Night Huntress 07 - This Side of the Grave (20 page)

To my dismay, the first two people I saw
when I came upstairs later were Mencheres and Kira. They sat next to each other in what I guessed was the living room, my cat sedately curled in Kira’s lap.

Both of them looked up, so it was too late for me to run. For once, I was grateful for Mencheres’s trademark stoicism as I met his impenetrable expression. If he’d waggled his eyebrows knowingly, or crossed his wrists in a mime of bondage, I might have jumped right out the nearest window.

“Let me say right off that if I could avoid you two for the next decade, I would,” I got out in a rush. “But since I can’t indulge in a little modesty-salvaging me time right now, I’ll just offer my sincerest apologies and hope we never mention what happened again. In fact, you know that amnesia spell you put on me when I was sixteen, Mencheres? I’d love another one.”

“You erased her memory when she was a teenager?” Kira asked in surprise.

“That’s a story for another time,” he smoothly answered her before turning that charcoal gaze back to me. “Unfortunately, Cat, my ability to erase your memory was predicated on your half-human status. Vampire memories can’t be altered.
At least, not that I’m aware of.”

“Just my luck,” I muttered. “Well, then let’s go with Plan A: Pretend it never happened.”

“Pretend what never happened?” Kira replied with deliberate emphasis even as she gave me a purposefully blank look.

I flashed
her a
grateful smile.
“Exactly.”

Something hazy caught the corner of my eye. I turned to see Fabian floating in the doorway, watching me with a mixture of happiness and wariness.

“Hey,” I said in surprise. “Aren’t you supposed to be with Dave? He’s not here, too, is he?”

“He’s still in Ohio.” Fabian came nearer, almost twitching in either excitement or agitation. “Are you well, Cat? Can I… do anything for you?”

There went that tingling in my cheeks again before I reminded myself that Fabian couldn’t mean anything suggestive by his question. He wasn’t
solid
, which was a definite requirement for what I’d needed before, my smutty lack of preference as to who provided it notwithstanding.

“I’m fine,” I said, trying to cover my lingering embarrassment with a businesslike mentality. “But why’d you leave Dave? Did something happen?” Maybe Dave had to stop trying to infiltrate
Apollyon’s
ghouls because of something going on with Don or the team?

Fabian seemed to shift uncomfortably even though his feet didn’t touch the floor. “I thought you needed me,” he mumbled. “So I found you. Dave still hadn’t come across the ghouls and it seemed okay to leave him—”

“What do you mean, you found me?” I interrupted, trying to make my voice calm instead of accusing. Fabian already looked like he might burst into tears, if that was even possible for a ghost. Still, if anything had happened to Dave because he hadn’t been able to send Fabian for help…

“He means you seem to be a spook magnet now,” Bones supplied, coming into the room. “Dozens of ghosts followed you from New Orleans to
Tepesh’s
and then even here. I suspect Mencheres has been sending them away lately, or you’d have woken up with some perched next to you in the cell below.”

Mencheres gave a concurring shrug even as Fabian looked more miserable. “So you just… found your way to me with no one telling you where I was?” I asked the ghost in disbelief.

He
nodded,
almost boyish in his dejection despite the fact that Fabian had been forty-five when he died. “Don’t be angry. Dave tried to call you but it went to voice mail, and I just
felt
like you were reaching out to me. I rode a few ley lines, not sure where I was going, but somehow I ended up here.”

Ley lines
.
Spook highways, Bones had called them once. I still didn’t fully understand how they worked, but I knew ghosts used them to get places very fast because they contained some sort of magnetic energy they could ride on. Like bullet trains for the dead, but invisible.

And these ley lines had led Fabian to me because he felt like I was “reaching out” to him. Him, and a bunch of other ghosts, from what Bones had said. Marie’s blood was the gift that kept on giving, it seemed, and each new revelation about its effects only mired me deeper into trouble.

If I’m a ghost magnet, it won’t take long before more than ghosts find me
, I thought with dismay. Aside from how I didn’t like that some of them might be Marie’s spies, this presented another problem, too. For the lethal cadre of ghouls out to stop
Apollyon
by killing me before tensions reached a boiling point, I’d just made myself a much easier target. Nothing said, “She’s over here!” quite like a line of ghosts following after me wherever I went.

“Fabian, I’m not mad at you,” I said in a soothing way, because he was flitting around in obvious agitation and it
hadn’t
been his fault. How could he know I now had the ghostly version of a dog whistle going off in my veins? “But I’m going to need your help. Are those other ghosts still nearby now?”

He glanced at the windows, which, due to the glare from the lights inside and the darkness outside, were harder for me to see through.
Especially since I was looking for people who were transparent, anyway.

“Yes.”

And being so close, they could hear everything I said. No
point
in having Fabian relay a message for me.

“
Alrighty
, then…” I sighed, leaving the room to look for the front door. After living with Fabian for almost a year, I knew that showing ghosts the same respect I’d show a living—or undead—person went a long way toward winning brownie points with a species that was routinely ignored.

Bones followed me, pointing to the left with a resigned look on his face. At least he didn’t argue about what he’d obviously guessed I was about to do. I went out the front door and saw the many diaphanous forms twirling around the trees at the end of the driveway. I couldn’t see any other houses nearby, but having been in several of Mencheres’s homes, I recognized this as one of his typical, large, off-the-beaten-path locations. In fact, with the steep hills, occasional rocks jutting through the landscape, and woods nearby, it reminded me of my home in the Blue Ridge. Like Bones and I, Mencheres didn’t want to increase his chances of having nosy neighbors get in on his business.

