Chapter 1
Elizabeth lay on the hearth, a low fire toasting her on one side and a cold draft sliding down the other. To even things out, she rolled over and back, readjusting the stiff embroidered pillow beneath her head. Each time she rotated, her foot bumped the ornate brass stand holding the fireplace tools and the dainty poker edged closer to the fingertips of the brass cupid which held it upright.
At the moment she was lying on her back. With one hand she twisted a lock of honey-colored hair that would later refuse to lie flat among its fellows. In her other hand was a Molière play, the spine of the slim volume cracked, a sad victim of her self-improving effort to read the play in French. She shivered slightly and frowned at the source of the draft, her companion who was draped bonelessly across the pink chaise longue a few yards away, a battered calculus book laid open beside him. Thomas Penrose scratched at a pad of paper with a long pencil and frowned back, his eyes on the broken spine of her book. He was working problems without the benefit of a calculator, which would have been useless to him anyway. Electrical devices went haywire whenever he approached to within a distance proportional to the complexity of the electronics, e.g. toasters were relatively impervious to his influence, but computers would give up the ghost.
A pity; he was an overclocker's dream. The air rolled off him at a temperature of fifty degrees Fahrenheit. She knew because she'd measured, and she knew that he himself was much colder. She'd tried to stick the thermometer actually into the plasm that constituted his not-quite corporeal form, but that experiment hadn't gone over too well.
"What is patte?" she asked him.
"Forefeet. For heaven's sake, you've got a dictionary right there."
"Be nice to the person who calculates logarithms for you," she said mildly, rolling over to thaw out her right side. The poker leaped to freedom and thumped to the rug.
"Hey, Elizabeth." Her sister Alice popped through the bedroom door. "Do you mind if we go out on your porch? We need to get at the oak tree." Their housemate Dirk followed her in, clicking a set of pruning shears in his hand.
"Sure, but why?" Elizabeth asked.
"Mistletoe, of course, 'pale-green, fairy mistletoe' for the hall and Miss Price wants some too," she said, wrenching open the porch door.
This was the first Elizabeth had heard of it. She abandoned her book and followed her sister and Dirk out onto the porch. The chill at her back, colder than Virginia in mid-December, indicated that Thomas was more than eager to drop whatever integral was currently tying his brain in knots. She'd peeked at his pad on her way to the door and seen that he'd divided by zero two steps back from the very bad place where he was now. No wonder a little light pruning had caught his interest. Besides, it was his oak tree.
This late in the season, the oak had dropped all its leaves to reveal the shadowy green bushes of mistletoe sucking life from its branches. One such branch extended parallel to the porch railing and sent twigs sideways to tap against the Victorian gingerbread of the porch. Elizabeth noticed Dirk didn't have any of his climbing gear on him and wondered how he (or Alice) intended to crawl out on a branch which was beyond the reach of any normal person. The branches within reach were too slender to support anything larger than a cat.
"How are you going to get out there?" Elizabeth asked.
"Well." Dirk rubbed his chin and surveyed the situation. "Before, we were always able to pull branches with mistletoe close enough to cut some, but I think we've exhausted that possibility since somebody went a little overboard last year. Alice."
"Hey, you can never have too much mistletoe. Unless you're an oak tree, I guess. Joe was telling me how his dad harvests it with a shotgun and he would have done that for us—"
"No." Thomas's eyes widened. "Not at the house."
Unable to hear the interjection, Alice continued. "—but I figured the neighbors might freak out if someone started shooting a shotgun at the trees. Besides, since I dumped him he's not going to come over here and help."
"Why did you dump him anyway?" Elizabeth asked. This was a relatively recent development and Alice, busy with Joe's replacement, hadn't fully apprised her of all the details.
"He cramped my style. I swear, I didn't realize how much illegal stuff I did till I started dating a cop." Alice flung one leg over the railing and reached out to grab a branch.
"Are you nuts?" Dirk dropped the pruning shears and grabbed her belt.
The railing creaked ominously.
"That won't hold her weight," Thomas warned. "It's kind of rotten."
