Chapter 6: Ezra - Entities to Lovers

Returning from a tour to a text from Rory is not a sign of my night looking up. She’s texted me before, on Delia’s behalf, to coordinate schedules. Our prior texts have been little more than dates and times. Despite the simple nature of the information, she makes drinks sound like a hit on my life.

And after the fucking tour I’ve had, killing me might be a mercy.

Not only did I trip onto the trolley, and pop a button off my shirt, which exposed a weird little piece of my chest, but I also destroyed one of our lanterns. Then we got a flat tire. Instead of waiting for AAA, Vic insisted (silently) he’d fix it, and directed me to help, which ended in me tripping on the sidewalk and throwing the lug nuts he needed into the sewer. Thankfully, we were walking distance from the store and we didn’t lose any souls along the way, but Vic might kill me next time he sees me.

Class earlier today wasn’t much better either. I had to give everyone their quiz grades individually since Marty still hasn’t fixed the portal, and then of course, my phone went off right as my supervisor walked by. That would have been fine, except for the part where Micah changed his personalized ringtone on my phone to “Ms. New Booty” years ago. Naturally, that would be the one time my phone isn’t on vibrate.

The students found it funny, and I may have gained some cred with them, but none with Dr. Hugh Belmont. For now, I got off with a groan, but I bet he bolted back to his office to write down my infraction of the day.

Needless to say, I am ready for a drink, even if it’s with Rory.

By the time I shed my costume, take off my makeup, and make my way to the Thorny Rose, it’s a little after nine. The store closed hours ago. How long has she been here?

I try to picture her outside of Ye Olde Spirit Shop, with a backdrop other than taxidermy owls and Edwardian dental kits. I imagine Rory Woods fits in well in rare bookstores, surrounded by questionable objects and actual feather quills. It’d match her flowing, patterned skirts and cinched sweaters, along with the smell of old books and crisp paper that would wear off on her. In time, she could bleed into the words and stories on the page and leave her impressions in her own way.

I do not imagine she is a natural fit at the Thorny Rose. It’s a quintessential Boston Irish pub, full of neon Guinness signs, Irish flags, and an overly involved painting of a leprechaun behind the bar. Rory’s nursing an amber lager and…doing a full tarot spread. Oh dear. Though, I bet she’s gotten free drinks for offering readings to all the bartenders.

But she doesn’t look entirely out of place, like I expected. However much Rory looks like some kind of ethereal forest witch, she has bite. There’s something unknowable about her and the part of me that loves a mystery is determined to keep digging.

I approach her slowly and clear my throat. She pulls another card and smacks it down on the sticky bar counter.

The Star.

“Interesting…” she mutters to herself.

I covertly order myself a bourbon on the rocks and place my credit card down. The bartender passes it back to me and shakes his head. “Nah, you’re good. On the house tonight!”

“Uh,” I hesitate. “Thank you? But, like, why?”

My dad would be so ashamed of me. He’s the most stereotypical Old New England guy I know. A penchant for Sam Adams, a good lobster roll, and Wicked Tuna reruns. He’d never turn down a free drink or even question it.

“Feeling generous. Your next one’s free, too, ma’am,” the bartender says.

Rory squints and shakes her nearly empty glass. “All right, Sully. Refill me.”

Something about her going toe to toe with a burly Boston bartender named Sully and swigging off the last of her beer makes me vibrate. The bartender returns with our drinks and I sit beside her, examining her tarot spread.

I know a little about tarot through my time working at the store and digging into the history of occultism for tour research, but while I don’t want to admit it to Rory, I don’t really know what the cards mean. I eye the Devil and a bunch of upside-down cards with swords that feel ominous. While I’m no expert, I can tell the latest card here is a change of pattern, and it sure looks optimistic. This naked lady is really having a time by the river.

“So. What’s so urgent?”

Rory pauses like she doesn’t know how to begin the conversation.

“Have you felt at all strange since last night?”

“You’re going to have to elaborate on strange,” I say.

