“Yes,Mom.”
He jogged down the steps. “Nooverexertion!”
“Total Hufflepuff,” I murmured as I shut thedoor.
The restof the day was spent cleaning up the place and catching up on the paperback I hadn’t had time to read. When dusk finally hit and I’d made a quick chicken salad for dinner, I headed down to the lab. It had been awhile since I’d worked in here, but after the incident with Dolores, I wanted to find out what, if anything, I had donewrong.
I moved the rug in the kitchen out of the way to expose a small knick in the wood that also acted as a hand hold. I lifted it up not without a small amount of effort, to expose the rickety wooden stairs. When I’d gone down a few, I reached over and clicked on the light. The air was musty with disuse, but I could still make out the smell of the honeysuckle candle I usually used while I worked. I reached the bottom of the stairs, my heart beating a little faster than normal. I always felt like I was going to break my neck every time I came down here. On one end of the wall, numerous bookshelves stood, crammed to the brim with hundreds of books. I read through about sixty percent of them. The rest I’d picked up on a whim meaning to get to them. But as a bookworm, it was in my blood to have an overflowing TBRpile.
I was proudly embracing my heritage. But now, with everything going on, I felt like I needed to make a bit more effort to get through it. I’d researched quite a bit before I accepted Dolores’ case, but I wondered if I had missed something or if maybe I didn’t fully understand the ramifications of pulling someone back through the veil who had been gone for thatlong.
One the other side of the room stood my slab. It was gray steel and was custom made with slots to hold the candles I needed. I was a stickler about making sure all of my ritual tools were pristine, but now there was a thin layer of dust over everything. I reached below into the cabinet and pulled out a roll of paper towels and a bottle of spray cleaner. Once I had tidied up, I tackled thebookshelves.
Some people color coded their books. Some people alphabetized them. I fell squarely in the category of organization by subject. This made it a little more difficult because all of the books were about necromancy or death in general, but I was able to narrow them down by their subcategories. There were books about funeral rites in different cultures, books about the history of necromancy, even more books about mortuary practices...basically anything about death was located right here in my underground shop. I carefully laid out the books I wanted to try to get through as I was organizingthem.
Scratching on the wood upstairs alerted me to the presence of Margo. I’d left her sleeping on the couch, but it seemed like she was either getting lonely or had to go out. I picked my stack of books up and sat them on the table beside my comfortable reading chair and slowly climbed thestairs.
Margo stood at the top sticking her nose into the hole created by theopening.
“Need to goout?”
She licked her lips and wiggled herbutt.
I sighed and finished climbing the rest of the way out. I needed to get a dogdoor.
I let Margo out to do her business and headed back downstairs with a canvas bag so I could gather up the rest of the books. Just as I was heading back up, Margo started tobark.
I’ve never heard her bark like that since I had her. I rushed upstairs, dropped my bag on the floor, flipped the wooden hatch down and used my foot to shove the rug back over thespace.
“Margo?”
The sounds of growling made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. The wards alerted me to someone’s presence. I pulled open the back door and saw my adorable little puppy guarding my back door. Her lips were drawn back in a snarl at the person standing on the backdeck.
Fear and confusion fought in my belly. “Lucien?”
The vampire was staring at my dog with fear. He didn’t look away from her even as he was poised to run. “Helen, thankgoodness.”
I wasn’t so prone to relief. Nor did I call my vicious little adorable dog off. “Care to explain why you’re on my backdeck?”
Lucien finally looked at me. “Uh, I was bringing your mugback.”
I looked at his hands. They were empty. One of my eyebrows rose. “Would you like to tryagain?”
Lucien shoved his hands in his pockets and made a frustrated noise. Margo took a step closer to him and growled again. “Fine! Fine. Can you call off your dog,please?”
“Nope.” I gave him a fiercesmile.
“Ms. Reaper. I’m only here because my boss made me come back out. He’s interested in something on the back of yourproperty.”
My stomach dropped like a stone. “So your job involvestrespassing?”
Lucien blew out a breath. “Can we just talk, please? I know this looksbad.”
I let out a surprised laugh. “This looks terrible. Not bad. And I think my dog hates you. That’s good enough for me.” I was about to call Margo and go back inside to call the police when he called myname.
“Helen! Please. Just give me five minutes of yourtime.”
My shoulders slumped. Margo gave a low snarl and turned back to look at me as if to askwant me to bitehim?
