Happy Valentine's Ghost

by Teresa Noelle Roberts

  Happy Valentine’s Ghost

  Teresa Noelle Roberts

  Happy Valentine’s Ghost

  Teresa Noelle Roberts

  Copyright © Teresa Noelle Roberts

  Electronic edition published 2017 by Teresa Noelle Roberts

  “Happy Valentine’s Ghost” originally appeared on SamhainPublishing.com (2010).

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Published by: Teresa Noelle Roberts, Mansfield, MA

  Inquiries should be addressed to Teresa Noelle Roberts.

  mailto:teresanoelleroberts@verizon.

  http://www.teresanoelleroberts.com

  Cover photo: ©KY Tan/Shutterstock.com

  A Duals and Donovans story

  Dr. Maggie Krantz had been willing to die to atone for the mistake of working for the Agency, which was performing government-sanctioned torture of shapeshifting duals and other supernatural beings. At least it would get her out of her contract! To her surprise, though, death wasn’t the end. It was a whole new beginning. A chance to fight back against the Agency as she hadn’t dared to do in life.

  And a chance to get to know Bill Wade, another lively but not exactly living resident of the Agency compound.

  Bill may have been dead since World War II, but he’s the hottest man (or spirit) Maggie’s ever met. He’s thrilled to help her sabotage the Agency in the name of an America where all species are equal. Soon, Maggie develops a crush on her fellow ghost—maybe more than a crush. He’s acting flirty—maybe more than flirty. But can someone as shy and awkward as she was in life learn to trust her heart in the afterlife and win herself a Valentine for eternity?

  This short story takes place after Lions' Pride (Duals and Donovans: The Different 1).

  Table of Contents

  Author’s Note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Thank You!

  About Lions’ Pride

  Other Books by Teresa Noelle Roberts

  About the Author

  Author’s Note

  The courageous, snarky ghost Maggie is my favorite secondary character in Lions’ Pride (Duals and Donovans: The Different 1). I liked her so much I decided to give her a story—and a hero—of her own. If you haven’t read Lions’ Pride yet, you can still enjoy this story, but I hope it intrigues you and makes you want to pick up Lions’ Pride and the rest of the Duals and Donovans series.

  Chapter 1

  “Will he be all right?” Agent Gonzales asked Dr. Maggie Krantz. After the torture session in which she’d been forced to participate, both lion dual Jude Duclos, the specimen a.k.a. victim, and Agent Shaw, the head of this seriously hush-hush Agency operation to turn duals into unwilling shapeshifting super-soldiers, had been transferred to the medical facility. Agent Gonzales, who’d been acting as a heavily armed back-up during the torture, remained behind. During the session, Maggie had had a feeling she, as much as the specimen, was under surveillance. Now she knew.

  Shaw must realize she felt he’d crossed a line into crazy-sadist territory. Okay, he’d crossed that line about six months ago with his experiments, but she’d been doing her best to ignore it out of self-preservation, because you didn’t want to piss off a crazy, sadistic sorcerer with lethal magic. (When you were heading a facility that was black ops even by Agency standards, you could get away with a lot and she suspected some of the people who’d “quit” or “been transferred” were simply not alive anymore.) Something about this particular specimen—no, this particular guy, because even if he wasn’t human, Jude Duclos was definitely a person—had pushed her to the point that she couldn’t keep silent.

  This might be a fatal decision. At this point, she was inclined to say “So what?” Wasn’t as if she was leading a decent life right now or had much hope of improving it. She’d gotten in over her head and was pretty much trapped.

  “He’ll be fine,” she said, shuffling papers on her desk and doing her best to pretend the Agent wasn’t there.

  “What about the specimen?” The uniformed guy gestured at the image of Jude Duclos on her viewing screen, lying unconscious in medical containment, monitors beeping.

  “I meant the specimen.” She didn’t realize how clipped she sounded, how dismissive of Agent Shaw’s well-being, until she caught the look on Gonzales’s face.

