How to Claim an Undead Soul Read online

  A prickling rush of heat tingled in my cheeks when I thought of the press of his lips on mine the night before he left to rejoin his unit, but I had seen him smooch enough girls that his technique had never been in doubt. It was all the rest of it—the mechanics of a relationship with him—that made me question his skills. And mine.

  “I’ll hold you to that.” I checked the time on my phone as I stood. “I have some thrones to polish before I head your way, but I’ll see you in about thirty.”

  “There’s a chance of rain in the forecast. Maybe you’ll get lucky and the girls will track in mud for you to mop.” He unfolded to his lanky height. “Failing that, I’ll sprinkle bobby pins like confetti so you can hang out with me longer.”

  “Thanks.” I snorted. “You’re a prince.”

  He smoothed back his hair. “If the crown fits.”

  After swatting him on the butt to get him out the door, I got down to business. By the time I marked off the last item on my to-do list, a victim had blown chunks on the sidewalk leading up to the front door. I blasted the concrete clean with a hose and reevaluated my life choices. When the late-late tour returned and Amelie flounced up to me with my spare helmet dangling from her fingertips, I was miles past being ready for sweet chocolate oblivion.

  Amelie was the first brave soul to hop on the back of Jolene and let me take her for a spin after Boaz taught me how to drive his one true love. That same trust had her crowding behind me so I could zip us over to Mallow. Plus, I think the bike reminded her of the brother she missed something fierce.

  The best thing about Mallow, besides the fact everything on the menu was mouth-wateringly delicious, was the fact it stayed open until dawn. Most folks in town thought it was a gimmicky tourist lure, but the truth was the owner was a necromancer, and she kept Society hours.

  After I parked, we crossed the lot together, our shoulders bumping, and got into a shoving match to see who could squeeze through the door first. She won by tickling me until I almost wet my pants, then she slid through the opening like a greased pig at a county fair.

  “You play dirty,” I grumbled with admiration. The only person who could tickle her was Boaz. Try as I might, I couldn’t get so much as a giggle out of her. “You should buy me a drink to apologize.”

  “Crybaby.” Rolling her eyes, she approached the counter. “I’ll take two hot chocolates with extra marshmallows and a side order of Kleenex.”

  The cashier blinked at her owlishly then passed over a handful of napkins.

  Amelie thanked the woman then stuffed them down the front of my shirt, giving me a lumpy third boob, cackling all the while. I ducked out of her reach before she could tweak my nonexistent third nipple and caught movement outside the shop from the corner of my eye.

  “Be right back.” I left her waiting on our order while I stepped up to the large display window. Jolene was the only vehicle in the lot, and I saw no pedestrians. I lingered a moment longer, scanning the area, but I came up empty.

  “Grier?” Amelie walked up behind me. “Is everything okay?”

  “Yeah.” I rubbed my hands down my arms. “I thought I saw something.”

  The light went out of Amelie’s eyes, and she took a look around as well. “Do you think we were followed?”

  It had happened before, and it likely would again. “I’m not sure.”

  “I’m texting Boaz.” She whipped out her phone. “He’ll skin me alive if I don’t keep him in the loop.”

  “It’s probably nothing.” I closed my hand over her screen. “Besides, he’s not my keeper.”

  “No, but he is my brother, and he is your wannabe friend with benefits.” She pried her phone out of my grip. “He’s earned the right to worry.” When she spotted the face I made, she laughed. “He’s four states away. He can’t drop everything and run home to shine a flashlight at shadows for you.”

  “So you say.” Her brother was more resourceful than she gave him credit for, and more commanding too.

  “He was right there. He saw the car pulling away, you inside it, and he couldn’t save you.” The playfulness in her swirled away like water down a drain. “Neither could I.”

  “Ame,” I breathed, yanking her into a hug. “You did the best you could. You both did. I don’t blame either of you, and neither of you should blame yourselves.”

