Fortunately, Auntie Ganda and her husband Mang Tetsu were cool with him staying over another night. It wasn’t the first time they’d had Loren overnight, though the last time he’d stayed here had been when he and Harmony were eighteen and they’d stayed over because it had been easier to commute to a college entrance exam. Before that, he and Harmony would sometimes stay for a couple of days to a week in the summer, mostly so their parents wouldn’t enroll them in summer sports programs.
They had both hated those summer sports programs.
He joined them for dinner, of course, apologizing profusely for not being able to join them properly for breakfast. In addition to Harmony’s aunt and uncle, there was also her younger cousin Maddie, who was in … high school? Junior high? He wasn’t sure, the education system had been rearranged a couple of years ago, but he’d already been in college at the time so he hadn’t really paid attention. Harmony also had an older cousin, but he’d moved out to his own place… that Harmony had helped him get…
“—and his place isn’t in any way haunted. Anymore.”
“Yes, I get it, I’m sorry I didn’t pick a property from the listing you gave me.”
All in all, it was an enjoyable meal. Auntie Ganda asked him how he as doing, if he had any jobs lined up, when he was going to marry Harmony, but that last was simply an escalation of her asking when they were going to start dating. It made him sigh every time, but what could he do? The woman thought that since he and Harmony were close and liked each other’s company, they should get married. People seemed to have trouble with the idea that the two of them were just close friends.
Mang Tetsu, at least, seemed to understand, and the oni maneuvered the conversation towards other talk. This had led to Loren and Harmony regaling the family with an abridged telling of their trip to get his stuff back. Loren got the sense that Harmony was clearly used to giving sanitized accounts of encounters of ghosts, because the way she described how the ghost had slipped on fallen on its back was far funnier than he thought it would have gone down.
Of course, Loren had done his best to make himself look good in the story and gloss over all the times he’d frozen, although when he let it slip he was able to blame Harmony’s aura of despair.
“Yeah, sorry about that,” his friend said. “I tried to exclude you, but it just slowly gets stronger, and I was trying to hold it all in so that the people on the floors above and below us wouldn’t feel it.”
“You shouldn’t have been using it in public at all,” Mang Tetsu said sternly, his frown pulling on his red skin so that his face looked like a mask. “It’s good you weren’t caught, but you know how little practice you get using your magic.”
Harmony winced. “Yes, uncle,” she said meekly.
Loren winced too. In hindsight, he should have figured that she would be relatively unpracticed using magic if she disliked how it made her feel, but at the time he’d thought she knew what she was talking about. A small part of him wanted to say that he hadn’t known she had Despair, so he wasn’t at fault, but he ignored that little coward. They were friends. If they got in trouble together, then they got in trouble together.
With a shake of his head, Mang Tetsu suddenly grinned, showing his two oversized fangs and making him look more like the fun uncle he actually was. “Though if it’s going to happen again, I can show you a better way to keep your head clear. That ‘wrap your head’ thing is too simple and too wet for anything serious.”
Loren perked up. “Really?”
“Sure. It’s not that hard to properly keep out Symbol auras if they’re not actually trying to get in, but you need the right approach. Back in the eighties I had to use it all the time because the old Ginto Syndicate had that fu—freak Bella Basilio as a hitman. She was a Symbol of Love who liked to get you to feel like you were in love with her, then ‘bang’…”
The stories of the more blatantly rampant crime forty years ago never ceased being horrifying. Harmony, Auntie Ganda and Maddie, however, just listened in rapt attention as Mang Tetsu told another of his old stories from back when he had been a vigilant. Not that he wasn’t listening as well—and taking notes about how his flame should be concentrated on the top of his head since most Despair auras tended to arc down instead of radiating in a straight line from where the Symbol was standing, and that the mix should be Life and Change to keep both his ‘brain juices’ and soul from getting altered—but he didn’t have Harmony and Maddie’s fascination or desire to join the vigilants and get into magic-blasting fights with organized crime, keres, terrorists, communists, and sometimes the government itself when they were being more corrupt than usual.
After dinner, Mang Tetsu had washed the dishes in soap and water—showing that even after all these years he was still madly in love with Auntie Ganda, to actually willingly get his hands wet when the plates were clearly marked ‘Flame Cleanable’—then had gotten himself a beer and offered Loren a Calamansi-Bahay so they could practice the shielding technique. Maddie, joining in, had gotten a guava-flavored vegetable oil.
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“Dad!”
“The law’s the law, Madoka,” Mang Tetsu said as he opened his beer bottle on his horn, a party trick that Loren still thought was pretty cool. “No alcohol until you’re eighteen.”
Maddie pouted, but took the little cup of cloudy pinkish oil, sipping from it as the impromptu lesson had commenced to supplement her Flame while the two of them had shown Loren how to properly protect his head from a Despair aura.
It didn’t take Loren all that long to get the technique down, especially with two experienced users of it supervising, but without Harmony dropping despair rays on his head, he really wouldn’t be able to say how much more effective it was. Mang Tetsu had also taught him how to alter the flame to protect him against other kinds of Symbols. Fear came from below, Love tried to get in through his eyes, and all the other vectors. Hope also came from above, apparently. Who knew?
