Free Pawsitively Dead (A Wonder Cats Mystery Book 2) by Harper Lin

the thought aside and continued. “I’ll bet Old Murray’s Unfamiliar would have healed his leg anyway.”
    I poured the soup into two bowls. Aunt Astrid carried her bowl of soup and the plate with all of the sandwiches to the table. I carried my bowl of soup and the giant bowl of salad.
    We ate for a while, then Aunt Astrid said, “Not necessarily.”
    It had been long enough that I’d forgotten what she would be talking about. “Not necessarily to what?”
    “The Unfamiliar healing the physical injury of their host. Most Unfamiliar spirits never had human bodies and wouldn’t know to do that.”
    I remembered watching an old movie about a little girl who was haunted by what the Greenstones would call an Unfamiliar. In a famous scary scene, it forced her to turn her head so that her face looked behind her, like an owl… not a human. A human body couldn’t survive that. She should have had broken her neck at that moment. But if an Unfamiliar wasn’t familiar with a human body, then…
    I shuddered in horror. That little girl in the movie could have been me.
    “Of course,” Aunt Astrid added, “it depends on what the motive is.”
    I munched on a lettuce leaf. “Now I’m confused. You told me that the Unfamiliars don’t understand basic survival. How can we possibly understand what their motives are then?”
    “Motive is a mental thing. Many other motives are much more in the realm of the other world than in the realm of the body. Remember Queen Myrtha?”
    She was talking about the ballet, the queen of the ghosts. All of the ghosts were women who’d killed themselves out of unrequited love, or because they’d married somebody who’d cheated on them, or something.
    “Imagine Queen Myrtha as Unfamiliar,” Aunt Astrid continued. “She wants something from our world, and she’s crossing lines and boundaries to take it. Nobody can know why. But the only method she knows to get whatever she wants depends on tempting all those other poor girls with the promise of getting what they want.”
    “Vengeance. The Wilis were the ghosts of women scorned.” I remembered reading something like that on the ballet program. “When Giselle forgave those two jerks, Queen Myrtha didn’t have any power anymore.”
    “Exactly.” Aunt Astrid murmured into her soup, “If only it could be that simple.”
    “It can be simpler,” I said. “Tell Queen Myrtha to get back in line. That’s what witches do. That’s what we did. Simple! Done!”
    “Your mother would be proud of you.” Aunt Astrid beamed. She added, “So I hope that you don’t take personally that she would also be suspicious that this was so easy.”
    I took a piece of bread and used it to sop up the bottom of my soup bowl. “Aunt Astrid… whose motives was my Unfamiliar using? Mine?”
    Aunt Astrid hesitated. “If you’re not sure—and you were the only one of us who was actually there, who was actually being bothered by the Unfamiliar—we may never know.”
    My mother would be suspicious of getting rid of an Unfamiliar so easily because she gave her life for it. I steeled myself against that thought. We could know. There was a way.
    I needed to know.
    “It’s full moon tonight,” I said. “What about we finally try that séance?”

The Walking Dead
    A fter the sun set , the moon was a perfectly round smudge of chalky paleness in a dusky blue sky. Aunt Astrid and I sat on my black picnic blanket in front of my parents’ graves.
    “I know, I know,” I said to the gravestones. “I’m early.” I turned to Aunt Astrid. “This suddenly got awkward.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I mean…” I tried to form the words. “Every year, for fifteen years, I’ve come here to talk to them. I took for granted that they were listening. Now… I don’t know. I’m going to talk to them, and I know they’re going to hear me, and if I’m lucky, they’re going to talk back. That changes things.”
    Aunt Astrid phrased it better. “Your attitude