A Ghoul's Guide to Love and Murder

  “We could always tell Michel and have him spill the beans.”

  That made me laugh. “You are such a chicken,” I told him. “And no way are we doing that to poor Michel. Gilley is fully capable of shooting the messenger.”

  Heath grimaced, but then he seemed to brighten. “You know, maybe it won’t be so bad. Maybe he’ll be happy for us instead of thinking we stole his spotlight.”

  My jaw dropped. “Excuse me, but have you met Gilley Gillespie?”

  Heath’s grimace returned. “If he’s gonna freak out about our being married, what’s he going say about the fact that we’re moving to Santa Fe?”

  That’s another big change that I forgot to tell you about. Heath and I had decided to retire from Boston and move to Santa Fe to be closer to his family. It’d be a big adjustment for me, but in recent months I’d grown closer and closer to his mom and his cousins. They were such lovely, warm, and welcoming people, and now that they were also my family, I wanted to be near them.

  “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” I told him.

  “Like when Gilley and Michel are off on their honeymoon?” Heath said hopefully.

  I pointed at him. “Exactly.” Then I turned away to bend over and fiddle with the dial on the safe. “Honey, could you hand over your ring?”

  “I think I’m going to hold on to it, Em.”

  I looked over my shoulder at him. He was tugging on his wedding ring, about to take it off. “You sure you don’t want me to put it in here where it’ll be safe?” I asked, a bit worried he’d lose it.

  “Yeah,” he said, still tugging. “It’s my good luck charm.”

  That made me smile, and I went back to focusing on the combination to the safe. After opening it up, I took off my rings and was about to place them on the bottom shelf when something inside the safe caught my eye.

  Or rather, it was the absence of something that caught my eye. “Ohmigod!”

  Heath came around the desk and over to me. “What?” he said. “What is it?”

  I pointed inside. “The dagger! The dagger! It’s gone!”

  Heath stared first at me, then inside the safe, and the color drained from his face.

  For the past few years we’d kept an extremely rare and incredibly dangerous relic in our safe: a dagger once owned by a particularly evil and quite deadly Turkish warlord named Oruç.

  Heath and I had first met at a hotel in San Francisco, where we’d been hired as the talent on another cable TV show, a special called Haunted Possessions. We were two of the four mediums hired as the talent to assess various objects that were said to have been possessed by evil spirits. Of all the objects put in front of us, only Oruç’s dagger had truly been possessed by something evil—and evil he was.

  Oruç had lived several centuries earlier, and he’d developed a lust for killing young women by stabbing them with his dagger.

  After he was murdered by a woman he tried to kill—with the dagger—his ghost figured out a way to use the dagger as a portal, which is a sort of gateway between our world and the lower realms, where evil things lurk.

  Oruç’s ghost was a crazy powerful spook in his own right, and his ability to completely possess anyone who handled the dagger was a very scary thing. His spirit could completely overtake the person in question and force him or her to commit murder.

  If that weren’t reason enough to lock the dagger away, it came with an added terrifying bonus: The dagger was also the portal for a demon that I don’t think was ever of this world.

  Oruç’s demon was truly a monster. I’d never actually seen it, but I’d sure as hell felt it, and I had the scars on my back to prove it.

  Its presence was big, like . . . big, and it would strike by swiping at us with its three talons. We knew they were talons because everywhere the demon struck it left that distinctive three-line gouge—in walls, in furniture, in flesh. It had been somewhat neutralized back when we’d first encountered it, meaning that it hadn’t been powerful enough to ever show its true form, but one of my biggest fears was that someday, that demon would figure out a way to escape the dagger again, and if it ever became powerful enough to do that, then there was no telling what harm it might cause.

  After first encountering the dagger and its horrors, we’d had a hell of a time putting those two genies back in their bottles, so to speak, and sadly, not before more than one person had been killed. Since then, however, we’d taken every precaution with it, securing it with powerful magnets that blocked the portal’s gateway and wouldn’t allow anything from the lower realms to come through.

