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“Thanks for the ride, handsome.” She giggled as she straightened up. “I’ll catch you later.”
He gave her a smirk and gunned his silent engine before taking off into the sunset.
I was pretty sure I was getting a headache.
Magda finally decided to saunter after me, breezing past an unimpressed Charlie who glared as I led her into the restaurant just off the main lobby.
It was a great spot, where you could hear the music from the ballroom, but the little round booths were cozy enough that you could still hear someone sitting across from you. There wasn’t actually any food to be served, but there were glasses and cutlery laid out. Ghosts might not eat, but they sometimes liked the little trappings of life. It made them feel like they were normal.
Magda tossed herself down onto the red velvet bench across from me, pulling her long wavy hair over her shoulder and combing it with her fingers before starting to braid it.
“What the heck did you think you were doing?” I started. “Why did you blow off my summoning like that?” The questions kind of burst out without me completely intending for them to. But the subject had been bugging me ever since that day in the office. I hadn’t even known ghosts could do that. Why hadn’t anyone warned me?
“Oh. That.” Magda shrugged, looking bored. “Look, I don’t know what you wanted, but I knew it was going to be boring, or tiresome, and probably both. And then you’d just pack me off back to the great beyond when you got whatever it was you needed, and where’s the fun in that?”
I wasn’t sure where the fun was in that, so I just didn’t answer.
“So, when you were distracted, I just… slipped out.”
“Slipped out?” I goggled at her. “What the heck for?”
Magda finally stopped fiddling with her hair and looked me square in the face. Her eyes were the same rich green as her granddaughter’s, and the weight in that gaze was enough to punch the air out of my lungs. The stodgy, serious, fierce matriarch I’d first seen was still in there, apparently.
“Listen to me,” Magda said, her voice firm but quiet. “All my life, I did the right thing for my family. I took care of them. Everything I did was for the security and benefit of my clan.”
Her hands dug into the table, and for a second, I thought she’d scratch long white scars into the black lacquer surface. “I married the ‘right’ man. I raised my children and my grandchildren. I took care of our business and kept everyone safe. I lived my entire life for them.”
“Oh.” I gave her a hesitant smile.
That heavy green gaze turned fierce and demanding. “So, now that I’m dead, I want a chance to actually live a little, for as strange as that sounds. To do things for myself, and have some fun while I can. Then, I’ll go wherever it is I’m supposed to.”
The uncomfortable thing was, I couldn’t really blame her. I hadn’t exactly gotten a lot out of my first life, and twenty-five years goes by in a blink. Then you find yourself dead. So, yeah, I got it.
Magda might have lived four times my lifespan, maybe more, it was hard to tell with supernatural types. But somehow, I doubted she’d squeezed in even half the life I’d had. She was just trying to live it up a little now that she was dead and her responsibilities were over.
“Okay, I hear you.” I placed both my hands on the table, and Cain’s ring winked in the light of the chandeliers. “But did it never occur to you that maybe Sophia just wanted your help with something?”
Magda snorted, flopping back into the richly upholstered back of the booth. “I assumed they were all whining after me to fix their problems and take care of things for them. That was the only reason they had for coming to me in life, after all.” She sighed. “But as to Sophia: was Manos being mean to her again? Did one of the cousins have a brush with the law?”
I took a deep breath. “Not quite. Sophia needed to know where the idol is.”
That got Magda’s attention in a big way, and she sat up so abruptly, it looked like she’d been shocked with lightning. “What do you mean, ‘where it is’? It’s always in the niche in my bedroom wall.
Yeah, I was pretty sure I would have noticed a gold snake lady statue when I visited her bedroom. Plus, I had Dimitri’s confession, which I didn’t think he would have spilled unless it was true.
Oh, boy,Cain muttered from the back of my head.
The dark plait of hair tossed over Magda’s shoulder actually moved, writhing across the bodice of her shirt as she glared, her nails pressed against the table, each one looking like a dangerous point.
“Did theyloseour clan’s idol?”
Holy smokes, I did not want to be sitting across a table from Magda Erepto if she was going to go poltergeist. And from the way things were looking, it was becoming more and more likely. Her eyes burned, like the green was back lit. Her teeth looked a little too sharp to be human, and when she spoke, I could have sworn I saw the flicker of a forked tongue behind her lips.
“Um, well, no, not exactly.”
Oh yeah, that was smooth, Darla. It was hard to keep a straight face, though, in the face of her fury. Sweat beaded along my hairline at the back of my neck, and goosebumps chased themselves up and down my arms. Even Cain had gone still and quiet, the way he did when he thought he’d have to move us in a hurry.
Magdasnarled, actually snarled. The sound rattled deep in her chest like the warning it was.
