Netherworld: Drop Dead Sexy (6 page)

Tristan’s cultured voice flowed, a balm
to my pain. “I’ll see to it you get a decent burial.”

“Thank you, but it’s not
necessary.”

“I think it is.” He kissed my hand and
rose. “Dan, I will leave her in your capable hands for now. I have
a few things to take care of before sunset.”

“I’ll give her the grand tour.” Dan
quirked a smile, and stuff inside me went all squirmy. He was so
handsome, especially when he smiled.

Tristan frowned. “Watch where you take
her. The east side of Old Town is getting violent
again.”

Okay, Mr. County Commissioner sounded a
little too paternal. What next, be home by eleven? “What does it
matter? We’re dead, right? So nothing can hurt us,” I pointed
out.

Dan slowly shook his head at me. “Oh,
we can be hurt. You felt pleasure with sex, didn’t you?”

Tristan gave me a very serious look,
serious enough that I got off my high horse about his patronizing
attitude. “Not only can ghosts be hurt, but we can be ‘killed’
again, so to speak. Permanently erased from existence. Which can be
a blessing if someone decided to torture you for eternity, which is
also possible.”

His words sparked a thrill of terror.
“Wow, nasty. What about vampires? If you get staked, you’ll be
ghosts full time, right?”

Tristan’s lips thinned into a straight
line. “Staking doesn’t kill vampires, it just pins them down so
they can be killed. But the answer to your question is that the
souls of dead vampires disappear entirely, including our daytime
ghosts.”

Dan added, “That’s why their day
resting places are kept so well hidden.”

Tristan spoke to him. “I’ll have a
channel present at tonight’s meeting, so bring her.”

“Okay.”

Tristan’s body went smeary, and then he
disappeared entirely. I gaped. Is that how I had looked when Dan
took me from the woods? Freaky.

Dan stood, pulling me up easily with
him. “Ready for the grand tour of old Fulton Falls?”

I took a deep breath. Tristan had said
Dan would keep me safe. “Sure.”

Hand in hand, we walked out.

Chapter Three

Outside the library I gaped at my
environment. It’s difficult to explain how a pool of inky black
surrounded me, yet I saw my surroundings without trouble. Imagine
being in town at night, streetlights turning everything to shades
of gray. It’s kind of like that, but without the actual
illumination.

I turned slowly, taking in the city
below the city. Streets of packed dirt ran between the blackened
ruins of buildings. Crumbling and cracked tabby walls, the building
material of choice way back when, showed where stores and offices
had once stood. Smears of soot darkened the once whitish gray
structures, cobbled with oyster shells.

From overhead where soil hung like the
sky, roots curved down to dangle in the air, a kind of crazy jungle
gym where one might swing if the impulse hit. Here and there I
spied steel and concrete supports, buttressing slabs of concrete
overhead. I couldn’t imagine how it didn’t fall down on our heads.
Score one for man’s engineering prowess.

It was an utter ruin down here with the
exception of the library. In the darkened wasteland of old Fulton
Falls, the grand building shone like a jewel. My jaw dropped to see
how it stood tall overhead, somehow appearing whole despite the
roof of concrete and soil that should have cut it off halfway down.
The tabby steps with the surrounding rails, complete with two lion
statues on either side, marched grandly up to the polished wood
double doors set in the brick wall. Even the windows were intact,
and inside I saw people in old-fashioned suits and period dresses
wander past.

“This is crazy,” I breathed. “I’ve
lived in Fulton Falls all my life and never knew this was down
here.”

Dan looked at the building like a man
in love. “Most people don’t.”

“Why does the library look that way?
Like it’s still whole?”

“As I told you, sometimes a place or
object can retain a kind of personality and manifest its own
ghostly presence. The library and a few other buildings around here
are like that.”

I turned to take in the strange
netherworld around me. With the exception of the lovely old
library, the original Fulton Falls was a corpse, slowly rotting in
its coffin. I swallowed. “I can’t say I like the rest of this
much.”

Dan squeezed my hand. “Being in the
dark like this feels depressing, but you can go above ground
anytime you like.”

A small beam of light two buildings
down caught my attention, and I let go of Dan to carefully pick my
way down the debris-rubbled street to look. A grate covering a
storm drain let sunlight in overhead, and I listened to the sounds
of life I still took for granted; car motors, the thrum of
conversation, and birdsong.

Dan followed me and I looked at him,
grateful to see him in the golden light instead of the strange wash
of gray that permeated the ruined city. “Are we under a street
here?”

“Altamaha Drive is right above
us.”

I shuffled through the debris below the
grate, trash washed down by the frequent spring rains, no doubt. A
gleam of metal caught my attention, and I stooped to see a woman’s
gold class ring with a dainty sapphire stone. “Look at that,” I
said to Dan. “Someone’s going to be upset she lost it.”

I reached and closed my hand over it. I
felt the cool metal against my fingertips and then a strange numb
sensation as the ring passed right through my grasp. I looked up at
Dan with wide eyes.

“Okay, I don’t like this at
all.”

He crouched next to me, his expression
soothing. “You can manipulate physical objects from the living
world, but you have to draw energy.”

“How do I do that?” For some reason not
being able to pick up the ring really bothered me.

“Most of us pull from the natural
magnetic field around us.” At my impatient huff, he coached, “Close
your eyes.”

I did so, though shutting out his
handsomely craggy face seemed like a crime.

“Do you feel a pulsing around you, like
a soft heartbeat?”

I went very still, trying to sense the
atmosphere around me. A horn honked in the world above. Someone
laughed, the sound an eternity away. Beneath it all I sensed a low
thrum that ebbed and flowed, something deep enough to pull at me.
“Yes, I feel that.”

“Now relax and think about drawing it
into you. Think of yourself as a magnet attracting it or a sponge
soaking it in. There you go.”