  Essentially, we’d sent Oruç and his demon back to the lower realms where they belonged, and as long as we had possession of the dagger, I knew with some certainty that the warlord and the demon were sufficiently shut down. But now the dagger was missing, and my first thought was one of panic, because in the wrong hands that thing was—at best—deadly. “Ohmigod,” I whispered as I continued to stare at the inside of the safe. “It can’t be gone. It can’t!”

  Heath moved a little closer to me and began pulling other things out of the safe. There was a wad of cash for emergencies, the lease for our office, and a few other odds and ends, but no dagger. No magnets either, but that hardly mattered with the dagger missing.

  “What the hell, Em?” he said when he’d emptied the contents of the safe.

  I stared wide-eyed at him. “It was there before we left for vacation,” I swore. “I know it was because I had to move it to one side to get to our passports. Sometime in the last three weeks, somebody got into the safe and took it.”

  Heath stared at me; then he inspected the door to the safe, which showed no tampering. “Who the hell knew about the dagger and also knew the combination?”

  A trickle of sweat slid down my back. “The only other person who knows the combination, besides you and me, is Gil, but he’d never take it. I mean, he’s afraid to even look at this safe, knowing what’s inside.”

  “So this had to be a professional job,” Heath said quietly, his eyes roving around the room suspiciously. I looked about too, and I knew that both of us were worried that we’d been burglarized, but nothing else seemed to be missing. My laptop was on the desk, and my scanner/copier—an expensive one—was over to the right, both untouched. In the corner our camera equipment was piled on a table, along with two extra laptops that Gilley had as backups.

  I got up and went over to my filing cabinet, where I kept the small box filled with petty cash, and the money was still there and also untouched.

  “Someone came in here and took the dagger but left everything else alone,” I said, a cold chill vibrating up my back.

  Heath sat down in the chair I’d just vacated. “So, somebody with knowledge of that dagger came in here and robbed us?”

  A second chill radiated down my spine and along my arms. “If that’s true, then they’d only want the dagger for one purpose: to cause harm.”

  Heath ran a hand through his long black hair with trademark white streak along one temple. “We could be in serious trouble if that happened, babe.”

  I pulled out my phone and brought up a local news Web site. I scrolled through the stories from the past few weeks looking for any hint of unusual and violent deaths in the area, but it didn’t look like anything involving the dagger had occurred. No strange or unexplainable stabbings or deaths. No rooms destroyed by an invisible demon. No telltale talon marks left behind to photograph. Nothing.

  Which only meant that the magnets binding the dagger hadn’t been removed. Yet.

  “We have to find it!” I said, feeling myself starting to panic. That dagger had been our responsibility. We’d promised people that it was safe with us. That they could trust us with it. To find it missing was like discovering that a vial of anthrax was loose in the city. It could only bring about horrendously terrible things.

  My
phone rang as Heath and I were staring at each other, wondering how we were going to track it down before the spook Oruç and his demon had a chance to possess someone and kill someone else. Lifting the phone again I looked at the display. “Gil,” I said, not even bothering with the niceties. “I can’t talk right now. We have a situation.”

  “You’re not the only one,” he drawled. “The flower shop wants more money and the caterer is refusing my calls. Why are wedding people so difficult?” He nearly shouted. And then he did shout. “Why, God, why?!”

  “Gilley!” I told him firmly. I had no patience for his antics just then. “I’m serious.”

  “And I’m not?”

  My brow lowered and my fist clenched. “Heath and I just looked inside the safe in our office, and . . . Oruç’s dagger is missing.” On the other end of the line there was silence. I took it for shock. “Gil?” I called. “Honey, are you there?”

  “What were you doing in the safe?” he replied, which was an awfully interesting question—given the circumstances.

  “Putting away our passports,” I lied before focusing on him again, my suspicions raised. “You don’t sound surprised that Oruç’s dagger is missing. Why?”

