I looked down at the piece of paper in my hand.

  The letter had arrived on Friday, the day before, like a godsend for a young man whose lease had just expired. I ran my hand through my short, brown hair as I glanced back at the blue Corolla parked in front of the gate. Everything I owned had fit inside the small car, which had made the journey to my grandfather’s house that much easier.

  Estate of Alistair Peregrine: Next of Kin.

  I looked up from the letter, back to the house. I’d seen my grandfather once in the last fifteen of the twenty-four years of my life. My mother had cut ties with the man after my grandma had passed away. She’d never talked about why she’d cut ties, but he’d never returned my calls when I tried to get him the information for Mom’s funeral. I’d spent years wondering what the two of them could have fought over that would have caused him to avoid his own daughter’s funeral, but after that, I’d written him off as someone I didn’t want in my life. Which was why the letter made even less sense. I hadn’t expected to ever hear about the man again, yet here I was standing in front of my grandfather’s house.

  Correction: my house.

  It wasn’t just the house but also the ten fenced acres around the house and outbuildings. For someone my age, it was like being gifted the keys to a castle.

  “Mr. Lawrence.” A mid-forties man in a black suit that was too nice for the small town in the middle of nowhere, Arkansas, stepped out of the house and walked across the lawn. “My name is Tony Spencer; I was in charge of Alistair’s legal team.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a key. “All of the paperwork has already been handled; the house is yours.”

  I took the key from the man and rubbed it between my fingers. “What about Grandpa?” I swallowed. “I mean, do I need to make a funeral arrangement, or—?”

  “Alistair’s ashes are in the urn above the fireplace next to his wife.” The lawyer sighed. “It wasn’t easy to track you down, so we had to have the memorial last week.”

  “Oh.” I looked over at the weird cedar tree that I’d climbed as a child. It was growing next to a tall oak tree, which had resulted in the climbing tree only having branches on the eastern side. “I guess that’s one less thing I have to take care of.”

  “You have my number if you need anything else. Enjoy your new house.” Tony nodded, then headed for the red Camaro parked in the open garage. He paused as he opened the door of his sports car but shook his head and got in his car without saying anything.

  I watched the car leave, then turned back to the house. It was exactly as I remembered it. A two-story house, complete with a wrap-around porch that separated the garage from the house. Rough stone lined the outer walls, ordained with ivy that grew up to the roof. I knew from personal experience that it was strong enough to support a child who wanted to get on the roof, but I doubted it would hold under my two-hundred-pound adult body.

  The lawn needed to be mowed and the knee-high grass flowed across the yard out to the pine thicket on the backside of the property. With the overpriced lawyer gone, the property had lost most of its elegance, leaving it with an old and almost aggressive aura.

  I rubbed the ancient iron key in my hand. While the gate to enter the property might have been a new, high-tech security system, it appeared that my grandfather had kept the lock on the house the same as it had been back when he was a child. I patted the skeleton key in my other palm. “Note to self. Get a new lock first off.”

  Nostalgia washed over me as I climbed the steps onto the porch. I looked over at the porch swing and smiled as I remembered many nights that I’d spent out there, listening to my grandfather tell stories about space heroes on faraway planets who fought wild monsters and rescued alien princesses.

  I’d loved those stories. It was the easiest way to stay up past my bedtime, though Grandma seemed to always find a way to ruin them by telling him to stop filling my head with nonsense. It was a bittersweet memory. It had just been the four of us, Grandpa, Grandma, Mom, and me, for the longest time when I was a kid. Now I was the only one left.

  I put the key in the door and turned the lock. The curtain was closed over the window in the heavy oak door, so I couldn’t see into the house until the door was open. I paused as I took in the scene. It was like I’d never left over a decade ago.

  Everything was like I remembered it. The furniture was in the same place; the pictures on the walls held the same photos. Even the smells were the same: the scent of dried roses and lemon. It was like he’d not lived here since we moved out. If there had been a lot of dust, I would have thought that maybe he’d been living somewhere else, but the house was clean. Too clean for someone whose memorial was last week.

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  “They probably had a cleaning service come through.” I mused as I closed the front door. I looked at the stairs on the other side of the living room and couldn’t resist the urge. I needed to know if my room was as much of a shrine as the rest of the house.

  I took the stairs two at a time, bounding up to the second floor. The top of the stairs opened to my left with a wall on my right. The hall went into the house and forked like a T with a bathroom at the end of each arm. There were three bedrooms on the east side of the house at the top of the T and a larger bedroom to both my left and right. Mom’s room had been on the left and mine had been on the right. Grandpa had used the bedroom directly across from me as an office and I had no clue what the other two were for. Their doors had always been locked. I’d tried more times than I could remember to break into them, but I’d never managed to get a peek inside.