  Not shock, exactly—it would take a lot to shock anyone here, even if they’d started their career with the Agency as naïve as she’d been—but confusion at her sounding as callous as most of them did on a regular basis.

  Of course, they were usually callous about the non-human sentient beings—Differents—in their custody, not other humans.

  She had a wild urge to laugh. Watching while Shaw goaded the specimen into attacking, she’d been rooting for Duclos and regretting that he was still too affected by the half-magical, mutation-inducing drugs intended to turn him into a super-soldier to shift into lion form and rip the bastard’s throat out. Of course, if he’d managed it, Gonzales and the other armed Agents would have riddled him with bullets, but the poor furry bastard was fucked anyway. Either he’d die in custody or he’d end up as a half-shifted freak that the Agency could wind up and unload on “enemies of the United States”, whatever that meant to people who’d sanction this operation in the first place. But at least if Duclos had let loose, it would have gotten Shaw out of the way and Duclos would have gone down fighting.

  She’d have popped some popcorn while Shaw drowned in his own blood.

  “Agent Shaw will be fine.” She was too tired to hide she wasn’t overjoyed by the prospect. “Besides, you knew the setup. We weren’t supposed to intervene until it was clear one way or another how the specimen would react to the treatment. In Shaw’s own words, Shaw’s life was an acceptable risk, but not the specimen’s.”

  “Even so... Shaw’s human.”

  Something snapped inside her.

  Maggie looked from Agent Gonzales to the two unconscious forms and back to the Agent. “Are you sure about that, Gonzales? Shaw can kill people with his mind. Is that more human than a guy who can change into a lion? They both seem pretty weird to me, and Shaw’s meaner and crazier than that dual. And Shaw chose his path. Duals are born able to change shape; it’s in their DNA. Shaw decided that it was a terrific idea to learn lethal sorcery.” She was going too far. She knew it. But this rant had been building up for a long time. Her grandmother the union organizer and her grandfather the Resistance fighter (different sides of the family) may have stopped rolling over in their graves about her cowardice. Knowing that gave the sense of danger a different edge—one that actually cut through fear to purpose. “Different species or not, I probably have more in common with Duclos than I do with someone who’d make that choice.”

  “I don’t get you. Sorcery’s just a skill, like shooting or that science stuff you do. He’s human, the same as us.” He looked completely baffled. Whatever Gonzales had been recruited for, it hadn’t been a genius IQ.

  Maggie had been recruited for a genius IQ, for all the good it had done her. A genius IQ and, she realized now, tunnel vision that let her focus entirely on her experiments and not see the big—evil—picture until it was too late. Though it had probably been too late from the moment she took the job.

  “
How human are any of us at this point? I remember from Philosophy 101 that part of what makes us human is moral reasoning. How much moral reasoning are we exercising here? Jude Duclos did ; he chose not to kill Shaw, even though he must have itched to do it. But what about us? When was the last time you or I exercised moral reasoning?”

  Gonzales shook his head. “I don’t...I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

  He literally backed away and out the door.

  Maggie sat down, shaking, fighting back the urge to weep.

  She thought at first, logically, that it was from terror.

  Then she identified what she was feeling as relief.

  She’d wasted a few months trying to figure how to get out alive knowing all she knew. Too late for that now. Pretty soon, she’d be killed.

  After that, she’d be free.

  Dead, sure, and as far as she knew that was where your story ended—but dead and free was an improvement over continuing as a don’t-do-this example for future medical ethics classes. And on the off chance there was such a thing as an afterlife, her grandparents might not dope-slap her when she arrived there

  She reached for her cell phone and called her next-door neighbor. “Nancy, I need to go out of town for a few days. Could you check in on the cats until you see my car in the driveway again? Key’s in the mailbox.”

