Witch In Charge - Celia Kyle Page 0,4

clip of his words settled uneasily into her already sour stomach. This was probably going to be a bad one.

“Look,” she said with a guilty sigh. “I get it…”

“Oh, so you remember this place?”

That got her attention. Maybe it wasn’t about her being late after all. For once, someone’s frustration might not directly be her fault.

“What about it?” She kept her tone cautious, lest this badger in a suit decide to make breakfast out of her after all.

Louie straightened his glasses as he clenched a portfolio under his arm. “So you don't know,” he said with a heavy sigh. “Hollow House is one of just a handful of sentient structures within Othercross.”

“Sentient? You mean haunted?”

He sighed again. “No, Miss Holloway, not haunted. Sentient. Meaning, the house itself has a sort of…consciousness.”

That was news to Kelly. “How is that even possible?” she asked, looking up at the dark, foreboding building with new appreciation.

“No one fully understands it, but the general idea is that the house has absorbed small amounts of magic from the centuries' worth of witches who've lived in it. Over the years, it’s collected this magic and is able to use it as its own for its own purposes.”

“Cool,” she breathed. “So can it, like, talk and stuff?”

“No, it can't talk, Miss Holloway. It's still just a house.”

“Then how do you know it’s sentient?”

Louie snorted. “The house has its ways of letting its feelings be known. For example, I've been here for over an hour and it won't let me inside. It wouldn't even let me sit on the front steps to wait for you.”

Kelly was immensely curious how the house had stopped him, but he clearly wasn't as amused by the situation as she was, and she didn't want to piss off the man about to hand her the keys to her own home.

“Well,” she said as brightly as she could. “Let’s see what we can do. It’s not going to keep me out, is it?”

Before Louie could answer, Kelly flipped her hair and trotted over to the front steps. The place was pretty ramshackle-looking, all told. The fading gables sported large, dark windows which frowned down on the sidewalk, looking even more forbidding in the light of an overcast morning.

The place was badly in need of a paint job, and in places the timbers sagged. Still, as her foot settled on the first step with a satisfying creak, she knew she’d already made it farther than this bookish little executor had managed. Shooting a pixyish grin over her shoulder, she nodded her head in invitation. With an exaggerated sigh, he fell in step beside her.

“That wasn’t so bad,” she said as they arrived on the broad, leaf-speckled porch.

Clearly unamused, Louie merely grunted. Undaunted, Kelly reached out a hand and tried the door. It was unlocked. In spite of the light throb in her temples, she felt like the day was starting to break in her favor.

Pushing the door wide, she stepped across the threshold and into the home of her youth—not that she remembered it. The door slammed hard behind her and she spun around to see Louie’s silhouette toss its arms in dismay through the curtained window.

“Oh, come on,” he grumbled, his words muffled by the heavy wooden door. “Are you serious?”

Suppressing a chuckle, she turned the knob and pulled back the heavy door to see his lips tight in frustration. Wrinkling her nose in a cute smile, she shrugged again, as if to say, What can you do?

“It seems like the house doesn’t like you very much.”

“Not just me,” he grumbled. “While waiting for you to come of age, we’ve tried to keep the place rented to witches so it didn’t fall into ruin. You see, the house needs witches living in it or its stored magic will drain away and it will…die, in a manner of speaking.”

“Well, from the look of things, your plan worked out great!”

He looked at her blankly and elected to ignore her sarcasm. Holding the door so it wouldn't snap back on him again, she stepped aside so Louie could join her in the foyer.

“Woah,” she said, looking around for the first time at her new residence. “It’s really dark in here.”

“Take off your sunglasses.”

“Oh. Thanks!”

That did help, but only so much. An air of gloom hung around the place, which had the strange effect of making Kelly feel right at home. Maybe it was the hangover but she found it difficult to quantify exactly what it was about the