He raised his eyebrows and gave me a look then swept past me in the direction of the kitchen and Clarence. Other than the second story that his home possessed and mine did not, the layout of our houses was similar.

  Clarence was still at the table, staring at his empty bowl as if it would magically be filled again.

  But he took one look at Hector and lost all interest in his dish. “Someone’s missing their favorite witch.”

  I paused on the threshold of the kitchen just long enough to catch Hector’s attention.

  He grimaced, his gaze flicking between the two of us. With an annoyed sigh, he said, “I’m concerned for her. She was supposed to move to—” He rubbed his jaw in obvious frustration. “She was supposed to move one place and she landed somewhere else entirely. I just found out. But we have other, more pressing matters.” His gaze settled on Clarence, and he crossed his arms.

  “What? What did I do?” To his credit, Clarence did seem genuinely confused.

  “I’m here to find out what sort of magic you’re hiding under all that spotted fur.”

  Clarence returned Hector’s accusatory stare with a cool look. “Ghosts don’t have magic. I’d have thought a demon with a library as large as yours would know that.”

  Ghosts didn’t have magic. Maybe that was why I’d always discounted the pine forest scent of him. And the way Tamara had used him to supercharge her herbs.

  But there was also the very fact that he possessed an animal’s body. Long term. With no deleterious consequences to his ghostly self or the body.

  And something about that possession… He said he’d tried to save the bobcat. How? Because whatever he did to save the animal, it had hastened his human body’s death. He’d admitted as much.

  Magic. It all came down to magic. There were too many unexplainable events if one looked at the entirety of the facts for there to be any other conclusion.

  We needed that one critical piece of evidence that Hector was currently here to ferret out: what kind of magic?

  “What do you need?” I asked.

  “Coffee?”

  I hid a grin. “I can certainly make coffee, but I was actually talking about him.” I hooked a thumb in Clarence’s direction as I passed the table on my way to the kitchen.

  I didn’t envision Clarence being a willing participant in whatever was going to happen next. He couldn’t be. That was what compulsion did: it controlled actions.

  Hector sat across from Clarence and retrieved those same glasses he’d worn the night previous from a pocket of his lightweight jacket. He placed them on the table before also pulling a small jar from another pocket. “The only other thing I need is for you to accept my apologies—and perhaps for you to open that window above the sink.”

  I picked up the electric kettle and started to fill it, opening the only window in the kitchen while I waited. So it wasn’t as if I wasn’t prepared, and yet—I wasn’t prepared.

  The stench that instantly filled my kitchen was more than foul. It was like a fog of disgusting pea-soup air. The kind that clogged your lungs when you inhaled. The kind that coated not just your tongue, but your throat and nasal passages.

  Clarence hissed and spat several curses I hadn’t heard from him in a long while. His more sensitive sense of smell made him even more susceptible to the nastiness of the miasma filling my kitchen.

  I turned on the oven fan, but it didn’t help.

  Suddenly, I realized what the coffee was for. I doubled the scoops of ground coffee, hoping that Hector knew his business and the strong flavor would cut the taste of death and decay that felt like it had taken up residence inside my nose and mouth.

  I also realized why he’d appeared at my house rather than inviting us to his. Usually he preferred to work in his own space. At least he’d apologized in advance, even if he hadn’t said why.

  Never had water taken so long to boil.

  While I waited, I watched the duo at the table.

  Clarence had stopped spouting profanity but had continued to spit and hiss. On my kitchen table. Just as well I hadn’t already sanitized it after his late lunch. With the way I was feeling, as if I’d been dunked into a sewer with decaying fish, overripe fruit, and a splash of skunk cologne, I’d be sanitizing the entire kitchen, floors and countertops included, when this was over.

  “Well?” Clarence finally said. “What is this supposed to do? Torture me into telling you everything? I can’t.”

  Hector was kicked back in his chair, for all appearances impervious to the stench. “I know.”

  And he just waited.

