Shifting Shadows

HOLLOW

There can’t be a collection of Mercyverse stories without a Mercy story, right?

I have always had vivid dreams. Those dreams are especially real when I am sick—sometimes it takes me a while to figure out which part was the dream and which the reality. This story is born from a nightmare about an old friend who was being haunted by his murdered wife. It is also about Mercy making peace with the changes in her life—which have been sea changes over the past few books. There are a few spoilers for Night Broken in this story.

The events in “Hollow” take place after the events in Night Broken.

Rick folded his father’s suit and set it in a box that was going to charity. The whole room was packed into boxes. A double row of donation items, boxes for auction, and two boxes of items he’d decided to keep.

The only thing left was his father’s bag of personal effects, then he could put his father’s presence behind him. A year ago, he’d have mourned, if for nothing but the lost opportunity for a change for the better. But he was a different man now at twenty-two than the boy he’d been at twenty-one. Losing both of his parents within months of each other would change anyone. Especially since his mother had committed suicide, and six months later, his father drove off a cliff. His death had been ruled an accident, but Rick was undecided: his father had been a very good driver.

But it wasn’t just his parents’ deaths that had changed him. Finding his wife’s dead body and then being charged with her murder had started the ball rolling. After he’d survived the trial with his freedom and sanity intact, or mostly intact, he’d become a man who could go through his father’s things without feeling either rage or sorrow.

He picked up the white plastic bag that held the contents of his father’s pockets and whatever happened to be on his body when he’d arrived at the hospital and spilled the contents out on the desk. His father’s wedding ring—why he wore one when he never had honored the vows it was supposed to represent, Rick had never been able to fathom. His wallet. A handful of change.

Rick opened the wallet. Someone at the hospital or the morgue had emptied the cash: his father would never have been driving around without cash. The credit cards seemed to be all there, though. He set those aside along with his father’s driver’s license to be shredded. There were two photos, battered and worn, in the wallet: Rick at six or seven with a softball bat over one shoulder and a determined look on his face, and Rick’s mother—one of the photos taken at their wedding.

Rick looked like he was on his way to being an athlete, and his beautiful mother looked sweet and happy. Rick wondered why his father would keep those photos, the ones that lied so badly about the people in them. Rick had never, that he could remember, hit a softball and made it go anywhere but in the foul zone. And his mother . . . well, sweet and happy were not adjectives he’d have applied to her.

Maybe his father had liked to pretend that his life was different than it really was. Rick understood that impulse even if he’d always been more of the face-the-bad-stuff-head-on kind of guy. So Rick put both photos in the to-be-shredded pile and tossed the wallet in the charity box.

There was something more in the bag and Rick dumped it out: a thick silver chain with a blocky, carved-jade pendant that looked both arty and masculine. It was a nice piece, but he didn’t wear jewelry—and he didn’t want a reminder of his father wrapped around his neck.

He picked it up and held it up to the light so he could judge if this was something that should go to auction or if he should give it to charity.

As he held it, he thought absently that it might have been an expensive piece. A deft hand had created the angles and the deliberately primitive lines of the pendant. Toward the center there was a change in color from clear, translucent green to frost. The carving dipped just there, as if the someone had started to carve out the cloudy bit but had reconsidered. He checked for a maker’s mark—something he could use to determine value.

He liked the way it felt in his hand, liked the contrast between cold chain and warm pendant. For the first time since he’d begun cleaning out the room this morning, Rick felt something. He clenched the pendant in his fist and let himself feel the love he had for his family—twisted and broken as they had been, he’d still loved them. The necklace felt like family.

He snorted at his own fancy. “Don’t anthropomorphize,” he advised himself. “It’s a piece of jewelry.”

But he put the chain around his neck anyway and didn’t feel as alone with the pendant warm in the hollow of his throat.

I walked up to the remains of my garage with the paperwork the insurance adjustor had given me and the paperwork Adam’s choice of contractor had given me. Spring was old and summer just around the corner, and the garage where I’d spent the better part of the last thirteen years looked beyond resurrection.

Adam’s friend the contractor was of the impression it would be much more economical to bulldoze the remains of the structure and start over because the fixes that the insurance adjustor had approved payment for weren’t adequate, in the contractor’s opinion.

And, in fact, the day after the insurance adjustor’s report had come—which had been three days after the county had allowed us in to clear all of my inventory—half of the garage had collapsed. Apparently when the volcano god tunneled under the building, he’d weakened some of the surrounding soil substructure. Or something like that. I was just glad that no one had been hurt.

We’d had the contractor set up a ten-foot-high chain-link fence around the whole place in an effort to keep neighborhood kids out while I healed up and made up my mind what to do with the garage.

It was my life, the life I’d built for myself after I’d realized I didn’t fit anywhere, so I’d have to make my own place. And I’d done it. Found a place to belong—and when Zee, the grumpy old fae who owned it, had been forced to admit what he was and move to the fae reservation, I’d made it my own.

And here it was, lying in wreckage at my feet. I knew that the right thing to do was to squeeze more money out of the insurance company, bulldoze the remnants, and sell the lot for what I could get.

Any car built in the last decade needed plug-in parts-changers, not mechanics. Most of the cars I fixed were older than I was, owned by people who could barely afford their forty-year-old cars. There wasn’t enough money to be made in the business to justify dumping in more.

Adam’s contractor thought we’d need to throw in fifty or sixty thousand dollars more after the insurance money kicked in to rebuild because there were so many things that would have to be brought up to the current building code. Most years I was lucky if I cleared fifteen thousand, and that only because of the cars we rebuilt for the collector’s market and because my right-hand man, Tad, worked for freaking peanuts.

I’d come here today to say good-bye when Adam wasn’t here to see me do it. If I’d come here with him, he’d know how much this battered building mattered to me, and he’d rebuild it himself if he had to do it using nothing but the rubble lying around.

It wasn’t worth that. Wasn’t worth a moment of Adam’s worry—I’d given him enough pain the past year or so. He didn’t know that I knew he woke up in the middle of the night and put his head against my chest to hear my heart beat. Didn’t know I knew he had nightmares that Coyote hadn’t come in time to fix me.

Being important to someone, to anyone, was something I’d hungered for most of my life. Adam was the lodestone of my life, and I didn’t like it when I hurt him.

An unfamiliar car pulled up beside me. I turned around to see a gold Chevy Tahoe that had seen better days. It bore a graceful stencil “Simon Landscaping and Lawn Care,” complete with address, phone, and contractor license number.

The driver’s side window rolled down next to me, and a woman I’d never met before said, “Please tell me that you’re Mercedes Thompson, who is now married with a different last name that no one can remember. Because this is the third time I’ve driven past here in the vain hope that I’d run into you.”

She was human. I blinked at her, pulling on my professional self—I was at work, even if my garage was in rubble. “Yes?”

“Yes?” she repeated with the same questioning inflection I’d given it.

“Yes. I’m Mercedes,” I told her with a smile. Professionalism allowed me to bottle up all the angst until I wasn’t in the presence of a possible customer. I was very grateful to this stranger for allowing me that retreat. “And it’s Hauptman.”

Her jaw dropped. “Hauptman the Alpha werewolf of the Tri-fricking-Cities? That Hauptman?”

I nodded, and she banged her forehead into her steering wheel. “How could they have forgotten that? Her husband’s a werewolf, she said. I almost called him, you know? Probably would have if I hadn’t run into you here.”

I cleared my throat, wondering how to pull her up without offending her. “You needed to talk to me?”

“You probably think I’m a freaking idiot,” she told the steering wheel. “This is why I send out my assistant to talk to people.”

I found myself smiling at the remnants of my garage. “No worries,” I told her. Life goes on. What was it Coyote had told me once? Change is neither good nor bad. It’s just change. Frightening, but survivable. I’d survived a lot worse than the destruction of my garage—and I’d learned a lot along the way.

“What can I help you with?” I asked her.

