by Trisha Telep
Still, it surprised me how translucent she was, like a shadow cast out by the moon. Everything about her was a pale silver, from the sweet old-fashioned gingham dress that she wore to the wild, wavy hair that cascaded down her back like a waterfall. Her features were sharp, though, painfully so. Big eyes, full lips, a crook of a nose. She wasn’t what I would consider to be pretty – her features were too hard for that – but there was something in her face that made you take a second look at her.
All put together, she looked like an old-timey mountain girl, someone who had once lived up in one of the hundreds of forested hollers that clutched around the city of Ashland like thin, green grasping fingers.
Besides, haints or not, only mountain girls went around barefoot in the winter. Like Jo-Jo Deveraux, the Air elemental who healed me whenever I needed patching up. I eyed the ghost’s bare toes, which rested on a patch of snow. I wondered if she could even feel the cold in whatever half-life she was so obviously clinging to.
I’d told Fletcher everything that was troubling me, at least for today, so I slid my knife back up my sleeve and focused on the ghost. It took me a minute to realize that she was trying to clean off the gravestone, just like I’d done with Fletcher’s. I didn’t know if she could really brush aside the glittering hobwebs – that swooped from one side of the gravestone to the other – with her silvery fingers, but the tight set of her mouth told me that she was sure determined to try.
I got to my feet and walked over to the grave she was cleaning. The haint didn’t stop her phantom brushing, much less look at me. I supposed that she was used to being ignored. So was I. As the Spider, I’d spent a good part of my life creeping through the shadows and being as invisible as possible – until the moment I chose to strike.
I watched the haint work for a while. Maybe it was just my imagination, but the silky strings of the thick, sticky hobwebs seemed to quiver, shiver, and slowly break apart one thread at a time under her relentless touch. Maybe she really could brush them away if she focused hard and long enough. And what was time to a haint?
My grey eyes traced over the faint markings on the smooth stone. Thomas Kirkwood, beloved son, 1908–1929. Maybe it was because I’d been thinking about Owen so much lately and trying to come to terms with my feelings for him, but I didn’t think the long-dead Thomas was the haint’s son. No, I thought, only a lover could inspire that kind of devotion, even among ghosts and, most tellingly, almost a hundred years later.
Curiosity was one emotion that Fletcher had instilled in me above all others, so I crouched down in front of the gravestone, then reached forward and ran my fingers across the weather-worn words.
The stone radiated sorrow.
People’s actions and feelings sink into their surroundings over time, especially into stone. As a Stone elemental, I could sense those psychic vibrations in whatever form the element took around me, from the proud whispers of a beautiful gemstone to the harsh cries of a concrete floor spattered with blood.
The gravestone’s sad murmurs filled my mind, along with soft whistling notes that told of the crumbling passage of time and how the sun, wind, rain and snow had slowly worn away the hard pointed edges of the marker. Not unusual emotions in a cemetery. The same feelings would eventually sink into Fletcher’s gravestone as the years rolled on by.
What surprised me was the rage.
It pulsed through the stone like a cold, black, beating heart – slow, steady and unending. Thump-thump-thump.
Somehow, I knew it was the haint’s rage. After all, if she’d died around the same time as Thomas had, then she’d probably been haunting the cemetery since the late twenties, which meant that she’d had almost a century for her feelings to sink into the gravestone. But who was the haint so angry at? Thomas? Had their love affair somehow gone wrong?
I concentrated on the rage, listening to the harsh mutters buried deep, deep down in the stone. I got the sense that the ghost’s anger was directed at someone else – someone who’d taken Thomas away from her. Sharp, anguished shrieks of helplessness also trilled through the stone, punctuating the rage and mixing with faint whispers of guilt.
Whatever had happened to Thomas, there was nothing the haint could do about it now –and it was eating her up on the inside. If she even had an inside anymore. Maybe that’s why she hadn’t faded away into the afterlife just yet. Maybe she couldn’t until things were set right. At least, that’s what always seemed to happen in the stories I read for the various literature classes I took in my spare time over at Ashland Community College.
