Duck Duck Ghost (14 page)

“No, for a phone call,” he grumbled and rubbed his face.

“Not to sound like a cliché, but who are you going to call?”

“The one person with mojo in the family that I
know
will come help me.” Wolf gave his cousin a hooded glance. “I’m going to call Cin, and I hope to God he’s someplace nearby.”

S
TEPPING
OVER
the bin filled with shattered doll heads he’d pulled away from Tristan’s sleeping form, Wolf sat down on one of the living room couches. He’d gone upstairs to check on his lover, making sure to leave a thick line of rock salt along the sills and across the doorway before he came back down. Fatigue trailed after him, running to catch up with his bones and seizing him every so often, like a game of tag he’d never win. His skin even felt tired, and Wolf wondered what had happened to his orderly world and why he never wanted to go back to it.

Tristan.

Damn it, his life had been perfectly fine before Tristan Pryce, but fine wasn’t how he’d ever wanted to live. Growing up as a Kincaid, he’d learned to despise pedestrian and safe, but there he’d been, resting on laurels while chasing after a nebulous dream.

“But am I using him?” Wolf played with his phone, turning it over in his hands. “Shit and hell. What the fuck am I going to do?”

He’d spent his career searching for viable, documentable paranormal activity, and now he had a lover who pretty much called ghosts out to play everywhere he went. Sey was talking to someone outside, but he tuned everything out except what he needed to say to Cin.

His slightly older cousin had been born cool; Wolf was sure of it. Stronger willed than any of the bossy women who ran the family, Cin soaked up every bit of Hellsinger knowledge offered to him, strapped on his own brand of raising Cain, and headed off to the world to fight demons—his own and others’.

But would he be willing to fight Wolf’s demons as well? Wolf stared at his phone, wondering if his big bad cousin would cross very firmly drawn family lines and come to his rescue.

“Only one way to find out,” he scolded himself. Then he made the hardest call he’d ever had to make in his life.

“’Lo?” Cin picked up before the first ring even faded from Wolf’s ear, and the man’s rough, deep voice sounded dragged down with sleep. “That you, Wolf? What fucking time is it? Where the fuck are you?”

“I’m at Sey’s.” He wasn’t going to waste time with formalities. “And I need you here, Cin, if you can.”

“What’s up?” Cin’s sleepiness was gone, and Wolf imagined, by the sounds coming through the phone, Cin was up out of bed and shoving things into a duffel bag. “Whatcha need?”

“I need a Hellsinger, man.” Wolf took a deep breath, breaking a vow he’d made to himself decades ago. “And I need you to teach me how to be one.”

T
HERE
WAS
salt across the doorway to the small room off the back porch entrance, and Tristan was very careful not to break the line as he stepped across the threshold. Elsewhere in the cavernous house, voices bounced back and forth as Wolf and Sey wasted their breath trying to convince Gildy to relocate to another relative’s house until they could dislodge the spirit haunting the former inn.

Gildy, much like he had himself, pretty much found different ways of telling them both to fuck off.

The tiny room glittered where the sun hit its salted sills, small prisms kicking up through the open lace curtains hanging on either side of the room’s wide windows. Even with the wraparound porch’s overhang, the sun seemed determined to reach into the space, lighting up a sea of dust motes hanging in the still air.

Like much of the house, the room was thick with paint and steeped in history. The walls were aged, whispering to Tristan of past conversations and liaisons. His imagination ran with the possibilities of what could have happened in the tucked-away room at the back of the former inn. Had someone slept here and dreamed of bigger things? Or had it been a place to shove the debris of others’ lives?

Whatever purpose the room might have once had, Sey used it to store fabrics and a few pieces of furniture too heavy to lug up to the attic—including a deep-seated, battered antique divan upholstered in an ugly mustard jacquard they’d been all too happy to cover with a sheet.

They’d piled all of the dolls’ parts on one end of the divan, carefully arranged so everything could be gone over at a later time. For Tristan, that time was now, especially since the other two were busy fighting a losing battle with an old woman barely tall enough to ride a car in Autopia.

“Okay, Tristan, let’s see what we can find out about this stuff here. Maybe something’s written on one of them.” He rolled his eyes at the thought. “Right, because this is just an episode of
Angel
, and everything I need to know about this week’s episode, I’ll find written on the back of a doll’s head.”

Frowning, he took a step across the wood floor, pausing when it creaked beneath him. But after finding out Wolf’s mother copied what they needed to banish the Grange’s malicious spirit from a book marked Banishments and Curses, for all he knew, the back of a doll’s head was exactly where he needed to look.

“Stranger shit has happened,” he muttered, remembering his epic battle with Winifred’s rogue tongue. “Hell, I’ve been some of that stranger shit.”

He didn’t know what he was going to find, but it gave him something to do other than fret.

Not wanting to sit on the bed with the doll bits, he grabbed a high-backed wooden chair and dragged it over to the edge of the sofa. Pressing his knees into the beaten-up cushions, Tristan reached for the largest piece, a doll head, nearly perfect except for the large
Y
shaped crack across its cheek and ear.

It was old. He didn’t need anyone to tell him that. The doll’s eyeless sockets were chipped on the edges, and it felt gritty in his hand, a fine powder clinging to his fingers when he rolled it around on his palm. Tristan couldn’t imagine the delicate, tangerine-sized head would have been able to stand up to the rigors of a little girl’s playing.

But then, he reasoned, the only experience he’d had with little girls were the ones who punched and teased him in elementary school—a particularly vicious breed of child only found in the hallowed halls of an educational institution.

It was a standard head, or so he imagined. The glue marks along its skull hinted it might have had hair at some point, but he couldn’t make out the color of its wig. Faint lines of paint clung to the creases in its lips and ears, dark smudges on its crumbling gray face.