She took a deep breath, glanced at me from under her bangs, and said, “I’m in love.” Then she looked horrified and surprised, and red swept up from her jaw to her cheeks. “I didn’t mean to say that. He doesn’t know.” She looked at me, this woman whose name I didn’t have, with total urgency. “You can’t tell him, okay? Not a word.”

I cleared my throat. “That’s not going to be a problem unless I know who he is. Is it someone I know?”

She shook her head. “No.” Then, “I don’t think so.” She looked at me. “Shoot me now. Shit. I practiced. I had this smooth speech-thing.”

“Yeah,” said a voice behind me. “I think that you might ought to’ve used it because we don’t got a foggy idea of what you need.” Zack’s voice was kind even if his words weren’t particularly gracious. “Mercy, it looks to me like someone managed to slide under the fence between now and the last time we looked. I don’t believe they managed to get anywhere dangerous—” Which meant he trailed their scent around, and they hadn’t gone into the building or burrowed under the large and heavy metal plate we’d put over the outside opening into the tunnel. “Still, it would be good to get this place bulldozed before someone manages to kill themselves exploring.”

“Okay,” I told him. “I’ll call Bill today and give him the thumbs-up.”

Zack’s hand came up and ruffled my hair. He was a new wolf to our pack, but once he’d gotten comfortable with us, he’d started touching everyone. I’d have thought it would bother me, bother some of the others more. But he was a submissive wolf—those are pretty rare—and all the touching had turned out to be just what the pack needed to get comfortable with all the changes that had been coming their way. Our way.

I think we were what he needed, too. When he’d come to us a couple of months ago, he’d been—as Warren described it—jumpier than a jackrabbit on speed. Now that Zack had settled down, there was a happy cloud that followed him wherever he went, spread by his touch. Maybe that’s why Adam had sent him with me today. I’d needed a happy cloud.

I gave the woman a smile in hopes that would reassure her. “Maybe we should start with introductions. I’m Mercy, and this is my friend Zack. You are?”

“Lisa Simon,” she said, sounding relieved that I had taken over the conversation. “I am so glad I found you. I have a—” She stopped, held up a hand. “I’ve got this now. I have a yard-care company centered in Yakima, but we service all the way from the Tri-Cities to Ellensburg—about a hundred-mile radius. We do everything from designing yards to maintenance, and I have two crews of four people each who work for me full-time. For the last eight years, I’ve been maintaining the lawn for Richard Albright.”

I blinked. “The Richard Albright?” Wealth, brilliance, eccentricity, and notoriety had haunted the Albright family for probably a hundred years until a couple of very-high-profile suicides, and an unsolved murder or three a decade or so ago had brought the notoriety to a climax that ended up with everyone in the family dead except for Richard Albright. As I recalled, he’d been in his early twenties at the time, and his wife’s had been one of the unsolved murders.

“That’s the one,” she said.

“He moved to Canada right after the trial,” Zack said. When I looked at him, he raised both hands slightly, and said, “It was all over the tabloids. No one who ever walked into a grocery store didn’t know about the murder trial and everything.”

Lisa nodded soberly. “And after a few years, he moved, very quietly, to Prosser.” I blinked at her. No one rich and famous moved to Prosser. It was a small town about thirty miles west of the Tri-Cities. It wasn’t a “pretty people” place like Walla Walla, which was pressed up against the Blue Mountains and beautifully green. Lisa had missed my surprise and continued to impart information in a circuitous fashion. “He never leaves the grounds. Not ever.” She looked at me. “And three days ago, I found out why not.”

I could feel the headache come on. She didn’t want me to fix his ’Wagon. “Ghosts,” I said, wondering who she’d been talking to.

“His dead wife,” she said at the same time.

“I don’t hunt ghosts,” I told her. The only time I’d tried had ended up with bodies.

Her mouth firmed. “I called in some big favors to get your name.”

“Who talked to you?” I asked. The wolves knew that I could see ghosts, I was pretty sure, though I didn’t make a big deal of it. That left . . .

“My best friend’s husband is Wenatchi and Cree. He’s a historian and folklorist. So I called her and he called me back this morning with your name. He said you are a walker and a spirit speaker and that you could help me. He said to tell you that Hank Redtail owes him a favor, and he is calling it in.”

Hank’s last name on his driver’s license wasn’t Redtail—but just as I turned into a coyote, he turned into a redtail hawk. For some of the traditionalists, a person’s name had more to do with who they were than what their birth certificate said.

I pulled out my phone to call Hank, but saw that sometime in the last four hours he’d sent a text message. Ghost strong as this is bad news. Listen to the story.

I ground my teeth, took a deep breath, and said, “Hank tells me I need to hear you.”

Richard Albright’s place used to be a horse farm. Most of the stables stood empty, if well kept and pretty, but the small, two-stall stud barn was Lisa’s for equipment storage or anything else. It had an empty office with a working minifridge stocked with bottled water, and a bathroom. Since his place was ten miles from anywhere, the bathroom was useful.

For a week in the spring and another in the fall, she’d bring a whole crew in to work the flower beds, clean out fountains, and do general repair. But because of the need for secrecy, Lisa did Albright’s place by herself twice a week the rest of the year. Sometimes, Richard Albright came out and joined her. The first time he’d done it, he’d introduced himself as Rick and told her she was supposed to find things for him to do. So she’d done as he asked. He hadn’t known anything about plants or landscaping—or even mowing—when he started. It took her six months to figure out that “Rick” who came out a couple of times a month to work with her was Richard Albright, multibazillionaire who was the most notorious “escapee from justice because he was rich” on the planet.

She’d thought about it for maybe five seconds and decided to keep on treating him the same way she always had. They grew to be friends. About four years in, she realized the reason that the last four men she’d dated had been so boring was because she was comparing them to the funny, smart-mouthed guy who trimmed blackberry bushes with her. She wasn’t an idiot. There was no way someone like him was going to be interested in his groundskeeper; she didn’t mind. It just hadn’t seemed worthwhile to keep dating once she knew, so she stopped.

It had been tough, not saying anything, but Lisa was tough-minded. And it was easier to have an unrequited love than to get all fussed and dressed and go out on dates every Saturday with men she was never going to fall in love with. So she’d quit dating, quit dressing up—and on the whole she was happier than she’d been before.

“I thought this was about a ghost,” I said. “Much as I enjoy—enjoy is the wrong word, sorry—as much as I am willing to listing to your painful romance story, there isn’t much I can do for you in that area.”

Lisa blinked at me. “Right,” she said. “Sorry.”

Zack put his hand on hers, where it rested on her car door. She gave him a tremulous smile and started her story again.

Two days ago, Lisa had mowed half the lawn, gone through two water bottles, and set out for the bathroom in the stud barn. The matter was of some urgency so she was dismayed to see an “Out of Order” sign on it. Taped to the bottom of the sign was a sheet of lined paper.

“Lisa,” it read. “Sorry. Well woes, apparently. Should be okay by next week. If you need to use the facilities, come on up to the house. —Rick.”

Had it not been urgent, she’d have just packed up and gone into town. As it was, she headed up to the main house and rang the doorbell. She’d planted the azaleas on either side of the door where they’d be sheltered from the cold and wind. She’d grown the hanging baskets and hung them herself.

And she’d never been inside the house, not in eight years.

“Hey,” Rick said, answering the door. His hair was ruffled as if he’d been dragging his fingers through it. His shirt had a hole in it, just left of his navel.

In short, he looked like he did most of the time he was out working with her. But his bare feet were on marble tiles, and the ceiling was ten feet or more over his head. Hanging on the entry wall behind him was an oil by a Western artist who’d died a hundred years ago and was well enough known that even Lisa, who had no interest in art of any kind unless it was green and growing, had heard of him.

And suddenly it wasn’t her buddy Rick who was standing there, but a bazillionaire who she was bothering, and she couldn’t open her mouth and make noise come out.

He looked at her, and instead of looking haughty as she’d half expected, his mouth curved up.

