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The kitchen tap isn't dripping blood today, and all of the cabinets are still closed. Everything still smells like the orange blossom oil Adora put in the diffuser this morning, and she doesn't hear even distant shrieking. Maybe this showing will actually go well.
"As you can see," Adora says, stepping to the side to let the couple through, "they're all new appliances."
As Mr. Hawk coos over the backsplash and his wife pokes the granite counters with what seems like disinterest, Adora peeks back at the front hall. No black mold crawling up the walls, no flickering lights, no porcelain dolls in the middle of the floor with their heads turned the wrong way. Maybe the old hag will finally let her sell the place.
"It's not hideous," Ms. Salinas says, tapping her husband's arm to get his attention. "You said there was a pool?"
Adora leads the way out to the snow-covered yard, and the smell hits her first. Thick sulfur, laced with flame and blood. The steam rising off the pool cover and the red seeping from the edges are overkill, honestly.
"It's a hot tub," Adora says quickly, but this lie is about as convincing as every other one she's told about this awful house. "Rust in the pipes. And there's also a gas leak, maybe. I'll make sure that's all taken care of before-"
"Nah, we're good," Ms. Salinas says, eyes wider than Adora thought hers could go, at the same time that Mr. Hawk steps ahead of her with his fists up and says, "Any apparitions that dare to harm my beloved must go through me!"
Adora gives up. She waves them through the side gate, fighting to keep her professional smile up. Her third showing in as many weeks. Glimmer's been asking Adora for a while to reconsider her commitment to never quitting on a house.
In six years, Adora's never wanted to quit so bad.
The walls rattle as soon as Adora steps back inside, impossible wind whistling up the stairs. Something dark drips from the ceiling. A deep voice thrums, so deep that Adora isn't sure it's coming from the floor or her own head. BEGONE OR FEEL MY-
Adora snaps off one of the icicles forming on the banister.
"If there's water damage," she says, "you're going to feel my wrath."
The icicle vanishes, barely leaving a cool spot in the middle of her hand, and the house snaps back to normal so quickly that Adora might have thought she'd been hallucinating if she hadn't seen it a dozen times already.
Light flickers at the top of the stairs, and it only takes a moment for the outline to solidify. "Hey Adora," Catra says, as if nothing's wrong. "What'd they think?"
"They thought the place was haunted," Adora snaps. "For some reason."
Catra slides down the banister, leaping off the end to float next to Adora. She only has to be a couple inches off the ground to be eye-to-eye. Her smile is infuriating. "You say that like it's a bad thing."
Sometimes Adora likes the banter, on days when she doesn't want to punch through walls. "It's good that your mom's already dead," Adora says, "or I'd kill her."
Catra's smirk slips a little. "Still an option."
Adora knows. Glimmer and Bow have been telling her to get an exorcist in here for months now. Even if Adora can find somebody that she doesn't think is a total fraud-
Any exorcism would take Catra out too. And Adora can't do that. So she's settled on hoping that eventually Shadow Weaver will stop making the faucets bleed eyeballs.
Adora rubs her hands over her face. "Just help me with the pool. Hopefully the blood didn't stain the grout this time."
It didn't, this time. The water is still a little warm, and Adora keeps her hand in longer than she needs to. This house is going to end her career, and maybe what's left of her sanity. She should've abandoned it months ago.
"How is your mother such a nightmare?" Adora asks.
Catra pushes a small clump of snow into the pool and watches it vanish. "Years of practice."
Adora shakes her hand slightly as she pulls it out of the water, trying to dry it before it gets cold, and Catra grabs it with one of her own. For a moment, her skin is as real as Adora's, cool and soft.
And then it melts into mist again, taking the water with it. Catra turns back to the snow like nothing's happened, and maybe it hasn't. Maybe anything between them is in Adora's head, and there's not actually a good reason to keep coming back to clean maggots out of the outlets.
"Come on," Adora says. "Let's see if your mom got creative with the bathtub this time or if the toenails are back."
There had been a time when Adora was excited to be selling 203 Alwyn Terrace. Remarkably good condition for its age, beautiful flowerbeds out front, excellent school district. The proceeds were going to a local academy, per the will of the previous homeowner who'd died without heirs, so the price was extremely flexible. All Adora had to do was stage it, and it would basically sell itself.