"Thomas says it's rotten," Elizabeth told the others.
"Oh?" Alice relinquished her hold on a slender twig and allowed Dirk to haul her in. Once both feet were back on the right side of the railing, she placed one hand on it and shook it. One of the gingerbread slats detached and fell to the ground, a good twenty feet below. It cracked in half and lay forlornly at the foot of the oak. "Tell Tom he should get this thing fixed."
"Tell your sister I can always raise the rent if she's not satisfied with the level of maintenance," Thomas said dryly.
Elizabeth didn't pass that on. It had hardly been a month since the housemates had learned of the presence of their ghostly landlord, but the charm of being the only one who could see or hear him was wearing thin. Generally Thomas conversed with the others by means of an old Underwood typewriter they now kept on the kitchen table, but they all tended to use her as an interlocutor out of laziness. Elizabeth liked reading through the sheets of paper that recorded one side of their conversations. She could tell with whom Thomas had been communicating from the style of his writing: simply structured sentences and punctilious modern spelling when speaking with Dirk or Bob, a style that, when Alice was involved, rapidly degenerated into long, unpunctuated statements that ran off the edge of the page onto the platen, with the spelling collapsing into a very seventeenth century lack of standardization and the caps lock key being left on.
Alice directed her gaze towards the invisible target of her sister's frown and let her blue eyes grow wide. "How light are you, Tom?"
"Oh no." Thomas took a step back.
"Can you fly?" Alice took a step forward.
Thomas's back was against the bricks. "Is your sister mad?"
"If he's really light," Dirk began.
"I think he's afraid of heights," Elizabeth said.
"I am not!"
"He wouldn't weigh down even the thin branches and he could get to the mistletoe," Dirk said.
"I could fall, just like you—no, you're not that silly—like Alice," Thomas said.
"How fast would you fall?" Elizabeth asked. "If you hardly mass anything, you won't accelerate like we would, you'd land really lightly."
"Et tu, Elizabeth?"
She shrugged. "You might as well give in. You know Alice won't. If it would make you feel better, we could stand underneath the tree and hold out a sheet to catch you."
"That won't be necessary." Thomas edged around the advancing Alice. He relieved Dirk of the pruning shears, eliciting a startled yelp from him, and climbed up on the railing which noticeably did not protest his negligible weight. Alice and Dirk gaped at the apparently floating shears. Thomas faded a touch, till Elizabeth could barely see him in the watery winter sunlight, and reached out for a branch. The most slender twigs bent only slightly as he transferred his grip to them. He carefully climbed out onto the larger branch and walked over to the trunk.
Elizabeth watched to make sure Thomas wasn't in imminent danger of falling, although she couldn't imagine what they could do for him if he did fall. If he fell really slowly, they could run down and catch him in a kitchen towel, maybe. She asked, "So, you didn't dump Joe for Museum Boy?"
"No. I didn't meet Mus—him till after. Joe was getting to be kind of a pain about me sort of taking that car."
"'Sort of'? You hacked into the DMV and transferred title to yourself! That's 'sort of' stealing."
"Fine. Be that way. It's not like I make a habit of white-collar crime. Technically. Anyway, he's sweeter than Joe ever was." Alice flipped her long blonde ponytail over her shoulder and watched the progress of the pruning shears through the branches of the oak tree. "Try for that big bunch, near where your head would be if I could see it," she called.
"Museum Boy is gay," Dirk said.
"You think everyone's gay," Alice snapped.
"Not everyone, but Museum Boy is. The gay-dar doesn't lie. He's only going out with you to get closer to me."
"Oh please! Why doesn't he just ask you out then?"
"Because he hasn't come out to himself yet. He still thinks he's bi. Besides, he knows I'm seeing someone."
"Riiiight."
"Get a clue. Museum Boy's got all of us tickets to that gala mummy thing at the museum. What straight man takes his girlfriend on a date to a fundraiser with—how many?—six of her closest friends?"
"Because he's nice. And he's doing it for me because I said how it was never possible to even see the mummy the way they have it displayed."
