How to Claim an Undead Soul Page 8

  “I meant there are other ghost tour companies. I can think of two more off the top of my head, and one of those buses its victims around in air-conditioned comfort. The other doesn’t require its girls to wear costumes. There are a billion shops on River Street or in City Market who would love to hire a local. You could check with the thrift shops on Broughton Street or the boutiques on Whitaker.”

  “I’m a history geek,” I confessed. “I love haunted history, the grimmer and grislier the better. Spending five nights a week talking to people eager to hear my version of a story is addictive.”

  “I’ll take your word for it. Public speaking falls in the same category as waterboarding with me.” Her scraping slowed. “Why are you here instead of working your beat if you love it so much?”

  “That trip out of town I mentioned? I didn’t clear it with my boss first.” I gave one greenish clump of musty foam my particular attention. “I had a family emergency, and there was no time to do anything but go.” To be fair to Cricket, I added, “It’s not the first time I’ve vanished on her, so I get why she’s leery of penning me on the schedule again. It’s next to impossible to find people willing to fill in last minute, and tours that get cancelled mean refunds and bad reviews. Those are her top two pet peeves.”

  “I get that.” An earnest quality entered her tone. “Papa’s the same. He’s always…”

  The overhead lights dimmed to a soft glow, flickering in eerie pulses that reminded me of a beating heart.

  Knowing better, I still played clueless human. “Electrical problem?”

  “Maybe.” She didn’t sound convinced, but she didn’t act worried either. “It’s still bright enough to see. We should keep at it and let the guys handle the wiring.”

  The hesitant scritching of our chisels grew heartier the longer the twilight lingered and nothing else happened. Marit exhaled a small laugh, perhaps surprised our conversation about Timmy had gotten under her skin. She didn’t bother hiding her relief, since she had no way of knowing about my acute night vision.

  The chill that exhaled through the room could have been blamed on the air conditioning switching on, except that the dimness made it hard to believe the vents could pump out more than an anemic gust at this point.

  “This kind of thing never happens to me,” she marveled. “Timmy must have sensed what you do for a living.”

  Seeing as how that was a distinct possibility, though not for the reasons she supposed, I worked on looking sheepish. “Guess so.”

  The clatter of metal against metal wasn’t alarming at first. There were rooms below this one where others worked, and someone, likely Mr. Voorhees, would be coming up to check on his daughter if the electrical issue wasn’t addressed soon. Assuming it affected the rest of the boat and wasn’t a contained phenomenon.

  “Ouch,” Marit cried out, slapping a hand over her thigh. “I think…” Her hand came away bloody. “Grier?”

  A crimson stain crept down her leg to soak the scraps where we knelt, oozing around a steak knife that quivered where it protruded from dense muscle. The subtle flex of the handle called to mind someone sawing back and forth to slice a difficult cut of meat.

  A whistling noise had me reaching up to touch my stinging earlobe. “What in the…?” Blood smeared my fingertips, perilously close to my carotid, but I had gotten lucky. A new piercing wouldn’t kill me. “I’ve got you.” I leapt to my feet and plunged through a cold spot. Hello, Timmy. I swiped my sticky hand through the air, hoping the disturbance would sent him skittering, but his icy presence twined higher up my leg the longer I stood there. “Give me your arm. I’m going to help you stand, and we’re getting out of here.”

  Eyes wide, she clasped forearms with me, and I hauled her to her feet. A sharp gasp told me she had put weight on her wounded leg, but she didn’t complain. I hooked an arm around her waist while she clutched at my shoulders, and together we hobbled toward the exit.

  This time the tinkle of metal brought sweat beading on my forehead. This was a dining room. A defunct one, but a dining room all the same. There was no telling where the ghost had hidden his stash of cutlery, but I had to assume he was well-armed.

  Halfway to the exit, Marit tensed in my hold and cried out, tears clinging to her lashes. I didn’t slow down to find out what had happened but kept her shuffling toward the open door. Once across the threshold, I called for help.