Rory chews her bottom lip. It’s then I realize she’s going to suggest something not of this plane. I sincerely believe Rory can do all she says she can, but it doesn’t mean I fully understand it, or it’s my go-to explanation for what’s happening to us. It’s just not my first inclination. I know most of the items in the store are probably haunted or harboring some kind of dark energies, but I’m more invested in the human histories in their fibers. Life is full of little mysteries and things that go bump in the night, and the scariest ones to me are real.

“I have had a brutal twenty-four hours. Everything from sleeping through my alarm to nearly getting impaled by antlers—”

“Sorry, what?” I gape. “Like the ones in the store above the dressing room?”

“Yes. And you…”

“Broke my phone. Cut myself shaving. Class was absolute ass.” I grimace. “My tour was a fucking mess.”

Rory shifts in her seat and her back straightens. She takes a sip of beer, still smirking. “Really?”

“You don’t need to be so smug about it. That’s just rude.”

“Oh, I’m not being rude,” she says, slipping into her accent with a smile. “I didn’t know Royce Montgomery the Fourth was capable of making such grievous errors.”

“He’s dead,” I retort.

“Okay, dying isn’t an error.”

“It could be,” I say. “I mean, it’s why people used to put little bells above graves so the person could ring it if they were accidentally buried alive. Happened more than you think.”

“Charming as ever, Ezra.”

“Yeah, you talk a big game, but I don’t think you’d like being buried alive.”

“Who does?” Rory counters. “Look, we’ve both had a horrible day, right? Except for a few pockets of good luck. Everything was going to shit, but then you walked in, and—”

“Aw,” I coo. “Did I make your day better?”

If she kicked my knee under the bar, I’d probably deserve it, but watching her big eyes narrow and sear into me—it pleases me more than it should. With Rory, I can’t help myself.

“Please.” Rory scoffs and takes a hearty sip of her beer. I never had her pegged for a beer person, more like gin or Chartreuse, which come from flowers or herbs. Topped off, of course, with an earthy garnish. “My life is never made better by your presence.”

“Ouch.”

“Don’t worry, I know the feeling’s mutual.” Her voice trails off and her gaze diverts from me. “Better” is not really the word I’d use to describe her presence. It’s frustrating. Exhilarating. Challenging. Being around Rory gets me wired in the most untamed way.

Her attention shifts to the tarot spread in front of her. “When you showed up earlier, I got a huge opportunity right after you arrived. Then when you left? Near impalement.”

Rory makes a little stabbing motion that’s oddly charming.

“As I waited for you here, I spilled a beer all over myself—my pants are still wet. I accidentally sent a fire emoji to my high school acquaintance’s story about getting her dog’s ashes back.”

I snort and choke on my bourbon. “Oh my god. You monster.”

“I didn’t mean to!” she cries. “I consistently pulled ominous tarot cards to see if they had any answers for me. Bad luck. Confusion. Betrayal. Then hope. When you walked in.”

I glance over the rim of my glass. “You think…I bring you hope? I’m not really sure—”

“No,” she interrupts. “I’m starting to wonder if we’ve been cursed.”

Well, that’s a pivot. I take a long sip of my drink and study her for any tells. She stares, waiting for my response.

Cursed.

The word jokingly passed through my head as I bumbled from one crisis to another, but in a metaphorical and proverbial way, not for real. When I imagine curses, I imagine the fears of ancient people, questioning if the failed crops were wrath from the gods. I think of paranoid monarchs relying on their mystical soothsayers for political guidance.

I do not think of me, an underpaid adjunct, breaking my phone and cutting myself shaving.

“Cursed…” I muse on it, verbally this time.

“I think what we did last night in Talbot House angered a spirit that’s been making everything go wrong. When we knocked over the altar, I…felt something. The house spoke to me for the first time ever.”

“It spoke to you?”

She swallows. “Yes, and it never does. I deal with spirits on random street corners, at train stations, everywhere—but a place as packed to the gills with energies like Talbot House? Never a word. Never a whisper.”

Well…that can’t be good.

“And what?” I gape. “You think there was an evil spirit in the bottle we broke? Who puts their evil spirits in a bottle?”

“Genies?” Rory suggests.

“Isn’t that a lamp?”

“Not according to Christina Aguilera.”

“Whatever.”

“It’d make sense! Ever since then, everything’s gone wrong. I have been in more puddles today than the local ducks.”

