A House Full of Ghosts
I woke the next morning at the house where Raven and Emry lived and, for a moment, thought it was all just a bizarre dream.
Then reality fractured around me. My mind struggled to reconcile two conflicting truths. In one, Emry was dead—had been for seven months. In the other, she was alive and had just been here, talking and breathing and laughing.
Momentarily disoriented, I blinked against the bright square of light behind unfamiliar curtains and blinds, now open, that Emry had closed last night. Which timeline was real? Was I still dreaming? We’d stayed up so late, the three of us, talking about the differences in our timelines and the usual life-death-and-the-universe topics we had always been so fond of in every reality.
Stretching, yawning, I realized I was still curled up on the living room sofa, wrapped in a quilt that smelled faintly of natural laundry detergent with maybe a hint of tea tree oil. My neck ached from the awkward angle, and my eyes were dry from crying. I remembered staying up late with Raven and Emry—laughing, crying, grieving, and remembering. Missing the Emry we’d known and reveling in this one.
Emry.
And even though she’d suggested we make love, the three of us, Raven and I had both said no. We were still bound to who we were in our reality, no matter how much we yearned for the best parts of this one.
That didn’t mean that we didn’t have back rubs and foot rubs and curling up against one another. We’d spent hours on the sofa, before Emry had wandered off to bed and Raven had made a pallet on the floor rather than make a choice he feared he’d regret.
I ran my fingers over the quilt’s stitching. My own energy, or almost my own energy, seemed to emanate from it even if it had been freshly laundered. In the corner was an embroidered tag: “For Lilah, with love. E.” I’d never seen it before yesterday, yet here it was—tangible evidence of a friendship that had continued unbroken in this reality.
The house was quiet except for the occasional creak of settling wood and the distant whine of a neighbor’s lawnmower. The mechanical sound stuttered, cut out for a beat, then resumed with a slightly different pitch. Sunlight off a neighbor’s window caught a crystal hanging from a ceiling fan, casting tiny rainbows across the floor like a tribe of fairies. They danced across a half-closed photo album on the coffee table and what looked like my old leather jacket—the one I thought I’d lost months ago—draped over a nearby chair. I remembered only now that Emry had borrowed it over seven months ago when the library had been too chilly for her short sleeves and she hadn’t brought her sweater.
Then clouds shifted outside, and the rainbows vanished as suddenly as they’d appeared, leaving the room dimmer and somehow colder.
I curled my knees closer to my chest, as if I could press the grief back into my bones. The sudden chill made me pull the quilt tighter around my shoulders. The grief of losing Emry once, and now the impossible fear of losing her again when reality inevitably shifted. We’d just gotten her back. But for how long?
And who, through what tiny interaction, had kept her from dying by the pool last summer? As far as we could tell, it wasn’t even a priest or priestess we knew but maybe some influential stranger who’d been erased had bumped into Aoife or Terre and prevented whoever had pulled away Emry’s soul.
We’d probably never know. Influence like that could have positive or negative results, and I couldn’t begin to guess how to sway someone in either direction to get a better result than the one I’d lived.
As for Emry, my Emry had confided in Raven and me several times about the angel-like figure in her dreams, tugging at her, how she’d almost lift out of her body but her soul would catch on her hip and settle back into her body. This Emry, the Emry who’d been the third in our triad, had never experienced any attempts at soul theft.
Twisting my knees toward the back cushions of the sofa, I stretched until my back popped, then rolled my shoulders. I wasn’t quite awake yet, and maybe I’d dreamed the whole thing and wouldn’t know it until after I napped more. Instead, I rolled my neck, ignoring the snap-crackle-pop of stiff joints as I blinked over the arm of the sofa.
Raven—who I distinctly remembered sleeping on a makeshift bed of blankets and pillows on the floor after Emry went to bed—was now sitting at the kitchen table with Emry’s laptop and a mug of tea.
He’d been working. There was a stack of notes beside him, a printout of a priesthood directory, and what looked like a half-finished access report.
