The Mammoth Book of Ghost Romance (Mammoth Books)

by Trisha Telep

  Her ominous plea delivered, the mountain girl stepped back inside the restaurant. I hesitated a moment, then leaned forward, grabbed the knob and pulled the door shut.

  My hand trembled the faintest bit as I slid the key into the lock and turned the deadbolt. I looked inside at the haint once more. The mountain girl’s sad silver eyes were the last thing I saw before Owen put his arm around me and pulled me away from her for the night.

  “She’s definitely a haint all right,” Jo-Jo said two days later. “Definitely a haint and not a ghost.”

  “What’s the difference?” Bria asked.

  I was curious about that myself. Fletcher had always used the words “haint” and “ghost” like they were interchangeable, and so had I.

  “Well,” Jo-Jo said, bending over to put another coat of magenta polish on Bria’s nails. “For the most part, ghosts are just troublemakers. Mean old souls who like to scare the living. They rattle chains, they moan and groan, they break mirrors, and they generally make pests out of themselves. But haints, now haints have a specific purpose. A mission, if you will. They’re clinging to this life for a reason, and they can’t or won’t let go until that mission is completed, no matter how long it takes.”

  Well, that told me the mountain girl wanted something from me, but it still didn’t tell me what that something was.

  “And why do you think I can see her?” I asked. “I thought only Air elementals like you and Sophia could see haints or ghosts. Not someone like me, with Ice and Stone magic.”

  Jo-Jo stared at me. “It might be because you’re supposed to help her with her mission. It happens like that sometimes, no matter what kind of elemental magic you have or even if you have none at all.”

  I looked to my left. The haint was here today, of course, pacing back and forth across the room. She’d been shadowing me for three days now. Every time I turned around she was there – including when I’d been in the shower with Owen two nights ago. I would have knifed her for that little intrusion if I could have. She must have seen the murderous glint in my eyes, though, because she’d backed off a little after that. I hadn’t seen her again until the next morning when I’d opened Owen’s bedroom door and found her slumped against the wall outside. Since then, though, she’d been my constant, silent companion.

  Now, the three of us – well four, if you counted the haint – were in Jo-Jo’s beauty salon, located in the back of her large antebellum house. Jolene “Jo-Jo” Deveraux made her living as a self-proclaimed drama mama. In addition to healing wounds, Air elemental magic was great for fighting the ravages of time, and Jo-Jo used her power to do everything from smooth out crow’s feet to get rid of pesky sunspots to put various body parts back up where they had been ten years and twenty pounds ago.

  Scissors, combs, tweezers, blow-dryers, curling irons and every other tool that could be used to cut, wax, pluck or exfoliate could be found in Jo-Jo’s salon, along with cherry-red chairs, stacks of beauty magazines and dozens of bottles of pink nail polish. Rosco, Jo-Jo’s pudgy basset hound, snoozed in a wicker basket in the corner.

  Like her sister Sophia, Jo-Jo was a dwarf, although she was pink and sugary sweet as cotton candy compared to Sophia’s darker gothic nature. Jo-Jo’s white-blonde curls were perfectly arranged on top of her head, and she wore a pink dress covered with enormous daisies. A string of pearls dangled from her neck. Even though it was January and the salon floor was cool to the touch, Jo-Jo’s feet were bare.

  Mountain girls, I thought and smiled.

  Jo-Jo had offered to give Bria and me manicures and pedicures so we could spend some time together. Bria Coolidge might be my long-lost baby sister, but she was also a detective for the Ashland Police Department – one of the few honest cops on the force. A few weeks ago, Bria had found out that not only was I, Gin Blanco, really her big sister Genevieve Snow, but she’d also discovered that I was the assassin the Spider.

  Needless to say, Bria had more than a few problems with my former profession and occasional pro bono deeds for the good citizens of Ashland. Still, we were trying to have some kind of relationship, trying to get to know each other again, and it was more than I’d ever hoped for.

