Netherworld: Drop Dead Sexy

by Tracy St. John

  The suggestion of her head fell back, and the gray hole of her mouth gaped wide as a thin whistle of a scream scraped through the air. The next second a jolt zinged through me, and substance returned to me, along with the sensation of weight.

  The wraith fed me her energy, subjecting herself to the horrible pain of being drained.

  “Wait. Stop.” I didn’t spare a thought to the fact I could talk again, that Erica’s magic had died with her. I struggled against the wraith, and she shredded in places where I pushed. I stopped fighting, but the electric thrum continued even as she came apart. The smoky bits clung stubbornly to me, insisted on bringing me back towards wholeness.

  “Why are you hurting yourself?” I cried, my voice growing stronger as she became less. “Stop it!”

  “The Ripper,” a low mumble said in my ear. I turned my head – I had seemingly real body parts again – and I faced another drawn, gray featured face. “Down there.”

  The wraith who’d fed me disappeared. I prayed she hadn’t sacrificed her entire existence just to pull me back together. Murdering Erica hadn’t offered a single guilty impulse, but my guts curled in horror to think I might have cannibalized another spirit.

  “Down there,” the wraith at my ear muttered again. My gaze followed the direction she indicated, which seemed to be the shadowed area across from the card table.

  Gentle pushes guided me towards that part of the room. The other wraiths gathered around me and seemed to be working together to move me where they wanted me to go. I adjusted my ghost enhanced night vision to the dim corner and realized a wooden crate sat there.

  “In there. Lift the lid.”

  Thanks to the one wraith’s sacrifice, I had the strength to do so. A Stygian black casket lay inside. Holy crap.

  “He’s in here?” I asked. The very modern casket didn’t fit the Judge. He belonged in a wooden box, the kind used in medieval times. Scratch that. The bastard belonged in the deepest pit of Hell.

  That’s right. I said bastard. Even I have a point where only a cuss word will do.

  “Kill him.”

  “Why me?” I asked. Yeah, I wanted justice for us all, but the Judge scared me spitless. The Judge was the Ripper, a coldblooded serial killer. A vampire.

  “You’re the strongest. We’ll give you what we have left.”

  They gathered tight around me and I realized what they planned to do. As God is my witness, I tried to get away. I’ll swear it on a library full of Bibles. I really tried.

  “No, please!” I screamed, my voice louder than all theirs’ combined. “Stop! STOP!”

  I twisted and fought, but it made no difference. They fed themselves to me, their pale shrieks ringing in my ears until they dissolved into nothing and their voices silenced forever.

  I ended on the floor, my ghostly self mostly restored. I sobbed without reservation this time, grieving as I’ve never grieved for anyone before, including myself.

  As Dan said, we all cry for the dead.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I don’t know how long I cried. When I finally stopped, I noted with horror the reddish-orange light filtering into the shack. The sun was setting, and the Judge would be climbing into his body pretty soon.

  He planned to kill Tristan.

  I jumped to my feet in an instant and rushed at the casket. I struggled to open it. I might have regained my strength, but my regular hum of energy wasn’t what I typically used to move real world objects. This wasn’t going to be easy. Par for the day.

  I closed my eyes and homed in on the steady pulse of the earth. Drawing in. Drawing in. Drawing even more in until a little tingle twitched my fingers and toes.

  It wasn’t as good as a hit of computer or camcorder, but it would have to do. I concentrated the energy into my hands and sprung the casket open. I jumped back with a gasp when the Judge was revealed to me, his black eyes wide open and staring.

  When he didn’t rise and suck me back into a wispy wraith, I calmed enough to approach the casket again. The Judge – the Fulton Falls Ripper – lay still, staring coldly but emptily at the ceiling. Unfortunately, the last bit of scarlet sunlight didn’t reach him at all. I would have loved to see him burst into flames.

  A wave of weakness surprised me. Perhaps I still suffered the aftereffects of the Judge’s attack. Maybe I’d been permanently damaged, as Dan had warned me could happen. Or maybe simple grief and horror drained me.

  No matter the reason, I was running out of time. Dark spread in the cabin like an inkstain, held back only by the dancing flame of the hurricane lamp. Forcing myself to be calm, I drew on the natural magnetic pulse that now found its way into the shack, re-energizing myself. My mind screamed for me to hurry, hurry, but I knew I had to pull as much strength as possible. I needed every bit I could get.

  I reached the point of tingling again. I continued to draw, trying not to notice the light slipping through the boards of the shack had faded entirely. At last I made one final pull, feeling a steady thrum buzz through my body.

  I hurried to the card table, climbing on top of it to grasp the pointed broken board hanging loosely from the ceiling. I yanked on it with all I had. The plank came easily, so easily that I lost my balance. The board and I tumbled to the floor.

  “Way to go, graceful,” I muttered at myself, scooping up the piece of wood after concentrating my power into my hands once more. I straightened and faced the casket. I screamed.

  The Judge had sat up.

