking from Adam to me.
Pixie pursed her lips. I didn"t want to go into too much detail in front of her. She might be more worldly than was expected in one only fifteen, but there was no need to expose her to the dark side of human nature any more than was necessary.
"Polters don"t live in just any house." Even to my ears, my voice sounded weary. "There has to be a bond with a mortal family in order for them to move in, and once they do that, it"s exceedingly hard to get them to leave. In the old days, they used to act as stewards, taking care of property for owners who had large estates. In the last hundred or so years, many polter families were forcibly displaced when their mortal hosts downsized. Some took over the property when the mortal line died out. But a house that has been in the care of a polter is forever changed."
"Changed? Changed how?" Savannah asked, looking around the room as if the answer would make itself apparent.
I smiled at Adam as he tried to explain. "It becomes kind of sacred land.
There"s a Poltern word for it, but it"s untranslatable. The closest I can come is "sanctuary." The house in effect becomes a safe haven for Otherworld beings."
"Oh." Her eyes went to Amanita.
"Exactly." Adam nodded. "Nita and the boys were attracted to my house because of its history with my family. I became their guardian, dedicated to preserving the house so it will continue to provide them sanctuary from the mundane world."
Savannah"s brow furrowed. "But what does this have to do with Meredith"s plans for a ... for a..."
"Brothel?" Adam growled.
"Yes, that. I don"t see the connection."
Everyone was silent. Pixie looked down at her hands, fussing with the fingerless black lace gloves she"d pulled from her bag. My father was suddenly fascinated with a book sitting on a table next to him. Adam watched me for a moment, one eyebrow c.o.c.ked in expectation.
I sighed. Why did these things always fall on my shoulders? "It means that Spider and Meredith weren"t planning just any sort of brothel. They needed a house that could offer sanctuary, one that would be comfortable to spirits and other beings, who would become the entertainment, a.s.sumedly in exchange for room and board."
"Dear G.o.ddess above," Savannah gasped, her face reflecting the horror in her voice. "They"d use ghosts as wh.o.r.es?"
"And polters, and sprites and sylphs, and whatever other freaks we can get, so long as they turn a profit," Meredith said. "Don"t make that face at me! You don"t have any idea the amount of money we were sitting on! Otherworld brothels are a gold mine waiting to be tapped! Spider knew that with his connection to the polter world, he"d be able to bring in the best sort of hookers.
We"d have every freak for a hundred miles around knocking at our door, hoping to get a chance at one of the-"
"Thank you for that confirmation," I interrupted, sending Pixie a warning look as she was about to make a comment.
She scowled at me but sat back, her lips tight.
"So you see, dear wife," Meredith said, strolling over to Savannah"s chair, "there"s every reason for your new friend here to have wanted her husband dead. She must have planned all along to knock off Spider, and set me up as the prime murder suspect in order to take over the plans for our brothel."
Adam looked at me with speculation in his eyes. I could see he was wondering if "It"ll all be mine when you"re gone" meant I had murdered Spider for his share of the venture.
"No," I told him softly in Poltern. "I swear I had no idea about any of this."
He nodded, murmuring that he believed me.
Savannah looked as if she was going to burst into tears, but once again, she surprised me. She took a deep breath, pushed back her chair, and stood to confront her husband. "You sicken me, Meredith. It"s as if I"ve never really known who you were, and now I see you for your true self. You are evil, truly evil, and unless you repent, I don"t see that we have a future together."
"You stupid b.i.t.c.h!" I thought he was going to hit Savannah, and stood up at the same time Adam did. Meredith snarled obscenities at us as he s.n.a.t.c.hed the whiskey bottle and backed up a couple of steps. "Fine! If you"d rather stay with the freaks, you"re welcome to them. I"m going to bed. I"ll deal with all of you as soon as I can get out of this madhouse."
"Happy nightmares," Pixie called after him.
"Hope the bedbugs bite," my father added.
"I told you we should get ourselves a nice domovoi like that Sergei to be a housekeeper," Jules said to Antony in a loud whisper from the corner of the room. "They know about the bugs!"
14.