"Yeah, nothing says love and romance like viewing a shriveled corpse."
Ignoring him, Alice went on. "All those school field trips to the museum. Some dumbass would ask to see the mummy, even when it was a trip to see the medieval stuff, and then we'd have to all go stare at that dumb, dark diorama forever while stupid people tried to convince themselves they could see something."
Elizabeth agreed. Every field trip she and Alice would wander off to look at art objects with actual light on them and get scolded. On one memorable occasion, they strayed into the collection of Greek ceramics and their teacher had a fit when she found them giggling over the anatomically correct depictions of naked athletes. Rumor (confirmed by Museum Boy) had it that the gala would feature the final viewing of the mummy before it was sent off for research and restoration, then sealed back inside its sarcophagus forever. And the sisters both knew that Museum Boy had access to all the light switches in the Egyptian collection. A plan was made. Tickets were acquired.
"Besides," Alice added, "I was telling him about those recurring dreams I've been having, the Egyptian priestess ones like I had around this time last year. They're the kind of dreams that play like a movie. There's a big crowd all dressed up in Egyptian clothes, like from the tomb paintings and they're all talking in some language I can't understand. In the dream, it always seems like something really amazing is about to happen. Then I wake up." Alice pulled her ponytail back over her shoulder and inspected the ends. "And in the dream, I have on a big black wig and a golden collar and everything. And this really awesome linen dress and cool sandals. Maybe next year I'll be Egyptian for Halloween."
"You had the same dreams last year?" asked Elizabeth.
"Yeah," said Alice. "I don't know why. Is it Christmas on the Nile or what?"
"Yeah, Christmas on Denial," said Dirk. "You're probably still eating too much Halloween candy before you go to sleep."
Thomas hauled himself up beside the mistletoe designated by Alice and attacked it with the pruning shears where it tapped into the oak. He asked, "Is Alice using this for decorations or is she planning some ghastly solstice rites?"
"What are you going to do with the mistletoe, Alice?" Elizabeth relayed.
"I'm going to hang some in the front hall and Miss Price wants some for the bookstore too. I think she's going to hang it over the register in case some Prince Charming with decent taste in literature comes in. The coven will probably want some for Yule too, but I think they really just want to get free mistletoe for their houses because it costs so much to get it from a florist."
"What does the coven do for Yule?" Elizabeth asked, hoping it didn't involve trespassing like their Samhain festivities did.
"Have a party and burn things," Dirk said. "It's pretty low key because everyone does Christmas stuff too and there's not time for everything. I think Miss Price would like to do more, but she's fighting a losing battle." He sat down in the porch chair and leaned back, locking his fingers behind his head.
Over in the tree, Thomas detached the mistletoe and heaved it at Alice's head.
"Hey! No poltergeist stuff!" she cried indignantly, pulling it out of her hair. "We need, like, three more of these." She set the mistletoe on Dirk and directed Thomas to another shrub.
The front hall was an obstacle course for the mistletoe-averse. Alice had hung sprigs over the front door, the entrance to the living room, and from every light fixture. Elizabeth couldn't imagine that Alice needed that many excuses to kiss her new boyfriend, unless Dirk was right about his sexual orientation and Museum Boy wasn't terribly interested. Elizabeth stood on the bottom step of the front stairs and, as an intellectual exercise, tried to plan a kiss-free route to the front door. To avoid the mistletoe hanging from the chandelier, she hopped at an angle onto the futon that still lay in the hall where Dirk and Bob had dropped it when they'd helped move her stuff into the house. The futon was now auxiliary coat storage, a relief for the overburdened coat tree, and occasional housemate storage for when Bob came home from the hospital too exhausted to climb up to his room on the third floor. He wasn't on there now; Elizabeth had checked, poking the pile of coats with her toe because you never could tell, before jumping on them. She stepped up from the futon onto the hall table.
The lock in the outer doors rattled and the doors opened to reveal Bob, looking unusually awake. He grinned at Elizabeth as he stepped through the inner, glassed doors, but his grin faded to puzzlement. "What happened?" He looked at the floor.
