Duck Duck Ghost (8 page)

No, cheap pork rinds were definitely not on Tristan’s list of things to put into his mouth.

Now, if only Wolf could somehow convince him that
he
was something Tristan could put back in his mouth, because the way things were going between them, the pork rinds weren’t going to be the only thing spending their lives alone.

They’d slept apart the night before. Way apart, because Wolf was in the far wing, back in the room he’d originally slept in. It was a small act of penance on his part—one Wolf wasn’t all too sure Tristan even acknowledged.

“How long are you going to be mad at me?” he ventured softly. “Remember, my family doesn’t do tantrums—”

Tristan threw him a cutting look. “I don’t know. You seemed to throw a pretty good one yourself.”

“Okay, I’ll give you that.” A sign announced they’d arrived in San Luis Obispo, and he guided the SUV up toward the canyons. “I
am
sorry.”

“Are we going to do this here? In the car?” A flash of green stormed in Tristan’s eyes.

Any warmth they’d built up the night before had burned off as quickly as a thin bay fog under a hot rising sun. Wolf’d known Tristan was hurt. Hell, if he could, he’d take back every damned word he’d flung at Tristan before he ran off to Florida.

“I’d like to work things out, babe. I fucked up. Hell, you and me—we’re flailing through this relationship thing.” The streets were a blur, and Wolf had to concentrate on the road, finally spotting the turnoff he wanted. “I like sharing a bed with you. I like laughing with you. Hell, I like arguing with you but not hurting you. I prefer loving you more.”

“Do you think we’re sharing a room at your cousin’s place?” Tristan raised his eyebrow. “And don’t mention the Slurpee again. Yeah, I liked it, but there’s only so much you can milk a blue raspberry slush.”

“Your tongue still looks like a jelly bean.” Wolf laughed. “I’d say yeah, I can milk it a bit more. And tell me the truth, Thursday. Did you miss me?”

“You were gone maybe a week,” Tristan pointed out. “And so many messages—”

“But did you miss me, Tristan Pryce?” They’d come to a red light, and Wolf leaned over to steal a kiss from the corner of Tristan’s mouth. “Admit it. You did.”

“If I do, are you going to sing?” Gesturing to the intersection, Tristan said, “Light’s green.”

“I promise. No singing.”

“Then yeah,” Tristan sighed resignedly. “I missed you.”

S
AN
L
UIS
Obispo—SLO—was larger than Wolf remembered. It began with a typical suburban sprawl and eventually led to a Disneyfied downtown district. Every other sign read organic or natural, although there were a few digs of carnivore pride scattered here and there. Tris counted five tea shops in the first ten blocks of quaint storefronts and got into a spirited debate with Wolf about if the natural juice store counted as well, since they boasted freshly brewed matcha.

The sidewalks were crowded, mostly wandering tourists or groups of young men and women burdened with backpacks. Wolf told him SLO was a college town, and it showed its demographic with pride. Scattered here and there were cheap eateries promising a hefty portion of fresh greens and filling wraps. A Mexican food place smelled promising, giving off a lingering aroma of grilled meat and refried beans done with real lard. Tristan’s oversugared stomach growled, reminding them both it’d been hours since he’d last eaten anything with protein in it.

“There was a ghost back there. She was staring out of the window.” Tristan tried to keep the excitement out of his voice, but more than a little bit of it snuck in. He actually bordered on gleeful, and Wolf quirked a smile at him. “And she didn’t look like she was planning on killing me. A repeater, I think.”

“Not a bad thing. The repeater part. Not the killing.” Wolf exhaled. “Let’s see if we can avoid the whole killing ghost thing again, okay?”

“If my uncle has his way of things, I won’t have to worry about any ghost, killing ones or otherwise.”

Wolf reached across the car and put his hand on Tris’s thigh, patting him gently. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll take care of your uncle.”

“Did you forgive me about the baklava?”

“What?” Wolf’s brow creased. Then he nodded in understanding. “Yeah, I was an asshole. I admit it. Fuck, I should have… hell, I should have done a lot of things, but more importantly, I should have listened to you. Or at least suspected my mother of something stupid like that. You’d think I’d know better by now. And you? Forgiving my asshole behavior?”

“I’m thinking about it. My magic mushrooming you was an accident. You screaming at my head was on purpose.” Tristan pursed his mouth. “Tell me about your cousin Sey. And why the hell does she have a toy shop?”