“Bathroom,” he said, stepping back. “Come on in, Lisa. Down the hall, first left, past the hot-tub room, and through the next set of doors. Or you could take the third left, fourth right, or up the stairs and, since there are more bathrooms than bedrooms, I expect you could find one.”

“Sorry,” she mumbled.

“Not a problem. It’s just me, here. I only need one bathroom at a time.”

But she’d already passed him and headed for the first bathroom he’d told her about. She’d been mute. She’d mumbled. And the third thing she tended to do when she was uncomfortable was babble. Given that she really had to pee right now, she really, really didn’t want to babble about that to the man she loved from afar.

When she turned to the left, there was a floor-to-ceiling glass wall on her left with a sliding glass door. On the other side of all that glass was a room filled with ferns and a huge hot tub. The cover was a deep brown that contrasted with the bright green ferns and the pale off-white of the tile on the wall and matched the dark brown marble tile on the floor. Daylight for the ferns drifted down from a pair of skylights and illuminated a statue of Pan in the corner.

The sly old faun was raising his pipes to his wickedly sensuous mouth, and he gifted the rest of the room with a distinctly Grecian look. She waved a hand at the statue because it seemed . . . polite and hit the bathroom with a sigh of honest relief that not even the imposing acres of marble and wood and things expensive that were all over that room could detract from.

She finished up quickly, washed and dried her hands, and opened the door. She turned her head to say good-bye to Pan—and screamed.

“I’m kind of embarrassed about that,” she told me. “And I’d rather not have to confess to screaming like a B-movie queen, but—” She shrugged.

She’d only been in the bathroom a couple of minutes. And in that time someone had taken off the cover to the hot tub and dribbled body parts all over the hot-tub room. A leg, clean sliced like someone had put it through a band saw, lay on the floor in front of the statue of Pan. Another leg was positioned so the cut end was hidden by the hot-tub stair. The woman’s legless and armless torso was arched over the edge of the hot tub where the hot water bubbled red as blood. Red with blood. The woman’s head was balanced on the edge of the tub closest to Lisa.

When Lisa screamed, the eyes opened, and the detached head said, “It’s his fault.” Lisa later remembered hearing the words as clearly as though someone had whispered in her ear, though the glass blocked the sound of the bubbling water, and a detached head couldn’t speak—no air.

And that impossibility finally cued Lisa in that what she saw wasn’t real. A moment later, an arm wrapped itself around her and tugged her away from the hot tub and out the front door.

Rick sat her down on the top step on the porch and forced her head between her knees. When she could focus on what he was saying, she heard, “Tell me, damn it. You saw that. You did. You saw.”

She blinked a couple of times and pushed against his hands. He let her sit up.

“What the freak was that?” she asked him. “Rick? Do you have aspirations of being the next George Lucas or David Cronenberg or something? I’ve got to tell you, it really had me going until the head started talking.”

He sat down beside her and looked up at the sky and gave a funny half laugh. “You saw that.”

“The body in the hot-tub room? Yes, of course I saw it. It was brilliant.” She reconsidered. “Sadistic and horrible. But brilliant.”

He rubbed his face, then rubbed his hair and laughed again. “I thought I was crazy,” he whispered. “Fourteen years. No one ever sees it.”

Lisa just stared at him.

“It won’t be there now,” he told her. “You can go look. But she never stays for long.”

“She?”

“My wife,” he told her, and he put his head in his hands. “She’s dead. She’s dead, and she won’t leave me alone. No one sees her, no one ever sees her, but me.”

“You mean,” said Lisa, suddenly understanding what had happened. “You mean that was a ghost?” She blinked at him. “You see that all the time?”

My half brother Gary answered the phone on the fifth ring. “Wait just a minute,” he said, sounding a little breathless.

I waited, listening to a few grunts and my brother’s croons. I had an unsettled thought that there was a woman involved in this wait, just as he came back on the phone—though it wasn’t quite the right grunts.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m training horses. Right now I’m on a two-year-old who objected to my cell phone’s ringing.”

My brother had left the state of Washington with prejudice. He’d found a job at a horse ranch in Montana where they raised quarter horses, a few Appaloosas, and cattle.

“Isn’t two a little young?” I asked. I didn’t know a lot about horses, but I’d grown up around people who did.

“Yep,” he agreed. “This one will be three next week, but still young. Driven by the market, Mercy. There isn’t a lot of profit in breeding horses anymore, and the ranch has no choice but to listen to market forces if they want to survive. It’s not like we take them out for fifty-mile trips.” Then, presumably to the horse, “You can just settle your butt down, sweetheart. Get used to it now, my friend. Life for you is going to be all about hurry up and wait.”

“I need to know how to exorcise a ghost,” I said to Gary.

Lisa abruptly looked a lot less confident in me. I hadn’t told her why I was calling Gary. I held up one finger when it looked like she was going to speak. My brother has good ears; he didn’t need to get distracted by a pretty voice.

“You just tell them to move on,” he said.

“Just tell them?” I was doubtful, and I let him hear it. When I was a kid, I’d screamed “go away” at a lot of ghosts to not much effect.

“Tell them,” he said with exaggerated patience, “the way your Alpha werewolf husband would tell one of his wolves when they get pushy.”

“Okay,” I said. I almost thanked him and hung up—but there was something in his voice. He was a son of Coyote, as much as he hated it. And that made him a little tricksy. “Where do they go?”

He laughed, and I knew I’d been right. “Somewhere else. Usually not too far away. One of our distant nephews, back in the Victorian Age, had a grand con. He found a haunted house and drove the ghost—a nasty moaning type—out. They paid him for it, then he waited a week and went to the house next door and did the same. If he’d stopped at the fifth house, he’d have made a tidy profit. But he’d forgotten that neighbors talk to each other. He knocked on the door of the sixth, and the man of the house tried to hold him for the authorities. Sadly for both of them, the young entrepreneur was killed in the struggle.”

I waited, but he wasn’t going to continue until I asked. “Why for both of them?”

“Because when our budding con artist nephew died, the man in the sixth house was left with a very nasty ghost that no one could send on. I hear that it is still there today.”

“Why couldn’t someone else send it on?” I asked.

“Didn’t they teach you anything?” Gary exclaimed, then in a softer voice, he said, “No, I suppose not. The werewolves wouldn’t know, and our dear papa couldn’t be bothered. A ghost, my dear sister, gains power when it is seen. When it is recognized by one of our kind, it gains a firmer hold on the world. There is a reason you shouldn’t speak the name of the dead.”

“I see,” I said. “So how do I get rid of a ghost permanently?”

He sighed. “You don’t read ghost stories, either, do you? You have to find out why it is lingering—confront it and take away its reason for being there. That only works with the ones who are intelligent, though. Convincing them that they really are dead is also supposed to be useful. Most ghosts usually fade away, given time. Why are you asking me about ghosts?”

“Because someone came to me for help.” And I explained the situation to him in a somewhat more condensed version.

There was a little pause. “Well, good luck with that, then,” he said doubtfully. “Call me if you get into trouble. Not that I can help you, but maybe I can learn something to pass on to the next walker who calls to ask me for help.”

I think he was teasing, but I wasn’t sure enough to call him on it. “Will do,” I said instead. “It has always been an ambition of mine to serve as an object lesson for others.”

“Nice to have ambitions,” he said. “A ghost that has been following a person around for fourteen years . . . that’s not normal.”

“I do know that,” I told him.

“Might not be a ghost at all,” he said as if thinking aloud. “A witch could do something similar.”

“I’ve thought about that,” I told him. The gruesome talking head was very Hollywood, I thought. Not something I’d ever seen a ghost do. Not that it wasn’t possible, just that I’d never seen it.

“Take backup,” he told me.

“I love you, too,” I told him, and hung up.

As soon as I was off the phone, Lisa asked, “You don’t know how to exorcise a ghost?”

I shrugged. “I’ve never tried it. Most ghosts are harmless, or nearly so. My brother has more experience with that kind of thing.” Like several hundred years more experience. “I thought it was worth a shot.”

