by Elle Adams
“I don’t trust him an inch, but I’m not certain that’s what his game is, to be honest,” I admitted. “If it’s not him, then we have some other wannabe ghost hunter to contend with.”
Which was kind of annoying, I was willing to admit. I’d been all for the idea of chasing Shelton out of town and then washing my hands of the matter. But there were too many unknown factors in this whole affair, and the disappearance of the two teenagers’ ghosts surely hadn’t been accidental even if the Reaper hadn’t been responsible.
“I guess,” she said. “It’s scary, though, isn’t it?”
“I’m not frightened of him.” I wasn’t—not for myself, anyway. “But if he goes after my brother, then we’ll have a problem.”
He hadn’t banished Mart, though, even when he’d been given the chance to. That wasn’t the behaviour of someone here to banish ghosts and nothing more. So what was he doing here?
“I meant the council,” said Carey. “It’s scary that they could just stop you from hunting ghosts if they find out you’re here.”
“I’ve spent years avoiding them,” I said. “Since I left home, pretty much. They say it’s not allowed, using my Reaper skills, but it’s not like they could police my every movement unless they set a tail on me. It’s not worth the effort for them to do that when they have actual rogues to chase.”
Carey’s expression cleared. “In other words, we need to get rid of the new Reaper, and then things can go back to normal?”
It wouldn’t be that simple, but I nodded. “Pretty much. Whether he’s involved with the two ghosts’ disappearances or not, the quicker he leaves town, the better.”
She gave a nod. “Then should we ask old Harold to help us send him packing?”
“He’s being almost as elusive as Shelton is,” I said. “Even the detective hasn’t been able to get him to answer the door.”
“Speaking of the detective, aren’t you going out with him tonight?” Carey said.
“Nah, he has to get back to work,” I said. “And make excuses for why he dug out the files on Eric and Lara’s murders.”
“He did?” she said. “Wow, he must really want you to spend time with him if he went as far as to delve into the files of an old murder case.”
“Maybe,” I allowed, “but I think the case is relevant to what’s going on now. Why would both ghosts vanish at the same time?”
“Weird,” she said. “They died at the same time, though, right? And their murders were never solved. That’s got to be the reason.”
“Seems that way.” Yet few other people knew their deaths might not have been accidental, or so I’d thought. And none of my suspects had been at the inn when Eric had disappeared.
There was, however, one person who could be in any place at once if he wanted to. We might have come to an agreement, but I wasn’t striking the Reaper off my suspect list just yet.
The endless list of questions I needed to ask circled through my mind all night, and I woke up to the sound of Mart singing loudly with the shower running at full blast. At least he hadn’t flooded the bathroom this time around.
I had an early shift, so I got on with work while I mulled over who to speak to next. Oh, and how and when to mention yesterday’s little excursion to Drew. When he messaged me and asked if I was free, I texted back saying I wanted to talk to him, crossing my fingers that he wouldn’t get too annoyed with me for leaving him behind to go chasing the Reaper. Okay, Drew would never stop me from doing as I wanted, but the fact that I’d gone after a potentially dangerous individual alone was bound to rub him up the wrong way.
Realistically, though, nobody but a fellow Reaper would have been able to take Shelton on if it came to it. I wasn’t certain I could get even Drew to understand that. He didn’t know just how dangerous a fully operational Reaper could be.
And whose fault is that? You didn’t tell him.
I shook the thought away, blaming my moment of insecurity on Shelton for taunting me by bringing up some of my biggest concerns about dating a non-Reaper. The secretiveness, for instance. But I hadn’t lied when I’d said the Reaper Council had no hold over me whatsoever, and that was why I’d started dating Drew without fearing repercussions.
The problem was more likely to come from more personal issues stemming from my Reaper identity. Like my propensity for taking risks that would kill a regular person. Or my creepy ability to summon up Death anywhere I wanted to. But I’d done both, and Drew still hadn’t run away. Not even when I’d brought up the rule about not dating non-Reapers during our first date. He’d even said he wanted to see me again, even if he hadn’t committed to a particular place and time. That ought to be worth something, right?
My phone buzzed with another message from Drew, saying he was on his way over. My heart gave a flip, and I sternly told it to calm down. For all I knew, my abrupt excursion across town to see the Reaper would be the last straw for him.
Ten minutes later, Drew entered the restaurant and walked over to me. “Hey, Maura.”
“Hey,” I said. “Want coffee?”
“Sure,” he said. “Same as usual. You said you had something to tell me?”
“Yeah.” I busied myself making our drinks while I debated how to broach the subject. Once I gave him the coffee, I settled behind the bar and took a long sip of my own drink.
“So,” I began, “I may have found our Reaper yesterday.”
His brows shot up. “You went looking for him again?”
“Not the way we did,” I added hastily. “I can use my skills to track any other Reaper if I want to, and I got fed up waiting for him to show his face. So I stepped through the shadows and cornered him where he was hiding.”
“Whereabouts was he, then?” he asked.
“Inside an old house.” I ran through what I’d discovered there, including the strange piles of herbs and the general sense that someone else had been looking for ghosts there. Someone who wasn’t the Reaper. “It’s bizarre, I’ll say that much.”
