Free The 13th Mage by Inelia Benz Page A

cleaning and getting the shopping snapped her out of it until the next time she moved into one of those dreams.
    Owen hadn’t been the same after the hypnosis episode, he had apologized the next morning, said he had been trying out something he read in one of her newspapers, to get rid of the butler’s ghost, and had gotten carried away with it.
    Whatever he had tried hadn’t worked, she saw the old man again three times, once in the living room, once staring at her from one of the paintings in the attic and once walking into Owen’s study, while he was in there. She ran to the door and tried to open it, it was locked. She knocked and asked Owen if he was alright, he came to the door looking pale and drowsy, could hardly speak.
    “The old butler,” she said, “he walked right into your study.”
    “Don’t disturb me in my study, I told you about that rule,” he managed to mumble out and banged the door closed.
    A girl on her street had become a drug addict the previous year. J ennifer remembered how she looked when she was drugged. Owen looked like that, but worse, more like the time when she’d seen the girl in Dublin after she’d been thrown out of her parent’s house. She could hardly speak, was grey and shaky. So thin.
    A drug addict. Owen must be a drug addict. She felt panic, how could she stay in the same house as a drug addict with a baby on the way? All this time she’d thought Owen was some kind of computer programmer or writer or something, locking himself away like that day after day, with all those computers and books.
    No wonder that room was completely out of bounds to her. He probably didn’t want her to find his drugs.
    “I am no drug addict,” he said walking into her in the kitchen and frightening the daylights out of her.
    “I… I never said you were, I just…”
    “You were thinking it, and you were thinking it very loudly indeed. You think everything too loud and one can’t get a thought edgeways in this place,” he said and sat down.
    He looked completely normal, although a few moments earlier he had looked completely out of it.
    “Think… too loud?” She asked. Maybe she hadn’t heard right.
    “Oh, you heard right all right. You think too loud and you poke your nose where it doesn’t belong. And you don’t behave like a normal mortal, so you better tell me what the hell is going on here.”
    “Me? Me not behave like a normal mortal? Have you looked at yourself lately? Do you think you are a normal mortal? I have never met anyone like you before, you are strange Owen, very strange,” she hissed the last words and felt him shiver.
    He was going to do that forget trick on her now, and she knew it before he opened his mouth.
    “Don’t you dare,” she said pointing her finger at him, “you try that hypnosis thing again and I am out of here, and you can tell Sean that as well.”
    He went pale as he stared at the end of her finger in horror, “I wasn’t,” he ventured.
    “Yes you were, you know you were, I can tell by…” she said and realized she didn’t know how but she could tell what he was about to do or say, “by the look on your face.”
    He looked away, his face red with anger, or embarrassment, or a mixture of both.
    There were a few minutes of tense silence, then he said, “yes,” before Jennifer asked if he wanted his tea now.
    They ate in polite silence, she got up to put things away after they finished, but Owen didn’t leave the kitchen this time. He sat and waited until she had finished cleaning up.
    “Okay,” they said as she sat down.
    “You first,” she said.
    “No, you first, ladies first,” he answered.
    There was so much she wanted to ask him, about the old butler, about his own life, about reading people’s thoughts.
    “Where do you go at night time?” He asked before she had time to get her thoughts in order.
    In normal circumstances she would have said, “I go to bed,” but she knew Owen meant the dreams, the times she used to