Description
Hannah Moore is the only person living in her ghost town. Oh, there are also actual ghosts—but they aren’t living. The zombies locked up in the old mill aren’t really alive, either. And her best friend, Eddie? He’s technically undead.
Until the night he becomes a ghost, too.
Which is bad news for Hannah. Not only because someone—or some thing—is targeting the people she cares about. But also because Hannah wasn’t Eddie’s only friend, and the powerful vampire who comes looking for his killer is out for blood. And if Hannah doesn’t find answers…the only blood spilled might be hers.
Please note: This is the first of three short novels featuring the same couple. Each book has a self-contained plot/mystery and ends happily for now, while the romance deepens over the course of the three books to a happily ever after (if you’ve read the first two books in the Hellfire Riders series, the format is just like Jenny & Saxon’s story and Jack & Lily’s story, though the individual installments are longer than those were.)
No AI was used in the creation of this book’s contents or cover.
Want a peek inside? You can preview the first chapters and the content warnings below (they are also on the copyright page within the book).
PREVIEW THE EBOOK
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On-page: Death (accidental, natural, and unnatural); supernatural violence and a little gore; a short act of violence against the heroine by the hero (after he discovers his friend’s mutilated corpse in her cellar, he grabs her throat hard enough to leave bruises); alcohol and marijuana use; swearing/foul language; blasphemous language; vampires and blood drinking; harvesting bovine and human brains (to feed zombies); violent intrusive thoughts (most are telepathically planted by the villain); explicitly detailed sexual activity between two consenting adults; age gap (she’s in her early-30s, he’s in his mid-1250s); some anxiety, depression, and emotional trauma related to seeing ghosts and dealing with post-death weirdness; dark and morbid humor. Also includes Portland, Oregon—which, despite what some people claim, is not war-ravaged, made of plywood, or on fire (at least not as of this story’s publication date.)
Off-page but mentioned: Death, death, and more death, including child death. (The heroine sees ghosts and tries to help them, so she encounters all kinds of deaths from all kinds of causes.)
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Kati’s note: This excerpt hasn’t gone through a final round of edits. Please forgive any typos, etc. The excerpt is fairly long so that we can meet both main characters — and although these two chapters are both from Hannah’s point-of-view, the book includes chapters from Jarrow’s POV, as well.
Chapter 1
“Kid! Hey, kid! The restaurant’s back that way. See the sign? No minors allowed in this section.”
The hot bartender pointed to somewhere behind Hannah. She didn’t turn to look, partially because she’d already seen the sign, but mostly because of a not-zero chance of falling off her barstool.
“I’m just here to take my sister home, sir.”
Oh god. Now Hannah didn’t need to look. Just by his voice, she knew it was Eddie in his fresh-faced Leave It To Beaver mode. The same mode he’d fooled her with the first time she’d met him, making her think he was just some innocent, sixteen-year-old boy who’d spent his childhood assisting his grandma and rescuing helpless kittens.
Though, chances were, that was exactly who Eddie had been. Way back when.
When he was human.
“Don’t worry,” Hannah said, though her tongue felt about three sizes too big for her mouth. “He’s not a minor. He’s closer to, I don’t know—a hundred years old?”
Hot Bartender didn’t appear convinced. Maybe because if you took Tom Holland from his first appearance as Spider-Man, but made him look even younger—then gave him green eyes, a smattering of freckles across his nose, and dark auburn hair—that would be Eddie. Add in his white button-up shirt and slim gray pants with a knife-edge crease, and he could have come straight from a freshman choir recital.
Or maybe the bartender just didn’t think a kid as put-together as Eddie could be related to such a hot mess. He jerked his chin in Hannah’s direction. “That’s your sister?”
“She is.”
Not. But what did it matter? Eddie was here, and he was a ride home.
Sighing, Hannah dug into the pocket of her jeans and pulled out a small wad of bills. Weird. It was a wad of singles. Not a twenty in sight. She could’ve sworn there were a few twenties—well, at least one twenty—and the singles weren’t going to cover her drinks, that was for damn sure.
Shit. Well, it wouldn’t be the first time she left a bartender with the key to her truck and a promise to pay her tab the next day.
“I’ve got it.” Eddie laid a few twenties on the bar, each bill too crisp to have ever come out of her pocket. “Ready?”
“Yeah. No. Hold on.” She drained the last half inch of her Jack and Diet Coke. “Now I’m ready.”
Mostly. There was a wobble when she slid off her stool, but she didn’t splatter to the floor. That was a victory, of sorts. Probably the only victory Hannah would get that week, so she’d take it.
Eddie stood by, steadying her now and again while she wrestled her arms into her jacket sleeves. She patted the pockets to make certain everything was where it was supposed to be. Keys, phone. Both still there. Another win.
She turned for the door and Eddie fell into step beside her. “Do you have your phone?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Your sister called me, wondering if I’d heard from you today. She said her messages weren’t going through. You should text her.”
Fuckity-fuck. Hannah fumbled for the phone. “I turned it off. Did something happen?”
“No. But she worried when you didn’t answer.”
Of course she did. Hannah never meant to worry Chloe, yet somehow it always happened.
Powering on a device while also walking proved far beyond her current capabilities. She stopped a few feet from the door.
Eddie took in her swaying form. “How exactly did you plan to get home? Not driving, I hope.”
“Of course not.” The home screen lit up, and Hannah cringed at the number of unread messages. “I was hoping to go home with Hot Bartender. But he shot me down. Nicely, though.”
“That was decent of him.”
“Pfft. Decent is overrated.” So was autocorrect. Hopefully her message to Chloe made sense, because Hannah was all fumbling thumbs. Rewriting the text would probably render it even less coherent. “Then I thought I might try for the guy who’s on the video poker machine.”
When disgust scrunched Eddie’s nose in such an adorable manner, it was hard to believe that he was a bloodthirsty killer. “Trucker hat or flannel?”
“Flannel.”
“Bullshit. You aren’t that drunk.”
“I intended to be.” More likely, though, she’d have slept in her truck until she sobered up. She’d done it before. Would probably do it again. “And…message sent. You should follow up. I have no idea what I said.”
“I already told her I found you.”
“Oh. Good. Thanks.”