His brow furrowed. “Someone used a spell to summon a ghost into the house? A witch or wizard?”
“Must have been,” I said. “Which is something we didn’t think of when we were looking around here for the perpetrator. If they summoned the ghosts of Eric and Lara somewhere else in town using a spell, they wouldn’t have had to be anywhere near the inn to get rid of them. They could just summon and banish them within the same place, and nobody would know.”
Which expanded our list of suspects to include the entire town. Not ideal.
“Are you sure the spell you found in that house was used on those particular ghosts?” he said. “Would there have been some kind of banishment spell, too?”
“I didn’t find one,” I admitted. “I suppose they might have done the banishment elsewhere in the house, but I didn’t search the whole place. Maybe I should have, but that Reaper annoyed the hell out of me when he ran off.”
“And are you sure the Reaper himself was telling the truth?” he asked.
I shrugged. “He was being evasive, I’ll say that much. He said that if he was here to banish ghosts, he wouldn’t have needed an elaborate setup like that, and… well, he’s right. It makes no sense. I can’t overlook that. He has a scythe, after all.”
“But those two ghosts were still victims of the same murderer,” he said. “Do you think that’s why they vanished?”
“I’d feel more comfortable saying yes if the Reaper told me why he was in town, if not for that reason,” I said. “He wouldn’t tell me. Said he didn’t trust me.”
Given his reaction when I’d accused him of being a rogue himself, it made sense for him to have reacted like that if he thought I was working against the council. Which couldn’t be further from the truth, but if he was with the council himself, he couldn’t possibly know who I was unless he’d had direct contact with my father or with someone who’d met me during my brief time as a Reaper’s apprentice.
He didn’t know there’d be a Reaper in
town when he came here. He couldn’t have. Which meant he was being cautious out of natural wariness about potentially being around a rogue. That made more sense, but it also made the oddly personal remarks he’d made to me about my relationship with the detective seem even stranger. Not to mention suspicious.
“Has he spoken to Harold, do you know?” he asked.
“I forgot to ask,” I said. “I was too caught up in trying to catch him off guard. I have no idea what his deal is, but if he has any knowledge of the local Reapers, he must have known Harold is supposedly in charge of the dead here in Hawkwood Hollow.”
The odds were high that he had known about Harold but not about me, so I made a mental note to add that to the list of questions to ask him the next time we ran into one another. The problem was, of course, that it’d be a little difficult to wrangle information from him when I didn’t trust him any more than he trusted me. And therein lay my problem. Aside from his bad attitude, that is.
The detective seemed to consider my words. “He didn’t know you were here, though?”
“No, because I’m not an active Reaper,” I said. “Every one of them has their name on a list that tells all the other Reapers what their skill level is and which area they’re in charge of.”
His brows shot up. “Would this Shelton person show up on that list? Can you check?”
“I don’t have access to it, since I’m not an active Reaper,” I said.
“But does Harold?”
I tilted my head. “I like the way you think. I actually don’t know. He might’ve lost the list or forgotten to keep it up to date…”
But it was somewhere to start. It’d at least deal with the question of whether the new Reaper in town was legitimate, which would take a weight off my mind.
“It’s worth asking,” Drew agreed. “If Harold will talk to you, of course.”
I groaned. “What did I do to deserve two grumpy Reapers giving me grief? I realise that it’s kind of a Reaper trait, but come on.”
“You aren’t grumpy,” he said. “Neither is your brother, from what I’ve heard.”
“Oh, Mart drove the other Reapers out of their minds by making jokes all the time,” I said. “He got more flak than I did for rule breaking as an apprentice, though he liked getting me into trouble as well.”
“Hey!” Mart said indignantly, appearing like clockwork when I mentioned his name.
“It’s true, and you know it,” I told him.
“Are you sure you never broke the rules yourself?” said the detective, a smile playing on his mouth.
“All the time,” said Mart. “She likes to pretend to be righteous, but she was always sneaking around behind the council’s back. Banishing ghosts… summoning them…”
I turned back to the detective. “Maybe a little. There were a few good reasons I left them. Aside from my brother’s untimely death.”
Mart let out a howl and flopped over dramatically in midair. “Uncalled for, Maura. That hurt deeply.”
I rolled my eyes at him. “Anyway, the council doesn’t know who I am, not really. I was only an apprentice for a short time, and I’m miles away from where we used to live. Shelton doesn’t know me. But Harold… I’ll see what he says.”
At that moment, Carey ran into the restaurant in her school uniform, her hair flying behind her and her eyes wild.
“Hey,” I said. “Something wrong?”
“Cris and her friends are hunting for ghosts again,” she said.
“Where?” I asked.
“She mentioned this abandoned house down by the river,” Carey replied. “Opposite the spot where those kids vanished.”
“Near the inn?” Oh, boy. “Do you know where?”
She nodded breathlessly. Drew and I looked at one another for a moment.
“You want to go after them?” he said.
“I think I should, before someone gets hurt.” I turned to Carey. “Can you lead the way?”
10
Carey beckoned her familiar to her side. “We’re coming with you.”
