Even with the threat of death, arranging a meeting was going to take some time. Jacky drove us back to the mansion so I could eat lunch.

Dinner was always served in the formal dining room, but for breakfast and lunch, we ate in the kitchen. There was a table tucked in the back, next to the French doors that led out to the deck. The kitchen’s table wasn’t anywhere near as fancy as the one in the dining room, but it kept our food off the floor.

Igor was cooking. It seemed like Igor was always cooking. I offered to help, but his brusque “no” made it clear that my role was to sit at the table and let the man work.

Olivia was already seated. I wondered if she might say something to me, but her eyes only strayed to me for a moment, then returned to the tome she was reading.

Yes, tome. It was old, leather-bound, and massive.

Between watching her read and watching Igor cook, I decided I’d rather watch Igor.

He was an odd figure. He was mostly bald, but what little hair he had came in several different shades, and all of it was clipped short. I didn’t know if he could grow a beard. Bushy eyebrows hung over his mismatched eyes. He wore baggy clothes, and his apron dropped straight down from his stooped shoulders, making it hard to say if there were any other deformities, but he definitely had a hump over his right shoulder, and he walked with a limp.

And he grumbled while he worked. He grumbled a lot. It didn’t seem to matter if anyone was listening to him. The low murmur of discontent followed him wherever he went.

I turned and whispered to Olivia, “Did something bad happen?”

“Igor’s always like that” was her curt response. She didn’t look up from her book.

“Where’s everyone else?”

She still didn’t look up. “Iset and Jacky don’t eat, Darius is asleep, and Kappa only eats twice a day.”

It took me a minute to go through my mental checklist.

“What about the wolfman?” I asked.

“Conrad?” Olivia finally lifted her head. She glanced around the room, shrugged, and returned her attention to the book.

Igor stopped grumbling and raised his voice to say, “One of us will have to get Mrs. Park.”

I had no idea who or what a Mrs. Park was. Considering the rest of the residents, she might have been a banshee hiding in the attic or a mermaid haunting one of the tubs.

“Not it!” Olivia called.

“I have to finish setting the plates.”

“I know you do that on purpose, Igor!”

“It’s a damn shame, but it looks like it’ll have to be you, Olivia.”

I decided to speak up before the air between their glares caught fire. “Um, I can do it.”

Olivia shifted her glare to me. Igor’s smaller eye turned my way, but the larger of his two eyes stayed fixed on Olivia.

“I just have to tell her that lunch is ready, right?” I said.

“Yes,” Igor said.

“Cool. Where is she?”

His larger eye joined its partner. “By now she’ll be up on the third floor.”

Ah. A banshee.

I pointed to the staircase in the corner of the room. “And that goes all the way up?”

“With a stop on the second floor, yes.”

I couldn’t believe he thought he had to mention that, and I’m pretty sure my expression told him so. Igor returned it with an expression that said he never underestimated the omnipotent and omnipresent nature of stupidity, and I couldn’t blame him.

“Kay. I’ll be back in a minute.” I hopped up and crossed over to the stairs. Before I went up, I said, “Will I know her?”

“She’s the one you haven’t met yet,” Igor said in the smug tone of a man who’s been proven right.

When I arrived on the third floor, I had to walk through the back hall to get to the main hallway. That meant I had plenty of time to worry about the creature I was about to introduce myself to.

The first door revealed an old sewing room that probably hadn’t seen use since before television was invented. The only furniture that wasn’t covered in dust sheets was a set of small drawers and a cupboard.

It didn’t look like anyone was there, but for all I knew, Mrs. Park might have been invisible.

“Hello?” I said to the empty room.

There was no answer.

The next door led to an equally empty bathroom. (No mermaid. I checked.) Across the hall was a large archway. When I walked over and peered inside, my jaw dropped so far I’m surprised it didn’t hit the ground.

Mouth still gaping, I wandered into the room and turned in a full circle, trying to take it all in.

The room spanned almost the entire front of the house. At both ends, twin chandeliers with ornate bronze details hung over the most elegant seating arrangements I had ever seen. The pinched area in the middle was dominated by a full-sized grand piano. The long south wall seemed to be made mostly of windows. Art and tapestries were hung up everywhere. Sculptures and vases filled up the gaps.