"Nothing. I'm just avoiding the mistletoe that Alice put all over the hall." She pointed out the various sprigs. The largest clump was hanging directly over Bob's head.
He did not move out from under it. "Elizabeth? I was wondering, they're having this thing at work on Saturday. A Christmas Party."
"Oh?" she said neutrally. If he were asking her on a date … The strains of a romantic Beethoven sonata drifted out of the music room and down the hall.
He paused, took a deep breath, and continued. "I thought you might like to come. It's in the Egyptian Building and you'd said how you were interested in seeing the inside of it."
The Egyptian Building was a mid-nineteenth century Egyptian Revival structure that had been the original home of the Medical College of Virginia. In the weeks since Alice had taken up with Museum Boy, she had revived the sisters' childhood Egypt obsession which had begun when they read The Egypt Game and only ended when their mother had caught them applying false eyelashes and spraying their hair black to look like Cleopatra. Then Elizabeth had discovered the Egyptian Building while walking in Jefferson Park. She'd looked out across the Shockoe Valley and into the skyline, where the a sixties-era brick box had lately been torn out to reveal the older structure behind it. The morning sun had dusted the papyrus tops of the columns with gold and glittered in the diamond paned windows. Enchanted, she'd walked the half mile over to the building and peered through the glass doors at the inlaid marble floors (scarab patterned) and stenciled trim around the interior doorways (more scarabs). The sisters had been plotting to get inside sometime, but they were always working during the hours that the building was unlocked. If Bob had had a key, he would have been dragooned into escorting them in after hours, but he didn't. Or if he did, he was wisely saying nothing.
But now if she agreed to go with Bob, then it would appear that the building was the attraction, not Bob, which didn't seem quite nice. But then he'd opened himself up for that with his not-a-date implication. But she actually rather liked him. He was nice, funny, and smart, and easy on the eyes. The one drawback was that he was her housemate and therefore not wise for her to date. But—
She jumped off the mental merry-go-round. "Sure. That sounds great. Is it formal? What time is it?"
Apparently expecting neither an affirmative nor a reasonable request for information, Bob blinked and suavely said, "Oh. Uh." He pulled a stiff card from his coat pocket and read it. "8:30 pm. What's 'Festive Business'?"
"Semi-formal," Elizabeth said decisively. When Bob did not appear enlightened, she elaborated. "You wear a dark suit and tie, preferably one that doesn't look like something you'd hang on a Christmas tree. A white shirt. I wear a suit or a dress that my mother would approve of, which means I probably can't borrow one of Alice's."
Bob brightened. "Okay, I have a tie. I think."
Thomas wandered in from the music room, where he'd been unknowingly providing the background music. Or maybe knowingly. Elizabeth had been wont to accuse him of having X-ray ears and she wondered if he'd selected the tune on purpose. It would be like him, except Beethoven was not quite sarcastic enough. He took in the arrangement of mistletoe, Bob beneath it, and Elizabeth's odd position on the hall table. "Really, Elizabeth, he's not that bad."
Elizabeth's fingers clawed at unyielding stone and stale air clogged her lungs. She felt her fingernails break and pain shot through her fingertips. She tried to scream but the stuffy air formed a pillow over her mouth and nose. When she opened her eyes, the darkness was unrelieved by even a sliver of light around the lid of the stone box which trapped her. With the last of her strength fading, she gasped for breath and kicked upwards against the lid in a desperate attempt to escape.
Rififi yowled indignantly.
Elizabeth woke up. She was lying in her own bed surrounded by blessed, blessed oxygen and she had kicked the cat and the covers off the bed.
This is so not fair, she thought. Alice gets recurring dreams of being some kind of pharonic rock star while I get stuck in a box. Every night for the past three nights.
She retrieved the covers and tried to go back to sleep, but her heart was beating too furiously and the adrenalin coursing through her bloodstream forced her eyes open. After a fruitless eternity of counting backwards in an effort to soothe herself to sleep, she decided that she might as well stay awake and enjoy breathing. According to the clock, it was so late it was early. She didn't need to leave for work for hours yet.
