"Go away now."
I turned back to the ghost. The voice—low, beautiful, and smooth as silk floating on water—came from him. As I peered closer at him, one eyelid cracked open and a beautiful brown eye glared at me.
"Um," I said.
"Leave now," the ghost said, his words coming from his clenched jaw and thinned lips as a sibilant whisper.
"Don't worry," I said reassuringly, wishing like the dickens I could pat him. "I'm going to make sure this torment you've been caught in for so very long is ended."
The eye closed for a moment, then opened back up. There was a strange quality to the iris that made me feel as if I were being captured in its mahogany depths. "Now. Leave now. Right now."
I nodded and bent to pick my notebook up. He was in a hurry to be Released. I didn't blame him one bit. If I were dripping blood all over the place, I'd be in a hurry too. "I'm going as quickly as I can. You just have to be patient for a couple of minutes longer; this is a bit new to me. I haven't had much practice doing this, and I don't want to mess something up and have you on my conscience. Oh, poop, now I've lost my place. Just a sec, I won't be a moment; then you can leave."
I flipped through the notebook, absently wiping on my leg the wet substance that coated the front of the notebook.
"If you do not remove yourself from my presence and this building in the next thirty seconds, your conscience will be the least of your worries."
He was looking at me with both eyes open now, glaring at me really, his hands clenched into fists on his belly, his body unnaturally—or rather, supernaturally—still. I dragged my mind from the wonder and joy that was his voice—a voice that had a delightfully sexy European accent—and back to more important matters.
Like his attitude.
"I beg your pardon?" I closed my notebook and rubbed my fingers together. The floor must have water seepage because the notebook was wet. "Now let's just get a few things straight here, shall we? I am here to help you. You are here to be helped. Copping an attitude is not going to do anything but tick me off and delay the aforementioned helping. So why don't you just lie there and be quiet, and I will get on with the Releasing, okay?"
The ghost's eyes rolled in a realistically annoyed fashion; then he rose up on one elbow and scowled at me. I stepped back, alarmed that he was too close to me, that if some part of his ethereal, albeit extremely solid-looking body touched me, it would break his cycle.
"I am trying to tell you to leave me. What is so hard to understand about that? Leave, I said, and all you do is nod and go on with your silly Release spell. I don't want you to Release me; I want you to leave. This building. Now!"
"You are a very rude ghost," I said, poking my notebook at him.
"I'm not a ghost."
I snorted. "You are, too. You're lying there dripping blood from some heinous torture you underwent before you died. I know a ghost when I see one, and you can take it from me, you're dead. Finished. A corpse. An ex-person."
Now the ghost was grinding his teeth. It was amazing the difference between a human ghost and the semitransparent cat. This man looked so real I had to fight a constant battle to keep my hands off him. "I'm going to say this once more. I am not a ghost. I do not need to be Released. I do not want your help. I do want you to leave me alone and go back to wherever you came from. Is that sufficiently clear?"
"I am a Summoner," I said with dignity.
"Brava. Go Summon elsewhere."
"I know ghosts. Okay, you might be the first fully human ghost I've seen, but I know ghosts. Many times the deceased are confused about their status. The first thing they teach you in Summoning school is that not all ghosts are willing to admit they're dead. Clearly you're in that category. Now if you will just be quiet for three more minutes, I will finish the Release and you can go on your merry way."
The ghost leaped up off the table and stood glaring at me. I couldn't help but look at where the cloth had fallen from.
"Eep," I said, my eyes close to bugging out of my head.
He snarled something and grabbed the cloth from the floor, wrapping it around his hips. "By all the saints, will you just leave me in peace?" Oddly enough, that beautiful, silky voice didn't lose any of its charm even when it was bellowing at me.
I dislike being yelled at, however. It takes me back to the days when I was married and didn't have enough brains to know that I didn't have to take either the verbal or physical abuse. For that reason, I tend to be a bit snappish when someone starts lighting into me. "That's what I'm trying to do, give you peace, you stupid spook! Now lie down and shut up!"