“Okay, remember, I have no idea what I’m doing here, so be gentle,” he told the doll head. “Supposedly a medium can see things when they touch something. Let’s see if that actually works.”

Cupping the doll head in both hands, Tristan stared into its emptied eyes, reaching down into himself and closing out any stray thoughts he might have.

He lasted about thirty seconds before his brain tickled back with a question about what kind of cookies Sey might have in her kitchen.

“Oatmeal, I think, mister. Maybe some of those cinnamon chocolate ones she makes sometimes.”

A deep voice behind him startled Tristan, and he dropped the doll head. It seemed to bounce off his fingers as he tried to catch it, but the head was determined to die, and it continued its deathly descent, arching almost gleefully to hit the floor. It shattered, breaking into tiny bits and powder, with only a single forlorn ear left of its existence.

“What the fuck?” Tristan turned, the chair scraping on the floor as he shoved it back.

He could see through the young black man. Filmy and translucent, the man was broad and thick-bodied, sporting a short bristle cut over his square head. Although shorter than Tristan, he appeared to loom in the room, his ghostly overalls sticky with viscera and mud. Despite the nearly bestial jut of his features, the man’s eyes were soft and his movements were gentle, as if he would take special care with anything he touched.

“Sir?” The man was younger than Tristan initially thought. “Are you okay? I can get the missus if you want me to.”

Although muscular to the point of massive, his downy cheeks and faint mustache put him barely at the dusk of adolescence. The button-up shirt he wore under his overalls was worn at the collar, and he’d rolled the cuffs up to expose his thick forearms. His hands were scarred, and his knuckles were barked with small cuts, bled dark over his ghostly pale flesh. Heavy work boots left a trail of faint muddy prints behind when he walked toward Tristan, but they faded after a few seconds.

He followed Tristan’s gaze to the floor, and a horrified look transformed his rugged face from Samarian to ashamed teenager. “Gawd, Mrs. Kincaid’s sure to lose her head if she sees me tracking mud across her floors. Can’t graduate without a head. Where’ll they put that hat?”

“Wait!” Tristan stood and, without thinking, reached for the young man’s arm when he turned to leave. His hand passed right through the specter’s bicep, but the ghost didn’t seem to notice. Instead, he paused and looked curiously back at Tristan. “Promise I won’t tell anyone you left the mud behind.”

“She’ll know,” the young man said in his soft rumble. “It’s because she’s a mom. My mom always knows. But she pays good, and she don’t mind me coming after classes. The missus wants me to graduate college. Says it’s as important as me playing ball. Football’s a heck of a lot easier than engineering, but I like knowing how things work more than I like taking other guys apart.”

“What’s your name?” Tristan knew he had to seize the ghost before he whispered away. The young man didn’t seem like a repeater, not with as much as he interacted. Maybe someone more like the Grange’s Old London Cook, a spirit tied to caring for others in the afterlife.

“Raymond, but most people call me Raygun or Ray.” He shrugged. “They say I kind of look like Flash Gordon—well, if he were a black man from the valley. I don’t think so, but it makes my ma smile, so I don’t mind.”

“Can I ask you a few things?” Dusting off his palms, Tristan saw the ghost flicker momentarily. “Shit, that’s what’s keeping you here. That doll head.”

Bending down, he tamped his hands into the head’s gritty remains and focused on the young man in front of him. Raygun was definitely clearer. The denim of his overalls gleamed a faint blue, and his crew cut had a definite silky sheen to it.

“Whatcha need to ask? Because I’ve got to get my work done soon. We’re taking the bus up to San Francisco this evening. Going to be playing Bowling Green State out in Ohio the day after next.” He cracked his knuckles, an ominous sound despite his cherubic smile. “Gonna whip some Toledo butt. Show them Cal Poly Mustangs are something to be reckoned with.”

If Raygun was a specialized repeater like Cook, Tristan was hoping he’d retain some memory of the other ghosts in the area who were around while he was haunting.

“Have you seen a little girl around here lately?” he ventured softly, only partially relieved when the young man’s expression turned to one of sheer terror. Nodding, Tristan reassured him with a gentle tone. “Yeah, I got that from her too. Why don’t you tell me everything you know?”

“I’
M
NOT
going anywhere,” Gildy insisted.

She’d come out of her room dressed for battle in khaki cargo pants too long for her short legs and a flowery pink bathing cap. After stomping past the cousins, she sat down at the kitchen table with a pair of scissors and began to hack off the ends of her pants to make them fit. The rubbery flowers on her cap bobbed as she moved, distracting Wolf as he tried to reason with her.

Unfortunately, he’d come too close to the woman, and her bad habit of gesturing with her hands as she spoke ended up with Wolf gaining a shallow stab wound in his side and Gildy’s sorry-not-sorry apology being lost beneath Sey’s scold.

“It’s not safe,” Wolf said for the fifth time. It probably would be safer for
them
if Gildy was gone. Spotting a pair of butterfly knives sticking out of a pocket of her oversized pants, Wolf leaned down and relieved her of her weapons. “You
cannot
go around with weapons. You’re going to hurt someone with these.”

“Those are perfectly safe! And I’ve never accidentally….” Her gaze drifted down to the bloody spot on his T-shirt, and her face flushed slightly. “Well, shit. You should know better than to come at someone when they’ve got something sharp in their hands. You’d think it was your first time around a pair of scissors!”

“What have you got on you, old woman?” Wolf moved to check her other pockets, but Gildy fended him off with the shears.

“Come near me, and I’ll shiv you like the dog you are,” she grumbled. “I’m not going out there without something to defend myself.”

“Ghosts can’t hurt you!” Sey muttered as she filled a coffee filter with ground beans. “Just give him what you’ve got, Gildy.”