Must Love Ghosts (Banshee Creek Book 1) (11 page)

His voice was bleak, and Abby instantly regretted starting this conversation. She had one friend who'd had a tragic accident and survived it. But how many friends had Mike lost, or seen crippled? She knew of at least one.

Cole.

She shied away from the thought. Zach, they were talking about Zach.

"You can tell when someone's gonna make it," Mike said firmly, shaking off his gloom. "Zach's one of those people."

"Really?" she asked, feeling a spark of hope.

"Yep. He's looking forward, not back. Although," he pondered, frowning thoughtfully. "He really shouldn't be driving that truck."

That made her laugh.
 

"Right, he should sell it to you, right?"

"Yes," Mike said, joining in her laughter. "He totally should."

She smiled at him and took a bite of pizza. It was spicy and delicious.
 

Mike, however, stared at the pizza slice on his plate. He took a cautious sniff, turned the plate around, and squinted at the crust.
 

"What's wrong?" she asked.

"This looks... different." His voice oozed disappointment.

"It
is
different. It's Argentinean pizza. Take one bite. You'll love it."

"This doesn't look like pepperoni," he said.
 

"It's chorizo," she replied. "And it's
better
than pepperoni."

Mike looked doubtful and who could blame him? "Better than pepperoni" set the bar pretty high.

"C'mon," she crooned. "Give it a try. Mr. Franco's special sauce is amazing."

He grimaced but picked up the slice and took a small, cautious, bite.

Abby waited. This wouldn't take long.

"Wow," Mike said, taking another bite. "This is amazing. Maybe he
should
expand that pizzeria."

And that was the last thing he said for a long while. Abby smiled and set down to devour the pizza in reverent silence. A Franco pizza dinner was not conducive to social intercourse, the pizza was simply too good. It was an immersive culinary experience.

After she'd happily ingested the last bite of delicious crust, she reached for the bag of donuts.

But her companion snatched it first.

"Hey," she said, stretching her hand. "Those are mine. Get your own donuts."

"There's a whole bag," Mike replied, trying to pull the bag out of her reach. But he was too slow. She snatched it out of his hands and sat back down, cradling her warm, cinnamony prize.

"Right," she said. "Half for tonight, and half for tomorrow morning."

He looked at the bag, looking as if he was trying to gauge its holding capacity. He did not seem pleased by the results of his assessment.

"You know," he drawled. "I run in the morning. I could, conceivably, drop by the bakery and pick up hot donuts."
 

"What time? Patricia runs out of donuts pretty early."

His eyes narrowed. "I'm an early riser, you know that."

"Ha," she scoffed. "How early? You have no idea how far people will go for hot apple cider donuts."

"Really early." He extended his hand for a donut. "Deal?"

Abby considered it. She knew Mike's schedule like the back of her hand and he really was an early bird. Moreover, he had provided her with multiple orgasms,
extremely
high quality orgasms at that. That had to be worth something, right?

Sure.

But was it worth a full donut?

She opened the bag, took out a powdery treat—damn, today was rum-glaze-with-cinnamon-sugar day—and grudgingly handed it over.

Multiple orgasms were worth one rum-glaze-with-cinnamon-sugar donut.

But just one.
 

She savored her donut slowly, enjoying every single spicy, sticky bite. Delicious. This night was perfect—sex, pizza and apple cider donuts. She had to savor it slowly. It simply didn't get any better than this.

Mike, however, ate his donut in one bite.
 

Amateur. Should she reward his impulsive behavior with another donut? She pondered the pros and cons lazily.
 

A loud bang, sounding very much like a gunshot, interrupted her reverie.

"What the hell is that?" Mike asked, practically leaping out of his chair.
 

Abby ignored the noise and continued eating her donut. But Mike ran to the window and looked out. He looked really worried.

"Don't worry," she said, trying to reassure him. "It's not a gun. It's probably just a car backfiring. I don't know if you've noticed, but we have a lot of old cars in Banshee Creek."