“Maybe he could exorcise Rick’s ghost?”

I shook my head regretfully. “He lives three hundred miles away and his job doesn’t let him travel.” Not to Washington, anyway. Not until they quit looking for him as an escaped prisoner.

“Maybe I should look for someone else with more experience,” she said.

“Okay,” I agreed.

“Okay?”

“I’m not a ghost hunter,” I told her. “You could probably do an Internet search and find a group nearby. If they don’t know how to get rid of a ghost, maybe they’ll know someone who does.”

“Think of the publicity,” murmured Zack. “Ghost hunters investigate famous recluse’s house.”

I stepped on his toe. I feel some obligation to help when people ask me for it—I’m not sure why. But only a little obligation in this case because I didn’t know either of the people involved. If she thought someone else would be better, I wasn’t going to argue with her—especially since she was probably right.

“Do you mind coming out and taking a look?” she said. “I think Rick has probably had enough publicity for a lifetime. If you can’t do anything, maybe we’ll try someone else.”

I looked at my garage. “It doesn’t appear as though I have anything better to do.”

I called Adam to let him know what we were doing, but his phone bumped me to another one.

“Hauptman Security,” said one of Adam’s minions.

“This is Mercy,” I said.

He cleared his throat. “Okay. Okay. I have a message for you if you called. Here it is: ‘Duty calls. Someone broke into a warehouse we have under contract. Cops came but it looks like burglar has a hostage. They need someone familiar with the layout, so I’m headed out. Call you when it’s over. Not dangerous.’”

I waited, but apparently that was it. “Okay,” I said. “Tell Adam I’ve gone ghost hunting. I’m taking Zack, and we’ll be back tonight. Not dangerous.” I hesitated. “Okay. Probably not dangerous, but he knows how these things go with me.”

“Address? Boss will want an address.”

I looked at Lisa. “Where are we going?”

Her lips thinned.

“My husband runs a security firm. They can keep secrets.”

“Your husband the werewolf.”

“That’s the one.”

She gave me the address. I told Adam’s man what it was and we all headed out: Lisa in her Tahoe and Zack and I in my Vanagon.

Prosser, like the Tri-Cities, is in a region of wine country that started out as orchard country. We took the highway on the north side of the Yakima River instead of the interstate on the south and it weaved along the river’s path through hobby farms and ranches that increased for a minute in density to become the town of Whitstran before thinning out again into countryside.

Zack didn’t talk as we drove. He turned his baseball cap around and covered his eyes. Someone else might have thought he was sleeping, but I could smell his alertness. He was just conserving his strength. I couldn’t tell what he thought about going ghost hunting with me beyond that.

The whole drive between my garage in east Kennewick to Prosser is usually about forty-five minutes on the interstate. The Old Inland Empire Highway was twistier and slower, so we’d been driving about an hour when Lisa turned toward the river.

The road was one of those sneaky dirt roads hidden in the narrow gap between fences. The highway had turned away from the river, and we drove maybe a quarter of a mile when the dirt road dropped and twisted, revealing a hidden Garden of Eden tucked into a flattish fifteen- or twenty-acre parcel between the river and a bench of basalt.

On the side of the road was a tall signpost with a large mailbox beside it. The top and biggest sign said THE HOLLOW. Below it on smaller, hand-painted signs were NO HUNTING, NO TRESPASSING, GO AWAY, and YES, THIS MEANS YOU.

We passed a barn, a smaller stable, then wound around to stop in front of a house that was maybe twice the size of the one I lived in with Adam. Since Adam’s house had been built with the idea that it would serve as a meetinghouse and safe house for Adam’s werewolf pack, our house was huge.

We parked in front of the house and followed Lisa to the door. She gave me a nervous glance.

“I didn’t tell him I was bringing you,” she said.

“A little late to mention it now,” I told her. “Are we going to stand on the porch until he notices us, or are you going to ring the bell?”

She hit the bell, and I could hear it echo—Rick must have had it piped in several places throughout the house. We waited long enough that Lisa was getting nervous before Rick Albright opened the door.

He was not as impressive as I had expected. The werewolves have given me a skewed view on the world. Important werewolves drip authority and (usually) dignity. Dignity, at least, wasn’t apparently important to Richard Albright.

It would have helped if his glasses had not been held together with green duct tape. It would have helped if his shirt hadn’t had a hole in the shoulder—helped more if there weren’t little toy boats sailing across it. But I don’t think I would have liked him as quickly if it hadn’t been for the toy boats. The only person I’d ever had that instant like for was Anna Cornick, the only Omega werewolf I’ve ever met.

However, Rick stepped out on the porch, shut the door behind him, folded his arms, and narrowed his eyes. Despite being the shortest person on the porch, he had enough authority to make Zack drop his gaze and step back.

“Lisa?” Rick’s voice was soft. And hostile. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

I expected, somehow, for her to drop back to babbling, as she had with me. Instead, she said, with a bit of defiance, “That thing has been following you around for more than a decade. So I made some calls, and they sent me to Mercy Hauptman here.”

He looked at her—and the connection between them was bright and clear to my coyote nose. She might not have told him that she wanted him. And from what she’d told me, he’d never told her he wanted her, either, but I could have cut the sexual tension in that exchange of looks with a knife.

Zack tucked his head and covered his smile with a hand.

Rick’s eyes focused on me, and all that heat turned to ice. “I have no intention of paying you anything.”

“You have a VW around here that needs work?” I asked casually, glancing around. The only cars I could see were ours.

He frowned, and the intensity of his gaze picked up. “No.”

“That’s the only thing I charge for,” I told him. “I’m a mechanic by trade. This ghost thing is not my chosen profession. And before you invite me in, you ought to know that the last time someone talked me into checking out a ghost, it turned out to be something a lot more dangerous. The woman who invited me to her house ended up dead.”

He pushed his glasses up his nose. “How did she die? Did the ghost kill her? Did you?”

“No. And no. But I couldn’t save her, either,” I told him.

He asked Lisa, “Who sent you to her?”

“Kiri’s husband.”

He took a breath, nodded abruptly, and opened the door to his house. “I suppose you’d better come inside, then.”

A curious thing happened as we entered the house. I shot a quick glance at Zack, who frowned at me and tilted his head. He’d smelled it, too.

Emotions have a scent—more of a feel, I guess, a combination of the sound of breath, heartbeat, and body secretions. Nervous sweat, aroused sweat, and exercise sweat are composed of different substances. They have an intensity, too. Outside on the porch, Rick had been aroused by Lisa and angry at our intrusion—and a variety of other things. He’d been intense. As soon as we came inside the house, everything muted. It might have been some effect of being safely in his own home—the force of emotions quite often is ameliorated by a safe haven. But this was a much stronger drop than I’d ever seen before—and Lisa’s emotions did exactly the same thing. As soon as she stepped across the threshold.

The effect was momentary, like what sound does just before your ears repressurize after an airplane flight or driving down out of the mountains. We followed Rick, and by the time he’d led us across the entrance hall into a room that felt mostly unused, his emotions—and Lisa’s—were normal. If Zack hadn’t noticed it, too, I’d have thought I had imagined it.

The room was . . . empty of smells. No one spent enough time here to leave a mark. Couches placed just so were without the normal scuffs and worn edges that such things acquire in daily living. Rick gestured us forward, but he, himself, stopped at a discreet half bar.

“Can I get you anything?” he asked, opening a sliding cabinet door I could hear even though I couldn’t see it. He pulled four glasses out and set them down.

“Not me,” said Zack.

“No.” Lisa had walked across the room to look out the window at the river.

“No, thank you.” The lack of other scents made some things very interesting. I stepped closer to Rick and took a deep breath. “Are you fae?”

His hand stilled where he had half lifted a bottle of soda water over a glass.