  “We just got you back,” she said, echoing the sentiment I had shared with Boaz not that long ago. “I don’t want to lose you again.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.” I hauled her to the counter in time to pick up our order while it was steaming delicious curls. “I’m working on getting stronger, and I’m going to fortify Woolly too.” We took our drinks and settled at our usual table. “Plus, Linus lives shouting distance away. I’ve got ’round-the-clock backup.”

  Amelie blew across her mug. “How weird is it having him as a neighbor?”

  “Pretty weird.” Impatient as always, I sipped too soon and burned my tongue. “It’s odd having a guest, let alone one staying in the carriage house. No one’s ever lived there. It’s strange to think I can walk across the yard and talk to someone if I want.”

  “I hate to break it to you, Grier, but you’ve been able to do that basically all your life.” She snorted into her cup. “I’m right across the yard in the opposite direction, in case you’ve forgotten.”

  Linus was different, though. He had answers for so many of the questions I was just thinking to ask. Amelie was a friend, a shoulder to cry on, a sister of the heart, but Linus was a resource as valuable as any book in Maud’s library.

  “You know what I mean.” I played it off like it had been a slip of the tongue instead of me realizing how much I liked the idea of having a living encyclopedia on the grounds. “He’s right there. There’s no buffer. It’s almost like having a roommate.”

  “Has he changed much?” Her eyes fluttered closed on her first sip, and she licked the melted marshmallow off her upper lip. “I haven’t seen him in years.”

  “He’s taller, thinner. He grew out his hair.” I pictured the wraith in his gaze and shivered. “His eyes are darker.” I didn’t tell her why, and I couldn’t explain keeping his secret, except conversations on magic between Amelie and me always dead-ended with each of us put out with the other. “Otherwise, he’s pretty much the same. Still prefers books to people. Still dresses like a little professor.” Except now he was one. Maybe there was something to the old adage of dressing for the job you wanted after all. “You should pop in and say hi sometime. He might enjoy having another social outlet.”

  “Nah. I’ll pass. He never liked me much.” She wiped her mouth with a napkin. “He hated Boaz when we were kids, no idea why, the possibilities are limitless. He snubbed me since I was tainted by association.”

  “I always thought…” Rolling in my lips, I wished I hadn’t opened my mouth.

  “That it was a class thing?” Of course, Amelie knew exactly what I’d meant. “Linus was a little snob. How could he not be with Dame Lawson for a mother? But he was polite to other Low Society girls. He did have some manners. He just never used them on me. He wasn’t mean when you weren’t around, nothing like that, more like I ceased to exist.”

  “Well, we’re all grown up now.” I poked the bloated marshmallows with my finger to watch them bob in their chocolatey bath. “Maybe things have changed.”

  “Maybe.” Her attention drifted to the door behind me and stuck. “I still don’t like this. I wish we’d taken my car. Jolene leaves us too exposed.”

  “I can check in with Linus if it makes you feel better.” With Boaz gone, we didn’t have a whole lot of other options.

  “Linus?” She laughed so hard she swatted her mug on its side and spilled the last few swallows of chocolate. “Are you sure he’s qualified to act as a bodyguard?” She wiped up her mess. “Or were you hoping he’d borrow a few of his mother’s henchmen?”

  Again I found myself biting my tongue about his wraith. “He’s got some tricks up his sl
eeves.”

  “Call him.” She spun her now-empty mug in her hands. “We’ve got no one else unless we want to involve my parents.”

  The Low Society tried to stay as far away from High Society politics as possible. Involving them would be a last-ditch effort since any assistance from the Pritchards would put them in the Grande Dame’s crosshairs.

  There was only one small problem with my plan. I didn’t have Linus’s cellphone number. All I could do was dial the landline and hope there was still a working phone plugged in at the carriage house and that he would pick up.

  “Woolworth residence,” an amused voice answered on the seventh ring. “How may I be of assistance?”

  “I can’t believe you’re playing receptionist.” I laughed at the mental picture. “Are you that bored?”

