Hellsinger 01 - Fish and Ghosts (P) (MM) (30 page)

“Welcome to my childhood,” Wolf muttered and held on when Tristan tried to pull away. “Don’t go anywhere. I’m here. I’ll take care of you.”

Panic was too mealy of a word to explain the anxiety erupting in Tristan’s chest. His throat began to ache as if remembering the last time he’d been in Winifred’s angry presence, and if he’d been cold before, he was downright chilled to the bone now.

“No… no… no.” He tried to stand up, but his legs weren’t responding. “I did not sign up for this. She tried to fist me… and it was someplace I don’t even have any
holes
! We aren’t even sure this is going to work!”

Meegan was too caught up in what she was doing, but Wolf was there, pulling Tristan in. Turning his chair sideways, he reached for Tristan’s hands. Wolf’s knees bumped against his legs, and Tristan gulped in some air to chase away the frantic sparks threatening to send his fear into a full inferno blaze.

“Mom, stop with the smudging for a fucking minute,” Wolf said calmly over his shoulder. “And come over here and talk to Tris about what the hell you’re up to. Are you sure about Winifred?”

To her credit, Meegan doused the sage in a cup of water she’d left on the reception counter and hurried over to Tristan’s side. Crouching down between him and her son, she closed her hands over their clasped fingers, adding her warmth to their touch. The cheerful, fluttering woman faded, and a seriousness settled over her pretty face, giving it a stern expression reminiscent of her son’s face when he spoke about his work.

“I should have told you what I was planning, Tristan.” Meegan brushed a strand of hair from Tristan’s cheek, tucking it behind his ear. “I’m sorry. I get so wrapped up in what I’m doing… and I guess I already think of you as one of my kids… like you already know what I’m doing because you’ve grown up with it.”

“But I haven’t,” he pleaded softly. “I just thought I was weird. Maybe even nuts. How was I supposed to know you all were crazy out there with me? I’ve never met anyone like me before.”

“Babe, there’s
no one
like you.” Wolf kissed the edge of his mouth. “And yeah, Mom gets a bit crazy sometimes, but I
trust
her to know what she’s doing, even if I don’t always believe in
what
she’s doing.”

“I’m asking you to trust me, then.” Meegan looked up him. “If you decide against this, then we stop. We’ll all go to a hotel that takes dogs and wait for Cin to de-ghost this place. But it might be a couple of weeks until that happens.”

“I don’t want her in here that long,” Tristan admitted slowly. “I want her gone. I want the Grange back to how it used to be. I want my home back. I know that sounds boring—”

“Trust me when I tell you that wanting your home to be a home is
not
boring,” Wolf said with a grin. “She’s outstayed her welcome. How does it go? Fish and guests stink after three days?”

“And ghosts. Them too. Mostly.” Tristan smiled, unable to stop himself from responding to his lover’s slow molasses smirk. Taking a deep breath, he nodded at Meegan. “Okay. Yeah, let’s see if we can get her out. I’m just… fucking scared as shit about what she can do to us.”

“That’s why we’re all here. Together. Wolf and I will keep you safe.” Meegan’s pixyish face brightened. “And I’ve got about ten pounds of salt under the table. We’ll brine that bitch if we have to, but she’s going to be gone. I promise you that, Tristan, if it’s the last thing I ever do.”

“Don’t say that, Mom,” Wolf hissed. “Really. Bad enough he’s got Winnie the Terrible, he doesn’t need you haunting this place up too. He’ll never get any sleep from the guilt, and I’ll never get any sex because you’ll never leave me alone. So yeah, if we fuck this up, Cin’s already on my speed dial.”

“Hah, it’s a pity I didn’t breed a funnier son. Thankfully, you’ve gotten me a new one so I don’t have to put up with the original model’s crap anymore.” Patting Tristan’s leg one last time, Meegan stood up and walked over to the remaining empty chair at the table. Easing into the seat, she reached for Tristan’s hand, clasping it firmly before taking Gidget’s in her other hand. “Okay, kiddies. Let’s rock this down to Electric Avenue.”

