Page 13 of Marked By Shadows

“Riding around going to quilt shops. That’s not busy,” Melissa pointed out. “I’d rather go ghost hunting. There’s a trail not far from here that has some scary stories. Make-out-point sort of bullshit. I’d love to see that.”

Alex swallowed hard, and I took his hand.

“You don’t have to go with the group tomorrow,” Freya told Melissa smoothly. “But I know Micah and Alex will want to go.”

“I’m all in for quilt shop tours,” Alex piped up, grasping the conversation right away. “No forests or spooky trails.”

“Seems silly for a couple of ghost tour guides to be afraid of the paranormal,” Byrony said.

“I’m just a guard,” Alex said. “To keep the human creeps away.”

“And we are not working this week,” I added. “We are on holiday.” I put my foot down firmly on the idea of involving Alex or myself in anything paranormal. He’d been taken for an entire month. Home only a few days. I was not about to get aboard that train again.

“Everyone eat,” Freya instructed. “Jonah, tell us about your upcoming reality TV debut.”

And just that easily she turned the conversation away from us, for which I was grateful.

Chapter 5

After dinner Freya showed us around the house. The craft area being the most detailed overview. A giant table doubled as a cutting area, as well as a place to iron. Alex marveled over the handmade ironing boards since they were small, lightweight, and portable. “This is nice.”

“Thank you,” Freya told him. “Easy enough to make with a few yards of fabric, batting, and a board from Home Depot.”

“Cool,” Alex said, running his hand along the board.

“I know you know how to use the long arm, Micah, so I won’t go into a lecture about it,” she said as we went through the layout of the craft space and pointed out the machine. Most people didn’t know what a long arm machine was. Freya’s was on the smaller end, having two rods to separate out the quilt as it stitched them together. I had seen machines that were fifteen feet wide. I was more interested in playing with the two mid-arms she had set up as I’d been eyeing getting one myself. Mid-arms looked more like wider sewing machines, often with a lot of stitch options and a very long neck. A lot of the newer versions had embroidery capabilities, which had always sort of annoyed me since I didn’t like the tight look of a machine embroidered piece and often did my own. Preference from childhood mostly.

I was not in any way a pro at free motion quilting, though I’d had a few classes. Ruler quilting was easy enough, but needed a larger machine than what I had, and I had to go pretty slow with the stitching. The two machines I had were an everyday machine, which I used for anything cotton, and a heavy-duty machine, which was more for heavier fabrics like denim, vinyl, and leather. A better machine might give me more reason to practice, but it was a big investment. I gave Alex a quilting overview on what they did before we moved on to the rest of the space.

The long tables and comfortable chairs in the bright room, even with the sunset outside, made me itch to work on something. “I do ask that no one use any of the machines after ten p.m.,” Freya continued. “Though you could probably work in your cabin later.”

“Micah will be sleeping,” Alex said. “We’ll both be sleeping regular hours while here.”

I hoped that was the case, but didn’t try to correct him. Sometimes a retreat like this turned into late night sessions of costuming, or idea slinging. And if I couldn’t sleep, I would find something in our cabin to do, to stay close to Alex.

The upstairs tour was fast. A hall of bedrooms and bathrooms, with a small sitting area. The house didn’t have a TV, but had Wi-Fi if someone needed to watch a movie on their computer.

Twice Alex looked behind us as we moved around, a few times at his feet, and I wondered if he saw something. Perhaps even the ‘white lady’, but he said nothing, nor did his expression change. He was not alarmed, which I took to be good news. His sensitivity to the unseen was downright scary sometimes.

“Can I get your measurements?” Freya asked me as we were wrapping up near her space and the back door which led to a path out to our cabin. The others were gathered in the entry, all talking in hushed chatter about their ghost hunting plan. “I have something I’ve been working on for you.”

“Wow, really?” I asked. Freya’s costumes were legendary. I couldn’t imagine her taking the time to make something for me.

“When you said you might be coming back to the trade, I thought, well I had an idea.” She smiled warmly at us.

“Sure,” Alex answered for me. “What do you need from Micah?”

Freya led us into her space and dug through a drawer until she found her tape measure and a pad of paper. “A few numbers to update. I have the old stuff, but I didn’t want to finalize anything until I knew if there was a change.”

I stood with my arms spread out as she took measurements, and watched Alex. He was starting to droop. He might come across as having endless energy, but he was still recovering from severe malnutrition. Feeding him wasn’t enough. He needed rest. It was one of the reasons I’d wanted to bring him along on this trip, as we would spend a lot of days working on sewing projects or exploring shops instead of running around the city of New Orleans with a bunch of tourists, seeking ghosts.

“Your cat is beautiful,” Alex said.

Freya glanced up, and then spotted the picture of her cat, Precious, on the wall. “Yeah, Precious the princess.”

I had never met Precious as she had crossed the Rainbow Bridge before I’d met Freya, but I knew the cat had spent almost twenty years as Freya’s partner in crime. There were even a handful of cosplays which Precious had ridden along, adding to the mythology of Freya’s namesake.

“You’ve lost some weight,” Freya said to me.