A Barrel of Whiskey - (An Urban Fantasy Whiskey Witches Novel) (28 page)

Paige understood that. Kind of. Well, the failing part, anyway. “Well, I’m not hiding.”

“I can see that.”

“We’d like you to join us.”

“Of course, I’m joining you, you dumb nut!” Alma frowned down at her hands. “I ain’t leaving you to the Eastwoods on your own, no matter how strong you might be right now. I’m goin’ with you.”

That was a relief. “We haven’t fully decided if we are or not. Nothing’s finalized. I have to stay here for at least two months, anyway. A lot could happen between now and then.”

“But once you get your mind settled on a thing, there’s nothin’ else what gets in your way.”

“Yeah.” Paige couldn’t hide that. “It must be hereditary.”

Alma quirked her lips, but her shoulders relaxed.

“We have a lot to do before we can move, though.”

“Yeah, well…” Alma glanced significantly through the door to the rest of the house. “If you can command those kids to do somethin’ like clean this house?” Alma nodded and met Paige’s gaze. “Well, I think we might just make it after all.”

Paige wasn’t so sure. Surviving a magickal war was a lot different than cleaning a house.

But then again, maybe it wasn’t.

“U
m, Pea?” Dexx called, his tone a little urgent. “We still got ghosts!”

“They’re not ghosts,” Leslie yelled from the top of the stairs.

“Right.” Paige threw back her head and yelled, “Tell them to go to the attic. Leah and I will meet them there.”

“Yeah, because spirits’ll listen to us?” Leslie yelled.

Paige turned to Leah and sighed, Bobby completely just zonked in her arms. “You ready to clean up your mess?”

“Um.” Leah wrung her hands. “I don’t—I don’t know.”

“Meh.” Paige wrapped her free arm around her daughter’s shoulders and herded the girl upstairs. “I’ll show you. Or, at least, I’ll try and you’ll muddle through it and, hopefully, you won’t destroy the house.”

“You think I could?” Leah’s tone rose a half octave.

“Worst case scenario,” Paige offered. “Besides, you really think you can do worse than the frelling bard? He breaks glass. With his voice.”

Leah opened her mouth, her face folded with worry.

“Or the fire starter? Can you imagine the damage Mandy does when she’s pissed?”

Leah loosened her shoulders a little. “Well, yeah, I guess.”

“And, anyway, it would give Grandma the perfect excuse to clean out that frelling attic.”

“I heard you,” Alma called.

Paige smiled.

“Grandma is scared of me.”

It took Paige a second to remember that the person
she
called Grandma wasn’t the same person Leah called Grandma. Right. Rachel. “She would be if she knew what you could do, you mean.”

Leah ducked her head.

“How long have you had your ability?”

“A few months. Almost a year, I guess.”

Paige turned to the left to drop Bobby off in his crib. Leslie was nowhere to be found, but Kamden was contentedly sleeping in the crib already. Paige stepped back into the hallway and called semi-loudly, “Bobby’s down.”

“Okay,” Leslie’s voice came from Tyler’s room.

Paige nodded once and headed to the far end of the hallway.

“What are we going to do?” Leah asked.

“Well, we’ll make sure nothing died in the attic while all your spirits join us. And if they don’t all come, then you get to wrangle them up.”

“Huh?”

“You get to call them to you. Same way you brought them through the Gate, only without having to open the door.”

“I don’t think I can.”

“Oh, chica,” Paige said, opening the door to the attic stairs, “I have confidence you can do it. If you can make the mess, you can figure out how to clean it up. Oi. Did these stairs shrink since the last time I used them?”

Paige and Leah straightened the attic a little, though it really didn’t need a whole lot. Miracle of miracles, though, in honesty, it was hard to figure out what had been destroyed or thrown to the floor. It wasn’t as though the attic was organized to begin with. Paige put organizing the attic on her list of things to do when and if they decided to move to Oregon. Though, how in the hell they were supposed to move half this crap out of the attic was beyond her. The couch? The chair? The desk? The old hutch? Yeah. They’d have to remove walls, or the roof. Gee whiz.