That was one part Rafe Ortega's shop and one part the crappy local economy. But the end result was the same—loud explosions were pretty common in this town.
 

"I know it's not a gun, Abby," Mike replied crossly, looking out into the street. "I know what a gun sounds like."
 

Abby crept up behind him, trying to peer out the window. Unfortunately, his rather large shoulders blocked the way. She couldn't see a thing.

"This is something much worse," he said darkly.

She stood on tiptoe, expecting to see an elderly vehicle with an incendiary muffler. But she didn't see a car, just a large group of people in costumes, milling around, and looking up at the skies. Another loud bang rang out and a group of girls in Sailor Moon cheered loudly.
 

Mike's face was grim.

"I think your friend Caine found some fireworks."

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTEEN

"C
LOSED
UNTIL
Further Notice."

Mike smiled as he read the pink and orange sign hung on the door of the Banshee Creek Bakery. A sticky note with a large smiley face taped to the bottom explained that the shop "will reopen at nine today, after a good night's sleep."
 

The Halloween party had exhausted Banshee Creek and the bakery was not the only shop that was closed. Everything was shuttered, the pizza place, the Chinese restaurant, the library. The place looked like a ghost town.

He chuckled. The place
was
a ghost town, after all.

The only signs of life were the sanitation workers, busy hauling bags of trash into their truck and the guy from Virginia Vintage Motors, who was working on a Tang-colored Honda del Sol.
 

The black Wrangler was still in the lot, sitting in a corner like a puppy waiting for a new home. But Mike turned away from the metal-clad succubus. He didn't need a souped-up Jeep with a customized motor, no matter how gorgeous it was. He needed a sensible car, something reliable with good gas mileage.
 

Something solid. Something dependable.

Something that didn't have eighteen-inch rims.

He turned resolutely away from the car lot. It was a gorgeous fall morning, perfect for running. The air was cool and crisp, and he could get a couple of miles under his belt before the bakery opened. He'd planned to pick up some donuts, drop them by Abby's house and go for a run after, but the closed bakery mandated a change of plans. He'd go for a run first, then pick up the donuts.
 

And he'd avoid the car lot like the plague.

He set off down Main Street at a steady pace, checking Abby's house as he passed Hooded Owl Road. It was dark and quiet. Abby, like most of the town, probably wouldn't get up until noon.
 

He kept running, increasing his speed, and Main Street quickly turned into Stuckeyville Parkway. Damn, this town was small, but Stuckeyville was gorgeous, a long, winding road flanked by well-kept farms, with the occasional horse or cow to break up the landscape. In less than thirty minutes, he'd already counted half-a-dozen abandoned silos. That was the likely explanation for the barn owl epidemic. No wonder the town was called Banshee Creek, there must be hundreds of screeching owls in the area.

But it wasn't a bad place for settling down. He could tell why Abby liked it here. She'd found a good community where people looked out for one another. True, they were also looking for supernatural critters, but, hey, no one was perfect, right?
 

He could come up with another reason why Abby would stay in Banshee Creek, but he didn't want to think about that. He picked up speed and ran until he hit a highway, then turned around. This was a tougher run because he was now jogging uphill. It was going to take him longer to return to town.

Which was good because he wasn't looking forward to getting back to town.
 

Oh, he wanted to get back to Abby. That wasn't the problem. He was dying to get back home and argue with her about donuts, or about organizing her music sheets, or about the mythical gremlin that supposedly lived in her attic and turned off the breakers whenever she sang a D flat.

He wanted to do all those things, and he wanted to do them for a very long time. He finally had the girl of his dreams, the question was, could he keep her?

He very much doubted it. He'd never been good at long assignments. A childhood spent moving from home to home with all your belongings in an old plastic bag wasn't conducive to long-term planning, which, come to think of it, was something Abby should understand. After all, his first conversation with Abby had turned into an in-depth discussion of the eternal cardboard box vs. plastic bag dilemma. Abby was a staunch box fan, not surprising for someone whose most precious possession was a secondhand guitar covered in My Little Pony stickers.