  Nancy volunteered at the local animal shelter. When she turned up dead, Nancy would see to it that Magnet and Pixel found good homes.

  She hung up the phone and saw Gonzales in the doorway staring at her. “You’re crazy,” he repeated.

  “I’m dead,” she corrected, as calmly as she could. “We both know it. You’re going to report me to cover your own ass and then I’ll mysteriously vanish. But at least my cats will be cared for when I’m gone. Moral reasoning.”

  Gonzales fled.

  Maggie thought for a second that another uniformed man took his place in the room—not an Agent, but a soldier in an old-fashioned uniform. She blinked, though, and he was gone.

  Nerves. A girl was entitled to a hallucination or two when she’d just signed her own death warrant.

  Chapter 2

  Maggie grinned. She’d figured out how to zap the locks on the holding cells. So convenient that the Agency was in love with high-tech and psy-tech! Plain old-fashioned locks would have been beyond her ghostly hands, but she could put anything that involved a computer on the fritz. Psy-tech was more challenging, since she hadn’t suddenly acquired magical abilities upon her death, but the combination of magic and computer chips was inherently unstable—so eventually the lock system had caved.

  Now to get the attention of the cheetah dual huddled in the corner, let her know the door was unlocked. The guard shift was changing, and there was a brief window where someone as fast as a cheetah dual might be able to run for it.

  Unfortunately, Maggie could pop the lock, but she couldn’t actually pull the door open, and she couldn’t make the dual see her. Alive, Maggie had been the type who blended into the woodwork at parties. Now she really did.

  As she tried brushing against the prisoner, who, huddled in misery, seemed to think she was a draft, something tapped her on the shoulder.

  Which was quite a trick, since living hands passed right through her.

  She turned around to see a fellow ghost, one she didn’t recognize as one of the regulars in the compound—all people of various species who’d been killed by the Agency. “Excuse me, Miss?” the ghost asked politely.

  “Doctor,” she said instinctively. Not that titles mattered when you were dead.

  Then she did a double-take.

  The compound had more than its share of ghosts. But this man, she thought, came from an earlier era. The compound was on a military base dating from World War II. Maggie was no historian, but the ghost’s uniform looked to be that vintage. To her, he appeared translucent, but vividly colored, which was how she knew he was a ghost. Most living people looked faded and blurry around the edges.

  And he was hot—a big, blond, blue-eyed young man with broad shoulders and an outdoorsy, sun-kissed air, even in death. Kind of like that superhero she’d always fancied, the one who’d started out as a weak but brave kid who wanted to fight Nazis.

  Some instincts never fade. Maggie smoothed her hair, even though she knew it was stuck in the disheveled state it had been in when she died, sucked in her belly, drew herself up taller. One of the few plusses to being a ghost was that she could be a little taller. In life, she’d barely made it to five feet tall, but she could cast a bigger illusion.

  In life, a guy that handsome wouldn’t have looked twice at nerdy Dr. Maggie Krantz, but the dead-people dating pool here was limited, and most of its members weren’t human. Maybe she had a chance.

  “Doctor, then,” he said, smiling. “Do you need some help getting the lady’s attention? I’m pretty good getting living people to notice me.”

  “Please.”

  The uniformed ghost changed consistency. Thickened. At the same time, his colors faded, so he looked like a movie special-effects ghost.

  “Miss?” Maggie heard. “Miss? The door’s open.”

  The cheetah, lost in her despair, didn’t look up.

  He reached somewhere—no place physical, Maggie was quite sure—and drew out a bouquet of roses. They were fresh in his hand, deep, almost glowingly red.

  He drew one from the bouquet and tossed it at the cheetah woman.

  It became dried and faded when it struck her chest and stayed solid only long enough for her to jump, see it, and look up.

  The soldier pointed at the door.

  The cheetah sprang to her feet, darted to the door and pushed. The door swung open. Quick as thought, a cheetah stood where the woman had.