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

As I stared up at the vaulted ceiling, I whispered, “Oh, geez.”

My numb meandering brought me close enough to the piano I could tap on a few keys, to see if it was real. It was probably stupid of me, but it looked too big to be allowed.

It wasn’t a toy. The notes came out loud, clear, and in tune.

I heard a murmur through the archway near the center of the room: “Darius? Is that you?”

Could that be the elusive Mrs. Park?

I went into the hall. There was an open door left of the grand staircase. My steps slowed as I approached. I could hear noises—shuffling sounds, a dull thump, and three random claps.

What was going on in there?

I peeked my head around the doorway. The room was crowded with boxes of every shape and size. Someone, or something, was moving around, but I couldn’t tell what they (or it) looked like.

Ever articulate, I started out with “um,” then added, “Mrs. Park?”

“Oh. You’re not Darius.”

The hunched shape straightened up and stepped out from the boxes. My brain tried to makes sense of the bright yellow hands and arms, and the bright blue body. Her face was half hidden, and a gray aura drifted around her when she moved.

“You must be Emerra,” the figure said. “Iset told me about you.”

I thought it’d be best to get it out of the way as soon as possible. “Right! What are you?”

The figure paused, then removed the mask covering her nose and mouth.

“Why, I’m a housekeeper, dear.”

Oh.

She beat some of the dust out of her clothes, briefly increasing her gray aura.

“I’ve been putting off cleaning the storage room for so long I’m embarrassed by it.” She realized the dust had mostly settled back into her clothes and made a hapless gesture. “That’s what I get, I’m afraid.”

She stepped forward while removing her yellow gloves.

Gloves, my brain noted. Her arms weren’t actually yellow.

Since I had ruled out the idea she was a monster, I had to admit, she appeared to be a normal old woman.

Well, not like a normal, normal old woman. Under the blue apron, she wore a long bohemian dress dyed in various shades of blue and jade.. Her disk earrings could have been used as dinner plates, and she wore cherry red lipstick to compliment her wide smile.

“But I’m so glad to meet you, Emerra. I was thrilled to hear you’d be moving in. I’m old enough, I love having young blood around.”

As I shook her hand, I said, “You are a human housekeeper, right? Not a vampire?”

She let out a loud laugh. “Oh, I can tell we’re going to get along famously. Yes, I’m a human. And I’m not offended you asked! It took me for quite a turn when I first met Iset. That was ages ago. Of course I was here to welcome in Kappa and Conrad, but it still takes a moment, doesn’t it?”

A moment. Sure.

“Now it’s my turn to be impertinent,” she said. “Your hair, dear?”

My hand went up to my scalp. “Yeah.”

“Is it a hairstyle?”

“It is now. It used to be chemo.”

“Oh, that’s rough. I’m sorry you had to go through it, but I hope you don’t mind me saying, you pull it off well. Did you win against the cancer?”

So Iset had told her about me…but not everything about me.

“Yes?”

She pumped her fist. “Good for you! You’re a fighter!”

I grinned. “What can I say? They can’t keep me down.”

“That’s the ticket, sweetheart. That’ll keep you going forever. Look at me! Sixty-seven and still working hard.”

I goggled at her. I would have put her closer to fifty than seventy! Something occurred to me. “And you’re not a witch?”

“Oh, well. You know.”

I looked around the room, helplessly. Did I know? It seemed unlikely.

“I dabble,” Mrs. Park admitted. “But it’s mostly for fun, dear. Mostly for fun.”

I didn’t realize dabbling in magic was an option. I wondered if I could do it. I’d have to ask Olivia.

“Do you live here, Mrs. Park?”

“Oh, no. I live down in town. After my husband died—ages ago, you don’t have to look sad—Mr. Noctis invited me to move in, but I’m a stubborn old thing. I told him that I wasn’t about to leave my home of twenty years if all it would do was save some driving.” She waved her hand around in a meaningless gesture. “Never live where you work, or you never stop working. That’s the first rule of being a housekeeper. Besides, it’s much easier to have people text me what they need from town so I can pick it up before I come in.”