“That sounds like a you problem,” I say.

“It’s both of our problems.” Rory takes another long sip of her beer. “If I’m right, cutting yourself shaving is going to be the least of your worries. Whether you believe in this or not, what’s happening to us is real. What if this is just the beginning? Do you want to be hit by a bus?”

The bartender passes us and stops in his tracks as Rory seems to threaten my life. I bet he’s regretting those free drinks. Rory’s cheeks flush pink and she nearly knocks her beer over in humiliation. My hand shoots out and catches it for her.

“It’s okay,” I assure the bartender. “She loves a hyperbole. We’re fine.”

Rory rolls her eyes. “I’m not like this with other people. Just you.”

“You aren’t fooling anyone, Rory Woods. I know you’ve got teeth.”

She shrugs. “I only bite the ones who deserve it.”

Her smile is playful and confident, as she always is when it comes to me. Rory is constantly pushing me to learn more, be the best, and show off all my finest skills, because she raises the bar to a new extreme. Rory and I have always been full of friction.

“I might dress up like a ghost every night and tell people things are cursed and haunted, but forgive me if I don’t buy right away that I am cursed,” I argue. “How could that even work?”

“Well.” Her tone grows icy, and her grip on the frothy beer glass tightens in discomfort. “Sometimes spirits latch on to people.”

“And yet I’ve never met anyone who’s been ‘cursed’ before.”

“You may think I’m a quack—”

“I don’t think you’re a quack at all,” I assert.

“Literally one of the first things you ever said to me was asking me if I was the resident Fox sister. Mediums who literally confessed to being frauds.”

Maybe it had been a less than tactful joke, but I do find the history of spiritualism in the Victorian era fascinating. In a time where science made rapid advances, the Victorians struggled with their relationship to these changes and revelations, leading them to seek answers from beyond. Even the concept of photography was a wild one. The ability to capture a moment and keep it forever must have seemed terrifying, but exciting at the same time. Despite being frauds, the Fox sisters tell us something about the era and what drew people to the occult in the first place.

“Oh my god, it was a deep-cut joke I doubted anyone was going to get.”

“Unfortunately for you, I’m very smart, but I’ve got nothing on Temperance Talbot. The woman did séances in her house almost every night, bought haunted paintings and objects to anchor spirits, and owned, like, eight urns. With people in them. If I was going to put my money on anyone having their home spiritually booby-trapped, it would be her. Is it really that absurd that us disrupting her space might have some repercussions?”

As much sense as it may make, I really don’t have the time to be cursed. I’m supposed to meet with Dr. Belmont next week for my evaluation, which could be detrimental to my future at Revere. I can’t afford to have everything go haywire. What I need is a win, not a plague upon my house.

“All I know is when you’re around, nothing bad happens. I only notice it because usually your presence is my most unpleasant time of day. Tell me you haven’t noticed the same thing.”

“That being around you is unpleasant?”

Rory sets her glass down with a thud. “Ezra.”

“Rory…I…I really don’t know what you want me to say. We should never leave each other’s sides? Trust me, I know you don’t want that.”

Her shoulders deflate and she scoops up her tarot cards. The Devil sticks to the bar’s surface and she digs her fingernail underneath to break the seal. “You know what, forget it. Fuck this.”

She drops the cards back into her bag and finishes the remainder of her beer in one sip. It feels like a flex and I am flexed.

“I shouldn’t have expected you to listen,” she mumbles under her breath.

“I did listen,” I argue. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that information. We’re cursed? What do we do? Find a priest?”

“No!” she exclaims. “We could figure out if we are cursed or not and find a way to break it. We could figure out what the hell is going on together.”

I could ask her to stay. If she’s asking me for help, she’s starting to believe in this theory herself, because she would never willingly join forces with me.

“See you at work, Ezra.” Rory slips on her jacket and shoves her way out of the bar, vanishing into the city streets.

It’ll be quite the test of her theory if everything goes to shit once we’re apart. For both of our sakes, I hope she’s wrong.

I’ve still got half my bourbon to go, so I settle in and try to ignore how empty the seat feels beside me. I scroll through some Reddit threads about little-known strange history facts I might be able to share with the class, when a woman takes Rory’s empty seat with a displeased sigh. I peer up from my broken phone screen.