She tucked away the phone and focused on walking in a straight line. Or, if not precisely straight, aiming for the general direction of ‘outside.’ Then somehow her arm was around Eddie’s shoulders and they were in the parking lot, crossing asphalt that was black and glistening from a recent downpour. It wasn’t raining anymore, but it was late October in northwestern Oregon, so it might not be long before the sky began pissing again.
Eddie steered her around a puddle and toward the gray sedan parked beside Betty Bradford’s old pickup—though, technically, the pickup belonged to Hannah now. Just like Betty Bradford’s weird old town belonged to Hannah now, too.
“Need anything from your truck?” Eddie asked, opening his passenger door.
“I can’t think of anything.”
Now that she was cradled in Eddie’s cushy leather seat, Hannah couldn’t think of much at all. Except for how nice it would be to get home to her own bed, then sleep like the dead.
Or sleep better than the dead. Because all the dead people Hannah knew seemed fairly restless.
Case in point: Eddie. She knew he slept. All vampires did. But unlike the lore, they didn’t sleep from dawn to dusk. As long as Eddie stayed out of the sun, he was okay. But he always seemed to be doing something.
“Do you ever lie in bed and do absolutely nothing? No phone, no book, no TV—and no thinking about all the stuff you need to do that day. Just…nothing.”
Eddie cast her a quick look as he pulled out of the lot. “Why?”
“Just curious. Wondering if the undead ever do the equivalent of simply sitting back and rolling a— Oh! That’s where it went.”
“What went?”
“My cash. I picked up some edibles before hitting the bar.” She fished the dispensary packet from her jacket’s inside pocket. “Want a gummy?”
A passing streetlight illuminated his grin. Fangless, for now. She’d only seen it otherwise a few scary times. “No, thank you.”
“Chocolate?”
“It’d be wasted on me.”
When he vomited it back up. “Yeah, it sucks to be you.” She popped in a gummy. “Does food still smell good? Or does the scent make you want to puke?”
“It smells good. Tastes good, too. But the one time I tried a candy I loved when I was a kid, the consequences cured me of nostalgic cravings.” He stopped at a red light and glanced over as she ate a second gummy. “If you’re hungry, we should pick something up before we leave the city.”
Because home was over an hour’s drive from this part of Portland, and there was nowhere to stop along the way. Not this late.
“No.” She only wanted to sleep. But until she could, she’d settle for simply emptying her head and watching the city lights sparkle and shine, their reflections dancing on the river. “Thanks for coming to get me.”
“It’s nothing.”
“It’s not.”
“All right. Maybe I’d have been a little irritated if Chloe called after I was already in Tranquility.”
Hannah shot him a baffled look. “You were heading all the way out there tonight? Why?”
“To feed Betty’s kids.” Eddie gestured to the rear of the car.
Oh. Ohhhh. For an instant, Hannah wondered whether he had an entire body in the trunk, or just a container full of someone’s brains. Then decided she didn’t want to know.
She nodded instead and turned to look out over the river as they crossed the St. Johns Bridge. When Hannah inherited Tranquility, Betty Bradford’s ghost town, she’d also inherited the care and feeding of a dozen zombies locked in an old sawmill. They weren’t children—at least, most of them weren’t—but Betty Bradford had taken care of the zombies for so long, she’d called them her kids. Hannah didn’t ever intend to call them her kids, yet she did intend to fulfill her obligation. Most of the time, cow brains did the trick and were easy for Hannah to get. But zombies apparently required human brains now and then. So when Eddie had volunteered to procure those, Hannah had never been so grateful to anyone in her life.
“After I’m done feeding them, I’ll run back to the bar so I can get your truck to you before dawn.”
“Why bother?”
“I can’t do it after dawn.”
“No, I mean…I don’t need to go anywhere tomorrow,” Hannah said, then shut herself down, down, when she felt Eddie’s burst of surprise and worry.
She hadn’t meant to open up. Especially while still near the city. But, god—she was tired.
“You called in sick?”
“And break my three-month streak?” The longest she’d ever gone without showing up late or missing a day. Not so coincidentally, also the longest she’d ever held a job. Feeling suddenly claustrophobic, Hannah hit the button for the window and dug out her vape pen. “Nope.”
And the pen’s battery was dead. Of course it was.
She pointed to the console. “Can I use your charger thing?”
“You can, but—”
“Shit.” It had the wrong USB port. A little one, instead of a regular one. “Do you have a… whatchamacallit? Not a translator. The plug thing with two—”
“Hannah.”
“I got fired. Again. No big deal. And an adapter! That’s what I need. An adapter.”
“I don’t have one.”
“Probably better for me, anyway.” She turned her head to the open window, let the cold air wash over her face. Like a dog.
Quietly Eddie asked, “What happened?”
“Money was missing from my till. My boss said he wouldn’t file charges, but I shouldn’t bother coming back in.”
Hannah didn’t know if all vampires hissed when something pissed them off, but Eddie did.
“That son of a bitch. You’d never.”
“Of course I wouldn’t. I only steal from dead people.” It came out too bitter to be as funny as she’d intended.
“Should I fuck him up for you? Suck him dry?”
That was funnier than her own poor attempt at a joke, but Eddie probably wasn’t kidding. Not completely.
“No,” she said on a sigh. Rain began to splatter the door panel and she rolled up the window. “Tom’s a nice guy. And it was probably one of the mechanics. So when money goes missing again, he’ll realize what happened and feel super guilty. That’ll be satisfying enough for me.”
“Will it? Really?”
It would have to be. Hannah rubbed her face and was surprised to encounter wetness on her forehead and cheeks. She hadn’t felt the rain on her skin before she’d closed the window, which meant her face was almost as numb as the rest of her. But numb was good. And better than crying.
“Hannah,” Eddie said a few minutes later. “You understand that you don’t need to work?”
“Yes, I do. Need to work, I mean. I understand that you think I don’t, but I do.”
He shook his head. “You can be paid a caretaker’s salary out of the town’s trust—”
“It’s not the money.” Not just the money. “It’s about having a job. Because that’s a normal thing to do.”
“Since when are you concerned about normal?”
She wasn’t. But why was he pushing so damn much? “Maybe because normal means I get to interact with people who aren’t dead?”
