by Laken Cane
I didn’t have to turn and look to know the spirit followed me in. I could feel him like an ice-cold hand pressing against my back. I carried my kit to my bedroom closet, and he was waiting on the bed when I got there.
“Sometimes,” I chattered, as I put away my kit and pulled some pjs from a drawer, “people have unfinished business—usually revenge or the consuming need to tell someone something dire—”
He flew at me, his eyes wide and mouth gaping, and somewhere in my mind, I could actually hear him screaming.
“Okay,” I said calmly, waiting for my heartbeat to slow, “I understand. You need to tell me something important.” And I started guessing, even as I undressed and climbed into the shower. I wasn’t shy around dead people. If I had been, I’d never have gotten clean. I continued guessing as I toweled off and changed into my pajamas. The first thing I asked was if he’d been murdered and he knew where his body was. Surprisingly enough, there were a lot of those.
I asked if someone else had been murdered, someone close to him, and he needed to take me to the body. No reaction.
He was young, early twenties, and because of that, maybe, I didn’t ask the one question I usually asked early on, and I didn’t ask it until I was sitting down at the dinner table, gobbling the most delicious foods I’d ever tasted. Lucille walked into the room, yawning. “I hope it’s not all cold,” she said.
“No, no,” I mumbled, my mouth food. “Good. So good.”
There were two steaks, three baked potatoes, warm bread, salad with just enough goodies in it to make me interested, and the largest apple pie I’d ever seen. There was a big bowl green beans with bacon and onion, thick slices of ham, and a platter of perfectly golden onion rings.
I was in heaven.
“Is it your child—” I started to ask, after I’d inhaled half a baked potato.
He slammed his ghostly ass down on my plate—on my plate—and got in my face. His eyes were wild as he gesticulated and silently screamed and begged me to help. To figure it out.
“I don’t have a child,” Lucy said. “I told you before I moved in that—”
“No, no,” I said, spearing a green bean through the dead guy’s leg, “I’m not talking to you. There’s a spirit in the room asking for my help.” I didn’t mind her knowing, for some reason. Lucille Shannon inspired trust, at least in me. Also, she apparently saw things herself, in her dreams. Though I’d kept my secret for years, it wasn’t the same as outing myself as a wolf. Hell, even the police knew I communicated with spirits—not that most of them believed it. That wasn’t a big deal. Being a vampire or a shifter, though, that was an entirely different thing. That was a secret I’d keep.
She made a perfect o with her mouth, and her eyes grew just as round. “What?”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “The girl who has spooky dreams is afraid of ghosts?” I took a drink of water. “I’m going to call him Jim. Makes things easier.”
“What does Jim want?” she asked, her voice hushed. “What is he saying? Where is he?” She cut a slice of pie and began eating quickly, as though she were too excited to just sit there doing nothing.
“I can’t hear him. It’s rare that I can hear what they say although…”
She stared at me, her cheeks bulging with pie. “Yeah? Although?”
“When a certain type of person dies, I can hear them.” I couldn’t tell her that ‘certain type of person’ was a wolf. I’d heard my former alpha’s mate after she’d died and come to me. Of course, I’d been a ten-year-old child then and maybe I’d changed as I’d grown older. No dead wolves had come to me since, so I really didn’t know.
That had been a fun time. Only not really.
He’d been full of grief at losing not just his wife, but his mate. Wolves could marry and have significant others without ever finding their honest to God fated mate. But Adam Thorne had found his. Her death had been a blow he had never really recovered from, and when she’d come to me and insisted I go to him with a message, I hadn’t hesitated.
I’d never told another living soul about that encounter. Not even my mother or father knew I could communicate with the spirits of the deceased, and I’d never told either of them about my visit from our dead female alpha.
Her message had been succinct. “Tell him this exactly. There is no promise. Only threat.”
