I spoke. “Yes, I know what I’m doing. I know every bit of it. Your plan is wrong, Dad.” My vision blurred as tears spilled from my eyes. “Lucky promised me a ghost gift when I returned his soul to him. Do you know what I wanted?”
“What?” he ground out.
I sniffled. “The opportunity for you to attend my wedding. I wanted to see you once more and see you happy for me.”
“We can still do that. Release me. Let me feed on the soul of that woman. Hold her and give her to me. Then we can be together. We can be together forever. This is eternal life, Blissful. Don’t you see that? What people have wanted since the beginning of time is what I have at my fingertips, and you can have it, too.” He licked his lips, and I knew he was tasting his freedom, he was so close. “All you have to do is release me. Let me go and we’ll be together.”
I shook my head. “It’s not that simple. You should know that. You can’t get something for nothing. Look at what having Lucky’s soul has done to you. It’s turned you into someone hungry to end another’s existence. Lucky is fading away, Dad. What if someone was doing the same to you? How would you feel about it then?”
“But they’re not,” he spat. “I’m the one in control. I’m the one doing the taking.”
I closed my eyes. He didn’t understand, and he never would. This wasn’t something that could be taught to him, a concept that he could empathize with. No, he wanted to live, and in order to regain something even close to his old existence, others had to cease to exist.
And that didn’t bother him.
Well, it bothered me. It bothered me a lot. “Dad, this isn’t right. None of this is. You’ve lived your life, and now it’s over. It’s time for you to accept that.”
“How’re you going to take it?” he asked bitterly. “You don’t have the strength, do you? The guts to take a soul from your father? I raised you, Blissful. I harnessed your powers, helped you become the ghost hunter that you are. Without me, you would have grown up in that orphanage and no one would have cared about you.”
My breath staggered. That was a low blow—too low. “I thought you loved me,” I whispered.
“Of course I loved you. I still do. But now you’re proving that you don’t love me, that you’re willing to destroy me in order to help a common criminal.”
“You’re not going to be destroyed. You will continue to be a spirit, and goodness knows, I can only pray that you never take anyone else’s soul from them.”
An idea struck me. “Sable, I need one of your ghost gifts.”
She looked at me curiously. “I wanted to use them all up putting warts and tails on Tex.”
“I need it more. Lucky’s all out of them.”
She shrugged. “Okay. What do you want?”
I took a deep breath. “That my father be stopped from ever taking another soul.” A fat tear rolled down my cheek. “That whatever needs to happen in order to stop him from doing it, be done.”
Sable cracked her knuckles. “It shall be done.”
And just like that, a white light floated down over my father. “No,” he screamed. “What’s happening? Blissful, you can’t do this! You can’t stop me.”
I tipped my head toward Roan. “Do it.”
Without a word, Roan plunged his hand into my dad’s gut. Roan grimaced and grunted, but after a moment he pulled out a shining light.
He presented it to Lucky. “This, I presume, is yours?”
Lucky looked relieved. He floated over and opened his vest, revealing the sickening hole where his soul should have been. Roan placed it inside, and I saw it, for a brief moment, the light floating in him, his soul glowing, before Lucky shuttered his vest and regained his strength.
He patted his stomach. “Good as new.”
My dad, on the other hand, was not. “What have you done to me? What have you done?”
“I think,” Lucky said, “that you can release your hold on him.”
I did as he said and let my father go. He whirled on me, his face full of fury. My dad looked ready to lay the entire house to waste, but Lucky strode forward.
“Vincent Breneaux, I will keep what happened between us a secret, so that you can return to the heavens. But if you ever even look at another spirit like you want to take their soul, then the big man will find out what you did. I can promise that you will be banished from the good place and sent to the pits of fiery brimstone.” He extended his hand. “Do we have ourselves a deal?”
My dad stared at Lucky’s hand for what must have been a full minute before finally reaching for him. “We have a deal.”