“Interacting with people is overrated. Alive or dead.”
Hannah huffed out a laugh. “You aren’t wrong. But, still. I can’t stay out there alone all the time.”
“But you aren’t alone out there.”
He said that as if it were the answer to her problem instead of being the largest part of every problem Hannah had. And she didn’t know what to say in response.
When her silence continued, Eddie regarded her sidelong before glancing over his shoulder. Looking into the back seat.
Apparently wondering if anyone was there. “The little girl,” he said after a hesitation, “the one from earlier this week—did she make it home? Or is she still around?”
“She went home.” Her throat was so constricted, her reply was barely even a whisper. But Eddie was a vampire, so he heard her anyway.
“That’s good.”
Hannah nodded.
“An accident or…?”
“Accident.” She squeezed her eyes closed. “She managed to open the gate in their backyard. There was a creek behind her house.”
“Damn,” he said softly, but no more. Perhaps sensing she didn’t want to talk about it. Hannah never let him into her head, but Eddie had a hundred years’ experience reading people.
“There was another today,” she eventually said, her gaze fixed on the night outside. No more city lights. Nothing alongside the highway but a blur of trees and the occasional darkened house. “An older guy.”
“Natural death?”
“Mmhmm.”
“Did he stay?”
“For a while.”
“What did he need?”
“Just to talk to someone.” And for someone to find his body. A week had passed since he’d died in his sleep, and he didn’t have an Eddie or a Chloe, or even a neighbor who noticed that he’d gone quiet. So Hannah had requested a senior citizen welfare check—a call she made so often, the number was saved to her very short contact list.
“Ah,” Eddie said. “That’s why you turned off your phone?”
She lifted a shoulder. Yes. No. Both.
Since she wasn’t a complete asshole, turning off her phone so she could give the poor old man her undivided attention was a bare minimum in terms of effort. But as to why she didn’t turn it back on? There’d seemed like a lot of reasons—mostly involving the terror that her life would end in the same lonely way. But she didn’t want to think of those reasons now.
And anyway, Chloe and Eddie had checked in on her. If that made her want to bawl…well, she’d do it later. After she washed off her mascara.
“Did he have any good stories?”
Because Hannah often heard the wildest confessions after people were dead. “Not really. He was just a very normal, very lonely old man. He went home as soon as they found his body.”
Wherever ‘home’ was. Whatever it was. Hannah didn’t know, and no one had ever returned to tell her. But ‘home’ seemed like a nice place to go, so Hannah had called it that since she was young enough to give it a name.
“Heh.” The sudden sound wasn’t quite a laugh.
She looked at Eddie warily. “What?”
“It just reminded me of a woman that Jarrow and I met in the year ’50. Or maybe ’51?”
Of the 1950s. Back when men were men, housewives tolerated their lives with the help of a little yellow pill, and movies were in black and white (but mostly white).
Hannah gave a dramatic sigh. “Are you about to tell me a Mr. Sippy story?”
“Young lady, you’ll listen and you’ll like it. We’ve got forty-five minutes left in this drive, and you said you’re thankful for the ride.”
He had her there. She sank down a little lower in her seat, closing her eyes.
In truth, she didn’t mind hearing about Eddie’s adventures with the vampire who’d found him dying on a French battlefield more than eighty years ago. Most of his tales were entertaining, and the ones that weren’t fun were at least interesting.
But that vampire, Jarrow. Hannah didn’t think Eddie lied or even exaggerated, but she did wonder whether he had a rose-colored view of his maker. Or sire. Or whatever vampires called the person who transformed them. Because when Eddie talked about him, his voice held more than a smidge of adoration and awe.
And his stories made Jarrow sound like a vampire Superman. But, no—that wasn’t right, because Clark Kent was a (super nice and super strong but otherwise) regular guy. So maybe a Fitzwilliam Darcy, but minus the insulting and haughty part of Darcy’s character arc. A perfect gentleman who was the epitome of wisdom and kindness…and who also happened to drink blood. But even that was only a sip here and sip there; he didn’t kill anyone.
Hannah thought anyone so flawless was more likely an insufferable prick.
Though she had to admit, Jarrow didn’t always sound insufferable. Like in the story Eddie began telling, they’d come across a frail, elderly woman during their nightly hunt, and the woman had mistaken the pale, white-haired, aristocratic Jarrow for an angel of death. And she’d welcomed him. Because she’d been completely alone, none of the dreams she’d had as a girl had ever come true, and she’d never seen anything or gone anywhere she’d hoped to. So she was tired of living, and begged Jarrow to end her misery.
Jarrow had, though not by killing her. Instead, he and Eddie spent a year flying everywhere the woman wanted to see, and gave her enough blood to keep her strong and healthy while they did.
That was where Eddie stopped talking. Though Hannah waited for the rest, he seemed done.
But that couldn’t be the end. “Did you or Mr. Sippy turn her into a vampire after that? So she could keep traveling and seeing things?”
Hannah always expected—hoped?—that the stories would devolve into a debauched vampire threesome, but they never did. Or maybe Eddie left out the good parts.
A small smile tilted the corner of his lips. “No. She made a friend—a human one—while we were visiting Sydney, and she decided to stay. We got a Christmas card from her for several years after. Then…”
He trailed off with a sigh, but didn’t need to finish. Hannah understood. The old woman had gone home.
“Do you ever get a Christmas card from Mr. Sippy?”
Who’d apparently gone on some kind of vampire sabbatical fifty years ago, taking a break from human civilization. Which, okay. People weren’t always awesome and the world was pretty much shit, so who could blame him? Still, when Hannah pictured a vampire brooding in some secluded castle (or wherever he was), probably dressing up in a tuxedo and cape every night—Eddie often mentioned how fastidious Jarrow was with his clothes—it sounded less like a sabbatical and more like “boring as fuck.”
Eddie looked amused. “I don’t think they sell holiday cards where Jarrow is.”
“He could make one.” It wasn’t as if someone brooding in a castle had anything else to do.
“He doesn’t need to.” He cast her a quick glance. “We can talk through our bond.”
Nice. Telepathic holiday greetings. No need to see each other in person.
Hannah wished she could do that with her family. Kind of. Not really. But sometimes.
Except for Chloe.
Which reminded her— “How did you find me?”
