Malcolm and Ives 02 - Trouble With Air and Magic by Patricia Rice Page A

practiced dim mak , and she hadn’t touched him, but her father’s heart was weak and his blood pressure was high and…it had just happened.
    Since then, she had stayed out of her father’s way unless invited.
    So the rest of her weekend would be spent rearranging Conan’s space and staying out of everyone’s way.
    She headed for the bedroom and her suitcase. She couldn’t wear a suit while rearranging a house. She’d brought her favorite broomstick skirt and a loose cotton sweater. With a tank top beneath it, she’d be decent and free to move easily. She didn’t have to impress Conan with her master of business attire.
    Once she was comfortable, she turned off the security alarm. Then she propped open the front door and some windows and surveyed the dump. He’d said she could arrange it. She was pretty certain that didn’t mean she could heave it all out.
    Which meant she would have to be very creative. If she wasn’t so freaked out about life collapsing around her, she might look on this space as a challenge. She dearly loved decorating…
    That was another avenue that was too deadly to explore. She didn’t understand the motivation of the men who’d killed her mother, but she had a strong sense that it was related to her mother’s paranormal talents. Dorrie would rather not tempt fate by publicly brandishing those same abilities.
    Being able to breathe at night was a worthy goal, however. She surveyed Conan’s clutter and the layout of his first floor.
    She didn’t even need her compass to locate the center of this level—it was right up against the wall dividing the finished living area from the unfinished. He’d cut his health sector in half! Short of ripping out the wall, she needed square objects and earth tones to encourage the flow of chi .
    She gathered all his unpacked cartons and pushed and stacked them against the dividing wall to form a square. If Conan wanted anything from the boxes, tough. She needed her mother’s red and gold embroidered tablecloth to cover the cardboard… She started a list of things to be retrieved from her father’s house once it was declared safe to enter.
    In the meantime, she found a brown sheet and fat yellow candles in the bedroom and began turning the boxes into a table. She had some green porcelain in her car, and she would buy a plant when she went shopping. That should settle the health sector of the bagua for now and add a soothing focal point to that gaping hollow of a room.
    She couldn’t leave the surfboards destroying the health center she was trying to improve. If she stood them upright, the wood ones would work excellently in the family sector, which conveniently happened to be in the attached garage. Maybe Conan would get along better with his brothers. Or she wouldn’t hear anything from her father while she stayed here. That worked.
    She piled all the various balls in gym bags and leaned them against the farthest wall of the front room, in the corner where the flimsy dividing wall met the exterior wall. Round shapes would enhance her creativity, and maybe it would improve their luck with finding Bo or taking care of his kids since that was also the children’s sector. Besides, it would get the damned balls off the floor.
    The energy was already circulating more freely.
    She brought in her porcelain vases and added a few earth-colored ones to the box-table. She definitely felt better just having a piece of home with her. The metal shelves at the front door were next. She shifted them over next to the balls, along with all Conan’s metal tools and equipment, arranging them so he could find them without digging under wetsuits and canvas.
    She carried a small white glass bowl from her collection to the entrance and set it on a black metal copier table with rounded edges to serve as an entry table. She looked for something undulating or black to approximate water to welcome the ocean energy into the house. Wickedly, she used his wetsuit as a rug. The