“Actually, I don’t know what to call it.” Wolf had the grace to look sheepish. “I think it’s more of a doll hospital gone over the edge. She’s an artisan, really—learned it from her mother. Fixes antique toys for a living. The place started off as an inn a long time ago, but when my aunt—Sey’s mom—took it over from
her
mother, it kind of became a place for the family to go to when things got a bit rough.”

“Did things get rough for you? Your mom’s kind of nuts, but I didn’t think she’d put you guys in danger.”

“Not us. For Hellsingers.” Wolf thought of the times he’d watched as members of his family crawled back to their safe houses, beaten down and bloodied from battling things no one else believed in. “Sometimes, yeah. Things can get rough. But Sey’s place, it was good to go to. Kind of like summer camp except with fake body parts all over the place.”

“And you call
me
Thursday Addams?” he scoffed when Wolf nodded at him. “You’re the weird one.”

“I thought it was cool when I was a kid. There were eyeballs everywhere. Now? Okay, yeah. Still kind of cool.”

“Really?” Tristan shuddered. “Like Winifred’s tongue?”

“They’re not
real
. Okay, they’re doll eyes. Some of them are human sized. I used to put them in my mouth and scare my cousins by spitting them out at their faces.” Wolf laughed at Tristan’s horrified look. “Swallowed one once when I was seven. I didn’t want to tell Mom about it, but I looked at my poop for days for it but never saw it. For all I know, it’s still rattling around inside of me, looking for the doll’s head it used to be in.”

“Great. That’ll help me sleep at night.” Wrinkling his nose in disgust, Tristan shook the remains of his slush to mix it back together. “But what’s she like?”

“Cool. She’s older than me by about maybe ten years, and sharp. Sey always tinkered with things. When I was a kid, she could fix anything. Probably still can.” Wolf slowed the car as a marker announced the entrance to San Luis Obispo. “Sey’s place is outside of SLO. You kind of liked the older part of town. I saw you smile. It’s very tree-hugging otter scrubber.”

“It’s like you speak English, but the words are not making any sense.”

“Granola town. SLO—San Luis Obispo—we just drove through it? That kind of very hipster douche kind of downtown. Lots of organic sandwich shops and fair trade coffee places with gluten-free biscotti. You even counted them.”

“And you think I’m like that?”

“Not so much the organic, but I’m pretty sure you’d scrub an otter if it needed it. There’s also a fantastic home-style sausage shop.” Wolf shot him a smirk. “Of course, I can give you a sausage—”

“Shut up. I’m still working on the forgiveness thing.”

“Hey, I’ve been saying I’m sorry since back at the Grange.”

“And what about the Grange? Do you really believe it’s haunted?” Tristan shifted in his seat to study the passing buildings. “Or do you think I’m crazy?”

“Babe, I was there. I can’t document what Winifred was or even explain it. Hell, I can’t explain what any of the things at the Grange are,” he admitted. “But I know I can’t measure them and present it as evidence. That doesn’t change the fact that I believe you. Hell, I didn’t at first. I’ll cop to that. And I’d love to study the Grange more—if I could make sure that none of my equipment was disrupting the energy of the place.”

“Do you think that’s what happened? To my ghosts?” Tristan chewed on his upper lip. “Your equipment? Your mom’s botched séance?”

“Truthfully? Everything spectral operates on frequencies. So does my stuff. That séance slash exorcism my mom hacked her way through? That could be only the tip of the iceberg. I’ve had some time to think about a few things, and I am wondering if something I did disrupted things somehow as well. I don’t know.”

“Do you think it’ll come back? Hoxne Grange
had
a purpose, and I liked how it was.”

“It still does have a purpose. Yeah, it got kicked in the teeth—hard, but I think it’ll be okay.” Wolf turned the SUV down a treelined drive, and the street began to wind around back toward the highway. “It’s a bit of a drive still. I wanted to show you the town since Sey lives out in boonfuck Egypt. It’s kind of isolated.”

“Worse than the Grange?”

“Oh, hell yes,” Wolf snorted. “I think that’s part of the problem. Sey’s out there without any day-to-day contact with anyone but a couple of farm guys who come by for a few hours. Sometimes a couple of my aunts drop by. They all move around too much to keep track of. Oh, and if my Aunt Bertha is there, whatever you do, don’t drink anything she gives you. She’s where my mom got the honey from.”