  There was a long pause; then Gilley suddenly said, “Oh! It’s the caterer. Thank God. Sorry, M.J.—gotta take this call.” And the little bastard hung up on me.

  I pulled my phone away from my ear to stare at it in shock before I connected the dots. “Son of a bitch!”

  “Talk to me,” Heath said.

  I ignored him for a moment as I dialed Gilley right back. It rang three times before going to voice mail. “My left foot he was on the phone with the caterer!” I spat. Had he actually been on the phone, the call would’ve gone straight to voice mail. Three rings meant he was purposely ignoring me. I nearly threw my cell across the room I was so furious. Only the fact that the iPhone is a six-hundred-dollar piece of technology not easily replaced stopped me. But just barely. “That . . . weaselly . . . sneaky . . . manipulative . . . little . . .”

  “Em,” Heath said, coming over to me to grab my shoulders and get me to focus on him. “What. Happened?”

  “Gil,” I said through clenched teeth. “He took the dagger.”

  Heath blinked. “Why the hell would he do that?”

  I called Gilley again. “I have no idea, but when I find out, you’re going to need to stop me from stabbing him with it.” Again the phone went to voice mail, so I clicked off his number and over to Michel’s.

  “M.J.!” he said when he answered the line. Michel is Scottish-born, but his mother was French. He’s a gorgeous man, about five-ten, black hair, sharp features, and beautiful big brown eyes with the most lovely brogue that becomes heavier whenever he talks of home. He’s very laid-back, patient, kind, well-spoken, and polite, and the absolutely perfect complement to Gilley, who is almost never any of those things. “How was your trip?”

  “Michel,” I said, bypassing the niceties to get right to the point. “Where is Gilley?”

  “Where’s . . . uh-oh, don’t tell me he’s gone off and done something stupid again.”

  “He’s gone off and done something insane again,” I said. “He’s stolen an extremely dangerous relic from our safe here at the office, and, Michel, in the wrong hands, and by wrong hands I mean anyone’s hands but ours, that thing is seriously scary. Deadly scary. I need to find Gilley and get it back asap.”

  There was a pause, then, “Might you be talking about that dusty dagger from the Turkish warlord, M.J.?”

  I gasped. “That very one, Michel. He’s shown it to you?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid so,” Michel said, a hint of worry in his voice. “And a few more people have likely seen it as well. But no one’s been hurt or upset by it as far as I’ve heard. You’re sure it’s dangerous?”

  My heart rate ticked up into the red zone. “What do you mean ‘a few more people have seen it as well’?”

  “Oh, has Gilley not told you about where he’s taken it, then?” Michel asked.

  I moved unsteadily over to one of my office chairs and gripped it hard as I sat down. Putting Michel on speaker so that Heath could listen, I said, “He hasn’t told me squat, Michel, and as I said, that dagger is deadly, so please, if you know where it is, please tell me.”

  “Oh, M.J.,” Michel said, “I’m so sorry. I made him promise me before he did anything to get your permission, but you know Gilley. He’s a wee bit willful when it comes to money.”

  I put the phone on the desk and lowered my head nearly to my knees, on the verge of a panic attack. “Please, please, please tell me he hasn’t sold the dagger!” I cried. If Gilley had put innocent bystanders in jeopardy I really would kill him.

  “No!” Michel was quick to say. I felt Heath’s steadying hand on my back. “He hasn’t sold it. He’s simply loaned it to the museum hosting the exhibit for the movie.”

  I glanced up at Heath and shook my head. I was unable to say anything more. I simply needed to focus on breathing. Heath took the cue. “Michel, Gilley hasn’t mentioned anything about it. Please tell us what the hell is going on and start from the beginning.”

