Midlife Ghost Hunter: A Paranormal Women's Fiction (The Forty Proof Series Book 4)

by Shannon Mayer

  She shrugged. “Sure, why not. It’ll take my mind off my broken heart.”

  “Sarge is gay, Jinx, and a werewolf,” I said. “It never would have worked.”

  “Bah, let me have my fantasy,” she grumbled. “You have yours, thinking Crash is into you.”

  I stuffed her back into my bag with a little more force than necessary. “I don’t know if Skeletor can take all three of us.” I looked at Eric and Suzy.

  Suzy grinned. “I can get us there through the lagoon. They won’t even think to look there.”

  I gave her a quick nod and put a hand on her arm. “Wait on the outskirts. We need to be as subtle as we can—the coven warned Penny to come alone, and she said they’re very strong, if not very good with their magic. My plan is to slip in through the back of the ride and grab Charlotte . . .”

  Eric touched his throat. “They won’t be able to see me. Perhaps I should go for Charlotte? Suzy can be my back up. You and Robert take the front door.”

  He was right, and I agreed. “Good idea. And Charlotte knows you.”

  “She’ll be asking for cookies in no time,” Suzy said. “Don’t worry. This will work, Bree.”

  Did she see my fear? My worry that it wouldn’t work and we’d get Charlotte hurt or bound up in the Coven of Darkness?

  I gave her a thumbs up. “Of course, it will. It has to.” But even as I said it, my guts knotted up. This was the biggest job I’d tackled yet, not because of what we were doing, per se, but because of what was at stake. Charlotte. Gran. The friends I’d gathered along the way.

  I swallowed hard on the bile that tried to claw its way up my throat.

  Eric clapped a big hand on my shoulder. “We will get them out, Bree. We’re a team.”

  My eyes watered, but before I could say anything else, he and Suzy jogged out of the house. I took a single cleansing breath and followed closely on their heels. Once outside, I held out a hand. “Robert? You around?”

  He sidled up on my left as if he’d been waiting for me, swaying from side to side. “Friend.”

  “We need Skeletor. Can we call him up here?” Shit, I should have made sure of this before I hinged my entire plan on our ability to call up an undead horse with a home base in Savannah.

  But my concern was unfounded. We were in a city of the dead, and all Robert had to do was point a finger at the ground, and the horse pulled himself up out of the lawn one hoof at a time. Once he’d fully emerged, he stood next to me, shaking dirt from his mane and coat.

  He was still missing chunks of hair and flesh here and there, but he was becoming more solid with each ride we took together.

  Alan float-walked out of the house. “Where are you going?”

  “To save a little girl,” I pulled myself onto Skeletor’s back and held out a hand for Robert so I could help him up. He was surprisingly heavy for a bony guy, and it took a little bit of grunting to get him up behind me, his bony fingers clutching my waist.

  Alan frowned. “Can I help? With the kid, I mean.”

  For a man with serious narcissistic behaviors, it was a big deal he’d even offered. “If you can listen to me and not get in the way, yes, I think you could.”

  Who knew how many people we’d be up against? Without Kinkly to do recon, maybe Alan really could help. Very few people could see him, and even if they could, they wouldn’t know he wasn’t just some random NOLA ghost. And he had gone for help when I’d been cornered in the mansion.

  I took his hand, and he didn’t even complain as I stuffed him back into my hip bag. I double-checked that my two knives were in there, and that was about as ready as I could be.

  “Let’s go, Skeletor. To the abandoned amusement park.” I clamped my legs around the horse’s barrel chest, and he took off, plunging forward into the dark of the night. I skidded a little to the left, but Robert helped straighten me out.

  The sound of Skeletor’s unshod hooves were a dull thud on the pavement and paving stones we galloped across. The few people who looked up as we passed seemed surprised, but they quickly glanced away. That was interesting. They had to be part of the shadow world in order to see us, but they didn’t seem intrigued . . . they looked scared.

  Maybe they had an inkling of what had been going on in this town.

