Page 48 of Woods of the Raven

“I can guess,” he whispered.

“When my grandmother passed, there was no one for me to lean on. We had kind neighbors, but no one at home, in our house, with me and him. He was all I had.”

“Sure.”

“I was nearly the same age as Cass,” I murmured, lighting the palo santo incense stick with the lighter he’d given me earlier. Once it had curls of smoke lifting into the air, I plunged it into the glass bottle and swirled it around. “So if he’d broken down, I would have been lost. He was my anchor.”

“Of course.”

“Even though he was grieving, he had to stay present for me.”

He nodded again as I lifted the stick out and held it between my fingers like a cigarette as I poured the rice into the bottle.

“I can hold that for you,” he offered.

“Thank you.” I passed him the stick, noting the shiver that ran through him the moment he took it from me. “Now, you know as well as I do that it’s been Lor who’s been caring for Cass, and while that’s been done out of kindness on his part, it’s also allowed you to retreat from the world.”

“It has,” he agreed, sitting up a bit straighter.

“You’re haunting this house, and you left him to do the heavy lifting with her, and I need to ask…would your wife want that?”

He exhaled deeply. “You have no idea what it’s like to lose the love of your life.”

“No, I don’t. But not living for your child seems selfish to me. It seems like she should be your first priority, not your own grief.”

He closed his eyes hard, and I let him sit there, inside himself, thinking, feeling, ruminating on all he was. I got up and carried the bottle full of rice to the front door, went outside, and set it to the side of the doorway, in the frame of one of the windows that were like decorative bookends.

“Allow no negativity to enter, collect it all, keep it all,” I said, then tapped the cork three times to wake it up.

Back inside, I rejoined James, taking a seat back on the table in front of him. He was watching me now, and his coloring, which had been ashen when I arrived, a sickly pale gray, was now improving. He didn’t have the lovely, warm tan his brother had, nor the burnished ivory of his daughter, but he no longer resembled a plague victim from the fourteenth century either. It was progress.

“Do me a favor, would you?”

James shrugged.

“Could you stand and use the smoke from the incense stick on the bottom of your feet and the palm of each hand?”

He did as I asked, and then I had him make circles in the air over his head, behind him, and finally in front.

“The past is behind you, the present is in your head. It’s where you stand and what you see, and the future is in front of you. We’re going to cleanse it all,” I said, and took first the incense stick and set it down in the other uncorked glass bottle, and then his hand, and walked him into the hall, where the wind tunnel was blowing chilled night air straight through the house from one end to the other. “Go now,” I said to the energy, to the weight of his grief and pain. “The memories remain, as does the love, but you are not welcome.”

He stood there, eyes closed, and I watched him breathe. I was very pleased with him.

When I glanced toward the door, there was a man there—a ghost—looking at me. He didn’t appear angry, just a bit confused.

“I’m so sorry,” I told him. “Normally, when people move into a house, they have a blessing, and you would have known then that it was time to go. I apologize, sir.”

He nodded.

I put my right hand over my heart. “We will take good care of your lovely home and treasure it and thank it for protecting and sheltering us.”

Another nod before he smiled, put on the fedora he was holding, and walked out into the night, disappearing in the moonlight. When I turned back to check on James, he and Lorne and Cass were all standing there, staring at me.

“This is why it’s so important to cleanse your space before you move in. You don’t want to miss letting others know that they don’t have to stay and watch over you, that you’re perfectly capable of taking care of yourselves.”

No one said a word.

I waved a dismissive hand at Lorne and Cass to continue with their cleansing, but instead, they both remained where they were. I was thinking they had questions.