How to Claim an Undead Soul

  How to Claim an Undead Soul

  Hailey Edwards

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  How to Claim an Undead Soul

  Copyright © 2017 by Hailey Edwards

  All rights reserved.

  Edited by Sasha Knight

  Proofread by Lillie's Literary Services

  Cover by Gene Mollica

  Tree of Life medallion drawn by Leah Farrow

  Contents

  How to Claim an Undead Soul Blurb

  Tree of Life

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Join Hailey’s Newsletter

  About the Author

  Also by Hailey Edwards

  How to Claim an Undead Soul Blurb

  The Beginner’s Guide to Necromancy, Book 2

  Life was simpler for Grier when she was flat broke and a social pariah. Now she’s carrying the baggage that goes along with the title of Dame Woolworth, and shouldering that weight is giving her a serious crick in the neck. Her work as a Haint is the one thing that makes her feel normal, but even that’s more paranormal than usual.

  Spirits are vanishing from well-known hot spots on the ghost tour circuit, and vampires are turning up as shriveled husks. Grier takes it upon herself to discover what’s preying on Savannah’s supernatural community, and what she uncovers is bigger than a few flickering lampposts gone dark. It’s a deadly threat unleashed by one of their own, and saving her city just might kill her.

  One

  A scream got hung in my throat, and I choked awake with it lodged halfway to my lips. I registered the unyielding press of the hardwood floor under my butt and the comforting wedge of the corner where I invariably spent my days huddled in a nest of sheets. I cracked open my eyes, which were damp with tears, and then I screamed again, louder and longer, until my uvula swung like a clacker against the sides of a cowbell.

  A wraith billowed in front of me, its emaciated arm extended, its skeletal fingers outstretched.

  Alerted by my frantic shrieks, Woolly flipped on every light in my bedroom and cranked them to blinding levels like halogen alone might banish the creature.

  “What do you want?” I touched my stinging cheek, the skin beneath my probing fingers icy where it had caressed me. “What are you doing in here?”

  The creature didn’t voice an answer—I wasn’t certain it could do more than wail—but it did swing its withered arm toward the window.

  I flicked my wrists, shooing it away before shoving to my feet. Keeping a wary eye on it, I crossed the bedroom, but it just hovered there. Through the glass, I spotted my new neighbor standing in the grass, gazing up at me. Through me, really. His main focus centered on controlling the wraith.

  Linus Andreas Lawson III wore a pair of green-and-white-striped cotton pajama bottoms and a white T-shirt. His dark-auburn hair, mussed from sleep, hung around his face. His full lips mashed into an unforgiving line, and his jaw flexed with his concentration. His eyes, so blue they appeared black from this distance, brimmed with power.

  Hands trembling, I fumbled open the latch, nudged up the sash, and leaned out the window. “What is that thing doing in my room?”

  Thirty seconds lapsed, tracked by the alarm clock on my desk, before he blinked clear of the darkness swirling through his eyes.

  “I heard you.” He cleared his raw throat, as though he had been the one screaming. “Woolly wouldn’t let me in, so I sent the wraith to check on you.”

  The last time Linus unleashed his wraith, it stole my undead parakeet right out of its cage and left behind an invitation I couldn’t refuse.

  “You broke into my house?” I snarled up my lip, grateful my heart pounded now for reasons other than terror. “Again?”

  “Woolly granted me permission.” He had the nerve to act offended I would suggest otherwise. “She was worried about you too.”

  “Is that true?” I jerked my head back in the window. “You let it in here?”

  A guilty moan escaped the floorboards under my desk.

  “You haven’t left your house in a week. The only person you’re allowing in or out is Amelie.” An undercurrent of annoyance rippled through him. “We’re wasting time.”

  Ah. Message received. What he meant was I was wasting his time.

  And maybe I was. Just a little. Mostly to mess with him since I was still irked he had been foisted on me. But I had also been digging through boxes in the attic, thumbing through tomes in the library, exploring all the old girl’s nooks and crannies, in search of clues that might help solve the mystery of what had happened to Maud, and to me. Only the basement, sealed behind its spelled door, escaped my grasping hands.

  The floor register hummed an inquiring noise, and the latch on the window flicked open and then shut.

  While I appreciated the sentiment, I waved away her offer. “There’s no use locking him out now.”

  A quick scan of the room proved the wraith had vanished along with Linus’s concentration, so there was that. I turned back to the man standing in my garden.

  “Join me for breakfast.” He made it an order. “We need to establish a schedule.”

  Facts were facts. I couldn’t avoid him forever. And he had offered to feed me. “Okay.”

  The window squeaked an apology when I lowered it, and the latch snicked back into place.

  “I’m not mad.” I trailed a finger down the cool glass. “I was just startled, that’s all.”

  I shot Amelie a brief text to let her know I was venturing out into the world—or, you know, across the yard—so she wouldn’t worry if she popped by and found the house empty for a change.