Guilt, rage, helplessness – they were all emotions that I could relate to, that I’d felt every single day since Mab Monroe had murdered my mother and older sister. Really, they were the driving forces of my life – and would probably be the death of me when I finally went up against the Fire elemental.
So I took pity on the ghostly mountain girl. I leaned forward and spent the next few minutes brushing off all the hobwebs that decorated the gravestone, as well as dusting off the dried leaves and snapped twigs that the wind had carried that way as well.
When I was finally done, I turned to look at the haint. “There,” I said. “Better now?”
I must have surprised her because, for a moment, she zipped around me like moonlit lightning. I blinked, and there she was, shimmering a few feet away. The mountain girl’s eyes met mine. When she realized that I was actually looking at her, that I could actually see her, her mouth rounded into a perfect O. After a moment, she crept forward and waved her hand in front of my face.
“What?” I asked, brushing away her cool, ghostly fingers. “If you’re trying to make me cold, I don’t think it will work. I’m an Ice elemental, you see. Ice and Stone, actually. I can create Ice cubes with my bare hands that are colder than you are. And if you’re trying to scare me, well, you should know that I’ve spent a good part of my life being an assassin and killing people – bad, bad people. So I don’t scare easy.”
The mountain girl dropped her hand. She backed up a few steps, crossed her arms over her chest, and considered me, her silvery gaze taking in every little thing about me from my heavy fleece jacket to my chocolate-brown hair to my grey eyes that were almost as cold and pale as hers were. I stood there and let her stare. As an assassin, I was used to being patient, used to waiting for my targets to become vulnerable, no matter how long it took – minutes, hours, days, weeks. Or in Mab’s case, years.
But even I couldn’t compete with a haint. She had all the time in the world, and I had things to do, specifically a restaurant to run.
“Well,” I said. “I hope you find what you’re looking for. Peace, revenge, whatever. Maybe I’ll see you the next time I come here to visit Fletcher.”
The haint didn’t speak, of course, and I didn’t really expect her to. Still, the mountain girl stood next to Thomas’s forgotten grave and watched me disappear into the darkening twilight.
“I think I’m being haunted,” I said the next day.
Finnegan Lane, my foster brother and partner in murder, mayhem and mischief, arched an eyebrow. Amusement filled his bright-green eyes, which were the same color that Fletcher’s, his father’s, had been. “Really? Has one of your previous dark and dirty misdeeds came back to bite you in the ass?”
“Nothing as dramatic as that. I seem to have brought home a haint from the cemetery.”
I jerked my head to the right. Finn stared at the spot, but he didn’t see the mountain girl spinning around and around on the stool next to him, a small, silly smile on her face. I wasn’t quite sure how she could spin like that and the stool not move, but then again, haints weren’t my specialty. Killing people was. So I just sighed and leaned my elbows down onto the counter.
It was almost closing time at the Pork Pit, the barbecue restaurant I ran in downtown Ashland, and my gin joint was largely deserted. I’d already sent the wait staff home for the day, and the only people still inside were me, Finn and Sophia Deveraux, the dwarf who was the head cook.
Well, us plus the haint.
I’d first noticed the mountain girl when I’d opened up the restaurant this morning. I don’t know how she’d tracked me from the cemetery to the Pork Pit, but she had. I’d found her wandering around inside, looking at the well-worn, but clean, vinyl booths, the peeling blue and pink pig tracks on the floor that led to the men’s and women’s restrooms, respectively, the long counter in the back of the restaurant, even the bloody, framed copy of Where the Red Fern Grows that decorated one of the walls.
She’d perked up when I’d come into the Pit, her ghostly figure pulsing a brighter silver. I’d tried to talk to her, to ask her what she was doing here and what she wanted, but all she did was stare at me with her big eyes that almost glowed with hope.
