In the Air Tonight (6 page)

“Tell him to look under the floor,” the fellow had said. “Under the floor in the locker.”

I’d tried to pretend I hadn’t seen, or heard, him. Maybe then he would go away. It didn’t work any better this time than any of the other times I’d tried it.

“Tell him!” the specter shouted, and I could have sworn my hair ruffled with the force of his icy breath.

I’d wanted to ask what floor? Which locker? Where? Why? And what locker has a floor that could be looked under? But I didn’t. Instead, I’d gotten out of there.

“Sheesh.” Jenn caught up. “Why are you always in such a hurry?”

“I have to work tomorrow.” I got into her car.

“You do realize it’s not even eleven o’clock.” She climbed behind the wheel.

I made the mistake of glancing at the house. In an upstairs window stood a man. I could tell right away from the shape of his silhouette that it wasn’t Bobby Doucet. Both the shoulders and the shape of the head were too narrow to be Bobby, or even the spirit that had followed him downstairs. And it wasn’t one of the few I’d encountered when I lived in the place, or even since. I knew each of them by both name and shadow-shape.

Ghosts attach themselves—some to a place, like Stafford—others to a person, for instance Bobby Doucet—for reasons known only to the ghosts. At least until they tell them to me.

I peered at the window again. The silhouette was now a woman’s. How many ghosts did this guy have?

“Homicide detective,” I said.

“Really?” Jenn threw her car into gear and drove down the dirt road as if she were Danica at Daytona. “From where?”

“New Orleans.”

“Why?”

“I think he was born there.”

She didn’t bother with the eye roll. I heard it in her voice. “I got that much from the nummy accent—Southern and a little bit more.” She made a purring, revving sound. “I meant why is he here?”

We still hadn’t gotten to that. And, really, we should have. There’d just been so many other things to get to.

“I assume it has something to do with the murder.”

We reached the main road, and Jenn turned toward her place. “Where are you going?”

She kept her gaze on the road. Despite her need for speed, she was a good driver. “You said you were staying with me.”

“That was only so I could get out of there without a gun.”

“It’ll be fun.”

“Take me home.”

“No.”

“I don’t have any clothes for tomorrow.”

“You can get some in the light of day. Right now it’s too damn dark.”

“You’re afraid of the dark?”

“Only when I’m with you.”

I cast her a quick glance. She never asked me how I knew things, why she sometimes caught me talking to the air. She pretended not to notice. But despite her party girl ’tude and her lighter-than-could-possibly-be-natural hair, she wasn’t a fool.

“You don’t have to be afraid.”

Ghosts couldn’t hurt you. They might startle you—make that me. And what they told me could be terrifying. But they were ghosts. Blasts of cold air and sound, no more corporeal than a wisp of smoke.

I glanced at the bruise on my forearm. Or at least they hadn’t been until today.

“I know that too,” Jenn said. “You’re still staying with me.” I opened my mouth to protest and she continued, “Unless you want to leap out of a moving car, don’t even bother.”

My mouth shut. To be honest, I had no interest in staying in my apartment. Even if the meat-cleaver-wielding maniac had been a ghost, and at this point I was pretty sure he was, who wanted to see that coming at them in the dark?

The guy would be back. He might even turn up at Jenn’s. Ghosts came to me for a reason, and they didn’t leave until I’d helped them make the reason go away. Despite the meat cleaver he wouldn’t, couldn’t, hurt me. Permanently. However, I’d rather discover the purpose of his visit when it wasn’t pitch-black dark and I was alone. If that makes me a coward, too bad.

Jenn lived at the opposite end of First Street from my apartment, in an adorable cottage set back from the road. The building would make a fantastic bookstore, caf
é
, or antiques shop, if New Bergin were the go-to vacation spot of west-central Wisconsin. Except the only tourists we saw were those on their way to La Crosse, Eau Claire, or Minneapolis who had a sudden need for gas and a restroom. Which meant we had no need for a quaint bookstore, caf
é
, or antiques store. Still, Jenn’s place was much nicer than mine, even without factoring in the meat-cleaver maniac.

