Lay the Ghost: Nightwatch Series book 4

by Cassidy, Debbie

  “You got sliced.”

  “Yes.”

  “A poltergeist?”

  She shook her head quickly. “No. Not that. It’s something else. Something that doesn’t belong here.” She groaned and touched the blank spot where her eyes used to be. “Oh, God …”

  “Hannah, what’s happening to you?”

  “There’s a hole. It took things. Things I can’t remember.”

  Oh, crap. “What can I do?”

  “Stop it feeding. It’s out there.”

  “I can’t leave you like this.”

  “I’ll be fine. Just need time to adjust. But the others … they’re not as strong as me. They won’t be able to fight it, and they’ll be lost.” She sat up, and her body began to solidify. “It’s out there, and it’s growing.”

  “Growing?”

  “The more it feeds, the larger it grows. I saw it take a specter’s memory until there was nothing left but a wisp of smoke.” Her lips pressed in a thin line. “The rest of the specters ran. It’s gone after them. You have to stop it.”

  Something niggled at the back of my mind, a memory of my own, a vital piece of knowledge. But when I tried to latch on to it, it slipped from my fingers like sand, leaving that annoying feeling like I was forgetting something super important.

  “What does it look like?” Henri asked.

  Hannah’s mouth turned down. “Big, inky black … huge teeth. No eyes. It didn’t have any eyes.” She sighed in exasperation. “That’s all I remember. It hit us so fast, barreling through here like a whirlwind.”

  “I’ll call it in,” Henri said.

  He stepped away on his phone, following protocol by calling Jay. His actions promoted a feeling of safety and security, as if this was just our regular run-of-the-mill case, when my gut screamed at me that it was far from that.

  “Go.” Hannah shooed me. “I need to shut down.”

  The room began to flicker like crazy. Shit, it was about to vanish.

  I stood quickly. “Guys, we need to leave. Now.”

  Henri tucked his phone into his pocket, Bres grasped my hand, and the three of us made a run for the exit. The room began to melt out of existence around us, and the door in front of us winked out for a second. My heart shot up my throat, but then the exit was back, and we were hurtling through it.

  My boots hit the pavement outside, and I sucked in a lungful of fresh air.

  “Shit, that was close.”

  “It’s gone,” Bres said. “Damn.”

  We’d made it out just in time. I leaned forward, hands on my knees, not winded, but needing a minute to get my shit together. Was this connected to the shimmer man, was this what he’d warned me about, the awful thing that was about to be unleashed. Was it here?

  “The specters could be anywhere,” Henri said. “Which means this thing could be anywhere.”

  Good old Henri, straight to the point, straight on the case. Focus, Kat. What did we know about this thing? Just that it fed on specters’ memories. Not enough information. Not nearly enough.

  “Jay is on it,” Henri said. “He’s searching the Council database for a creature that matches the description.”

  “And what if it’s not in our database? No, we can’t wait.” I walked toward the car with the guys flanking me. “We need to split up and search for it.”

  “No,” Bres said. “We do not split up. Idiots split up.”

  Henri nodded. “I agree with Bres.”

  “Fine, in that case, we’re going to need help.”

  “Do you want me to call Jay?” Bres asked. “Ask him to send Kris and Mai?”

  My lips curved in a smile. “No need.” I held up the whistle that was hanging around my neck and blew.

  The gargoyles came within minutes, leaping off buildings and sliding out from the alley to our right. They crowded around us, inquisitively waiting.

  “Hi, guys. I need your help.” I filled them in on the creature hunting the ghosts. “Split into pairs, and if you see it, one of you needs to find me, while the other keeps his or her eyes on the prize.”

  “What will you do?” one of the gargoyles asked. He was smaller than the rest, wiry with sharp features.

  “I’m going to stop it.”

  * * *

  “How?” Henri asked as we jogged down the main street away from Good Spirits.

  “How what?”

  “How will you stop this thing when you have no idea what it is? We need to wait for Jay.”

