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He was a complete bastard for thinking something like that.

“Do you know what can be done about it?”

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“Good God,” Vlad whispered, and Andrew held his mate a little  closer as it looked like Vlad’s eyes were about to pop out of his skull.  “Those really were ghosts doing that to you? All that time?”

Ivan looked like he was biting the inside of his cheek. “Yes.”

“Baby,” Andrew said, but Vlad couldn’t be stopped.

“No, don’t. It’s just that…Jesus Christ, Ivan, I’m so sorry.”

Ivan looked at his younger brother strangely. “For what?”

“For never believing you,” Vlad blurted. “I mean you told me, but  I never believed you. I always thought it was in your head, and that  you were hurting yourself on purpose.”

Vlad looked like he was ready to cry. Eric felt sorry for him.

Though no one in the pack had been cruel to him, it had gone  around that Ivan was mentally unstable, and sometimes violent unto  himself. There were people, mostly the children, who avoided him for  that. This proved otherwise. Ivan was not dangerous and never had  been. It had always been the spirits to attack him.

Ivan held no ill will against his brother either. “You kept Markus  from sending me away to be put in a straightjacket.”

“Do people even still use those?” Isaac asked.

James elbowed the human in the side, shutting him up.

Ivan never took his attention away from his brother. “Besides,  ever since coming here, things have been better.”

“How so?” Eli asked.

This time Ivan did look him in the eyes. “Eric’s been keeping the ghosts away from me. He could only do that whenever he was able to visit me wherever I was, and we didn’t know how his travel worked,

so it wasn’t all the time, but even that I thought was good enough. I  haven’t had an attack since coming here at all. Eric stays here pretty  much all the time.”

“Eric’s been visiting you?” Eli asked, and Eric winced at the  shocked hurt he heard there. “For how long?”

Ivan looked at Chris now, and the way the man with multicolored  eyes gripped Eli’s shoulder, it seemed Vlad wasn’t the only person in

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the room who had wanted the support of a mate during such a hard  conversation. “Almost right after he pulled your mate out of the pond.  That was the first time he came to see me.”

Eli’s throat seized up. “Is he here now?”

Eric fought the urge to go down there and make himself known, to give Ivan a message that he could pass on to Eli.

I’m here, bro. Don’t you worry.

“I don’t see him or sense him right now. He’s been avoiding me.”

Those last words were a knife in Eric’s heart.

“That is precisely the reason why I am here,” Opal said. “You see,  it’s not natural for a spirit to wander around on earth. Eric protects  you because he is a noble warrior and only recently dead. The longer  a spirit wanders the earth, the more…How shall I say this? Not good.  It’s not good for them,” Opal said.

Now Eric was hanging onto her every word.

Not good? What was that supposed to mean?

Ivan asked just that question.

“Those spirits, the ones who’ve been attacking you, they didn’t do  it out of spite or because they have a score to settle.”

“I know. They’re doing it because they want life,” Ivan said.

“Not necessarily life,” Opal said, lacing her fingers together, her  colorful bracelets rattling with every movement she made. “They  want to move on. They want to go to the next realm. They see you  and on some level are able to sense that you can do that for them. If  they take your body, they will be given life again and therefore be on  a realm different from their own. Does that make sense?”

“The ghosts want to kill him?” Vlad asked, staring hard once

more at Ivan.

“If a spirit possesses the body of a medium, and then pushes him  out and keeps him out for long enough, then, yes, Ivan will die and  the new spirit will become the owner of the body.”

“That’s why you were always hurt?” Vlad asked. “You were  trying to beat them out of you?”

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“Or they had been trying to push me out.”

Now Vlad’s face and chin did begin to tremble, but he held

himself in check.

“Are you saying that you know how to stop them? You do not  give the impression that you are attacked on a daily basis,” Ivan said,  his eyes moving up and down her body as though searching for any  hidden scars.

“It is a little difficult to explain,” Opal admitted. “But with  strength of will and body, you should be able to frighten the spirits off  yourself. Ignoring them is also an option, and the one I find works  best.”

“I’ve tried ignoring them. They know I can see them anyway,”

Ivan said.

“It’s not that simple,” Opal countered. “You have tried ignoring  them, but they can see by your body language that you know they’re  present. Not responding to their threats and screams isn’t enough.  You have to put yourself in the mindset that you are the only person  in the room. You have to believe it so much that eventually, the spirits  vanish and you really can no longer see them.”

That still sounded pretty simple to Eric. The fact that Ivan just  needed to take some acting lessons and that was it? Problem solved?

“If you like, I can help you with this,” Opal offered. “We could  meditate together. During the night, of course.”

“I can’t do that. Eric keeps the spirits away from me.”

“Ask him not to.”

Eric fought the urge to growl. His suspicions of this lady were steadily rising, and he didn’t like the way that Ivan looked as though he were seriously considering it.

If—when—Eric eventually left him to cross over into the ever after, he would hope that Ivan would show a little more remorse for him that that. Eric would certainly miss him.

“I’ll think about it,” Ivan said.

“What do you want in return for this?” James asked, and everyone

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suddenly turned to the pack alpha.

James’s scarred face was grim. He had some of the same  suspicion of Opal that Eric had, and his respect for his leading alpha  went up a couple of notches.

