His eyes shifted toward me, and the smile, the creepy tilting of his lips toward his cheekbones hit me like a brick to the face.
“You.”
I should have seen it, should have known but I had been too caught up in the rest of the drama to miss the obvious. His talent was impersonations, and he did a very good job at them. He could have easily changed his voice to sound female, even like Lucy.
“Now that you know, I’ve got something to show you.” Rudy gestured for us to follow him toward the living room where a modern TV sat before the old couch.
“What are you talking about?” Jude questioned him and I tugged Jude closer to me, his hands letting go of a curious Lucy who glanced back and forth between her friend and us.
Jude’s eyes narrowed on my fear-stricken face, trying to piece together the puzzle I’d connected in my head.
“He’s the killer,” I breathed, my heart racing while I observed the room for any threats Rudy might have set up for us.
“Rudy?” Jude didn’t look convinced that his closest friend would do such a thing.
“Yes, Rudy. Wake the fuck up, man,” Rudy said. “You’re too nice, wasting away all that talent, those looks, your life. For what? To save someone from a broken heart. You get to be alive, while I get to be stuck in the eternal friend zone with a woman you could have fucked twenty times over. You’re not worthy of the life you’ve been given, but no worries, that’ll all change soon.”
And there it was. The motive behind the killings. Rudy envied Jude. Rudy wanted to live again, to be with Lucy, to party, and be free of his ghostly chains.
“You’re a coward,” I said, feeling a tingle in my hands that demanded I take this murderer somewhere toasty. I heard hell was particularly warm this time of year.
“Yeah, I thought about that little gift of yours and came up with a security plan to make sure I don’t get taken to hell now that the curse is finicky. I plan on staying after this mess, and I don’t need you two or those heroes stopping me.” Rudy clicked on the TV and my heart dropped to the floor.
My friends.
Emily, with her kind heart, and the members of the Hero Society sat in a room with two ghosts and five dead corpses guarding them.
“What good is super speed or becoming an animal against a ghost who can kill? Do everything I say, and they go free. Piss me off and they die.”
Oh God.
Chapter Thirty- One
Jude
Rage didn’t cover the emotions flowing through my body as Rudy crowned himself king of the mansion. My pulse pounded in my veins and my fists twitched with the need to beat the shit out of my ex-friend. I wanted to tear his ghostly soul apart with my power, but I didn’t know where he kept his hostages and they were defenseless against the dead.
“This is living,” Rudy moaned as he walked with each of his arms slung over the shoulders of two women. Little did they know they were about to shack up with a dead man. I hated being forced to use my powers like this, for him to shack up with anyone who would spread her legs.
It was two days before Halloween, and my death day. Rudy ordered me to move the last performance to the mansion, where everyone would dress up for a masquerade to see the show and party. At the end, just before midnight, I would walk up to the tower where I had found my father dead.
Rudy had taunted me with the images of a rope around my neck for the past few days, then he’d throw in a threat of Selene dying with me to make me cooperate further. She’d been sent home, all part of the games Rudy wanted to play. He made her sit and think about what was happening to her friends, to me, while she couldn’t do a damn thing. He wanted me to suffer, too, taking away the love I had found.
He had been right about me wasting my life before, so while catching up in my future, I’d stopped focusing on now. While he thought I was wallowing, I was planning a battle strategy.
Two days, one performance, and a hanging lay ahead for me, only I wasn’t going down without a fight. I had something and someone to live for now and she needed me. Everyone needed me.
Screams and moans of pleasure echoed down the hall, and even Lucy who sat on the chair across from me rolled her eyes.
“He’s really taking this whole living thing to the edge, huh. Gross.”
I nodded, then stood to stretch, having sat for hours.
“You’re leaving?” She arched an eyebrow, and I shook my head. I wasn’t allowed to leave. Instead I thought I’d take a walk down to the cemetery.
“You can come if you want, but you’d have to be quiet about all you hear,” I warned, and she nodded. She was as a prisoner in the house, too. Rudy loved her, and still she refused him. According to her and Joslyn, Rudy had killed before. It was why he ran away to the circus; it’d always been a stain on his soul.
We walked to the cemetery with corpses I’d never seen before guarding us with old weapons from another era. Rudy had found a way around the binding of the gates and had freed ghosts to take over their old bodies again. So the graves that had been broken into had actually been broken out of, then they all came here. I wished I knew Rudy’s grand plan, but by the number of ghosts and corpses that did not belong on his property hanging around, I assumed he craved domination. After I was gone, there would be no one to fight off the dead. I had no offspring, and if Selene was allowed to live, she could only take one soul back at a time. There were at least fifty squatting on the property with a stench that could drop you to the ground, with more on the way.