His hair was pulled back in a loose knot, dark circles shadowing his eyes, yesterday’s stubble on his cheeks. Despite the tension in his shoulders, there was something oddly domestic about seeing him like this—comfortable in a space that, according to all evidence around us, we had shared countless times before.
“Good morning, sunshine.” He didn’t look up.
A car engine rumbled past outside, slow and deliberate. I glanced toward the window but couldn’t see anything through the curtains.
I stretched again. “Have you been up all night?”
He shook his head. “Only since dawn. About six hours ago.”
Startled by how late I’d slept, I leaped to my feet. Instantly, I regretted moving so fast.
“Emry left already,” Raven added. “She logged me back in before she ran errands. Said she needed to grab everything she might need from the library before Monday.”
“Why Monday?”
“Aoife’s having all the libraries eliminate public hours.” He took another sip of tea, and I wondered how many cups he’d had at this point, but I could tell by the tiredness in his voice that he hadn’t slept a full night. “Starting next week, the library’s only open to the priesthood and the Historical Society, and only part-time.”
He pushed a printed memo across the table.
“New edict came down this morning. It’s getting worse—they’re implementing an ‘identification verification system’ for all visitors. Retinal scans, facial recognition, the works.”
I blinked. “Seriously?”
“Seriously,” he confirmed. “She’s calling it ‘enhanced security protocols for uncertain times.’ It’s martial law in all but name. I’m surprised she hasn’t decided to have us chipped like puppies to keep us where we’re supposed to be.”
Raven nodded toward the counter. “Fresh-baked blueberry muffins, if you want breakfast. Or… very early lunch. Something about this place has re-awakened my baking talents.”
I sniffed the air and groaned. My stomach growled, but my appetite vanished as quickly as it had appeared. The muffins sat in a ceramic dish painted with blue flowers—another piece of this strange shared life I couldn’t remember living.
I turned away. “Not hungry. Probably the shifting realities messing with my appetite.” I walked into the kitchen and leaned against the counter. The lawnmower outside fell silent again, creating an odd pocket of quiet that made me pause. “Has anything changed since yesterday? Since we left the library?”
Raven rose from his chair. “Not that I can tell. Here.” He handed me a muffin wrapped in a paper towel. “Eat anyway. You never know when we’ll get another chance.”
“I wonder if there’s any way to tell,” I murmured. “About the changes, that is.”
A mental countdown hovered in the back of my mind. Two days left. Two days of protection before time would steamroll over us, our memories reshaped to match whatever timeline we ended up in. If we weren’t erased.
He lifted a small brass mirror on a stand from the table and tapped the glass. “Nope. Apparently, I still like braids.”
He turned the mirror toward me. My reflection showed a messy, half-untangled braid trailing down my shoulder.
I moved closer, studying the face that was both mine and not mine. I turned my head slowly left, then right, watching the braid sway with the movement. I raised my hand to touch it—the reflection did the same—but my fingers met only loose strands of hair.
“This is wild,” I whispered, flexing my fingers in front of me. In the mirror, the reflection’s hands seemed slightly different—the nails longer, a ring I didn’t own on the middle finger. “Like looking at a different version of myself. One whose life took another path.”
I ran my fingers through my own loose hair, confused. “That’s not—how did—” I shook my head.
We sat together in the quiet kitchen, watching light and shadow from the windows spill across the floor as we ate muffins. Raven made another cup of tea while I drank alkaline water from a bottle from the fridge. Apparently, in this reality as well as the one I’d left behind, I still had residual trauma about drinking anything dark that I hadn’t made myself or from a bottle I hadn’t opened.
Makes sense. In both realities, we had a shitty childhood.
I finished my second muffin. Licking the blueberry stain off my finger, I said, “It’s been what, eighteen hours? And still nothing’s changed.”
“That we know of,” Raven added.