Then she’d disappeared and I’d never seen her again. The alpha had been angry at me. Disgusted. And so very hateful. I didn’t think he’d believed me when I’d told him she’d come to me—I only knew that from that moment on he seemed to hate me. He’d lost the love of his life and maybe he’d thought I was messing with him.
The details had grown fuzzy over the years, but I still remembered how he’d watched me after that, watched me with a darkness that had made me lower my gaze and run away every time I found myself near him.
Two years later, he’d killed my father and banished me from the pack.
I believed, as the doctor believed, that he hadn’t banished me just because of my father’s attempt to gather followers to help destroy him. I believed he’d never forgiven me for telling him that I could talk with the dead—worse, his dead mate. The love of his life.
The spirit—Jim—had become agitated, and I pushed my plate away to tend to him. “Don’t throw this food away,” I told Lucy. “I’ll be back to finish it off.”
She nodded, darting her eyes around the room, hoping to catch a glimpse of the dead man.
I stood and faced him. “You need me to find a child. Is it your child?”
“Wait.” Lucy jumped up and ran around the table toward me, then hesitated, grabbed a chair, and put it between her and where she thought the ghost might be. “I had a dream.”
“A dream about a child?” I asked.
“Yes. Usually, I write my dreams into a sort of internal dream notebook, then lock them up in a file cabinet where they won’t bother me. But sometimes, like with you, I pay attention because I know…” She shook her head. “I know there’s something I can do. That it’s close. Sometimes I have trouble separating what might be a telling dream from a dream I have because I’ve seen something on TV…do you know what I mean?”
“Just tell me about the dream, Lucille.”
“There was a child. A little boy, maybe five or six years old. I didn’t see him, but I felt the urgency of his circumstances. And the one thing that I did see—the only thing, really, is the date September seventeenth.” She stopped and looked at me expectantly, but she wasn’t the one who had my attention, really.
Jim was going nuts. Seriously nuts. Blinking in and out, screaming silently, whirling through the room—and then he stopped with a disorienting abruptness right in front of my laptop, which was sitting on the countertop. He pointed.
“Okay,” I said. “That date, the child…this is why he’s here.” I glanced at her. “When did you have this dream?”
“Just now,” she told me, “before you came home. It was what woke me up.”
“Could you have had it because he was in the house? In your room?”
She shuddered, paled a little, then nodded. “I suppose I could have.”
I strode to my computer. “That date will be when the boy was kidnapped, I have no doubt. Let’s find out who he is.” I quickly keyed in “September 17 Jakeston kidnapping” and waited to see what would come up.
“Son of a bitch,” I whispered. “Of course. This is Mayor Hedrick’s little boy, Noah. This just happened a couple of weeks ago.”
“Oh my God,” she said, her hand over her heart. “How do we find him?”
“That’s why it’s good to see ghosts,” I told her grimly, my stare on the dead man. “He’s going to show me where the child is.”
“Kait,” Lucy called, as I walked across the floor. She tossed me my jacket when I glanced back. “It’s freezing out there.”
The spirit walked to the kitchen door, calm now, and held out his hand. Come with me.
I shrugged on my coa
t, grabbed my cellphone off the table, and then took the hand that only I could see. This had never happened before. I wasn’t sure if I was getting stronger, I just knew life was about to change—for the mayor, the little boy, and the kidnapper.
For me. Certainly, for me.
God please, I prayed. Don’t let me be too late.
With the spirit of the dead man leading me on, I went to see if I could help save a little boy’s life.
Chapter Fifteen
Snow had begun falling once again, and the city, for once, was quiet. I cranked up the heater, waiting impatiently for the car to warm as I drove slowly down residential street after street, going where the spirit pointed.
The always present pain of my hobbled shift was almost comforting, if only for the fact that it was so familiar. It also gave me something to concentrate on so I wouldn’t fall to pieces at the thought of a child in the hands of a monster.
“Who are you?” I asked the man beside me. “How do you know about this child? And what killed you? Are you related to the mayor? Obviously this child is why you’re still here instead of crossing over into whatever afterlife awaits you. So who are you?”
