ONE
“Hold him! Can you hold him?”
I shook a mass of violet hair from my eyes and watched as Alice, a plump woman in her late sixties/early seventies, held out a rectangular box.
No, I hadn’t asked Alice her age because every woman knew it wasn’t polite to ask another that question unless you had a death wish coming to you.
Anyway, Alice grasped a box as if it held the bubonic plague. Her eyes were wide, her arms were stretched out, and her mouth twisted in fear.
“Alice, you’ve got to throw the box at it!”
Alice’s glasses slid down her nose as she took in the spectral sight only a few feet from where she stood, hands now trembling as she held the EMF generator.
Oh, you probably need to know what an EMF generator is. It’s an electromagnetic field maker. The thing creates static energy walls so that I can capture ghosts.
I forgot to mention that part, didn’t I? The name’s Blissful Breneaux, and I am currently one of three ghost wranglers in the small town of Haunted Hollow, Alabama.
Haunted Hollow is unique as it’s the second most haunted city in the United States.
Yes, all this zipped through my mind as the spirit looming over Alice unhinged its jaw, revealing a pit of blackness. Like seriously, the Holland Tunnel had nothing on this thing. The mouth was deep, dark and looked like it could swallow half a town and burp up the leftovers.
Gross, right? I know. Don’t worry, if you didn’t like that, it only gets worse from here.
I do not pull punches.
Anyway, I’m staring at this mass of angry ghost. Oh boy, is this guy mad. We bothered him while he was eating his dinner. By dinner I mean the guy was dining on the energy around him.
The three of us—Ruth and Alice, my two geriatric ghost wranglers, and I—had been called to rid a nice domestic family consisting of two parents, two kids and two cats, of the spirit.
But this guy had attitude, and I wasn’t in the mood for it.
The specter turned his black, soulless eyes on me. “You can’t defeat me! I’ve been pulling energy from this family for years.”
I aimed my hand at this guy. He was big, nearly nine feet. His clothes were old-fashioned. I don’t know what century. I wasn’t a history major in college.
No, I didn’t actually go to college because I had a job right out of high school. That job was clairvoyant to a covert government agency.
Unfortunately I was no longer part of that gig. Now I played ghostbuster in a small Southern town. Not exactly what I would’ve considered my dream job, but I liked it.
I liked the people. This job gave me time to have friends. So what if they were old enough to be my grandmothers and talked more about their aching bunions than about the latest makeup styles?
I still loved them.
All that mushy stuff was quickly thrown aside when the spirit took a step toward me.
“You think you can capture me, Blissful Breneaux?”
I hitched a shoulder. “I had considered it.”
He pointed toward the living room, which I assume meant he would start talking about the family he’d been feasting on. “They never would’ve known I was here. Never. If they hadn’t called you.”
My jaw dropped. “Are you kidding? You mean you forgot that you move their pots and pans? You scared their cat, for goodness’ sake and attacked one of them in the shower. Did you really think they wouldn’t have figured out you were here?”
He shrugged. “I forgot about those things.”
“Short-term memory problems. It’s a thing with you ghosts.” I nodded toward Alice. “Are you ready?”
Alice’s voice hit a frantic pitch. “What am I supposed to do?”