  Jo-Jo had already finished my nails and was now working on Bria’s. I wasn’t much for manicures. As an assassin, I’d always kept my nails short, since it made getting rid of the blood that settled underneath them that much easier. But Bria had always loved playing with our mother’s make-up when we were kids, so I’d come to the salon and sat through Jo-Jo’s ministrations. The dwarf had also trimmed Bria’s blonde hair while she was at it, forming it into a bob that was sleek and tousled at the same time.

  “I heard of a few haints when I was living down in Savannah,” Bria said. “But nothing like what Gin’s describing. What do you think this one wants? What do you think her mission is?”

  I shrugged. I hadn’t told anyone about the whispered words the haint had sent me through the brick of the Pork Pit, but they’d echoed in my head ever since.

  Help him. Please.

  “Well, I don’t know exactly what she wants, but I know who she is,” Finn called out from the doorway.

  My foster brother swaggered into the salon, a cup of steaming chicory coffee in one hand and a thick manila folder in the other. He pulled up a chair so that he was sitting between me and Bria, then turned and gave my sister his most charming smile.

  “Love the new ’do, detective,” Finn murmured. “It really brings out your bone structure.”

  Bria snorted, but a spark of interest shimmered in her blue eyes. Finn had laid a very public, very passionate kiss on my baby sister a few weeks ago during a Christmas party at Owen’s house. Ever since then, the two of them had been engaged in their own sort of mating dance, with Finn running after Bria the way he did any beautiful woman who crossed his line of sight, and Bria just as easily resisting him.

  I didn’t know what the final outcome would be, but so far, it had been entertaining to watch their battle of wills.

  After another moment of ogling Bria, Finn turned his attention to me and held up the file.

  “You know, I didn’t expect this to be quite the challenge that it was,” he said. “I actually had to go over to the newspaper office and bribe one of my sources to let me into their morgue.”

  “Poor baby,” I murmured with false sympathy.

  Bria snickered at my tone. Finn glared at her a second before turning his attention back to me.

  “Seriously, Gin, do you know what a pain in the ass it is to go through microfilm? It took me hours to find the information. Hours I could have spent in the arms of a good woman – like sweet Bria here.”

  Bria rolled her eyes, and this time, Jo-Jo snickered.

  “You were the one who volunteered,” I said and plucked the folder from his hand. “So lay it out for me.”

  Finn batted his eyes at my sister one more time. “The guy who’s planted in the cemetery is one Thomas P. Kirkwood.”

  “I knew that already.”

  I opened the folder and found a black-and-white picture on top of a stack of papers. Thomas Kirkwood had been a handsome man. Thick curly hair, kind eyes, a nice smile. Even a couple of dimples in his cheeks. I could see why the haint had been drawn to him. Most women would have been.

  The mountain girl floated over to me. She bit her lip and stretched out her fingers, caressing Thomas’s face, even though it was only a photo. A silver tear slid out of the corner of her eye, streaking down her face like a falling star.

  “Yes,” Finn said in a smug tone. “But you don’t know how he died. You don’t know how he was murdered.”

  “Murdered?” Bria asked, bristling. “When?”

  “Relax, detective,” Finn said. “This was back in the twenties, well before you were a twinkle in anyone’s eye. Apparently, there was something of a feud going on between Thomas and another man, Homer Graves.”

  Jo-Jo stiffened at the name.

  “Do you know him?” I asked.
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br />   The dwarf looked at me with her clear, almost colorless eyes and nodded. “I do. He’s a vampire. Probably around three hundred years old or so. Lives up on top of one of the ridges not too far from Warren Fox’s store, Country Daze.”

  Her words were innocent enough, but concern filled her middle-aged face. Whoever Graves was, he was a bad person – bad enough to worry even Jo-Jo, who was one of the strongest elementals around.

  “Anyway,” Finn continued, “Thomas was in love with a girl named Tess Darville. By all accounts, she was in love with him too, but her parents wanted her to marry Graves instead.”

  My eyes flicked over to the haint. She looked at me and nodded. Tess, I could almost hear her say. My name is Tess.

  “So what happened?” Bria asked.

