by Vivi Andrews
I am more badass than anything in here, she told herself as she stalked toward the kitchen. Ghosts whipped around her, chilled breezes and eerie moans marking their passing as they swirled through the house. Jo didn’t so much as pause. “Ready or not, here I come,” she growled to the Big Bad waiting in the kitchen.
She felt the pulse of energy, as if there was too much to be contained within the room, when she was still halfway across the dining room.
“There are more than last time,” she muttered. Wyatt didn’t respond, though he stayed close on her heels as they approached the swinging door to the kitchen, which was swinging merrily back and forth, caught in the ghostly breeze. Jo caught the edge of the door, stopping its movement, and Wyatt handed her a chair to prop it open all the way.
The pulse of energy was stronger here, humming against her senses. Jo closed her eyes and listened to the hum, straining to hear beneath the static of so many ghosts crammed together in one place.
There it was, barely audible, a soft, sibilant voice whispering words too fast and slurred to make out. The words of a spell.
“Shit,” Jo muttered. “It is magic.” Even knowing it was the most likely explanation, Jo had been hoping for another cause. Just about any other cause.
“Magic?” Wyatt whispered, keeping his voice low so as not to disturb her concentration. Jo wasn’t actually concentrating at the moment, so she didn’t bother pointing out how distracting his attempt not to distract her was.
“There’s some kind of spell at work here. That’s the voice you keep hearing. I’m betting you only hear it because the ghosts inside you are so strongly affected by it. Just like these ghosts are.” She gestured toward the kitchen where a dense stew of green specters spun. “Take a few steps back. I’m going to go in there and release as many of them as I can.”
“Release?” he asked, already stepping back as she requested.
“Transcend.” Jo waved a hand. “The whole white light thing. Just, if you see a bright light, don’t go into it, okay?”
“No problem.”
Hopefully, it wouldn’t be.
Jo stepped into the kitchen and was immediately swallowed up by sensation. She tried to sort through the myriad energies, tried to see through the energy haze to identify a spot where the ghostly presences were more thickly concentrated, but they never seemed to stop moving and her senses were overwhelmed by the presence of so many. Even as she blocked out the individual imprints of the ghosts—the names and voices—she was still swamped by the force of their residual presence.
This is a bad idea.
Jo squashed the creeping doubts. She couldn’t doubt herself now. She needed concentration and confidence. The latter had never been a problem for her before, but she’d never questioned her mojo before either.
She closed her eyes, focused, and shoved back, raising her hands and pushing them away from her, the physical gesture helping her to clear the mental space around her.
Jo opened her eyes and searched the room for a thin spot she could open into a portal, simultaneously scanning for any sign of witchcraft bending the ghosts to a foreign will. There was no sign of either, just a constantly swirling vortex of ghost energy.
Jo stepped farther into the room, until she was standing dead center. It was quieter here, like the eye of a storm. She looked down, searching the tiles beneath her feet for a pattern—a pentagram or some other occult symbol laid into the ground, but there was nothing.
The ghosts were encroaching, so she pushed out again, clearing the space around her and scanned again for a thin spot in the air. She almost missed it, because this time it was directly above her. When she took a step back, the air seemed to thicken, so, frowning, she stood directly beneath her portal. She reached, yanked, and it popped open.
Just like the last time, the ghosts shied back away from it. And just like last time, Jo frowned at the uncharacteristic behavior.
She didn’t have the patience for delicacy tonight. Jo gritted her teeth and shoved as many ghosts toward the portal as she could. As soon as they brushed its edges, they vanished through it, but as soon as she had cleared one corner of the room, it filled again as ghosts were sucked into the empty space from other parts of the house.
She hurriedly shoved more through, trying to empty the steadily refilling room, but it was like trying to move a desert one handful of sand at a time.
Jo felt like she had been working for ages, focusing intently on forcing the ghosts to the portal, but in reality it couldn’t have been anything more than a few seconds, when the other presence in the house woke up.