“So, something happened today that I should probably tell you about.” A tendril of guilt wormed its way into her heart. “I, uh, took your grandmother to court today.”

Leah’s lips were tight and her eyebrows rose as she shuffled a big box that must have had nearly nothing in it.

“I don’t know if she told you.”

“I guessed something happened. I’m not stupid, you know.”

“I do sometimes forget you’re not seven, you know,” Paige said, using Leah’s tone.

“Okay. So, you took her to court. She’s never going to lose. You know that, right? She won’t lose. Not to you, anyway.”

“What makes you say that?”

“She always gets what she wants.”

“How does she do that?”

Leah set down a box and sighed. “I don’t even know. Another one just came up.”

Spirit. Paige was going to have to teach that girl how to give some non-verbal indicators when she shifted the conversation to the invisible people. “That’s what, five of them now?” They’d been seeping up through the floor for the past ten minutes.

“Six.”

“Mmm.” Paige must have missed one. Leah had said eight had come through, so they only needed two more. “Well, I did win today.”

Leah jerked, a frown furrowing her forehead. “What?”

“Temporary orders.”

“You didn’t even ask me. What about what I want?”

Paige stopped and perched against the arm of the red chair. “Yeah. What do you want? I mean, I had to act quickly. I realize I should have asked you, but I don’t even know if you know what you want. And I’m not entirely certain that being with that wo—with your grandmother—” Shit. That was hard. Paige might despise Rachel to the bottom of her soul, but Leah still loved her. “—is necessarily safe.”

“I am safe with her.”

“Right. And that’s why you hid your gift from her. Because she’ll just open her arms to you and be right as rain.”

“Pa—Mom.”

She wasn’t the only one remembering how to be a decent human being. That was comforting in a weird, this-shouldn’t-be-comforting-because-she’s-a-kid-and-you’re-an-adult kind of way. “Lee.”

“She’s my grandmother. She loves me.”

“Yeah, well, my grandma told me that Ra—my mother—” Fuck. “—loved me once, too.”

“But you raise demons.”

“And you bring back the souls that have crossed to Heaven and Hell already.”

“At least that isn’t evil.”

“According to you.”

Leah frowned and pulled away. “Are you trying to say you’re not evil? According to you?”

This conversation was turning out to be a lot more grown up than Paige had been prepared for. “How old are you?”

“If you’d been around, you’d know.”

“Oh, I know. I’m just not believing that this conversation is being held with a twelve-year-old.”

“Because I’m supposed to be stupid?”

“In some things? Yes!” Paige flopped her hands in her lap, her shoulders scrunched. “Look, I’m just as stupid in certain things. I’m not going to lie. I’m still learning here. Learning who you are. What you like. How you think. You’re just more mature than I would have guessed, and I didn’t even really know how to have this conversation with you if you’d been, you know, a normal kid.”

“And what would that have been?”

“Like me!” Paige let her head fall back and breathed, closing her eyes briefly. She raised her head and met Leah’s gaze. “Look. I don’t know what I’m doing on a good day in a normal situation. I want you in my life so bad I ache. My heart hurts when you’re not around, when I can’t hear your voice, when I can’t hear your footsteps, when I can’t see your face, or hear about your day. And I have the stupid questions in my head. Like, ‘Does she still like Blue’s Clues or My Little Pony or is she into Barbie?’”

“Mom,” Leah said, her tone filled with derision. “I was over Blue’s Clues before Grandma took me away.”

“No. Well, okay. Kinda, yeah. You were. I guess. But I wasn’t. I loved Dora.”

“You
did
love Dora.” Leah shook her head and crossed her arms over her slim chest.

“And now I’m looking at you and I’m asking myself, ‘Has she had her period yet? When did you have your first period? Is she getting boobs? Holy crap! When did you get boobs? Are you making her older than she is? Hell if I know! I can’t remember that far back!’ I mean, I can, but—”

Leah screwed up her lips in a “yuck” face.

Paige tried to stall the next words coming out of her mouth. She didn’t know what they would be exactly because her mind wasn’t in control as much as her heart was at the moment, and those moments rarely ended well. “—my life wasn’t complete until you were in it.”