“My grandfather,” he told me. “My mother’s father. He abandoned his wife and my mother. I don’t know exactly what he was. He left me with a bit of intuition about people—and that’s it.” He finished pouring. “I tell you this because you’re married to a werewolf—I may be isolated, but I do read local newspapers. Hauptman is a name that comes up as often as the reporters can figure out how to slide it in. The Tri-Cities’ most famous person, the handsome face of werewolves everywhere.”

I smiled at his sarcasm. “I think he’s pretty, too. Truthfully, his good looks annoy him, though he’s not above using them when he needs to.”

“I will answer your questions, mostly, because my fae-born intuition”—he smiled wryly—“for what it is worth—tells me that you are exactly what you say you are. And that you just might be able to help. I am not in the habit of sharing my family secrets with everyone.” He grimaced. “If you really wanted to know, you could just read any of the true-crime novels written about my wife’s murder, anyway.”

“All right.” I felt bad intruding on his privacy even if it might be for his own good. I met his eyes. “You should know that I’m not fae or werewolf, but I am something. That’s how I knew you were fae—and that’s why I might be able to do something about your ghost. I’m giving you my secret because I stole one from you—and I’ll be asking you for more. You should have at least one of mine in return.”

Rick looked at me, then nodded. He glanced at Zack. “Our introductions were truncated. I’m Rick Albright. Lisa, you’ve obviously met, and I’ve met Ms. Hauptman.”

“Zack Drummond,” Zack introduced himself.

Rick nodded. “All right.” He looked at me. “You’re in charge.”

“Lisa said your wife has been haunting you since her death,” I told him.

He nodded. “I thought ghosts were supposed to be attached to the place they died, or at least someplace important to them. But it doesn’t matter where I am. In airports. Business meetings.” He blanched, drank the soda water in one smooth gulp. “Sometimes she looks alive. I’ll look over, and she’s eating at the table next to me.” He looked away from us and kept talking more and more quietly. As if noise would make the images more real. “Or walking down the road. Sometimes she’s . . . in pieces. Just like when I came in from a night of drinking and found her body cut up in our kitchen. Some of her was in the sink, some of her was . . .” He stopped speaking. “Excuse me,” he said, and walked rapidly out of the room.

Zack and I could hear him vomiting. We waited for him, Lisa visibly torn because she wanted to follow him.

“Sorry,” he apologized as he returned.

“Why don’t you show us around the house,” I said. “Tell me if you see her, and I’ll tell you if—”

And standing behind him was a woman who was almost six feet tall, a stunning redhead with bright blue eyes and a sad mouth. She reached out and ran a hand over his shoulder.

“Well,” I said. “I don’t think that will be necessary. What was your wife’s name?”

“Nicole,” he stared at me, then looked behind him. “You see her? She’s not there.”

“She’s wearing a camisole,” I said. “Blue with embroidered black flowers and a pair of black yoga pants.”

“That’s what she was wearing when she was killed,” he said. “All the newspapers reported it.” His eyes narrowed at me in sudden suspicion. He turned all the way around, looking through the ghost I saw as if she weren’t there. When he faced me again, he said in a low voice, “There were photos of her clothing in one of the books.”

“What about your intuition?” asked Lisa in a small voice. She was responsible for bringing me here.

His mouth softened.

“Nicole,” I said.

She looked at me—and then straightened when she could meet my eyes. “I can’t leave,” she said.

I nodded. “What are you doing?”

“I can’t leave,” she told me sadly, running her hand down his arm.

“He didn’t kill you?” I asked.

She looked at him, bewildered. “I can’t leave.”

There wasn’t a lot of intelligence left. The kind of haunting that Rick had described, brutal and powerful, just seemed beyond her.

“Rick,” I said, still looking at her, “did you kill your wife?”

“What do you think?” he said bitterly. “Do you think she’d haunt me otherwise? The case against me was dismissed, you know, because my money ensured that no one could prove my guilt.”

Sometimes people learn to lie so well I can’t hear it in their voice, especially if they’ve had years to practice or even come to believe their own lies. But I had to get a yes or no answer even to try.

“Did you kill your wife, Mr. Albright?” I asked again.

“I can’t leave,” his dead wife said again, and leaned her head against his shoulder. “I can’t leave.”

He shivered, but I don’t think he felt her. “Yes,” he said coolly. “Of course I killed her.” He looked at Lisa when she gasped. “You have to know it,” he said harshly. “If I hadn’t been filthy rich, I would’ve rotted in prison for the rest of my life—or sat on death row until someone decided to pull the lever.”

“Werewolves and Mercy,” Zack said conversationally, “can tell when you are lying.”

“What Zack means to say, Lisa,” I told her, “is that that was a big fat lie. Not the part about being rich having saved him—but the part about his having murdered his wife. Which leads to the question—why, then, is she haunting you, Rick? All she can tell me is that she can’t leave.”

Zack stared at me as if I were speaking Greek, but Lisa took a big shaky breath. “I knew it,” she said. Then she walked over to Rick and shoved him. “That’s for trying to make me think you’re a murderer. Stupid.” Then she turned back to me. “So why can’t she leave?”

I shrugged. “I’ve run into a few different kinds of ghosts.” I used to think there were only three kinds, but I’d expanded my knowledge a bit over the past few years. There are more things in Heaven and Earth and all that. But some things still held true. “One of the most common kinds that I’ve seen are repeaters—ghost that seem to reenact the same events over and over.”

“Traumatic events,” said Zack.

I nodded. “Usually. But sometimes just everyday things. Habits. They don’t interact with the real world much. The appearance of body parts—that fits with a repeater, except that she didn’t die here in the hot-tub room, right? And repeaters are usually tied to places, not people.”

“It’s his fault,” the ghost said.

“No,” I told her. “He didn’t kill you.”

“It’s his fault,” she said again. “I can’t leave.”

“Is he holding you here?”

She stared at me. “It’s his fault. It’s his fault I died.”

I don’t know if the dead can lie or not. I just didn’t think that this ghost had enough . . . personality left to lie.

I looked at Rick. “How could it be your fault that she died?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

The hair on the back of my neck started to tingle, and my ears popped like I was on an airplane in rapid descent. A sweet scent from my childhood drifted to my nose as well as the sharp scent of ozone—lightning just before it strikes. I didn’t know what it was, but it didn’t feel like anything very healthy. And the first rule in my sensei’s rules of combat is—run.

“Everyone out of the house,” I said.

I followed my own advice and started for the door. I grabbed Lisa’s upper arm as I moved. I didn’t run, but I wasn’t waiting for flies to gather, either.

Zack took my lead and, as he walked by Rick, he put a hand on his shoulder and pushed him along. Rick didn’t struggle so much as hesitate, but Zack was a werewolf—so Rick came with us.

So did Rick’s dead wife.

Even with the ghost tagging along, I felt better with the door closed behind us. Which meant whatever was unnerving me, it wasn’t Nicole Albright.

“Tell me,” I said, “about the times you saw your wife when you weren’t here. When was the first time?”

“If you’ll tell me why I just got hustled out of my own home,” Rick said.

“Something happened,” Lisa said. “I don’t know what, but a whole marathon of people were jogging across my grave.”

“Did you feel anything?” I asked Zack.

“The spike of emotion from you and a moment later from Lisa,” said Zack. He was kind enough not to say that what he’d smelled was terror. “But I smelled something different . . . not sure what it was. Sweet.”

“Bubble gum,” I said.

And Rick’s pupils contracted.

“That means something to you?” I said.

“My mother.” He half laughed. “She had this shampoo that was supposed to be pomegranate or something. She paid a fortune for it. But to me it always smelled like pink bubble gum.”

“Tell me,” I said, “about your mother.”

“I’m not in the habit of opening my personal box of poor-little-rich-boy stories to everyone who asks,” he told me. I think he meant to sound affronted or cold because he ended up somewhere in the middle—and I could smell his refusal. His pain.

Lisa put her hand on his and squeezed.

He looked at her, and I remembered what he said about intuition. He must know how she felt—even without intuition, Lisa’s face was open and honest.

