A Ghoul's Guide to Love and Murder

  With a little smile, I pointed down the hall, and there, silhouetted against the light filtering in from a dirty window at the end of the hall, was an angry-looking woman in a long silk robe, her arms crossed over her chest and a deep scowl on her features.

  Oh, and she was also floating two feet above the floor.

  “What . . . the . . . fuck?” Olivera gasped when she spotted Gerty. Then she took several steps forward and Heath and I both reached out to grab her before she could get too close to the spook. Gerty’s temper was nothing to trifle with.

  “Easy there, Detective,” Heath said. “Whenever we see her, we give her plenty of breathing room.”

  Olivera blinked several times and squinted toward the ghost. “It’s a trick,” she said at last, folding her arms over her own chest in a perfect imitation of Mrs. Grady and making a point to look at Heath’s cautionary hold on her shoulder.

  I sighed. Why were some people so stubborn? Glancing at Heath, I saw a flash of anger sweep across his features. He’d had enough of the skepticism too. Removing his hand and making a sweeping motion toward the corridor ahead, he said, “After you, then.”

  I felt a jolt of alarm but saw that Heath began to walk right behind Olivera, just in case things got tricky, and I relaxed a fraction. Still, I was pretty tense.

  And I will give Olivera some credit; she didn’t falter on the way to Gertrude’s ghost. I think she must’ve been pretty convinced we were big fat fibbers. Even when the temperature dropped by a good twenty degrees in the span of about three seconds, Olivera kept on striding down that hallway. I wrapped my arms around myself; there’s nothing that cuts through you like a ghost chill.

  When Olivera was about ten feet from Gertrude, things got interesting, and by “interesting” I mean things went the freak-show way they normally do around me and my crew. It began with a wicked smile from Gertrude, and then she disappeared. “Here it comes,” I whispered, but I never could’ve predicted what happened next.

  Olivera paused for half a second, then darted forward and looked from side to side. She stood smack-dab between Apartment 4B on one side and 4E on the other. Both doors suddenly opened and a scream so earsplittingly loud that even I covered my ears erupted from both doorways.

  Olivera ducked and drew her gun. Heath closed the distance between them and was just about to reach out to the detective when she was jerked in a half circle and then pulled right into 4E by an unseen force.

  She screamed—which I couldn’t blame her one bit for—and as Heath reacted by changing direction toward her, the door to 4E abruptly slammed shut.

  “Oh, shit!” I swore, launching myself down the hallway. I didn’t really think Gerty would hurt Olivera beyond pushing her around a little, but I wasn’t certain about that. She’d looked pretty mad when Olivera had approached. From beyond the door where Olivera had disappeared, there was another sharp cry, followed by gunshots.

  What I did next was instinctual; I dived for the floor. A moment later I felt Heath’s weight hovering over mine protectively. More shots erupted, followed by shouts from Olivera that sounded an awful lot like “Boston PD! Drop your weapon!”

  I think Heath and I had the same thought at the same moment. He ducked his chin to look at me, and we both mouthed, Weapon?

  Something slammed against the interior wall right next to us and Olivera’s gun measured out several more shots. I wondered when she would run out of bullets.

  Heath continued to cover me as the pop-pop-pop from Olivera’s gun went on a few more times. Then all was deathly still.

  No gunfire, no screaming, no slamming around of heavy objects . . . nothing at all. It was freaking creepy.

  Heath slowly got off me, but as I tried to get up, he pushed me back to the floor. “Stay down!” he whispered. I glared at him but heeded the command. He moved to the door of 4E and put his ear to it. We locked eyes and he shook his head slightly. He couldn’t hear anything. I watched as he tried the handle. It didn’t move. Stepping back from the door, Heath raised a leg to kick it in when all of a sudden it opened on its own, and what stood there . . .

  “Heeeeeath!” I screamed, popping up to my feet in an instant. My husband was already backing away from a spook I knew he’d never seen before, the one I’d prayed we wouldn’t encounter. Hatchet Jack stood in the doorway with the evilest, most sadistic grin on his face you’d ever not want to see. He was a bony figure, all sharp lines and angles, with wisps of black greasy hair on a somewhat bald head. His nose was too large for his ugly face, and his eyes were recessed and sinister, but his worst feature by far was his black, rotting teeth, exposed by thin lips pulled back in that menacing smile. Clutched high in one skeletal hand was a hatchet, it’s edge razor-sharp and dripping with blood.