  Finally, the water boiled. I set the timer to three minutes—I couldn’t hold out for five—when Hector said, “That’s all right, Geoff. It doesn’t need to steep. Just plunge it, and pour a cup for each of us.”

  Each?

  “Uh, caffeine isn’t great for Clarence’s bobcat body.”

  He continued to watch Clarence as he replied to me. “It won’t be a problem this time.”

  Right. Because whatever disgusting concoction Hector had created and that we were all inhaling, it made cats immune to the deleterious effects of caffeine.

  Well…why not?

  I poured three cups. Unlike Hector and me, Clarence couldn’t exactly sip and blow, so I asked, “Can I add some tap water to Clarence’s? I don’t want him to scald his mouth.”

  For the first time since he’d opened the jar of unspeakable stench, Hector turned his full attention to me. And smiled. The charming demon was back.

  “Some tap water is fine.”

  I plunged the coffee and poured three equal portions into coffee mugs. I chose one with a wide mouth for Clarence, then topped his with cold water.

  I didn’t think it was possible, but as I approached the table, the stench worsened. Clarence’s eyes watered as I placed his cup in front of him. He shot me a look that spoke volumes, first and foremost, that there would be retribution.

  With any luck, he’d aim his feline ire at Hector and not me.

  “We are trying to help,” I reminded him, then delivered Hector’s coffee.

  I sat next to Hector with my own cup. It seemed a wise choice to be out of spitting, puking, and clawing range for the moment.

  “Cheers.” Hector lifted the mug to his lips and drank as if the contents weren’t near boiling.

  I blew on the top of mine, lifted it first in Clarence’s direction then Hector’s, then took a sip.

  While I couldn’t speak to its quality in comparison to a properly brewed cup, it did wonders for clearing the taste of rot from my mouth. As the warmth traveled down my throat, it eradicated the effects of the stench in the room.

  Sadly, it didn’t last. As soon as I took a breath, my throat, tongue, and nasal passages were once again coated in whatever it was that emanated from the open jar on the table.

  “It helps,” I commented when I saw that Clarence hadn’t touched his.

  “I can’t.”

  “The coffee’s just coffee. Nothing magical there.” Hector continued to drink his as if it was room temperature.

  Clarence squeezed his eyes until they were just slits.

  Eyes watering and what looked suspiciously like kitty drool collecting in the corner of his mouth, Clarence said, “You’re not lying?”

  Lies weren’t well tolerated by witches, but demons? I didn’t know the answer to that question. I knew next to nothing about demons, even though one lived on my street.

  “I’m not lying.”

  Clarence lapped at the watered-down coffee, then wrinkled his nose. “It’s only marginally better than the crap coming out of your jar.”

  Hector didn’t reply. Instead, he slipped on the glasses that had thus far lain unattended on my kitchen table.

  He was examining Clarence through them. It was obvious he was. He wasn’t even trying to be discreet. He leaned forward looking through the lenses, then ducked his head and gazed at Clarence for several seconds without the aid of them.

  He repeated this a few times, then said, “Huh,” and passed me the glasses.

  I stared at them for a few seconds, then finally put them on.

  The second I looked up, I jerked back at the unexpected vision of…a man.

  Well, a young man. Nineteen years, if I wasn’t mistaken.

  And I wasn’t, because he looked exactly like the picture of Clarence Hart that Lilac had shown me in the car. Tall and gangly, broad-chested, with floppy bangs.

  Also, he didn’t look a bit like a specter. He appeared to be flesh and blood, not ghostly at all.

  The cat that housed Clarence’s ghost was nowhere to be seen.

  I looked over the top of the glasses and there he was, staring back me, looking angry and very much like a bobcat.

  But Hector had been looking for signs of Clarence’s magic, not Clarence the human ghost, so I looked once again through the lenses of the cursed spectacles. This time, I steeled myself against the shock of seeing a man, not a cat or even a ghostly mirage of a man, sitting across the table from us.