He turned his hand over until he held Lisa’s. “But I’ve already agreed to this, haven’t I? She was a real piece of work, my mother. Psycho of the Year who was married to the Worst Husband of the Year. But it’s not my mother who is haunting me, it’s my wife.”

But his dead wife touched his cheek, looked at him with her big, sad eyes, and said, “It’s his fault. It’s his fault. I can’t leave.”

He flinched and let out a gasp—and I couldn’t see her anymore.

“Did you see something?” asked Lisa.

“She was here,” he said, “just for a moment.”

“But you didn’t see her.” I double-checked with Lisa.

“No.”

“Me, neither,” Zack said. “But I smelled something. Just for a second.” His mouth twisted a little, and I knew that whatever he smelled hadn’t been pleasant.

“Did you hear what she said?” I asked Rick.

He shook his head. Beyond that quick gasp, he hadn’t reacted at all.

“I’ve heard her say two things, over and over,” I told him.

“It’s your fault,” he said tiredly. “I can’t leave.”

“When I saw the head in the hot-tub room, she said, ‘It’s his fault,’” Lisa told me.

“That’s what she tells me, too,” I said. “You didn’t kill her. So why isn’t she haunting whoever did?”

Rick looked around as if he’d never been out on his porch before. Then he walked over to the steps and sat down. He patted the stairs beside him, and Lisa joined him.

Zack folded his arms, nodded to them, then turned away. His body language was a promise to stay in the background. He was right; Rick would talk more if I was the only stranger he was talking to.

I hopped over the porch railing and walked in front of the stairs. The porch was high, so sitting on the top step as they were put their heads and mine on a level.

“First,” I said, “you know who my husband is—so you know that if I wanted fame and glory, I wouldn’t have to use you to get it. I am not about to sell your story to the newspapers or tabloids. Second, Zack and I have very good noses—and for me scent is sometimes the first indication that there is a ghost in the room. Third, your wife doesn’t have the . . . energy it would require to follow you for all these years. If I hadn’t known that she was this active, I’d have told you she’d leave in a few months.”

I paused and waited. Lisa patted his hand, and he turned his over and grabbed hers hard.

“You think my mother is behind this?”

“I know that there was something else in that room when I pulled us all outside. I know it was not Nicole—it didn’t have the same feeling at all. It felt like some weird combination of fae magic”—some fae magics smell like ozone to me—“and danger. And Zack and I both smelled bubble gum. You say your mother smelled like bubble gum, and she committed suicide two days after your wife died.” Even I remembered that headline. I paused for effect. “Tell me, Rick. How did she and your mother get along?”

Lisa whispered, “You think his mother killed his wife, then killed herself?”

“I don’t know anything about his mother,” I said.

“I’ve thought about it before,” Rick said starkly. “She could have done it. My mother was . . .”

“Batshit crazy,” said Lisa, and moved until her body leaned against his. She looked at him for permission, and he nodded for her to continue. “She pulled Rick out of school when he was twelve because she thought he was associating too much with the wrong kids. He was playing with one of the groundskeeper’s kids a few years before that, and she shredded the kid’s face with her fingernails—” Lisa made a claw out of her free hand. “Kid had to have cosmetic surgery, which Rick’s dad paid for.”

Rick cleared his throat. “My mother was sixteen when she met my father, and he was forty. Her father had abandoned her and her mother when she was thirteen. Her mother committed suicide when my mother was fifteen. She told me that her father’s family took care of her—but I can’t confirm that because no one, and I mean no one, ever talked to them but her. She was too rich to go into the foster system, so she was left in her home and watched over by a series of caretakers who were hired by trustees and lawyers.”

He took a breath. “My father was handsome, rich, and far older than she was. She was beautiful, rich, and young, and had no one. If my father had been a different man, it might have worked. He really loved her at first—and she adored him. Adored being his wife and adored being the mother of his child. When she was pregnant with me, she found out he was having an affair. And our home was a battle zone from then on.” He smiled one of those smiles that mostly point out that the person wearing them is not happy, and said, “For most of my life, she alternated between being Supermom and a crazy woman. Sometimes both in the same ten minutes. So, do I think she could have killed my wife and cut her into pieces?” He looked over my shoulder at nothing and swallowed. “Yes. I’ve always thought so.”

He returned his gaze to me. “She found Nicole for me. Introduced us, encouraged me to ask her to marry me, then after the wedding, the day my wife was murdered, Mother came to my office with a folder. She showed me proof that my wife had been sleeping with another man throughout our engagement.” He cleared his throat. “Nicole got a butterfly tattoo on her shoulder blade two weeks after we started sleeping together. The photos clearly showed her tattoo.” He grimaced. “My mother had had Nicole followed. She knew about the affair before Nicole and I married. She chose to show the photos to me that day and told me that it was for my sake. So I would understand that my mother was the only one I could trust.”

“Crazy bitch,” growled Lisa.

“And that night your wife was killed,” I said.

“Murdered,” Rick corrected me like it was important. “If anyone had known that my mother had showed me that file that afternoon, I wouldn’t have walked out of the trial a free man. I was always pretty sure my mother had done it—it had all the marks of one of her frenzied, violent moments. Though as far as I know she’d never killed anyone before. I could never have convinced anyone she’d done it, not once she was dead. Only my father and I ever saw her at her worst. Most people thought she was this little porcelain doll.”

“And Lisa is the only one besides you to have seen your wife’s ghost,” I observed. Lisa, who was beside herself because of how much she loved him, who had gone into the house and was treated to a gruesome sight.

But Rick was still caught up talking about his mother. “My father said she was a psychic vampire,” he said.

I blinked at him. “Hold that thought,” I said, and pulled out my phone.

“Mercy?” Samuel answered his wife’s cell phone. “You know we’re in Ireland, right? And we don’t want to be bothered.”

Belated honeymoon.

“Yes. Sorry. But I really need to talk to your wife,” I told him. Ariana was a very old fae. If what I was worried about was possible, she would know. Maybe she’d know what to do with it.

“Life and death?” Samuel sounded resigned.

“Death, anyway,” I told him. I would have felt worse, but I knew Samuel. If he and Ariana really hadn’t wanted to be disturbed, they wouldn’t have had the cell phone on.

He handed me over eventually. I explained the situation to Ariana, taking my time so I didn’t miss any of the details that might or might not be important.

“So,” I asked her, “is there any way someone of fae blood could kill themselves and make arrangements to haunt someone for the rest of their lives?”

“They would have to have some sort of power source,” she said. “You told me that when you walked into the house, both you and Zack noticed a drop in the emotional intensity of the humans.”

“Yes.”

“There aren’t a lot of ways this could work,” she said after a moment’s thought. “The easiest way would be to quench an object in her death.”

I’d heard that word before. “Like when a weapon is quenched and takes on the personality traits of the person who dies.”

“Like that, yes,” she agreed, “but it doesn’t have to be a weapon.” She gave me a detailed explanation and several possible solutions.

“Okay,” I said, tucking my phone back into my pocket. “There are some fae who can feed on emotions. Literal emotional vampires. Zack and I both felt something odd happen when we walked into the house. Rick was ticked off, and both of you”—I pointed at Lisa and Rick—“were so hot for each other it was uncomfortable.”

Rick looked at me, but Lisa sucked in a breath and looked at Rick. I shouldn’t have done it, but I just couldn’t bear watching them not watch each other anymore. Four years, she’d been in love with him—and he with her, if I were any judge.

I continued as if I hadn’t noticed anything. “But all that dropped when you walked through the doorway. It didn’t seem important at the time. Death magic is not something that the fae are much involved in—that’s a witch thing. But there are some magics that the fae can use to tie the essence of a person to objects—they used to use it to power their blades or some of their magical items.” The essence or spirit was different from a soul. A person’s soul, except for thankfully rare instances, was mostly beyond the touch of magic.

“Your mother, if she learned magic from her father’s family, might have learned how to do that. Or maybe she contacted someone and asked. My expert friend says that usually the . . . the personality fades from such objects. But if your mother could feed herself on your emotions, then she could keep her personality intact indefinitely.”

