Midnight Moon

by J. R. Rain

  “Like the devil,” I said, recalling a conversation I’d had a few months ago with, well, the dark lord himself.

  He nodded. “Speaking of the devil, literally, have you heard anything from him these days?”

  “Nothing since our last meeting.”

  “At the train station?” said Kingsley. “When he blew himself up, so to speak.”

  I nodded. The devil, in a dramatic exit, had stepped in front of an oncoming train, and wastefully destroyed what had been a rather sexy bad boy host body, even if he had been a full-blown devil worshiper.

  “And how’s Anthony doing?” Kingsley asked.

  “Still keeps to himself.”

  Our meals were served. Admittedly, the serving part took a while, as plate after plate was laid out before Kingsley. Steak and veal and chicken and fish. He’d already slayed the steamed clams, shrimp cocktail, fried calamari, and fresh oysters. I was fairly certain our table just tilted toward Kingsley. He would have it no other way.

  I said, “That’s one more plate of food than last time.”

  “You jest, but what can I say? I’m a growing boy.”

  And he was, literally. Except he was no boy. Not by a long shot.

  I had just twirled the perfect bite of angel hair pasta onto my fork, with a small piece of meatball to cap it off, when Kingsley pushed aside the first of what would be many empty plates. One or two people were watching him. Next, he positioned the chicken pomodoro in the place of honor before him.

  “I literally didn’t see you eat any of that,” I said, waving at the now-empty plate.

  “Truthfully? I didn’t either.”

  I grinned and took my first bite. As I ate, I thought of my son. Yes, he still kept to himself, and no he didn’t want to talk about that day two months ago, when he’d been kidnapped by a local pack of werewolves, a pack who’d been keen to consume his rare blood type. Or, rather, his rare blood legacy. Such blood—my blood, too, and my daughter’s and my whole family—had the added benefit of giving the consumer added strength and abilities.

  Lucky us.

  I was halfway through my first meal—and tasting enough of it to actually kind of enjoy it—when Kingsley pushed the last of his plates away. I knew he wanted to wipe his mouth with the back of his hand. I knew he wanted to belch, too. I knew he also wanted to slam his fist down on the table and demand more grog, or whatever the hell it was that conquering Viking warlords drank. Instead, he sat back and used his napkin and wiped his mouth discreetly, and reached for his glass of wine as if he hadn’t just eaten seven full meals, as evidenced by the empty plates stacked precariously on one corner of the table.

  “You’ve been quiet,” he said.

  “And you’ve been busy,” I said, motioning to his stacked plates.

  “No busier than normal. You gonna finish that?”

  He hadn’t gotten the sentence out before I pushed my own plate over to him.

  “You’re thinking about your son,” he said between mouthfuls.

  “Hard not to.”

  “The thing about the devil,” said Kingsley, who didn’t bother with the twirl method, preferring, instead, the shoveling method, “is that he can’t win.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s in his nature to lose. It’s how...” Kingsley shrugged and took another bite and might have swallowed without chewing. “It’s how he was constructed. Or, rather conceived. God’s foil and all that. God’s foil who can never win, no matter how clever or smart or handsome the devil is. Remember that, Sam. Remember, there’s always a way to beat the devil.”

  Chapter Four

  The house was big. Damn big.

  This was the kind of street I should be living on. This was the kind of home I should be living in, too. My God, Danny had been an attorney. I had been a federal agent. We should have gotten a nice home. A big home, one that didn’t shake every time Anthony guffawed and slapped the floor, which he was prone to do when watching TV or playing Xbox. A home that didn’t creak endlessly, too. A home with, wonder of wonders, an attached garage. A home with a laundry room and more than one bathroom. My God, what I would give for two bathrooms. A shiny, new, beautiful home with a billiard room. Why not, right? I suddenly saw myself playing pool with Kingsley and Allison and Sherbet. Maybe that character Knighthorse, too, and his pals Spinoza, Sanchez and Aaron King, who may or may not be Elvis. Maybe some of my other cop friends I’d met on any one of my hundreds of cases over the years. Funny how I had so many police and private eye friends. Then again, I always did gravitate toward good people, honest people, and hardworking people—people who fought for truth, justice and the American way. And yeah, I’m pretty sure I would be friends with Superman, too, if he existed. Of all my friends, only Fang didn’t really mix. Or Dracula for that matter. Or the Alchemist, although I suspected he might shy away from such gatherings.