  He had a point, but waiting meant allowing this thing to feast. “It’s a monster, and we stop monsters. We’ll figure it out.”

  Henri made a sound of exasperation. “Dammit, Kat, this is exactly how you almost got yourself killed last year.”

  “Not the same. I knew what I was dealing with last year. I knew what I was doing. It was just dangerous. So, this is nothing like that.”

  “May I make a suggestion?” Bres asked.

  I shot him a grateful glance. “Please.”

  “We find it, but we don’t attack unless it attacks a specter. We track it instead and wait for Jay to call.”

  “I agree with Bres,” Henri said for the second time.

  I turned to Bres. “Okay, what did you do to him?”

  “What?”

  “I agree with Bres. I agree with Bres. What is that? What mojo did you use, huh?”

  A reedy scream drifted toward us on the night air. Living or dead, it didn’t matter. I veered toward it, taking the guys with me. Our boots pounded pavement, down a side street lit only by the automated streetlights and lined with residences with dark windows that looked at us like clawing eyes.

  The scream came again, not just one but several, and louder now.

  “This way!” Henri took a sharp right between two houses, down a short access tunnel, and into a moonlit garden. But the moonlight was shadowed by a monolithic figure that stood at least eight feet off the ground. Black as night, its skin seemed to ripple with each movement as it stalked toward the cluster of specters hovering by a treehouse at the bottom of the garden. There were four ghosts, but they were huddled so close together they merged into one, emitting a glow that reminded me of pretty floodlights. How were they doing that?

  “Shit.” Bres put up a hand to shield his eyes. “What is that?”

  “What is that?” Henri pointed toward the monster because there was no other word to describe what I was seeing. The memory that had slipped away from me surged now, filling my mind with neon eyes and a warm voice.

  One escaped. You have to find it. You have to bring it back.

  The Shade.

  This thing was from the Shade.

  Chapter Four

  And just like that, I knew how to get rid of it, except … Except it was fucking huge and almost on the ghosts. It moved like it was stalking them, toying with them, like it had all the time in the world. If it knew we were here, it wasn’t paying any attention to us. Its sole focus was the glowing specters. Damn, of course. They were combining their energy and drawing from the leylines to try and ward off the monster, except, my gut told me, their efforts were going to be in vain.

  Their unified screams ripped the air as the monster grew closer, but they didn’t flee, which confirmed my conclusion that they believed they could ward it off if they stayed together, stayed in that particular spot where there was probably a leyline hotspot.

  I took a step forward, and Henri grasped my wrist. “Don’t.”

  But I had to because this was my fault. “I know what it is. I know how to stop it. I have to do something.” I twisted free of his grip and ran toward the monster. “Hey! Ugly!”

  It continued to advance on its prey, oblivious of my presence or ignoring me, I wasn’t sure which. One of the ghosts broke free of the huddle and made a run for it. I expected the monster to swerve and pick off the runner, but it remained stuck to its path, attention on the group whimpering in the treehouse. It was totally focused on the light.

  The light.

/>   Oh, shit bags, it was attracted to the combined soul energy—the glow the specters generated when near one another. He was beelining for it, just like the monsters in the Shade had made a beeline for me when I’d gone all supernova. But my shine only worked in the Shade, not here, not on this plane. There was no way to use it to distract the monster. No, I’d need to use his obliviousness to my advantage.

  Geronimo! My body made contact with the obsidian mass, and I reached out and latched on to it, tethering to it with a sharp snapping sensation at my solar plexus. A roar filled my mind.

  Yeah, you notice me now, don’t you, bitch?

  Bres’s bellow and Henri’s cry of alarm were distant and fading things as the blood whooshed in my ears and the connection between me and the Shade monster solidified. Gotcha, you fucker.

  Now, to pull it into the Shade.

  Ice rushed over my skin, and my breath froze in my lungs. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. Icicles sliced through me, burrowing into my solar plexus and up toward my heart like frosted knives.

