Hellsinger 01 - Fish and Ghosts (P) (MM) (15 page)

Also in time to have the Grange’s front doors slammed in his face.

Hoxne Grange was definitely made in the day when pride was taken in a manor’s workmanship. Some long-ago craftsman tasked with the job of creating the Grange’s imposing entrance obviously took his responsibility seriously. Hand carved with swirling designs and sleek panels inset with ancient glass, the double solid wood doors dented Wolf’s nose fairly dramatically when they came to a shuddering stop against his face. He felt a small crick of cartilage giving way and quickly stepped back, pressing the bridge of his nose between his fingers as he tilted his head back to stop an impending gush of blood.

He’d grown up with a vicious younger brother, and their epic battles were enough of an experience for Wolf to know he’d lost a melee with a nosebleed even before it began. Sniffing at the whiff of metal forming in his sinuses, Wolf blindly felt for the door latch, hoping Tristan was too pissed off to lock it behind him.

Luck was with him. The latch snicked, and he opened the door.

Just in time for his luck to run out and the terrified screaming to start.

Tristan hadn’t made it very far into the house, so they both hit the stairs at a dead run, leaving a trail of water and mud behind them. The steps were slick, made slippery from their wet feet, but the men continued to run toward the screaming woman.

Because Wolf was pretty sure the woman yelling her head off in a frantic terror was Gidget.

Matt met them on the second-floor landing, rounding the sweep of stairs leading down from the third floor. Gidget’s screams devolved into a fierce swearing, a hot spitting rage of words echoing from the elongated stretch of rooms toward the left of the Grange. Grabbing a decorative dirk from the wall, Wolf headed for the cursing with Tristan and Matt close behind.

“Don’t know what you think you’re going to do with that,” Tristan muttered. “Not like there’s anyone here but us.”

“Someone could have broken in and hurt her.” Wolf instantly regretted what he’d said. Matt turned pale and rushed past them, his flat sneakers flapping a hard tattoo on the hallway carpet. “Shit.”

It was easy enough to find Gidget. Once they’d reached the T in the hallway between the length of the manor and its jutting wing, her screams became louder, and then she appeared out of the thin shadows, her vibrant hair streaming behind her in a flaming trail of silken curls.

Wolf didn’t have much time to process anything other than Gidget’s terror… and more importantly, the gray-fleshed older woman running behind her. A sour-faced woman in a long, old-fashioned dress chasing her prey with an ax circling over her head.

“Run!” Gidget screamed at the men blocking her escape. Pushing past them, she turned left instead of right, going deeper into the Grange instead of heading downstairs to the open foyer.

Startled, Matt blinked owlishly once, his mouth widening in shock. The old woman was rushing them too quickly for him to do anything other than throw his hands up to ward her off. Wolf grabbed Tristan, shoving him against the wall and putting himself between the blond and the ax. Holding the dirk out in front of him, he braced himself for the woman’s assault, ready to throw her off her stride. She wasn’t slowing down. If anything, her eyes grew larger and darker as she drew near, and Wolf swallowed at the sight of the double-bitted ax heading straight for his head.

Reaching up to grab its handle, he prepared himself to take her weight when she passed right through them.

It was an odd feeling. Cloying and sticky. A bit of a tugging of his skin as it was jerked out from inside of him, and for a moment, Wolf thought his heart had stopped cold, gripped in an iciness he couldn’t shake off. The sensation lasted for the briefest split-second, but the prickling remained, a phantom impression of his flesh being pulled up from his bones.

As incorporeal as the woman was, the labrys she wielded definitely had some effect on the world around her. Its fore blade gleamed dully as it swiped through air next to Wolf’s leg. The metal curve made a solid
thunk
into the floor, and the woman was forced to stop, pausing only long enough to jerk the ax handle back and forth until she pulled the blade free. The splinters dislodged by the ax were solid and sharp, flying up from the damaged wood to skitter across the floor nearly a foot away.

“Holy fucking shit.” Wolf jerked his foot out of the way in case she swung again, but the woman was already gone, hurrying down the hall after Gidget. Stepping over the long gash in the floor, Wolf turned to Tristan. “What the hell do we do now?”

“How the hell should I know?” the blond spat back. “My
guests
don’t usually try to kill me.”

“Gidge,” Matt stammered. “She could hurt Gidge. Come on.”

