A Ghoulish Midlife (Witching After Forty #1) - Lia Davis Page 0,47

my son, Wallie. Wallie, this is my ghoul, Alfred.” I watched my son carefully for his reaction. What I saw was confusion and fear.

“Mom, what’s a ghoul?” Wallie glanced from Alfred to me and back again. His nose crinkled.

“The long story short is that a local necromancer died, and Alfred was his. Alfred doesn’t want to be freed from his fleshy prison, and ghouls need someone controlling them at all times, so now Alfred belongs to me.” I shrugged. “That’s all I really know about them.”

Wallie gaped as Alfred shook his hand rigorously.

I grinned at them. “I think he’s happy to see you, Wallie.”

Alfred nodded.

Wallie shook himself out of his stupor at meeting Alfred and turned back to me. “Anyway, Mom, I enlisted the help of my roommate. We figured out in the first few days that we both know about all this stuff. He doesn’t have any magic, but his step-mom is a witch, so he knows about it.”

I raised my eyebrows. “A lucky coincidence in a roommate.”

He nodded. “Yeah, but he’s a computer genius, right? So, I asked him to help me look into this witch hunter business. And he got some good information.”

I ushered him into the living room. “Well, come, sit, tell me about it.”

He stretched out in one of the chairs while the rest of us settled around him. I noticed Alfred heading toward the kitchen, probably going to make us something to eat or drink. I wished I could explain to him that he didn’t have to keep doing this. I felt bad that he always did things without me asking.

Owen noticed where my attention had gone and said, “It’s a ghoul’s job to provide services to their handler.”

Nodding, I sighed. “I guess.” We still needed to talk with Alfred about Betty’s death. But I wasn’t sure how at the moment. Besides, Wallie had dirt on the hunters.

“So, anyway, we found some websites that seemed a little more legit than the ones that were basically Buffy fan sites. Dustin hacked into one and found it had a whole private network behind it. Super protected with multiple firewalls and other stuff that I don’t really understand but Dustin does. And we hit the mother lode.” The grin on Wallie’s face made me proud. Somehow, I knew that if med school didn’t pan out, he’d most likely go into private investigating or something.

He pulled a bunch of papers out of his bag and handed them to me. “So, the gist of what we printed off was that the Walker family has been hunting for years.”

Olivia and I both gasped. “Did you say Walker?” she asked. She leaned over and snatched the papers from my hand, scanning them and rifling through them.

“Yeah, there’s even a family tree in there.” He looked at Olivia, then leaned forward. “Why?”

“That’s the local sheriff’s last name, and we’ve gotten some other type vibes off of him.” I pointed to Owen and then myself as I spoke.

Wallie nodded. “Well, check the page with the tree. It seems this thing doesn’t pass down to every kid, and they only have the family member with the gift on the tree.”

Olivia shook the papers. “Here it is.”

“There’s something else,” Wallie said. “I’m having some crazy powers out of the blue.”

Owen spoke up for the first time. “You didn’t have powers before?”

Wallie gave him a weird look. “I did, but they were pretty low key. Basic witch stuff. This is bigger. Like, I can heal superfast. And I don’t need an actual spell to achieve what I want. I think about it and will it so.”

Okay, that wasn’t normal necromancer powers so maybe he wasn’t one after all. I had hoped it would skip him all together and he just got the witch half of my family.

“Then,” Wallie added, lowering his voice. “We went to a party that was near a cemetery and I felt the dead.”

Crap! That was definitely necromancer magic. “I was sure hoping that you would be spared those powers.”

I sank down in my chair just as Alfred entered with a tray of coffee and snacks. When he sat it down on the coffee table, I said, “Thanks. Can you hold off on making dinner? We want to talk to you about something.”

Alfred looked unsure as he scanned the faces of everyone in the room before he took a seat on the floor next to Sammie, who was playing a game on his mom’s phone.

“When you started using your necro powers again, it must’ve jump started his,” Owen said.

“How can that be? We’d