Honestly, even though my life has taken a turn for the crazy, I wouldn’t have it any other way. I love Merlin, and I love our adventures together, no matter how much they frighten the frijoles out of me.
I can’t cast magic, but that doesn’t mean I’m not important in our fight against the wicked illusion witch who has set her sights on us.
But this time when she finds us, I’ll be ready to take her down.
An unholy shriek woke me from a dead sleep.
Meeeeeeeeeeeh!
I darted upright in bed and grabbed my cell phone to serve as a flashlight.“Who’s there?” I demanded.
But was only answered by Merlin thumping down the hardwood floor in the hallway.
Meeeeeeeeeh!the shriek sounded again, and this time I realized it was Luna crying her heart out.
And so it went. Shriek, scamper. Shriek, scamper. Until at last I made my way into the hall and found them both staring at the far corner of the ceiling with their ears pressed back against their little kitty heads.
“What’s going on?” I asked, knowing full well both of them were capable of more than just uncivilized meows.
“Gh-gh-gh-ghost,” Merlin said, then took another sprint down the short hallway.
I glanced up to the spot where Luna still had her large unblinking eyes fixed… and saw absolutely nothing.
Still, I asked her,“What do you see?” Generally, she was the more logical of the two—or at least the one more likely to open up to me.
“I can’t see anything,” she whispered without removing her gaze from the ceiling. “But there’s an energy that’s forming. It’s not wholly in our world yet. It will be soon, though.”
“So you see a pre-ghost?” I summarized.
“Something like that.”
“But how can you tell? You’re not magical anymore,” I reminded her.
Luna couldn’t stifle the hiss that escaped her. “I may not be a witch, but I am still a cat. Magical or not, we can all see into the supernatural realm.”
“Like Nocturna?” I asked, referring to the magical nighttime city that was only accessible to magical creatures at the twilight hour.
Merlin growled and began to kick up his hind legs.
“Oh, no, you don’t!” I cried, reaching down to pluck him into my arms. “No tornadoes inside the house.”
He growled in dismay until I set him back down.
“We must get rid of it before it takes its full form,” Luna told me as she worried her bottom lip with her top fangs.
“The fact that it’s here so soon in its after-life journey is a very bad sign,” Merlin revealed, and when I looked down at him he had arched his back and puffed up to maximum volume.
I grabbed him into my arms again.“Definitely no lightning inside the house!”
“Then what should we do?” Luna asked with a gasp.
“Let me make some coffee,” I said, admitting defeat at last. It was clear that neither cat would let me go to bed until I found a way to bust this newborn ghost… or at least to send it off to haunt some place far, far away from here.
2
Coffee in hand, I settled myself at the kitchen table. The hard wood of the old chair did little to make me comfortable, but it did help keep me awake.
I took a slow sip from my mug, letting the steam warm my face, then glanced over at the two cats sitting across the table from me.
“So a ghost is coming,” I said. “I can see how that would be a bad thing. Do either of you know how to make it go away?”
Luna shook her head sadly.“It’s Virginia,” she said, speaking of her late familiar. “I just know it is.”
Merlin rubbed his head against his girlfriend’s neck. “Her death wasn’t your fault. It was her own greed.”
“It feels like my fault,” Luna mumbled. She’d been blaming herself ever since it happened. When she learned that Virginia had gone rogue in her thirst for magical power, Luna hadn’t hesitated to sever the familiar bond, leaving them both powerless. And in her desperate grasp for the fleeingmagic, Virginia toppled headfirst down a well and met her end.
Now apparently she was in the process of taking ghostly form and planning to haunt my house.
Was she after revenge?
Would she hurt me or one of the cats?
Whatever was going on, it definitely couldn’t be good.
And just when I thought things were starting to settle down.Ugh.
My only hope now was that either the cats were wrong about the ghost or they had a different explanation for its presence.
I sucked in a deep breath, then let it out slowly.“I don’t really know much about ghosts outside of what I’ve seen in old movies. Can one of you catch me up?”
Luna and Merlin exchanged a tense glance.
“What? What’s wrong?” I asked with a heavy sigh. I almost didn’t want to hear what they said next, but I needed to be prepared in case I found myself caught in the middle of another magical standoff.
Luna began to speak, but Merlin put the side of his paw against her chest to stop her.
“You’re already distressed enough, my dear. Let me handle Gracie,” he offered magnanimously.
“I don’t like it when you talk about me as if I’m some kind of liability,” I muttered as I wrapped both hands around my coffee mug to soak in its warmth.
“Look,” said Merlin, approaching me slowly from across the table. “Luna and I are both young witches. Or, at least she was until… Anyway, the point is, I’m still a witch. A young one.”
I groaned at his jumbled mix of explanatory stops and starts. I wish he could just tell it to me straight, no matter how bad.“Your point being?”
Merlin looked to Luna, who nodded for him to go on. He swallowed hard, then said,“Well, neither of us has had any experience with ghosts before now, either.”
I didn’t understand their worry. So they didn’t have practical experience. Book smarts could do in a pinch, and these two witchy cats seemed to have a limitless supply of knowledge when it came to the hidden world of magic.
When neither said more, I put on a smile.“No big deal. You learned how to deal with ghosts in witch school, right?”
A growl rumbled in Merlin’s throat, and he lowered his eyelids as if it pained him to look at me. “Oh, you humans. So myopic in your world views. Just because you need years of schooling to function in society doesn’t mean other creatures do. In fact, we witches learn much of what is needed simply by observing our everyday surroundings.”
I scowled right back at him. I didn’t get out of bed in the middle of the night just to be insulted by my feline roommates. “Great. And what’s that taught you about ghosts?”
He coughed and looked away.“Fair point,” he admitted. “I guess we aren’t really equipped to deal with some of the rarer magical conundrums.”
I drew in another slow, deep breath.“So where does that leave us? Do we just wait for the ghost to finish materializing and then ask it to leave?”
“Oh, no.” Merlin scoffed. “Surely not.”
“Ghosts are incredibly uncommon.” Luna’s voice was hardly more than a whisper from her side of the table. “The deceased only return to our world when they have a burning purpose. Something they wanted so badly while they were living that the quest for it became embedded in their very soul.”
I shivered despite myself.“Sounds serious.”
Merlin nodded.“To want something that much. It’s often not good.”
“Virginia yearned for power,” Luna said softly. “The same thing that killed her could have brought her back.”
“Yeah, that’s definitely not good,” I agreed, taking another long slurp from my coffee.
Both cats stared blankly at me while I drank. Somehow they treated me as a sidekick but then expected me to have all the answers.
“Um, can we capture it in a positronic box?” I suggested with a shrug. I hadn’t seen Ghostbusters in a long time, but it was really the only frame of reference I had here. And somehow I doubted Virginia would be returning to us as a chubby green pizza-loving cartoon character.