I closed my eyes briefly, a fragment of memory surfacing—Emry’s laughter echoing across Dru’s backyard, the angled light of the golden hour before sunset. The heaviness of dread as she mentioned the magical attacks she’d been experiencing after we’d spent the afternoon playing a Daeganean ice-breaker Jakin called “Prophecy Games.” Dessert by the pool. The shock of watching Emry fall into the water, Raven diving in after her. Emry’s relief, then sudden terror when she noticed the protective sigils on her arms had blurred and washed away.
“I keep having these flashes. Of that night. At Dru’s.”
“The night she died,” Raven said, his voice equally quiet.
I nodded. “It’s so vivid. But here she is, alive and well, making sex tapes and running errands like nothing happened. Like she never died in your arms.”
“She didn’t. Not in this timeline.”
“But she did in ours,” I insisted. “That’s the reality I remember. That’s the truth. Our truth.”
I hesitated, then said, “I keep thinking about something Rune said once. She bragged about never getting out of bed before noon.”
Raven raised an eyebrow. “You think Rune’s behind this?”
“I think she’s involved. I’ve seen her handiwork before.”
“Like what?” Raven asked. “You think it’s payback for you and me planting surveillance at her house for Dru? Or maybe for Dru trying to put an end to her stealing from the library?”
“When you put it that way, it could be any number of things on a very long list.”
“Or maybe just the fact that her husband still loves you and regrets marrying her?”
Warmth rose in my cheeks. It didn’t matter if Charlie still loved me and Rune had found out he was hanging on to mementoes I’d given him early in our relationship. He could paint himself as a martyr, if he wanted, for saving a damsel in distress and marrying her to protect her from a threat that didn’t even exist, but I was the one who’d been jilted and his sacrifice didn’t feel so noble to me, especially since Rune had manufactured the danger she was in.
“Sorry,” Raven said. “I shouldn’t have brought that up. But I don’t know that Rune is the culprit. The Book of Heroes is a weapon, and she wouldn’t know that.”
“She wouldn’t have to. Yes, she’s stolen artifacts and rare books and sold them on the black market, but she also carves up antiquarian books and sells them as individual pages. Sometimes, the sum of the parts is worth more than the whole. Like the time I caught her trying to sell a page from the Corvus Grimoire online,” I replied, the memory sharp and clear. “She tore it out of the book while she was in Gate 1 and then it turned up on eBay. She’d framed it behind UV-protective glass and listed it as ‘rare occult art’ for eight thousand dollars. When I confronted her, she just laughed and said Charlie would never believe me.”
“I remember. Dru thought she had her on camera in Gate 1, but she was hiding behind one of the pillars in the room when she did it. And Charlie was on duty, but we already know he’s complicit.”
“Dru was never able to prove it, but we all knew it.” I started pacing, my familiar anxiety rising. “It hasn’t happened much inside the Special Collections Library. At least, not where we could prove it, but I do know that Rune has a habit of acquiring rare books our library isn’t interested in. She sells the pages.” I paused at the window. “You remember that coven grimoire? The one from Samantha’s old group?”
Raven nodded.
“She didn’t sell the whole book,” I continued. “She framed the pages individually and sold them online—one by one. Made a hundred times more than she would’ve if she sold it whole. Half of them were love spells Samantha wrote for Jakin.”
“Hmm, embarrassing. I’m guessing that’s why Samantha hates Rune? Or,” he added with a laugh, “are we just gossiping about things that happened in another reality that didn’t happen here?” He waved for me to sit down with him.
“Hey, now! Don’t be mean,” I teased. “Oh, and remember that map of Atlantis we recovered last November? It disappeared while Matrease was couriering it back for us. Dru found pieces of it for sale on three different occult auction sites. Each fragment going for thousands. Rune doesn’t care about knowledge—she cares about profit.”
Raven frowned. “And revenge. You think she’s doing the same with The Book of Heroes? Slicing out pages one at a time and changing reality without knowing what she’s doing?”