  Skeletor stretched out, his ears perked forward, and I leaned forward with him. With the wind whipping in our faces, I felt a surge of determination. Of hope. I wasn’t doing this alone. I was going in with friends at my back and by my side. We would save Charlotte, stop this coven from trapping Penny, and then we would find Gran, and somehow . . . somehow, I’d be cleared of the murder charges too.

  All of that had to happen. There was no other option.

  “We can do this, Robert!” I yelled out, my words torn from my mouth.

  “Friend.” Robert growled back, tightening his fingers on me. Yes, we could do this.

  Of course, I hadn’t counted on anyone else showing up to the party besides the coven.

  22

  The amusement park reared up in front of us, looming out of the night like a lumbering thug looking for trouble. Bits and pieces of the former rides still clung to the sky, which was currently rumbling like an old man with gas pains.

  Gawd help us that we didn’t get shit on.

  I slowed Skeletor to a walk, the rush of the nighttime gallop still singing in my veins. I patted his neck. “Good boy.” A quick check of the time told me the ride had lasted all of three minutes. We were probably here ahead of Penny.

  The undead horse blew out a long, low snort and stopped in his tracks abruptly enough to unseat me. I yelped and clung to his neck.

  Robert slid off the horse’s back and landed lightly on his feet, then looked up and held out a hand to me. Hand, not skeletal fingers. “He can’t go farther,” Robert said, pointing to a painted red line on the pavement. “The coven has put a protective line around the park, and the horse is a guardian of sorts.”

  I took his hand, no longer surprised by his appearance as a solid man. Whatever magic held Robert to being a skeleton seemed to be . . . maybe fading was the right word? I wasn’t sure, but I appreciated his newfound ability to talk, however temporary. I needed all the help I could get.

  “He can’t, but you can?” My legs wobbled as I slid off the sort-of-dead horse.

  “I’m tied to you. Wherever you go, I go.” He gave me grin. “Basically you’re stuck with me.”

  My hip bag rumbled, and when I flipped it open, Alan came tumbling out. “I am also stuck here,” he said.

  Robert nodded. “Different ties. But, yes, you’re stuck with her for now.” For now. Damn, I really hoped that Marge could help me take care of that.

  Skeletor blew out a long low snort, pawed once at the pavement, and then nudged me forward with his nose. I stepped up to the red line and looked down at it. I didn’t want to think about what had made it. Blood? It would have taken a lot of blood to go around the whole park.

  Robert stepped up beside me and put his hands on his hips. “Probably not what you think. Paint mixed with herbs.”

  I snorted. “Amateurs.”

  Robert shot me a look and let out a chuckle. “Let’s hope so. Because it would make our lives much easier. But didn’t Penny say they’re strong? Strong but untried.”

  Looking at the line, I glanced at Alan. “Can you go in and see if you can pinpoint Charlotte’s location? She has dark hair, big dark eyes, and is about ten years old,” I said. “Look for the Jocos Mardi Gras ride. That’s where Penny said she’d be held.”

  For once in our marriage, Alan didn’t argue with me. He hurried across the red line as if it were nothing and disappeared into a sudden fog that rolled out of the amusement park. Thicker than pea soup, the mist curled along the ground about knee height, higher in a few places, obscuring any obvious threats.

  I nodded as I eyed up the fog. “That could work in our favor. We can’t see them, but they can’t see us either.”

  I had the map of the p
ark set in my mind, and while my knee ached and my body felt as though it needed a two week vacation on the beach with some hot young guy rubbing me all over with sunscreen, I knew we were Charlotte’s only hope.

  We had to get her out of there.

  Robert and I stepped across the red line together.

  “You going to tell me how you know our necromancer friend?” I asked quietly. The question had been in the back of my head since the dream.

  Robert sighed. “I know a lot of the old ones, Bree. And I got in their way, the same way you are doing now.”

  “So you are like me?” I pushed a little on that. “Whatever I am?”

  “Yes,” he said softly, and a hush crawled over us.

  I motioned for him to follow me, suddenly not feeling like I could speak without being heard.

  I wanted to get to the far side of the creeptastic joker ride the coven had set as their meeting place with Penny. If Robert and I could tuck in out of sight and keep an eye on Penny, that would be ideal.