Chapter 18

T
RISTAN
HAD
to admit, he was rather disappointed there wasn’t any chanting. At the very least, he’d expected some mystical sounding noises or words. No, instead what he got was Meegan sounding more like she was coaxing a very naughty child to come take a bath with an underscore of Gidget hiccupping loudly because she’d drank her Coke too quickly.

The hiccups were much more entertaining than the beguiling. Gidget had the unfortunate luck of sounding like a pissed off baby pterodactyl when she let loose, and her whole body jerked upward as if she were about to take flight.

Despite the periodic screeching and Wolf’s bemused chuckles, Meegan soldiered on.

After an hour had passed, Tristan’s stomach began to growl nearly as loudly as Gidget’s lovesick Hatzegopteryx calls, and nothing he did shut it up.

His butt was numb, and not in a good way, and when he stole a peek at Matt, he could have sworn the tech was dead asleep with his eyes partially open. Only Wolf’s fingers around Tristan’s hand kept him mostly awake. Well, aroused was more like it, but awake worked too.

When the hell would Wolf touching him
not
make him hard?

Tristan was shifting in his seat, trying to get feeling back into the meat of his ass, when the table jolted slightly.

“You okay?” Wolf whispered under his mother’s pleading.

“Yeah, my ass is just falling asleep.” Tristan frowned. “Why?”

“Felt like you hit the table with your knee or something.” The man’s eyebrows came together when Tristan shook his head. “Maybe it was Gidget. Or Matt kicking in his sleep.”

“That’s not possible. It’s got a thick pedestal leg in the—” Tristan never got to finish explaining how the table couldn’t have been kicked hard enough to move it because he was violently flung back from the wooden edge, his fingers tearing from Wolf’s grasp.

From there, things went blurry for a minute, mostly due to the fact that he was upside down with his cheek to the floor and his ass plastered against the lobby’s curved reception desk. Meegan’s cajoling sounded far away, a fuzzy, distant scolding much like the too-gentle remonstrations his own mother used on a household staff member who’d disappointed her.

Somewhere close by, something wet trickled onto his face, and Tristan sniffed, suddenly realizing he couldn’t quite breathe out of his left nostril. Even more alarming, the something wet appeared to be coming out of his nose and tasted more like blood than the salty, viscous fluid of an overworked sinus.

There also seemed to be a very concerned Wolf crouching over him and trying to straighten him up. Ever helpful, Tristan did what he could, which mainly entailed falling over onto his side like a piece of too-wet fish on a piece of nigiri. The floor was colder than he’d remembered, but it felt good considering his face was too warm from the blood leaking out of it.

“Just let me lie here a bit. I’ll get up later.” He was pretty certain he’d have remembered getting his tongue pierced, but apparently something had happened in between the pterodactyl cries and the table suddenly throwing a fit because his tongue no longer seemed to fit in his mouth properly.

“No, babe. Now.” Wolf was unfairly stronger than he was, especially since Tristan had just committed to lying on the floor when he was summarily lifted up to his feet like a sack of slithering beans. “Come on. Get up. Winifred’s coming.”

The peaceful droning of Meegan’s calm, soothing voice had gone the way of the dodo if the raspy screeching coming from her mouth was any indication of how the séance was going. Winds whipped through the lobby, and Tristan battled to keep on his feet when a gust nearly knocked him back into Wolf.

When he finally stood up, Tristan was horrified at what he saw. The Hoxne Grange he’d loved and dedicated his life to was gone, and in its place a mouth to some sort of hell had opened, allowing a host of fanged and winged shadows to pour out of its inky depths and into the heart of the manor.

Right in the middle of it, a partially formed Winifred stood with her arms up and her lips peeled back in a keening wail, exhorting the shadows to rise up as if she were a three-foot-tall mouse in a star-embellished magician’s hat and the darkness were her brooms.

And Winifred looked a damned sight more scary than anything the Kingdom of the Mouse could
ever
have come up with. Especially when she turned her soulless gaze at them and scowled.