So where did that leave him? Nowhere.

Nowhere with something he still had to do, a delivery he should have done when he'd first arrived. He'd failed in his duty. He'd gotten distracted.
 

No, that wasn't quite it. He'd
wanted
to be distracted. He'd
embraced
the distraction.

And now he was in big trouble. His easy-peasy, just-get-it-done delivery was now awkward as hell.

Awkward and dangerous.

He finally had a chance with Abby, a real chance. But the tiny package carefully stowed in the front pocket of his duffle bag could destroy that.

He made the run last as long as he could, including an unscheduled detour to check out a couple of silos, but all good things have to end and his run was no exception. In short order, he found himself back on Main Street jogging toward Lavender House.

The house looked less spooky in the early morning light. Or maybe it was the half-torn party banner hanging from a window and the eclectic collection of cans and bottles that littered the porch, not to mention the large signs on the porch that read "Mothman Rules" and "Virginia Welcomes Its New Alien Overlord." The place looked more like an eccentric frat house the morning after freshman rush, Gamma Warlock Gamma or Phantom Omega.

A dark shape crossed the porch, triggering Mike's suspicions. The town was empty, everyone was fast asleep, and the house was locked up for the day. Who was wandering around Lavender House?

He crossed the street and neared the house, but he didn't see anything. He walked around the yard, stepping carefully around the discarded cans.
 

Nothing.
 

A gust of wind made him shiver. He was about to turn back towards the street when he noticed a shadowy figure suspended from a tree branch.

He crept closer, trying to get a better look. The figure swayed, the bulbous top and limb-like tendril giving it an eerie resemblance to a hanging body.
 

He held his breath and walked boldly up to the tree. He peered through the leaves and immediately sighed with relief.

It was just a doll, a Mothman dummy. Someone had dressed up a beach ball in a black cloak and decorated it with cardboard wings and cellophane red eyes. The final touch was a red t-shirt bearing the legend "I *heart* Virginia."

He squinted at the tree, trying to figure out how to take down the dummy. It looked like a good knot. He'd probably need a knife or—

A metallic rustling sound made him jump. He spun around, instantly alert.

Nothing.

Just a couple of cans on the ground.
 

He heard the noise again, this time closer to the house. He walked toward the front of the house, straining to hear.

Nothing, just a party banner rustling in the breeze.

He was about to return to the backyard when he felt something hit him on the back of the head. He turned and a crumbled up beer can bounced off his shoulder and onto the grass.

He looked up and found Caine standing on the porch with a trash bag full of empty cans. He was still dressed in the same jeans and leather vest that he'd worn last night.

The biker laughed.

"Not as much of a skeptic as you'd like to pretend, uh?" Caine said, chuckling. His voice had the telltale rasp of a long night spent drinking and—here Mike's imagination failed. He had no idea what the rugged biker did for fun. Chase UFO's with his biker posse?

"Very funny," he replied, and focused on looking for the mysterious figure. But the morning was still and quiet and Caine seemed to be alone.

"What are you doing up so early?" Caine asked. "Running?"

His tone was accusatory and Mike guessed that Banshee Creek wasn't big on fitness regimes.

"Running," Mike admitted. "And, er, donuts."

That seemed to pacify Caine. "Ah, yes, Abby's special craving. Patricia should be opening up soon."

 
"Yeah, I hope so," Mike said, gesturing toward the figure swinging in the breeze. "That was some party last night. I guess people are excited about the owl guy."

"Mothman." Caine threw a bottle in his bag. "He's called the Mothman."
 

Mike decided not to argue. Instead, he bent down to pick up a pair of cider bottles and walked up to the porch to throw them in the trash bag.

"And tonight," Caine continued, offering the open bag, "I'm going to prove that it's not an owl. Are you coming?"

"Coming where?" Mike threw the bottles in the bag.

"Didn't Abby tell you? To Mothman Mountain, of course."

Mike frowned in confusion. "The monster hasn't been here a week," he said. "How can it already have its own mountain?"