  For a moment, I thought about trying the key in my hand, but a quick glance told me that the ancient key in my hand wasn’t going to work on the modern lock. I sighed and with muscle memory that I’d thought I’d lost, I walked over to the door to my room and threw it open.

  It was exactly how I’d remembered it. I walked into my room like my nine-year-old self had never left. My feet shuffled over to the bed as I sat down and ran my hands over the superhero comforter. It wasn’t something that my teenage self would have been caught dead climbing under, but as an adult, it felt like home. I looked at the bookshelves and spotted the holes that had housed the toys and books that Mom had grabbed when we’d left. Not that I still had the books, action figures, or Legos that belonged in those empty spaces, but to see all of the things that I’d left behind and forgotten about still here, waiting for me, brought back a flood of memories.

  What’s Mom’s room like? I bounced off the bed to my feet and hurried across the hall and threw open the door. Unlike my room, there was nothing inside my mother’s old room. A pit formed in my stomach as I realized that while my grandfather had preserved my room as it had been, he’d emptied all the memories that my mother had left behind.

  What a bitter old man. I grumbled as I closed the door. On a hunch, I walked over to the other three bedrooms and tried each of the handles, but all three were locked.

  “Maybe he left a key for me somewhere.” I muttered to myself as I headed back down the stairs.

  Once I reached the bottom of the stairs, I paused. My grandfather’s room was to my left, which might be where an extra set of keys was, but there was also a basement. The door to the lower floor looked like a closet door under the stairs, which made bringing things down to the basement a royal pain since you had to be able to make the sharp ninety-degree turn, so as far as I knew there wasn’t anything down there but a bunch of boxes and the laundry room. I remembered what a pain it had been to get the washing machine down there after the old one had broken. Not that my eight-year-old self had been allowed to help, but I could remember my mom and grandfather yelling at each other as they maneuvered the machine through the door and down those stairs.

  I thought for a moment about which way to go next, then headed for the stairs. There was also a bedroom down there where my grandfather would rest after his workouts. Memories of sitting at the top of the stairs and watching my grandfather swing a sword around in the large open space came back to me. Mom had forbidden me from touching one of the weapons, but considering how most things were still in the same place, discovering if my grandfather’s swords were still downstairs became my top priority.

  I dashed down the stairs, jumping the last couple to land on the cold, concrete floor. Sure enough, the rack of swords was still hanging on the wall opposite the stairs. My quest to find the key to the upper rooms was forgotten as I marched across the open room. There were three swords on the rack and I grabbed the bottom one, sliding it out of the scabbard to reveal a blue blade.

  “So cool!” I touched my finger to the cold steel. Even colder than the room, like the blade itself was made out of ice. I pulled my thumb back and stuck it in my mouth. The coppery taste of blood dripped over my tongue. I took my thumb out of my mouth; my eyes widened as I realized that I’d cut my thumb while feeling the edge of the blade.

  “Those swords aren’t toys, little Nolan.” I heard my grandfather’s voice like he was there in the room with me.

  “I know.” I slid the sword back into its scabbard, then gripped it with two hands and swung. “But this should be safe.”

  One, two, three slashes, then I twisted and came face-to-face with my grandfather.

  “GAH!” I was midswing and unable to stop and the sheathed sword sliced right through my grandfather’s chest, distorting the image of him as it passed through him like he was a ghost.

  “You’re lucky I’m not really here, or that would have hurt.” My grandfather clicked his tongue.

  “Wha—” I swallowed as I backed up and quickly returned the sword to where it belonged. “What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be dead!”

  “Oh, I’m quite dead.” My grandfather grinned and pointed at the ceiling. “My ashes are up there next to Margret.”

  “If you’re dead, then what is this?” I motioned at the man standing in front of me.

  “This?” He pointed at himself. “Think of me as the memory of your grandfather. I am everything that Alistair left behind to get you ready for your inheritance.”

  My brow furrowed. “What is there to know about this place?” I gestured at the walls. “It’s a house.”

  “Oh, it’s so much more than that.” The image of my grandfather snapped his fingers. The wall beside the swords split and the blocks folded back on themselves to reveal a gold ring that was wide and tall enough that I could walk through it.

  “What’s that?” I touched the ring. Compared to the rest of the basement, it was warm, but not in an uncomfortable way.

  “That.” The image of my grandfather grinned. “Is your true inheritance.”

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