“You couldn’t’ve just come here out of the goodness of your  heart. What do you want Ivan to do for you?”

Opal blushed and scratched beside her ear. Eric had never seen  anyone have that kind of reaction before. “You caught me. There is  something I would like.”

Probably for Ivan to change her into a vampire or something, Eric  thought. That usually was what people were after when they  discovered immortality.

“My goal is to learn more about my people. Why we are the way  we are. Why can the spirits touch and hurt us, and us them? Why do  we hear them? Clearly these traits are not specific to humans either. If  they can be found in vampires as well as humans, who knows how  many others out there are seeing spirits. How many of them are being  abused by them and have no one to turn to?”

Eric was starting to hate the way he was constantly feeling like a  jerk today.

Those reasons for tracking Ivan down and speaking with him were  a whole lot more noble than the reasons for Eric constantly sticking  around here.

He was too much of a coward to leave his brother behind again, and he couldn’t bear the thought of being separated from Ivan.

Ivan’s eyes brightened. “Very well. I would very much like to learn from you.”

Ivan then turned uncertainly to James. The look on his face suggested that he’d forgotten for a moment that he was not in position to be inviting anyone to stay on pack land.

“Would it be too much trouble if she were to stay here? Are there any places for her to sleep?.”

James nodded, gripping Ivan’s shoulder. “Of course, but for

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obvious reasons, this arrangement will have to be temporary,” James  said, turning that steely gaze back to Opal.

She nodded, hardly containing the smile on her face. “Of course. I  understand the need for secrecy, and I promise I won’t impose myself  on you any more than absolutely necessary.”

Eric lifted himself back up through the ceiling, and then he sat in  the attic for a couple of minutes, listening to the mumbles beneath  him that he could barely make out.

This new medium, Opal Drew, she was going to teach Ivan how  to take care of himself, without Eric’s help. That shouldn’t bum him  out so much, but the ache in his gut felt so real and heavy that he  couldn’t help himself.

He hadn’t felt this way since the first night after his death, when  he came to from whatever sleep he’d been in. Then, only after some  walking around, a lot of questions on his part, and screaming in the  ears of every one of his friends did he finally realize that no one could  see or hear him.

Ivan might claim to love him, maybe he even did, but his love was based off the gratitude he felt to Eric for being his protector against those spirits for those weeks they were together. When he finally learned how to fend for himself, he would move on with his life, just the way a living person was meant to, and Eric would eventually fade away into the ever after.

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Chapter Five

Opal parked her truck onto a patch of grass, turned off the ignition, and stepped out. It was an old piece of shit, and she hated it, but it got her to the places she needed to go.

She would be able to trade up without a problem the second she became a vampire and started making some real money. As it was, just her nerves wreaking havoc on her were almost too much. She had to fight herself to keep from overspending on her credit cards. She was determined to wait until the money had come before she made her upgrades.

The bastard made her wait. He always did.

A shuffle sounded in the bushes behind her, and she whipped her head around. The arrow-shaped head of a giant gray wolf appeared between the twigs and leaves, growling at her.

Her heart jumped for only a second since she’d thought that it might’ve been one of those werewolves she’d just visited at the pack where the other medium was staying.

Could one of them have followed her here? If so, she had a lot of

questions to answer since she was supposed to be going back to  Brampton to collect her things from the motel she was staying at.

She breathed a sigh when she recognized that particular wolf  head. The scraggly gray hairs and sharp golden eyes, and that crook in  the lips, let her know that this was Deacon.

Thank God.

He came fully out of the shrubs. He was a massively huge alpha werewolf, about the size of a pony, only a little thicker and a lot harrier.

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Opal didn’t have much experience with werewolves, but from what she understood, most alphas were about his size, sometimes a little smaller or a tad bigger, but the omegas were always smaller.  Usually only about half the size of the alphas when transformed.

Deacon brought no other alphas with him, or omegas. His pack abandoned him long ago after he lost the rights to his land from  James. There were other werewolves he’d tried transforming, but they had rebelled almost immediately, running off into the woods to live the lives of wild werewolves.

Opal thought all werewolves were disgusting. Wolves, real wolves, were beautiful and majestic hunters. Werewolves were dirty men in a desperate need of a bath, all of whom thought it was great to go out hunting the local wildlife and eating the meat raw.

Real wolves had the excuse of being part of nature and wildlife.  Werewolves were just…yuck. She didn’t even want to think about it.

Maybe if they all weren’t so bloodthirsty with their twisted sense of honor and entitlement, Eric would be alive right now instead of a ghost clinging to the first medium he’d come across.

She did her best to keep her face neutral, hiding these thoughts from Deacon as he stepped in front of her, his body rippling and shifting as pushed himself up onto his hind legs, the fur falling off of him and bronzed skin revealing itself.

Opal wrinkled her nose at the smell of the man when he was done with the change. That she could not hide.

If there was any werewolf in the world who fit her description of them to a
 
T
, it was Deacon. He was in desperate need of a bath, or at least of jumping into any body of water to wash the scent of sweat and stink off of him.

“Did you do it?” Deacon asked.

She nodded. “Of course. I have a session with the vampire  tonight. He’s even convinced the pack alpha to let me stay in the  pack.”

Deacon lifted a brow. “Really?”