I had no idea why. I wasn’t one to inspire hope in people – more like fear, followed quickly by terror, panic and death.
The mountain girl had hung out in the restaurant the rest of the day, always keeping me in sight. When I went over to a booth to take someone’s order, she tagged along. When I went into the alley in the back of the restaurant to dump the day’s trash, she stayed two steps behind me. She’d even followed me into the bathroom, until I shooed her away and told her that I liked to do my lady business in private.
But none of the folks who’d come into the Pork Pit had noticed her hovering over their shoulders, wistfully eyeing their thick, juicy barbecue beef and pork sandwiches, steak-cut fries and baked beans coated with Fletcher Lane’s secret barbecue sauce. Apparently, I was the only one who could see her.
Well, me and Sophia.
I supposed it made sense. Sophia was an Air elemental, which meant that she could create, control and manipulate all the natural gases in the air the same way that I could in the stone around me. No doubt she sensed the psychic vibrations the ghost was giving off. Not that Sophia would say anything about it, since she didn’t talk much. Still, every once in a while, the dwarf would stare at the mountain girl out of the corner of her eye.
And the mountain girl stared right back at her. That’s because Sophia wasn’t just a dwarf – she also happened to be a goth. Sophia wore black from the bottoms of her heavy boots to her thick jeans to her T-shirt, which featured a grinning pirate skull and crossbones. A matching silverstone skull dangled off the black leather collar that ringed her neck. Her hair and eyes were black too, although her lips were a bright, glossy pink in her pale face.
Sophia’s clothes stood out in stark contrast to Finn’s slick, designer, Fiona Fine suit and the simple long-sleeved T-shirt and jeans that I wore.
“And why do you suppose this particular haint has decided to haunt you?” Finn asked, taking a sip of the chicory coffee he favored. “You didn’t kill her, did you? Or someone she cared about?”
“No,” I said. “According to the gravestone she was floating around, she probably died long before I was even born.”
Finn perked up. “Gravestone, eh? What was the name on it?”
In addition to being an investment banker, Finn also had a network of spies throughout Ashland and beyond. To him, digging up dirt on other people was an amusing hobby, as was seducing whatever woman happened to be strolling by at the time. I’d never been able to decide what Finn liked best – money, secrets or women. But his unashamed pursuit of all three was one of the many things I loved about him.
This time, I raised my eyebrow. “You really want to research this for me? It’s just a ghost.”
“A ghost who’s haunting you,” Finn pointed out. “She’s got to have a reason, right? Otherwise, why not just stay in the cemetery and hang out for another hundred years?”
He had a point. Truth be told, I was kind of curious myself why she’d latched on to me. Oh, I could tell the haint wanted something – I just didn’t know what it was or why she thought that I could give it to her. As a semi-retired assassin, I wasn’t known for my kind and generous nature. Quite the opposite, in fact.
“All right,” I said. “See what you can find out.”
Finn toasted me with his coffee mug, downed the rest of his brew, and left to get started on his mission. On his way out the front door, Finn passed someone coming into the Pork Pit.
Owen Grayson.
A smile creased my face at the sight of the sexy businessman, and all sorts of warm feelings flooded my veins – feelings that I didn’t want to examine too closely. Owen and I had been lovers for several weeks now, and it always surprised me how much I’d come to care about him in such a short time.
But the really crazy thing was that he seemed to care about me just as much.
Owen knew all about my violent, bloody past, present and future as the Spider, but it hadn’t made him run screaming in the other direction – yet. He never shied away or ignored who I was and what I did as an assassin, mainly because he’d done his own share of dirty deeds over the years to keep his younger sister, Eva, safe. Owen’s complete acceptance of me was one of the things I liked most about him, along with the fact that he always gave me the time and space I needed, whether I was stalking a target or trying to come to grips with our blossoming relationship.
Still, despite all we’d been through, some small, cynical part of me couldn’t help but wonder when it would end. When Owen would get tired of the danger that I put myself in and all the nights that I came over to his house with blood spattered on my clothes. When he’d tell me that we were through. Sure, Owen cared about me, but I didn’t know that we were meant to last for ever.
