Good Will Ghost Hunting: Demon Seed [Good Will Ghost Hunting 1] (Siren Publishing Classic) (16 page)

Damn, he missed her.

When she was little, she’d spent many nights in bed with him, snuggled against him to keep the monsters away, as she claimed. With her mother dead and their father rarely around, Aidan had raised her. Then when she grew older, she hated sleeping alone. Many mornings Aidan had awakened to find her snuggled tightly against him. Inseparable. That was him and Chloe. She knew his deepest, darkest secrets and didn’t care. She was the only one, before her husband, and Will, who’d known.

He wished Will could have known her. But she died before he met Will. He was much older than Will, even though in looks he appeared to be a few years younger. Will had grown up in a different part of the world, and it wasn’t until Chloe’s death that Ryan’s father brought him and Will together.

He would have loved for Chloe to have met and married Will, but there was no changing the past.

He hadn’t agreed with Chloe’s choice of a soul mate. She, however, had loved the shit weasel, and that was good enough for Aidan. Admittedly, the man had treated her like a princess and made her happy, so what more could he have asked as her big brother? If her death devastated him, it had torn her husband apart from the inside out, having his soul mate brutally ripped from him. To this day he hadn’t taken another soul mate. Aidan sensed he never would. Not that he could blame him, because Aidan had never had a soul mate to begin with.

All things considered, maybe he never would.

Bound by Ryan’s father, Will and Aidan teamed together to keep his brother-in-law alive those early months, until he recovered enough from his injuries and his grief to survive. He’d nearly died trying to protect Chloe…

Aidan diverted from that road of memory.
Fast-forward
, he thought. And he did.

As Ryan’s father gave Ryan more responsibilities, it was the three of them taking on the world—Aidan, Will, and Ryan. Then Will met Abby, and it was almost like having a sister again. Like now, the way he felt with Kal.

Ryan never would tell Aidan why he walked away from Will—and as a result from him since Aidan and Will had grown so close—after Will took Abby as his soul mate. Maybe he’d thought it should be a guys-only club. Despite being soul brothers, Ryan had turned his back on them without explanation.

Jerk.

Now this.

What a fuck up. He wanted to hate Ryan, especially for this, but how could he? They had too much history between them for too many years. While forcing the situation upon them, at least maybe Will could be happy again. He’d hopefully quit wanting to die now.

Maybe Ryan should take a dose of his own medicine.

Aidan’s dreams drifted into darkness and, eventually, with the feel of Kal breathing in his arms, a deeper, restful sleep.

* * * *

Kal awoke cuddled next to Aidan, startled and disoriented until she remembered where she was and who she was with. The clock read seven forty-six, but Kal didn’t care. Let them be late to work, Monday or not. It was the least consideration Ryan could give them. She snuggled against Aidan, comforted by his presence. Whatever happened, she instinctively knew he wouldn’t let her get hurt. If there was another way, Aidan would have dang sure pursued it, wouldn’t let her do this if Will would hurt her.

She eventually rolled over to face him. Aidan stirred and looked at the clock. “Hey, sugar plum, you hungry?” He had a handsome face. Despite the romantic movies she’d seen, she didn’t have any overwhelming urge to lean in and kiss his pouty lips. Like he’d said, it would be like kissing a brother.

Yergh.
“You promised me breakfast.”

His broad smile could melt hearts, including hers, so why the heck hadn’t someone snapped him up yet?

“Anywhere you say. If you want to take a shower, go ahead and use the guest bathroom. I put some towels and stuff in there for you last night.”

“Thanks.”

His sweet honey-hazel eyes studied her. He softly spoke, his normally playful voice filled with sadness. “Will is a good man. I’m sorry this happened. I mean it, if I’d known—”

She put a finger to his lips. “I know. It’s not your fault. I’m not mad at you.”

He nodded, still looking at her. “If it’s any consolation, I wish my sister could have met and married him. I mean, that was a long time ago and she never knew Will, but my baby sister was my life. If I would have married her off to Will, you know he’s good folk.”

Kal tried to lighten the mood. “But I’m guessing you probably wouldn’t have married her off to Ryan, huh?”

