Jacob’s eyes flicked from the machine to me, questioning. I shrugged helplessly, looked closer, then even pretended to tie my shoe to drive a little more blood to my brain.
Still nothing.
Damn it.
If only my Mood Blaster hadn’t been replaced by that stupid Blip.
Jacob scowled harder at the machine. He wouldn’t see anything—he never did. But if I was in my head and he was grounded, and the two of us were in sync, I could tell him where the creatures were, so he’d be able to make a grab for them. In a sense, Jacob already had a pair of SPECs. And those glasses were me.
Unfortunately, all my performance did was remind him that Jacob never got to play with any of the cool toys.
The one guy whose opinion really mattered to me, and I managed to let him down. Maybe he’d be better off with a piece of tech, at least where ghost hunting was concerned. Our current partnership was underwhelming at best. We’d turned upa heaping helping of nothing in Boswell’s apartment. And now I couldn’t even treat him to some habit demons.
Driven by my own disappointment, I sucked in even more white light—to the point where I felt a little loopy and something throbbed vaguely behind my right eye. And I looked again.
Aside from a dead fly feet-up, the lottery machine was clean.
Sometimes, I reminded myself, I didn’t see anything simply because there was nothing there to see. “Sorry to get your hopes up,” I told Jacob…just a prickle of unease skittered down my spine, and my eardrums flexed as if the air pressure had just shifted.
“Hope’s a funny thing.” The words came from behind me, where moments ago there’d been nothing but a spinner rack of cheap kitchenware. “It usually ends in disappointment.”
I must’ve been a glutton for punishment, because I did have hope—mainly the hope that the voice was coming from a perfectly mundane source. But even as I entertained the notion, I knew damn well I was in for a big, fat, ghostly letdown.
I turned slowly. The spirit had materialized not two feet away, as if he’d been standing right behind me in line for the register…way too close. He wasn’t transparent, exactly—but somehow, hard to see. I wasn’t really looking with rods and cones, iris and pupil, but with whatever spirit-stuff my third eye was made of. He was solid, but drained of all color. Like a gray plastic model waiting for its coat of paint. All except…his hands. Dripping with blood that was redder than red.
“What is it?” Jacob hissed, but before I could even put a word to it, he moved to insert himself between me and the threat hecouldn’t see. He didn’t need to, not really. All he had to do was look at me.
“Hope makes men weak.” The ghost’s voice was awful, the sound of a chain link gate scraping across buckled concrete. “It makes them think they can have it all: the job. The house. The loving,faithfulwife. Hope is for suckers.”
On instinct, my adrenaline manufactured a white balloon, which I immediately expanded to contain me, Jacob, and the blue-haired girl down the aisle.
“My sweet, sweet, Helen,” the ghost sneered. He was still hard to look at—my gaze kept wanting to slide off him—but he was a lot more solid now that he knew he had an audience. “That ungrateful bitch tried to run off, first chance she got. I lost my shirt in the stock market…and her true colors came out. A door-to-doorbiblesalesman. So much for honor thy husband!”
“Whatever happened, you need to move on,” I said. Usually, that’s when the veil makes itself known. It’s a kind of swirling vortex that links the physical plane to the other side. I don’t know if it’s always there and I just call attention to it, or something in my exchange coaxes it out. Whatever it is, I’ve got no illusions that it’s my own ability at work. More like two winds colliding to form a funnel cloud…or the universe leaping on a chance to balance itself.
“You sound just like that four-flusher that tried to take Helen away from me.” He moved to lunge toward me, stuttered, and appeared right up against Jacob. My white balloon hadn’t done squat. But Jacob’s natural aura stopped him. The ghost’s confusion bought me a fraction of a second as he registered a barrier he hadn’t expected, while I swung around to the shelves, hoping against all hope to find a canister of salt at hand.
No such luck…the shelf was crammed with cleaning supplies, trash bags, and watery, off-brand laundry detergent. But there, by the bottom, a row of dusty prayer candles caught my eye. And peeking out beside them was the familiar vintage label of Murray & Lanman Florida Water Cologne.
Good thing I’d been doing so much yoga lately, or I would’ve thrown my back out for sure snatching it up off that low shelf.
“Get back here, you spineless coward,” the ghost taunted, as I danced around to keep Jacob firmly fixed between him and me. “You’ll take Helen over my dead body.”
Great. Now he thought his wife was running off withme.
The bottle lid came off easy enough, but a pesky foil seal stood between me and the stinky cologne. I picked frantically with my thumbnail while the ghost tried to ram his way past Jacob.
Jacob rocked as if he’d been physically pelted. The ghost was strong and fueled with hate. And he’d confused me for the bible salesman—who was probably just an innocent bystander in the whole sordid thing. Anyone spiteful enough to murder his own wife to stop her from leaving was likely seeing threats everywhere. But unlike Boswell, who donned a tin foil hat and carried on, this guy made sure the people around him suffered for his delusions.
Jacob could feel the ghost now, which gave him a better idea how to block me as I struggled to open the damn bottle. But Jacob’s interference only made the vengeful double down. My breath huffed out in a visible cloud as Bloody Hands powered up.
I fumbled the bottle, caught it, then shoved my thumbnail under the seal. Florida Water splashed out, covering me in clove-stinking perfume. But the smell was as familiar as it was cloying, and my white light valve opened wide, and let the spigot of the universe fill me with psych juice.
A crimson hand swiped at me over Jacob’s shoulder as my vision went white around the edges. I flailed the Florida Water—mostly across the back of Jacob’s neck—but at least some of it must have splattered the ghost. “You’re dead. And you don’t belong here. Not anymore.”
I don’t know what he thought he’d do once he got to me. Try to kill me—or slip inside. But it wouldn’t come to that. I wouldn’tallowit.
At some point, a switch flipped inside me, and I went from pulling at the white light to letting it flow. The air behind the ghost rippled and the atmosphere thinned—the veil. I sloshed out the rest of the Florida water and grated out, “You’re dead, now. Dead and gone.” And with one great shove, I sent Bloody Hands spiraling through the rift.