“Great,” Tristan sighed. “I’m going to Underhill. Next you’ll be telling me she’s married to Oberon.”

Wolf laughed once, then sobered up. “Well, actually—”

I
T
TOOK
them another forty minutes to get to the canyon road Sey lived on. A sign announced they were heading onto a private road, something clearly evident by the cracks in the blacktop and a thick overhang of tree branches above the SUV, but Wolf drove on. Tristan was tiring, coming down from a sugar high, and overwrought with worry about his home. Ophelia Sunday assured him she could keep the Grange in its odd business while they were gone, but Wolf had his doubts. Sure his sister was sensitive. She’d always been a dowsing rod for spirits back when he’d considered a career as a Hellsinger, but dragging his kid sister around on hunts wasn’t exactly what he’d had in mind for a life.

Instead, he’d taken advantage of his paternal grandparents’ generosity and gone to school—to become someone his mother’s side of the family viewed as a traitor to his own kin—a paranormal investigator. Explaining he wanted to
prove
there were ghosts fell on deaf ears, and he’d been met with more skepticism by his blood relatives than he brought with him on a job.

Tristan’s home, Hoxne Grange, was the most intensely active site he’d ever worked, and now it seemed to be faltering—its spectral activity fading quickly into the mundane before he could capture actual documentation of its paranormal essence.

And there wasn’t a damned thing Wolf could do about it.

He could, however, take care of the man who owned the place, especially since Tristan seemed to have not slept the entire time Wolf’d been gone.

The tree line hugged the road, and white stiles separated the woods from the shoulder. In some spots, the brush thinned, and they could see older farm homes, complete with rust-painted barns and the occasional livestock. Most were cows, but when they turned a corner, a mottled alpaca peered out from behind a willow tree, keenly interested in the SUV’s passing.

Sey’s place emerged slowly, creeping out of a thick copse when he turned up into a gravel road. A large, sprawling old two-story house, it wore its past as an inn on its grounds. A large circular driveway led off to a cement pad marked with cracked, worn lines for parking spaces.

The house itself was a clapboard colonial with a few touches of Victorian styling, complete with a turret and rotunda off the side. Painted lemon yellow with a blinding white trim, it loomed out before a backdrop of hills and forest, shouting a welcome to anyone passing by, with its wraparound porch and yards of flower beds stretching out from its river-stone foundation. Its many rippled glass windows shone as best they could in the winking sunlight. The house sparkled and flirted with them as the SUV pulled up.

A massive spread of trees climbed up the hills behind the property, and acres of cleared land stretched out on either side of the house. An enormous old-style barn, complete with hay doors and white accent beams on its crimson paint, crouched behind the yellow house, and to the right, a thick white fencing corralled a small herd of enormous shaggy red cattle. The bovines paid no attention to the SUV, although a fuzzy rust-colored calf lowed at the vehicle before scampering off to join the others.

“Those are awesome. They’re like… bantha!” Tristan was fascinated by the cattle, and he watched them closely as he got out of the car. Peering over the roof at Wolf, he looked both alarmed and intrigued. “She doesn’t eat them, does she?”

“No, they’re freeloaders. All of them are. We’ll get eggs from the chickens, but that’s if they’re in a good mood. Sey’s a sucker for lost causes. Things here die of old age or boredom. Last I heard there’s a camel around here too, but that was a while back. He might be gone, but you never know.” Wolf grabbed their bags and then dropped them on the ground as a slender red-haired woman rushed down the house’s broad porch. “Hey, there’s my girl!”

Her hair was rooster bright, and while a bit on the slender side, the handsome woman had a raw-boned strength to her. And if anything, her broad smile was as brilliant as her coxcomb shock. Dressed in worn hiking boots, khaki cargo shorts, and a formfitting white tank top, Sey Kincaid was the picture of health, her long limbs tanned a dusky gold, and she moved effortlessly across the lush lawn, her arms spread wide to embrace Wolf.

“Ah, Wolfie!” She launched herself at him, delight written all over her face.

“Sey!” Wolf grabbed at the woman, catching her in midlaunch. She felt good in his arms, a solid piece of Kincaid, as familiar to him as his own skin. “God, it’s good to see you.”