Another of those odd looks she couldn’t comprehend. “Believe me, he wasn’t my first choice, sweetheart.”

Kal picked their favorite restaurant for breakfast. They took their time and didn’t arrive at the office until nearly ten. Apparently, Aidan had told Will their itinerary, because The Great Brooding One wasn’t hovering like a nervous hen at their tardy arrival. In fact, he left to run errands soon after they walked into the office. Purs and Gery departed a few minutes later for a “normal” job, meaning something relating to the production company’s regular schedule and not the Otherworlds show. Kal wasn’t involved in those projects, though. That was Purs and Gery’s bailiwick, while Aidan usually assisted her with her Otherworlds duties.

She worked alone in the office with Aidan. He walked over to her desk and held out his hand. “Come on. I want to show you something.”

Kal had had enough surprises in the past few days to last her one thousand lifetimes. “What?”

He patiently kept his hand extended. She finally stood and took it. He reached for the amulet around his neck and closed his eyes. At first she thought maybe she fainted, because the office dissolved around her and she felt the hard floor change to soft grass beneath her feet. They were now standing in a field—

No. A cemetery.

Aidan released her hand and walked down a row, briefly pausing to get his bearings. Lots of old, huge live oaks shaded most of this section. He glanced back at her. “Well? Are you coming?”

She looked around and followed him, still trying to accept they weren’t in the office anymore. She swallowed to form spit and felt a dry click in her throat. “Where are we going?”

“You’ll see.”

His long legs quickly carried him across the grass. She had to jog to catch up and frequently took several steps to match one of his strides. Eventually it became clear they’d landed, or whatever it was called, in a distant section of the cemetery, apparently far away from the entrance to avoid being seen. Their destination was a huge live oak larger than the others, surrounded by giant azalea bushes that dwarfed her.

A well-worn path through the shrubbery led to a small, private shaded clearing at the base of the tree. When Aidan stepped to the side, Kal saw the marker.

AnnaBelinda Hellenboek—Beloved soul mate.

The date of death a little less than a year before her own birth.

“Who was she?” Kal asked.

Aidan crouched to the side. Fresh, unblemished white roses in the vase at the base of the headstone hadn’t yet wilted in the heat. Aidan made no move to touch them. “Abby.” He looked her in the eyes. “Will’s wife.”

Will’s…wife?
She didn’t even realize he’d been married, much less widowed. It explained a lot. “But—” She looked at the date again as she calculated the math. “It’s been over twenty-five years!” It couldn’t be.

Impossible.

This was turning out to be one humdinger of a Monday.

Aidan pulled up a blade of grass and worked it through his long fingers. “Yep.”

It took her a moment to force the words out. “He doesn’t look…” Her knees weakened. Still staring at the gravestone, Kal dropped to the ground. It finally hit her it was ludicrous to argue about how long Will’s wife had been dead and how young Will looked. Not when they’d talked about archdemons and wraiths and she’d just been teleported from their office in Tampa to—

“Where are we?”

Aidan finished shredding the blade of grass and started on another. “North of Tampa. Almost to Wesley Chapel. This is where Will comes every Wednesday morning, why he’s always in a bad mood that day. He always brings her white roses. They were her favorite.”

“Why Wednesdays?”

“It’s the day Abby died.”

Kal’s mind tried to stitch together what she knew, what reality and science and her faith told her was true, and what stared her smack in the face. Then she remembered the comments about Abby that passed between Will and Ryan back in Atlanta.
So that’s who she was.

“How did she die?” she whispered.

Aidan shifted position on the grass, started on another blade. “She was murdered,” he quietly said. “There was…trouble. Some people trying to get to Will came looking for him and found her. He wasn’t home. They decapitated her.”

Kal fought the urge to retch. “That’s horrible.”

Aidan nodded and looked at the marker. “It killed her immediately. She was the soul mate of the most powerful archdemon in existence. Had they shot or stabbed her, anything like that, we might have been able to save her.”

Admittedly, while Kal understood what was going on, she still struggled to wrap her head around the whole “demons good” memo. “I thought demons were supposed to be evil.”