  “Not at all,” he assured me. “I was working on a syllabus when Woolly started flashing her lights in Morse code. I put down my notebook to play cypher, and that’s when I heard a faint ringing coming from the kitchen in the carriage house. I assumed that’s what Woolly meant, so I answered.”

  Amelie cleared her throat and rolled her hand in a get to it gesture.

  “The reason I called is I’m at Mallow with Amelie, and I maybe saw something outside.” I stuck out my tongue at her. “I checked, but I didn’t see anything. Do you think it’s safe to go home, or do I need to wait on backup to arrive? And when I say backup, I mean you.”

  A sigh gusted over the line. “Step outside.”

  “Oookay.” I pointed toward the door so Amelie knew where I was headed, waved off her protest, then stepped out onto the sidewalk. Still alone as far as I could tell. “What am I supposed to be—?” Movement above my head had me slapping the air like a bee might land on me. “Oh, my goddess.”

  “Grier, it’s all right.”

  Tipping my head back put me face-to-faceless with his pet wraith. “You’re spying on me?”

  He scoffed at me. Actually scoffed. “You really believed I let you leave without protection?”

  “No?” I backed toward the door, unnerved when the wraith followed like a lost puppy. “I expected Elite sentinels dressed in catsuits prowling through the bushes, tracking my every move. Not this.”

  The mental picture of Boaz crammed into a spandex jumpsuit made me snort, until I was tugging at my collar when my imagination supplied an image of all that muscle wrapped in one stretchy package. Oh, geez. I was not going to think about packages. Nope. Nah-uh. No way. My brain was a delivery-free zone.

  “You already felt caged by the agreement you made with Mother,” he murmured. “I didn’t feel inclined to point out the bars.”

  Learning he could monitor me so easily didn’t come as a shock, exactly. Wraiths made perfect spies and assassins. Stealthy and silent, they blended with the night. But he should have warned me that the bodyguard he had selected for me lacked, well, a body.

  “I prefer to know where the bars are.” I miscalculated my retreat and bumped into the display window. “Comes in handy for figuring out how to squeeze through them.”

  “You need protection. You’re not safe on the streets alone.”

  As much as I wanted to fling it in his face that Amelie was with me, that I wasn’t alone, we both knew she and I had failed to save my skin the last time. Necromancers weren’t built to combat vampires. Magic was our only hope, and that defense required tools, preparation, and time assailants didn’t allow before attacking.

  “I understand you have to take precautions.” I was proud of how even I kept my tone when what I really wanted to do was track him down and thump him soundly on the head. “But next time you take preventative measures, give me a heads-up, okay?”

  “Do you object to the wraith?” he asked without answering me.

  “No.” Better the shadow than the man himself. “I’m getting used to it hanging around.” The creature inclined its head as though appraising me. “How sentient is it?”

  “When fully bonded, they possess limited faculties. They follow orders. That’s all. They remain in a type of stasis when they’re not deployed.”

  “Is it male or female?” I studied the billowing hood, the gnarled fingers, and had no clue.

  “They’re spirit and bone. That’s it. That’s all.”

  How sad to be reduced to an it when you once were a person. “I’m going to call him Cletus. He looks like a Cletus.”

  A choking noise filled my ear. “You’re going to what?”

  “Cletus,” I enunciated clearly. “You can thank me for naming him later.”

  “If it makes you more comfortable to humanize it, fine.” He sighed. “You can call it Cletus.”

  “I’m going to give Amelie a ride back to her car, then I’ll head home.” Realizing he would be there, even if it was across the way, struck me as oddly comforting. “See you at dusk for our first lesson.”

  “Sleep well.” He hesitated. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.”

  “Thanks.” Nothing short of magical or pharmaceutical intervention would suppress the dream, and I’d had enough of being suppressed to last a lifetime. “I can manage.”

  After warning me he couldn’t promise to always be at the carriage house when I needed him, we exchanged cell numbers and ended the call. I paused a moment to wonder where he might be going at night but reminded myself it was none of my business. He was born in Savannah and raised here too. He had family in town, and friends. He probably had work too. His mother wasn’t the type to let a valuable resource go to waste, and I would only take up a few hours of his nights.