  “Well, everyone thought that Tess and Thomas just up and ran off together.” Finn hesitated. “Until their bodies were found two weeks later. They’d both been tortured. Mutilated, really, with their throats slashed from ear to ear. But the worst part was that their, um, hearts were cut out of their chests and never found. Of course, Homer Graves was the prime suspect, but the cops could never prove anything. They just didn’t have the forensic science back then that they do now. It’s all there in the newspaper clippings.”

  Bria frowned. “Their hearts were cut out of their chests? Where were the bodies found?”

  Finn looked at her. “Out near the old Ashland Rock Quarry. Why?”

  Bria’s face tightened. “Because I got called out to a body dump there three days ago. Two victims, a young couple, both eighteen. They’d been missing for almost two weeks.”

  “And let me guess – their hearts were cut out of their chests,” I finished.

  Bria nodded. “I need to call in about this. See if Graves has any connection to my two victims.”

  Bria barely waited until her nails were dry before getting to her feet. She pulled out her cell phone and called Xavier, the giant who was her partner on the force, filling him in. Finn trailed my sister out of the salon, insisting that he was going with her, that he could tell her even more.

  I waited until I heard the front door of the house shut behind them before I turned to Jo-Jo. “What else do you know? I saw how you tensed up when Finn said Graves’s name. He’s rotten, isn’t he, Jo-Jo? Rotten to the core.”

  She hesitated. “There was some other talk about Graves as well. Not only that he murdered that poor couple way back when, but about how he did it.”

  My eyes narrowed. “What kind of talk?”

  “That he was an Air elemental in addition to being a vampire,” Jo-Jo said in a low voice. The dwarf raised her clear eyes to mine. “That he . . . that he actually ate their hearts. Fried them up like hamburgers, put them on a bun and everything. Supposedly, cutting out their hearts helped him suck their souls out of their bodies. Eating them, well, I think he did that just for fun.”

  I’d seen a lot of bad things in my time as the Spider, and I’d done more than my fair share of dark deeds myself, but that turned even my stomach.

  “Can you . . . can you even do that with Air magic?” I asked. “Tear someone’s soul out of their body?”

  Jo-Jo slowly nodded.

  I rubbed my chest, which was suddenly aching, and glanced over at Tess Darville. The mountain girl floated over and took Bria’s chair. For a moment, her features blurred, and she looked exhausted. Just . . . exhausted.

  I had no doubt that Graves had murdered her and Thomas Kirkwood out of jealousy or spite or both. But I still had so many questions. Had the Air elemental vampire really sucked out Tess’s soul? Was that what I was looking at right now? And where was Thomas? Where was his soul or spirit or whatever? If he’d loved Tess as much as she did him, then why wasn’t he here with her right now, even if they both had been murdered?

  Tess stared at me, and I could tell exactly what she was thinking. See? This is why I’ve been haunting you. Because you’re the only one who can help me. Because you’re the only one strong enough to do what needs to be done.

  Suddenly, I knew what Tess wanted and why she’d latched on to me that day in the cemetery. It was my own fault really, for telling her who I was and what I did. I should have known better than to open my mouth, even to a haint. Fletcher had taught me that. But the old man had also taught me that it was OK to help folks who couldn’t help themselves, and that sometimes, the only way to do that was with the edge of one of my knives.

  I stared at the mountain girl. After a few seconds, I nodded. Tess blinked at me in surprise for a moment before she nodded back.

  “Gin?” Jo-Jo asked, looking first at the haint, then at me. Since Jo-Jo was an Air elemental, she could see Tess just like her sister Sophia could. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to do what I do best,” I said. “What I’ve done so many times before as the Spider. I’m going to kill that murderous son of a bitch Graves so Tess here can finally rest in peace.”

  Jo-Jo gave me directions to Homer Graves’s place. I grabbed a bag of tools that I kept stashed in her house for just these sorts of situation, got into my car, and headed out. Normally, I would have been more cautious, would have waited to do some recon at the very least before going in knives slashing. But there was no time. Not with Bria sniffing around. She’d do the right thing, the cop thing, and go get a warrant before she went to question Graves. I already knew Graves was a murderer who liked to torture his victims. I didn’t want my baby sister anywhere near him – especially if he was the soul sucker that Jo-Jo thought he was.