I wanted us to, though – more than I should have.
As Gin Blanco, my deepening feelings for Owen were unsettling enough, since I’d never been the type to wear my heart on my sleeve. As the assassin the Spider, they were downright disturbing, since I knew just how very easily someone could take Owen away from me for ever. I’d already lost so many people – my mom, Eira, my older sister, Annabella, Fletcher. I didn’t want to lose Owen too. Not now, not ever.
I smoothed my features and kept the troubling turmoil out of my eyes. “Hey there, handsome,” I drawled.
“Hey there, yourself,” Owen rumbled.
He leaned across the counter and gave me a quick kiss that made me wish we could skip the dinner reservations he’d made and go straight back to his house for dessert.
He drew back, and I realized that the mountain girl had stopped her spinning and was staring at him. No surprise there. Oh, Owen wasn’t as handsome as Finn was, since few men could compete with my foster brother’s perfect features and smarmy smile, but there was something in Owen’s face that had attracted me right from the start. I’d never been able to figure out if it was the slightly crooked tilt of his nose or the thin scar that slashed underneath his chin. Or maybe it was his piercing violet eyes, which were further set off by his blue-black hair. Either way, once you looked at Owen, you didn’t want to stop. At least, I didn’t want to stop.
“You ready?” Owen asked. “Our reservation’s at eight. I figured we’d swing by my place first so you could shower and change.”
I arched an eyebrow. “Shower, eh? You know, I never end up showering alone at your house. Why do you think that is?”
A devilish grin spread across his face, and heat sparked in his violet gaze. “Well,” he said, matching my earlier drawl, “I wouldn’t want you to get lonely in there. Besides, you need someone to wash your back, and I’m more than happy to volunteer for that particular job.”
I laughed. “Well, how can a gal refuse such a generous offer? Just let me close up for the night and get my bag.”
Owen made a low, formal bow. “As you command, my lady. Now and always.”
His voice dropped to a raspy murmur on the last word. The intense look in his eyes made my heart quiver with longing, but I pushed the wistful feeling aside. For what seemed like the thousandth time, I told myself not to care too much for Owen Grayson, even if I knew it was already too late.
Sophia helped me turn off all the appliances before grabbing her own things and leav
ing through the swinging doors that led to the back of the restaurant. The goth dwarf would close up behind her, which left me to lock up the storefront.
I was so busy laughing and talking with Owen that I forgot about the mountain girl until I stepped outside and turned to pull the front door shut behind me. She stood there in the doorway and I hesitated, wondering how rude it would be of me to reach through her translucent body to grab the knob.
The mountain girl’s silvery eyes flicked to Owen, then to me. An aching sadness filled her face for a moment before her mouth flattened out into that determined line again. She reached over and touched the brick that lined the door of the restaurant, pressing her ghostly fingers into the stone as best she could. Then, she looked at me once more, raising her eyebrows in a silent question.
I frowned, then reached over and put my hand on top of hers, so that we were both touching the brick.
As always, my Stone elemental magic let me hear the clogged, contented murmurs of the brick – the ones that matched the stomachs and arteries of so many of my customers after eating at the Pork Pit. But there was something else in the brick now, some other faint emotion mixed in with the usual pleasure. I closed my eyes and concentrated, focusing on that sound, pulling it out of the stone and trying to make some kind of sense of it . . .
Help him, a soft voice whispered in my mind. Please.
Startled, I dropped my hand from the brick. My eyes snapped open, and I found the mountain girl staring at me once more. Who was him? Thomas? And why did she want me to help him? Thomas was dead and buried in the cemetery, just like Fletcher was. There was nothing I could do for either one of them now. I killed people – I didn’t bring them peace after the fact.
“Gin?” Owen asked. “Is something wrong?”
“No,” I said, plastering a smile on my face. “Everything’s just fine.”