She’s tall, lean, and eighty-five percent legs in a cream-colored sweater dress. The bartender returns and asks the woman what she’d like to drink.

“Anything that’ll erase a bad blind date,” she tells him.

I laugh under my breath. She looks me over and the intrigue in her gaze is a compliment. My love life is middling at best—maybe to the point that I’ve stopped trying. I’ve had enough mutually beneficial hookups with classmates and disinterested strings of dates to gather there will always be something about me people lose interest in. There’s never something they want to fight for and I’m easy to quit on. The hopeless romantic in me hopes there could be someone out there whose life I make better or who thinks I’m worth the effort. Each time I read old letters or diaries in my research, capturing loves that stood the test of time, I crave the comfort of knowing I’d loved someone so much they wanted it to be remembered.

For now, I suppose, maybe the best I can get is a harmless flirtation.

“In that case,” I say, leaning over the bar, “I’ve got your next drink.”

I push my card onto the bar again, and this time, the bartender takes it. No free drink for her. Hmm…

The woman tucks her dark hair behind her ear. “You don’t have to do that.”

“It’s no problem.”

“Fine. I’ll do a glass of cabernet,” she laughs.

“Great. And you can close me out,” I tell the bartender. He fetches the woman’s wine, and she turns to me. I can’t explain why, but as I work my stare up her body, I find myself wishing I was staring at a certain blond, curly-haired menace.

“So, do you have a friend to blame for this bad date?” I ask.

“An ex-friend now. I swear to god, this man tried to get me to buy into a cosmetics pyramid scheme. Anyway, what’s your deal?”

“I’m a professor,” I say. “History.”

She nods. “Oh, that’s charming.”

The way she says charming sounds like a noncompliment, but I pretend not to notice. “Thank you.”

The bartender brings her wine over and flags my attention.

“Sir, your card declined.”

I swallow the panic in my throat. Finances have been tight, but I know I have enough money to pay for one drink. I hear Rory’s chiding laugh in my ear. She’s gone, and now something ridiculous has happened. No, no, it’s a card reader issue. It’s certainly not me. Nor a curse.

“It’s, uh…probably the chip,” I say. I turn to the woman. “Does your chip ever do that?”

She’s not amused. I’m no better than Mr. MLM, so I scramble into my wallet and pull out a couple of twenties and call it a day. Thank god for tip money.

“Anyway,” I recover. “Cheers!”

She takes her wine and tips it toward my glass. It all happens in slow motion. Our glasses clink in the middle, and then there’s a splash of deep red wine all over the woman’s cream dress. It was hardly even a plink, but plink does not matter when she is covered in fermented grapes. My token of goodwill could not have failed more spectacularly.

“What…the…fuck,” the woman gasps.

“I am so sorry,” I say. “Here, let me, um…”

I reach for the single napkin underneath my glass, but it’s not going to do anything. Between this and the coffee incident earlier, I really need to start carrying a Tide pen around.

“You know what, no. I don’t think I need your help at all,” she scoffs, placing the broken glass on the bar.

“Right,” I say. “I’m going to…I’m gonna go, then.”

I’m sure my extra cash will cover the cost of the broken glass. Now I’m panicking. What if Rory was right after all? She planted this damn idea of a curse and now I’m wondering if something does have its ghostly claws in me. I’ve spent years in school studying logic and facts, and often, fantastical stories have some totally normal explanation. It doesn’t mean there are answers for everything…

Even worse, if Rory was right, well…Rory was right and I was wrong, and I fear I’ll never hear the end of it. All I know is I need to leave before the roof collapses. In a fugue state, I push through the crowd, emerge safely outside in the cold, and flee. Rory’s words echo in my brain again.

Cursed.

I don’t think any further before something else hits me. It’s a sharp collision to the side of my head that knocks me off balance. My attacker thuds to the ground.

It’s a whole-ass street sign.

The pain of the hit doesn’t sink in until I bring my fingers to the side of my head and catch a dab of blood on my skin. What are the fucking odds?

EZRA (9:42 PM): OK…maybe you were on to something.