about an hour and a half for me to read the mojo on the jewelry box, get knocked flat on my ass, and come back to my senses without making you late for your date.” I was being intentionally flippant, but the reality was much more dangerous, and we both knew it.
“Do you think we should wait for Sorren?” Teag asked.
I thought about it for a moment, then shook my head. “Kinda late now, don’t ya think?” I asked with a wry half-smile. “Besides, he’s in Boston, taking care of whatever-it-was that made him up and leave on a moment’s notice. I think I’ll be okay. Let’s get it over with.” I moved my chair closer to the box on the table.
The velvet was worn and faded. It was too big for a ring box, and I wondered if it had originally held a pair of earrings, or maybe a dainty bracelet. The wraith had shown up a few seconds after I opened the box, but as I thought back over what had happened, I realized that the wraith hadn’t come from the box. That was important, because it meant the wraith hadn’t been trapped inside. But why had it shown up at all?
Hard experience taught me to look before I touched. I was also learning to see what I could learn without making contact with an item. Practice was sharpening my ability to use the magic I was born with but had only recently begun trying to control. I held out my hand, palm down, over the faded blue velvet and closed my eyes, concentrating.
The sense of overwhelming loss made me sway in my chair. Second-hand grief welled up in my throat, as tears stung my eyes. Beneath those darker emotions, I felt the remnants of something joyful, sullied now by whatever had been taken away. Dimly, as if in a faded photograph, I saw an image of a couple in their twenties, hand in hand. Then, as I watched, the young man’s image faded away to nothing, leaving the woman all alone.
Magical seeing – things like psychometry, clairvoyance, and being a psychic – requires a lot of reading between the lines. I wish it were as clear-cut as it seems on television, where ghosts speak in complete sentences and visions are in high-definition with the volume turned up. In real life, images are distorted, murky, and incomplete. Spirits move their mouths, but often no sound emerges. The little snip of stone tape memory we see leaves a lot of room for interpretation. And that’s the problem. When we don’t have full information, we have to guess. Sometimes, we’re right and the problem gets solved. Other times, we guess wrong, and someone gets dead.
Then I realized what was causing the extra buzz that my magic had picked up from the velvet-flocked box; this item came with its very own ghost.
In general, my psychic gift of reading the history of objects doesn’t give me any special power to see ghosts. Oh, I’ve seen more than a few ghosts – then again, I live in Charleston, which is one of the most haunted cities in North America. I think it’s written somewhere that every house built before 1950 has to be haunted, and every native-born Charlestonian has a yearly quota of ghostly sightings. Given the nature of what we do at Trifles and Folly, seeing ghosts comes with the territory. Some of the spirits have been helpful. Others have been lost, not even sure that they are really dead. And some of those ghosts have been downright pissed off and dangerous.
In this case, the ghost was terrified out of its ever-lovin’ mind.
As I reached toward the box again, my fingers hovering over the velvet, the ghost welled up at me in a rush, so fast that I rocked onto the back legs of the chair, and might have gone over backward if Teag hadn’t been standing behind me. Most of the time, ghosts hang back, but this one got right in my face, so to speak, screaming soundlessly, eyes wide with fear.
“Are you okay?” Teag was worried. I gestured to him that I was fine. So far, this ghost wasn’t trying to hurt me. It just really wanted to get my attention. Maybe I had been the first living person it had ever had a chance to contact. Or maybe the wraith that had come after Teag and me wasn’t really looking for us at all. Perhaps it had a different