  I was light-headed even looking at it. Had he killed Olivera?

  Heath took a step back from the nightmare spook. I couldn’t seem to get my legs to move fast enough. My husband wasn’t wearing any kind of protection. No magnets, no spikes, nothing. He was totally exposed. And as I looked at Hatchet Jack, I realized that in the many years since we’d encountered each other, he’d gained some power. It was in his stance, the way he gleefully approached Heath holding his weapon. I had little doubt the spook had gained the ability to kill, and there was that matter of the dripping blood from the blade he wielded.

  “Heath!” I cried again. The distance between us was too far; Hatchet Jack was much closer to him than I was.

  I prayed for a miracle, but what I got was something on the opposite end of the spectrum. Detective Olivera appeared in the doorway behind Jack, her gun raised and a determined yet frightened look on her face. “Drop your weapon!” she shouted at the spook.

  Hatchet Jack paused long enough to turn his head around and stare at her, but the way he twisted his head—one hundred and eighty degrees—was like something right out of The Exorcist.

  Olivera’s already pale face whitened even more, and a second before her finger pulled the trigger I shouted, “No! Don’t shoot!”

  Jack was, of course, unfazed by the bullet fired from her gun, but Heath’s head snapped back and he dropped like a stone. The scream that came out of my lungs was unlike anything I’d ever uttered—just a raw, agonized, primal cry as the man I loved was gunned down right in front of my eyes.

  Chapter 8

  I was mindless of Jack. Mindless of Olivera. Mindless of the hallway, the apartments, the freezing cold. My entire focus was on Heath, who lay facedown, unmoving. I ran to him.

  The floor at the edge of his scalp was tinged with red, and even in those last two steps I knew that Olivera’s aim had been higher than I’d first realized—she’d shot for Jack’s head, and in turn had hit Heath’s.

  I was still screaming when I reached him, shaking so hard, denying the scene and begging for it all to be a mistake. A dream. A trick of the light. As I fell to the floor beside Heath, more blood pooled away from his scalp and I sucked in a ragged breath, only to expel it in another primal scream. Rage, terror, and hopelessness poured out in that cry in an eruption of noise that bounced and echoed off the narrow corridor. “Whyyyyy?!” I wailed. I shouted it to every spirit I’d ever helped. To every ancestor I’d ever prayed to. To Heath’s ancestors and to God. In that moment—I hated Him with such intensity that I could’ve easily walked myself into the lower realms and lived for eternity with the very souls I’d banished there—all because I’d never forgive the God that took my beloved from me.

  “Aw, shit!” I heard somewhere in the background. “Jesus! Jesus!”

  I covered Heath’s body with my own, gently laying myself across him, sobbing. I couldn’t turn him over. I couldn’t see the hole that Olivera had put into the center of his head. I couldn’t look upon his dead eyes and ever hope to stay sane. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no!” I wailed, curling around him protectively.

  “Mrs. Whitefeather,” I heard Olivera whisper
a second before I felt her cold hand on my shoulder. “Let me see him.”

  “Get off me!”

  She backed away, and I was racked with sobs, clutching at Heath’s shirt, begging him to stay with me. A moment later her hand was on my shoulder again. “Please,” she said. “Let me check for a pulse.”

  That rage came back with a vengeance, and I lifted myself away from Heath’s body long enough to lunge at her. Catching her by the wrist, I shot to my feet and shoved her back to the wall so forcefully that when her back hit, it shook the whole hallway. “You goddam idiot!” I shouted at her. “Why? Why?!”

  Her eyes were wide and she shook her head. Sweat coated her brow even though it was still freezing in the hallway. “I aimed at the assailant!” she said. “I shot him!”

  “You shot a fucking ghost!” I screamed back, shaking her by the lapels of her jacket and banging her against the wall again. I wanted to kill her. My rage was that strong. “We told you! We told you!”

  “Em,” I heard a feeble voice call from behind me.