  I was looking for…what? Sylvie and Lilac talked about stripping layers of reality to reveal what was underneath, but I wasn’t seeing any sparkles or glow or even the haziness I was accustomed to seeing when ghosts were involved.

  “I don’t see anything. What do you see?” Which was when I made a tactical error and turned to Hector.

  He was blindingly bright. Iridescent. All colors and none. White, but with depth. Breathtaking. Beautiful. Otherworldly…

  “No touching.” Hector snatched the glasses from my face.

  It was then that I realized I was reaching out with my right hand. I hadn’t even realized. I jerked it back. “Sorry.”

  Hector grimaced. “One of the reasons I don’t like going out in the day, not that most people can see it.”

  “Ohmigod, did you just see Hector’s daytime aura? I wanna see it. Give me the glasses. Put them on me. Please.” And Clarence’s FOMO had arrived in full force.

  “I’m not putting the glasses on you.” Hector matched his actions to his words and pocketed the glasses. “I’m not a peep show.”

  His grim tone dulled some of Clarence’s enthusiasm.

  But not all of it, so I pointed a finger at him and said one word: “Shaun.”

  He’d made his way through all the Great British Bake Off episodes at least three times and had recently landed on Shaun the Sheep as his preferred evening entertainment. Personally, I found both choices to be perfectly acceptable. But for some reason, he found them embarrassing.

  And since Clarence regarded Hector in much the same light as I did, as a picture-perfect version of all that was manly and desired by women, he didn’t want to look like a Shaun-the-Sheep-watching sort of cat.

  That shut him up.

  His silence also gave me some room to think, and I realized the terrible stench had abated. I glanced at the jar to find it was capped once again.

  “Tell me that you got what you needed, because I don’t think your jar of unspeakable stench worked for me.”

  “What did you see?” he asked, as if he was only mildly curious.

  “Clarence Hart, aged nineteen. A tall kid with a mop of hair falling in his eyes. A kid who doesn’t look anything like a ghost.” I caught Clarence in my peripheral vision, and his mouth was agape.

  “That’s exactly what I saw,” Hector replied with a smug smile.

  6

  If I was being fair, Hector wasn’t smug. More like pleased with the result of his noxious experiment.

  Clarence had enough of being examined. Either that or the compulsion was doing its work, because he left in a hurry. From the kitchen table, I could hear the faint sounds of the TV in his room.

  Clarence’s dirty dish and his barely touched coffee drew my eye. The evidence of his hissing and spitting wasn’t visible, but I still had an urge to clear the table and disinfect it.

  I managed to restrain myself.

  “Are you going to explain what we saw?” That seemed the obvious question to ask, since Hector hadn’t elaborated after confirming we’d both seen the same thing.

  He looked over his shoulder. “Can he hear us?”

  “Not with the TV on.”

  He nodded. “The concoction—what did you call it? The unspeakable stench?—when combined with a stimulant makes a being’s true self visible. I haven’t managed to perfect the formula, so it’s not visible to the naked eye.”

  “Hence the cursed specs that allow the wearer to detect magic.”

  “Correct.”

  “So Clarence’s true self is…a man?”

  “Ah, not just a man. No dead human’s true self is a fully corporeal, undamaged human body.”

  “I’m not sure I understand this ‘true self’ that you’re talking about. Are you saying that we saw Clarence’s…soul?”

  Which actually made a disturbing sort of sense, because I hadn’t seen even a hint of Clarence’s bobcat host.

  Hector inclined his head. “Some might say the true self is akin to a person’s soul. And Clarence’s wasn’t the only one on display. I got a look at yours, as well.” An expression I couldn’t parse passed across his face.

  Knowing Hector had seen something so deeply personal was disconcerting. Then again, I was basically just a human. Nothing special there. A former soul collector, yes, and perhaps there was something magically odd in the fact that I could see and hear ghosts—but still, I was basically human.

  I wouldn’t look anything at all like, for example, a demon.