Rififi calmed down more quickly than she did. He stopped lashing his tail and settled on her ankle, which promptly began to ache from the weight of the overfed cat. She shoved the cat off. He sat back down on her ankle. She pulled her ankle out from under him. He walked across the bed to the new location of her ankle and sat down on it.
"That's it." She swung her legs out of bed and stepped into her slippers. Wrapped in her blue terrycloth robe, she headed downstairs to the kitchen and debated whether she should begin the morning's caffeine intake, or drink some herbal tea and try to catch a little more sleep. Rififi followed her.
Light from the kitchen leaked up into the gloomy stairwell. At the bottom of the stairs with Rififi slithering between her feet, she pushed the kitchen door open and found Thomas sitting at the kitchen table and reading a paperback novel.
When she entered, he looked up, surprised, and placed the book face down on the table. The spine of this book was already broken; she recognized it as one of her own.
The cat spared a hiss for Thomas and went over to sit beside his empty food dish.
"What are you doing up at this hour?" he asked.
"Nightmare," she said, rubbing her eyes in the light. She walked over to the coffee maker where she stood and dithered for a while. "It's not fair," she burst out finally. "Alice gets all the good dreams."
"What?" Thomas laughed at her.
"Alice dreams about being some Egyptian princess and I dream I'm getting suffocated in a box," she grumbled. She decided on tea and filled the kettle at the sink.
"Oh, just go back to sleep."
"No, I can't sleep anymore. I've had the same dream for the last couple nights and it's one of those that when you go back to sleep, it comes back again. I can't even wake myself up out of it." She set the kettle on the range and cranked up the burner. She went over to the cabinet where the tea was stored and looked for something soothing.
"Well, life's not fair," Thomas said unhelpfully. Smiling, he leaned back in his chair. He looked wide awake and awfully well rested for someone who'd last slept centuries ago. His blue eyes were bright and his longish black hair was smoothed back from his forehead. He was neatly turned out, as always, in the simple clothes he wore in the portrait into which he'd been cursed back in 1689. She often wondered whether he could manifest in different clothes at all. Why else would someone wear the same clothes for three centuries?
"No kidding." She glared at him. Throwing a chamomile teabag into a mug, she flopped down in one of the kitchen chairs to wait on the kettle. "With all this Egyptian stuff going on, I wish I were more suggestible. Hah! It's even getting to you." She nodded at the novel on the table, an Amelia Peabody mystery. "Addictive, aren't they?"
"Maybe a change of subject would help," said Thomas when she opened her mouth to complain some more. "Why don't you complain about Miss Price instead."
"I don't want to," she said.
"That's a change."
"No, really," she said. "I think I'm no good at this witch stuff. Just because I can see you and make stupid little glowy pentagrams in the air doesn't mean that I'm any good at anything. She's still trying to get me to see auras and I can't. And Miss Price is no help. She's been able to See Things since she was a little child, so she can't even tell me how to learn how to see them."
"Auras are only another type of ethereal object," Thomas said. "I'm really rather obvious at the frequency, for lack of a better term, at which I manifest. The pentagrams you and your coven drew when you warded the house for Halloween are like children's crayon drawings compared to the ethereal objects that occur naturally. Auras aren't any different, but they are more subtle. If you close your eyes and try not to get distracted by every little thing, they should come into view quite easily. Once you know what you're looking at, you should be able to see them with your eyes open."
"Yeah, Miss Price keeps saying that," Elizabeth said. The kettle rumbled. She pulled it off the burner and poured the not quite boiling water over her tea bag. "But I'm not distracted, I'm very calm. I sit there and concentrate and I can't see anything at all. It's so frustrating and I feel like an idiot." She sat down at the table and cupped her hands around her mug.
"Try it now."
"But there's no one around to see the aura of."
Thomas said, "I have an aura like anybody else. Besides, this room is full of electrical appliances and the wiring glows in the ethereal plane."
