I drove back home slowly, concentrating on the curving backcountry roads in the gathering dusk. I probably shouldn’t have driven so soon after the blow to my head, but I didn’t have much choice. I certainly was not going to stay in Lura’s house – even if she had asked me.

The sight of my own freshly painted, squared, and trim house made me sigh with relief. I’d bought it impetuously and had had cause enough to regret the decision since then, but right now I was grateful that I had such a welcoming home.

When I opened the front door and knocked over a tin pot full of water, soaking the mail lying on the foyer floor, the relief quickly evaporated. I’d forgotten about the leaks. I had to find someone to fix them before my house started to look like Lura’s. Just the thought of those peeling walls and crumbling ceilings made me feel cold and damp – and my dress smelled suspiciously of cat pee, which Ralph confirmed when he sniffed me. Wrinkling his nose, he disappeared into the hall closet (where he liked to sleep inside my shearling lined winter boots).

Ugh! I couldn’t blame him. I picked up the bucket and the wet mail and carried them both into the kitchen, sticking the bucket in the sink and spreading the damp mail out on the kitchen table to dry – bills and fliers, mostly, which I could deal with later. What I needed now was a hot bath and bed. I’d rest up tonight and then tomorrow I’d call Liz and tell her that I’d found enough Aelvesgold to power the circle. Heck, I thought unwrapping the stone from Lura’s piece of flannel as I climbed the back stairs, this stone could power a dozen spell circles and heal Ann Chase’s daughter. When I reached my bedroom I stood by the window and held the stone under my desk lamp, feeling a pleasurable tingle in my hand. Instantly I felt less cold and tired. But Lura had warned me to use it as little as possible. Regretfully, I wrapped it back in the flannel (the same tartan plaid as the shirt she’d worn, I noticed) and slipped it into one of the little pigeon-hole drawers in the built-in desk. I kept an assortment of tokens in those drawers – shells and stones, a fairy stone my father had given me, a piece of broken willow pattern china, which Liam had brought back from one of his rambles. I took out the china shard, recalling Liam’s habit of bringing little tokens – stones and birds’ nests, pine cones and dried flowers – home from his walks. The house had seemed full of his spirit when he’d lived here …

Now the house felt empty. By banishing Liam, I’d rid the house of the spirit of the incubus who’d haunted Honeysuckle House for over a century. Dahlia LaMotte had struck a sort of truce with the incubus in the years she’d lived and written here, allowing him back into the house periodically. By studying her notebooks I’d figured out that she used her interaction with the incubus to fuel her writing. He was her muse. But when he had served her purpose, she would banish him back to the Borderlands.