  No.

  I couldn’t do it. Not strong enough. Panic hit me in a crushing wave, and my mind went into meltdown, the kind where you realize a current has got you, that you’re rushing away from shore and are going to drown.

  Drown.

  Oh, God, I remembered now. The boat and the dark water closing over my head. The sensation of being unable to breathe, and then darkness followed by Gramps’s weeping face. It was a memory from before the binding, before I’d been made to forget.

  “Kat!”

  Kat? Who was Kat? Oh, fuck, that was me.

  Someone was calling me, and then pain registered at the connection point between me and the monster—a throbbing, pulsing pain. The monster was feeding on me, on my essence, my shine. My mind revolted, and my body arched. With my final iota of will, I grasped the tether, twisted, and pulled.

  My knees hit the ground, and the world rushed back in, smashing into all my senses with sounds and warm breath and hot hands on my ice-encrusted skin.

  “Kat, fucking hell, Kat.” Bres cradled me to his warm body as my thoughts came back online.

  “Help me.” His voice was a desperate rasp. “Henri, we need to warm her up.”

  More heat and breath on my cheek. Hands rubbing my thighs. But the ice was inside me, deep inside me, and spreading.

  “Breathe, baby. Please, breathe,” Bres sobbed.

  Don’t cry, please …

  “Kat … fucking hell,” Henri said. “She needs to feed.”

  “She’s barely conscious,” Bres replied.

  “Help us,” Henri said.

  Gentle heat touched my chest. My eyes opened a crack to a soft glow. Specters hovered above me. Bright and beautiful.

  Run. Run before he finds you.

  But they were moving closer, touching me. My solar plexus warmed, and restorative heat trickled outward into the network of my veins.

  The glow intensified, and the heat built, and then my chest expanded, sudden and violent, as my body took a hungry, desperate breath.

  “Oh, God. Oh, thank God.” Bres held me tighter, rocking me back and forth in his lap.

  I opened my eyes to Henri’s face looking down on us, his mouth a thin line.

  “Stay here. I’ll bring the car,” he said.

  Unconsciousness beckoned, but I fought it. “The monster?”

  “Gone. It ran,” Bres said in a hoarse voice.

  But it would be back. This was my fault. I’d let it through somehow. I’d let it out during one of my trips, and it would keep hunting until I stopped it.

  The problem was, it was clear I wasn’t strong enough.

  * * *

  I fed off Bres, legs wrapped around his waist as I swallowed his hot, potent blood. He was hard against me, his arousal jerking with every pull of my mouth on his neck. One huge hand spanned my waist. The other made soothing circles on my back.

  We weren’t alone in the room, but that didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but Bres’s body against mine and his blood in my mouth.

  I wanted to stay here, like this, my fangs in his jugular, my body wrapped around his, but I’d taken enough. I retracted my fangs with a pang of regret and laved the puncture wounds to seal them.

  “Better?” he asked.

  I leaned back to look at him. “Thank you.” I kissed his lips softly, resisting the urge to deepen the kiss because post-feeding desire was an actual thing, and if I deepened the kiss, I’d want to fuck. “Thank you.”

  He raked me with a knowing gaze and then closed his eyes with a sigh. “I thought you were dying.”

  “I think I almost did.”

  His grip on me tightened. “No more.”

  I wish. “I have no choice. I’m the only one who can stop it.”

  “Except it almost killed you.”

  But while I’d been recovering, feeding, and rubbing up on Bres, my mind had been working on a solution.

  “I have a plan.”

  Bres graced me with a slow blink. “Does it involve not dying?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then let’s hear it,” Jay said, reminding me that Bres and I weren’t alone in the room. I climbed off my lover’s lap and faced Jay and Henri on steady feet. Mai, Kris, and Karishma were no longer in the room.

  “The creature is from the Shade. I remember seeing others like it. They chased me, attracted to my glow, and I noticed how it was attracted to the specters who were huddled together because their combined energy created a glow.”