  Everything stopped. I held perfectly still except for the tears streaming down my face. For a moment I wondered if Heath’s ghost had whispered to me . . . it was a very real possibility.

  But Olivera’s expression told me the truth. She was looking over my shoulder with such relief that I knew I’d been wrong. Heath hadn’t been taken from me.

  He lived.

  Slowly I pivoted and saw him propped up on one arm, the other hand covering a wound at the side of his scalp. Blood seeped through his fingers and I immediately let go of Olivera and dashed back to him. Gently I took hold of his hand and said, “Let me see it.”

  His face was twisted in a mask of pain, but he allowed me to peel his fingers away and I saw a long, mean streak of exposed flesh beginning at his temple and continuing for several inches along his scalp. The bullet had skimmed along his skull and missed entering it by millimeters.

  “How bad is it?” he asked while I shrugged out of my jacket, removed my sweater, and pulled off my tank top.

  Wadding up the shirt, I put it over the wound and replaced his hand. “Hold some pressure on that,” I said, my voice quaking slightly. Putting my sweater back on, I looked back at Olivera. “Shouldn’t you be calling someone by now?”

  My tone was harsh, the rage barely quelled even though I knew Heath would be okay.

  “I tried,” she said, holding up her cell. “My phone’s dead. It had nearly a full charge when I got out of the car.”

  I glared hard at her. All that emotion from a minute earlier was simply funneled into anger at her stupid, ignorant, bullheaded actions. It was only then that I realized that Hatchet Jack had disappeared almost immediately after Heath had been shot. “A spook can drain a phone at thirty paces,” I snapped. “If you’d listened to us, maybe you would’ve known that.”

  It was her turn to get a little testy. “You’re the ones who invited me here!” she snapped. “How the fuck was I supposed to know this stuff is real?”

  “Where’s Jack?” Heath said, calling my attention back to him.

  I put my coat over his shoulders. His face was pale and he was starting to shiver. I didn’t know exactly what’d happened to Jack, so I turned to stare at Olivera expectantly.

  “He was standing right here,” she said, pointing to the ground in front of her, “and then, the second Mrs. Whitefeather came close, he disappeared.”

  I looked around the hallway. There was no sign of either Gerty or Jack. Which was odd, because I expected at least one of them to taunt us from the end of the hallway—out of range of my magnets. “Hey,” I said to Olivera before pointing to the landing at the stairwell. “Go down there and bring back Heath’s stuff.”

  I probably had enough magnets on me to cover all three of us, but I didn’t want to take any chances. As she took a step in that direction, though, I called her back and held out a spike to her. “Take this,” I said. “And I’d sprint down that hall if I were you.”

  She took the spike gently from my outstretched palm. Her fingertips were ice-cold and I saw that her hand was trembling. She was more shaken than she appeared.

  As I began to feel a little pang of guilt over that, I turned back to Heath. “We need to get you to the hospital, honey. That head wound is bleeding bad.”

  Heath pulled my shirt away from his head. It was soaked in dark red. My stomach turned and I had to quickly look away or I’d lose my cookies. “That’s gonna leave a mark,” he said.

  Leave it to my husband to crack a joke while bleeding profusely. Taking a deep breath, I firmly pushed the shirt back over his wound, then got my arm underneath him and helped him to his feet. He wobbled a little and said, “Whoa, that made me dizzy.”

  “Lean on me.”

  “Okay, but go easy.”

  I moved slowly and carefully with Heath, one step at a time, my entire focus on him. Which is why I didn’t immediately notice that anything was off. But Heath did. He stopped in his tracks and whispered, “Em. Look.”

  I glanced at him first, then to where his gaze was focused, down the hall at Olivera, who was looking all around the stairwell, as if she’d dropped something. Between us and her was Hatchet Jack. He stood facing us, that axe in his hand gripped tightly while he smacked it soundlessly against his other palm. The same sinister smile crept onto his face and, with eyes intent on me, he licked his lips seductively.

  I stiffened, because I knew exactly what he intended. “Olivera,” I called, trying to keep my tone as neutral as possible. “I want you to put on Heath’s jacket, and I want you to do it right now.”

