The Skeleton Under the Stairs (Beyond the Veil Book 3) Read online

  THE SKELETON UNDER THE STAIRS

  BEYOND THE VEIL: BOOK THREE

  KM AVERY

  Copyright © 2022 by KM Avery

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  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

  CONTENTS

  Special Thanks

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Epilogue

  Follow Me!

  About the Author

  SPECIAL THANKS

  This book is for the one person who puts up with all of my disasters every day and who actually thought it would be a good idea to marry me.

  I love you.

  1

  You would think that seeing dead people would be exciting. And sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s amazing and wonderful. Sometimes it’s heartbreaking. Sometimes it’s downright terrifying. Usually, though, it’s just annoying.

  Dead people aren’t all that different from living people, aside from being mostly insubstantial. You get the nice ones, the smart ones, the dumb ones, and the assholes, exactly the same way you do with the living.

  As far as I’m concerned, the only notable benefit to the dead people is that if they really piss me off, I can make them go away.

  Sadly, this is not something I can do with the still-breathing without breaking several fairly significant laws and my own moral code.

  My name is Ward Campion, and I’m a medium, courtesy of a fairly lengthy bout with the magical-ability-granting Arcanavirus about seven years ago. I’m also the co-owner of Beyond the Veil Investigations. My other half—in every sense of the phrase—is Mason Manning, ex-professor, historian, witch, and orc.

  Last spring, we’d partnered our tiny little company with the Lost Lineage Foundation, which specializes in helping people find their deceased family—maybe parents, maybe grandparents, maybe ancestors several times removed.

  Poor Mason has been up to his eyeballs in archives ever since.

  He loves it, the great big nerd.

  At the moment, he was off nosing around in some county courthouse going through records dating back a couple centuries, which is why I was having to deal with the irritation that was a living, breathing human being.

  The woman in front of me was wearing enough perfume that she was probably violating an EPA regulation, and I was trying my best not to cough or let my eyes water. Admittedly, I am more sensitive than most people to things like scents, but I’ve been around plenty of people with the capacity to keep their personal eau de toilette at less than chemical warfare levels.

  She had a short-ish asymmetrical bob that had been liberally streaked by blond highlights, although the base color underneath was a medium brown. Her eyes were also fully made up with what looked, to my admittedly inexperienced eye, like false lashes in addition to at least two shades of pink shadow. Her mask, sliding precariously close to the end of her nose, was covered in tiny, glittery pink flowers.

  She had yet to tell me who the fuck she was or what she wanted.

  “I want to speak with the own-er,” she repeated for what must have been the third time, slowly enunciating each syllable.

  I sighed—also for the third time—and repeated myself.

  “I am the owner.”

  “The real owner.”

  I was so done with this.

  “Ma’am, I started this business, personally, six years ago.”

  She blinked at me, and I tried to decide whether or not her pupils were actually that color, or whether the intense green was the result of colored contacts. “You’re… Edward Campion?”

  “I am.” I tried not to sound as annoyed as I actually was. My headshot is on the website. It looks exactly like me. I have no idea what she was expecting, if not me. I mean, okay, masks sometimes make it harder to recognize someone, but if the owner is a pale, skinny guy with messy black curls, just how many people who look like that do you think work for his company?

  I guess the problem was that headshots don’t include the wheelchair. And once she saw the chair, then she made all sorts of judgments about the person in it. It wasn’t—annoyingly—uncommon.

  Her look of incredulity was evident. “I don’t believe you.”

  “Well, I’m afraid I don’t keep a birth certificate at the office,” I snapped back. “If you aren’t going to talk to me, then you might as well leave, because no one with any more authority is ever going to show up.”

  She stared at me, her eyes wide. I would have bet significant money that, under her mask, her mouth was hanging open.

  I deliberately turned myself around to head back into my office.

  “No, wait!”

  I didn’t bother suppressing the smirk that slid over my face. I had a mask on, after all. Mine was an understated black with dark grey swirls.

  I turned myself around again. “Is there something I can help you with, after all?”

  The woman drew herself up to her full-but-unimpressive height and looked down her nose at me. It’s not hard—in my chair, I come up to the middle of most people’s chests. It’s still annoying as fuck.

  “I need you conduct a séance.”

  I was going to really hate this woman. “We can discuss your situation to see if conducting a séance is going to be helpful.”

  She narrowed those green eyes at me. “I know I need a séance.”

  I suppressed a sigh. “That may well be the case. But sometimes there are other, more appropriate alternatives.” Like a banisher or exorcist, if the spirit in question was being violent or destructive.

