Duck Duck Ghost (11 page)

“So you were tossed out because you didn’t have blind faith?”

“Pretty much,” Wolf conceded. “And then you came along, and the whole paranormal thing took a left turn into reality. Now I don’t know what to do or what to think. Do I still believe most hauntings are bullshit? Yeah, because it’s been few and far between when I’ve run across something I couldn’t explain away. Hell, I’m kind of glad I’m a skeptic because sometimes people are scared—paralyzed by it—and I come along and show them it’s not real. I don’t think I want to stop doing that.”

“What if you come across something that
is
real? What then?”

“Then—shit, I don’t know,” he admitted softly. “Maybe that’s where I need to really stop and think about what I’m doing. Do I study the place? Because, God, I want to go balls-deep into the Grange to see what makes it tick, but suppose I fuck it up? That place is important to you—”

“And I’d kick your ass,” Tristan reminded him with a nip on his nose.

“Yeah, there’s that. Is my research—my want to prove spectral existence—worth losing you?” Wolf rubbed his thumb over Tristan’s high cheekbone. “I’ve already decided that it’s not. So, where does that leave me? Is what I’m doing really going to matter in the long run? Or am I just pulling wings off of faeries?”

“But suppose you
do
find a way to prove there’s a ghost? And suppose it’s something like Winifred?” Tris sighed. “Shit, we barely survived that. And you guys kind of knew what was going on.”

“Okay, I have no idea if my mother knew what she was doing.” He nodded at Tristan’s wide-eyed stare. “Trust me, babe. Meegan’s idea of research pretty much is reading whatever pages aren’t stuck together in her cookbook most of the time. The only reason I agreed to her supposed séance was because she’d gotten the info from one of my aunts. I wouldn’t have let her take a stab at it otherwise.”

“And it’s not like they would have spoken to you about how to get rid of the ghost.” Tristan shook his head. “Fuck, isn’t that like cutting their noses off to spite themselves?”

“They look at me being a scientist as a betrayal.” Wolf slid his index finger over Tristan’s parted lips. “I’m not saying all of them do, but most. Especially the ones who hold the purse strings. They’re suspicious and clannish—where the hell do you think I got it from?”

“Your mom—I mean, Meegan’s not exactly the most suburban person I’ve met. Okay, hell, most of the people I’ve met are dead and lived before there were suburbs, but still.”

“My mom’s considered a family radical. None of her kids really cleave to the Kincaid ways. Hell, Bach’s a damned chef and owns a restaurant with tablecloths and candles. Definitely not a family way of life.” Wolf laughed. “We were raised to have everything we own fitting in one suitcase and being able to skip out on a motel bill at the drop of a hat. The Kincaids walk a fine line between charlatan and exorcist, with very few of them actually being able to shove a ghost off its rocker. But it’s what we do, and I, my darling Tristan, rocked that boat so hard you’d have thought they were all on the Titanic and I was the largest, iciest mofo they’d ever seen.”

“So you going out to prove things aren’t things that go bump in the night is kind of like a slap in their faces? Because you’re saying what they do is bullshit?”

“Yeah, pretty much,” Wolf murmured. “But see, most of the time, I used to think that. I didn’t have
proof
. I couldn’t provide any proof, and I still can’t. That’s what’s frustrating about this whole thing, Thursday. If I can just find a way to get evidence,
irrefutable
evidence, I’ll be validating everything any Hellsinger past and present has been doing with their lives.”

“You’re as much of a Hellsinger as they are,” Tristan snorted. “You’re just working at it from a different point of view. That’s all. God, they’re fucking stubborn. They should want you to do this. They’d have nothing to lose and everything to gain.”

“Yeah, I guess so.” Wolf laughed. “So maybe in the end, I’m a Kincaid whether they want me in their clan or not, because I’m just as stubborn about wanting to do this as they are wanting me to quit. I’m not going to give up on this if you’re willing to tough it out with me. Not until I can show the world ghosts do really exist, and I’m kind of hoping—if you feel up to it—you’ll be willing to help.”

