Free Autumn Whispers (An Otherworld Novel) by Yasmine Galenorn

lived. But they’re both still quite healthy and happy. And they both live in this area.”
    Camille stared at me, a question in her eyes. I could only answer it one way. I turned back to Carter.
    “Do they know about us?”
    He shook his head, then handed me a sheet of paper. “Walk softly, girls. This is bound to be a shock for them. They know about their aunts and uncles, but they don’t know about Maria. And they do not know about you. I cannot tell you what to expect in the way of a greeting from them. There are too many variables.”
    Nodding, I took the piece of paper. “For good or ill, I think . . . it’s time for a family reunion.” I glanced at the sheet. Hester lived in Kirkland, and Daniel lived in Bellevue. We were sitting within half an hour’s drive of two cousins we hadn’t even known existed twenty minutes ago.
    Camille shook her head. “This is one hell of a turn of events. I think I’m mildly in shock. But before we run off, hunting down family, we need to ask you a few questions about another matter.”
    I tried to focus on what she was saying, but it was hard to turn off my thoughts. Would they resemble our mother in any way? Had Mother taken after her father in looks, or Theresa? Would they welcome us in, or freak out and push us away? I tried to clear my thoughts and turned my attention back to the matter at hand.
    “We need to know whatever you have on the Farantino building. There’s daemonic activity going on there. Also . . . what was his name, again, Kitten? The man you were sent to . . . oblite? Is that the word?” Camille gave me one of her
buck-up-and-get-with-it
smiles.
    I coughed, clearing my throat. “What we do to the souls we are ordered to cleanse is referred to as
oblition
. How we do it . . . is to obliterate them. Doesn’t sound very nice but that’s pretty much the long and short of it.”
    She shrugged. “We’ve all done a lot of not-so-nice things. It is what it is.”
    “True, that. And his name was Gerald Hanson. He was a lawyer at the Farantino Building, Carter.” Quickly, we outlined what had happened during the evening, starting with my orders to take out Hanson, and ending up with Grandmother Coyote’s visit.
    Carter crossed to his desk, where he typed something into his computer. After a moment, he motioned us over. “I have a long history on the Farantino Building. I didn’t realize that actual gargoyles were in stasis there, but I will annotate that little fact. Let me see what we have here . . . yes, the building was built over a hundred years ago by Michael Farantino.”
    “Hmm . . . hence the name of the building.” Camille leaned over his shoulder and he glanced at her with a look that I hoped she hadn’t noticed. Carter was part daemon, his mother a succubus, and there was a refined sensuality to him that bordered on scary.
    “Yes, hence the name of the building,” was all he said. “I’ll note that Gerald Hanson was his great-grandson, and that Gerald died today.” As he quickly typed in the information, I slid the dossier on our relatives into my messenger bag, and refocused my attention.
    “Let me see . . . we have a lot of ghostly activity taking place in that area of the city—”
    “Please don’t tell us that the building is in the Greenbelt Park District!” A good share of our time during the last six months or more had been spent fighting ghosts and demons in that nasty little division of Seattle. The last thing I wanted was to troupe back there and deal with another haunting.
    But Carter shook his head. “No, not at all. It’s up in the U-District, actually. Near Forty-fifth Street, off of Eleventh Avenue Northeast. Old brick building.”
    The U-District? We had a center of daemonic activity hanging out in the University District? Oh wonderful, and how many college students had decided to go check out the weird-assed energy around the building? Just what we needed: amateur ghost hunters getting themselves in trouble.