Alvaro's roommate is possessed by the devil. Nitiya strangles people in her sleep. Gracie's lung donor shows up to ask for her organs back.
For an amateur food blogger, a creative writing professor, and a recovering ICU inpatient, living with the p...
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It takes me thirty-five minutes to find a payphone.
I'm standing eight blocks from my house in an actual blizzard, poking at the clumsy square buttons. I fat-finger the wrong number, groan, and start over. Mittens and payphone dial pads are existentially incompatible.
Theo has been texting me with updates all day. My text log is a rambling, monologuing mess:
6:15 - Good morning. I think the ghost is in my heating ducts.
6:33 - I am hitting the vents with a broom. It keeps moving around. By the way, the water thing worked. Now our apartment is covered in saltwater. Good. Job.
6:34 -Just kidding, love you. appreciate the advice, professor! Lol
7:18 - We have evacuated to a coffee shop. Still in pajamas. There are so many people here, who gets up this early? Do you think all of their apartments are haunted?
11:15 - Nitiya seriously, I know the coin is like really really important to you or your family or whatever, so I'm sorry I keep asking for it. But can I seriously please borrow it.
11:26 - Raya is telling me to drop it but we can't afford an exorcist or a paranormal investigator or a new apartment. And the building manager isn't doing anything about it until we produce tangible proof but like how do you get proof of a ghost they're literally invisible
11:33 - Sorry if I'm bugging you
1:20 - I will pay you 200 dollars just to borrow it.
1:32 - When does your sister get here?
I'm pretty sure he's texting me to make me feel guilty. It's working.
The first few times my phone buzzed this morning, I hoped it was Clara texting me with the details of her arrival. That hope diminished with each subsequent message. It's irritating to know she answered Theo's email and none of my texts. Clara is a flake, sometimes a pain, and usually a bit too much for me, but she is genuinely good at her job.
I think that's how – between me, Clara, and my half-brother Griffin – I'm the one who inherited the coin Theo keeps asking for. I'm not above admitting it: Clara and Griffin can handle paranormal junk without it. I can't. In the twenty years since inheriting the warding coin, I have slept with it, showered with it, everything with it. When you've had one really bad experience, it's worth the inconvenience.
I punch another wrong digit, grit my teeth, and pull off the mittens. I can't handle another three days of constant messaging from Theo. But I still have one trick up my sleeve. It's one that I don't like using, because it makes me feel bad. It makes me feel bad as in guilty, but also literally bad, as in I want to throw up.