I had dropped my notebook again when he leaped off the table, and bent down to pick it up, secretly amused by the stunned expression on the ghost's face. My amusement died when I picked up the notebook. It was sticky with wetness. I flipped it open and noticed that everywhere I touched I left red smears.
Smears of blood.
I stared at my hands for a second, then down at the floor where the ghost's blood had collected.
"What is… Is it ectoplasm?"
The ghost raised his hands to the heavens. "In all my years I have never been so plagued as I am at this moment! No, it is not ectoplasm!"
I touched a wet spot on my notebook, then looked at a cut on his chest that was slowly seeping blood. Hesitantly I reached out and pressed a finger against his flesh. It was warm, firm, and felt like the softest velvet over steel. I instantly wanted to touch more, much more.
Then I realized what it meant. I blinked. I swallowed. I cleared my throat. "You're not a ghost."
The nonghost seemed to be breathing hard, which made his wounds seep blood all that much faster.
"I am not a ghost," he acknowledged, his teeth still apparently doing the grinding thing. "I have told you that at least six times now—"
"Twice."
Breath hissed out his really nice lips. His eyes darkened until they were obsidian. His fingers clenched. "Twice what?"
"You said you weren't a ghost twice, not six times. Must be the blood loss making you a bit woozy."
Muscles in his chest rippled. I tried not to notice them, feeling it was rude to stare at such a magnificent—if bloody—chest when its owner was clearly in need of deep psychiatric and immediate medical care.
"I have never been spoken to as you have spoken to me."
"Is that so?"
"I do not like it," he continued, just as if I hadn't said anything. "You will cease it immediately and leave."
"Leave. As in… now?" Clearly he wasn't thinking straight. It behooved me to try to calm him down before he did any more damage to himself.
"Yes, now," he answered me, a muscle in his jaw twitching. "You need to leave right now, before you ruin—" His lips clamped down on the words, cutting them off.
"Ruin what?" I couldn't help but ask. "I realize it's a bit nosy of me, but I don't often find naked men slowly bleeding to death in the basement of haunted inns. Call me silly, but I think you still need help. It can't be good for you to slice yourself up like that and then lie around in the damp and drip blood everywhere. I'm sure there are some very nice doctors who would be happy to take care of you—"
He said something in a language I didn't recognize, but which sounded suspiciously like it was swearing, then froze and looked at the doorway. There was a soft noise from the upper level that sounded a whole lot like someone had just closed the back door.
"Peste," the man snarled, whirling around to leap back on the table. His voice deepened until it felt like the richest velvet brushing against my skin. "I command you to go now, without allowing the others to see you. You will forget everything you have seen here tonight."
"You know, I was married to an arrogant, domineering, tyrannical sort of man who thought he could control me. You can just take it as a given that the high-and-mighty act isn't going to cut any ice with me."
The man banged his head on the table twice. I winced for him. The table sounded awfully solid.
A faint echo of a
voice reached me. I turned my back on the crazy man and rushed to the door. "Hello? Is there someone up there? Listen, I need some help down here. There's a guy who needs a doctor and… uh… a policeman. Hello?"
Hushed voices whispered to each other for a moment.
"You know, there's some really bad karma to be had from refusing to help someone when they're injured," I yelled up the stairs. "If you don't want to come down here and help me restrain this guy, the least you can do is call for—"
A hand wrapped itself around my mouth and pulled me backward against a warm, hard body.
"Now listen carefully," the man said in my ear, the silk of his voice doing all sorts of naughty things to me. "You will heed my words and do as I command."
It was the word command that did it. Ever since Timothy, I react badly to it. Without even the merest thought about the repercussions of my actions on an obviously insane and badly wounded man, I stomped my boot down on his bare foot and slammed my elbow back into his belly. He grunted in pain and doubled up as I lunged forward and raced up the stairs. I knew it was the sheerest folly to leave a lunatic with a bag full of expensive equipment, but I had no choice. Whoever he was waiting for, whoever had left without having the decency to help, clearly wasn't going to call the police or medical aid. I leaped up the stairs, ignoring the pain in my leg and the stitch that instantly formed in my side as I ran down the hallway to the door. I had remembered seeing a callbox down the block. I'd call for help, then sneak back into the inn and keep an eye on the poor, handsome, utterly deranged man.
