Duck Duck Ghost (31 page)

“You want me to rock the ghost out? Are you nuts?”

“No, it’s what I’m hoping will work on her, because tonal fluctuations push spectral entities back,” Wolf explained. “I think the sonic thing she just did tired her out. I don’t think we’ve got much time before she comes—”

“You’ve got to get out of here, mister.” A tall, strong-faced black man flickered into existence not more than a few inches from Tristan’s face.

He stepped back, his hands up to push the man away, but they went right through him. Stumbling forward, Tristan fell through Ray, and the ghost tried to catch him, leaning to scoop him up from the ground. Tristan hit the floor face-first, barking his arms on a hooked rug.

“Shit.” There was blood in his mouth, and the ache in his ribs from the night before was back with a vengeance, reminding Tristan of the ass-kicking he’d already gotten from Charity Sinclair. “Ray, you’re the one who needs to get out. We’re going to try to—”

“Where the hell did he come from?” Wolf turned to grab one of the bags of salt spilling over onto a table. “Shit, she’s—”

“Don’t. It’s Ray. Remember? I told you about him,” Tristan groaned, unsteadily getting to his feet. “Shit, I hurt everywhere.”

“I’m telling you, mister, you’ve got to leave. She’s going to tear this place down.” Ray’s voice crackled and sparked from his wavering form, and for a moment, Tristan was afraid the young man was going to do what Charity did and set them all aflame. “She wants you all dead. Heck, she’s not going to give up until every last one of you is gone and she can burn this house to the ground.”

Tristan felt his panic rise. Sending Charity away should have been easier, at least in his mind. She was a little girl. Sure, she’d died more pissed off than a slug accidentally dropped by a bird onto a salt flat, but she was still a
child
.

Then he recalled a few of the encounters he’d had in school before his parents got him tutors, and Tristan
knew
Winifred’s rage was probably a drop in the bucket compared to Charity’s.

“She’s coming here, mister…. I can’t remember your name, but I know you, right?” Ray’s expression grew troubled. “Why can’t I remember your name? I—”

The young man flickered again, and Wolf handed Tristan one of the salt bags. “If he attacks you, use this. I don’t care if you sat around a fire and sang Kumbaya, you get rid of him before he can hurt you. I’m going to see if I can get the runes down. Watch the doll.”

Charity’s doll lay on the chair, doing nothing as far as Tristan could see. If anything it looked more bored than possessed, even as its soft weeping continued. Its eyes were leaking the same black viscous substance they’d seen in the hall, and the dribbles eased slowly down its cheeks, welling a drop at a time and following a slender trail to the cushion’s thick forest-green fabric.

“It’s not doing jack shit, so stop trying to distract me,” Tristan shot back. “I can help with this. Ray—”

He’d been about to tell Ray to flee to the barn and find Petal, hoping to push the stalwart man toward his young lover, but as he opened his mouth, Ray’s body stiffened and his eyes milked over. Tristan reached for the man, unsure and confused, but something wiggling under Ray’s chest made him pause.

His chest erupted, splattering Tristan’s face and torso with a sticky gush of fluids. The cloudy fluid was almost spongy, flecked with black bits, and when Tristan wiped some of it from his face, stinging welts began to bubble up where it’d hit him.

Tiny pale fingers were forcing their way out of Ray, their nails clotted with a chunky ebony dirt. The fingers became hands, and Ray’s entire being shook and trembled as full arms drove out of him, their pale skin mottled with stygian-blue lines spreading into a maze of frilled endings and crosses.

Blonde hair poked out next, followed by a shattered temple, a deep triangular gouge dug into the bruised skin above an eyeless socket. Dark blood mottled the wound, ancient dried-out flakes tumbling from Charity’s shattered forehead.

“She’s coming for you, mister…. I can’t stop her,” Ray looked terrified. Hell, his voice creaked with fear and panic. “I’m sorry, mister. I just can’t—”

He exploded outward, coating the room with sticky ichors. In his place, Charity stood defiant, her dress plastered down from Ray’s fluidic demise. Her fingers grew long as Tristan watched, turning to smoking talons, their tips nearly glowing red with an intense heat.