  Mr. Voorhees barreled up the stairs, followed by the captain whose name I no longer remembered. His gaze touched on Marit leaning all her weight against me, slid to the blood covering our hands, and then dipped to her thigh.

  “What happened?” He bellowed inches from my face. “What’s wrong with my daughter?”

  “The ghost,” I panted. “We were scraping up foam when the lights dimmed. We could see okay, so we kept working. The next thing I knew, a knife was sticking out of her thigh.”

  Unwilling to let his daughter brave the steps, Mr. Voorhees swept her up in his arms, hollering orders down the stairwell to the others. The captain had his phone out, and he was talking to someone in a commanding voice. He grabbed my elbow, hauling me down after him, and asked, “Are you injured?”

  “No,” I lied, unwilling to be examined. “The blood is Marit’s.”

  The urge to backtrack and confront the ghost thrummed in my veins, but I had no kit with me. I would be as defenseless against it as Marit had been, and I had no reason to believe my luck would hold if I presented him with a singular target for his wrath.

  The crew gathered around Marit as her father lowered her onto a makeshift pallet, taking care to arrange her on her left side, facing away from me. The fluffy pink cushion beneath her resembled insulation, and I was glad someone had the forethought to cover it with one of the thick vinyl signs advertising New Cruises Coming Soon!

  One of the crew members who looked an awful lot like the captain stripped a hoodie over his head and passed it to Mr. Voorhees to use as a pillow. While he held Marit’s hand and murmured reassurances to her, he glared at me, like this was somehow my fault.

  Apparently he had been counting on the fact the ghost never bothered Marit when he assigned her the dining room as her pet project. Just as obvious was his fury over his foiled plan. No doubt he’d hoped a night of hard labor in spook central would send me scurrying to Cricket to beg for my toilet wand back, but his daughter had been the one who limped from the room and not me.

  “Grier,” Marit panted over her shoulder. “Thanks for getting me out of there.” Her fingers tightened around her father’s much larger hand. “I wouldn’t have made it without her.”

  I started to brush off her comment, but then I noticed the wound that had caused her to cry out as we made our escape. Four steak knives protruded from the back of her left thigh, each one a fraction closer to the inside of her leg, as though each toss had been aimed mid-stride, and the topmost blade had come within inches of piercing her femoral artery.

  “Thank you,” Mr. Voorhees rasped to me, his attention finally locking on his daughter’s face.

  “I’m glad I could help,” I mumbled, wondering how I was going to get back upstairs to confront the ghost. Tonight it would be impossible. Tomorrow would have to be soon enough.

  With all eyes on Marit, I decided to make myself scarce before the cops arrived. I crossed the gangplank at a lope to beat the EMTs then power walked for Jolene. I straddled her then pulled on my leather jacket, muttering a curse at the sticky zipper.

  “Ms. Woolworth,” Detective Russo called. “A moment of your time.”

  This night just kept getting better and better.

  I kept my seat and let her see me get comfortable. “How can I help you?”

  Much to my annoyance, her notepad made another appearance. “You witnessed the attack on Ms. Voorhees?”

  A sliver of paranoia wedged beneath my skin. Russo must have been stalking her radio for action. The alternative, that she had been stalking me, had me searching the black sky for signs of Cletus.<
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  “Yes.” I ran down a highly edited version of events leading up to Marit’s injury. “And that’s it.”

  “What’s wrong with your ear?” She peered at me over her notepad. “Were you hurt too?”

  “No,” I repeated my lie. “It’s Marit’s blood.”

  “You were sitting right beside her.” Russo stared at my ear like she was waiting on fresh crimson drips to prove me a liar. “You didn’t see who attacked her?”

  “It was dark.” How dark, by human standards, I wasn’t sure.

  “There must have been some light.” She checked her notes. “You told Mr. Voorhees you two kept working. It was only after the attack that you left the dining room.”

  Fiddlesticks.

  “I told you what happened.” I unhooked my helmet from its lock and held it in my lap. “I can’t help what you believe.”

  “There’s a lot more to this, and to you, than the eyes can see.”

