by Vivi Andrews
“Jo!”
Wyatt stumbled to his feet and half-ran, half-staggered toward the house. He fell to his knees only once, when he looked up and saw the house shaking and pulsing a vivid green. Ghosts hung from every eave and he could see every one of them.
Either his sanity had officially cracked wide open or his reality had just blown up to double its original size, but Wyatt wasted no time deciding which. He shoved himself to his feet again and took the steps up to the porch in a single leap.
The front door hung open. Wyatt raced through, straight for the kitchen. The quaking had stopped, but timbers still groaned and shifted around him.
A harbinger of the destruction within, the swinging door to the kitchen lay across the dining room table, blown clear off its hinges. Inside, the kitchen had been reduced to a pile of rubble, appliances melted down to misshapen hunks of metal.
A body lay unmoving in the midst of the debris.
“Jo.” Wyatt’s heart plummeted out of his chest and down through the demolished floorboards.
She lay heartbreakingly still, only the slight rise and fall of her chest reassuring him that she still breathed. He yanked his cell phone out of his pocket, already thumbing the numbers 9-1-1 before he noticed the battery was totally dead. He swore and threw the useless piece of plastic against the wall.
Jo didn’t so much as twitch. He checked her pulse, more because he thought he was supposed to than because he had any idea what the hell her pulse was supposed to feel like. Her heart was beating. That much he ascertained.
“Wake up, Jo. Come on, honey.” He brushed her hair away from her face, feeling more helpless than he’d ever felt before. She was breathing, so he didn’t need to do CPR, did he? Was there something about pupils dilating? Should he check them?
The talisman. A small, silver, worked-metal charm lay in her right palm. Wyatt grabbed the charm and a crowbar. With one swift blow, he shattered it.
He fell to his knees at Jo’s side, watching for her to blink awake, for those beautiful blue eyes to open, but nothing happened. Her breathing remained shallow, her eyes sealed shut. “Dammit.”
Prince Charming has to kiss Sleeping Beauty.
Wyatt jumped up, spinning around, looking for the voice that had just spoken. “Hello?”
A soft, childlike giggle was the only reply.
“Who’s there?”
Kiss her, the voice urged again.
Wyatt froze. He was haunted. He not only believed in ghosts, now he could see them. And he was hearing voices. This was just a banner week for him. Happy Acres better be getting a padded cell ready for him. He had a feeling he was going to need it before long.
Snow White, Sleeping Beauty…the magic spell is always broken by True Love’s Kiss.
“Angelica?”
Well, if he was going to go around the bend, he might as well go all the way. It wouldn’t be much fun being sane without Jo anyway.
Wyatt bent and brushed his lips against hers. When he drew back, he was almost surprised that she didn’t open her eyes.
You have to mean it. True Love’s Kiss doesn’t count if you don’t believe in magic.
Wyatt gritted his teeth, not particularly keen on being scolded by a know-it-all child who’d been dead for half a century or more. He wasn’t sure what it meant that he could now hear the ghosts inside him and right now he didn’t care. Jo could explain it to him, just as soon as he woke her up.
He cradled her jaw in his hand and bent to kiss her again, but this time he closed his eyes and put every ounce of faith he had—in Jo, in magic, and in love—into it. He put his soul into the touch of his mouth to hers. He made it a promise, a vow and a confession all in one, the opening of his heart and mind to her.
He kissed her until he felt her lips curve beneath his and she sighed against his mouth. Wyatt drew back slowly, still cradling her face. “Jo?”
She smiled groggily. “Happy Halloween, stranger.”
“Halloween,” he winced. “Shit.”
“No. Halloween. Candy. Trick my treat.”
Relief washed through him. She sounded like herself. “How do you feel?”
“Like I just got my ass kicked.” She groaned and propped herself up on her elbows. “How ’bout you? Last time I saw you, you were doing a damn fine impression of an epileptic.”
“My brains are a little rattled. I’m hearing things. And seeing things.” He nodded toward the ceiling where a host of ghostly spectators hovered. “Green things. So much for not believing.”
Her eyes popped wide. “Ghosts? You’re seeing ghosts?”
“And hearing them,” he grimaced. “I wouldn’t have had a clue how to wake up Sleeping Beauty without the voices in my head.”
Jo’s stunned expression suddenly turned serious. “You can hear Angelica and Teddy? I don’t think that’s a good sign, Wyatt. We need to get them out of you. Right now.”
“No, no, no.” He caught her shoulders when she tried to sit up all the way, easing her back down. “You’ve had a hell of a night already. You were unconscious. We’ll get you to the hospital, get everything checked out.”
“I’m not going to the hospital.”
“Yes, you are. The E.R. doctors can take a break from X-raying candy and checking out kids with tummy aches to make sure you don’t have any permanent—”
“No, Wyatt.”
She was in no shape to be doing anything, especially not helping his sorry ass. “The ghosts are just going to have to wait a few days.”
“They can’t wait.” She shoved his hands away, sitting up again, shaking her head. “You don’t understand. The barrier that kept the ghosts separate from you, from your spirit, Angelica described it as clouds. She couldn’t see or hear through the clouds.”
“So?”