“Simone….” Charity hissed, raising her hands. “You took my daddy. You took….”

She moved quickly, far too quickly for Tristan’s eyes to follow, and the talons flashed, leaving a hot white trail behind them when she struck. He couldn’t get away in time, and she scored a hit, tearing through his shirt and down into the skin on his belly. The fire they left behind spread through Tristan’s nerves, and he fell back, tumbling over Wolf’s long body.

“Gotcha, babe,” Wolf whispered in his ear. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” Tristan mumbled. The unseen flames licking away at his skin were fading, and he clenched his fingers, working the numbness out of them. “Feeling’s coming back. Still want me to shove my MP3 player up the doll’s ass?”

“Trust me on this one. You grab the doll, and you find something loud and raucous to play over it. Hell, fit the damned headphones over its body if you can. Just find something ear-bleeding.” Wolf kissed him quickly. “We’ll free the sister at the same time we banish the brat.”

H
E
’
D
SPENT
over a decade not catching a whiff of the afterlife. Then suddenly his world was filled with boo-wigglies and screaming phantoms eager to suck his life clean from his marrow. But despite the chills, thrills, and soul-threatening danger, Wolf had never felt more alive.

Especially since Tristan was by his side.

In a lot of ways, it felt right. Like chasing down the things that wouldn’t let go of their mortal coil was what he was meant to do, even if the family didn’t agree with his methods and kicked him to the curb. Wolf Kincaid was born into a line of ghost cleavers, and damned if he wasn’t going to live up to the name and bloodline.

He just had to convince his cousin Cin to give him more instruction on how to do the job, because winging it didn’t seem like the way to go.

It was an uneven battle. He’d spent his life trying to prove the afterlife existed, and Charity—well, she seemed to have dedicated her spectral time building up a lot of rage and ways to coax people over to her side of the curtain.

From the ectoplasm scattered about the room like the aftermath of an elephant sneeze, little Charity Sinclair seemed to take her
one
job very seriously.

His hands were dusty from the marks he’d made on the wood floor. The seamstress markers Sey’d stashed on her worktable were the closest thing he was going to get to blessed chalk. Somewhere behind him—hopefully—Tristan was cuing up his music player. There were definitely sounds of something going on and a few tinny taps of metal on metal. Then Freddie Mercury began screaming about fat-bottomed girls, and Wolf spared his lover a withering glance.

“Really? Queen?”

“You do your thing, and I’ll do mine,” Tristan sniped back. He’d connected his player to an auxiliary port in Sey’s stereo, so the room was drowning in rolling beats and piano. “Do you think I should try to get a fire started? So we can throw the doll into it? Or is that going to hurt Simone?”

“Pretty sure Simone is as sick of being in that doll as we are of her sister.” He tried to keep one eye on the ghost edging through the circle.

Charity suspected something was up, but it was hard to tell what the spirit was going to do. Her skin-curtained eyes were edged in black again, and Wolf wondered if that was any indication of her building up power. Beyond them, the sofa blocking the doorway rattled, and Wolf spotted a spray of segmented fingers digging into the cushions. A mess of tangled brown hair popped up over the edge of the couch for a brief moment. Then the doll head tumbled back down, unable to gain a purchase on the furniture.

There was a rumble of cursing coming from the foyer, and Cin appeared in the hall, framed by the blocked doorway. He made eye contact with his cousin, then held up what looked like a garden sprayer. Pumping the handle hard, Cin worked up some pressure in the canister. Holding down the trigger, he let loose with a strong flat spray, coating the seemingly immortal toys with whatever he had in the tank.

“You okay in there, cousin?” Cin shouted over the hissing and screaming coming from down the hall. He sounded rough, his words blurring. Then Wolf remembered the damage the toy’d done to his tongue. “What’s the plan? And what the hell is with the music?”