  Lots of men in my life, I thought. And only Allison and Mary Lou to balance out all that testosterone. And Tammy, of course. Luckily, she was mellowing out as she got older. She was also taking her gifts a little more seriously, too. She often asked to help me when she could, recognizing her value to me and my cases. Having almost lost Anthony had been an eye-opener for her.

  Yeah, I pictured all of these characters—and they were all characters, every last one of them—here at my big new house, playing pool, having a barbeque, talking shop, ready at a moment’s notice to help those who couldn’t help themselves, to fight the good fight and put themselves in harm’s way to help a fellow human being.

  “Would be a helluva pool party,” I whispered as I approached the door.

  It was nearly eleven p.m., which was our agreed-upon time. I’d spent the last two hours with Kingsley at his own estate, which itself was so big that even jealousy went out the door. After all, is one jealous of, say, an ornate museum? Or a glass shopping mall? Or a skyscraper? Hardly. One admired and moved on, and that’s how I viewed Kingsley’s own rambling mansion, with enough extensions and wings to form an entire flock.

  We had, of course, spent the majority of that time in his bedroom. The poor guy had to work at it, as I wasn’t in the mood, or feeling sexy. Hard to care about such things when the devil has targeted your son. But I eventually came around, and I’m fairly certain the big oaf finally got what he wanted. By the time I left, he was out cold, snoring away, and looking far more like a bear than I was comfortable with.

  The community wasn’t gated, nor was Charlie Reed’s home. That said, it was hard to miss all the security cameras. He’d warned me about the cameras, which was why I had overdone it on the makeup on the way over here. At the door, I knocked lightly. He was evidently waiting for me, as the door opened immediately and my new client’s now-familiar face appeared above me.

  “Thank you for you coming, Ms. Moon,” he said. “I would think these aren’t your normal working hours, but I suspect private eyes work all hours of the night.”

  I winked and shot him a blank with my forefinger. “You suspect right.”

  He stepped aside and showed me the way in. My Asics made a surprising amount of noise on the polished marble floor. In the foyer, at the base of twin curved stairways, I was greeted by an alabaster statue of a rising horse pawing the air. Or whatever the hell they might call it in horse circles. I asked as much.

  “Rearing,” he answered. “I take it you’re not a horse girl.”

  “Not really, although I do have an affinity for wolves.”

  “Sure,” he said, and looked a bit puzzled.

  “A beautiful home you have,” I said. “Who knew electrical engineers made so much money?”

  “We don’t. But I just sort of have a habit of...” But he blushed and looked away.

  “A habit of what?” I asked.

  “Maybe money. It’s weird. Everything I do, it just sort of works out for me.”

  “Lucky you,” I said.

  “I suppose. This way, Samantha. I can show you where she appears to me.”

&
nbsp; She being his ghost of course. I was led through the entryway and down a small hallway, then through the kitchen and living room. I noted the 90-inch TV hanging from the wall. Yeah, a lot of money. Along the way, I kept an eye out for any ghostly activity. To my eyes, ghosts appear as a collection of energy. And by energy, I mean the surrounding staticy energy that only I can see, energy that lights up the night for my eyes. The more the energy that’s gathered, the brighter the ghost. As far as I could tell, there were no ghosts.

  At an office that was surely fit for an ace detective, there was a desk of epic proportions. Not just U-shaped, but a complete wraparound desk, with a narrow opening that afforded access within. Once inside, Charlie no doubt felt that he could conquer the world. Or at least eBay, or whatever the hell he did in here. At any rate, this would make a helluva crime-fighting command center.