Adora was showing new construction across town when Bow called.
"So, uh," he said, voice at least half an octave too high, "the Alwyn Terrace house. How much time have you spent in there?"
"I walked through, why?" One of the prospective buyers looked up from the sink. "I'm showing Thaymor Drive now, so-"
"Come by when you're done." Something shuffled on the other end of the line, then Glimmer's voice said, "And bring a Ouija board or something."
Adora had thought they were at least a decade past teasing her for believing in ghosts. "Quit messing around and do your job," she said. She hung up before they could do any more bits, sliding her customer service face back on.
Adora's believed since she was a kid, when she swore she could see her mother in the moments between sleeping and waking. Razz said she saw her too. But it wasn't until Adora entered the house and watched the figure condense into shape on the staircase that she finally stopped questioning whether she was crazy.
Bow and Glimmer refused to set foot back in the house, so before she could sell it, Adora had needed to pack it up herself. Luckily, this house came with help.
Catra pulled a book off the shelf - a farmer's almanac from thirty-two years ago - and wrinkled her nose at it. It must have been a ghost thing that Adora struggled to look away from her. "Every time I almost forget how weird that bitch was."
Adora glanced behind them, but she didn't see Shadow Weaver. Adora had never seen her. Catra said Adora was lucky.
"Any chance you can turn this stuff into smoke or whatever so I don't have to deal with it?" Adora asked.
Catra snickered, dropping the book in a box. "Fill them with worms, maybe. Never really got the hang of smoke."
"I didn't know you could pick things up," Adora said. "Aren't ghosts supposed to-"
"I can be corporeal when I want to." Catra shoved her lightly in the shoulder. "And right now I want to."
Between the two of them, the upstairs went fast, until they've emptied almost every room of Shadow Weaver's bottles and stones and books.
"Just like the rest of the place," Catra said, as she pushed the last door open, "nothing but junk in here."
Adora had been through the whole house as part of her initial inspection, but she was looking for cracked walls instead of seeing the belongings inside them. A bedroom, stripped spartan. The only color was in the cabinet of medals and trophies. Under the dull layer of dust, silver and bronze figures flipped and bent.
Catra picked at a fragment of tape on the mirror over the dresser. She made eye contact with Adora through the mirror and said, "Bitch took down all my hot gymnast pictures. God forbid her daughter be nineteen. And gay." Teeth flash in her smile. "And into muscled blondes."
Adora pivoted her attention as quickly as possible to the cabinet, talking so the pink on her cheeks might be less obvious. "So you were a-"
"Yep." Catra opened the door and sweeps a shelf of trophies into the box, kicking a cloud of dust into the air thick enough to make Adora cough. "One of these says I'm the second best in the region. Which I'm sure they took back when I fucked up a salto bad enough to snap my own neck."
Nothing Adora had ever read about ghosts had told her what to say to that.
"Well," Adora said, already regretting it, "they probably switched to past tense, anyway."
Catra laughed, raspy and squeaky. Particles floated in the air between them. "You're an idiot," Catra said, but the laugh was still in her voice, smile on her face, and Adora wanted desperately to know what Catra would be corporeal for.
It always snows before the anniversary of Mara's death. Sometimes days before, sometimes weeks, but the only time Adora remembers seeing her mother's bare headstone is the day she was buried.
Mara liked flowers, or so everyone had said, and Adora's brought them ever since she was young enough that Angella had to drive her. No one told her what kind, so Adora picks different ones every year. The chrysanthemums looked good today, colors rich and deep.
Maybe Adora should've asked Catra if she wanted any at her headstone. Or her mom's. Adora knows Shadow Weaver liked flowers.
"If you're floating around somewhere," Adora says to Mara's grave, "it might be nice to let me know. I'd love to know a dead mother that's not making the walls ooze slime." The wind is cold on her face. "Maybe you'd know how to keep their garden from dying, too. I've tried googling but-"
"Mulch," says a voice behind her. When Adora whips around, there's a woman, long black hair spilling down her shoulders. It only takes an instant for Adora to realize why she didn't hear anyone walk up. It doesn't make a sound to float over the snow.
"The ground needs mulch," the woman says again, in a tone that suggests she's said it at least a dozen times. "And the roses should be wrapped, too. All of that should've been done months ago."
