Chapter One
Salem, Massachusetts
Thursday, October 29th
“Hey, Kitten, I’m home.” Freyja Amador stood at the threshold of her unlit apartment, her fingers resting upon the cold brass doorknob, and waited. Light from the communal hallway made a weak attempt to penetrate the blackness of her rooms and failed. Which was exactly how she wanted it.
He only replied in the dark.
She waited a moment longer, heart thumping in the silence of her held breath. It was so quiet. Not even the tick of a clock.
A waft of air, chilly as a New England winter, licked across her hand. The skin on her arms and the back of her neck prickled with goose bumps. Any moment she would receive her answer.
An eerie meow wafted out of the darkness.
Reaching inside for the light switch, Freyja snapped on the old-fashioned hanging lamp with its onion-shaped glass globe, to reveal her empty living room. Well, it wasn’t empty of furniture. Nor of books. She had plenty of books. And there were also plenty of dust bunnies, truth be told. Unlike television’s Samantha Stevens, around whose statue tourists clustered in downtown Salem, real witches couldn’t wriggle out of housework with a wiggle of their nose. But there was one thing totally absent from her apartment—a cat.
Or rather, no living cat resided here.
The ancient floorboards beneath her worn carpet creaked as she left the door and crossed to the center of the living room. “Meow to you, too, Baby Cat,” she announced to the area at large.
The ghost probably wasn’t a kitten. He could shift chairs when he wanted to. She had seen her kitchen chair squeak and stutter into a reel on the linoleum like a little, invisible bull was pushing against one of its legs. So he was probably an eighteen-pound, Maine Coon tomcat. Nevertheless she thought of him as her kitten.
“I heard that,” a cultured male voice chided from behind her.