  No less than three full computers sat on the interconnected desk. Two laser printers. Stacks of paper, folders, a Kindle, an iPad, another tablet computer of unknown origin. Trinkets and other knickknacks filled the remaining desk. Or tried to. There was, after all, a lot of desk space to fill up. Between two of the computers, I saw a complete Star Wars fleet of X-Wing fighters and flying bookends (which is what they always looked like to me), and other oddly-shaped spaceships that someone had spent far too long gluing together. I’m looking at you, Charlie Reed. There was the roundish Millennium Falcon, tilted at a proud angle, ready to unleash its full arsenal upon the forces of evil, which, I assume, meant Darth Vader, although Darth Vader was the star of three movies of his own.

  There were other toys/figurines, too. Batman and Superman waging an epic battle, forever frozen on his desktop, each delivering an epic punch that would probably hurt. There was Wonder Woman with her long, Amazonian legs. I didn’t have long legs, Amazonian or otherwise. I had short legs, and maybe a little too muscular, according to Danny back in the day. The dick.

  “She appears there,” said Charlie, sidling up next to me a little quieter than I was prepared for. Hard to sidle up next to me with my own super hearing, but he’d done it. Anyway, he was pointing to a side hallway through a nearby archway. Yes, the study was so big that it had two entrances.

  “Mind if I have a look?”

  He didn’t mind, and so I did. The hallway branched to the left and right. The right dead-ended at a floor-length series of drawers and cubbyholes. The left opened into another bathroom. Neither end revealed a ghost, although I was sensing a lot of... energy in the hallway. I stood there and let it sweep over me, and sort of reveled in it.

  “You see anything?” he asked.

  “No ghost girl,” I said.

  “Well, that doesn’t surprise me. We’re early.”

  “Of course,” I said, and stepped back into the office. “Which of these computers do you use?”

  “This one here.”

  “Mind if I sit? Do as they do in Rome, as they say?”

  “Sure,” he said, pleased all over again that he seemed to be loosening further.

  I moved over to it and sat down in it. Leather, with lower back support. A full array of paddles and levers underneath. Brass studs. High neck support. I veritably disappeared into it. Cozy as hell. How anyone could actually get any work done in it was beyond me. The sucker was just begging to be tilted back and slept in. Or meditated upon.

  “You work from home?”

  “Rarely.”

  “So this office...”

  “Is mostly just for show,” he said, and blushed a little, and I realized he’d made a small joke. If anything, the whole damn house was for show. Yes, he was definitely loosening up. “I am working on a novel, though,” he added.

  “Ghost story?”

  He chuckled. “Actually, it’s a fantasy novel.”

  “Fantasy? Like sexual fantasies?”

  He laughed again. “More like a Game of Thrones, although there is sex in it. I try to make the story as real as possible. Except, you know, the dragons and shit.”

  “Right,” I said. “Because dragons aren’t real, of course.”

  “Of course,” he said cheerily. Then he turned somber, literally on a dime. His red aura seemed to deepen to a crimson. “Except that I haven’t written in four months.”

  I did the math. “Since your wife left.”

  He nodded. “Right. A world-class case of writer’s block.”

  I looked at the time. We had about twenty minutes to kill before his very own Lady in White showed up. While we waited, I asked to read the first few pages of his novel. He didn’t know what to make of the request. No one had ever read the book before. Not even his wife.

  “What about the ghost?” I teased.

  No, not her either. But that broke the ice and he asked me to move over a little, and I did, and he brought up the book on his computer. Then he moved away to sit at a full-length couch near the arched hallway entrance, where he watched me like a voyeur. I don’t like being watched like a voyeur or otherwise, so I did my best to ignore him. Judging by the intermittent spitting sounds, I think he might have been chewing his nails.

  I wasn’t expecting much. In fact, I had already been planning on how to let him down easy if I thought the book sucked—including wiping his memory of me reading the book—when I came across something surprising. A remarkably fine first sentence that hooked me. And a second that might have been even better than the first. And a third that was rich and real, and so I kept reading. And reading. And as I read, something happened to me, something beautiful and magical, and not expected at all. I felt...