The approval in his voice strengthened
me, and I felt a prickly hum run through my body. “It kind of
tickles,” I told Dan.

“Okay, now try to pick up the
ring.”

I opened my eyes and noticed how my
hands seemed to exude the same glow as the old library.
Fascinating. I closed my finger and thumb over the ring again, and
this time I was able to lift it.

“Wow, it works. Hey, am I brighter to
you?”

He grinned at me. “Yes, brighter and
more solid. If a living person was here, he might see you as an
indistinct shadow or mist right now.”

My grip suddenly felt numb, and my
finger and thumb met. The ring clattered to the ground. “Fudge,” I
griped.

Dan patted my shoulder. “Pulling energy
will become second nature as you get used to it.” He straightened
and pulled me to my feet. Tugging me along, we ventured further
down the street. “It just takes practice, and you have eternity to
get it right.”

I skipped over a large rock in my path.
“Are there stronger sources than the magnet field?”

“Magnetic field,” he gently corrected.
“Batteries are excellent sources to pull from. We can also pull
from each other, but it’s bad form to do so. It’s incredibly
painful and stealing energy from another spirit will turn them into
wraiths. Do it long enough, and the wraith will wink completely out
of existence.”

I skirted a rusted spike of rebar
despite realizing I could probably walk right through it. “I
thought wraiths were spirits of the dead. What’s the difference
between me and a wraith?”

He grimaced. “What we call wraiths down
here are ghosts of ghosts. It’s a terrible way to be, and an even
worse way to die.”

I shuddered. “Sounds like
it.”

Dan toured me around the remains of old
Fulton Falls’ downtown where most businesses and government
buildings had been buried. One building in particular was
completely missing: the Armory, where the Fire of ’36 had started.
A drunken private had accidentally set off some rounds of ammo,
hitting several hydrogen tanks. The nearby naval airbase, which had
a small fleet of zeppelins, stored their surplus there. In a
conflagration that seemed an ominous foreshadowing of the following
year’s Hindenburg disaster, a sizeable portion of Fulton Falls went
up. It was said the explosion at the Armory could be felt clear out
to Jesup, a town that sat an hour away by car.

The resulting fast-moving fire, fed by
a drought that had lingered for the last two years, took over six
hundred lives. A thriving port town, Fulton Falls had once rivaled
its northern neighbor Savannah for supremacy. The fire had pretty
much put the kibosh on that. Fulton Falls recovered, but has lagged
behind ever since. A pulp mill and the Glynco Naval Airbase, later
taken over by Homeland Security, became Fulton Falls’ main
employers, with shipping lagging a distant third.

The decayed remains of old Fulton Falls
was one of the most depressing things I’d ever seen. A couple of
buildings glowed similar to the old library, appearing whole from
the outside. One was a pub, in which the sounds pointed to a
full-on brawl going on inside. Another ‘live’ building proved to be
the original First Baptist Church. A doleful mixture of groans and
sobs emitted from its open doors. I decided I liked the pub
better.

There was a lot of the pitiful sound of
weeping down here, rising above the mumble of traffic in the world
above us. Mourning apparently continued, as souls bemoaned lives
not lived to the fullest and ended too young. The odor of the
underground town, alternatively dank or burnt or, especially
beneath the grates overhead, laden with motor oil and gasoline,
wasn’t exactly a pleasure to inhale.

Dan brought me to the old City Hall,
one of the brighter structures. A building that lived on despite
physical ruin, it presented itself with gleaming white columns and
stately red brick. Men wearing old-fashioned suits and hats of
various bygone eras mixed freely with more modern men and women. I
recognized Judge Anthony Monroe, who’d presided over Fulton Falls’
criminal court until only a year ago when he’d died in
his

private chambers of a sudden stroke. He
rested a companionable plump hand on the shoulder of a spare black
man as they spoke in low, sober tones.

“What’s above us now?” I asked,
frowning.

“The courthouse.”

“Which one?” We had two courthouses in
Fulton Falls. The older had been built soon after the fire and
these days officiated paranormal residents’ legal concerns. The
newer, built only twenty years ago, was concerned with human
law.

“The Old Courthouse. Judge Monroe
presided over that one until the new one went up and para justice
was separated from human.” Dan’s lips tightened as Judge Monroe
caught sight of him. The two men exchanged stiff nods.

“This isn’t much of an afterlife,” I
observed, my mood definitely shading to blue. “This place is so
depressing.”

“That’s why I stick to the library.
You’ll find mainly those who died in the Great Fire down here. Most
ghosts haunt the place of their deaths, their old homes, or follow
loved ones around.”

The heaviness in his voice got me
wondering for the first time how Dan had died. “What about you?
Where are your people?”

“My family moved away.”

Getting personal information from Dan
was like pulling teeth. But hey, I’d given him sex, so he could
satisfy my curiosity. “Children?” I pressed.

“Two boys.”

I noticed Judge Monroe scowling at us.
What was his problem? “Do you ever check on them, see what they’re
up to?”

Dan glanced up at the judge and took my
hand. Pulling me down the street, heading back in the direction of
the library he said, “I caused them enough pain in life. They don’t
need me hanging around after everything that happened.”

I looked at his careworn face,
wondering if I should pursue my questions after all. Something dark
had appeared in Dan’s eyes. Inquisitiveness is one of my failings,
but I did manage to change my line of interrogation. “You must have
died young.”

He nodded. “I was thirty-eight. That
was pretty young to go from a heart attack.”

I stopped in the middle of the street.
“Wow Dan, that’s ridiculously young. How awful. Don’t you think
your family would want to know you’re okay, so to speak? I mean,
you could get a message to them, right?”

His voice stayed steady, but the
darkness in his eyes grew. “I died in prison.”