“What?”
“When Chloe called, how did you know where I was?”
Eddie slowed, waiting for another car to go by in the opposite direction before he turned onto Tranquility Creek Road. It would be thirty more minutes before they reached the ghost town at the end of that road. When Hannah drove the winding forest route, she spent the entire time praying she wouldn’t hit a deer. With Eddie, no need to worry. He had better vision and better reflexes—and he could hear the deer coming.
Yet he didn’t seem to hear her question.
“Eddie,” Hannah said flatly.
He grimaced. “I put a tag in your truck.”
“A tag? Like a tracker?”
She supposed his hesitant nod in reply should have pissed her off. But considering how often she turned off her phone, and how bad things could get in Tranquility if something went wrong at the sawmill…
“Okay.”
“Okay? Oh. Good.” He sounded relieved.
“Did you think I’d be upset?”
“Maybe. And if you were, I didn’t want to be crushed by your invisible hand.”
Her invisible hand? What in the world did he think— Oh. He meant her telekinetic ability.
Hannah probably couldn’t have used it, anyway. Not now, when she was too tired and too wasted to really focus. But no need to tell Eddie that.
A minute later, as if still feeling out the idea even as he spoke, he said slowly, “If you really don’t mind me always knowing how to find you, we could do it another way.”
“What way?”
“A bond. You ingest a drop of my blood, I ingest a drop of yours.”
Ingest. She shuddered. “No thanks. I don’t want to become a vampire.”
“From a drop?” He laughed at her. “Hannah, trust me when I say it takes a hell of a lot more blood than that.”
“Okay, whatever. But I also don’t want to be your minion.”
That made him laugh again. “You won’t be a minion, either. Though it would be fun to have one. I should look into that.”
“Do that. Share your blood with them. I prefer the tracker.”
“Fair enough,” he said, still grinning.
Hannah closed her eyes. When she opened them again, cold rain was dripping onto her face as Eddie helped her out of the car, then he gently guided her up the stairs to her front door.
He got her through the entrance and into the house, because a long time ago Betty Bradford had welcomed him in, and Hannah had never rescinded his invitation.
He didn’t bother to turn on the lights. “To your room?”
“Please.” She mushed a sloppy kiss against his cheek. “You’re a good friend, Eddie. Even if you ingest blood.”
“And you’re still drunk.”
“Also a leeeeetle high.”
“Well,” he said, steering her into the bedroom, “you had a rough week.”
“I sure did. But why are my boots still on?” Hadn’t she stopped to take them off at the front door? She yanked at the laces, then gave up. Flopping onto the bed, she curled up atop the coverlet. She’d have to wash her bedding in the morning. But she didn’t care. That was a problem for Future-Hannah. Now-Hannah just wanted to sleep.
And forget. For a little while.
But she never did.
***
“…Hannah,” Eddie was saying. “Hannah! I need you to wake up.”
But she’d just gotten to sleep. Mumbling, “I’ll take off my boots later,” Hannah rolled over and grabbed for a pillow to put over her head.
“You’re not supposed to be in here,” a feminine voice chided. Schoolteacher Sally? “Miss Moore declared the inside of the house as off-limits to us, in order to preserve her privacy.”
What the hell was Schoolteacher Sally doing in Hannah’s bedroom?
“You’re the second person tonight who told me I shouldn’t be somewhere,” Eddie replied, sounding irritated. “But I expect Hannah will forgive me, considering.”
“I dunno, kid. She doesn’t strike me as particularly forgiving or Christian-like.” That was Mobster Melvin. Also in Hannah’s room. While she was trying to sleep. “I bet she knows how to hold a grudge.”
For fuck’s sake. Hannah lifted her head long enough to hush them all with a loud “Shhhhhht!” before letting her face drop to the mattress again.
“No, Hannah—don’t go back to sleep! I need you.”
For what? Oh. “Truck keys are in my pocket,” she said groggily, raising her arm and pointing toward the closet. Oh, but she was still wearing her jacket.
Except she wasn’t. Her boots were off, too. And the quilt that usually lay folded on the armchair was covering her.
Weird.
“I can’t get the truck, Hannah.” It sounded like Eddie was close, maybe even on the bed with her, though she hadn’t felt the mattress dip. “Someone killed me.”
“I know.” He’d told her that story so many times. About how he’d been riddled with German bullets when Mr. Sippy found him. “A stupid Nazi.”
“No, not during the war. Tonight. I’m dead, Hannah. I’m a ghost. And I need you to wake up.”
A ghost? Blearily, she opened her eyes. Eddie was right there, lying next to her, his nose almost touching hers. She snorted.
“Good joke,” she said, lifting her hand to flick his nose. “But you’re not a ghost, you’re just a silly vamp—”
Her fingers went through his head.
No. No no no no. Again, she tried to touch him and encountered nothing but her bed. “Eddie? Eddie!”
“I’m here.” The words were choked. “I’m so sorry.”
“No. No.” Hannah flung herself back, fumbling for the lamp on the nightstand. She didn’t need the light. She never needed light to see ghosts. Only to see everything else, but Hannah wasn’t sure she wanted to see a world that suddenly wasn’t right.
Her bedroom looked the same, however…despite being crowded with every ghost who resided in Tranquility. Not just Schoolteacher Sally and Mobster Melvin, but also Farmer Frank, Traveling Travis, the Boy—even Mind-Your-Own-Business Melba had come. As a group, they were uncharacteristically solemn. Likely waiting to hear what had happened to Eddie, whom most of them had known for years and years.
Though she hadn’t been friends with him nearly as long, Hannah needed to know, too.
“How?” she whispered hoarsely, looking Eddie over. To her eyes, he appeared the same as when he’d come into the bar. God, was that only two hours ago?
“I’ll show you.” Suddenly he was standing beside her. “You should ask the Laffertys to come.”
The family who owned the farm on the opposite side of the river. Good idea.
Hannah nodded, searching for her boots—and found them placed neatly beside her bed. Which meant Eddie had taken them off after she’d passed out. Taken off her boots, her jacket, and tucked her in.
She wouldn’t cry. She wouldn’t. Not yet.
Throat so tight she could hardly breathe, Hannah whispered, “Can you text Althea from my phone while I get ready?”