It was raining—a cold, nasty, sleety type of rain—as I galloped awkwardly down the road to the call box. It took me three tries to dial 999, but at last I was connected with an emergency dispatcher. Two minutes later, having described where I was and what the problem was with the man, I headed back to the old inn at a slower pace, worried that my escape might have sent the poor man over the deep end.
I crept into the hallway and stood with my back to a moldy wall, keeping an eye on the stairs to the basement. It seemed like it was an hour before the sound of a police car siren Dopplered against the building, but according to my watch it was only eight and a half minutes. I greeted the two policemen, explained quickly what I had seen, and followed them down the stairs to the now closed door. They switched on powerful flashlights and cautiously opened the door.
The room was empty.
Not only was the room empty, the table was gone, and the pool of blood on the floor had vanished. My bag and piece of chalk and flashlight were still there, but everything else was gone.
"Wait a minute—I… There was… He was right here! How could he… And the blood, it was right there—that table must have weighed a ton! How could he have moved it so quickly?"
"Madam," said the smaller of the two policemen, shining his flashlight right on my face. I heard him gasp as I turned away so I was in profile. "Madam," he said again, his voice a bit shaky. "Are you aware of the fact that it is a crime to call the police out on a nonemergency situation?"
"But…" I looked around the room, keeping my head tipped so they couldn't see directly into my eyes. There was nothing here but an empty room, two cops, and my bag of tricks. "He was here! I swear to you, he was here! Bleeding all over the place, and naked as the day he was born."
The taller policeman took a deep breath. It didn't take any psychic abilities to know I was in for a lecture. I gathered up my things as they took turns telling me what happened to tourists who turned in false alarms. By the time I explained what I was doing there, reiterated that I wasn't given to phoning in prank calls, and heard their second round of lecturing, they hustled me upstairs. I was more than willing to believe that I'd had some sort of weird episode in the inn, something related to its spectral inhabitants, and imagined everything with the handsome, if troubled, man.
Until I reached in my bag to pull out the key to lock the door behind us. Then I saw my notebook.
There were bloody fingerprints all over it.
I spent the rest of the night writing up my experience, in between watching the ghost cat sleep, groom itself, and hobble around the room poking into things. It didn't seem to be thrilled to see me, and after trying unsuccessfully to convince it to lie on the bed next to me (so I could take a picture of the two of us together), I ended up more or less ignoring it as it ignored me.
By the time dawn lightened the gray layer of clouds enough to indicate it was morning, I was exhausted and cranky, unsure whether I had witnessed some amazing spectral encounter with a ghost that could manifest a physical presence, or if I was delusional.
I fell asleep wishing the former. At least then I could touch him.
"No messages, Miss Telford," Tina the receptionist said that afternoon as she handed me the room key. I waited to see if she had anything else to add, anything along the lines of a complaint about the three-legged semitransparent feline that was inhabiting my room, but she just smiled and turned to deal with another customer.
"Curiouser and curiouser," I said as I limped over to the elevator, my bag clinking and rattling. I shifted it to the other shoulder and wished I were in a line of work that didn't require so much equipment, equipment that had to be taken everywhere, just in case it was needed. My day trip to a haunted abbey turned out to be one of the times when it was nothing more than a heavy albatross hanging off one shoulder. I punched the number for my floor, and wondered if the Summoning had faded enough to let the cat return to its previous existence. Maybe the maid hadn't seen the cat because it was gone.
