I tried all the techniques I had used throughout my thirty-three years, but lying there in the quiet was just too much. I kept seeing the scene in the study. It was haunting me like it was its own specter, except I was entirely cognizant that every time my mind conjured it up, it made it a bit worse.
It wasn’t going to stop unless I did something about it, so I got out of bed and headed back to the scene of the crime.
Before the magical community revealed themselves to humans about two hundred years ago, such a crime scene would have been sectioned off for days and taken quite a long time to clean. However, now there were all sorts of magical folks in law enforcement, and I had been promised that the office would be magically scrubbed once everything was meticulously documented in both physical and enchanted ways. Hopefully, seeing the room in its normal state instead of a scene out ofa horror movie would help my brain stop replaying that one moment over and over again.
Once more, I was struck by that sense of everything being far too surreal, and I couldn’t help but wonder if I was locked in a nightmare. It was a subtle sense of foreboding at first, but it grew stronger until it was practically a drumbeat behind my temples as I turned the doorknob of what had been my father’s study just the day before.
Now it was a tomb.
An empty tomb, however, or at least that was what I hoped. Taking a deep breath, I pushed through my disquiet and opened the door.
Only to be greeted by complete and utter normalcy.
No blood. No sense of horror and betrayal, of fear and pain. There wasn’t even a speck of dust, all of it having been collected by whatever forensic wizard had been on the team to handle our case. It was uncanny, but finally, that horrific image in my head began to ebb.
It didn’t vanish entirely, of course. I feared the sight would linger in my memories until I was old and gray, but it helped take some of the teeth out of it, so I stepped in a little farther.
Then a little farther.
I had no idea what possessed me, but I slowly walked around, letting my eyes roam where they wanted. The forensic team had done a truly incredible job with enchanting away all the evidence to their labs, but certain little things were off.
I knew my father’s study like the back of my hand. The thick coaster that he always used for his morning tea was on the wrong side of the desk. Luther had made him that one summer, and my father had always treasured it.
“They put his books back in the wrong spot,” I mused to myself as I spotted his favorite reads,Himalayas!andThe Discerning Alpha,on the shelf behind his desk rather than onthe small bookstand our mother had found during one of her thrifting expeditions.
My father’s desk was hisisland, no one else’s, and he always kept what was most precious to him on it. That included several photos of our whole family and us kids individually—even Jackson—in gilded photo frames, his books, his coaster, a model plane that Chris had put together, and our diplomas.
Over the years, there had been other bits and bobs, as there usually was with kids as they grew. If he’d kept all of them on his desk, he wouldn’t have had any room to work, so he occasionally rotated things out of his drawers.
“Left side business, right side what matters,” I murmured to myself before sitting in the exact chair I’d found my father in.
Probably a bit macabre, but in some way, it grounded me. Yes, I had seen something truly awful, something scarring, but it wasn’t there anymore. Things had been cleaned, my father had been cold-selected for an autopsy, and soon I would bury him. The chair was just a chair; he wasn’t still in it.
With that thought in mind, I opened the drawer to my right and looked down at his treasures. I saw a terrible origami crane I’d once attempted in the fifth grade, housed in a little acrylic container slightly yellowed with age. A little wooden figure of a duck Luther likely whittled before I was born. There was a picture frame about the size of my hand covered in decades-old pasta, ribbons, and other little crafty bits with a photo of my father and Penelope within it. It looked like it might have been her first day at the boarding school all us VanMarches went to from kindergarten to senior year.
Beneath all those little bits and bobs from our kids were the special pieces that belonged to my mother.
“He never forgot about you,” I murmured, as I thought about Aisling VanMarche and the short life she had lived. My only solace was that my parents were finally reunited, and maybe myfather would become the Caspian he had been before he lost his mate far too early in life.
Part of me felt like I was crossing some sort of personal boundary, but another part of me longed for a connection that had been so unfairly ripped away from us. So, I told myself I was just picking out what items my father would want to be buried with. Even though the man had been fairly closed off ever since Mother passed, I knew right down to my bones that he would want to be interred with his most-prized possessions.
Some of the items I had already known about, like my mother’s engagement ring and the bonding necklace he’d given her when they had become eternal mates, but there were a few pieces that surprised me, such as the faded and curled gardening magazine, which I remembered my mother poring over happily every time the winter blues got a little too strong and her craving for seed starting picked up.
“You used to love keeping the grounds,” I said. I’d never had a habit of talking to the dead before, but suddenly I had a three-hundred-percent increase in the number of loved ones I’d lost. Verbalizing things was stopping me from feeling particularly adrift.
Grounding. I’m just grounding myself.
Not quite peace, serenity, and control, but it didn’t need to be. It felt right.
“We have staff for that now—you probably know that—but Father made sure they kept up with things and always planted your favorites.”
Sometimes it was hard to reconcile the romantic, caring man with the strict, particular, and often cold alpha. I’d had eight years with him before his greatest heartbreak, which was more than my brother Jackson could say.
I continued to mention certain things to my mother, sometimes to my father. Nothing of substance, but it did helpme feel less lost in the moment. However, my monologuing petered out when I came to a double-page ad smack dab in the middle of the gardening magazine. It wasn’t that advertisements in magazines were all that shocking, but I was fascinated by the glamour of it and the elegant woman at its center.
Ophelia Donmoueof Haus de Donmoue, Psychic Extraordinaire!
The ad went on to make a lot of amazing claims about her and what she could do for her clients, as well as some famous predictions she made. Memories floated to the surface. I’d seen her ads on TV back in the day. Mostly during Saturday morning cartoons.