  I almost dropped the stave. It took only a millisecond for me to notice his eyes were blank, his face expressionless. With the setting of the sun the lights had switched on, but no one had come home yet. Nevertheless, that was the world’s longest millisecond ever.

  My relief proved short lived. The ghost of the Judge hazed into existence beside his body, and his stare lit on me in an instant. Fury suffused his features even as he began to bleed into the corporeal tomb of flesh that held him during the night hours. He struggled to remain free, knowing I had the drop on him.

  I took advantage of his distraction, running up and plunging my hand into his smearing ghost. I yanked energy from him, feeling myself go more solid, heavier, more real. He screamed, his face a brutal rictus of pain just before his body drew him in like a super-suction vacuum cleaner.

  As his furious consciousness bloomed to life in his eyes, I plunged the sharp end of the wooden board into his chest with all the strength I’d leeched. I staked him with a savage, animal cry, smashing through skin, muscle and bone, knocking him back into the casket.

  He animated quickly. “Meddling whore! Take this out of me!”

  “Don’t think so,” I snarled, my smile brutal with triumph.

  The victory didn’t last long. I hadn’t staked him to the ground, which would have rendered him helpless. He grasped the stave in his chest and pulled. It began to reluctantly retreat from his body.

  I backed off. Darn it, he would get away, and then what? Without Erica, I thought the Judge probably couldn’t touch me until he returned to ghost form, but Tristan remained in immediate danger. And if Tristan went down, there might not be anyone standing in the Judge’s way until he returned to ghostliness himself, at which time he could come after me again.

  My mind racing and coming up with nothing good, I continued to back away. As the Judge pulled the board free of his chest, I bumped into the card table. The table shook, and the hurricane lamp’s wobble sent crazed shadows jumping along the wall.

  Instinct overwhelmed conscious thought. I grabbed the hurricane lamp and threw it at the Judge as he crawled out of the casket. He dodged the lamp, and it crashed against the ebony surface of his resting place. Glass shattered, sending kerosene splashing on the casket and the vampire.

  Fire whooshed, setting my enemy ablaze. The Judge screamed and spun like a top as he went up. Vampires are very flammable even without an accelerant, and the flames consumed my killer in an instant. I remained rooted to the spot, watching him reduced to the spindly skele
ton that still fought and jerked until it was blackened as dark as the casket.

  The shack was just going up when the struggling framework of my killer collapsed into a pile of ash.

  * * * *

  The Fulton Falls Ripper had met his deserved end. Unfortunately, I knew his evil lived on. Weakened once more from my exertions, I transported to the library, hoping to find Dan so we could dash to Tristan’s rescue.

  The main room we usually frequented was empty except for Miss Gertrude, eternally reading as always. She paid me no mind as I staggered drunkenly, exhausted once more.

  No doubt Dan searched for me, but I had no idea where he might be looking. Tristan and Patricia had risen by now and were probably under attack by the Judge’s allies. My first instinct was to go to them and join in the fight. I assumed the attackers were corporeal, probably vampires and shifters. One dim, shaky ghost couldn’t hope to do much. I needed help.

  “The press conference,” I told myself. “That’s where Tristan’s aides will be.”

  I fixed the Old Courthouse in my mind and prayed I had enough juice left in me to get there.

  * * * *

  The Old Courthouse where paranormal folks’ trials are held is a grand old lady, replete with ivy-covered columns and neo-classical architecture. Across the large fountain-dotted courtyard looms the larger New Courthouse, used for mundane human affairs. The more recent of the two is a larger colonial-styled building and lovely in its own way, but possesses none of the regal charm of Fulton Falls’ original dispensary of justice. Tristan’s press conference had been staged on the picturesque front steps of the Old Courthouse.

  It resided between Rennings and Elder Streets, where a collection of old Victorian homes, now the abodes of legal practices, lined up like ladies-in-waiting. These former houses and the Old Courthouse had been built in a time that knew nothing of cars, let alone parking lots. The wide streets accommodated both traffic and parking. Right now television news crews choked the lanes. I saw local stations as well as those from Savannah and Jacksonville represented, their vans congregating like a herd of white hippos on the asphalt river. I was shocked to see CNN had also shown up. Tristan was going nationwide tonight.

  The vans claimed my attention first and foremost, not the podium crowded with microphones and surrounded by Tristan’s staff, nor the crowds of curious onlookers and camera crews. The local station’s setup was the closest to me, and I went straight to it. The doors hung wide open, and all sorts of equipment filled it, lighting up the interior like a Christmas tree. For a starving ghost, it resembled a buffet of gi-normous proportions.

  Local reporter Amy Hoskins spoke to her cameraman nearby as I scrambled into the truck. I had gone to high school with her. We’d even been friends back in the day. She managed to be a sweetheart but no-nonsense at the same time. I frowned a little as I took in her appearance. The air had turned her blond hair a bit flyaway and made her nose on the shiny side, but in the heat and humidity of Fulton Falls, I couldn’t really fault her slightly less-than camera-ready look. Amy was a great gal.