I couldn’t remember being so anxious, so nervous. I was practically jumping out of my skin, and I wished more than ever that I could shift. I felt the importance of what was happening, and it was overwhelming.
I could feel the dead man’s sorrow. It wafted from him, wrapping around my heart and bringing tears to my eyes. He put his hands over his face, then looked at me, and there was not only sorrow and pain in his eyes. There was also guilt.
“You had something to do with his kidnapping,” I realized. Sudden rage rose up to swallow my anxiety, and I welcomed it. “You need to atone.”
He nodded.
“Fuck you,” I snarled. I didn’t speak to him again, just followed wherever he pointed, until finally, he let me know we’d arrived.
I parked the car at the side of the street but left the engine running so I could feel the heat. I was never this cold. Maybe it had something to do with the proximity of the dead, but that cold slid through my body like a thousand icicles.
Jim had led me to a part of the city known casually as “the ‘ville,” short for Clarksville. It was an unpleasant neighborhood but not a terribly dangerous one. It boasted its own post office but little else, other than a couple of pizza joints and a gas station. As long as I’d lived in Jakeston, I’d been to Clarksville exactly once.
Finally, I turned the engine off and climbed out, shutting my door gently as though afraid I might wake and warn the child’s abductor. A dog barked incessantly, adding to my anxiety. It was beyond me why people got a dog only to chain the poor thing outside.
Jim disappeared and I had to scan the area for a good thirty seconds before I saw him standing in the shadows of an alley. I jogged across the street—Oak Street—and down the alley between two houses with peeling paint and dark windows before cutting through someone’s back yard. I nearly tripped over a bicycle, then looked up to see him standing on the back stoop of a two-story with rusty fencing around the tiny back yard and a gate with a chain and a padlock keeping it secure.
I jumped over the fence easily and landed on the other side before I straightened, stared up at the house, and lost my breath.
God, it’s bad here.
Cold, ugly, grim. I could feel the horror of this house’s past sliding insidiously across the ground. Its dark hands wrapped around my ankles and pulled me closer to the house, and I had to fight the nausea that threatened to make me lose all of Lucy’s delicious dinner.
Jim remained on the back stoop, slightly hunched, his agony obvious. If he’d helped steal that boy, I hoped he felt the agony of his actions for eternity. The dog, less loud now that I was farther away, continued to bark.
Any doubt I might have had was gone. Little Noah Hedrick was inside that house. “Is he still alive?” I whispered.
Jim nodded, then held up a finger, which I took to mean, but not for long.
“I’ll call a detective I know,” I told him, then turned and raced back to my car. The urgency I’d felt had escalated, and I knew I had to hurry.
I climbed inside my car but didn’t turn on the heat. I was no longer cold after my initial reaction. I was burning up. I dug my phone from my pocket and tapped Detective Moreno’s name.
He answered almost immediately, though his voice was a little sluggish. “Don’t you ever sleep, Kaitlyn?” he grouched.
“Detective,” I said, and just like that, my voice was thick with tears and I began to shake.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, his voice suddenly sharp. “The demon?”
“Not the demon,” I managed, then took a deep breath and forced my momentary weakness away. “I found Mayor Hedrick’s son. I know where he is.”
“The fuck,” he growled, and I could hear a bustle of activity as he likely leaped from bed and began dressing. “Address, Kait.”
“1121 Brown Street. Two-story white house, fenced back yard. I parked on Oak Street, directly across from the house. You’ll see me.” I hesitated. “He’s alive, Rick, but I don’t think he has very long.”
“You’d better not be wrong,” he said. “I have to call the mayor. We’ll be there in fifteen.”
“Come in quiet,” I told him. “If you warn the man—”
“I know my job, Kaitlyn,” he said, and then he was gone.
Fifteen minutes was equal to forever.