“H
OW
LONG
have you known him?”

Sey was sneaky. And for some reason, Wolf’d forgotten exactly
how
quiet and stealthy his cousin actually was. Especially when she wanted to corner someone in a place he couldn’t quite run away from without seeming like a yellow-bellied skink.

Her patented ninja ways, however, were a good way to give a guy a heart attack at three in the morning as he watched his sensors flatline with not a peep of phantom activity since the house finished its Linda Blair impression.

“Jesus fucking Christ, Sey! Put some fucking bells on or
something!” Taking a deep breath, Wolf got his heart back under control. “Are you
trying
to kill me?”

“If I’d wanted to kill you, I’d have plugged that toaster in and tossed it into your bathtub when you were ten.” His cousin refilled his coffee cup from the spare machine he’d found in her pantry. Pulling up a chair to sit next to him, she looked around the house’s former maid quarters, taking in the dizzying array of monitors and sensors he’d hooked up. “This is a lot of shit. It’s like living in a video game.”

“Yeah, sometimes,” he admitted sheepishly. “But honestly? It’s a fuck of a lot of fun when I get a hit. It’s like… a car chase where I can’t see anything but the fog.”

“You the cop or the thug?” Sey returned his broad grin and crossed her legs on the chair’s seat. The rubber soles of her purple footie pajamas scraped on the lounge’s plaid fabric. “And don’t think I don’t know what you just did there. You’re avoiding my question—how long have you known Tristan?”

“I wasn’t avoiding it. I was ignoring you.” Wolf saluted her with his mug of black coffee. “And I told you about Tristan. It’s been over a month.”

“Moving kind of fast, aren’t you?” She studied him, expertly peeling back his protective layers.

“He met Meegan and survived to tell the tale.” He grimaced, remembering the anger he’d unleashed on Tristan once the doctored-up honey finally left his system. “I’m not sure
I
did, but he took it like a champ. Between the two of us, he’s the one who deserves better, but Tris is still willing to give me a go. So yeah, I’m going to move fast before he changes his mind.”

There was more to say—mostly about how Tristan made him happy inside and how Tris and his quirks somehow touched the dark, cold bits in him, left behind when he’d been ripped up by the roots when his family turned their collective backs on him. Everything he was warmed in Tristan’s presence, and short of sounding like one of those cards that sang when opened, Wolf didn’t know where to begin telling Sey how much Tristan seemed to fit into him—and around him.

The words never reached Sey’s ears. As Wolf began to open his soul to his cousin, every piece of equipment on the table lit up and began to sing.

“Shit, here we go.” He spun around to focus on the bank of flat screens he’d set up on the other side of the
L
he’d made. The cameras he and Tristan set up hours before flickered and spat back images turned lime green by night-vision lens. A microphone picked up the creaking of someone’s weight on the front hall’s floorboards, and the camera tracked a shimmering white form gliding toward the living room.

An agile form that looked remarkably like their Aunt Gildy.

The cameras tracked the old woman’s progress as she paused long enough to glance up the stairs leading to the upper floor bedrooms, then gleefully skip-hopped over to the study. Sliding something out of a pocket in her nightgown, she jimmied open a glass-fronted china cabinet set against one wall and threw the doors back with wild abandon.

“What the hell is she doing?” Wolf cocked his head. “Isn’t that where you keep the booze?”

“Shit, she’s not supposed to drink. It screws up her meds.” Sey muttered curses under her breath and rose up in her chair. Wolf put a hand on her shoulder to set her back down, and she snarled back, “Look, no one wants her living with them—well, I do. She’s weird, and she might shoot my head off, but I like the old bat. I don’t want to see her pickled to the gills, and damn it, she’s been faking this whole ‘I’m an old woman’ bit. The only reason I put her on the first floor is because she said she couldn’t move well enough to climb the stairs. She’s like fricking Ginger Rogers out there.”

“You can deal with that in a bit,” Wolf said softly. “Look behind her.”