  I strolled back into Mallow to find Amelie ordering us to-go chocolates, proving why she was the best friend a girl could have, and I sidled up to her. “We’re good to go.”

  “Is Linus coming?” She kicked up an eyebrow. “Or dispatching someone?”

  “He already has.” I picked up the tab before she could dip into her wallet. “We’re safe to go as soon as our order is filled.”

  “He’s having you followed,” she said, thinking it over. “Good idea.”

  “I wish he would have told me,” I grumbled.

  “Would you have thanked him or fought him?”

  I cut her a smile. “What do you think?”

  “I get the feeling Linus is going to have his hands full with you.”

  Poor guy. I got the feeling she was right.

  Four

  After spending a week cooped up at home, my night out drained me. I parked Jolene and started toward the front porch, ready to grab a shower and update Woolly on all the gossip we’d missed over the past few weeks. Rustling in the bushes pulled me up short, and I sent up a prayer to Hecate that Taz hadn’t come back for seconds. Creeping around the side of the house, I went to investigate and spotted a flash of red hair. “Linus?”

  Dressed in a crisp navy button-down, the sleeves rolled up to reveal corded forearms dusted with freckles, Linus made for an elegant gardener. Dark-wash jeans hung low on his hips, the knees damp, and he wore a pair of scuffed, black boots coated in mud. He’d pulled his long hair into a neat topknot, and the same pair of black-framed glasses he’d worn at breakfast perched on the end of his nose. His elegant hands were covered in a mixture of crimson ink and clumps of… Was that concrete?

  Skipping my gaze from him to Woolly, I sucked in a sharp breath at the smooth expanse of foundation running along this side of the house.

  “I got to thinking about the wards.” He dropped into a crouch in front of a small trough filled with a wet mixture. A trowel handle stuck out of the center like a bulbous candle on a birthday cake. “The only way to repair the damage to the foundation is to first repair the foundation.”

  Hardly breaking news, but the blank canvas he’d created made her look so naked, so vulnerable.

  “Woolly can’t function with a quarter of her wards down.” I rested my hand against the siding like that might help me feel her heartbeat. “I promised her you wouldn’t do this again. I gave her my word I
would protect her. You should have asked me before you started. I could have talked to her, warned her what was happening so she wouldn’t be afraid.”

  Linus let me rant at him until I ran out of steam then cocked an eyebrow at me. “Are you finished?”

  “No.” I sucked in air for part two then promptly deflated. “Wait. Are you laughing at me?”

  He plucked a blade of grass and let it drop. “You don’t trust me much, do you?”

  “You broke into my house and kidnapped my bird.”

  A grimace twisted up his face. “There is that.”

  Whatever excuse I expected him to recite never made it past his lips. He owned the blame for his actions, though he must have known I suspected his mother of issuing the orders. Had he thrown her under the bus, I would have gladly switched it into reverse then taken my own turn behind the wheel.

  “I transcribed the existing wards before I mixed the concrete.” He indicated the lowest board on Woolly’s siding. What I had assumed was dirt was actually tiny rows of interlaced sigils. They had been drawn on with a permanent marker with a crimson undertone. Another of his inventions? “Woolly is fine. I talked to her myself, and I asked her permission before I put a hand on her.”

  The window above our heads swung open then clicked shut in agreement.

  “Oh.” I knelt beside him, thankful I had done all the prep work of scrubbing the foundation clean weeks ago. “Are you sure it will hold?” I tipped back my head and examined the sky. “Neely said it’s going to rain.”

  Linus got busy stirring his mixture. “Who’s Neely?”

  “Neely Torres. He’s a friend from work.” I patted my hair, not remembering until I touched frizz that he hadn’t painted me into my character tonight. “He does hair and makeup for all the Haints. He’s also a kickass accountant.”

  “Oh.” Comprehension dawned across his face. “He’s married to Cruz Torres.”