Casper meowed in agreement.
I shook my head. “Don’t go following Cris and the others into a creepy house. It’s not—”
“Safe?” she said. “I know Cris and her friends. They want to get footage for her blog, and I don’t think they’ve considered the risks at all.”
Drew and I took the lead, while Carey walked behind us. She carried her ghost goggles in one hand as though hoping to catch good footage of any spirits we might run into in the house, but I suspected the footage would be the least of our problems if we didn’t stop those kids from risking their necks for a cheap joke. Her mother wouldn’t be thrilled with me for taking her with us, either, but with a little luck, we’d get to the house and send the schoolchildren home to their parents before anyone else had to know.
The three of us crossed the bridge and walked alongside the river until we reached a street full of abandoned houses that had half collapsed due to neglect. Carey hesitated, scanning the front of the buildings, while a flicker of familiarity stirred within me.
When Carey picked out one of the houses, I peered through the window. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“What is it?” said Drew.
“I think this is the house where I tracked the Reaper down yesterday.”
How in the world had those kids found this place? The Reaper didn’t know the students from the local academy, surely. He wasn’t even from this town.
“Are you sure?” whispered Carey, her eyes wide.
“I didn’t go outside and check the location while I was there last time,” I said, “but I recognise the room.”
The old house looked even more dilapidated from the outside, with crumbling bricks and missing roof tiles. Its shattered windows were boarded up, preventing us from seeing who was inside, but I could hear voices from behind the closed door and recognised Cris’s ghost-seeing blond friend, Ann, among them. Definitely the right place. Had it been her idea to come here, or Cris’s? Or had someone else pointed them in this direction? Given the absence of any ghosts the last time I’d been here, it was anyone’s guess.
Drew pushed the door inward, and we headed down the short hallway and turned right. Cris and her friends had gathered in the living room, and several shredded herbs lay scattered on the ground at their feet.
So it’s true? Had they been the ones who’d summoned the ghosts here after all?
“What are you doing here?” Cris demanded. “Go away.”
“I’m here to stop you from making a foolish mistake,” I said. “You were about to summon a ghost, weren’t you?”
“What’s it to you?” she said. “We can’t all snap our fingers and have spirits appear in front of us like you.”
“Look, do you even know which ghost you’re summoning?” I said. “If you aren’t specific enough when you cast the spell, you might get a spirit who’s stronger than you’re prepared for and who isn’t thrilled at being summoned by a bunch of kids. Trust me, this is a bad idea.”
Cris’s gaze went to Carey. “You told tales on us, didn’t you? You called the police and told your friend to come here.”
“I didn’t call the police,” Carey protested.
“The Reaper witch is dating the detective, though,” Ann piped up. “So she brought him along to try to scare us off. Too bad it won’t work.”
Carey’s face flushed. “Look, I was worried about you summoning a ghost without thinking it through. Spirits aren’t harmless. They can be really dangerous. I’ve nearly been killed by one of them before. Maura is the expert, and she knows what she’s doing.”
“Ghosts aside, this old place is falling to pieces,” said Drew. “If there was an accident, one of you might have ended up seriously hurt.”
Cris glared at him. “We aren’t stupid. We were getting on just fine before you got here.”
A creak sounded from somewhere above our heads. I looked up at the off-white ceiling, as did everyone else in t
he room.
“What was that?” Ann asked, unconvincingly.
“What did you summon?” I asked.
Cris blinked. “Nothing. We didn’t finish the spell before someone interrupted us.”
Uh-huh. I wasn’t sure I believed her, and I certainly wouldn’t be leaving without checking out the source of the noise. Someone, living or dead, was definitely upstairs.
“I’m going upstairs,” I said to Drew. “Can you keep an eye on things down here?”
“Of course.” He knew my Reaper skills meant I’d be fine even if the whole house came crashing down on me, in theory, but that didn’t mean he was keen on the idea of me facing an unknown spirit alone.
“None of you follow me,” I warned the others. “In fact, you should leave the house right now. All of you.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Cris protested.
“Yes, you are,” Drew said in as stern a voice as I’d ever heard from him. “All of you, get out.”
He was in full police chief mode, and even the most stubborn person wouldn’t dare disobey. The students traipsed out of the house, while Carey hung back, an uncertain look on her face.
As for me, I trod upstairs, following the creaking sound. Had the students managed to summon up a ghost after all? I knew that to summon a specific spirit, you needed something that belonged to the person, and it was pretty unlikely that they had any of the personal possessions of Eric and Lara. That meant they’d probably conducted a random summoning spell in the hopes of drawing the attention of a spirit… any spirit. While the old house probably did have a history of ghosts attached to it, I hadn’t been kidding when I’d said anything might have answered their call, from a simple spirit to a full-fledged poltergeist who wouldn’t have been able to resist tormenting a few students for a laugh.
I trod gingerly across the floorboards, careful to watch my step in case my foot went through the floor. Been there, done that. Yet I didn’t see anything ahead of me, human or ghost. I turned on my Reaper senses and scanned the upper floor through the blanket of shadows around me, but I drew a blank. No ghosts. No living people either, including the Reaper.
