I didn’t think Granny could see the dead, but if she thought it was something other than our resident ghost girl, I was going to believe her.
The spiral staircase looked empty to me. I walked over to it, lifted the rope and started up.
“Hey, now.” Ryder started up right behind me.
“I’m a cop, Ryder. I can go in theEMPLOYEESONLYareas. It’s not against the rules.”
“This isn’t about that,” he groused. “This is about you going after a ghost who just tried to push someone down the stairs.”
I paused, glanced back at him over my shoulder. We’d been climbing so were now on the second flight, and hidden from the room below. “You really have no problem believing in any of this stuff, do you?”
“I’d have to be pretty stupid not to believe in what is right in front of my eyes, Delaney.”
I grinned, and was about to tell him that it’d been in front of his eyes for pretty much all of his life and he hadn’t believed in it, when a wave of icy air rolled over my skin as if the temperature had suddenly plummeted thirty degrees. That was followed by an instant blast of heat that was gone almost before I felt it.
Almost.
Also: ouch.
Also also: not normal.
Ryder’s hand landed on my hip, and he stepped in closer behind me, protective. “You feel that?”
“Yes.”
“Ghost?”
I was about to tell him the combination of Arctic blast and Death Valley summer wasn’t like any ghost encounter that I’d ever had when a scent assaulted my senses.
Spicy, woodsy, I would know that cologne anywhere. It was my dad’s.
He.The girl had said the ghost was a he, and that he had pushed her.
But the only ghost in this lighthouse was Harriet.
“Delaney?” Ryder’s hand tightened on my hip.
“Dad?” I whispered.
The wash of cold and heat hit again. I closed my eyes briefly, straining to hear his voice, to feel his presence.
A fist punched my shoulder, right below the vampire bite. Hard enough I jerked backward, my eyes flying open. Ryder locked up behind me, solid as a concrete piling holding back the ocean, holding both of us steady so we didn’t fall down the stairs.
For just a heartbeat, I saw my father standing in front of me, his eyes familiar as my own, his hands reaching. Goose bumps broke out across my skin and it had nothing to do with the temperature.
The air around him twisted, went foggy. Something dark and burning reached out from behind him. A clawed hand wrapped around his throat and yanked him backward.
Dad’s eyes widened, his mouth opened around words I could not hear.
Then Dad, the claw, the twisted fog disappeared.
“What the hell was that?” Ryder’s voice was a growl in my ear. He’d pulled a gun out from somewhere and held it low to one side of me, aiming at the image, the phantoms that were no longer there. I could feel his heart beating against my back. It was as fast as mine.
The air was no longer hot or cold. But I shivered, glad for the heat rolling off of Ryder.
“A ghost.” I swallowed and tried that again without the hesitance and crack in the middle of it. “My dad.”
“What was with him?”