  She huffed at me, the sides of her mask puffing out at the exhalation of air. “There is a spirit in my house,” she proclaimed.

  I nodded. “Did you wish to communicate with them? Or are they making noises or breaking things?”

  “I don’t think they’ve broken anything. But there are definitely noises.”

  “Okay.” I didn’t point out that houses make settling noises all the time. “Are they posing a problem?”

  “I… I don’t know.”

  I felt my eyebrows go up. “You… don’t know if they’re a problem?”

  “Well, I don’t know anything about them, now do I? There are… noises.”

  I frowned. “What kinds of noises?”

  “Just… noises.”

  I counted quickly to five in my head to avoid saying something obscenely rude. “What is it that makes you think there’s a spirit in your home causing the sounds?”

  “I know.”

  “How do you know?” I pressed.

  She sniffed. “Because I do.”

  Oh, for fuck’s sake. “So the spirit does not move objects, write on mirrors, interfere with electronics, or do anything else to indicate their presence? You don’t hear words, for instance, or crying?”

  “N-no.” She sounded a little hesitant, but she didn’t elaborate.

  “Are the noises loud?”

  “No. Just…sounds.”

  I let the silence stretch for a few minutes before replying. “And what, exactly, makes this spirit a problem, then?”

  “You know.”

  I clenched my jaw. “I’m afraid I don’t.”

  “Well, what if they’re… unsavory.”

  “You’re concerned about a criminal spirit?”

  “It could corrupt my children.”

  “Are your children mediums?”

  She huffed again. “Of course not.”

  “Then how, exactly, would they be corrupted by a spirit?”

  “Undue influence,” she proclaimed.

  I was fairly certain she had no idea what that phrase even meant. I tried to steer things back to somewhere less stupid. “So you would like to have a séance to determine whether or not the spirit in your home is some sort of… bad influence?”

  “Finally! Yes.”

  The request was idiotic. I was probably still going to do it anyway. I was bad at saying no to people. And money.

  “All right, ma’am. If you’ll come into my office, I can pull up our calendar and we can find a time that’s available.”

  We settled on the following Tuesday, although the woman—Paula Kurstis—had objected repeatedly that I wasn’t going to help her immediately, or at least not this week. I politely informed her that we typically book
ed our clients multiple weeks out, and she was lucky to get a time that was only a week away.

  After huffing and sighing a good deal more about how put out she was with me and how much of a burden her life was, I finally managed to escort her out of the building.

  “She seems… fun,” Mason’s resonant voice remarked from behind me.

  I pulled a face as I unhooked my mask from my ears, turning so that I could see all six-foot-seven of his green muscle and exposed lower canines. Orcs, like all Arcanids, could no longer contract Arcanavirus, so he didn’t need to wear a mask.

  “I am not looking forward to that one,” I told him.

  “You could have said no,” he pointed out, always practical.

  I grimaced. “She’s paying for it,” I answered.

  “I’m sure. You do remember that we can actually afford to be picky now, right?”

  I sighed. “Yeah, I know. I’m just… used to it, I guess.”

  “Putting up with bullshit?”

  I barked a laugh. “Yeah, apparently.”

  He stepped out in the hallway to meet me as I rolled toward him. Mason stopped when I reached him, then bent down and pressed a kiss to my lips. His were warm and tasted like chocolate.

  “You have candy?”

  He laughed. “Yours is on my desk. I didn’t want to, ah, interrupt.” In other words, he didn’t want to make himself visible to a client who would probably take umbrage at the fact that he was an orc. Sadly, he was probably right, given how much of an issue she had with me.

  But chocolate was chocolate, and I reached out and wiggled my fingers, palms up. Still laughing, Mason went into his office, returning with a bar of toffee chocolate.

  “Ooh, you got the good stuff.”

  “I had to bribe Fiona,” he replied.

  “For what?” Fiona, the librarian in charge of special arcane collections at the Library of Virginia, was a friend and a huge fan of Mason’s. She’d probably have done whatever it was without a bribe, although I wasn’t judging. I always brought her coffee when I went in. Apparently, Mason had taken to bringing her fancy chocolate.

  I wasn’t jealous. Fiona isn’t into either men or orcs, and Mason doesn’t like women. And he always brought me chocolate, too.

  “Access to something I probably shouldn’t have access to,” came the response.

  I opened the wrapper on my chocolate and broke off a piece, sticking it in my mouth. “What’s that?”

  “The diary of Hannah Neale, which isn’t in Richmond. I need help getting into to the special collections in the Northumberland County historical society. Rumors about Hannah’s abilities suggest that she could not only make contact with the dead, but also command them.”