“Hannah,” Eddie said softly. “I can’t.”
It took a few seconds to understand. Her vision blurred when she did. Then she blinked back the tears and swallowed the lump clogging her throat. “Of course you can’t.” He couldn’t touch a phone now. He couldn’t touch anything now. “Never mind. I’ve got it. Where are we going?”
“Out by the sawmill.”
Because he’d intended to feed Betty’s kids. “Do you know who did it? Or do we need the Laffertys to sniff out the fucker?”
Who must be another vampire. Or maybe a werewolf. Probably not a human. It would have taken someone strong and fast to get a drop on Eddie.
“I never saw who it was.” The grim seriousness in his voice made her glance up from the message she was typing. “If the Laffertys decide to use their noses, fine. But I want them to come in case you need protection.”
She blinked. “Do you think I will?”
“He snuck up on me, Hannah.”
And if a vampire hadn’t heard his killer, hadn’t seen him, Hannah wouldn’t either. Even telekinesis wouldn’t save her from a threat she couldn’t see coming. Inviting a few werewolves might even her odds.
She swallowed hard and nodded. Then finished the message to Althea Lafferty, her fingers shaking. “Snuck up on you,” she echoed, trying for a light tone. “Imagine what Mr. Sippy would say.”
Hannah meant to tease, but Eddie only shook his head, his expression tinged with unease.
“Jarrow would say we need to kill this thing. As fast as we can.”
Chapter 2
An overgrown track through the woods was all that remained of the original road between Hannah’s house and the old sawmill. Her truck could have made it there; Eddie’s sedan couldn’t. In the summer, maybe. But a full week of rain had turned the old road into a sloppy mess just waiting to suck a car’s tires down into the mud. And since the person—or thing—who killed Eddie might be lurking nearby, walking the distance wasn’t an option.
So Hannah had to fly there.
She hated it. In every superhero movie she’d ever seen, flying was supposed to be joyous and fun. But she could only hear the echo of her mother’s worried screams and her father shouting at her to get down, GET DOWN NOW! before she got hurt. She could only remember how much it had hurt when the screaming and shouting made it impossible to concentrate, so she’d crashed and proven them right.
They told the doctor she’d tumbled off a roof, and it was mostly true. Except Hannah had plummeted onto the roof before she’d rolled off it.
So Hannah didn’t fly if she had other options. And when they set out, she’d been afraid her focus would be all over the place (Eddie had been killed! By something fast and strong enough to kill him!) and she’d drop out of the sky and join the growing ghost population of Tranquility, Oregon.
But Eddie himself gave Hannah something to focus on. His ghost flew just ahead of her, a bright spot in the dark, and she watched him twirling and laughing in the air. Just like a superhero.
Some vampires could fly, too—but only the older ones. Eddie had once told Hannah that he was still five centuries away from developing the ability.
Dying seemed like a shitty way to level up faster.
But at least he enjoyed this part of it. Whereas Hannah was miserable. And freezing. It was raining again, the sort of relentless drizzle that seeped down into her bones, despite her raincoat and the extra layers she wore. And she couldn’t see a damn thing except for Eddie. Not a hint of moonlight shone through the clouds. Even her flashlight was useless, unless she wanted to see a bunch of pointy treetops.
She didn’t. Because then she’d imagine being impaled on a pointy treetop if she fell. The chance of that happening actually seemed pretty high, since there were a lot of fucking trees around here.
But that tracked. Without trees, a town wouldn’t have been built here in the first place.
Until nine months ago, Hannah had never heard of a place called Tranquility nor ever stepped foot in Oregon. But people who’d lived in the state all their lives had likely never heard of Tranquility, either. Not unless they had a specific interest in Oregon’s history or its ghost towns.
Even if they’d never heard of Tranquility, however, its history was similar to any other western boom town. First the government and white settlers swooped in, killed or forcibly displaced the native population, then parceled out the stolen land. No cabins or homesteads from that time still stood in Hannah’s town. All that remained was the name they’d given the stream running through the center of the surveyed township—Tranquility Creek.
Then came the money. In some places it was a railroad, in others it was gold. In this part of Oregon, it was timber. Lumber companies jizzed their pants when they saw the thousands upon thousands of acres of old growth forest. They brought their saws and men whose job was sawing. And while some companies only established temporary camps for the loggers, others built towns for the workers and their families.
That’s what the Bradfords of the Bradford-Williams Lumber Company did in the mid-1920s. They built a main street, a school, and neat rows of little houses on the northern side of town. On the southern end, the Bradfords built themselves a big Victorian (which Hannah had to admit that she loved, even if it creaked and moaned like it was haunted. Which it wasn’t, because—aside from the unexpected visit from Eddie and Tranquility’s other residents—the town’s ghosts respected her privacy.)
West of the town, where the creek merged with the Clatskanie River, they also built the sawmill, laid a railway, and dug a millpond.
It all went swimmingly for a while. They clearcut the forest, milled the trees into lumber, shipped it out and made a fortune. But then the timber was gone, the sawmill shut down, the jobs went with them, and the town died slowly…until a fire tore through the company housing and half of Main Street in 1957. Then it died quickly.
After that, Betty Bradford’s uncle was the only person left. Well, the only person left alive. Because there’d also been a few dozen zombies (exactly how that happened, Hannah still didn’t know).
At some point, Uncle Bradford began a reforestation effort, planting Douglas fir seedlings around the town and in the surrounding hills. Six decades later, those trees stood well over a hundred feet tall.
So even if Hannah plummeted from the sky and miraculously avoided skewering herself, she’d still smash into the ground from over a hundred feet in the air.
But she wouldn’t let herself think about that. Focusing on Eddie was better.
Paying such close attention to him was the only reason why she wasn’t startled shitless when he suddenly called out, “Almost there! I made it just past the south bridge.”
The south bridge over Tranquility Creek. Beyond that wasn’t an evergreen forest, but a scattering of big leafy trees around the millpond and the ruins of the old sawmill. The rest was an overgrown tangle of sword ferns, blackberry bushes, and ass-tall grass.
“Well, damn,” Eddie said as he began to descend. “He didn’t just punch through my heart. He ripped off my head, too.”
Oh fuck. Hannah’s stomach dropped. By some miracle, the rest of her didn’t.