"Fine." Elizabeth closed her eyes and frowned. She could see nothing except for retinal afterimages and the faint red glow of the kitchen light through her eyelids. "But I can't see anything."
"Just relax and stop trying so hard," Thomas ordered. "As you said, there isn't that much to see anyway."
Elizabeth took a deep breath. She could smell her tea steeping away. The refrigerator hummed softly at the edge of audibility. The afterimages of the kitchen slowly faded from her retinas to be replaced with absolutely nothing. "How is this supposed to work again?"
"Hush," said Thomas. "You're all knotted up. It's no wonder you can't see anything."
Elizabeth sighed and tried to relax without thinking of her nightmares or the ethereal objects that she ought to be able to see but couldn't. Miss Price had given her a crash course on Seeing Things and thus far she had gotten absolutely nowhere. Supposedly there really was nothing to it except letting your eyes and mind pay attention to information they normally filtered out. Miss Price had even described everyone's auras to her so she would know what to look for. Elizabeth was light blue, Miss Price herself was green, Dirk was aquamarine, and Alice was some unidentifiable color that Miss Price could only describe as "sparkly-poo."
Elizabeth sensed Thomas rising from the table and moving around behind her. There was no ethereal vision involved; she could tell by the way the air temperature changed.
"I probably shouldn't do this," he murmured.
She felt a light touch on her forehead, light but very, very cold and then she felt something in her head, like a door opening. The odd sensation would have felt divine if somebody with warm hands were doing it to, say, her back, but the sense of icy fingers fiddling around somewhere near her hippocampus was unnerving. And then, something else, more intimate than touch.
"Stop that." She stiffened in her chair and kept her eyes closed because she didn't want to see if he actually had his hand through her forehead.
"Nothing, only undoing a knot," he said softly.
She felt him withdraw and a gentle touch brushed her hair back from her brow. She opened her eyes. "Don't do that. Don't ever do that again. That was so weird." She put hand to her forehead and collapsed against the back of her chair.
"It's all right," said Thomas. "Calm down and try again. You had some kind of tangle in your mind and I undid it. It's hard to describe because it's not really a physical structure. But you should be able to see something now."
"Is that like chakras or something? Energy channels?" she demanded.
"Or something," he said mildly and sat back down again, his eyes shadowed.
Elizabeth frowned at him, but closed her eyes obediently. "Still can't see anything," she reported.
"For heaven's sakes, give it a minute."
Afterimages from the kitchen again faded from her retinas and this time she could see some of dark blue form flapping in and out of her field of vision. "What is that? Are you waving your hand in front of my face?"
"Yes. Did you see it?" The dark blue form make a rude gesture.
"Cut that out!" she exclaimed.
"Aha!"
She held out her arms and waved him away. Concentrating a little harder, she saw traces of the wiring slowly begin to appear, watery pink lines forming a delicate web all around the kitchen. She tried to see further, but the refrigerator seemed to be about the limit of her range. A small green glow resolved in one corner and arched its back.
The effect was rather like being in a computer graphic wire-frame model, only blurry. She turned her head towards Thomas again, although that wasn't strictly necessary as her perception at this level of the world didn't need to pass through eyes or any analogue thereof. As she concentrated, Thomas resolved into a dark blue form, man-shaped, but the color wasn't solid. Instead he was shot through with a spidery network of red light and blackness. Her own color was a solid bright blue, unbroken by any other hue.
She opened her eyes and found Thomas gazing at her with a searching expression. He quickly looked away.
"So that was it?" she asked. "Why didn't you do this weeks ago?"
He shifted uncomfortably. "I thought it would be better for Miss Price to oversee the process. I assume she has particular ideas as to how you should be handled and I should defer to her. She must have wanted you to work it out yourself."
"Why? She hasn't said anything. I think she's about to give up on me anyway."
"That's not likely. It's only that Miss Price is a white witch, about as white as I've ever seen. I can't tell that she's ever meddled in dark magic. I suspect she must have and she's extraordinarily good at covering up," Thomas said. "She certainly isn't teaching you anything but white magic. I'm afraid that if I were to get involved, the waters might get muddied."