Chasing after a ghost… an armed and pissed-off ghost… was certainly not how Wolf saw his career ending. After spending years studying phenomena and cracking apart frauds, he was now merrily waltzing after a Victorian woman with murder on her brain. Definitely not something he could bring up to prospective clients hoping to get a fair assessment of their spectral woes.

“Mom’s going to be fucking laughing her damned ass off,” he muttered as he followed the two men into the second floor’s warren of rooms.

The path toward Gidget was laid out for him. Even without the swearing and screams, Wolf only had to find the line of ax cuts in the floors or walls. One painting, a heavy depiction of dogs hunting a duck pond to blood and feathered corpses, suffered as well. One of its springer spaniels had its head neatly severed in two, leaving its brain case on one side while the rest of its head was folded into a flap of cut canvas.

Running didn’t seem to help. The maze of corridors on the second floor crisscrossed into other spaces, but he finally found them in an alcove in front of a rear balcony. Matt, Gidget, and Tristan looked whole and unharmed, but he couldn’t say the same about the rest of the room. Or the flickering gray womanly shape in front of him.

She’d been more solid in the hall, but in the watery light coming from the balcony’s french doors, her solidity suffered nearly as much as the ill-fated painted spaniel. Now Wolf could see straight through her, right to the blond man who stood between her ax and the young couple clutching one another in front of a broken wing chair.

Gidget stood trembling in Matt’s arms, and they rocked back and forth amid the carnage of broken chairs and a destroyed table. Strips of wallpaper hung from the walls, the tattered fabric rippling from the cold wind coming through a cracked window. Tristan had a line of drying blood on his cheek. Since it looked more like damage from flying glass or wood, Wolf skidded to a stop and sighed with relief.

“Slattern! Whore!” The specter’s ghoulish howl was a grate of noises and crackles, and Wolf strained a bit to make out what she was saying. “I will kill you before I let one of my own touch your diseased filth again! Do you think you can trap him into taking you to his bed? As his wife? I don’t care if I hang for your death. Anything to protect him.”

The ax rose up once more, and the seams of her dress strained with the press of her shoulders against the unyielding fabric. Taking a step forward, the woman screamed, a horrific, bone-rattling howl that dropped her jawbone down and elongated her mouth into a stark black maw.

For the first time since he’d put up his shingle as a skeptic, Wolf was terrified of a ghost.

Too many things happened at once for him to process, but he was clear on two events. The first was the wild-eyed woman plowing into a full run at his vibrantly haired technician. The second was Tristan flinging himself at the woman’s trunk, hoping to stop her from reaching Gidget and Matt cowering behind him.

He was about four steps too far away to help, but Wolf lunged forward anyway, his adrenaline-hopped brain ordering him to tackle her from behind. The logical chunk of gray matter normally in charge scoffed at the nonsense flowering up from his primal fears, carelessly buffing its nails in smug arrogance as it reminded the rest of his consciousness that one did not simply tackle something that had no physical presence.

Wolf only wished that part of his overly confident, haughty brain had spoken up before he’d flung himself at Tristan’s long body.

Tristan yelped when he flew through the woman’s body and saw Wolf looming up in front of him. Twisting to avoid Tristan, Wolf arched badly and struck the other man in the chest. They hit hard, tumbling to the floor in a tangle of legs and arms Wolf would have been happy to be involved in but for the fact they were both fully clothed and on the far side of arousal. His elbow hit something hard, and he hoped it was the floor instead of something on Tristan’s body, but his luck, already thin in places, proved to be as solid as the woman passing through the Grange’s wall, her furious howling fading behind her while the very solid ax tumbled to the floor.

His elbow struck Tristan’s lip, and Wolf could practically feel the man’s tender flesh split beneath the solid cut of his sharp teeth. Blood gushed out from Tristan’s mouth, and he rolled away, clutching at his face and spitting. Wolf’s shoulder continued on its trajectory, slamming into the floor, and he lay back, stunned at the amount of places that ached on his body.

“Are you trying to fucking kill me?” Tristan muttered through a mouthful of blood and fingers. Red dripped from his palm, and he shook off Wolf’s attempts to reach for him.

“What?” Wolf gaped up at the man. Tristan struggled to get up from the floor, using one hand to steady himself while the other staunched the slackening flow of blood from his face. “You tried to grab her too. We both figured we could hold on to her.”

“You’re holding a fucking knife, asshole!” The blond jerked his bloodied chin at Wolf’s clenched hand. “That thing would have gone right through me.”

