Chapter 1
“Indefinite leave?!”
Ethan Roan stared in shock at his father’s stern, unyielding glare.
This isn’t right,he thought desperately.This can’t be happening.
At the back of his mind, his pegasus flared its nostrils in outrage.Us? Indefinite leave? It cannot be possible!
As much as Ethan agreed with it – and might have been tempted to flare his nostrils a little himself – he forced the pegasus’s rage down. Right now, it was only going to make a bad situation worse.
His father nodded, eyes hard. “This isn’t just a small mistake that can be waved off, Ethan. You’ve created one hell of a mess – one which I now have to clean up. You do realize that this firm could lose Swynford Industries as a client over this, don’t you?”
“But I –”
Ethan cut himself off, rubbing at his eyes and releasing a slow breath as he tried to think of a way to smooth things over. But really, there wasn’t one.
Because there was no explanation he could give besides the truth. And he didn’t think that his father would be particularly responsive tothat.
Despite being a pegasus shifter himself, Ethan’s father was not given to flights of fancy, preferring to keep his feet firmly planted on the ground… except for during his monthly scheduled pegasus time, every third Saturday of the month from two p.m. until four p.m., carefully sandwiched between his midday pickleball match and his evening boozy schmooze.
For two hours a month, he would gather with Ethan and his brothers, Patrick and Dennis, at Ethan’s cousin’s ranch, at which point they would shift, fly around for a bit to keep their pegasi from getting too cranky, and then shift back into human form and head back to the city in time for their next appointment.
Pragmatism was the name of the game for pegasus shifters, and doubly so for his father. Ethan was pretty sure that his father would not acceptA ghost sabotaged my Zoom meeting by playing YouTube clips of abandoned Japanese train stations whenever I tried to share my PowerPoint presentationas an excuse for the Swynford debacle.
Even though it was completely, entirely, one hundred percentthe truth.
Pegasi shifters didn’t believe in ghosts. Hell, Ethan hadn’t believed in them until this one had come along a couple of months back and decided to ruin his life.
Nothing could have prepared him for looking into his mirror as he shaved in the morning, only to find a ghostly, transparent man standing behind him. It had scared the hell out of him, to be precise – he’d leapt about a foot in the air and whirled on the spot, razor blade raised in self-defense against this intruder, only to find there was nothing behind him but thin air.
Well, he’d told himself at the time, hehadbeen working some long hours. Maybe he just needed to get some sleep. He’dhave to make sure he was home no later than eleven p.m. Hit the gym a little harder to work off some stress.
But then it hadjust kept happening.
Why? He had no idea. He’d never done anything that could cause a restless spirit to come and seek vengeance against him.
Ethan started seeing it more and more often: a vision of a man wearing what he could only termold-timey clothingstanding there, staring at him and moving its mouth, like it was trying to tell him something. And no matter where he was – at his five a.m. gym sessions, in the lunchroom, in a meeting – it was clear that no one could see this ghostly apparition but him.
He’d tried asking his secretary once ifshecould see the man who was pretty obviously – to Ethan at least – sitting on the couch by the potted palm outside his office, but she’d simply smiled in a slightly confused way and said his three o’clock wasn’t here yet.
It gave Ethan the creeps of course, but after that, he’d resolved to ignore it as best he could. He had a job to do, after all. He didn’t have time to be haunted.
And ignoring ithadworked – at least for a while.
In fact, before today’s disaster, he hadn’t seen it around for a while. He’d even dared to hope it’d gotten bored with haunting him and had wandered off to find someone who’d scream or cry or cower a little more whenever it showed up.
But no – clearly, it had just been gathering its wits to get more intrusive in its haunting attempts.
Which apparently meant hijacking his electronic devices and bending them to its whims, utterlyruiningthe meeting he’d been having with the famously stern and humorless CEO of Swynford Industries,justas Ethan was trying to explain why they should extend their contract with the law firm his grandfather, Chester Roan, had built from the ground up.
Needless to say, once the third YouTube video had popped up instead of Ethan’s painstakingly prepared infographic, the CEO of Swynford Industries had snapped rather angrily that he didn’t have time for this, and that maybe Ethan should come back once he was prepared to be serious, before abruptly ending the call.
Maybe most people wouldn’t consider the ghost’s actionsvengefulorthreatening, Ethan thought glumly – but that was almost worse, somehow.
Horrendous ghostly retribution, he could deal with – it might even give him an excuse to shift into his pegasus form.
The destruction of his career, on the other hand… that was the one thing that truly did terrify him.