“Loud music disrupts EMI. Okay, I’ve got salt and blood.” Wolf dodged Charity’s swipe, but a tip caught his cheek, and he hissed at the sharp pain. “Okay, now I’ve got more blood. Bone. I need bone.”

“The doll’s buttons. Those are bone.” Tristan grabbed at the large doll, snapping the spheres lining the back of her dress. “Sey told me they made buttons out of bone or shell. Shell’s a kind of bone.”

“Any port in a storm,” Wolf grunted and dove, avoiding Charity again. This time she missed, but Tristan’s movement caught her attention, and she turned, obviously sniffing out her quarry. “Shit, she’s found the damned thing. Hand them over, Tris.”

Charity flew at Tristan as he flung the buttons toward Wolf. They crossed into one another, and the ghost twisted as if the tiny spheres were knives slicing through her. Nearly the size of Wolf’s pinkie nail, a few hit the ground and rattled about, but he’d caught most of them in his cupped palms.

Pouring them into one hand, he then smeared his fingers through the blood on his face, coating as much of his skin as he could. Satisfied he got good coverage, he closed his hands together, trapping the buttons between them, and shook, covering the buttons in his own blood.

“I can’t see your sigils,” Cin shouted. “What did you use?”

“Fucking everything.” Wolf piled the buttons into the center of his circle, then stood facing Tristan, who was holding Charity off with a handful of ivory umbrella supports. “You might want to duck, Thursday. This might get messy.”

His lover’d gotten a small fire going. It was weak, but the flames licked and spat out sparks as it tried to eat through the kindling. Tristan crouched on the hearth with the doll between his legs to prevent Charity from getting her hands on it. In between swats at the ghost, he fed handfuls of something orange into the embers.

“What the heck is that, Tris?”

“Doritos. They make really great kindling. I had a bag in my backpack.” Tristan yelped, and Wolf saw Charity had a handful of his hair. He stabbed at her with the ivory stays again, and she screamed in response, holes appearing along her ribs where Tristan made contact.

“Only you would know that, Thursday.” He needed to move quickly, but it was difficult. Wolf’s feet were stinging from the damage done to them earlier, and he needed to find accelerant. A bottle of old brandy was going to have to do. Grabbing a few things off Sey’s desk and tables, he hopped back into the circle to finish the exorcism. He worked quickly, trying to keep the buttons coated while he organized the final few items. “Okay, nearly ready.”

“Music is changing up.” His lover batted at the ghost again, then tried to shove a hank of his damp blond hair from his glittering eyes. “Since Queen didn’t do it for you.”

The opening bars of some guitar lick wasn’t one Wolf recognized, but at the moment, he didn’t care if Tristan was playing “Itsy Bitsy Spider,” so long as it was loud and threw Charity off her game. The music resonating from the speakers shifted, breaking into something harder, and the words pouring into the room were defiant and angry.

Don’t talk to me about your God

I don’t need your broken bread

Not for my soul

Not for my heart

Not for my countless sins

You want to give me something?

Something to save my wicked soul?

Give me the same as you’ve got

Loving who I want, and leaving me alone.

It was definitely loud and pulsing with emotion. The singer’s raw blues voice rasped and growled around the tune, daring someone to challenge him. Charity was pushed back by the antagonistic sound wave, and she floundered, her swaddled eyes crawling with black dots as she tried to hold onto her power.

Wolf took the emotional ride of the song and embraced it, using the thundering beat under its words to fuel his own rolling chant. It was a nursery rhyme they’d all been taught, a simple cadence of blackbirds and falling down, but the words were strong, steeped with decades of ruin and failure. The intent was more important than the actual spell; he’d remembered that much.

With one final round of crackling words, he threw the bloodied bone orbs down on the pile of brandy-soaked rags he’d tossed into a metal bowl, then set the whole mess on fire, flinging the fireplace match into the fray for good measure.