  Besides, Tess had waited so long already. I figured she was anxious to get on with things. Even a haint could only be so patient.

  I got as close to Graves’s rugged, remote property as I could, then pulled my car off the side of the road, shouldered my bag of supplies, and hiked the rest of the way in on foot. Tess floated beside me the whole time, her face tight with worry, her hands fisting in the ghostly folds of her gingham dress. I didn’t know why. I was the one sticking my neck out here – hers had already been cut long ago by Graves. Still, her concern touched me.

  According to Jo-Jo, Graves lived at the top of a holler in the mountains above Ashland. I followed her directions up a faint hiking trail, then stopped when I crested a forested ridge and spotted Graves’s house through a screen of trees. Above me, the bare skeleton branches creaked and cracked back and forth as the wind tangled through them. The faint whispers almost seemed to be warning me. Stay away . . . stay away . . . stay away . . .

  I pushed my unease aside and used the binoculars I’d brought along to peer at the house in front of me. It could have been a replica of a hundred others I’d seen in hollers like this one – cheap white clapboard that had long ago turned dingy with age, a porch with warped, weathered, sagging boards and a dull tin roof dotted here and there with black mold. Charming.

  Whatever else he was, Graves definitely didn’t care what kind of disrepair his property fell into. Still, his neglect would make my job easier. It was only about three in the afternoon, and he would have easily seen me creeping through his yard if the grass hadn’t been as high as my waist and choked with winter weeds and black briars.

  Once again, that feeling of unease crept up on me. Maybe it was because the area was so completely lifeless. No birds fluttered in the trees, no rabbits scurried through the fallen leaves, nothing moved at all but the wind with its relentless whistle of cold air.

  “OK, Tess,” I whispered, turning to the haint. “Time to earn my pro bono services as the Spider. Where’s Graves most likely to be? I want to do this quick and quiet-like, before he even knows I’m here.”

  Tess bit her lip, then pointed to the left side of the house. Still keeping inside the tree line, I put my binoculars back into my bag and skulked in that direction.

  A small shack was attached to the backside of the house, made out of the same dingy clapboard as the main structure. I got down on my belly and left the trees behind, crawling through the grass and masking my
furtive movements with the gusts of wind that blew across the overgrown yard.

  Five minutes later, I reached the side of the shack and eased back up into a standing position. I peered in through one of the windows, but an inch of grime covered the glass. All I could see inside was a faint glow, like someone had left a bare bulb burning.

  The windows were too small for me to go through, so I dropped my bag on the ground, palmed one of my silverstone knives, and tiptoed over to the door.

  And then I waited, counting off the seconds in my head. Five . . . ten . . . fifteen . . .

  Five minutes later, I was still waiting, and I hadn’t heard a peep from inside the shack. No rustles of clothing, no soft footsteps, no whispers of movement. Graves wasn’t here.

  “All right, Tess,” I said in a low voice, “he’s obviously not in there. So where to now? The main house?”

  The haint shook her head and pointed at the door. I sighed and started to move away, but she darted in front of me, stomped her bare foot into the ground, and stabbed her finger at the door again. Whatever was in there, Tess wanted me to see it.

  “Getting bossed around by a haint,” I muttered. “Finn will never let me live this down.”

  I hesitated a moment, then reached out and tried the doorknob. To my surprise, it turned, so I eased it open and slipped inside. I thought it would take a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the semi-darkness, since the windows were smeared with dirt, but there was plenty of light in the shack.

  Hundreds of lights, actually – all trapped in glass snowglobes.

  The globes sat on shelves that covered all four walls of the shack from floor to ceiling. A large stone table was set into the middle of the packed dirt floor. Even from here, I could see that the table was crusted with dried, black blood, and I could hear the harsh, ragged screams that raged through the stone.

  Bad things had happened on that table, some very bad things indeed.

  This was where Graves had tortured Tess and Thomas and who knew how many other people over the years, including the two bodies that the cops had discovered in the rock quarry. This was where he’d cut out their hearts.