Duck Duck Ghost (16 page)

“She’d better, or Wolf’s going to skin her alive.” Sey nudged her aunt. “Come on, lady. You and I need to have a serious talk.”

“Look, with all the ghosts and earthquakes, you can’t blame a woman for being a little jumpy!” Gildy protested. “Look at what that scamp did to blondie here! Do you think I want to wake up packed in like I’m a skull in a Paris catacomb? I think not! Better safe than sorry.”

“Ghosts, you say?” If anything, Daylen’s glowing smile brightened to nearly nuclear levels, and Tristan wondered if they made lead sunglasses so he wouldn’t lose his eyes. “I
love
haunted houses! This place is haunted? Is that what you’re studying? Is it a White Lady or something more sinister, like a rejected suitor coming to kill his rival?”

“We don’t know what is happening, per se.” If possible, Sey’s sigh seemed to get heavier with each passing second. “Wolf’s here to study what might be a phenomena. The house is a historical landmark of sorts, so there might be something to it, but honestly, we don’t know.”

“The boy woke up from a dead sleep with doll heads staring up at the ceiling!” her aunt proclaimed loudly. “Phenomena my ass! That’s a full-out fucking haunting. First class spooky. Half of those damned things were clown dolls. It doesn’t get any more scary than that.”

“Gil, get upstairs and help me get Daylen’s room ready. We’ll put him in the back bedroom,” Sey ordered. “And don’t give me any shit about not being able to move well. I watched you sneak easily enough to the liquor cabinet the other night. Daylen—”

“You can call me Dayle if you like. Everyone in the family does. Although my father calls me Quad because I’m the fourth. Odd man. Thinks it’s funny because his nickname is Trey. Mother keeps telling him—”

Tristan fled before he couldn’t shake himself loose from the man’s polished, hypnotic meanderings.

He found Wolf in the kitchen, bent over the sink with the faucet’s spray hose pointed at his face. Tristan waited until Wolf finished washing the salt off, handed Wolf a towel, then instinctively winced in sympathy when he saw Wolf’s bloodshot eyes.

“Wow, what was in the salt?” He took the towel back and patted at Wolf’s damp shirt, trying to blot out some of the water spots spreading through the cotton. “Acid?”

“Wouldn’t surprise me in the least,” he muttered under his breath. “She’s going to kill someone, Tris. If I don’t kill her first.”

“Sit down. I’ll get you a beer. Unless you want something stronger?” He was already rifling through the refrigerator before Wolf grunted that a beer would be fine. After popping open two Tsingtao, Tristan slid one over the kitchen table toward Wolf as he eased down into one of Sey’s chrome and vinyl diner chairs. Plopping down across from Wolf, he swallowed a foamy sip, then said, “That really wasn’t Cin?”

“Did he
look
like a Kincaid?” Wolf’s nostrils flared in offense.

“Having only seen four of them—and one of them was your mother, who dresses in early rainbow—so I couldn’t say,” Tristan shot back. “Now who is he?”

“No one.” Wolf rolled his eyes when Tristan nudged him in the thigh with a sharp jab from his bare toes. “He’s some guy Sey’s supposed to teach about antique toy restoration. She forgot he was coming because she was in the middle of this shit. And she can’t send him back to Canada. They’ve already made the hostage exchange, one of her students for one of theirs. She’s stuck with him for three weeks, and that means
we’re
stuck with him.”

“Shit, and I thought the worst thing I had to worry about was something like Winifred.” Having someone around—
a mundane
Meegan called them—would muck things up tremendously. Or would it? He wasn’t sure. “Sey probably doesn’t want the academic community to think she’s crazy, so—”

“Ixnay on the ostghay,” Wolf concurred.

“I have no idea what that means,” Tristan admitted. “Wait… pig Latin. Is that pig Latin? So old school. Much mocking. Do you know leet speak? I hear it’s the rage with all the kids.”

“I hate you so much right now. And yet, when you’re surly, I want you even more.” Reaching across the table, Wolf snagged Tristan’s hands, wrapping their fingers together. “And yeah, no ghost stuff around the civilian. But I think it’s already too late. He got one look at your ass, and now he’s going to be as much of your shadow as that useless wolfhound of yours. We’re just going to have to get Sey to keep him really busy. Now tell me what you found out. Did you find something in the doll heads?”

“Better….” Tristan knew he was grinning like a silly idiot. “I got a ghost to talk to me.”