“So if she can see and hear and talk to you now, then the barrier between your spirit and theirs is getting thin. Soon, I won’t be able to get them out of you, without taking part of your spirit out too. We can’t wait, Wyatt. We need to do this now.”
Wyatt took in her serious expression. Serious and utterly drained. Heavy shadows surrounded her eyes, as if she’d been sucker-punched by a raccoon. Her face was too pale, her lips almost blue. He weighed the urgency in her voice against the strain in her eyes. It was no contest.
“No.”
She blinked at the finality in his tone. “No?”
“We’ll risk waiting. I don’t want you pushing yourself any more tonight.”
Jo’s jaw dropped. “Excuse me. I don’t believe I asked your permission to do my goddamn job.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t remember asking you to kill yourself on my behalf.”
He couldn’t let her take such a chance for him. His heart had all but stopped beating when he saw her lying there on the floor. He was in love with her. No two ways about it. The inn, all of the Haines Hideaways, his professional reputation—that was all just business. This was personal.
She’d slipped into every corner of his life and every dark, neglected cranny of his heart. He didn’t care if the world thought he was just as crazy as he’d originally thought she was. Wyatt hadn’t really lived until he met her. If anything happened to her now…
“No,” he repeated emphatically. “Absolutely not.”
Her eyes narrowed threateningly. “We are going to discuss this tendency you have to think you’re in charge all the time. Later. Right now, you have a decision to make. You either walk up the stairs to the attic with me right now, or I will have the ghosts take over your body and you can get it back when I’ve taken them out of you. Now, which would you prefer?”
“No one is going upstairs until I get a construction team in here. After that earthquake, I don’t trust the stairs.” Visions of the rotted boards collapsing beneath her sent a shudder through his body.
“That wasn’t one of the options I gave you.”
“Twenty-four hours, Jo,” he insisted. “I’ll have the house looked over. You’ll be rested. It’s
so much more logical.”
“Then isn’t it lucky I’m not driven by logic. You have five seconds to decide.”
“Jo. This is ridiculous—”
“Four.”
“I’m not going to—”
“Three. Any last words?”
“Dammit, Jo.”
“Two.”
A wave of exhaustion hit him like a freight train. Wyatt was asleep before he heard, “One.”
Chapter Thirty-One: Toys in the Attic
At the top of the stairs, in the highest tower, lay a small, square room with bay windows on every wall. Jo followed Wyatt’s body, steered by Angelica, up the rickety stairs. She wasn’t entirely sure what she was going to do to get the ghosts out when she got to the top, but she knew from her conversation with the Bubblelicious brat that this was where it had to happen. This room was where they belonged.
Jo felt like she’d been flattened by a steamroller and her second sight was fuzzy and raw from the aftereffects of her duel with the talisman, but she wasn’t willing to risk Wyatt’s soul for another second.
The movements of the rest of the ghosts in the house were lazier now that the medallion had lost its power over them. They drifted in a more natural way, listlessly, as if they didn’t quite know what to do or where to go anymore. A thousand lost children.
Jo knew she would have to take care of them, and soon, but at the moment she was more worried about the two children lost inside Wyatt Haines.
At the landing at the top of the stairs, Angelica hesitated. Jo slipped past her and opened the door then gasped in surprise.
For all the renovations in the rest of the house, this one hadn’t been touched.
A thick layer of dust coated the hardwood floors and vintage toys crowded into the small space. Dollhouses and porcelain-faced baby dolls fought for space beside hand-carved jack-in-the-boxes and toy soldiers. It was a time capsule, a treasure trove, painstakingly prepared by someone who had loved these two little children, these two little ghosts, very much.
Jo turned and beckoned to Angelica. Wyatt’s eyes were filled with her tears. “Home,” she whispered in his voice.
Angelica stepped across the threshold. As soon as the body broke the plane into the room, the green glow that was Angelica began to rise away from him, like steam. That simply, as Jo stood by and did nothing, Angelica was free of Wyatt’s body, with Teddy not far behind. They floated across the room, their spectral bodies growing clearer as they roamed the room, brushing against their toys.
Wyatt shook his head sharply, swaying as he came to himself again. “Dammit, Jo!”
She beamed at him, ridiculously pleased to hear him sounding so much like himself, his spirit still safely attached to his body. “Look,” she urged him quietly, pointing to his two former occupants.
Wyatt’s tirade froze on his lips when he spotted the two children. “Is that them? It worked? What did you do?”
“I didn’t have to do anything. This is where they’re meant to be.”
Wyatt frowned, coming farther into the room, careful not to disturb the ghosts as they reacquainted themselves with all their possessions. “What is this place?”
“Haven’t you ever been up here? This is your house, after all.”
He shook his head, running his fingers through the dust over an old train set. “The tower room is too small to be of any use. We planned to close it off and use it for storage. No refurbishment necessary. But it looks like someone put a lot of time and energy into this room.”
“It’s Angelica and Teddy’s toy room,” Jo explained.
“But who made it like this? Ghosts can’t just walk into a toy store and buy things.”
Jo looked around the room that had been arranged with such care and love. “It was their sister. Their little sister.” When Wyatt just frowned at her, she clarified. “You know her as the little old lady who went to church and gave to charity. The previous owner of the house.”