  “I’ll be back in a bit,” I told Woolly as I pulled on clothes. “Unless the breakfast is lame. Say a bowl of those high fiber cereals served with almond, soy, or cashew milk. In which case, I will scurry home for my usual bowl of strawberry oatmeal with real dehydrated apple bits—” masquerading as strawberries, “—and full-fat milk.”

  Let Boaz keep his frozen blueberry waffles and imitation maple syrup. I had standards.

  On my way through the living room, I stopped to check on Keet, who hung upside down from his swing like a bat from a cave ceiling. I reached through the bars and scratched his cheek. “Stay weird, my friend.”

  Barefoot, I padded through the kitchen and out onto the back porch where I checked the wards. Weak, a faint melody that tickled my ears, but steady. Pleased our meager protections were holding, I hit the stone path that wound through the rose garden and led to the carriage house.

  The mingled scents of coffee and frying meat hit my nose when I walked through the door Linus had left propped open, and my stomach rumbled in appreciation for the spread decorating the kitchen counter.

  “You’ve been making yourself at home.” The living room and eating areas had been tidied, all surfaces dusted, and a few of them polished. “Did you do all this, or did you bring in someone?”

  The idea of a stranger on the grounds without my permission set my molars grinding.

  “I violated your hospitality once.” He caught
the drift of my thoughts. “I won’t do it again by inviting someone onto your property without asking.”

  “Time will tell,” I muttered, unwilling to forgive him just yet. An acknowledgment of wrongdoing wasn’t an apology, after all.

  “I had time on my hands, so I got organized.” He returned to his station at the stove. “I clean when I need to think.”

  This sleeker Linus bore only a passing resemblance to the solemn boy he had once been, with red cheeks and pudgy fingers, but the lightning flash of intelligence in his eyes remained unchanged.

  “In that case, you’re welcome to visit me anytime you’ve got something on your mind.” I approached the table and spotted a newspaper folded neatly into quarters. The word ghost leapt from the headlines. “Do you mind?”

  “Help yourself.” He palmed a set of tongs and sizzling commenced. “I’ve digested all the news I can stomach for one evening.”

  His choice of reading material was the local paper, not the weekly Society-issued bulletin, and the heft of the newsprint was peculiar in the digital age. The story that caught my eye was an interview from a bed-and-breakfast owner who claimed her resident spook had vanished.

  “Now that’s something you don’t read every day.” I glanced up from the article. “Most humans want their homes and businesses to be ghost-free. She wants hers back.”

  “Her business is dependent upon thrill seekers and ghost hunters.”

  “Hard to bill your B&B as the most haunted in Savannah if you’re down a ghost, that’s for sure.” I refolded the paper and tucked it beside his place setting. Humans might not know the difference, but everyone else would note the lack. “An interview in the local paper wasn’t her brightest idea. Anyone searching for haunted lodgings will see this and be warned away.”

  “Perhaps that’s part of her plan,” he mused. “What’s better than an active haunting? Proof the soul continues on in some form?”

  “A banished ghost,” I reasoned, following his line of thought. “Proof that the soul can be made to discontinue?” I used the word proof here lightly. “And if exorcists are real, then so too must be what they exorcise.”

  Basically, a backwards way of proving the existence of ghosts by proving the sudden absence of one.

  Nodding, he focused on the hissing pan before him. “Meaning she can lure in a fresh crowd.”

  “People who want answers as to how it was done or if it was done at all.”

  “Some of those will be return visits from ghost hunters or would-be exorcists, but it opens the door to religious elements and other opportunities her previous business model was unable to capitalize on.”

  The haunting was a well-documented case that had drawn national attention, meaning any number of the TV shows, ghost hunting crews, fanatics or casual enthusiasts might come back to compare their original findings against their current ones. The publicity might not save her business in the long run, but it would buoy her for a good while if she milked it properly, and she was squeezing the teats of public interest with both hands.

  “Are your dreams always that intense?” He selected pale sausage links from the fryer and placed them onto a paper towel-lined plate. The package near the sink claimed they were made from chicken and apples. I had my doubts. “Is it all right to ask?”

  “I might as well be honest with you.” I stole one of them, burning my fingertips, and started nibbling before it cooled. Hmm. My doubts appeared to be unfounded. The sausage was delicious. “You’re going to hear me on occasion if tonight is any indication. You have my permission to use noise-dampening sigils if you want.”

  “It happens every night?”

  Every. Single. One. “Pretty much.”

  “There are sigils to help you sleep—”

  “No.” I choked on the bite I’d sucked down my windpipe. “I don’t want to risk being stuck in the dream.”

  “The dream.” He moved on to stirring a double boiler filled with creamy grits, and I wondered if he realized avoiding eye contact made talking to him easier. “As in it’s the only one you’re having? A recurring nightmare?”