"Oh, hello, kitty," I said as I unlocked my door. It was sitting on the windowsill, staring out the window. "I thought you'd gone. I'm glad to see you haven't, although…" I tugged on my lip. Between the tests I'd conducted early the evening before, and the ones I'd done during the dark hours of the night, I had about as much data as I could conceivably collect. Pictures, video, infrared and ultrasound readings, ion analysis, you name it, I had it, enough to give the analysts back at the office an orgasm. Perhaps it was time to Release the cat.
"You want to go home, kitty? I think it's time. I really don't want to have to explain to the housekeeping staff just what I've been up to in here, and although you really are the almost ideal pet—no shedding, no litter box odor, no finicky eating habits—I get the idea you aren't wild about being here either."
I laid out the necessary tools in front of me, and after sprinkling a bit of ginseng over the cat, started reciting the words of Release.
I had to stop midway through to pinch the bridge of my nose. The powdered ginseng was tickling my nose, making it scrunch up and my eyes water with the urge to sneeze. I waited until the urge passed, completed the Release chant, made the protection symbols, and unguarded my mind to envision Releasing the spirit to another plane of existence.
The cat twitched an ear at me and started licking its shoulder.
"Uh-oh." I gnawed on my lower lip and considered the cat. Maybe I didn't use enough ginseng? Or maybe my stopping in the middle of speaking the words threw it off. I'd try it again, this time taking care not to breathe in the ginseng.
As the last word of the Release left my lips, the cat moved on to licking its sole back leg.
"Poop. Something's not right here. I wonder if the ginseng wasn't fresh enough?"
I spent the next hour and a half trying variations on the Release, adding and subtracting amounts of ginseng, even adding a dollop of dead man's ash in case that was the secret ingredient to a successful Release.
Nothing worked.
I was starting to get a bit worried. I knew by the rules of Summoning that if I didn't Release the cat, it would be bound to me for all my days, and while it had managed to escape being seen by the maid, I couldn't count on it achieving that feat every day.
Not to mention how I was supposed to get it home to my apartment in northern California. I hated to think what I was going to have to write on the customs form: One translucent feline, dead fifty-some-odd years. Vaccinations u
p-to-date.
The alarm on my watch started pinging, signaling something I was supposed to do.
"Oh, that stupid book signing. Drat. It would have to be now, when I'm busy with something important."
I thought of brushing it off, but Corrine had begged and pleaded with me before I left for London to attend this book signing.
"Honestly, Cory and her vampire romances," I scoffed as I started repacking the bag. "So some hotshot author has a book signing. Big deal. I have a job to do! But no, I have to go stand in line and wait for a smug author to sign a copy of a book she could get back home. I have to suck up and make nice just so he'll write something pleasant that she'll forget five minutes after she reads it. I have to spend my evening standing on my bad leg in a line that's sure to go for miles because Mr. I'm So Important Dante can't be bothered to do more than one book signing a year. Well, fine, just fine. Make me give up trying to Release my ghost cat. Boy, she's going to owe me for this!"
I finished tidying the bag, popped on my evening sunglasses, told the cat to behave itself, and headed out to find a taxi to Covent Garden. On the way there I ran over the mental list of who in the area I could consult about why the Release wasn't successful.
"Let's see… there's Carlos at SIP, but he's not a Summoner. There is that witch who Ras mentioned supposedly Summoned the ghost of Karl Marx, but I don't have her address, and besides, I'm not sure I want to hang out with someone who actually wanted to spend time with a dead Marx who wasn't Groucho. Urn…" I tapped my lip, watching as the dark, damp streets of London passed by the rain-splattered window. "Oh! That hermit that the woman at the SIP office mentioned. That might be a possibility."
"SIP as in Society for the Investigation of the Paranormal?" the taxi driver asked me.
Rats. I was talking to myself out loud again. It's a habit that I can't seem to break myself of. I smiled at the driver and nodded, hoping he wasn't one of the religious fanatics who seemed to delight in lecturing me as to the sinful nature of my job. "Do you… um… know about them?"
"My wife and me go ghost hunting with them a couple of times a year. Just last August we spent the night in the Tower."
Sex and the Single Vampire do-2 Page 3