It was difficult to reconcile the slightly moon-faced technician as having come from the skeletal from filling out in front of him, especially when the flickering candlelight seemed to be swallowed up by her shape, sucking away any bit of glow from the air around her. Nothing of Matt’s nearly constantly smiling face showed in the woman’s thickening features, her skin forming slowly around her long, crooked teeth.

The sands scattered about the floor seemed to be feeding her manifestation. The grains were caught in swirling devils, adding to Winifred’s long body, and she stretched out, her heavy, rough skirts flowing down her hips and dragging on the floor. Tristan blinked, trying to shake off the fuzziness in his vision, but it was doing him no good.

Gone was the see-through essence of the transient spirits he’d known all of his life. While she was definitely less alive-looking than the guests arriving at the Grange, their faded blue-gray forms solid to his vision but elusive to the touch, Winifred was certainly solid enough. Or would be once the sands and debris in the lobby were sucked up into her presence.

There was no mistaking the ghost for a living woman. All signs of life were bleached from her skin, and her flesh hung sloppily from her bones, waves of nearly translucent folds swaying to and fro every time she moved. Her jaw worked back and forth as she turned, misshapen either by time or circumstance, but the bone didn’t appear to be solid enough to keep her tongue in because it slithered up and around her lips, sliding out to dangle over her chin until she pulled it back in with a slurping curl.

A stench preceded Winifred’s form, something dark and musty layered with a tart foulness, more regurgitated spoiled milk than anything sulfurous. Her feet were bare, gnarled, stick-like things she toddled on as she took her first step into the human world in what must have been over a hundred years.

Her head hung at an odd angle, as if the weight were too unfamiliar, too unwieldy for her neck to handle, and the specter jerked as she took another step, her joints clattering with the effort to coordinate her movements. There was something odd about her limbs, and Tristan wondered how hard he’d hit the desk, because they seemed to… move… undulate, really, a fluid motion at total odds with the twitch and shudder of her knees and elbows.

“Shit, this is the last time I agree to call up a ghost,” Tristan muttered, grateful for Wolf’s hands on his hips. “Her arms… they keep bobbing up and down. Like she’s Doc Reed or something.”

“Yeah, Mom and I are going to have a fucking discussion once we get out of this shit,” Wolf agreed. “Now come on, babe. Move.”

For some reason, the pounding at the back of his head began to really catch his attention. His eyes felt like they were about to pop out from the throbbing behind them, but still, he couldn’t really close them. He needed his eyes if he was going to see what Winifred was up to.

“Can’t move, Wolf,” he blurted out. “If we move, she’ll see us. Don’t they hunt by sight?”

It was nonsense, but it was all he could find operating in his brain at the moment, and it was enough to make Wolf smile.

Apparently, Winifred disapproved of humor, because the black orbs in her eye sockets latched onto them, and suddenly Tristan wondered if the woman was actually descended from a T-Rex.

Catching the dead woman’s attention was possibly the worst thing he’d ever imagined could happen to him, because the instant her eyes found him, every speck of smoky, howling shadow in the Grange’s lobby came gunning straight for him. There was nowhere to run, certainly nowhere to hide, despite Wolf’s insistence that he somehow curl up behind the man’s large body. Winifred had Tristan in her sights, and she wasn’t going to let him slip away.

The misting shadows buffeted him, pushing him into the side of the reception desk, and Tristan fought to keep his ground. Grabbing at Wolf’s arm, he used the man’s larger body to steady himself. He’d taken a few steps along the curve of the desk when Wolf started shouting something at him, something he couldn’t hear through the whooshing of the shadows pushing past them. The ghost was a few yards away and moving slowly. They had to get out of the lobby, or at least take some shelter and regroup.

Looking around, he spotted Gidget and Matt cowering behind the upended massive table. A small trickle of blood spackled Gidget’s forehead, but for the most part, other than fear, they seemed to be fine. Meegan, however, was a different story. She stood in the middle of it, an avenging paisley and brightly hued angel, chanting through the screaming winds to extol the ghost to behave.