I crossed my arms. “It feels right. It fits her pattern. She probably wouldn’t go from front to back. She’d aim first for the pages that she thinks will sell fast. They’re pretty or interesting or something. As far as we can tell, nothing’s changed since she’s been—most likely—asleep. We need to find her and see what we can learn. She’s not above profiting from knowledge she doesn’t understand. Even if she doesn’t know it’s a loaded weapon she’s got, it’s still loaded.”
“But first, we’d have to find her,” Raven said. “Assuming she hasn’t vanished again.”
“We both know where Charlie lives,” I said quietly. “Or did. In a previous timeline.”
“The surveillance mission,” Raven said with a nod. “When we planted cameras in their house.”
“And I stole the toilet paper,” I added with a faint smile. “Not my proudest moment.”
The silence that followed was shaped by everything we’d left behind.
Raven’s hand moved across the table, briefly covering mine. The warmth of his touch anchored me.
“You are my anchor.”
The words I’d said during our protection spell. The words inscribed in the book where the spell had been.
“If Rune is behind this,” he said softly, “we’ll stop her. She’s not some powerful witch like Aoife or Terre. Just a soft-spoken psychopath who masterminds a ring of book thieves and lately hasn’t been that good at it because we keep blocking her plans. We’ll fix this, Lilah.”
I turned my hand beneath his, our fingers briefly intertwining before I pulled away. “Even if we do, what then? Do we go back to our original timeline? Or are we stuck in whatever reality we end up in when the protection spell expires?”
“Emry left me logged into her networks. The Book of Heroes has a file in the database where someone scanned the book and cross-referenced it. The file lists all the heroes by name and birthdates.” The laptop screen flickered briefly, lines of static racing across it before clearing. Raven sighed and turned back to his laptop. “I looked it up again this morning. You’re not in The Book of Heroes, Lilah.”
“Should I be offended?”
“You should be relieved.”
“Is Dru in it?”
His expression grew thoughtful. “No. I checked—Drusilla’s not in there either.”
I snorted. “I’m not sure I like that. Some people would consider me more of a villain than a hero.”
Raven chuckled. “It’s not about that. The Book of Heroes is priesthood-specific. Only initiated, active Daeganeans with measurable influence get listed. You and Dru… you’re protectors, but you’re not initiated. Or weren’t as of 2015. So you’re not included.”
A notification chimed from the laptop, but when Raven glanced at it, the screen showed no new messages. He frowned and tapped the trackpad.
“Still,” I said, “that doesn’t mean we’re safe. If a priest or priestess who influenced us gets erased, then so does their influence. Like… like George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life that we watch every Christmas.”
I hesitated, my voice catching. Suddenly, it was hard for me to breathe.
“And I—I would hate to think, Raven, where I’d be now without your influence.”
My thoughts filled with all the ways Raven had shaped my life, pulling me back from dark edges, teaching me how to control my empathic abilities, believing in me when no one else did, calming my literal and figurative demons. If he disappeared… who would I become?
Raven regarded me for a long moment. “Or without Jakin’s. Or Aoife’s.”
Rolling my eyes, I looked away. “Jakin. He’s not in the book either, is he?”
“No,” Raven confirmed. “Even though people called him the Bad Boy Priest, he was more show than substance. Charismatic, sure—but no real impact.” Raven grunted. “Over anyone, really, and that’s sad.”
I shrugged. “Jakin was never meant to be a hero.”
Raven studied me thoughtfully and reached for his now-cold tea. “I’m not listed in The Book of Heroes either. Too young, I suppose,” he mused. “Or at least I hope. But there are certainly people listed who had a tremendous influence on me. Like Terre. Aoife. My foster mother, Tessa.”
I could see the shadows of both Terre and Tessa in his eyes when he spoke their names, like incantations in a Daeganean ritual.
He went still, then sputtered, “Not to mention my parents. They’re both in the book. And if either of them is deleted… so am I. All because, in some other reality, Rune—or someone else, if not her—is removing the pages, one at a time. And eventually, their pages will be gone, and so will they. And so will I.”