Don’t picture what’s down there. Don’t think about it. Just focus on getting down.
She still couldn’t see. But the other ghosts were converging toward a single spot on the ground (don’t think of Eddie’s body being that spot, don’t don’t) their figures glowing like a landing strip at an airport. Not wanting to land exactly on that spot (on Eddie’s body) Hannah aimed about twenty yards to the east and concentrated on making it down alive.
Alive, she managed. But it was fortunate she didn’t try for safely or elegantly, because she hit the ground too fast. Her knees buckled, and she sprawled face-first into a clump of ferns. Mud soaked her jeans, coated her hands, and probably splattered her face—but at least the only witnesses were seven ghosts and two werewolves. Hooray.
She distantly heard one of the ghosts say, “Yup. That’s a dead body.” Farmer Frank, most likely. He had a habit of stating the obvious.
A big shadow with Kian Lafferty’s familiar voice loomed out of the dark and offered his hand, helping Hannah to her feet.
“Sorry, Hannah. Damn. I was distracted looking at”—he tilted his head to indicate something behind him. Hannah could still barely see, but guessed it was Eddie’s corpse from the way some of the town’s residents were exclaiming their horror and shaking their heads. “I didn’t expect you to come dropping out of the sky, or I’d have caught you.”
Maybe flying wouldn’t be so bad if one of the Lafferty brothers was at the end of it, waiting to catch her in his arms. “Maybe next time,” Hannah said, then cringed. “Shit. Forget that. I hope there’s never a next time.”
“There certainly won’t be for me,” Eddie said cheerfully—at the same time Kian spoke over him with, “There won’t be. We’ll track this fucker down.”
Hissing, Eddie leveled a disbelieving glare at the werewolf. Then realization bled into Eddie’s expression.
If flying was an upside of being a ghost, this was a significant downside. Because even one of the Laffertys, whose good manners had been drilled into him by his formidable mother, would talk over a ghost he didn’t know was there.
Eddie shot a puzzled glance at Hannah. She gave a tiny shake of her head.
Typically, she would’ve already established a psychic link between her mind and the brothers’, which allowed them to see and hear the ghosts as Hannah did. But the connection required a slight opening in her psyche, like cracking a door ajar and letting her power flow outward.
Although she created a strong barrier to prevent anything else from flowing outward—and to stop other people’s emotions from flowing inward—Hannah wasn’t certain her barrier would hold when she saw the condition of Eddie’s body. Better to keep her brain locked up tight until then.
Steeling herself, she pulled the heavy flashlight from the deep pocket of her raincoat. No need to turn it on yet. Not with the ghosts to guide her in the right direction.
Kian gently touched her arm as she began to trudge her way through the grass and mud. “You steady?”
How unsteady did she look that he felt compelled to ask? “Why?”
“Uh…” The high-pitched edge to his voice told Hannah that he was searching for the politest way to say it. “You smell like you just threw a really good party.”
“If a self-pity party counts, then I did.”
“Yeah, it counts. I’ve thrown plenty of those myself. Malcolm never does. He hates them.”
That was no surprise. ‘Stoic’ could be Malcolm Lafferty’s middle name. She’d never seen him crack a smile, though Kian did often and easily.
“I’m not a hundred percent sober,” Hannah admitted. Maybe not even fifty percent. “But I’m steady.”
From up ahead, Malcolm said dryly, “I think what my little brother really wants to know is whether you’ll puke your guts out the instant you turn on that light.”
“Pretty much,” Kian agreed.
Hannah didn’t worry about throwing up. She worried about collapsing to the ground and bawling her eyes out—then never stopping, never getting up again. “I’m sure I’ve seen worse.”
“Not when it’s a friend,” Eddie said quietly.
That was true. Yet Eddie being a friend was even more reason to stiffen her spine and help find the thing that killed him.
Hannah flicked on the light. The bright beam flooded the path ahead, but she was still a few yards away from where Eddie’s body and the other ghosts waited. Clusters of sword ferns and tall grass hid everything on the ground near their feet.
Malcolm squinted against the light, rising from his crouch as Hannah and Kian approached. Like his brother, Malcolm only wore a pair of loose sweatpants. They probably hadn’t worn any clothes (or been in human form) when they’d crossed the river between their farm and the millpond, yet Hannah supposed they brought the pants to protect her delicate sensibilities.
It was sweet they still believed she had any. And at any other time, she’d have been more appreciative of all the thick muscle on display, or the way the rain glistened on their brown skin. But she couldn’t now.
“Our mother asked me to extend her condolences, and for you to let us know if you need anything,” Malcolm said. “She would’ve come, but we figured someone ought to stay home, just in case.”
In case whoever killed Eddie headed to their farm. Hannah had zero doubts whether Althea could handle anything that did. “Thank her for me, please. And thank you both for coming.”
“Don’t mention it. Do you sense anyone else nearby?” Malcolm asked.
“No. But I also don’t know if it’s a human, or something that might be able to hide from me.”
“Have you ever met anything that can hide from you?”
“No. But it doesn’t mean nothing can.”
“True. Though I trust we can rule out a human, because it’s doubtful one could do this much damage. Another of the wolfkin could, but neither Kian nor I picked up any sign of one being out here. And I caught another scent around the wounds.”
The wounds. Hannah didn’t look. Not yet. “Do you recognize it?”
Malcolm grimaced and shook his head. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever smelled before.”
“Me, either,” Kian added. “But the scent is fresh, and it’s all around this area. We’ll follow the trail once we get everything squared away here.”
So they were waiting on her. And the longer they waited, the more likely Eddie’s slayer would get away. She just needed to look at the body and—
Oh god. God. Maybe she did have delicate sensibilities. Or Eddie was right. It was so much harder when it was a friend.
“Deep breaths, Hannah,” Eddie urged from beside her. She was bent over, arms around her stomach, struggling against her scream. “Deep and slow. You’ve got this. Just breathe.”
And open her eyes again. But even with them closed, Hannah could still see him. His white shirt, blood red. Mud all over those choir boy pants. His red hair matted and wet, his head—
His head.
“I know it’s hard, Hannah,” Kian said, crouching next to her, his voice a soothing croon. “I about did the same when we first got here. It’s not easy seeing him like this. Eddie was special.”