  I swallowed my chocolate. “You’re trying to figure out if I have some sort of blood magic.” The term was used for someone born with magical abilities not tied to Arcanavirus—as far as I knew, I hadn’t been born with any such abilities, but what I was capable of doing as a medium went beyond what was typical.

  Most mediums could summon and talk to the dead. Some—usually known as banishers or exorcists—could push them forcibly across the Veil. I could do both… which wasn’t unheard of. Probably a third to half of all mediums could, to one degree or another.

  What I could do was physically make contact with the dead, giving them quasi-tangible—if slightly goopy—form. Nobody Mason or I had talked to had ever heard of a medium being able to do that. And to top it all off, I could also temporarily give them the ability to touch other people, although I’d only done that once and I’d been in a state of complete panic at the time.

  Mason was trying to figure out if there was historical precedent for what I could do, since he was working on the theory that I had some sort of latent magical ability that had been triggered either by the Arcanavirus or by our run-in with the long-dead magus who was the reason I was in the wheelchair.

  The past couple of years had been rather eventful.

  I’d met Mason a few months before that—a year and ten months ago, to be specific. The day I’d met him changed my life completely, although it had taken me a few weeks before I’d started to realize just how much.

  A couple months later, I’d ended up in a fight with the dead magus, Preston Fitzwilliam, who literally clawed out part of my sacral spine and put me in this chair. And not long after that, we’d shut down an institution ironically named Tranquil Brook designed to drain magic from its unwitting patients under the guise of providing them with long-term mental health care. Most of them were doing much better these days.

  While investigating that, we’d also learned about the existence of a shadowy magical organization known as the Antiquus Ordo Arcanum. And then promptly hit a dead fucking end.

  One of the doctors at Tranquil Brook had been a member of the Ordo, but aside from the names of its leaders, he hadn’t provided much more information. He was low-ranking, and was only occasionally permitted to attend rituals, at which most members were masked and hooded. And the Ordo had murdered him and two nurses because they were a risk to the operation at Tranquil Brook.

  I’ve yet to hear about a secret society that doesn’t do some nefarious shit, but this one was a party to at least three—and probably more—murders, the torture of quite a few children and adults, and who knew what else.

  I was firmly of the opinion that people who were part of secret societies probably should think very carefully about why, exactly, it was that the people around them hid their faces. Because if the organization is legit, they would have no reason to keep themselves or it secret.

  Mason was working on it, as was Detective Hart, who had been the lead investigator on the murder cases. Neither of them had come up with much of anything, though. At least not yet.

  And if all that weren’t exciting enough, we’d also officially launched Beyond the Veil’s office with an open house for both us and Lost Lineage last August. Mason and I had been shocked at how busy we’d been since. The founder of Lost Lineage, Elsbeth LeFavre, had been very, very good at drumming up business—particularly from wealthy clients. After only a few weeks, she’d brought in a handful of people who clearly needed to find more ways to spend their money. And it wasn’t long before we’d started getting occasional pro bono cases funded by Lost Lineage—most of them through the Elegba Society’s connections throughout the American South.

  We were now three months from our one-year business anniversary… And I still had to pinch myself sometimes to make sure the whole thing wasn’t a dream or hallucination.

  Oh, and Mason and I were seven months from our wedding.

  And really, really behind on planning.

  In theory, I understood that things like flowers and cakes and food and clothing were required, but fuck all if I could find either the willpower or the time to actually sit down and plan any of it. I was half hoping that Mason was doing it, but I also knew that he was just as busy as I was, if not more so.

  We really needed to get on that.

  2

  “The fucknut shitbag took a deal,” said the elegant tones of the extremely foul-mouthed elf on the other end of the phone.

  “Why, hello, Detective Hart. How are you?” I replied, forcing myself to sound chipper. “I take it you have news?” Even though I was teasing him, my blood pressure had immediately skyrocketed at what he’d said. Because I could only think of one person that Hart would call that and expect me to know who it was.

  From across the kitchen, Mason’s eyebrows went up, and he turned to partially face me as he stirred a bechamel sauce on the stove.

  I heard Hart sigh. “Ward,” he replied by way of a half-assed greeting. “Yeah, Lessing took a plea deal.”

  “Which means what, exactly?” I asked. I knew I must have sounded stressed because Mason shut off the burner and came over to put his hands on my shoulders. I didn’t bother hitting the speaker button on my phone because Mason’s orc hearing was sensitive enough that he could understand Hart either way.