  “Follow us,” the man in uniform said, gesturing.

  More solid, he led the way while Maggie made sure any surveillance cameras en route met with electrical trouble.

  By the time anyone noticed a problem, the cheetah was sprinting toward the forest surrounding the compound. Good luck catching her there. With cheetah speed and human smarts, she’d be halfway to Ithaca, the nearest city, before anyone noticed she was gone.

  Maggie turned to her companion. “Thanks. I couldn’t have gotten her out without you.”

  “And without you, I wouldn’t have been able to do much except keep her company as she willed herself to die.” The blond ghost shook his head. “You’re amazing. How does that thing you do to the cameras?”

  “As best I can figure, we ghosts are largely made up of electrical impulses and spirit. Physics never was my strongest subject, and I’m no electrical engineer, and don’t ask me about metaphysics because I didn’t even believe in ghosts until I turned into one, but if we’re energy, we can turn ourselves into little lightning storms and fry inconvenient electronics. It’s a hoot once you get the hang of it. There are limits I haven’t figured out yet and some of the tech around here is powered by magic, which is an entirely different problem, but that’s the basic gist. Understand?”

  He laughed. “Not even a little. Nebraska farm boy here. Didn’t even finish high school. I could fix a tractor or a car in my day, but that was about my limit. This new-fangled technology is way beyond me. But I’d like to learn if you’d like some help fighting these creeps.”

  “Gorgeous, good-hearted, and eager to be useful too? How come I never ran into anyone like you when I was alive?”

  Maggie froze as the words popped out. Even dead, she retained her patented lack of social graces. Pretty soon Mr. Dead Hunk in Uniform would remember he had someplace else to haunt.

  Instead, he laughed. “Gorgeous? Did you misplace your glasses when they killed you, pretty doctor? I’m just a big lout of a Midwestern boy. Must be the uniform you like.”

  Be still her beating heart—okay, her non-beating heart that would be racing wildly if she was still alive. Could he actually be flirting back?

  “Every woman likes a hero.”

  T
o her astonishment, the self-described big lout blushed. Then he faded so she could barely see him, though his voice, when he spoke, came through clear. “Seems that you’re the hero. I’ve been watching you since you were still alive. Saw you stand up to that evil man who’s in charge around here. Saw him kill you. I tried to stop him, but guys like that don’t scare easily. And I’ve been watching you since. You’ve been fighting people who are doing truly evil things. I’ve been moping around since I died because I missed my chance at fighting the Nazis but you...you’re doing things to help, even dead.”

  She thought of glossing over the truth, but she couldn’t. She’d been a lousy liar in life—part of the reason she was now dead—and now that she was dead, she refused to even try to hide behind a lie.

  Even though she really, really wanted to look good in this handsome soldier’s eyes.

  “I’m no hero. I’m a woman who realized one day I’d been conned into doing terrible things. I could only get out in a pine box. Been trying to make up for it ever since.”

  The soldier eased back into visibility. “I’m not sure if that’s sadder or better than being all gung-ho to fight Nazis but getting killed in an accident in basic training. Better, I think. At least you got a chance to try.”

  “If, in place of Nazis, you’ll take people who pretend to be defending the All-Human American Way or whatever their bullshit line is, but are actually up to dirty tricks that Hitler might think were too creepy, I can help you out.”

  He actually whooped. “You’re on! I hate seeing my country going backwards like this, as if duals and magic-users and normies aren’t equal. Private Bill Wade at your service, miss...that is, Doctor.”

  “Dr. Maggie Krantz.” She extended her hand and he took it. Ghost to ghost, his big hand felt solid and warm. Trustworthy, she thought, a strong hand that was used to working hard and still retained that memory, even though Bill Wade had been dead far longer than he’d lived. “But you can call me Maggie.” People didn’t use first names as freely back in his day, if she remembered her grandmother’s stories correctly, and she wanted more than she cared to admit to hear him say her name.