  “It didn’t go after the lone specter,” Henri said.

  “Exactly. It remained fixated on the group,” Bres added.

  “When I was connected to it, I felt its hunger. It’s lost, empty, and it’s feeding on memories in an attempt to find some kind of completion.”

  “Okay,” Jay said. “But that doesn’t explain how you’re going to stop it. I assume you planned to drag it into the Shade like you did the riders, but it was too strong.”

  I nodded. “It is too strong, but I can still take it to the Shade. I’m just going to need a little help.”

  “The specters who healed you …” Henri met my gaze. “You’re going to get them to help you. To channel the leyline energy into you.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But how will you find the monster?” Jay asked.

  “I won’t. I’ll make sure it finds me.”

  * * *

  It had just gone three in the morning as we made our way across rocks and pebbles toward the dead-eyed lighthouse. The sky was cloudy, and the moon was hidden, but Nightblood vision was excellent, and now that I’d fed, I was filled with the zing of energy.

  Bres and Henri trekked behind me as I led the way toward the towering, shadowing structure, crowbar clutched in my hand. According to town records, the lighthouse had been closed for almost a decade, but if the crowbar didn’t get the doors open, the bolt cutters Henri was carrying should do the trick. Failing those options, brute force would have to do. If, for some reason, all options failed, then I’d be climbing to the top using the feytech suction cups I’d packed in my nifty backpack of tricks.

  “Do you think they’ll come?” Bres asked.

  I hopped from rock to rock. “I fucking hope so. The plan can’t work without them, and even if they don’t trust me, they’ll listen to Hannah.”

  Ghosts, we needed lots of ghosts, and we needed them here at the lighthouse because this decrepit building was sitting on an intersection of leylines, a cluster that was uber-powerful. Mai had confirmed as much after studying the leyline maps they kept in the study.

  It was the perfect spot to draw energy, to gather ghosts, and to lure a monster that came from the Shade. The plan was simple. The ghosties would gather, draw energy from the leylines, and do their glowing trick. The monster would come, and I’d tether to it using the specters’ energy to fend off the monster’s icy kiss. The heat the specters provided should be enough for me to fight off the monster’s arctic inf
luence and buy me time to blast a hole into the Shade, drop off the beast, and come back.

  Easy.

  Okay, so why was anxiety doing the River Dance in the pit of my stomach? Shit, the lighthouse was huge close up. White, peeling paint webbed with cracks. Damn, it looked like it was about to collapse.

  Thick chains looped around the door handle. I stepped back to let Henri get to work with the bolt cutters. The chains fell to the ground with a clank. Henri grabbed the handle and tugged. The door opened with a grating sound that put my teeth on edge.

  “Damn, I was hoping for some crowbar action.”

  Bres chuckled. “There could be a door inside that needs busting open with a crowbar.”

  A girl could only hope.

  Henri ducked into the gloom, and I followed with Bres at my back. A dry, musty smell tickled my nose, and then we were climbing stairs, loads of stairs winding up to a control room at the top. But we needed to go farther, up to the actual light that once cast a beam across the sea.

  A set of steps led up to a hatch. Henri shoved with his shoulder, and it slammed open.

  Yeah, I guess crowbars were kinda pointless if you had a golem on your team. Henri hauled me up into the lamp room. Damn, that was one big bulb. Bres closed the hatch, and we wandered toward the glass to look out onto the beach below.

  Where were they?

  I’d stopped off at Good Spirits to find it gone, but Philip had been there. He’d promised to pass my message to Hannah. The specters were in hiding, scattered across Scorchwood, but Hannah would know how to call them together.

  She had to.

  “Shit, maybe I’m making too many assumptions. Optimism can be a downfall.”

  “No,” Henri said. “Optimism has always been your most attractive trait.”

  I glanced sharply at him, and his expression shut down.

  Bres cleared his throat. “Henri is right. There’s nothing wrong with optimism, especially in dark times.”