  We heard the faint sound of a creaking chair and I imagined Michel leaning back in his desk chair and swiping a hand through his hair, his own anxiety probably ratcheting up now that he was stuck in the middle and playing the role of messenger. “The studio called Gilley about two weeks after you two left for your trip. A producer from Prescott Productions said he’d heard about the dagger, and he told Gilley that a haunted relic like that would be the perfect thing to really draw in the crowds. He asked Gilley if he would consider loaning it to the museum for the length of the exhibit, and at first Gilley said no, but then the producer called back and offered Gilley a sum of money that my sweet fiancé simply couldn’t refuse. So Gilley agreed to the loan, but he also demanded that he be in charge of securing the dagger for the exhibit. When I pressed him about it later, he insisted that the dagger was safe and there was no threat of its being stolen or any harm coming to it.”

  “The harm wouldn’t be coming to the dagger, Michel,” I said. “It would be coming from it.”

  “Yes, so you’ve said,” Michel said soberly. “Had I known that, M.J., I never would’ve allowed him to take it from your office.”

  My hands were curled into fists. I’d never been more angry with Gilley in my life. “Michel?” I managed, my jaw still clenched.

  “Yes, love?”

  “Would you please call your fiancé and tell him to meet us at the museum in half an hour, and, Michel, let him know that if he doesn’t meet us there in that time, then I will personally post to my Twitter feed and Facebook pages all his deepest secrets, including his real height, age, and weight and why his last boyfriend broke up with him.”

  Gilley was very careful about controlling his online image. The mere suggestion that I’d tell the world the truth about his age would be enough to have him sprint down to the museum, where I would then murder him, but that was beside the point.

  “Oh,” Michel said. “It’s that bad, then, is it?”

  “It is.”

  “All right, love, I’ll get hold of him straightaway.”

  The second he clicked off the phone I got up and moved to the closet. Yanking open the door, I shrugged out of my sweater and took out a black canvas vest lined with over a dozen magnets, hanging on a hook inside the door.

  “Wait,” Heath said. “You’re going to wear that?”

  The vest was a spare. It was made for us by Gilley’s mom a year earlier, and while it was truly sweet of her, the bedazzled Ghoul Getters logo on the back was perhaps a bit much for either Heath or me to be seen in public with.

  We had subtler clothing at home. “There’s no time to go to the condo right now,” I told him, pulling out the one that Mrs. G. had made for him. “We’ll wear these. They’re fin
e.” When he looked at me skeptically, I snapped, “Do you really want to waste extra minutes before retrieving the dagger because you’re embarrassed by a few rhinestones?”

  Heath opened his mouth but stopped himself. I had a feeling he’d been about to say yes. Perhaps it was the no-nonsense glare I offered him that made him (wisely) hold his tongue and put on the damn vest.

  “At least I’ve got my boots here,” I said, reaching back into the closet for my black leather riding boots. Shrugging out of the modest heels I’d worn on the plane, I slipped into them, feeling the carefully placed interior pockets—the boots were also lined with magnets—slip past my toes.

  We’d discovered on a casual ghostbust about a month before we were able to quit the show that magnets in our shoes prevented any of us from being possessed. It had something to do with grounding our energies to the earth, I think. It didn’t really matter what the mechanics were; it worked and I was grateful to have discovered it.

  Heath stared down at his running shoes. “Mine are at the condo.”

  “We’ll be fine,” I said, bending to zip up the boots. “What’s important is that we’ve got enough between us to protect us, and once we get our hands on the dagger, we can use some spare magnets from the vests to pack the dagger in until we get it back here.”

  “Worst-case scenario, Oruç and his demon could get blinded by the rhinestones,” Heath said as he took the vest and unzipped it to take out the hanger.

  I sighed. I was in no mood for jokes. This was a scary and deadly serious situation, but sometimes my husband made jokes to help lighten his own anxiety. And I got it, but at times it was still a little annoying.

  Once I was done getting dressed, I nodded to Heath, who had also just finished getting into his own gear.

  Within six minutes of hanging up with Michel, we were out the door and headed to the museum, ready to wage war against the nastiest spook and demon you’d never want to meet.

  Chapter 2

  We arrived at the Museum of Modern Science twenty-eight minutes after walking out the door of my office. And they were twenty-eight anxious minutes, believe me.