“The little girl? Tris, you shouldn’t have—”

“No, not her. Another one. A young man from the sixties. He’s kind of a repeater like Cook.” Tristan described the young man he’d been able to keep with him for a few minutes. “He used to work here, but I don’t know when he died….”

“Don’t they—the ghosts—normally show up the age they died at?” Wolf’s beer bottle hovered at the plump of his lower lip, pressing the flesh down into a moue. “You know, I never ever thought of that.”

“If that was the case, maybe I’d be running a senior center instead of a hotel. I think people become ghosts at an age they felt happiest at or maybe even when something really big happened to them. I don’t know, but I don’t get anyone that old.”

“Unless they died young?” Wolf took a sip and licked at a speck of foam left on the rim of the bottle. “No, I think you’re right. We know Winifred was oldish when she died, but she looked middle-aged—”

“But crazy,” Tristan interjected. “Don’t forget the crazy. Maybe that’s when she went crazy—middle age.”

“Crazy is what made her a ghost.” He gestured out at the world in general, a graceful dip of wrist and fingers. “Middle age just probably made her bitter.”

Tristan felt a burn start up in his cheeks when his brain whispered to him about what those fingers did to him the last time he’d had sex with Wolf. The beer wasn’t cold enough to quench the fire under his skin, but it went a long way in shoving it aside, especially when he nearly choked a mouthful of foam up his nose.

Outside, the wind howled a moment before its voice was lost in the pound of a sudden rain. Wolf got up and closed the kitchen’s open windows, dousing the hush of falling water. The shifting daylight bled silver over Wolf’s features, but his lascivious wink at Tristan provided enough of a glow to set sparks off in Tristan’s insides.

On his way back to the table, Wolf stopped only long enough to leave Tristan gasping from a hot kiss, their tongues sliding up against one another in a melting velvet push before the other man pulled away. He was still struggling to catch his breath as Wolf sat down, his heavy-lidded eyes sparkling with a smug satisfaction at taking Tristan’s wind from him.

“Okay, now tell me about this kid. How much can he tell you if he’s a repeater?” Wolf cocked his head. “I’ve only seen your Cook ghost when she comes in, and not all that well. How alike are they?”

“I’m only guessing. Not like I got a manual or anything.” Tristan eyed his lover. “Did you? Do the Hellsingers have something we can use?”

“Dunno, babe,” Wolf admitted slowly. “I’m not on their loaning-books-to list. Hell, I’m barely tolerated at funerals. Have you seen this kind of ghost before, elsewhere? Are they weekly like Cook?”

“No, it’s all different. I don’t know why.” He shrugged. “There were Chinese prostitutes when I was a little kid, but they weren’t constant. Just shifted in and out once in a while. Shit, my great-grandfather falls down the Grange’s stairs every Christmas Eve and breaks his back. He lies there for about five minutes shouting at people to kill him because he can’t walk anymore, but he just broke his legs and hips. Took him a while, but he healed up. Hell, he refused to live on the first floor because that’s where the servants slept. It’s why the Grange has an elevator, but that’s the moment his ghost repeats. Not his death but that one moment. And only once a year.”

“Okay, so you can die and haunt a place that you might not have died in, but it was significant to you,” Wolf mused. “Can we take a chance on your guy being more like Cook? Do you think you can pull him up again for Cin? A full manifestation would go a shit ton of a way in convincing him we mean business here. Shit, I wonder if you’re the only one who can see him. Channeling instead of entity realization.”

“I’ll try. He got stronger when I had some doll head dust on my hands. It might work again. I left it there, just in case.” He’d been worn out when he’d finished talking with Raygun, but the ghost at least gave him some kind of place to start looking for answers.

“So talk to me, Thursday. Now that I’ve got your attention.” Wolf wiggled his eyebrows at him. “And Raygun? What kind of name is that?

“Dick,” Tristan muttered. “It was a nickname. He was a football player for Cal Poly, and he was going on a plane trip to Ohio, I think—Toledo, he said Toledo.”

“That would be Ohio,” Wolf agreed sagely. “How does that connect to our Little Girl Dead?”

“I think Ray—that’s his real name—is like Cook and remembers what happens only during the time of his current haunting. If I ask Cook about a guest she’d seen yesterday, she’d remember, but if she’d left and come back, she wouldn’t know who I was talking about.”

“Do they retain—your guests—do they hold onto memories of other ghosts there?” Wolf studied him curiously. “Is there a resonating consciousness in the specters?”