Adora blinks, and it doesn't help the sight in front of her make more sense. "I'm sorry, who-"
"You reek of my daughter," the woman says. "Though what you're doing at that house if you're not even caring for it, I cannot fathom. What in god's name is Catra doing to it? Did you say slime?"
Catra's mother lives at the house. Catra's mother is the one-
"I'm sorry," Adora says again. "You're Shadow Weaver?"
The woman sighs. "She's always needed so much supervision. I should've known she'd destroy the place as soon as I was out of the way."
It doesn't make sense. "She said you were in the house. She said you were doing the-"
"She'll say anything to save her own skin." When Shadow Weaver looks at Adora, her glowing eyes are familiar. She pulls a vial and a pouch from her robes, holding them out. "Even you can manage a basic exorcism, I'm sure. The instructions are simple."
Adora shakes her head, against every instinct telling her not to. "Sorry, mom," she tells the gravestone, pang of guilt almost buried under her revving heartbeat. "I'll come back."
Shadow Weaver calls something after her as she leaves the cemetery, but it blurs under the ringing in Adora's ears and wrenching under her ribs.
Adora lets the door slam behind her. "Catra!" she yells, and she's never been good at hiding how she feels when she's angry.
Catra flickers into view on the stairs. Her usual smile drops immediately.
Adora walks up to her, close enough to make out the wallpaper pattern behind Catra's translucent skin. "I know your mom isn't here."
There's a twitch in Catra's face, as she thinks about lying again. She chooses silence instead.
"So you've been jerking me around this whole time?" Catra doesn't react. "How long did the haunted drain thing take you to come up with? Or filling the living room with spiders? Or-" Adora's laughing, because it was so fucking obvious. "God, I am an idiot."
"How many times do I have to tell you to get some fucking holy water in here?" Catra's eyes glow, colors sharp against the gray of her face. "You could've solved this months ago."
"Maybe if I'd known it'd been you sabotaging me the whole time," Adora says, heart pounding, "I would have!"
Catra's shoulders straighten. "I'm not stopping you." Her voice is barely a hiss. "What are you waiting for?"
Adora doesn't know. Surely Shadow Weaver is still in the cemetery with the components and instructions, and Adora can come back tomorrow to show a house where doorknobs won't start whispering and the floors won't start growing mold shaped like skulls. Maybe someday her friends will let her ever live this down, after they've been telling her to do this from the very beginning.
Thinking about walking back into this house and not seeing Catra on the stairs makes Adora grit back tears, which is stupid, because Catra lied to her. She isn't whoever Adora thought she was.
The wallpaper pattern around Catra is warping, twisting into tangles and melting into pools. Ozone gets thicker and thicker in the air, and something dark and iridescent starts to drip from the stairs above them.
Adora shouldn't keep talking. "I don't understand. You didn't need to play games with - you didn't need to make me think we-"
Were the same? Were friends? Could've been more?
"You owe me the truth," Adora says, and maybe Catra will agree if Adora says it firmly enough.
The ceiling drips stop, and the patterns along the wall pause. Catra's freckles are dark on her translucent face. "It was about fucking with you, for the first, like, hour. Then-" She lets out a breath she definitely never needed to take. "Then I wanted you to stay. Liked having your dumb face around. A hell of a lot more than any of the other people who came through here. And if you sold the house-" Catra's lips snarl at the edges, shine in the corners of her eyes.
"I would've left," Adora finishes, stomach tight.
"But you're alive! You're supposed to! You couldn't've-" Reality starts to warp around Catra again. "I was stupid. So get out the salt or chalk or whatever the fuck and finish this already."
Adora shakes her head. The edges of Catra's outline blur, but when Adora finds her arm, it's as solid as the floor under her feet. "I'm going to buy it," she says, because she's still crazy.
Catra snaps back into focus. Her eyes skitter over Adora's face. "What?"
"The house. I don't want to leave."
Catra's throat shifts when she swallows. "I heard it's haunted."
Adora's hand still hasn't phased through. "You say that like it's a bad thing."
The world slides back into place - wallpaper flat, ceiling dry, air tinged with faint citrus. Catra's eyes crinkle when she laughs, hand coming up to cover Adora's, and her skin is warmer than Adora remembers.