  “Why are you here?” Now that I was paying attention, she wasn’t standing with the other cops, and she wasn’t consulting with them either. Maybe I hadn’t been too far off the mark with my stalker comment. “Why the interest in me?”

  “Ms. Meacham filed a missing person report two days after you disappeared five years ago.”

  Shock rearranged my features before I could smooth them. “I didn’t know.”

  “You were a nice kid from a good family, never missed work, never gave her any trouble, and your best friend was employed by her too. You were solid and dependable, not the type to blow off work or quit and not bother to tell anyone.” She kept glancing between the page and me like her notes stretched back that far. For all I knew, maybe they did. “She drove out to your house the second night you were a no-show. A crew wearing white biohazard suits was working in the living room. They were cleaning what looked like blood out of the carpets, the curtains, everything.”

  The muscles in my abdomen clenched tighter and tighter until I imagined my navel touching my spine. Details. She had details. Details I needed if I ever wanted to piece together what really happened to Maud. But the cost was too high. Paying her would emotionally bankrupt me. I had to cut my losses and figure out a way to get my hands on her case notes. “She must have misunderstood what she saw.”

  Russo wasn’t buying what I was selling. “Your guardian was Maud Woolworth, correct?”

  “Yes,” I whispered, tasting bile.

  Woolworth House was iconic. She might not be part of any walking tours, but I couldn’t stop buses from passing the house or guides from sharing her history. She was a landmark in Savannah, both mundane and extraordinary, the bronze plaque rooted in the front lawn said so. Factor in my last name, and there was zero hope of a mistaken address pulling my buns out of the fire.

  “She passed away around the same time you stopped coming to work.” Russo tried on a smile, but its edges were sharp. “What happened to her?”

  Bright spots flickered in my vision, stars filling my eyes, blinding me with their proximity. “Heart attack.”

  “Heart attacks are clean, quiet affairs. My grandfather died from one after eating Thanksgiving dinner four years ago. Everyone thought he was asleep until he didn’t get out of his chair for pie.”

  A hazy swirl of memory clouded my thoughts.

  He has a new girlfriend. His third one this week. Just as mundane as all the rest.

  Why not me? Why won’t he ask me? I would say yes. He knows I would say yes. Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe I should play hard to get. Maybe then he would see we were meant to…

  The carpet squishes under my feet, and cold slime seeps between my toes. I shiver, confused, my anger at Boaz forgotten. The smell hits me then, copper and rose water and thyme.

  Maud.

  “Ms. Woolworth?” Russo palmed my left shoulder with enough crushing force to keep me from sliding off Jolene onto the pavement. “You’re in no shape to drive.” She turned all solicitous. “You can sit in my car until you get your head on straight.”

  “No.” I tried wetting my lips, but my tongue was too thick and too dry. “I’m fine.”

  “You’re not fine.” Her right hand locked around my forearm. “You’re white as a sheet.”

  The panicked bird trapped in my chest smashed its skull against the bars of its cage. “Let me go.”

  “I only want to talk,” she soothed, but that hunger for truth lingered around her mouth.

  Made claustrophobic by the pinch of her steely fingers, I flowed into a move Taz had shown me. Turning my palm over so it faced me, I made a fist as I brought my arm up, almost like I wanted to tap myself on the shoulder, then struck high with my elbow. Her hold broke, and she stepped back. “Am I under arrest?”

  Her eyes narrowed, reassessing me. “No.”

  “Then I’m going home.”

  I didn’t wait for permission. I cranked Jolene and blazed a path for Woolly.

  Jittery after my confrontation with Russo, I stashed Jolene in the garage and locked it for the day. I was too exhausted to search for tools, and I wasn’t convinced I’d need them after tonight. As I trudged across the yard, I questioned the bright idea to join a demo team. The whole reason I had wanted to stay employed in the human world was to keep my feet on the ground, and they were certainly dragging now. But working for Cricket had set me in Russo’s path, and that wasn’t a place I wanted to be.

  The more aches presented themselves, the less motivated I became to return to the Cora Ann.