Jenn turned on all the lights. Like that would help.

I’d been trying to get the old woman in the corner rocking chair to cross over since Jenn had moved into the house. But she was attached to the cottage, and she wasn’t going to leave until the building either burned to the ground or was razed—maybe not even then.

Instead I responded to her nod with one of my own—when Jenn’s back was turned—and went on with my business. Directly to the kitchen and the nearest bottle of red. I’d only had a swallow—large though it had been—of my nightly allotment. I was due.

Jenn held up two wineglasses. I snatched the one that was more of a brandy snifter and filled it with enough wine to be unfashionable then did the same for her. Whenever I went to a restaurant I had to fight not to laugh—or sometimes cry—at the splash of liquid considered a serving.

“TV?” Jenn asked.

I shook my head, sipped my wine.

“You wanna tell me about it?”

I wasn’t certain which
it
she was talking about. The intruder? My father? The murder? Bobby Doucet? Didn’t matter.

“Nope.” I took a seat in the living room and continued to sip.

“You should take the plunge.”

I frowned.

“With the detective.”

I was still confused. It was October. Not a good time for swimming.

“Raye, sometimes I worry about you.”

“Sometimes I worry about me too.” I drank. The wine was nearly half gone. Damn.

“You’re twenty-seven and still a virgin.”

Suddenly I understood her reference to “the plunge,” and I nearly complimented her clever euphemism. But that would only encourage her.

“I am not!”

“Once doesn’t count,” Jenn said.

“Technically, it does.”

Even without the oversharing on the part of that eternal ass, Jordan Rosholt—whoops, guess I’d named him—the incident hadn’t been intriguing enough to repeat. It had been awkward, uncomfortable, and other words I didn’t want to think about let alone do. But, as Jenn had told me the single time I’d discussed it, we must not have been doing it right. I didn’t know there was a wrong way, but then I didn’t know much.

“The detective is into you,” she continued. “Or…” She waggled her eyebrows. “He wants to be.”

Apparently she needed no encouragement.

“Who says I’m into him?”

“You’d have to be blind, deaf, and dumbass not to be.” She drained her glass. “And if you don’t tap that, I will.”

The idea of Jenn sleeping with Bobby Doucet bothered me more than it should. I had no claim on the man, even if I had seen him first.

Still, he
had
run straight toward danger at my request. Not that there’d been any danger, but he hadn’t known that at the time.

Jenn set her glass on the coffee table. “You haven’t had a date in nine months.”

“Ten,” I corrected.

“But who’s counting?”

“It’s not like one of the guys I’ve known all my life is suddenly going to become more appealing.” Or learn how to keep his big mouth shut.

“But, Raye,” Jenn said in a far too reasonable voice that set my teeth on edge, “the detective isn’t from here.”

She made an excellent point. One I considered further while I finished my wine.

It seemed a bit cold-blooded to sleep with a man just because he was from out of town.

Then again … I didn’t think he’d mind.

*   *   *

The spirit of Henry Taggart hovered in the darkness outside Raye’s childhood home.

He and Prudence had crumbled to ashes in Roland’s witch pyre, then no doubt been scattered to the breeze. Who knew? Who cared?

Their spell had fanned the flames; the sacrifice of their lives had fueled their magic. Their daughters had been saved.

Centuries had passed in an instant. Henry had opened his eyes and seen the eldest of his three daughters, a baby in a crib, babbling to the corner. It hadn’t taken him long to realize that she’d been babbling to him.

At first he’d wanted to speak to her, to tell her who he was, who she was. But she’d been too young to comprehend, and as time went on and he’d observed the world she was in, he’d decided that remaining silent was for the best. Perhaps, if they were very, very lucky, he’d never have need to speak to her at all.

For her sake, he probably should have remained invisible too, but there were times he just had to see her, and when he did she always saw him.

Seeing ghosts in this world wasn’t nearly as much of a problem as it had been in his. She wouldn’t burn for it. But it still marked her as strange in a place and time where no one wanted to be. Really, had there ever been a time when anyone wanted to be strange?