“I still am,” Eddie said.
She couldn’t laugh, but managed to straighten up and drag in a ragged breath. Then another. “It’s okay. I’m okay.” Not really, but she’d been functioning in a ‘not okay’ state for so long, it barely mattered. “Did it want something—or take anything?”
“Check his pockets,” suggested Mobster Melvin just as Malcolm asked, “All right if I roll him over?”
Hannah nodded when Eddie said, “Yes.”
“We found another body in the road.” Kian gestured toward the muddy track leading to the sawmill. “A human, but dead for at least a few hours. Eddie’s scent is on him, and his throat’s ripped up.”
“Eddie was on his way to feed Betty’s kids.” The brothers knew about the zombies. And although Althea Lafferty and Betty Bradford had reportedly argued in the past about Betty’s choice to keep the zombies alive, the Laffertys still provided the cow brains that served as the zombies’ primary diet. Probably because Althea decided it was far better to have placid zombies next door than hungry ones.
“So who’s the dead guy?” Malcolm asked.
Kian added, “Could this be a revenge killing after Eddie sucked him dry?”
Hannah looked to Eddie, who smiled thinly and said, “I’d be surprised if anyone cared enough about that asshole to kill me in retaliation. But there are a handful of little boys in Gresham who will be very glad he’s dead.”
“Good riddance, then,” muttered Schoolteacher Sally. Farmer Frank and Traveling Travis both vanished and reappeared on the road, unzipping so they could ghost-piss on the pervert’s corpse. Hannah didn’t need to watch that, because she’d seen it before. Melba was already gone, minding her own business, and the Boy sidled closer to where Mobster Melvin was bending over Eddie’s head, examining the ragged stump of his neck.
“Eddie doesn’t think it was revenge,” Hannah relayed only the important bits. “The guy was a pedophile from Gresham.”
Kian blinked. “Hold up. Eddie’s talking to you? He stayed?”
No reason not to establish a connection now. She’d had her meltdown, and the danger of letting her emotions slip through her mental barrier had passed. Automatically, Hannah reached out to Eddie first—and the wrenching grief of not finding him was a new and raw pain that she hadn’t known was coming.
Hannah could always sense the presence of ghosts, but she couldn’t connect with their minds, couldn’t feel them like she could anyone else. And although Eddie was standing right beside her, she couldn’t reach him.
But she could see him. He wasn’t gone.
That thought couldn’t dispel the pain of sensing nothing where he should be…but it helped. So did keeping her gaze on Eddie while linking to the wolves.
The surfaces of their minds felt similar to a human’s, but with an undeniably feral essence. Even Kian’s, whose psyche reminded her of a bouncing puppy, held that deep-rooted wildness. Malcolm’s was more quiet and watchful, and seemed surrounded with a prickly tangle of blackberry thorns.
But that was only the surface. Hannah never delved deeper. Partially because it would be a rude invasion of privacy. Partially because it was unnecessary when establishing a link. Partially because she discovered opinions and heard thoughts she’d rather not know. But mostly because it made Hannah feel like she was drowning in someone else’s life, and staying afloat in her own was hard enough.
“Eddie, my man.” Kian raised his hand as if to bump fists, then awkwardly seemed to realize he couldn’t. “I’m so damn sorry. We both are.”
He indicated Malcolm, who gave a grim nod.
Eddie shrugged, looking so normal. He still wore his white shirt and gray pants, but in his ghost form they were unbloodied and unmuddied. “I’m not sure if I’m sorry yet. It doesn’t feel real.”
“It looks real enough,” Malcolm said, glancing down at Eddie’s body. His eyes widened slightly upon seeing Mobster Melvin, who was still examining Eddie’s head.
“You see anything like it before, Melvin?” Eddie asked the other ghost.
“Never. And I’ve seen maulings, manglings, maimings—I even once saw a drunk old fool shear his head clean off by driving his convertible up under the back of a semi at ninety miles per hour.” His expression was all sad eyes and a wrinkled brow when he glanced up, giving his face a hangdog appearance beneath his oil slick of hair. “That last is the nearest I’ve seen to this. But your head wasn’t sheared off because something slammed into your face. More likely it was torn off. See how the flesh and skin is all ragged, but nothing’s crushed? Nothing except your back and chest. That looks like he punched right through your heart.”
Eddie frowned. “That alone shouldn’t have killed me. Even if my heart’s torn apart, it’ll heal. Unless it’s gone?”
With a glance up at Malcolm, the old mobster said, “Will you turn him over again?” He peered into the gaping hole through Eddie’s chest when it was done. “Yup. Heart’s gone.”
“Well…well, fuck,” said Eddie, looking befuddled. “Why?”
“The thing who did this to you didn’t say why?” Malcolm asked.
“It didn’t say anything. I didn’t see it, hear it, or smell it coming.”
“You didn’t?” Kian scratched the back of his head. “What could do that?”
Eddie lifted his hands. “Your guess is as good as mine. Though I know someone who might have run across something like it before.”
“Ah,” said Kian. “Your daddy?”
Hannah bit her lips to contain her smirk. The Laffertys hadn’t heard quite as many Mr. Sippy stories as she had, but they’d heard more than a few.
“Jarrow’s more like an older brother than a daddy. A much older brother,” Eddie countered. “But I don’t know how to reach him now that I’m dead.”
Dead. Hannah’s throat tightened. When talking with Eddie, when Kian teased him, it was so easy to forget. Even with his corpse lying in front of them.
Yet it couldn’t lie there for long. As Malcolm seemed to realize, too, because he asked, “Do you want us to move your body or just leave it for the sun?”
“Since my heart’s gone, might as well let it turn to dust.” Eddie sighed. “I can heal from a lot, could even reattach my head. But without a heart, there’s no coming back.”
Hannah stared at him, trying to imagine that. She’d known almost nothing could kill a vampire, but— “Are you saying that if we find your heart, you might come back to life?”
For a second, Eddie looked uncertain. Then said, “I’ve never seen it happen before, but…possibly?”
“So if this thing tossed your heart away in the woods, we could heal you?”
“There’s a chance, yeah.”
