I pinched the bridge of my nose and sighed. “Stop antagonizing him. It makes them excited.”
“Swap me with the vampire,” Hudson demanded.
“Imagine your ego being so fragile that you feel threatened by a gay vampire,” Sebastian needled.
“Seriously?” I snapped. They were being ridiculous.
Hudson folded his arms and lasered me with a glare, making Sebastian snort. I rolled my eyes, pulled up my contacts, and swapped them around.
“You can’t do that,” Sebastian protested. “I’m your number one.”
“Now whose ego is fragile?” Hudson shot back with a smug grin.
I slid the phone back into my pocket just as the door to The Pit slammed open and our resident alchemists tumbled into the bar. Rockhard glanced around and froze. Lenson, his partner in life, love, and magic, stumbled into his back with a curse.
“What did you do?” Rockhard muttered, making everyone but me laugh.
Why was it always my fault? I didn’t have a monopoly on dead shenanigans. “I did nothing. These things were already terrorizing the line dancing enthusiasts of The Pit before the sheriff asked me to check it out.”
Lenson, the slim, slightly more flamboyant of the pair, glanced around. “It’s line dancing night? Damn, I missed it. Did you guys get hats?”
Did everyone but me come to line dancing? I pointed at the bar where we left our discarded hats. Somehow, battling shadowy creatures while wearing pastel cowboy hats was a step too far into weirdness. Lenson grabbed my pink one and dropped Dave’s black one onto Rockhard’s head with a wink and a quick kiss.
“Where’s Karen?” Rockhard asked.
I swung my thumb over my shoulder toward the office she’d barricaded herself in. “She said not to leave sage around and to open the windows, because she hates the smell.”
“She does hate sage,” Lenson said with a firm nod. Just how many cleansings had Karen needed?
“Odd problem for a woman that works with the constant smell of stale beer and sweat,” Dave said.
That was my thought, but to each their own. Maybe she had gone nose blind to The Pit’s permanent odor.
Aunt Dayna arrived from her sweep of the room and hugged Lenson and Rockhard with a carefree giggle. “I miss you guys.” She did? Why was everyone leading a double life? Since when was I the one who was transparent? Dave caught my eyes, and I remembered all the new secrets I was keeping from everyone I loved. Okay, so more like opaque.
“What are they?” Hudson said with a jerk of his head at the dance floor, thick with slithering shadows.
Dayna’s smile fell. “Well, spirits, but not.”
Harry blinked at her. “She has quite the insight.” Now my normally clueless ghost was being sarcastic. He’d obviously been hanging around me for too long.
“What does that mean?” Dave asked.
Dayna’s brows knitted. “They are definitely remnants of dead people.”
“So they are ghosts, just less,” Sebastian declared.
Harry tilted his nose in the air. “I resent the implication that ghosts are not people.” I twisted my lips to the side. Next, Harry would campaign for ghost rights.
“I think they are something that gets left behind when the soul passes through the light.”
Dave pointed at the ceiling. “Like the actual light.”
“No, the one you left on in your room after being up my sister’s skirts this afternoon.” Aunt Liz glowered at her sister.
“I didn’t think anything got left behind,” I said in an attempt to prevent a Roberts woman argument. We didn’t have time to clean up the bar if they got into it.
Dayna broke eye contact with Liz and blinked at me. “It’s the soul dualism concept. One is associated with the body. It’s what keeps us functioning, our hearts beating, and animates us. The other is said to be the timeless soul. It leans more toward reincarnation. It is what enters the body when we are conceived, and it leaves when we die. This is the free, or wandering soul.” She turns to face the shadows. “These are, I suspect, the body souls.”