  At least until I recalled the pain etching Marit’s face. The poltergeist had to be handled. Cricket might think haunted cruises were a great idea, and I had to agree there, but people wouldn’t pay to get maimed. She would fail in this venture unless someone knocked Timmy down a few notches before some unlucky human lost their life.

  With that cheerful thought in mind, I shoved through the garden gate, walked up to the carriage house and knocked on the door. Linus answered after a small pause wearing a gray dress shirt held closed by a single button at his navel. Hints of dark ink and pale skin drew my eye before he gathered the halves of his shirt in a tight fist. A mechanical buzzing filled my ears, and an antiseptic scent made the air taste stringent.

  “Am I interrupting?” I kept my eyes glued to his face.

  “No.” He stepped back and gestured me in. “I was just thinking about you, actually.”

  More like he had been pondering new tortures to inflict upon me. “Oh?”

  Papers scattered across the kitchen table, each covered in ornate sigils. A few of the designs niggled at forgotten memories, but all of them were lovely. Linus claimed his work was standardized. From where I stood, it looked like I wasn’t the only one who had trouble recognizing their own talent for flourish.

  “Tell me you weren’t holed up designing pop quizzes,” I pleaded. “Is one on the agenda for tomorrow?”

  “Again,” he said on a soft laugh, “they wouldn’t be pop quizzes if I warned you about them.”

  “Right.” I shook my head. “It’s been a long night.”

  “You’re not dressed for work.” He noted my clothes, my mussed hair. “Where did you go?” The final detail, the dried blood on my hands, earned me an arched eyebrow. “What happened?”

  I weighed his reaction and determined it to be genuine. “You mean Cletus didn’t tell you?”

  “I had plans tonight.” His gaze dipped to his ink-stained fingers. “I set the wraith to follow you but gave explicit instructions not to interfere unless you were in danger.”

  Between one blink and the next, the wraith clouded his eyes, an alien sentience that made him appear timeless, ageless, immortal. His forehead wrinkled into neat rows, and he nodded to himself a few times as though listening to a conversation beyond my hearing. All the while, his midnight gaze never left mine.

  Funny how my hands hadn’t itched until he mentioned them. Now the skin pulled beneath the dried blood, and I wanted nothing more than to scrub away the reminder of what happened to Marit. About
the time I decided I had overstayed my welcome, his vision cleared, and he was simply Linus once more.

  “You boarded a riverboat,” he said, confirming my theory he’d been communing with Cletus. “The wraith couldn’t follow.”

  “The river.” Water disrupted magic, and moving water negated its power entirely. Not all supernatural creatures could cross even stagnant water. Others shied from currents and still more avoided oceans and their salt. I hadn’t, until this moment, realized wraiths were averse, but the current was strong, and the Atlantic Ocean was eighteen miles away. “I didn’t give it a second thought.”

  He scratched his thumbnail on his shirt button. “What were you doing on the Cora Ann?”

  “First things first.” I presented my hands. “Blood doesn’t bother me, obviously, but this belongs to a friend.” Or someone who had, until the lights dimmed, the potential of becoming one. “Do you mind if I use your sink?”

  The absence of potential in human blood was unsettling. Marit’s coated my hands, about as magic as red paint.

  “Help yourself.” He gestured toward the kitchen and followed me in there. “Will you tell me what happened?”

  “Have you heard about the Cora Ann haunting?” I cranked the water up hot and poured soap, some fancy brand he’d bought that might as well have been named Cha-Ching, in my palm and started scrubbing. “Apparently it’s been all over the news.”

  “I don’t watch television.” He took out his phone and performed a quick search. “Ah. I see. This Cricket person you work for purchased shares in the company?”

  “More like she’s bought the right to use the Cora Ann at night for haunted cruises. She doesn’t care about the other boats. If things go well, she might mix it up to include some of the daytime history tours we do too.”

  “The injured woman was human?”

  “Yes.” I did a double take before thinking through how much the wraith must have seen from its spot on the docks. “The owner’s daughter. I was assigned to help her in the dining room, where the most activity has been logged. Marit told me the ghost boy never bothered her, so my presence must have agitated the spirit.”