A spray of orbs bobbed along behind Gildy, dancing as if pulled by an invisible string. The sensors in the study sent back modulating screeches and clicks to Wolf’s equipment, and his EMF meter sang a merry little tune perky enough to inspire an Irish jig.

“I’ll be damned. You
are
haunted.” He exhaled, glad to see the sensors’ response.

“You doubted me?” Sey nudged him hard in the ribs with her bony elbow. “Fuck you. I
told
you I wasn’t hoaxing.”

“I wasn’t thinking you were, but it’s not outside of something Gildy would pull just to get attention.” Rubbing at the spot, Wolf ducked another dig. “Hey, you’re not the only one who’s been taken in by the old lady.”

“I’m going to have a serious talk with her.” Sey frowned. “And shake her down. For all I know she’s got an Uzi in her bedroom.”

“Shit, she’s probably got a tank in there.” Wolf jotted down the time of the activity as the camera recorded their aunt’s movements.

“This is a damned sight better than walking around the house with an EMF reader and holy water,” Sey admitted. “This shit picks stuff up you can see!”

“Problem is, it’s infrared, so really, it could be a lot of things. Ambient energy bursts or light specks reflecting off a source we can’t see. I’ll have to do some spectral analysis. If it repeats night after night in the same spot, then that kind of debunks the activity. Those kinds of things usually prove to be someone coming home at the same time every night from work and their headlights bouncing off of something or a power surge cycling through the grid.”

“And if it doesn’t repeat?”

“Then you’re still kind of screwed because you can’t accurately replicate the event. So you’ve got one instance of orbs, and that’s not enough data to be definitive.” He reached over and tapped a metal box with a digital gauge running up and down with numbers. “This is an ultrasound monitor. A lot of spectral activity operates on a sub-spectrum below light, so that’s something I’m working on getting reliably documented. If I can match up a good tonal record timed to your orbs, it’ll reinforce the data a bit.”

“Does all of your geekness turn Tristan on?” She pulled her fingers through her hair, making its ends stick up all around her head. “Because you sound like a really badly written porn novel right then.”

“Tris outgeeks me any day, and yeah, it’s a huge fucking turn-on.” He scribbled down notes for his timing check. “You should hear him talking about monster origins. Makes me harder than one of your badly cooked biscuits.”

“Hey! My biscuits are fine!”

“Archeologists look at your biscuits and wonder if they’re not remains from Pompeii.” Sey’s elbows flashed again, and this time Wolf couldn’t avoid her strikes. Red stars sparked over his vision, and his ribs ached enough he wondered if she broke one. Rubbing at the spots, he scooted his chair a few inches away. “And stop with the praying mantis jabs. Jesus, do you rent your elbows out to ninja or something? Fuck, they’re like knives.”

“Quit your whining and take it like a man. She’s going to get drunk off her ass. I’m going to find her on the floor if we don’t say something.” Sey sighed. “Really, she’s like five pounds soaking wet. My cat’s bigger than she is.”

On the monitors, they got a clear view of the older woman sipping from a cut-crystal glass, both of her hands folded around its faceted sides. She’d found a thickly upholstered chair to sit in, and with her knees drawn up, she was almost lost in the darkness if it wasn’t for the flash of light catching her eyes as the night-vision camera scanned the room.

“You have a cat?” Wolf cocked an eyebrow at her. “Where is it? On the mantle somewhere? Tell me it’s stuffed and there’s a squirrel dressed in a union suit and a top hat riding it into battle.”

“Shut the fuck up, and no, Crowley’s just lazy. Most of the time he’s sleeping off his breakfast or dinner on my bed. It gets the best sunbeams.”

“You named your cat Crowley?” He spared his cousin a glance, then shook his head before returning to watching the monitored study. “That’s kind of fucked up.”

“Hey, not—God, you’re a dick.” Sey punched his arm, and Wolf turned to bare his teeth in response.

Laughing, he hooked his hand under the edge of his chair and scooted another few inches away. “Ah, but I found someone who likes my—”