  Transported. Straight into his fantasy world, where his characters came to life. They were funny and real and troubled and heroic—and that was all within the first twenty pages. A Game of Thrones, indeed. Maybe better. Maybe a lot better.

  I didn’t want to stop reading, couldn’t stop reading. Charlie’s fancy home had long since disappeared. Charlie had disappeared, too, until I heard his words reaching from seemingly far away. I blinked, irritated, wishing like hell that whatever was talking to me would just go away. I was, after all, quite happy here in the magical land of Dur.

  Finally, finally, Charlie’s words reached me.

  “Sam, she’s here.”

  Chapter Five

  And so she was.

  Crankily, I looked up and saw the bluish glow in the hallway. The glow was pretty damn obvious, more so than just about anything I had ever seen. No wonder why he caught snatches of it, even being a mere mortal.

  Yes, I’d seen all levels of apparitions, from the very faint, to just blobs of energy. I’d seen more full-bodied spirits, too. My last interaction with Danny’s ghost had been a particularly clear apparition. Little did I know at the time that the real Danny—as in, his actual soul—was hiding in my son.

  Let it go, Sam.

  I nodded to my own internal dialogue and let it go. For now. After all, a brightly lit ghost was presently standing just inside the hallway.

  “You can see her?” I asked.

  “Only when I turn my head and look away.” He demonstrated for me. “I can see the bluish glow, and maybe, just maybe, a woman standing there. But when I turn to look at her—poof, she’s gone.”

  Except, of course, I wasn’t having that problem. There was no poof. I could see her full on, and she was quite beautiful. She wore a sort of nightgown, but it was antiquated. She was tall and slender and had big, nearly cartoonish eyes. Eyes that, if I had to guess, were filled with tears. She also seemed familiar in a way that I couldn’t put my finger on. I’d certainly never been to this house before. Nor had I seen her. I was sure of that. No way anyone could forget a face like that. But yet... I felt I might know her. Worse, that I should know her. Was she an actress, maybe? A model? A pin-up girl from yesteryear?

  That was about when my warning bell sounded, buzzing lightly in my head, and causing an increase in heart rhythm, which really wasn’t saying much. But it was noticeable, at least to me. The buzzing was light, akin to a pesky mosquito. I wa
s being warned that something was amiss, but not terribly so. His friendly ghost, I suspected, was anything but friendly. In fact, few things caused my inner alarm to sound. Vampire hunters, yes. Serial killers, check. The Devil himself? Oh, yes. Ghosts, not usually. Yet, here was my inner alarm, warning me of potential danger.

  I continued sitting in the chair, surrounded by toys and computers and enough desk space for a start-up company, and watched the ghost standing in the hallway, staring forward.

  Most important, I was pretty sure she wasn’t a ghost. At least, not any ghost I had ever seen. The energy was different around her. Most ghosts were composed of zigzagging energy, a sort of gathering of such energy. Not her. She was complete, whole, pure. Just... not quite here. Closer to a hologram than anything.

  I eased away from behind the desk, and stood. Charlie shot me a glance but, interestingly, the ghost never looked my way. In fact, if anything, she looked even more distracted, more distraught. Now I could see the tears spilling from her eyes. Most interesting—yes, most interesting, I could see her lips moving. Rapidly. She was speaking. Now she bowed her head. Was she praying... praying?

  I edged through the gap in the desks, and got a better look at the woman standing in the archway. She was beautiful and otherworldly. She seemed to take no notice of me.

  “It’s okay,” I said to her, now about halfway from the desk to the arched opening. “I won’t hurt you.”

  But my words had no effect. She just stood there, lips moving silently, and weeping. Since when could I see a ghost’s irises and pupils? I was pretty sure that was never.

  Because she’s no ghost, I thought. What she was, I hadn’t a clue.

  I saw her perfect, even teeth, her impossibly full lips. She didn’t seem real, as in, no woman really looked like that, did they? She could have been a Disney princess come to life. Or any man’s fantasy come to life.

  Now she bowed her head and held her fingertips to her lips, and now I was certain she was praying. A second or two later, she turned around and walked away, disappearing within a few steps. And just like that, she was gone.