  I wasn’t really interested in going in guns blazing if we didn’t have to.

  The fog swirled up and around us, and for a moment I was sure I could smell funnel cakes and popcorn, but the scent was there and gone, like a memory of what the amusement park had been years before.

  Looking about, my eyes landed on one of the remaining signposts. I followed the faded lines that had been painted onto the wood to help park goers find their way. Little pale-yellow arrows here and there, the edges blurred and the points softened from the ravages of everyday weather as much as the meaner hurricanes.

  I pulled one of my knives out, the handle giving me a little comfort. I didn’t really understand my magic, which seemed to come out in random bursts requiring no real skill (I really needed to work on night school or something for bringing out my magical side), so a knife touched with Crash’s magic was all I had to keep me safe from the Coven of Darkness.

  Robert walked beside me, icy blue eyes scanning the area. We followed the park’s pathways until the tinkling sound of music cut through the air ahead of us.

  We both froze, and my skin about crawled off my body even while it erupted in goose bumps. The song was a classic circus tune that I didn’t know by name. Robert grimaced.

  “Fitting, ” he whispered.

  “Not my circus, not my monkeys.” I whispered back the only circus quip I had in my repertoire.

  He grunted. “Not even the flying monkeys?”

  I shook my head and cringed. “Please no. Let’s not invoke fate’s weird sense of humor.”

  Moving even more carefully, which meant I was half crouched and my thighs were currently trying to burn a hole through my leather pants as my muscles screamed at me to stand up straight like a normal person, we turned the next corner, and there it was. The Jocos Mardi Gras ride.

  Robert and I scooted back so we were hidden from view and then peeked around the corner to get a feel for what we were up against.

  Bright jeweled eyes of a leering Mardi Gras clown or maybe a jester in 3-D relief on the sign above the entrance, stared out over the park like some sort of freakish ghoul from a B-rated horror movie. Hands flopped loosely at the wrist, no longer attached to the sign, as if the fingers could clutch you without warning. Wherever the witches were, they weren’t currently within view of the ride. Either they were inside, or they hadn’t arrived yet.

  Basically I didn’t like it, not one bit. The entrance to the ride was dark, an open black tunnel with no obvious sign of anyone watching for us. That didn’t mean anything, I was sure.

  Silently Robert pointed to a heaping pile of old seats on one side of the entrance. It had been blown off a ride by the looks of it. I nodded and we dropped to our bellies, scooting across the ground, the fog covering us.

  Look at us go, like we’d been sneaking around for years. And yeah, belly crawling took its toll on me. I mentally added it to the list of exercises I needed to work on as my arms all but groaned with the effort.

  With the fog swirling thicker with each passing second, our passage was covered and we reached the jumbled pile of seats in all of a minute. And just in time.

  I tucked in behind a seat, my nose crinkling at the smell around me. How the hell could the seats still smell like puke? The red paint had been peeled off in most places, showing a good amount of rust in the metal buckets that had at one point made park goers squeal with delight. But that wasn’t what had my attention.

  The soft shuffle of feet and the tap of a cane made me peek out around our hiding place. There was Penny, making her way through the fog, muttering under her breath.

  Our timing couldn’t have been better.

  “Damn fools, think they know what they’re doing? No, no, they don’t and now they need my help because the damn fools killed off anyone in their own coven who could help them!” She thumped her cane a little harder, and the ground seemed to actually shudder under the blow.

  I shot a look at Robert, who was staring at Penny hard, but he said nothing.

  Through a hole in the bottom of the broken-down seat, I watched Penny approach the open maw of the tunnel.

  “Fools, where are you?” Penny snapped. “I’ve got no time for this. My water pills will kick in, and then you’d better have a place for me to pee, ’cause I ain’t squatting out here in the middle of the park.”

  The music didn’t die down, but a voice boomed through it.

  “Penny Hannington, order of the Coven of Silver, you dare come to us?”

  I blinked a few times, and even Penny seemed taken aback. “You damn fools! You called me!” She threw a hand in the air, following it with a wave of her cane, and then about-faced and started away from the entrance.