“That’s because the other side has better PR. To paraphrase one of my favorite songs, religion’s controlled by some real whack jobs.” Aidan lay back, propped on one elbow. “A lot of different beings get lumped into the demon category. The typical evil bastards that gave us all a bad name are the lowest version. They’re not really solid, they’re just energy and can manifest a form, but can easily be destroyed. Then you’ve got things like wraiths that are also mistaken for demons, given the same label by humans, especially priests who like their job security.”

Kal studied him for a moment. “Let’s say for the sake of argument that I do accept this whole crazy situation. What are you, all of you? What do you do?” She caught a whiff of a scent, maybe the flowers, or maybe Aidan was wearing a new cologne. The scent smelled vaguely familiar…

Aidan looked at the grave marker again. “You ever see the movie
Men in Black
?”

“Yeah.”

“Sort of like that, except without the aliens. See, the upstairs folk—and that’s also a misnomer—they don’t really give a rat’s ass what happens here because they don’t live here. They poof around as they see fit. They’re of the air, their own dimension in a way, tied to the Earthly plane of this world. They’re basically the same thing we are, only they do their floaty cloud thing. Just like our water counterparts could care less what we do on dry land. Most bad things don’t care about what happens in clouds or water, they want to stake out turf here on terra firma. We live here. We give a damn if some evil bad thing decides to go batshit and tear up the joint.”

“So Ryan is really the…” She couldn’t make herself say it.

“The Devil?”

She nodded.

Aidan grinned. “Well, theologically speaking, I supposed you could call him that. Again, that’s just PR on the other side’s part. The old myths are closer to the truth. The airheads, they like having people going all goo-goo over them. Like I said, we
live
here. Why would we want to destroy where we live? We’re fighting to keep it together. Cold war super secret shit times a bazillion. We can’t control the weather or natural disasters like televangelists claim. We don’t cause bad things to happen. We try to stop as many of them as we can, what we can. The weather, that kind of stuff, is out of our control. We’re the peacekeepers. We keep bad nasties out and nonhumans from trying to take over the place. We’re not evil, obviously. Geez, Ryan does good to put on matching socks in the morning, trust me.”

Kal smiled, because Aidan was the last person who should criticize anyone’s choice of socks or other clothing considering his horrible taste. That she could still find humor in the situation said something about her, or about Aidan.

“Ryan certainly seemed to plan this well enough,” she countered.

Aidan shrugged. “Ever hear that saying about a hundred monkeys with typewriters eventually pounding out
Macbeth
?”

She nodded.

“He’s one of those monkeys. ‘What’s done is done.’” Aidan frowned. “He fricking got lucky for once.”

She smiled. She never would have pegged Aidan as a Shakespeare kind of guy. “‘Or have we eaten on the insane root, that takes the reason prisoner?’”

He laughed and shook his head. “‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair.’ We could sit here and do this all day, I bet. Old Billy boy had a way with words. He was an original. Damn good writer when he wasn’t drunk off his ass and chasing tail.” He glanced at his watch. “We need to go. Will might be back and wonder where we went. I don’t need him hunting me down and finding us here.” He stood and offered a hand, helping her to her feet. “Look, don’t tell him I brought you here today. Please?”

“Why?”

“Because he’s very private about Abby. He doesn’t want to talk about her. He doesn’t want people butting in. I just wanted you to know he’s not bullshitting you. He’s as upset about this as you are, if not more.”

She bristled and wondered if that was her emotions or the wraith stirring a little early. “Why? Doesn’t he want to sleep with me?”

Aidan turned and met her gaze. “No, he doesn’t. It’s nothing personal, Kal, I keep telling you that. It’s not that he doesn’t like you, because he does.
This
is why he refused to work with women and kept himself closed off. He didn’t want to put himself in a position where he’d meet someone and fall in love. He wanted to die. Another few years without a soul mate, he would have weakened enough that he could have killed himself.”

She stopped in her tracks, stunned. Aidan realized she wasn’t following behind him anymore and turned.

“What? What’s wrong?”