The first yank back against the ghosts was so fast and unexpected Jo was thrown to the ground, slammed into the hard tile before she realized what was happening. She kept the portal open by instinct alone, but with the break in her focus, she lost the ability to block the ghosts and the sudden cacophony of hundreds of children’s voices nearly deafened her.
Jo flinched and raised her hands up in defensive reflex to cover her ears, but the noise wasn’t coming from outside. It echoed inside her brain. She struggled to block them, fighting for a second of calm, but there were too many and they were too forceful.
She grabbed at the nearest voice, the plaintive wail of a small child, and yanked that one presence toward the portal. The child zipped through into the light, but Jo couldn’t thrill in the small victory. She was drowning in voices. She couldn’t hope to put them through one by one, especially not if she had to fight that other force along the way.
As if called by her thoughts, the other presence crashed against her, battering her through the ghosts that connected them. The voice, the whispering rush of the spell, grew deafening, blending with the screams of the ghosts and pounding in her brain. Jo writhed on the floor. She couldn’t find the source and fight back. It pushed at her from the inside out, simultaneously pressing in on her from all sides.
“Jo!”
Wyatt’s hands found her in the middle of the maelstrom. He swung her up against his chest, his body curled protectively over hers as he ran from the room. Jo let the portal snap shut and clung to him, but the ghostly hysteria that battered her didn’t ease until he stumbled and fell to his knees on the front lawn, still holding her cradled against him.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” Her voice didn’t come out right, so she tried again, putting more strength behind the words. “I’m fine now.”
“You’re shaking,” he murmured, tucking her even more tightly against him as he shoved to his feet and continued toward the relative safety of the car.
Only then did Jo notice the shudders wracking her body. She tried to breathe, tried to calm the adrenaline flood rushing through her veins, but all she could do was hang onto Wyatt. “I’m okay,” she tried to reassure him, but even her voice shook and it was hard to talk through chattering teeth. “You got me out.”
Wyatt Haines, anal CEO, had saved her. His very insensitivity to ghosts had protected him from the battering she had taken. Her mojo had failed her, but Wyatt had been there. Thank God.
She looked at her unexpected savior and saw the glimmering shapes of Angelica and Teddy still buzzing in his chest. The spell hadn’t pulled them out of Wyatt’s body as she’d hoped after all.
They reached the car, but he didn’t immediately put her down. His arms stayed locked around her as he leaned against the Bentley. His face was lined with strain and there was the afterimage of fear in those intense blue eyes. For some reason, that fear kicked Jo right in the stomach. He had been afraid for her.
He forced a weak smile, gently setting her on her own feet. “Let’s not do that again.”
Jo smiled back, just as shakily. “Deal.”
Chapter Twenty-Two: Afterglow
Wyatt watched Jo plop down sideways onto the couch, folding her legs up, facing him. She tucked her cell phone back into her pocket. “Karma says hi.”
Wyatt tossed her an arch look. “Is that what she says?”
&n
bsp; “Yeah. That and if I ever try anything remotely like what I tried tonight, I’ll be fired so fast my head will spin. Other than that, it was all pleasantries and small talk.” She winked at him.
He’d noticed that her mood had improved steadily the farther they’d gotten away from the house. By the time they got back to his condo, she’d been downright chipper, which was a pleasant change from the arctic blast of her company after he’d pointed out their incompatibility. He wasn’t about to mention that again.
“It’s nice to know she doesn’t encourage you to walk into dangerous situations,” he said, matching Jo’s light mood.
“I don’t think it was the danger that bothered her so much as my resounding failure. Not only did I just get my ass handed to me by some funky ghost-spell, we are no closer to figuring out who set it or why. Although, I do have a theory.”
“Oh? What’s that?”
Jo bounced a little on the couch. “I think the old dead lady, the previous owner of the house, is trying to resurrect herself.”
Wyatt snorted with disbelief—the world of crazy just kept getting crazier—then carefully wiped his face of all expression. “Is that so? And what did Karma think of this?”
