Fanatics Read Online Free Page A

fussy, old-fashioned design in thickly varnished oak, finished in red mahogany. A little railing, about four centimetres high, with tiny urn-shaped balusters, skirted the outside edge of the shelf. The panels down each side of the fireplace opening had small decorative shelves also bordered by little dowel fences. The mantel was not only charred from the heat of the fire but also warped beyond hope. So, another question for Mrs. Stoppini: replicate the mantel or replace it with a simpler design?
    Conscious of the resentment that seemed to seep from every corner of the silent library, I left the room without looking back.
    U NLIKE R APHAELLA , I had always been a two-brained personality. I had a sort of divided and contradictory way of looking at the world. One part of me was scientific and logical, with a love of gadgets and gizmos. The other I didn’t know how to describe—spiritual? intuitive? Raphaella called the first one “techno-mode,” and until getting to know her I saw things from that perspective most of the time. She brought out the other side of me, the part that realized some of the best things about my life, like love, exhilaration, friendship, couldn’t be measured or explained and weren’t always predictable. Both of us had learned from experience that spirits and what we called “presences”—the remains of minds or souls who came before us—existed all around us,and that Raphaella had been born with a gift that allowed her to sense them much more deeply than I could. I wasn’t New Age, or whatever it was called. I wasn’t about to change my name to Prairie Sunburst or something. But the threatening undercurrent in the dead professor’s library was as strong—and as real—as the chaos of scattered books and the stink of smoke, and I knew there was no way I could ignore it.

Three
I
    “H OUSEKEEPER
AND COMPANION , she said?”
    “Yup. Her very words.”
    “Hmm.”
    “Hmm indeed, as Mrs. Stoppini would put it.”
    “Of course, companion could mean a number of things,” Raphaella mused.
    “My theory is that they lived common-law because one of them was legally tied to someone else.”
    “But why describe yourself as a housekeeper if you’re partners?”
    “Who knows?”
    As I set up the rice steamer, chopped vegetables, and arranged spices at the counter in our kitchen, I filled Raphaella in on the offer Mrs. Stoppini had made me earlier that day. Raphaella was sitting at the table with a cup of green tea, watching me work.
    I crushed a green and a red chili, a couple of cloves of garlic, some black peppercorns, and a bit of shredded ginger, and put them in a small bowl. In another dish I piled the vegetables—snow peas, whole baby corn, diced red bell pepper, and chopped spring onion. Rice noodles were soaking in a bath of warm water beside a platter of raw shrimp, shelled and de-veined. I hauled a big iron wok out of the cupboard beside the sink and set it on the stove.
    “Are you going to accept?” Raphaella asked.
    A polished copper ankh hung from her neck on a leather thong. As usual—and, I sometimes thought, only to tempt me—she wore her hair long, caught at the back of her neck with a sterling silver brooch. She was wearing black denims, leather sandals, and a canary yellow T-shirt depicting a street sign in crimson across the curvy front.
WITCHES’ PARKING ONLY ALL OTHERS WILL BE TOAD
    The lame T-shirt joke reminded me of our high school days, when Raphaella’s transfer from Park Street Collegiate to my school came with a bundle of unflattering rumours—the tastiest one being that she was a witch. Little did the rumourmongers know, I thought.
    “That’s what I need to discuss with you,” I replied, leaning against the counter. “I told her I wanted to think about it, even though I was tempted to snatch the opportunity on the spot.”
    “Yeah, it’s a bit … surprising,” Raphaella commented. “Almost too good to be true. You wonder, What’s the