"And the metaphors too," Elizabeth said. "You don't practice black arts."
"I was put into this form by the black arts," he pointed out. "You can see it, it's part of what I am."
"You mean that red and black in your aura?"
"Exactly. I reek of sorcery, it shadows everything I do. I can't escape it." He squinted at her. "I think you're alright. You don't look cursed."
Elizabeth's hands crept, unbidden, to her head. He looked away from her and spread a hand, palm up, on the dinette. He went on, "Good, proper white magic takes the long way around everything. No shortcuts. I only know shortcuts. I didn't start learning magic—didn't even believe in it—until I was cursed, and then I only wanted to find how to break the enchantment and get my life back. I didn't bother with any of the fundamentals that keep witches on the straight and narrow. And by the time I figured out how to escape this state, it was too late and I kept going down that same road I was on."
"Too late for what?" Elizabeth asked.
"Just … too late." He returned her inquisitive gaze and raised it with a bland stare.
Oh, the stone wall. She didn't like the stone wall, it wasn't even any good banging her head on it because he'd just vanish or wander off after getting in the last word. They sat in silence for a while.
Finally, he said, "Another thing you need to be mindful of, this house is sited at a place of power. Power which isn't entirely pure. Although the ley lines which intersect here are blue, there is some taint from the dark forces that reside beneath the hill. The sinkhole in the basement corresponds to a weak spot through which the darkness can leak."
"Ah. Sorcery: You're soaking in it?" Elizabeth sipped her tea.
Thomas looked away from her. "I probably shouldn't have," he began and his voice trailed off.
"No, it's all right. I don't feel any different," she lied. Her fingertips tingled, but she assumed that was from the warmth of her mug. Which had never made her fingers tingle before, but anyway. "At least I'll be able to get on with whatever Miss Price wants to do next. Probably Seeing Other Things, that I won't be able to see," she added glumly. Something else occurred to her. "So you can see into our brains? Euw. Hey, could you do that—whatever to the others so they could see you?"
"No. They don't have the right patterns and I can't make big changes, only modify what's already there. Maybe Alice, though," he admitted. "But don't tell her that."
"Okay." Elizabeth smiled into her tea.
Now he looked directly at her, looking only slightly haunted. Still trying to spot bits of red in her aura, she suspected. She closed her eyes again and examined her hands. Still light electric blue, not even a little pink, and slightly glittery where her fingers tingled. She hoped that wasn't incipient sparkly-poo. She began to feel more awake, nearly energetic.
They heard the front doors of the house open and close. Footsteps made their way slowly towards them down the long hallways and across the broad expanses of the dining room. Bob entered the kitchen and blinked when he saw Elizabeth.
"What are you doing up? It's only five o'clock," he said.
"I had a bad dream," she said. "I couldn't get back to sleep."
"Oh, and, uh—" He looked around the kitchen for the member of the household he couldn't see.
"Yes." She pointed at the chair Thomas occupied.
"Right. Hi." Bob went to the refrigerator and pulled out a beer. Pulling off the bottle cap with his teeth, he went into the butler's pantry where he'd put a half bushel of apples his parents had sent from their farm in Bath County. He came back into the kitchen with an apple, spat the bottle cap into the trash can, and washed down a bite of apple with beer.
"That is disgusting." Elizabeth wrinkled her nose.
"It's two food groups. Y'all are always on me about nutrition. And besides this isn't morning beer for me, it's end of twenty-hour shift beer," Bob said around another bite of apple.
"Yeah, and I guess they make fruit beers in Belgium, so you're just all sophisticated and European now?" she said.
"Sure, whatever. If this were cider you wouldn't say anything." He held up the beer bottle and drank some more.
"But it isn't."
Thomas said, "I can see you two are going to get along fabulously on this date."
"It's not a—" She caught herself.
"Yeah, you just said that," said Bob. "I get it."
"Don't mind me, kids." Thomas pulled his (her) novel over. Before he started reading again, he eyed her over the top of the book. Softly, he said, "You will, you know, get along quite well."