“That’s brilliant,” I said.

She sighed as she looked around the room. “The second rule of housekeeping is never let the dust get so thick you can write in it.” She turned back to me. “Nevermind that. What can I do for you, Emerra? Did you need something? I’ll have to get you my phone number.”

That wouldn’t do much good since they hadn’t buried me with a phone, but I didn’t mention that to her.

“Igor wanted me to tell you that lunch is ready.”

“Oh, I completely lost track of time. Thank goodness for that darling Ingvar.”

“Uhhhh. You mean Igor?”

“Yes. Ingvar.” She reached behind her to untie her apron. “He’s such a sweet old thing.”

“You think Igor is…sweet?”

“Oh, yes.”

The woman wasn’t a banshee, she was a lunatic.

She put her apron down. “I know he grumbles a bit, but don’t we all? And the poor man has probably had a bit of a rough time of it. After you get down past all the grumbling, you know he has a heart of gold.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” I said.

“I have to wash up. I’ll meet you downstairs in a few minutes.”

My climb down the stairs was slower than my climb up had been. I was pondering over how deep Igor might have buried his golden heart and if it was to protect it from heart-thirsty pirates.

When I reached the kitchen, I said, “Igor, what’s your name?”

The larger of his two eyes rolled over to me. I waited for him to question my intelligence, but he didn’t.

“Igor. Four letters. I-G-O-R. You’d think it wouldn’t be difficult, wouldn’t you?”

“And are you a sweetheart?”

“Good lord, no.”

“Thank you for setting me straight.”

I turned back to the table. Olivia’s brow was furrowed, and she threw up one of her hands.

“What?” I said.

“You think you can simply ask someone if they’re a sweetheart? You think that’s normal?”

“He answered me, didn’t he?” When I slid into the chair next to her, she scooted away to give herself more room. “Olivia, I hear that people can dabble in witchcraft.”

Igor scoffed.

“No,” Olivia said.

“Just…no?”

“To be a witch means that you produce your own magic. A person is either born a witch or they’re not.”

“But Mrs. Park said—”

“Mrs. Park reads books on New Age Wiccanism and collects pretty crystals, whereas I went through ten-years of intensive training at a three-hundred year-old school that specializes in American witchcraft. I think I know what I’m talking about.”

From over by the kitchen island, Igor said, “Ah, but Mrs. Park is so glad to have someone around who shares a mutual interest.”

“Yes,” Olivia droned, “she is.”

I looked up in time to learn that Igor’s grin was lopsided, but then the moment of mirth was gone.

Jacky strolled into the room.

“Good afternoon, Igor.”

“Good afternoon, Mr. Noctis.”

“Olivia.”

“Hello, Jacky,” she said. “How did it go this morning?”

If Olivia wanted to know what had happened, I wondered why she didn’t ask me—but Jacky was already answering.

“We confirmed Wayde’s soul isn’t in the study. Our next task is to try to figure out where it might be. To that end, I’ve arranged a meeting with the Torr for this evening. I have to ask them a few questions.” He turned to me. “Emerra, would you come with me to the meeting? It’ll take several hours to drive there and back.”

The short silence ended with me blurting out, “You want me to come?”

“Yes.” He hesitated. “I thought my question made that clear.”

“Why do you want me to come?”

“Shall we say, to see all there is to see.” Jacky put his skeletal hands behind his back. “I think you’ll find that, at least in these circumstances, I’ll be asking for your help more often than not. You are, of course, welcome to refuse me—there would be no repercussions—but don’t be surprised that I ask.”

My head dropped in a slow nod. “Okay. Sure. I don’t mind helping.”

“Good. Please be ready to leave by six o’clock.”

Jacky left.

Mrs. Park arrived in the kitchen via the back stairs and sat down at the table while Igor, still grumbling, put our plates down in front of us.

I had to lean over to say to Olivia, “Hey. What’s a Torr meeting like?”

The tome in her hands snapped shut. “I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been to one.”