His voice broke slightly on the last words, and I saw real fear in his eyes. The idea that his entire existence might depend on a page in a book that someone was methodically destroying.
The same car engine rumbled past again, slower this time. I caught a glimpse of dark blue through the window sheers.
I drew in a sharp breath. “So we’re in real trouble here?”
Raven’s eyes met mine. “Both of us.”
“Then we need to act now. Every hour that passes is another possible deletion, another life erased.”
I grabbed a piece of paper from Raven’s notes and sketched out the route from memory. “Charlie’s place is only about half a mile from here. At least, it was.”
Another chill swept through the room despite the warmth from the heating system.
I glanced out the window. “Since Emry’s gone for a while and we don’t have a car, we might as well walk over and confront Rune. End this whole mess.”
Raven raised an eyebrow. “Assuming the book and the missing pages exist in this version of reality, and she has them.”
We both sat in silence for a moment longer.
“Still,” I said, “so far we seem to be protected. From everything.”
We traded a look.
Raven gestured toward me with his mug. “Remember the words?”
“Something about being impervious to the charms and spells of others. But only for three days. Which means we’ve only got two left.”
The countdown ticked louder in my mind. Two days. Forty-eight hours, give or take, before we lost our protection. Before we forgot who we really were.
We both turned toward the mirror one last time. I lifted the brass frame and angled it toward us. Nothing had shifted.
Through the kitchen window, I caught sight of birds wheeling overhead—too many of them, moving in tight, organized formations that didn’t look natural. They circled in precise patterns, like they were mapping the area.
We rose, gathered our things, and walked toward the front door. At the threshold, we hesitated.
“Phones?” Raven asked.
“Emry was just worried about what we said in the house. I think we’re okay.” An uneasy feeling settled in my stomach. “Maybe we should keep them off until we get there.”
Raven’s eyes confirmed our understanding, and we moved our phones from the Faraday bag to our pockets. Immediately, Raven’s phone buzzed. He pulled it out, frowned at the screen, then showed it to me. An incoming call from a number that was just a string of zeros. He declined it, but it immediately started ringing again.
“That’s weird,” he muttered, powering off the phone entirely before tucking it back into his pocket.
Outside, we began our walk through a quiet, tree-lined neighborhood. The February air was mild in the Florida sunshine, though I could feel the chill whenever we passed through shadows. Yet I couldn’t shake the unease that had been building all morning. The birds I’d noticed from the kitchen window were still overhead. Their formations were too precise, too coordinated, and something about their flight patterns made my skin crawl. I kept glancing up at the sky, shoulders tensed, every instinct screaming that something was wrong.
In the distance, the lawnmower started up again, then cut out abruptly. The sudden silence felt deliberate, like someone had been waiting for us to leave.
Something shifted in the atmosphere. Not visible, but palpable to my empathic senses. A presence. Watching. Hunting.
“Those birds,” I whispered to Raven, pointing up. “They’re not moving like birds should. We’re being followed.”
Raven scanned the sky. “Birds?”
“No.” I watched the dark shapes above us, counting at least six in a perfect hexagonal pattern. “Look at how they’re flying. Too organized. Too… mechanical.”
I reached for his perception, trying to share what I felt. “It’s… aware. Almost sentient. Circling.”
He narrowed his eyes. “Drones.”
High above, the black shapes circled in a wide arc, closing in.
Without another word, we broke into a dead run.
Heat rose from the asphalt in shimmering waves as we sprinted down the street. My pulse rushed in my ears. It drowned out everything but the rhythm of our footfalls. Raven’s boots skidded on loose gravel as we rounded a corner. His hand reached back to steady me.
The presence followed, heavy and imminent, like a storm cloud looming ever closer. My lungs burned as we pushed harder, faster.
We rounded a corner—only to freeze. Charlie’s neighborhood was gone.
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