“But that means they’ve been here for decades.”
“At least seven decades,” Jo confirmed. “Maybe more.”
“Why seven?”
“They didn’t remember the second World War or the Great Depression. Those things have an impact, even on a nine-year-old. Angelica did remember The Great War, but it was far away and didn’t affect her.”
“How did they die?” Wyatt asked, his voice low and somber.
Jo figured he was probably experiencing the same epiphany she’d had at Bethie’s house. These were real children once. Knowing that they had been loved, the center of someone’s world, somehow made their ghostly state all the more tragic.
“They got sick,” Jo explained quietly. “I think it was probably the influenza pandemic, but neither of them knew what year it was or exactly how it happened. This was their summer house. Their spirits came here because they remember being happy here. The next summer, when the family came back to stay, their little sister could see them. Her parents thought it was a manifestation of her grief, being left an only child, playing all day with her invisible siblings, but she really did see them. She came to live in this house and even though she aged, they never did. She kept the toy room for them.” Jo pointed to a projector screen that pulled down over one of the windows. “She even had a film projector installed and showed them Marx Brothers movies. She loved them.”
“It really was their house.” Wyatt grimaced. “No wonder they were trying to get rid of me.”
“Don’t worry,” she reassured him. “I’ll transcend them. I’ll transcend all of them. No more Episodes.”
“We don’t want to go.”
Jo looked over, startled by the sound of Angelica’s voice. The young ghosts stood side by side, Angelica petulant and mischievous, Teddy solemn and silent.
“We want to stay here,” Angelica insisted. “In our house.”
“It isn’t your house anymore,” Jo said reasonably. “It’s Wyatt’s house now and soon it’s going to be an inn, with strange people coming and going at all hours. You don’t want to live in a place like that. Er, exist, rather.”
Angelica frowned at her mistrustfully. “What happens? Where do we go?”
“I don’t know exactly,” Jo admitted. “You go on. It’s where you’re supposed to go. No child should be deprived of her afterlife. It’s nice over there.”
“How do you know?” Angelica countered aggressively. “You’re not dead.”
“You’re right, but some things you just have to take on faith. This is the way it’s supposed to be.”
Angelica’s lower lip shoved out in a pout as Teddy shoved his thumb into his mouth. “I don’t like rules,” she complained.
Jo smiled in spite of herself. “You and me both. But there are some rules even we can’t get out of. Come on, Angelica. Be brave for Teddy.”
That got her. The young ghost looked at her little brother and straightened her intangible spine. She caught her brother’s hand, gave him a reassuring smile, and nodded her consent to Jo.
Jo took a deep breath and grounded herself. She reached out, easily finding a thin spot for the portal. The entire room felt thin, as if it were right on the edge between this world and the next, probably a side effect of housing ghosts for three-quarters of a century.
“Whoa, wait a second. No one is transcending anyone yet.”
“Wyatt, I’m fine. I can do this. Stop being such a—” Jo caught herself before she said something inappropriate for young ears. “A, uh, doofus.”
“I’m sorry if I’m being a doofus, Jo, but this can wait. It can all wait. You need to go to the hospital—”
“I’m fine!”
“And there is no way we are doing any more ghost sh—” He quickly modified what he was saying when he caught her glare. “—stuff. No more ghost stuff up in the attic with the creaky timbers all around us when every time you do something ghosty, it triggers an earthquake.”
Jo frowned. She hated to admit it, but Mr. Uptight might actually have a point with
that one. “I think the quakes were probably caused by the medallion, but you’re right. We should probably go downstairs and stand in a doorway or something.”
He blinked, visibly stunned by her capitulation. “I’m right?”
“Don’t make a big thing of it. It happens. Rarely. Come on.”
Jo stood in the front hall, having had enough of the kitchen thank you very much, and tried not to waver on her feet. Wyatt didn’t need any more fuel for his “you are too exhausted to do this tonight” argument. She refused to show weakness.
He glowered at her from his post at the front door, poised to yank her from the house at the first sign that it was coming down around their heads.
“This is stupid and masochistic.”
So was her being in love with him, but she did that anyway. Why should this be any different? “Shut up, Wyatt, or I’ll put more ghosts into you.”
“You’ll probably do it by accident anyway,” he insisted. “You don’t have the energy to do this.”
“As inspiring as your vote of confidence is, I’m doing this whether you want me to or not. Since you have such a problem with this, why don’t you wait outside?”
“Did asking me to wait outside work last time?”
“No, but I was hoping you’d learned your lesson.”
Jo thought that would be the last word on the subject, but apparently Wyatt wasn’t done pleading his case. He shoved away from the doorway and came to face her, capturing her face between his hands.
“Jo. I’m not trying to control you or saying this just to be contrary. I’m worried about you. These ghosts. What difference does it make whether you transcend them today or tomorrow? Who cares? You don’t have to prove anything to anyone.”
She laughed at herself a little. No wonder he thought she was a masochist. She hadn’t bothered to tell him why it was important to do it now. “I’m going to have to work on my communication skills,” she muttered.
“What?”