Leah blinked. Her arms dropped to her sides as she shifted her weight from one foot to the next. “Then…” She shook her head, dropping her gaze. “Why didn’t you fight for me?”

Leah’s voice was so lost and that tone pinged every heartstring in Paige’s stone cold heart. “I did.”

“You didn’t.” Leah met her mother’s eyes. “I didn’t hear your voice for five years. You didn’t call. You didn’t write. The cards were from Aunt Leslie. They were never from you.”

They stared at each other for a long moment.

Paige swallowed. “I raised a demon to kill Rachel.”

Leah’s eyebrow twitched.

“I was so angry and so—” Paige couldn’t force the words up her tear-clogged throat. She didn’t want to admit this to her daughter. She didn’t want her daughter to know just how badly she’d fucked up. Somehow, it was easier for Leah to think Paige had just not fought for her for five years. But…the words pushed through anyway. “I hurt so badly, Lee. You weren’t—” She brought up her arms, her painfully empty arms. “—here and I got pissed. I wanted to destroy that woman. I wanted to kill that woman. I wanted to maim her and heal her so I could maim her again.”

Leah’s expression relaxed.

Paige gritted her teeth, her head bowed. “The demon I raised went to Grandma Alma, told her what I’d done, and they banished my memories of you and warded off my gift. I’d done something horrible and—” Paige swallowed the snot brought on my her unshed tears “—the justice they met out was…well, it was just. You can’t raise a demon to kill someone else because you’re pissed and hurting. She was horrible to me, Lee. She—” Paige shook her head violently. “No. You love her. I have to respect that, but I loathe that woman. I want her off my planet so
damned
bad.”

Leah was silent.

Paige raised her head and looked at her daughter. She wasn’t going to push. She wasn’t going to prod. The girl deserved some time to adjust.

“So,” Leah said finally, her voice small, “you really did fight for me.”

Paige nodded. “Yeah. Just in the wrong, worst way.”

“And Great Grandma made you forget me.”

“Yes, but, to be fair, she didn’t really know what else to do, Lee, so don’t blame her.”

“I’m not going to like her.”

Paige had to put herself in Leah’s shoes. How would she react? “Well, just don’t raise a spirit to kill her. That’s all I ask.”

Leah ducked her head with a hint of a smile. “And you don’t call anymore demons to kill my grandma.”

Paige smiled. “Deal.” She frowned. “I just told you something horrible.”

Leah shrugged. “That was better than what Grandma told me.”

Paige wanted to point out that that was a bad thing and made Rachel a bad person, but she bit her tongue. She wasn’t going to do to Leah what Rachel had. Leah would have to discover things on her own and make her own decisions.

Leah seemed to understand that. She took a step toward Paige, a ghost of a smile on her lips.

“Well, anyway, we won—
I
won temporary guardianship. You have to go to therapy. There’ll be supervised visitation with Rachel, but it can’t be here. She just pisses too many of us off. I’m sorry, Lee. I really do hate her, but I’ll try to keep that off of you. I realize you love her. I don’t quite understand how, but you get to see a different side of her.”

Leah shrugged again, her expression dimming. “I don’t know. She…sometimes, she kind of scares me.”

“You’re not just saying that, are you?” Paige had a pretty good idea she wasn’t. Otherwise, she would have told Rachel about her abilities.

“I don’t know.”

Now, that was something Paige had expected a twelve-year-old girl to say.

“And I do still like My Little Ponies, except that they changed the head and I don’t like that. I don’t like Barbies, but I love Monster High.”

Paige bit her lip and ducked her head, a warm whisper of happiness swirling in her chest. “I have looked at them. They look pretty cool. There’s that one that’s a pirate?”

“Yeah. I would love that one. Also, there’s a few in the movie that I would love to see made into dolls because they’d totally rock.”

Paige tempered the happiness growing inside her. She needed to establish rules and boundaries. “I’m not going to pretend that staying here is going to be awesome every day because, well, we live in a zoo now. So, it’s really not going to. But.” She swallowed. “Would you at least give us a chance? Would you at least think about the possibility of staying?”