  The music cut off abruptly, and a figure ran out of the darkness, illuminated by several tiny glow sticks hanging off their waist. I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman as they were wearing a hoodie, hood pulled up.

  “Wait! Please. They didn’t realize I’d reached out to you.” The young woman’s voice was breathless. “Please, Aunty.”

  Aunty? Maybe it was just a title?

  Well, shit. Talk about things getting complicated.

  Penny turned and looked at her niece. Or maybe great-niece considering their respective ages. “Beth, it wasn’t your voice on the phone.”

  “Aunty Penny, the spell, it’s . . . it’s really bad. We can’t figure out what we did wrong, and now it’s completely out of control.” Her words came in gasps between gulps of breath. She bent at the waist, gasping for air, and my first thought was good act. Not that there wasn’t a problem with the spell, because there could be, but the girl . . . she didn’t actually seem out of breath.

  Which meant they were still trying to fool us.

  Well, wasn’t that just ducking great. Robert grabbed my wrist tight enough to hurt, and I turned to him.

  He shook his head and mouthed a word I couldn’t quite make out. I frowned and shook my head. Leaning in close, he put his mouth to my ear, his very real-feeling lips brushing against my skin and tickling me.

  “Ruse.”

  It was a ruse!

  I mouthed back at him, You sure? He nodded.

  I trusted Robert, probably more than anyone else. But how were we supposed to get a message to Penny?

  Turned out, we didn’t need to. She had a slightly dubious look on her face as she asked, “What spell would that be? I might not be able to help you if it’s outside of my scope and abilities.”

  Penny had told me it was a spell that bound demons to the caller, making them stronger.

  Beth looked over her shoulder and then back to Penny. “A spell of transfiguration,” she said, apparently not getting the memo of what Penny was told from the first phone call. “Three of our coven members are stuck halfway between human and animal, and they’re in great pain! Please hurry!”

  Penny had tested her, and Beth had failed. I knew without asking that Penny was going to stick with our plan and stall for time.


  She had to.

  Damn it, where was Alan? He should be back by . . .

  As if my thoughts called him, he sprinted out of the ride and darted across the space between Beth and Penny. Penny startled, but Beth didn’t so much as blink. I guess not every witch had the ability to see ghosts.

  Good. Seeing him would give Penny confirmation we were here, that we had her back.

  Alan slid to a stop in front of us and wiped his face as if he could still sweat. “That big hairy fellow with the bowtie has the little girl almost clear of this place. He said to tell you that he’ll get her far away, but Suzy is going to stay and help. She’ll wait on the inside and hit them from behind.”

  I nodded and gave him a thumbs up.

  “Rude, you can’t even thank me properly?” he muttered, and I glared at him. Still trying to control my behavior in death, even when the life of a child was at stake.

  I grabbed him by the ear and whispered, “Tell Penny the girl is safe.” This was good. We’d grab Penny and run for it, grab Skeletor on the outskirts of town, and then we’d be gone. We’d lose nothing more than our breath.

  I was a fool to think life would suddenly get that easy.

  When I let go of Alan, he bounced backward as if he’d been made of elastic. He stumbled over to Penny, periodically twisting around to glare at me.

  “The kid is safe. My bitch of an ex-wife didn’t even thank me. Nor did she ask me who else I saw in there. Very important to ask all the questions if you ask me.” He was practically shouting, but of course, Beth couldn’t hear him. I didn’t know if any of the other witches could hear him though, the asshat.

  I would have gladly strangled him, given the chance.

  Beth held a hand out to Penny. “Please, Aunty. Please help us.”

  Penny drew herself up, and power crackled the air around her in a warm whoosh. “No, I don’t think I will.”

  From the tunnel came a low thrumming laughter, followed by that crazy damn music that was—this time—cranked up even louder.

  The music was bad, but that laughter sounded . . .familiar?

  From out of the darkness stepped the black-robed necromancer. He moved in herky-jerky lurches, as if he were some sort of marionette, but the build was familiar. He was a perfect match for the man I’d seen in Jackson Square, and in my dream only a few hours before.