He’d forgotten about the dirk, and Wolf stared at it in horror. Flinging it away, he got up and grabbed the remains of a pillow, stripping it of its filling. He pulled away Tristan’s hand and pressed the fabric against the man’s cut lip, murmuring his abashed apologies to what he figured were probably deaf ears.

“Whatevers.” Tristan spat again, wiping at the pink spittle hanging from his split lip. “Just… can you do me a favor and check to see if she’s outside? I mean, I doubt it, but….”

“Yeah, hold on.” Wolf kissed the top of Tristan’s head, thankful the man was okay. Grabbing the dirk off the floor, he held it up for Tristan to see. “Don’t know if this will help, but maybe the whole cold iron thing works?”

“That’s a reproduction,” Tristan snorted at him. “It’s made of stainless steel, but you just go with that.”

Stepping carefully around the glass and wood shards, Wolf checked the balcony for the crazed woman. The wind bit through him, paring off any remaining adrenaline from his blood. Finding the sweeping overhang empty, he returned to the alcove. Shaking his head at Tristan, he gave Gidget and Matt a quick look over, satisfied the couple was okay except for a few shaken nerves.

Once back inside and out of the cold, he rubbed at his bare arms and laid the dirk down on the only whole piece of furniture left in the alcove, a tiny side table tucked under the scant protection of a splintered chair rail. Gidget was pacing back and forth, her arms wildly flailing about as she muttered angrily at Matt, who was stunned into silence.

“How the hell did all of this happen so fast?” Wolf surveyed the damage to the space. “She didn’t have enough time.”

“It just sort of happened,” Tristan said softly. “She wasn’t here when we got to Gidget, but things were just… exploding around us. She appeared right before you showed up. It was like a sneak attack before we could circle the wagons or something.”

“Any idea who it is?” Wolf eyed a particularly heavy raking of a framed canvas. It had taken more of a beating than the hunting dogs. The woman obviously hated canines, because the oddly contorted pair of white lap dogs lying on a chaise were nearly julienned.

“I’m guessing it’s Matt’s granny.” Tristan let Wolf grab him by the chin, moving his head when Wolf turned to inspect his lip. “And I don’t think there’s really a question of who that was. Let go. I’m okay. I just bit my lip.”

Wolf didn’t want to let go of Tristan’s jaw, but there definitely was a storm brewing, and it was inside the Grange, swirling around his two young technicians. It crackled for a moment, then broke loose in a hail of angry words and spitting curses nearly as furious as the ghost they’d just encountered.

“Your grandmother!” Gidget poked Matt’s chest, pushing him back a step. “Your fucking grandmother tried to kill me!”

“Hey, we don’t know that.” Matt held up his hands, trying to calm her down. “This place is humming with activity. It could have been anyone!”

“Really? Anyone? She had your dad’s honker!” Gidget’s fury turned outward, blasting the room at large. “Some crazy woman with a British accent in a long dress appeared out of nowhere and tries to kill me, but we don’t think it’s Matt’s grandmother? You know, the serial killer?”

“Didn’t she mostly poison?” Tristan sounded like he was trying to offer a reasonable doubt, but Matt shook his head, mournfully sorrowful as Gidget reared herself up for another fully steamed rant. “No?”

“No.” The bookish tech twisted his mouth into an ashamed grimace. “Um, she also liked to hack up her neighbors’ wives. But only one that they know of. Really.”

“Just the one,” Tristan repeated flatly. His hazel eyes went hard, nearly amber-yellow as they pinned a fierce glare through Wolf. “Okay. This shit’s got to stop. You two, go clean this mess up. You’re the ones who tossed that ring into my pond, and you, Kincaid, since you brought this crazy into my house, you’re going to have to find some way to make her leave before she kills someone.”

“She didn’t actually hurt anyone,” Matt offered up, then withered when Tristan glanced over his shoulder at him.

“Your grandmother, assuming it’s the only murderess we actually know
could
be here, just got loose. I’ve always been able to see the spirits visiting here, but others haven’t.” Tristan softened his words, but Wolf could still hear the fear cutting into the other man. “The Grange helps the departed manifest. It always has. She’s starting to feed off that power. Since I think we can all say she’s not going to follow the three-day rule everyone else does, she’s going to build up that power. She might not have been able to hurt us now, but can we say that in a week? A few days? Tomorrow?”