Leaves rustled, the foliage stirred, and a great, black wolf emerged from the forest to stand at his side.

“Darling,” Henry murmured.

Sweetheart.

Pru, through virtue of her affinity with animals, had been reborn in this world as a wolf. Henry assumed his affinity with ghosts was the reason he was one.

His wife now communicated with him through some form of telepathy. He heard her thoughts, and despite her being a wolf, she understood everything he said.

When he’d first become aware that he’d traveled through time, he’d been afraid he had done so alone. But within days—maybe weeks or months, time was odd when one was a specter—Pru had joined him in her present form. They both bore the brand that Roland McHugh had left on them. Henry’s was hidden by the high neck of his coat, Pru’s by the thickness of hers.

She was still beautiful; he still loved her, he wouldn’t, couldn’t stop. However, Henry couldn’t say he wasn’t disappointed that they weren’t the same, be they both ghosts or wolves. But when dealing with powerful witchcraft, time travel, life after death, one took what one was dealt and was thankful for it.

Pru had opened her eyes and seen their middle daughter—a child with an affinity for animals just like Pru. Henry, the ghost, had come to Raye. Neither one of them had any idea where their third daughter had landed, and it bothered them. Now that Raye was in danger it bothered them a lot.

“How is she?” he asked.

The same. Safe for now. And here?

“The same,” he answered. “Safe no longer.”

How did they find us?

“They didn’t find
us,
” Henry said.

Pru growled, the sound rumbling against Henry’s palm as he smoothed it over her sleek head.

“Hush, Mama Bear.”

She growled louder.

“My apologies. Mama Wolf.”

Do you think it’s Roland?

His hand stilled. “Roland’s dead.”

So are you.

“But not in quite the same way.”

Are you sure? Maybe Roland found a means to come back too.

“The man hated witches. He burned them. He burned us.”

With all that blood on his hands, he could probably do just about anything.

Henry got a chill, which was an interesting trick considering he wasn’t really … real. But he was a witch. Roland wasn’t.

One doesn’t have to be a witch to benefit from magic.

Sometimes Henry didn’t even have to speak for Pru to hear him. He never had.

“Roland believed magic was evil, that witches were the tools of Satan.”

Pru’s lip lifted into a snarl.
He was tool.

For an instant, Henry didn’t know what she meant, then his seventeenth-century brain translated the word into twenty-first-century-speak and his lips curved.
Tool,
modern slang for arsehole, fool, and the like, was a perfect description for Roland McHugh.

He was obsessed. He would have done anything to have his vengeance.

“You don’t think he had his vengeance? We burned, Pru.”

And the girls disappeared. That had to have made him insane.

“He already was.”

Precisely.

“The latest murder wasn’t committed by Roland.”

He always had minions.

“They should be as dead as he is by now.”

Pru shook herself, and her sleek black fur shimmered brilliant blue in the silvery light of the moon, its only relief a ring of pure white fur that surrounded her own brand.

Someone has resurrected the
Venatores Mali.

“It doesn’t mean they’ve resurrected him.”

The wolf that was his wife turned her all too human green eyes in Henry’s direction.

It doesn’t mean they haven’t.

Chapter 5

Bobby dreamed of the dead.

Though he tried to put his cold cases behind him, only taking out those files and looking over them when he had no fresh murders to ponder—and how often did that happen in New Orleans?—nevertheless they were his failures and he would never rest easy until they were solved.

Two men and a woman—he remembered their faces, their names. He knew pretty much everything about them, except who had killed them. No wonder they haunted his nights.

He woke to the scent of coffee and the muffled clatter of a pan, the tink of silverware. The sun wasn’t up, though the sky had lightened. The red numbers on the bedside clock read 6:15.

He was into and out of the shower in ten minutes flat. Bobby Doucet had never been one to waste time.

Coming downstairs, he considered heading straight out the door. There’d be coffee at the police station. There always was. However, the scents and sounds trailing from the kitchen revealed that John Larsen had taken the breakfast portion of
bed-and-breakfast
seriously, and as Bobby’s stomach growled loudly—he hadn’t eaten since leaving New Orleans—he decided he should too.