  “So all that…” I didn’t have words to describe the brief glimpse I’d gotten of Hector’s true self. Bright and beautiful. Exquisite. So wondrous that I’d been drawn to touch the splendor that was before me. Obviously awkward when that splendor was Hector. “What I saw, that was your true self?”

  “Downside of the concoction: to be able to see others, you must also reveal yourself. What you saw was a part of my true self. You could say that I’m a dual-nature variety of demon.” He didn’t seem enamored of the description.

  “Oh, I see. Day versus night—” I stopped when I realized I was exponentially increasing his discomfort by harping on the details. “And you don’t want to talk about it. Apologies.”

  He shrugged then flashed a grin, but it wasn’t as easy as his usual smiles. “Back to Clarence. If he was human, I would have expected to see the cat’s body and a ghostly impression of Clarence.”

  I went back to what I’d seen, and there most certainly had been no bobcat.

  “You can stop frowning. I didn’t see any signs of the cat either. You wouldn’t in this instance, because the cat has no spiritual self. No existence beyond the physical. No soul, if you will.”

  “But if Clarence were human the cat would have a soul? That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “If Clarence were fully human, he wouldn’t have been able to inhabit the body of a wild animal—any body, actually—once the soul departed.” Hector sighed. “Think about it this way. Do ghosts invade graveyards and possess the corpses buried there?”

  My skin crawled at the thought. Zombies were creatures from the movies, so far as I knew, not a real-life phenomena. “Of course not.”

  “Exactly. As unique as possession is, it’s supposed to be impossible once a host has died.”

  “But we already knew that Clarence’s was the only soul occupying the cat’s body.” Part of my initial negative impression of Clarence had been my inability to see that fact. I’d thought he was torturing some poor wild animal by sharing its body. “Tamara told me that.”

  “Now we have confirmation.”

  I refrained from expressing my annoyance. Actually, no, after what I’d just experienced, I felt justified. “Did you just pollute my kitchen so we could discover exactly what we already knew?”

  “Not at all. We discovered something else.” He stood. Lifting his mug, he said, “A touch of cream or milk? Now that the odor’s gone.”

  “Help yourself. I’ve got full-fat cream and skim milk in the fridge.” Sylvie liked real cream in her coffee, so I kept some on hand.

  While Hector doctored his coffee, I cleared the table and put on another kettle of water.

  “Just a second,” I said when Hector was about to reclaim his seat. I sprayed down the table and wiped it with a paper towel. “It’s Clarence’s new diet. A mix of raw meat and organs and bones and—” He was looking at me with a funny look on his face. “What?”

  “You care about him.”

  “Of course I do. He’s my friend. And really, it’s just the right thing to do. He needs a special diet, because for all he’s human on the inside, the outside is a wild cat.”

  A fact that had been proven by Clarence’s corresponding behavior changes. His human self might crave the comfort of familiar foods—like brats and nachos—but his physical body needed something else entirely. And since he’d been eating a more appropriate diet, he hadn’t been so voraciously hungry.

  I was also worried that without proper care, Clarence might shorten the already brief life of the cat whose body he inhabited. Bobcats only lived an average of seven years in the wild. Just seven. That was a blink of an eye.

  “I have a theory.” He settled himself back into his chair once I’d run a clean dry cloth over the table. “I think Clarence has old magic. The kind that mingles well with the wilder world.”

  The wilder world… Like forests, maybe? “His magic, it, uh, it smells like pine forests to me. I assume it’s his magic, because it’s certainly not the scent of a wildcat.”

  This time when Hector grinned it was broad and genuine. “Is that right? Now that is an interesting piece of information.”

  “You never noticed it?”

  “No, though I suspect Tamara did.” His expression shifted, became more closed. “If she was taking my calls, I’d ask her.”

  I wasn’t as close to Tamara as Hector was, but I considered her a friend. I understood where he was coming from. “At least you have a working number for her. The one we all have is disconnected.”

  Hector shook his head. “She’ll sort herself out eventually.” He caught my eye. “And I don’t think it’s going to take ten years for that to happen, whatever arrangement she’s made with Lilac.”

 

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