“I don’t know. Mara seems to remember things.” Tristan was ashamed to admit it, but he normally just checked the arriving specters in and left them to their own devices. There was a shift of something in Wolf’s face when Tristan spoke about the deceased housekeeper, but it was gone before he could comment on it. “I haven’t really tested it. It’s not like we talk about anything that’s happened in the past. Mostly she talks about things that happened to me recently. We don’t even talk about Uncle Morty, but I know she goes into his rooms.”

“Something we actually can investigate,” Wolf said softly. “I haven’t seen anything manifest outside of your presence, Tris. Sure, I’ve seen some orbs and other stuff, but most of the big flashy stuff happens only when you’re around.”

“I don’t
do
these things—” He bristled, but Wolf shook his head, cutting off his tirade.

“I didn’t say you did. What I’m saying is that you might be a catalyst of some kind.” The man’s tone was gentle, but the implication still rankled. Wolf scooted his chair over next to Tristan, and their knees bumped, jostling both of them in their seats. “It’s a good thing. Babe, if we can somehow pinpoint—”

“For you, it’s a job. For me, it’s my fucked-up life.” Tristan knew he sounded bitter, but he couldn’t help it. Not after years of listening to his relatives talk about him as if he weren’t even in the room. Called everything from delusional to insane, talking to the dead drove him further and further from his family until he was left alone, rattling about in a large mansion with only ghosts to keep him company.

“Hey, Tris.” Wolf’s arms came up, and Tristan let himself be wrapped into a tight embrace. “This isn’t about making you some kind of experiment or shit like that. I want to help you to learn to control this thing you’ve got. On a lot of levels, it drives you crazy. Wouldn’t you like to be able to turn it on and off?”

“God, yes,” he grumbled. “I can’t even walk across the Golden Gate.”

“It isn’t just about working with the dead. Yeah, that’s what I want to prove.” His lover coaxed a smile out of him with a brush of a thumb over Tristan’s chin. “But to me, figuring out
how
you do things isn’t as important as you. Okay? If you want to stop—just walk away from all of this—we can. Don’t ever feel like you can’t. I’ll walk with you. Whenever you want.”

“I don’t want to walk away,” he confessed. “I just don’t want to feel like a freak.”

Wolf quirked his mouth, “You kind of
are
a freak, babe. But see, that’s what makes you interesting. Nothing wrong with being a little freaky. I wouldn’t mind being a little bit more weird myself.”

“You get any weirder, and we’ll have to share a straitjacket,” Tristan scoffed, but he gave Wolf a quick, awkward hug. “Thanks for… talking stuff through with me. I think I just get a little tired or something when I’m done talking to dead people I don’t see all the time.”

“Shit, I get tired talking to
live
people, so I’m not going to throw any stones from over here in my glass house. Now tell me about Ray. Then we can go rescue Sey from Gildy and Octopus Boy. Does he know anything about our resident soul sucker?”

“He thinks she’s a hotel guest staying here with her parents.” Tristan nodded at Wolf’s confused look. “You’ve got to remember, when he was alive, this place was an inn, so he doesn’t know it’s a private residence now.”

“Does he think Sey’s… shit, her grandmother owned this place back in the sixties. Does he think Sey’s her grandmother?”

“I don’t think he sees anyone who is alive.” Tristan thought back to the too-short conversation he had with Ray. “He said the missus. Sey’s not married, and in his mind, there were kids here. He didn’t want the missus’s kids playing with the little girl staying here. He tried talking to her, but she was looking for something—a doll.”

“Is the doll Simone? The name she was saying when you saw her?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t tell me.” He shrugged. “I didn’t have a long time with him. He was worried about staying too long. But Ray said he
had
to go look for the doll. It might be why he was attracted to the doll head I broke. She was screaming at him, and it hurt him—”

“Sonic transference? Could she have pushed her reason for haunting onto him? That would be interesting. Weird but interesting. Consciousness contagion.” Wolf leaned back in his chair, pulling at his lower lip as he thought. “Shit, I need to make notes. Keep talking. There’s got to be pen and paper in here someplace.”

Tristan stared at the window for a few seconds, watching the rain grow heavy and hard. The porch’s embellishments dripped from the torrent, and the walkway was already slick with puddles. A gust of wind hit the house, rattling the windows in the kitchen, then died off, angling the rain in yet another direction. Beyond the back garden, one of the property’s workers struggled to hustle a shaggy red cow into the barn, the Highland moseying along as its thick coat repelled the storm’s beating.