  She held up a finger, still turned away from me. “I’m looking for it,” she said. “But it’s not here. I could’ve sworn he tossed it on the floor of the landing, right?”

  Heath and I traded looks of concern. “You still have that spike, though, right?” I asked, staring at Jack, reminding him that if he wanted to attack her, it’d at least be painful for him. His grin widened. Asshole.

  I put a hand to my waist. I had a spike there, but Heath’s arm was still across my shoulder, and Jack took in the subtle move of my hand and shook his head, grinning at me as if daring me to try it.

  Gauging the distance, I knew I couldn’t get to Jack before he got to Olivera, and he wanted me to know that he knew it too. Double asshole.

  “I think they fell down a flight,” Olivera said, now descending the stairs and leaning over the railing.

  Jack took a few steps backward, his gaze still locked with mine.

  Heath’s arm lifted from my shoulder ever so slightly. “You’ll have to be fast,” he whispered as the figure of Olivera began to disappear down the stairs.

  “Keep my jacket,” I said in reply.

  Jack snickered and stopped palming his hatchet. Behind him I could still hear the faint click of Olivera’s footfalls on the stairs.

  Jack then lowered his chin slightly in challenge. I snarled at him, and just like that we were off, me freeing the spike from my waist as I raced toward him, him spinning on his heels to raise the hatchet and spring toward the stairs. “Olivera!” I shouted, knowing the spook could move faster than me. “Behind you!”

  From the stairwell there was a sort of shocked silence as the detective’s footfalls stopped, and then what I can only describe as a surprised gasp. In my mind I imagined her reaching out of reflex for her gun, so I was quick to shout, “No guns! Use the spike!”

  By then Jack had already reached the landing and leaped high into the air before descending several stairs. As he went down he emitted a victorious shriek, and right afterward a gunshot sent out a deafening boom.

  “Em!” Heath shouted.

  I ducked and darted to the wall, but I didn’t stop. “Dammit, Detective!” I yelled at Olivera. “Use your spike!”

  Jack’s head floated away from my line of vision. Olivera screamed
, but it wasn’t a panicked cry of terror; it was the scream of a warrior. I willed my legs to move faster and faster, pumping my arms harder and harder to reach the landing and lend her some help. When I did gain the landing, I leaped into the air too. I’d just have to pray I didn’t break a leg when I came down.

  As it happens, I’m more agile than I thought (must be the pregnancy hormones), and I dropped onto the midfloor landing like something right out of an action movie: hard, but upright. With bared teeth I went straight for Jack, who was taunting Olivera with his hatchet, swinging it in an arc right at her head. She ducked and maneuvered as if she were a trained martial artist, but you could see that she was scared she was gonna lose the dance. I didn’t waste any time advancing on Jack. I raised the spike high and drove it into the center of his ectoplasmic visage, and my arm met nothing. No resistance at all.

  I was expecting Jack to spin away from my spike, reeling in pain. But he barely noticed. Instead he whirled around, lifting his hatchet to come at me.

  I swerved to the side and flattened myself against the wall. His weapon sank into the wood with a loud thunk. I raised my spike again and struck, but the thing had absolutely no effect. His evil grin widened yet again, and he yanked out the hatchet where it’d been stuck in the wall and prepared to bring it down on my head.

  I reacted more out of reflex than thought. I kicked my leg up hard, and it did meet with something. Not quite a body per se, but resistance for sure. Jack howled in pain and grabbed his nethers just like someone who’d been kicked in the gonads should. He staggered away from me, and, surprised, I pushed myself from the wall and ran at him, kicking outward the whole way. I got in a few good whacks and he snarled and spat and growled at my feet, while feebly trying to lift his hatchet to strike me. In response, I channeled my inner Rockette and kicked it right out of his hand. It fell to the floor and disappeared. I didn’t let up. Twisting slightly, I kicked at Jack like I was trying to break down a locked door. “You. Son. Of. A. Bitch!” I roared as I struck at him. In the back of my mind, I couldn’t figure out why the magnets in my boots worked on him, but the spikes hadn’t. That was something to figure out later. At that moment, all I wanted to do was hurt him, and hurt him I did.