Sleeping that night was difficult. The shifting lights and shadows flickering across the ceiling of the living room as he lay on the sofa kept reminding him of the ghost in the bathroom. He kept dreading seeing a limb or face every time the shadows moved. Eventually he just closed his eyes and just didn’t let himself open them so his active imagination had no fuel for its fire. Sleep came eventually.
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The next day, Loren had been woken up at the wet and dripping hour of five in the morning, giving him horrible flashbacks of elementary school. Harmony, douse her, was unfortunately a morning person and just rolled her eyes at his suffering.
After taking an—unfortunately—wet bath because he was borrowing a shirt from Harmony and that had been her price to let him wear it, he’d had breakfast with everyone, which was a quicker meal than it had been last night. Then he, Harmony, Maddie and Mang Tetsu had gone on their various commutes, the sun still behind the horizon.
Now, Loren stared at their destination. In front of him was a small, understated, and relatively new-looking sign that read ‘Happy Homes: Stigmatized Real Estate Investment’. The sign also included a phone number, the address, a scrying address, a Tomepic profile, and all the usual stuff. Notably, the listed business hours were still more than an hour away.
That was all perfectly understandable. What was making him stare was the fact that instead of being mounted on some ratty old building, or one of the newer, soulless arcade buildings full of bland and identical business premises, the sign was mounted on a wall topped with metal spikes to discourage intruders, broken only by a metal gate that might or might not have been a chramecirum alloy. Said wall was surrounding a sizable property, and since they were in Old Selurong, that meant the property had a value measured in hundreds of thousands of rings per square meter, and had probably been owned by the same family for at least the past two hundred years, probably longer. Several tall, thick and clearly very old trees scattered behind the wall seemed to stand as testament to that.
It also seemed to have been relatively untouched by the war from decades ago, which had famously leveled significant portions of the city of Selurong into rubble at the time, leaving only a scant few places standing like oases in a desert.
Harmony tugged at his arm. “Come on, we need to go in through the back. This entrance doesn’t open ‘til eight.”
Loren followed after her, glancing sideways at the large property they were now skirting around. He could see a rather tall building behind the walls, at least three stories tall and made of dark wood. There seemed to be a significant distance between the building and the walls around the property. “You work here?” he said, pointing at the house just to be clear.
“When there’s paperwork,” Harmony said with a shrug. “Usually when I’m editing videos for our ScryVids channel and things. Usually I’m running around to do research on properties or helping with restoring the properties. Well, taking footage of us restoring the properties and helping with heavy lifting. Now hurry up. Mal sometimes brings the good donuts with glaze instead of powdered sugar, and I want to get at them before the boys arrive.”
He glanced at the house on the other side of the wall again. “Is this place one of the properties you guys exorcised or something?”
“Huh? No, this is Steve’s house, he and Norm just run the business from here because it’s cheaper. Technically, it’s his family home, but they don’t really live there anymore. Steve says they only show up for Winter Solstice, New Year, and Qinzhou New Year. The only ones who live here on a regular basis are Steve, his wife, and his grandparents. Oh, and Diwata, of course. And there’s the maids and the groundskeeper too, but they won’t be in the office spaces.“
“I’m not going to get in trouble for this, am I?”
“You’ll be fine. Now hurry up, I want my donut!”
“You know, of the two of us, I’m pretty sure I’m the one whose magic makes them immune to diabetes.”
“Screw diabetes. I’m self-medicating so I don’t start developing chronic depression!”
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It was an hour and a bit more—most of which Loren spent sleeping on the couch in a nicely appointed if old-fashioned-looking waiting room—before he finally got to meet Harmony’s boss.
Steve Banta—according to the handwritten, handmade cardboard name plate on his desk—looked to be in his forties or fifties. He was a surprisingly thin man who could almost be described as ‘bony’, and who had just barely enough muscle mass for Loren to not worry about his health. As it was, the Flame mage still felt a strong urge to try and get the man to eat something to put on more weight.
“So, Harmony tells me you got a bad deal on an apartment,” Steve said after they’d both made introductions. “Haunted, she said. Now, I’ll need to hear some details so I can properly assess your situation. Could you tell me the earliest possible instance of the haunting that you recall?”
Loren didn’t answer, staring at the coffee mug on the desk in front of Steve. The spoon in the mug was slowly stirring the coffee, occasionally scraping against the sides of the ceramic…
Steve followed his gaze. “Oh, don’t worry. That’s just Spiritualism. No ghosts here.” He gestured with one hand, and though he didn’t recite any sort of spell, the spoon began stirring in the opposite direction.
Embarrassment made Loren flush slightly. “Ah, sorry. It’s just… after what happened recently…”
A reassuring smile that reminded him of his childhood pediatrician. “I understand completely. Encountering ghosts can be surprising and sometimes traumatic the first time, even if you know what to expect. Take your time.”
Loren nodded. He forced himself to get his thought in order, took a deep breath and began to relate what had happened to him two nights ago.