“Hi,” I said to the group. A flurry of activity commenced as at least two dozen hazy apparitions stopped what they were doing and zoomed over to the front porch, hovering around it like the coolest Halloween decorations ever. I was amazed at the range of eras the ghosts represented, like a snapshot of history in a glance. Out of outfits I could recognize, I saw one had on what looked like a Union army uniform while another wore Confederate gray and saffron. One was shirtless with buckskin leggings, another was a woman in full Victorian gear, two wore sailors’ gear, another was in a twenties flapper dress, a few looked straight out of a fifties movie, and a few more might have been cowboys. Only two looked like they were from my time, judging from the cut and style of their clothes.

All we need is some spooky music, a full moon, and a few bats for this to be perfect
, I thought irreverently.

“Hi,” I repeated, trying to meet each ghostly gaze at least once so they’d all feel included in my speech. “My friend Fabian tells me that some of you might have just… ended up here even though you’re not sure why or how,” I went on. “Normally I’d say that’s fine. The more the merrier, but I’ve got some stuff going on that makes you guys hanging out, um, potentially problematic for me.”

I was starting to doubt the wisdom behind this idea, seeing some of the ghosts exchange confused glances with each other. Fabian rested his hand over mine, the outline of his nonexistent flesh merging with my skin in the closest he could come to an encouraging pat. I squared my shoulders. I’d come this far, might as well plunge ahead and see if the power I hadn’t wanted to absorb from Marie could be used to help me now.

“So while I’d love to see you all again in the future, right now, I need you guys to
go
,” I said, putting force into the words to make them more than a request. “Please don’t follow me, even if you feel like you should. I also need you not to repeat anything I just said, or anything that you might have overheard before. I know you’ll do this for me, because ghosts are an honorable species, and—” Oh crap, I was just babbling now, and this wasn’t working. None of them even moved. “—and it would really help me out,” I finished lamely.

Ghost Whisperer, my ass
, an inner voice seemed to mock me.

Nothing but silence from the
spectres
.
Silence,
and complete immobility. My hopes sank. Whatever I’d absorbed from Marie’s power over the dead, it didn’t appear to be the ability to make ghosts leave if they didn’t want to. Either I didn’t know how to channel her powers properly when it came to regular spooks versus Remnants, or maybe there was a special code word she knew that I didn’t—

All at once, the ghosts simply vanished into thin air. I’d seen Fabian do the same several times, but it looked a lot more eerie when it was dozens of them dematerializing simultaneously. Even their energy faded from the air, leaving behind only the soft caress of the evening breeze to waft along my skin.

“
Quite impressive,” Bones said from
behind me.

I turned around to smile at him, relieved that it worked, only to notice that Fabian, too, was now gone.

“Fabian!” I exclaimed.

He materialized in front of me moments later, an expectant look on his face.

“What can I do for you?”

Guilt stabbed through me. If he was making that offer of his own free will, it would be fine, but Marie’s blood changed the balance between us. Friends shouldn’t be able to compel their friends into doing things whether they wanted to or not.

“Fabian, you don’t
have
to do anything for me,” I told him. “You can make up your own mind about what you want to do or not do.”

“Whatever you say,” he replied, still looking at me expectantly.

A stifled snort came from Bones. Okay, so this wasn’t as easy as it looked. Damn Marie for making me
drink
her voodoo juju blood.

“I order you to do only what you want to do,” I tried again, more strongly this time.

Now a slight frown stitched between his brows. “I’ve made you angry. Tell me what to do to make you happy again.”

I threw up my hands even as
Bones’s
snort became a full-blown laugh. “Kitten, I’m sure there’s a way to fix this in the future, but right now, we’ve more pressing concerns,” he said once he’d controlled his chuckles. “Ask our mate what can help repel ghosts. Can’t have you stopping to do that same speech every few hours, and while New Orleans might be one of the world’s most haunted cities, it’s not the home of
every
spook on the planet.”

I shook off my guilt and frustration over Fabian’s sudden lack of willpower enough to absorb
Bones’s
point. New Orleans did have an unusually high ghost population, which I’d always attributed to its history of disease, war, malaria, natural disasters, and native predators. But Bones was right. If Marie’s blood called to ghosts—and obviously it did, judging from my new popularity with the living-impaired—then the Big Easy should have tons more spooks than it did. Here’s hoping the dampener to Marie’s spectral siren song wasn’t just a natural geographical perk, like an overabundance of alligators. That would be cause for even more notice than a huge posse of ghosts trailing me everywhere.

Even though Fabian would have heard Bones, he didn’t offer up any information on the topic.
Just continued to look at me with an eager expression.
I sighed, thinking Ghost Dominatrix probably fit me better than Ghost Whisperer with my new condition.

“Fabian, if I wanted to try to keep ghosts from following me everywhere, what could I use?”

He looked worried. “You want to get rid of me?”

“No, of course not,” I replied, mentally cursing Marie once more. “You’ll always have a home with us; I told you that. This is only for a short time until the situation with
Apollyon
is fixed. You need to get back to Dave in the meantime, anyway. He’s in danger without you.”

I assuaged my conscience by reminding myself that Fabian had agreed to accompany Dave before, when he had control over his own actions. This wasn’t ordering him to do something against his will; it was just sticking to the plan.

I still felt like a heel.

“Ah, I understand,” Fabian said, smiling again as he stroked one of his sideburns in contemplation. “I can think of two things that, when combined, are hard for many ghosts to be near because they make the air feel bad. One of those is garlic. Not just a few cloves, but many.”

My mouth sagged at the irony. The plant most fabled to repel vampires was actually part of a
ghost’s
kryptonite?

“The other is the plant some people smoke,” Fabian went on. “When large quantities of that and garlic are present in close proximity, most ghosts can barely stand to be near it.”