“You think my mother killed my wife, then decided that she’d kill herself, so she could follow me around and, what? Take care of me?”

“Run off anyone who might compete with her for your affections,” I told him. “Or maybe just anyone who might harm you. You don’t really seem like a hermit at heart—but here you are, living isolated from everyone.”

“Because anytime I went out, anytime I brought anyone home, my wife would make an appearance,” he said. “I thought I was going mad. I worried someone would notice.” He looked at Lisa. “You don’t know. It was horrible for you, I know. But you don’t know what it meant that someone else saw it. I—” She leaned over and kissed him.

Which was lovely and sweet. A second later, the window in one of the upstairs rooms blew out and poured glass all over them. I leaned forward to help, but Zack tackled me around the middle and ran fifty feet before he put me down.

I stepped back from him and opened my mouth.

“I am your bodyguard,” he told me, almost angrily. “You are still limping, and you almost died. I am doing my job.”

“Okay,” I said. The one thing you didn’t want to do to a submissive wolf that you cared about at all was put him in the middle of contradictory orders. Adam had told him he was to guard me. I wouldn’t yell at him for it like I would have any other wolf. Probably one of the reasons Zack had been my bodyguard a lot lately.

Rick and Lisa joined us. Rick had a good-sized wound on his hand, and they both had a few cuts that looked nasty. They’d be feeling them for a few days—but they’d survive. If a big chunk of glass falling from the second story had caught one of them wrong, it could have killed them.

Ghosts are seldom truly dangerous.

The key word is “seldom.”

“If I told you that I think your mother killed herself in a ritual that would put her essence in some object and is, from that object, influencing your wife’s ghost—tried to scare Lisa away because Lisa loves you, and your mother wants to keep you to herself—what object comes immediately to mind?” I asked Rick.

He looked at me.

“That one,” I said. “The one that puts that look in your eyes.”

“But it wasn’t hers,” he said.

“What wasn’t hers?”

“A jade pendant. My father died in a car accident right before I was acquitted. He drove off a cliff with his latest girlfriend—she was seventeen. When I was going through the bag the morgue gave me, I found it. I don’t ever remember seeing him wear it. But I liked it, so I kept it.” He reached up, then looked puzzled. “I still wear it most days.”

“Not when you come outside to work with me,” said Lisa positively. “I’ve never seen you wear any jewelry.”

His face went slack with realization. “This is going to sound weird.” He looked back at the house, where the curtains were fluttering through the broken window. “Okay, not as weird as today has been. But weird enough. I didn’t want to wear it around you, Lisa. It never felt right. I haven’t worn it since you came inside the house—and I always wear it.”

“Love,” observed Zack quietly, “is a good antidote to a lot of foul magic. Leastwise that has been my experience.”

“So,” Lisa asked, her naked face turned to Rick. “What do we do next?”

I walked over to my van and popped open the back hatch. Inside, I found a nice steel pry bar. “I find the pendant and break it—according to my expert friend.”

“What she said,” Zack reminded me because he’d overheard both sides of the call, “was that breaking it usually stopped the problem—but that there could be a backlash when the item broke.”

“Where is it?” I asked Rick, ignoring Zack for the moment.

“In my bedroom.” He glanced up at the broken window. “Up there.”

I talked Rick and Lisa into staying outside. Rick wasn’t happy about it but conceded that unless he did, Lisa wasn’t going to stay outside. And Lisa, I thought, was the one in real danger.

Zack and I, pry bar in hand, walked back in the front door—and nothing happened. No weird effects, no weird sounds. No dead women. Nothing.

By the time we walked up the stairs, everything felt pretty anticlimactic. I was basing my whole plan of attack on the smell of bubble gum and ozone—and the intuition of a fae-gifted man who thought his mother had killed his wife.

Zack made me let him walk into the room first. When nothing happened, I followed him in. The room was huge, with a walk-in closet beside the door and a bathroom on the far wall. A king-sized four-poster bed dominated the room in dark splendor. Beside it, the nightstand held nothing but an alarm clock that was blinking twelve.

“It was supposed to be on the nightstand, right?” Zack asked.

And all hell broke loose.

“Are you okay?” I asked Zack as I crouched beneath a library table along one wall. It was one of the few pieces of furniture that hadn’t started attacking us.

Zack had grabbed a silver tea tray and was using it as a shield and baseball bat. It beat my table because it was metal and more solid—and he could move without losing his protection.

The corner of a drawer managed to hit him in the shoulder pretty good, despite his mad tray-wielding skills.

“Tired of this,” he said, shaking out his shoulder. “Finding anything in this mess is going to take an act of God.”

Abruptly, the flurry of thrown objects subsided.

I rolled out from under the table, and Zack walked in front of me, tray at the ready.

“I’ve got an idea,” I said, thoughtfully. “Let’s walk around the room and see what happens.”

“I have a better idea,” Zack said. “We both go outside. Call Elizaveta and set her on this problem.”

I shook my head. “I don’t want to owe the witch any favors.” She worried me, truth be told. Witches aren’t my favorite people to deal with—and Elizaveta raised my hackles.

“She is being paid,” Zack pointed out.

“For pack matters. This has nothing to do with the pack,” I told him. “If this doesn’t work, we’ll rethink.”

“All right,” he said reluctantly. “Shall we try near the bed first?”

He took two steps toward the bed, and a paperweight flew at him. He caught it—and I got hit by a candlestick I hadn’t seen coming because I was watching Zack. It hit me in the ribs with brutal force.

Luckily, Zack was distracted and hadn’t seen it fly at me. I grabbed it as it fell and held it casually in the hand that wasn’t holding the pry bar—as if I’d just picked it up so I would have a weapon in both hands. I tried not to make a sound because if Zack knew I was hurt, he’d grab me and take me outside to wait with the other two, and I had a strong feeling that I was going to have to be the one who confronted the dead woman.

One thing that shapeshifting into a coyote had taught me was that I should listen to my instincts, even if common sense said that Zack was better suited to take on a poltergeist and find the amulet.

I gripped my pry bar more tightly, tried to breathe in shallow breaths, and watched the pattern of activity. As soon as Zack neared the bed (overturned with the mattress on the far side of the room) more things flew into the air. Smaller items this time—more paperweights (someone evidently had a collection of the damned things), vases, figurines—but they were thrown hard and, as we approached the bed, with increased fury. Zack ducked and danced like a professional dodgeball player, and so did I. She couldn’t keep this up for much longer—ghosts have limits.

I have spent a long time learning martial arts. If you spar too much and don’t actually fight, you get to the point where you attack with no intention of hitting anything. Every piece that came at us was intended to do damage. I could almost smell the desperate anger of each missile. Except for one.

The little wooden box would have missed Zack’s head even if he hadn’t ducked. I watched it fly across the room and land in the open closet and roll under a shirt lying on the floor.

The closet was between me and the door we’d come in from.

I moved, and a shoe hit my side just where the candlestick had, and this time, I let out a pained yelp.

“Mercy,” growled Zack, as I had known he would. “I can handle this. Please, please go. If Adam were here, he’d make you go.”

“Fine,” I said, pressing my free arm against my ribs. I didn’t even have to act like it hurt—because it really did. “Fine. You know what you’re looking for, right?”

“I was there when he told both of us,” Zack said dryly.

“Okay,” I stumbled to my feet and tripped over some of the stuff on the floor. The movement hurt. A lot. But it also put me next to the closet.

I used the pry bar to balance myself, feeling the ache in my just-healed left knee because I’d strained it when I fell. I turned as if to say one more thing to Zack and used the motion to hit the box as hard as I could with the pry bar. It shattered on impact. I had a momentary glimpse of a greenish stone, and I aimed my second strike at it. The steel—not as good as cold iron for dealing with the fae, but not a bad second choice—hit the pendant full force and turned it into jade shards.