Jo slumped and made a face. “Pretty much the same thing you just thought. Although she wasn’t quite as tactful. The word harebrained was used a lot. I didn’t know people still said harebrained.”
Wyatt frowned. “Is that even possible? Resurrection?”
He was beginning to think that Jo’s Santa Claus belief in ghosts might be more accurate than he had ever imagined, but magic? Spells? Resurrection? There was only so much insanity a man could be expected to process in a forty-eight hour period.
“It’s sort of possible,” Jo replied, shrugging. “In theory. Of course, her body will have already decayed past the point of being useful, which is why I thought it was likely, given the breathing and everything, that the house itself was supposed to be the vessel for her soul to return.”
Wyatt snorted before he could stop himself. “She wants to come back to life as a house?”
“Yeah, I admit that’s a little far-fetched, but if she were trying to become a demon of some kind, capable of possessing the bodies of living creatures, then the house would be a logical stop-over between dead and demonic.”
“Logical.” Logic had stepped out the door as soon as Jo stepped into his life.
“Yeah. She could draw souls to her and feed on them until she had enough power to become a real demon.” Jo frowned and flopped back against the cushion. “Although, if she were feeding on the souls then they wouldn’t be stock-piling the way they are. And KC’s demon guy who Karma had look at the house would probably have sensed something. But other than that, I really like my theory.”
“And what does Karma think?”
“That I should leave the house alone.”
Wyatt liked that plan. Every time Jo walked in there, she ended up laid out on the floor. This time, when he’d seen her screaming and writhing, he’d decided he’d had more than enough of that damned house. “And you said?”
“I agreed. For now.” She launched herself off the couch and began pacing. “We need more answers. We’ve got a thousand maybes and nothing concrete.”
“We’ve tried going to the house. We’ve tried talking to the ghosts. What else do you want to try?”
Jo spun around and struck a superhero pose, planting her hands on her hips. “It’s time to go see the expert.”
“I thought Karma was the expert.”
“Karma’s the boss. My grandma is the expert. She’s in a home about ninety miles from here. We can go tomorrow.”
“This is the same grandmother you said was a little nuts?”
“Yeah, but she’s canny. She’ll know what’s going on.” Jo spun to face the window again and hugged herself. “She has to.”
Wyatt rose and moved to stand behind her, drawn to her side just as he had been earlier in the evening, but this time he didn’t touch her. The last thing he wanted to do was remind her of their argument. “It’s going to be okay, Jo,” he said. “We’re going to figure this out.”
But once they did, she’d be gone from his life. He could no longer delude himself that he was still eager for that day. He was going to miss her brand of insanity.
Jo turned to him and sighed, searching his face for answers she knew she wouldn’t find there. “Are we going to figure it out?” she asked, hating the doubt that had crept into her life.
He flashed her a cocky grin filled with bravado. “Of course we are. We’ve got contingency plans on top of our contingency plans.”
Jo made a face, hearing him repeat her words back to her. She dropped her forehead until it rested against his chest and sighed heavily. “You know, as pleased as I am that you finally trust me, I could do with a little less pressure.”
“Hey—” He caught her chin and tipped her face up so she was forced to meet his eyes. Eyes that seemed to be getting bluer every time she looked into them. “No pressure. We’re going to figure this out together. You may be the Ghost Goddess, but you could still learn a thing or two from me. Trust me. I don’t know how to fail.”
Her smile was wry. “I love it. Even when you’re comforting, you’re an arrogant prick.”
He laughed softly. “We all have our talents.”
He was still holding her chin, tipping her face up to him, when his mouth settled gently over hers. This kiss was an entirely different species from the hungry attack in her office, but she was no less affected by it. The only points where he touched her were his mouth and the tips of his fingers gently holding her jaw. His lips were soft and firm, the smooth, reassuring taste of him undiluted by the blind rush of passion.