  As I eyed the banks of electronic equipment, preparing to feast hard and fast, I heard Amy say, “Stop bitching. You know these things never go off on time.”

  I chose the humming stack of black rectangles with plug-in cables running strands of black insulated wiring in complicated loops. As I moved close to it, the cameraman grumbled, “I don’t want Hector reaming me because we missed the ten o’clock feed.”

  I opened wide and sucked in a monster hit of electronic nutrition. The power burst over me, setting my hair on end, raising me up on tip toe, and quaking me with orgasm. Imagine your entire body as a clitoris and you just came in contact with the world’s biggest, strongest vibrator. Oh yeah. It was that frickin’ awesome.

  The interior lights of the van fluctuated, and machines beeped in alarm. As I yelled a “Woo!” that would have made wrestler Ric Flair proud, the cameraman climbed into the van beside me.

  “Shit, now what?”

  I burst from the van pumped so full of energy that twenty laps around both courthouses wouldn’t have settled me down. As I raced towards the podium and the assembled aides, I heard a shocked, “Did you see that? I think we had a ghost in here!”

  I didn’t stick around to introduce myself. Fairly crackling with power, I ran towards the familiar faces of Lana, Gerald, Taylor and Isabella.

  The organizers of the press conference had lit the steps of the courthouse until it was as bright as a summer’s day on the beach. To one side stood the four people I needed to speak to most, and I flew with the winged shoes of Mercury to reach them.

  Every sense I possessed was as bright as the lights. The typewriter chatter of conversations, the hum of nearby traffic with an occasional splatter of engines possessing less well maintained mufflers, even the buzzing song of the cicadas were a cacophony. And the scents: a smoky bed of gasoline underlay the resonance of human sweat, deodorized by a spiral galaxy of colognes. Sweetest of all was the springtime coating of azaleas and wisteria that made the humid air a warm, soothing blanket.

  In my sensitized state, I was having difficulty attending the task at hand. Everything wanted to distract me; the gray shrouds of Spanish moss hanging like cocooned bodies from the gnarled oaks, the urge to stroke the plump cheek of a baby slumbering in its stroller while its mom replaited the cornrows of an older sister, the sickle-thin knife of the moon rising in the star-splatted sky. I wanted to revel in the sights and sensations of this night, but death loomed large for my vamp sweetie and his sister if I gave in to diversion.

  I leapt among Tristan’s trusted group, springing with all the vigor of a kangaroo. “Lana! Lana, can you hear me?”

  Lana’s cry broke into the group’s discussion of what was keeping Tristan and Patricia. “Brandilynn? Honey, what’s wrong?”

  Everyone silenced and turned to her. I jabbered fast and loud anyway, as if I stood in the middle of a monster truck rally. My volume control was badly lacking. “Tristan’s under attack. He needs help out by Sanderson Cottage on the island. Get everybody out there!”

  Lana’s face creased in frowning concentration. She shook her head slightly. “Calm down, Brandilynn, I didn’t get anything past ‘Tristan’s under a flag.’”

  I stamped my foot in frustration, and suddenly realized I was barefoot. And still wearing the bikini I’d donned to taunt the Judge. I sure looked cute in it. Too bad no one could see me.

  Darn it, I was getting distracted again.

  I tried again, talking faster than ever. “Tristan’s in trouble. He needs Gerald and the rest to go to—”

  Lana interrupted me to speak to the others. “She’s too upset. I can’t make head or tails of what’s wrong.”

  I squealed, jumping up and down. “Darn it all!”

  What I did next was out of bounds, but I couldn’t see any other way. Tristan might be dying. Dead. For good. “Sorry, Isabella,” I said before forcing my way into her body.

  We had a kind of metaphysical shoving match before her spirit fell back, letting me commandeer her physical form. The heaviness enclosing me took away some of my frantic energy, and I came down from the brutal high.

  Taylor’s expression couldn’t have been more insulted. Whatever the outward appearance of my struggle for supremacy for Isabella’s body looked like, she knew what I’d done without me speaking a word. “Brandilynn, you don’t force yourself on a channel.”

  I could feel Isabella gathering her resources to defy my usurpation. When she’d allowed me in before, she’d put herself in a state that left her unaware of what was going on. She was very aware now and didn’t appreciate sharing her body one bit.

  I related the situation in a rush. “Tristan and Patricia are under attack at Sanderson Cottage. They’ll die if you don’t get over there and help!”

  Gerald impressed me by not hesitating for a single moment. The big werepanther was off and running, shouting to his fellow paras. “Everyone to Sanderson Cottag
e now! Vamps and weres with me!”

  The humans shrieked, cowering like children as vampires shot into the sky like rockets and weres shapeshifted into a menagerie of hogs, alligators, and even a couple of bears that moved much faster than their pure animal counterparts. The grounds of the old courthouse emptied of paras in an instant.

  Isabella had grown quiet at my announcement, and I sensed her waiting patiently now for me to finish my mission. God bless her for her kindness.

  To Lana I asked, “Have you seen Dan?”

  The medium’s eyes widened. “He’s not with you?”