“What the—?” The barrage of things that had been in the air stopped, a brush dropping straight to the ground, though it had been on a quick trajectory for the middle of his back. He looked at me and saw the broken box under my pry bar.

“You lied,” he said, astonished.

“Nope,” I told him. “I don’t lie to werewolves, it’s too much trouble. I had every intention of going out with the others, though I think I’m going to need a hand to get there. I just thought I’d destroy the pendant before I did.”

He shook his head. “I am glad you aren’t mine. You’re going to be dead before you’re forty.”

“No,” rumbled my husband’s soft deep voice from the hallway. I could always tell when he was really mad: it was when his voice got really quiet. “I’m going to be dead before she’s forty.”

He stuck his head through the doorway and took in the mess. He frowned at me. “There I was, talking to five cops at the same time, when Samuel called me from Ireland and told me that Ariana said you were about to get yourself killed. I might have a speeding ticket waiting for me when I get home—if they don’t show up here.”

I’d made Adam break the speed limit. Adam always drove the speed limit.

I tried to look like breathing didn’t hurt. A big drop of blood from my forehead hit the carpet. It was probably a good thing the carpet was dark brown. “I’m not dead yet.”

He closed his eyes and sagged against the door frame. Since he couldn’t see me with his eyes closed, I figured I was safe limping over to him. But he lifted an arm for me to duck under as soon as I got near, so trying to hide how badly I was hurt was probably a lost cause.

“Are you finished here?” he asked.

“Yes,” Zack said.

“No,” I told them. “I don’t think so.”

“Okay.” Adam nodded at Zack. To me he said, “Do we need to wait here, or is it okay to head downstairs?”

Before I answered, there were sounds on the stairs.

“She said wait outside,” said Lisa.

“My house, my ghost,” Rick answered. “And it sounds like the worst is over, one way or another, anyway.”

He walked through the doorway, Lisa trailing after him. She gave me an apologetic look. “He’s not used to following orders.”

“No,” Rick said. “He isn’t. He also doesn’t like being talked about in the third person.” He took a good look at his bedroom and quit teasing Lisa. “Holy Roman Empire. What happened to my bedroom?” He paused, glanced around a little mournfully. “I liked that Tiffany lamp.”

Guiltily, I shook my hair, and a few more fragments of colored glass fell on the floor. Zack had had time to mend, so the dark red spots on his naked chest that would have been bruises on someone else had faded to normal.

“Your mama,” said Zack apologetically, “didn’t want us to smash that necklace.”

He paused, and his nostrils flared.

I smelled it too, ozone and bubble gum.

“Mercy?” asked Adam, his body stiffening next to mine.

“I thought it was too easy,” I told them. “The pendant was a focus, but ghosts don’t just—” I paused as a woman took form in the center of the room.

Ghosts don’t just appear at nighttime, but they are scarier then—and maybe easier for people to believe in.

“Can anyone else see her?” I asked quietly.

Adam shook his head—and so did everyone else.

“Rick?” I asked. “What’s your mother’s full name?”

I don’t know that it mattered. But the fae thought it did, and I know that pack magic rides on identity; new pack members come in with their full names for the pack to recognize. As my brother Gary said, most of the Indian tribes don’t speak the name of the dead for fear that they’ll attract their attention—or make them linger.

“Gina,” he said. “Gina Stephanie Albright. Is she here?”

“She’s tiny,” I told him. I could see where Rick got his lack of height. “Dark hair, blue eyes.” She was staring at me.

“That’s her.”

She threw the knife so fast that if I hadn’t been half expecting something, and if I hadn’t been a fair bit faster than human, she’d have hit Lisa with it. As it was, I knocked it out of the air and stepped in front of Lisa. Adam followed my lead, and the other two men closed the holes until we had Lisa walled off.

“Gina,” I said. “It’s time to sleep now.”

She shook her head, looking at me with wide, innocent eyes. “That tramp. I thought he was safe. But that tramp, she has to die. You saw how she looks at my boy. She wants him—but she’ll only hurt him. He’s too unworldly, he doesn’t know that she’s a whore at heart. You’ll see.”

“Gina”

“It’s my job,” she screamed at me. The violence of her anger was sudden, like a flipped switch. “My child. I protect him, and he won’t leave.” She frowned at him, and as quickly as it had come, the rage was gone, and she was just sad. “They always leave. Mama says that men are weak and women are whores.” She looked at me with sudden intensity, and I became aware that Rick’s shoulder brushed mine. “Whore.”

“Gina Stephanie Albright,” I told her. “It’s time for you to stop.” She was spirit without soul, so there would be no moving on for her—and I never lied to something that might know I was lying.

She made no motion, but a pottery vase flung itself at my head. I knocked it away with the pry bar, took a deep breath, and pulled on my mate-tie to Adam, borrowing the absolute authority that he bore innately. And also that part of me that was Coyote, the part that allowed me to see ghosts when no one else could.

“Gina Stephanie Albright,” I told her, filling my words with truth and command. “You have no power. You have no place. You will not hurt anyone ever again. You do not belong here. Go away.”

Her face twisted in rage, and I could feel her push at the commands I had given her. But I could also feel the fade in the energy of whatever force it was that allowed her ghost to remain.

“Whore,” she screamed at me. “Whore!”

“Go,” I told her.

And she was gone.

“So,” I told Adam as we drove home together—Zack had volunteered to take my van home. “I think that there’s no point in rebuilding the garage.”

I’d told Rick and Lisa that I was pretty sure that the one ghost was gone and that the other would fade with a little time. I also told them that if they (or the neighbors) had any further trouble, they were welcome to call me. I had the distinct impression that “they” was the right pronoun, and Lisa wasn’t going to be going to her home anytime in the near future.

“You don’t want to rebuild the garage.” Adam’s voice was very neutral, a statement, not a question.

“I mean,” I said, trying to sound casual about it. Businesslike. “It’s not exactly a high-profit career—fixing cheap cars so they’ll run another year. It will cost a lot to rebuild—more than the business could earn in years. I’ve already sent in the call to have it leveled to the ground.”

I didn’t need to be independent. I trusted Adam—and I could find other ways to be useful. If I decided I needed to earn my own money, I could find a job at Jiffy Lube and make more than I did at my garage.

“Call came to the house phone while we were gone,” he said. “Jesse left a voice message on my phone a few hours ago. The new body-and-paint guy, Lee, says that he told you the Karmann Ghia you put the Porsche engine into was going to be a hit. He was quite clear that he thought you should have trusted him.” Lee had taken the Karmann to a concours in Southern California. “It apparently brought in twice the estimate at the auction—about $19,000.” Adam glanced at me, then away, the corner of his lip turning up. “Jesse told me to tell you that she is sure about the $19,000 and, yes, she asked him twice. Apparently the guy who lost the auction is sending you a good body to fix for him if you can do all the work for $12,000—which Lee has already assured him you and he could do. He’s bringing back two other commissions as well, so you should—I quote Jesse, who quoted him—‘get your ass in gear and find somewhere to work.’ Unquote.”

Nineteen thousand dollars meant about $10,000 profit split between me, Kim the upholstery guy, and Lee—the new body-and-paint man. For work that had taken me about forty hours altogether. Not doctor’s wages, but not bad, either. I said a quiet prayer of thanks, not for the first time, that the Karmann had been getting painted and hadn’t been stuck in my garage when the disaster struck.

“So,” Adam continued. “I took the liberty of telling our contractor to be ready to rebuild, and in the meantime you can work out of the pole barn. I’ll loan you the amount the insurance doesn’t cover.”

“With interest,” I demanded.

He pursed his lips, and said, “Of course. That makes sense. Charging my wife interest. What a smart idea.”

“Hmm,” I said, and he grinned at me.

He turned his head back to the road but pulled my hand to his lips and bit one of my knuckles with playful promise. “Besides. As long as forgotten deities, vampires, and kids with grudges stay away, mechanicking is a much safer occupation than ghost hunting. I’m all about keeping you safe.”