He didn’t push for more than that simple press of lips, but pulled back and rested his forehead against hers. “I know,” he said softly. “Not in front of the kids.”
Jo said nothing, wanting that quiet moment to stretch for a few thousand years. At length, he drew back away from her, and for a second Jo considered pulling his mouth back down to hers. Whenever she thought she had built a wall between them with her anger and his prejudice, he managed to find a way to sneak through the cracks and get under her skin again.
She tossed her head, trying to banish the blend of lust and affection he stirred in her and was momentarily disoriented by her lack of hair flipping over her shoulders. The ghosts. Teddy and Angelica were yet another symptom of her failure.
She was fighting her attraction to Wyatt, fighting to save his cold, corporate soul, and fighting to get her own mojo back. It was exhausting to be fighting every second. As badly as she wanted Wyatt, she wanted sleep just as much, but sleep wasn’t an option. Unless…
“Mr. Haines, I believe I have an idea as to how you and I might be able to get a good night’s rest.”
Wyatt raised hopeful—and bloodshot—blue eyes to hers. “I would sell my grandmother for a good night’s rest.”
Jo laughed. “Fire your mother, sell your grandmother. You’re just a regular family man, aren’t you?” He’d probably eat his young.
“I would love to stand here and be witty with you, but someone mentioned something about sleep and my brain just shut off.”
Jo grinned. “So, Wyatt, have you ever been tied up?”
Jo slipped into Wyatt’s bedroom early the next morning and leaned a hip against the bed as she watched him sleep. He looked so peaceful. Much more peaceful than she felt.
She wasn’t particularly well-rested, a state that had little to do with the sunlight that started pouring through Wyatt’s living room windows at dawn, the too-short couch she had slept on, or even the racket that Teddy and Angelica had caused last night when they found they were not going to be allowed out to play. Her lack of sleep had much more to do with the fact that she had a gorgeous man who wanted her like crazy—though only as his dirty little secret, an acidic little voice in her head reminded her—tied to his bed less than twenty feet away.
>
No, it hadn’t been a restful night.
Jo fingered the silk ties she had used to tie Wyatt’s wrists to the headboard. The silk dug into his skin and was probably ruined from being stretched and knotted so tightly, but she hadn’t wanted the ghosts to be able to slip out of them and Wyatt didn’t have anything better to be tied with.
A little smile escaped her mouth as she remembered his teasing that they would have to find a sex shop open on Sundays and pick up a pair of padded handcuffs before tonight. The wicked light in his eyes had promised that, as soon as she got the ghosts out of him, she could test-drive the handcuffs herself. Jo hadn’t been as immune as she would have liked to that unspoken invitation.
He stirred in his sleep and Jo considered untying him, but as long as he was out, the ghosts could still seize the opportunity to take control.
Instead of loosening the bonds, Jo climbed up onto the bed beside him and cuddled up next to his warmth. The man was a living furnace. His heat burned through her tension and doubts, and she relaxed against him.
She should wake him up soon. They needed to get an early start if they were going to get to her grandma’s and back in time to do anything about the house tonight. She should have woken him, but she didn’t. Instead she let her eyes fall closed and nestled close. Just a few minutes.
For just a few minutes, she wanted to lean into his warmth, to feel safe and sheltered and normal. No ghosts, no prejudices, and no dirty little secrets. Just her and Wyatt.
It was a foolish fantasy, but Jo couldn’t resist its allure. Sunday mornings curled up together like this, lazing through the day. Normal and happy and loved.
Jo closed her eyes and let herself dream, if only for a few minutes.
Chapter Twenty-Three: Over the River & Through the Woods
The Serenity Hills Senior Facility was not at all what Wyatt expected. It looked more like a high-end resort, not unlike some of his own more extravagant properties, than it did the sterile, clinically depressing old folks’ home he had anticipated. Cute, single-level bungalows backed up against golf courses and every carport featured large, low-slung American machinery. This was where yuppies and soccer moms went to retire. Next stop, heaven.