Jim never reappeared, and I wondered if he was inside that house, standing over the mayor’s child, attempting to keep him safe from a monster. Smart guy, having me park a street over, as though he’d been afraid the child abductor would somehow hear or see me.
And despite the fact that a spirit had led me here, despite the fact that I’d felt not only the evil but the innocence inside that old house, deep down I was terrified that I was wrong.
I pulled my cell from my pocket when I felt its vibrating ring, and the very instant I saw Lucille’s text, I realized that with everything that had happened, I’d forgotten the address Jessie’s friend had given me.
997 Oak Street, Clarksville.
I was literally standing on the street where Jessie’s ex lived. One street over from the kidnapping bastard the spirit had led me to. “Small world,” I whispered, and because I had a few minutes left before Detective Moreno arrived, I sent Lucy a quick reply as I slipped down the street to Trevor Short’s house.
I didn’t have time to talk to him, but I could scout out the house. It was a tall, skinny place, appeared well-kept, and it was the house where the dog was barking.
“Son of a bitch,” I muttered.
I still couldn’t see him so I crept around to the back of the house, because I couldn’t resist. The second he saw me, he stopped barking and crept behind the tree to which he was chained.
He peered around the tree, his little white face the brightest thing in the darkness. The streetlight didn’t reach back there, at least not well, but I could see that he had what appeared to be an old ice cream bucket to hold water, though I couldn’t tell if it was full or empty.
The ground was already covered with snow, and it was cold, grim, and dark, and I couldn’t stand the thought of him chained in the snow for endless hours.
“Hey baby,” I murmured. I walked close enough so that he could reach me if he wanted to come from behind the tree, but not close enough to scare him. I wished I had something to feed him when he finally walked from behind the tree, then belly crawled toward me. He was emaciated. I could count his ribs and his backbone was prominent. The asshole who owned this dog was neglecting him. “Hey little pibble.”
He inched closer, flinching only a little when I held my hand out to let him sniff. He’d know I was safe. He’d smell my wolf, and though it seemed a dog would be at the very least suspicious at smelling wolf in a human, most dogs were reassured at once.
He laid his face in my hand and stared up at me with his sweet eyes, ey
es full of the need to be with a pack, to be touched, to be loved…
God, I knew well that feeling.
I murmured to him as I gave him as much love as I could before I heard the cars rolling quietly down the street, and then I kissed his head and though it broke my heart to do it, I left him there.
Detective Moreno stopped beside me as I jogged back down the street, and I kicked my boots clean on the side of his car before climbing in.
Behind us came two black cars, and behind them, four patrol cars. “I told them all except for the mayor that an anonymous person called in a tip,” he told me. “Louis and Amy are in the car behind us.” He hesitated, not looking at me. “I told them you were the caller, but no one else will know.”
There was a tap on my window, causing me to jerk, and before I could let it down, the person outside pulled open the door.
I swallowed. “Mayor Hedrick,” I greeted.
He looked ill. Haggard and unkempt, his black hair threaded with gray, though he was only forty-two years old. His eyes were bloodshot and full of a grief I couldn’t begin to understand.
“Ms. Silver,” he said, his voice raspy but soft, “if you give me back my son tonight, I will be forever in your debt. There will be nothing I won’t do for you. But if this is a lie, if my boy is not inside that house…” He had to pause to gather himself, and when he spoke again, his voice was full of rage and tears. “Then I will bury you.”
I only nodded.
Someone pulled at his arm, and he looked around then moved aside so his wife could get to me. She threw herself at me, then wrapped her arms around my neck and sobbed until the mayor finally pulled her away.
“God,” I whispered. I hoped they would give her the man who’d taken her child. I hoped they would stand back and let her rip him to pieces.
The mayor led her away, but only to stand against the car they’d arrived in. And already, their eyes were turned toward the alleyway from which they hoped the police would carry their son.
“God,” I whispered, again.
Detective Moreno reached over the squeeze my arm. “I’ll need you to stay here with them.”
