Page 46 of Demon and the Raven

“So in my case, you wanted to get rid of all my younger brother’s hurt and pain in the house, but keep the love Cass and I had started to build.”

“That’s right,” I said, staring at the man I loved. “You’re quite perceptive.”

“Hey, I’m not just a pretty face.”

“Oh, I know.”

He took hold of my hand, lifted it to his lips, and kissed my knuckles.

We returned to the sitting room, where Lynette was still passed out.

“Should we worry she’s not up yet?” Lorne asked.

“I think she’s been stressed, and probably like a lot of people around town, hasn’t been sleeping, so her body is taking a moment to rest.”

There was a boom above us and then some creaking.

“The hell was that?”

“That is magic making changes to the physical plane.”

He squinted at me. “Meaning?”

“What we said—the bad goes out with the good.”

“Not sure I understand what’s happening.”

“I have a hunch,” I said, letting go of his hand and walking to the straight hall connecting the front and back doors. I didn’t step into the wind tunnel, instead stood and watched.

Lorne, who had followed me, pointed at the balls of what appeared to be cobwebs being blown out of the house. “Explain, please.”

“She said she’d been seeing things all day, and I suspect those are them.”

“You’re saying if you didn’t come over that first time and clear out my brother’s house, it would have gotten like this eventually?”

I shook my head. “This is at least a couple of decades of not cleansing the space. The house has been in the Fornell family for a long, long time, and as far as I know, Lynette’s devotion to magic and mediumship only started after her first bakery went bankrupt.”

“She’s not a witch, then.”

“She’s a practitioner, but this goes back to our talk at Kathy’s.”

“About tools.”

“Yes.”

“So the sage itself would have cleansed this place if she had bothered to do that.”

“Correct, in theory. The problem is, she doesn’t believe in it, so she never learned how to use it correctly.”

He cleared his throat. “Remember when the ghost left our home?”

“I do,” I said, seeing shapes in the smoke rolling out the back door.

“How come there’s no nearly corporeal people stopping to speak to us?”

“I suspect that many of them have no actual ties to the house but were brought by others during her séances.”

“And got stuck here.”