  “Yes.” I helped myself to a glass of orange juice from the fridge. “And before you ask—I don’t remember what happens. I wake up terrified with a vague sense of déjà vu, but that’s it.”

  “Do you mind?” He palmed a bag of sliced artisan bread on the counter and passed it to me. “The toaster smoked the first time, but I cleaned out the dust. Maybe open the window just in case?”

  The toaster had been cocooned inside a knitted cozy. Dust shouldn’t have been an issue. But if he was paying me a kindness by offering a breath of fresh air to clear my head, I wasn’t about to complain.

  The window required a hard jiggle before it raised, but that first gasp of night air paid off my sweat equity in full. As my lungs expanded, the tightness in my chest from talking about the dream lessened. But it refused to budge all the way now that I was paying it attention, so I shifted my focus elsewhere.

  The same breeze tangling my hair rustled the lush ivy climbing wild over the eastern wall. I ought to thin it. I needed to trim back the roses too. The peonies wilted on their stems, their heads in need of cutting. So much had gone undone during my absence, and I’d done nothing to rectify the situation. As much as it pained me to admit, the garden was looking shabby.

  Maud would have a conniption fit if she was here to see this.

  A pinching sensation in my chest warned me away from those thoughts. They hurt too much to examine this early, so I asked Linus for a distraction. “Who taught you how to cook?”

  “Books. Food Network. YouTube.” He checked a saucepan full of simmering water and bobbing eggs. “Our old cook, Louie, used to let me help him prepare breakfast on the weekends. I figured it was a skill I should learn for when I moved out on my own.”

  “You have a driver. You didn’t want a cook too?” He could certainly afford both.

  With reluctance, I abandoned my view and the nascent dream of hiring a gardener to whip the property back into shape while I started on the toast.

  One of my duties as Dame Woolworth would be rebuilding my household from the ground up, but that could wait until I decided what staff I wanted on the grounds with me and how often. Until I figured that out, I was fine being on my own.

  “I don’t have a driver. I borrowed Mother’s.” He passed me a glass butter dish and a dull knife. “I don’t need a cook. I can fend for myself or order takeout. Atlanta has everything I could want.”

  The knife clattered from my hand onto the counter. “You live in Atlanta?”

  He must have heard the shock in my voice that his mother let him that far out from under her thumb.

  “Yes.” He cocked an eyebrow at me. “I teach at Strophalos University, among other things.”

  Knock me over with a feather.

  Linus was actually qualified for this job? I’d assumed his mother had palmed her most loyal pawn off on me to act as her spy while training me in advanced resuscitation theory. She couldn’t very well auction my services to the highest bidder then sit back and hope for the best. Not when clients would expect a one hundred percent success rate as a return on their investment. But this? He was a bona fide teacher from a prestigious university who could offer me the education Maud had denied me. That didn’t make his apron strings any shorter, but it did make him crashing in my carriage house that much more appealing.

  “What about your classes?” Selfishly, I had only considered how the Grande Dame’s proclamation affected me. I had dismissed Linus as a throwaway heir, one of his mother’s yes-men, and that had been shallow of me. At least this was all to my benefit. He had nothing to gain by helping me except his mother’s favor. As her only son, he must be drowning in that. “How long will you stay?”

  “I’m on sabbatical.” He plated the sausage, grits, and soft-boiled eggs. After I added a few pieces of buttered toast to his burden, he carried it all to the table. “I can stay for a year before I have to fi
le more paperwork. I won’t know if that will be necessary until after we start your training.”

  “What about your home?” I rinsed out my glass then poured milk for each of us since that had been his breakfast beverage of choice for as long as I could remember. “What about your friends?”

  “The loft will still be there when I return.” He carried two pressed napkins to the table and placed them at our settings. We both stood there, looking at one another. “Thanks to modern technology, my colleagues are never more than a call, text, video chat, or DM away.”

  I startled when he crossed to me, but all he did was pull out a chair and wait for me to sit. I did, and then I returned the favor. The table was small, meant for two even though it had four places, and I stretched out my leg to push his seat back with my toes.

  “Thank you.” He let me take a few bites before starting on his own meal, but he didn’t have much of an appetite. “There are seconds if you’d like more.”

  A flush I blamed on the steam rising from my plate pinked my cheeks. “Are my table manners that bad?”

  One too many frozen dinners had left me ravenous for a home-cooked meal, and this one was excellent.

  “No.” He bit the edge off his toast, chewed methodically, and had trouble swallowing even that one small bite. “I just don’t want the food to go to waste.”

  The first helping vanished before I registered its taste, and I heaped a second plate high with leftovers. He watched me eat, his fascination making me slow the fork-to-mouth action. I demolished the sausage before the awkward scrape of my silverware drove me to conversation.

  “The night I helped unbreak your nose—” after Woolly had slammed her front door in his face to bar his entrance, “—you told me we would address my magic, but I skipped class the next day.” And the six days that followed. “Can we do a makeup lesson?”