The Xurian characters in and around Felix’s office.
I tried the window, curious if there some bonus out for emergencies only. My hand hit the barrier, as expected. Then I moved on to casting general sensing spells.
Since they were so, well, general, they were more taxing on my weak magic. I had to do tiny areas at a time, with long breaks in between. If they were easy, I would have cast them over the whole damn house already. By the time I got to the corner of the room where I sensed something, I was beat.
But behind this wall was an empty space.
Not normal space for wiring and plumbing, but a space big enough to be a hallway. I cast the spell again, finding out the hallway extended downward, into the foundations of the house.
Of course there was a hidden basement level. Why wouldn’t the creepy graveyard house have one of those?
The bookshelf wasn’t attached to the wall like the others, which I discovered when I removed all the books and tugged on the wood. It also didn’t have a fancy swing function to make the heavy furniture piece easy to move. Whatever was in this basement didn’t need to be accessed often, at least recently. Then again, if Felix’s magic was stronger than mine, he could use spells for all this heavy lifting.
Behind the bookshelf there was yet another barrier in the form of a solid sheet of thin wood, un-wallpapered and bare tan. I knocked once, hearing how hollow the space behind was. I had to break through it, and the easiest way probably didn’t involve carefully cutting through the material.
Grabbing a paperweight from Uncle Felix’s desk, I used the tall, heavy object to punch a hole through, cringing. Dust flew at me and I coughed, bringing my sweater up to cover my mouth. I hit with the paperweight a few more times before switching to using my hands, careful to cover my skin with my tunic sleeves and avoid splinters. I’d peeled the bottom half of the wood away when the room went cold, and so did the blood running through my veins.
I knew that fucking feeling.
Ghost.
My body trembled and froze, brain going fuzzy as I peered into the dark. All I could see were a couple of stairs, nothing farther down revealed yet. When I saw the soft glow coming toward me, my body kicked back into gear and I stumbled backward, screaming at the top of my lungs.
A blue-white mass of fog shot up from the depths of the basement, flying through me and leaving my teeth chattering. In my retreat my feet caught on the edge of a rug, body flinging backward as I braced myself for a quick and painful greeting from the ground.
Instead, the back of my head smacked against the corner of the desk, my body dropping as dead weight to the ground when I passed out.
***
Waking up in the tub with Zan hovering over me after being attacked by a ghost was traumatizing, to say the least. I reverted to my initial reaction to him, a scream and scramble away, my body not recognizing that he’d done nothing to hurt me. One bad apple in the bunch and all my ghost-loving progress had been reversed. Wonderful.
He stared wide-eyed at me, darting away without another word. By the time I’d calmed my beating heart, Kirin had burst through into the bathroom, staring at me with awe in his eyes. The orc rarely looked at me any other way in the mornings, unless I confused him.
“Bathtub can’t have been a comfortable place to sleep, princess,” he said, smirking.
I nearly sighed, but didn’t quite have my breathing under control. He often said some variation of this, suggesting I should have slept with him.
“I would have welcomed you into my bed if you’d asked.”
“Maybe next time,” I said.
He lit up. No offense to Kirin, but his flirting wasn’t high on my list of things I wanted to deal with after being attacked and killed by the object of my worst nightmares. All I really wanted to do was curl up in a ball in a corner and rock myself back and forth until I forgot the bone-chilling cold of the ghost rushing through me. Forgot the heavy presence of a being who didn’t especially want to be locked away in some dingy basement.
A dingy basement I needed to get down into, somehow.
With a ghost guarding the entrance.
Had Uncle Felix done that on purpose to force me to face my absolute greatest fear, or was it a coincidence? He was a fucking sadist if he knew the extent of my reactions and still did that to me. Believe it or not, I’d actually made progress in therapy since the initial ghost attack. Right after, I’d been jumpy and watching for the faintest curl of fog as soon as darkness fell, and if one had appeared…
Well. My current best coping mechanism for panic attacks was causing myself minor physical pain. Back then, there had been some close calls with wanting to die to escape the horror of another attack.
“Are you always this quiet?” Kirin asked, breaking me out of my thoughts.
“With people I don’t know, yes.”
I wasn’t lying, though Kirin no longer counted among the ranks of people I didn’t know. We had intimate knowledge of each other, though I supposed we hadn’t spent much time chatting about our lives or what we did while outside of this prison house.
“How cute, you’re shy,” he said with another flirtatious smile.
