Stacia Kane: Home

Mrs. Solomon followed her through the rest of the house. Three bathrooms, four bedrooms with one acting as an office. A nice place, really, if one was into that sort of thing. Which Chess wasn’t.

The master bedroom was huge, almost as big as Terrible’s warehouse apartment. Nature pictures and a few bright paintings hung on the walls. A satin nightgown in a deep wine color lay shriveled like a discarded snakeskin on the unmade bed; a few vibrators and various other adult toys—at least Chess assumed that was what they were, she’d never seen some of those things before—sat on a shelf next to it.

Well, well. More clothes covered the floor in little clumps. Mostly men’s clothes, button-up shirts and khaki trousers, boxer shorts and boxer briefs, jeans and t-shirts. Average clothes.

So why did something about them bug her?

She didn’t know, and with Mrs. Solomon standing there chattering and blushing harder by the minute she wasn’t going to figure it out. She snapped several pictures to look at later.

Mrs. Solomon had just finished telling her about how love was the most powerful force on earth when sounds drifted up the stairs.

“My husband’s home.” The woman’s bright smile hardly moved as she talked. “So you can meet him, and I’m sure you can see there’s no ghost here, and we can call this whole thing finished.”

Oh, man, this lady was not going to give up, was she? It didn’t change anything, of course. It was just irritating.

Doug Solomon appeared to be a few years older than his wife, with a salt-and-pepper beard and matching hair that reached his shoulders. His tie-dyed t-shirt—ugh—had a slightly stretched collar, and his jeans had holes in the knees. Brown sandals completed the look. Double ugh.

He wasn’t as nervous as his wife. “That bitch next door needs to mind her own business.

It’s because she wants us out of here, you know. We ruin her image of the perfect neighborhood. She didn’t like our parties, she doesn’t like our music, she doesn’t like our clothes or our cars or anything else.”

“Why do you think that is? I mean, can you think of some reason why she dislikes you so much?”

Mrs. Solomon sniffed. “She disapproves of our lifestyle.” Chess looked at them blankly. They stood beside each other against the living room wall like suspects in a lineup, but instead of looking at Chess they looked at each other, reached for each others’ hands. It was almost…well, no, it wasn’t almost. It was. Sweet.

It felt like a private moment, one Chess shouldn’t be seeing, and it made a little spark of pain flare in her chest. She wanted to go home. She didn’t want to be there, didn’t want to be working or watching the Solomons. She wanted to be with Terrible, wanted to touch him, to have him touch her. It…it actually physically hurt that he wasn’t there.

She’d always thought it would hurt to be in love and not be loved back; that it did hurt, when Terrible wasn’t speaking to her and she thought she’d blown it for good. She hadn’t realized that the pain didn’t come from whether or not the feelings were returned.

The pain came from love itself, and nothing could stop it or keep it at bay.

Nothing except drugs, anyway, and as soon as she got out of there she was going to take some.

“We’re polyamorous,” Mr. Solomon said, breaking her reverie. “Moxie—Margaret, I mean, I call her Moxie sometimes—and I often invite other men to share our bed. We had parties for people like us, who enjoy celebrating their intimacy and love by sharing it with others.”

Chess wasn’t about to comment on the whole idea of “celebrating love,” no matter how many people were involved. “So Mrs. Brent knows you have these sex parties, and that’s why she hates you?”

“They weren’t sex parties.” Mrs. Solomon seemed stronger with her husband present and holding her hand. Some of the tension had left her voice. “They were just parties for people we like, who like us. And if the mood was right and we found ourselves wanting to express ourselves physically, we did.”

“It’s not illegal,” Mr. Solomon cut in. “It’s not adultery if she has my permission and I have hers.”

Even if it were illegal, Chess wouldn’t give a shit. Not her department. Besides, the Solomons were facing a much tougher charge. Adultery was a day in the stocks outside the Church, assuming a betrayed spouse wanted to press charges; summoning a ghost was a death sentence.

“Why did you stop having them? The parties, I mean.” The Solomons glanced at each other; Mr. Solomon spoke up. “We’ve just been busy lately, is all, and tired. But we will have them again. We’re not going to let that nosy bitch keep us from living our lives. What we do is none of her business, and we believe in spreading love around, that it’s positive and right to spread love around, and we’ll keep doing it.”

Mrs. Solomon leaned closer to her husband, rested her head on his shoulder. “If it’s never happened to you, you don’t know. The…the energy we can raise together, the joy we fill the room with…it’s beautiful.”

Mr. Solomon twitched. Not a big twitch, nothing Chess would have noticed had she not been specifically looking for it. But a twitch was a twitch, and Mrs. Solomon had mentioned raising energy, and now Chess knew how they were summoning ghosts. She just didn’t know why.

Speaking of twitching… It was time to go. She had some pills in her bag with her name on them.

She stood up. “Well, I won’t take up any more of your time this afternoon. You’ll probably hear from me at some point in the next few days, so don’t leave town or spend the night elsewhere or anything until further notice.”

“We have a vacation home in Crestview,” Mr. Solomon said. “We were planning on taking a long weekend—”

“Sorry. You need to stay here until my investigation is complete. I’ll try to finish it as quickly as possible.”

Not that it mattered. When she finished her investigation the Solomons would go to prison and then to the City of Eternity below the earth where the dead lived forever.

Where humanity was safe from them, because a ghost aboveground was a fucking killing machine, and the Solomons were putting thousands of lives at risk.

One last thing. Chess stopped at the door, held out her hand. “Thanks again, Mr. and Mrs. Solomon. I’ll be in touch.”

Mrs. Solomon shook first. Energy, yes, but not particularly strong or powerful. It was definitely in the air, in the house, but that was only to be expected. Especially since the woman was so open. She had no protections, no “psychic armor” for lack of a better term, to keep her energy inside and away from people. A born victim, really. Just a twist of fate had led her to being a villain instead.

Mr. Solomon was different. His hand touched Chess’s, and energy shot up her arm and made her tattoos vibrate. She glanced up at him just in time to see a flash of silver disappear from his eyes.

Mr. Solomon was Hosting.

“Like that dude Tyson, aye?” Terrible slid the Chevelle up against the curb two streets away from the Solomons’ house. “Got a ghost inside.”

“Right. He’s not as creepy, but he’s still sharing his body with a ghost. That’s why they have all those sigils and shit on the windowsills and doors. They’ve made their house a spirit home to keep the ghost there.”

Terrible got out of the car, came around to open Chess’s door for her, a little habit of his.

She’d wondered a few times where it came from, why he did it; certainly he hadn’t had a mother or father to teach him. He’d grown up like her. Well, he’d grown up both better and worse than her, sleeping on the streets or being taken care of for a week or two by the occasional drunk or lonely junkie instead of being moved from foster home to foster home like she’d been, beaten or raped by a string of shithead rent-a-parents, starved or treated well all according to chance.