“Well, then,” said Schoolteacher Sally, who’d been mostly quiet until then, watching them all with her arms crossed over her chest. “We’ll start looking for it.”
Good, because the ghosts’ night vision was better than Hannah’s. And the wolves’ noses were far, far better than Hannah’s. While the schoolteacher crisply directed the other ghosts to fan outward in a search, Malcolm and Kian exchanged glances. The brothers weren’t psychics but still managed to conduct a full discussion with that look.
“All right,” said Kian as Malcolm transformed into a massive werewolf and bounded away. A moment later, he was beyond the reach of Hannah’s flashlight. “He’s going to search for the heart. I’m going to haul that kiddie-fucker’s body to the sawmill—and just to be safe, you’re coming with me.”
He’d get no argument from Hannah. “Okay,” she said.
“Then we’ll take Eddie’s body to…where? You need no sunlight, right?”
“Right.”
“My cellar?” Hannah asked, looking to Eddie.
He nodded. “It won’t be the first time I passed a day in one.”
“Then it’ll keep your body safe until we find your heart.”
Eddie murmured an assent. Hannah couldn’t help but notice he didn’t seem as optimistic as she was.
“You don’t think we’ll find it?”
“I hope you do. But why take someone’s heart only to toss it away? He must have a use for it. Or he intends to eat it.”
“If he has a use for it,” Kian said, “then he’ll still have it. So we’ll find your heart when we find him.”
“Whether you do or not, I appreciate you all trying. Mostly, though, I worry he’ll return and kill someone else,” Eddie said.
Likely mostly worried about Hannah, since he’d asked the werewolves to come and help protect her.
“We’ll look after her, old man,” Kian said as they reached the body in the road.
“You’ll need to be careful, too. All of you.”
“You can be sure we will.” Kian grabbed the dead pedophile by the ankle and began dragging him through the mud toward the sawmill. “There was no warning at all?”
“No. Except… I don’t know. This might be nothing.”
“And nothing might be something,” Hannah said. When Eddie glanced at her, she told him, “Most people would swear there’s nothing walking to my left.”
As he was—with his hands in his pockets, his hair and clothes seemingly dry though it was drizzling rain, and not a speck of dirt on him while strolling down a muddy lane.
“Fair point,” Eddie conceded, then chewed on the corner of his bottom lip, the way he did when thinking about how to word something that was difficult to describe.
Hannah’s gaze caught on his teeth, which were straight and even—just as they’d been ninety-nine percent of the time she’d known him. Was he a human ghost or a vampire ghost? Hannah didn’t know. She hadn’t met any vampires other than Eddie, alive or dead. As a ghost, would his fangs grow when he was hungry or in fight mode? Human ghosts didn’t feel hunger, though a few mentioned craving different foods. Would Eddie crave the blood (or ectoplasm, or whatever ran through the veins) of other ghosts? Without the teeth and the bloodlust, was there any real difference between a vampire and a human?
She’d have to ask him later, because after all his ruminating, Eddie finally said, “Just before it happened, I felt something…creepy.”
That was the last word Hannah expected out of his mouth. Eddie seemed to realize it because he gave her an abashed look.
“I can’t remember the last time I was scared,” he continued. “Wary, sure. Mostly of people who’d expose us. Or when meeting a werewolf for the first time.”
Kian grinned. “We were wary of you at first, too. But other people? Shit. We’re real careful about making sure they don’t see anything they shouldn’t. Because maybe we could trust some. There’s gotta be good people out there. But there’s too many who think they’re doing ‘good’ by trying to rid the world of anyone who isn’t exactly like them. So it seems a hell of a risk.”
Hannah understood all of that too well, but didn’t feel the need to chime in.
“Have you ever felt uneasy walking through the woods alone at night?” Eddie asked him.
Kian chortled. “Be serious. Apex predator here. And I can see in the dark.”
“Yesterday, I’d have said the same. That I hadn’t been uneasy in a long, long time. But I wasn’t scaring myself like a child does. It was more like feeling something coming—along with a sense of dread that seemed to crawl over my skin.” He shook his head. “Gosh, I haven’t felt something like that since…”
He trailed off, but the goshes and gollys usually came out when Eddie was thinking about the olden days. “Since you first met Mr. Sippy?” Hannah guessed.
“Earlier than that. Remember when I told you about the tornado that tossed my grandpop’s house into the next county?”
With most of his family still in it. “I remember.”
The rest of that story was about how his family was barely scratching out a living in Nebraska during the Dust Bowl. After the tornado, Eddie and his mother loaded up what was left and took the Tom Joad road to California.
“I was outside before the twister hit. Standing there, looking out over fields that wouldn’t even grow a damn weed, with the sky as green as those fields should’ve been. That ought to have been a warning, but I was only seeing those dark clouds and praying for a single drop of rain. There wasn’t wind yet. Just a breeze. Everything was quiet—except Pa’s old hound. He was beside me, whining and shaking and cowering. And suddenly I felt just like that dog, with the hair raising on the back of my neck, my skin crawling. Then I watched the funnel come down, and the wind started howling and shrieking, like the sky had decided in an instant to kill everyone below. It mostly did.” He fell silent for a few steps. “Anyway. That’s how I felt tonight, right before something hit me from behind.”
“And you didn’t see anything after?” Kian asked.
“I looked down, saw a bloody fist coming out of my chest. I thought, ‘Oh, shit.’” Eddie looked to Hannah. “I knew I needed help. So I simply…went to you. Because I felt you out there. Waiting for me.”
She detected a new warmth in Eddie’s expression as he regarded her. Not respect, because that wasn’t new. Maybe a different level of respect, though. Or admiration. Hopefully it wasn’t awe.
Whatever that look was, it made Hannah want to squirm and protest that she’d done nothing to earn it. Whatever drew some people to her when they died, she hadn’t worked for it. She hadn’t asked for it. She’d simply been born with it.
But she would help him as best she could.
They reached the sawmill—which wasn’t technically the sawmill itself, but the powerhouse that had once been part of the collection of buildings that had made up the enormous mill. Ivy climbed concrete walls that stood over twenty feet high. The roof had collapsed decades ago. A number of trees had taken root inside and had grown taller than the surrounding walls. Their canopies formed a new roof, of sorts. A leaky, useless roof. That open top was also the sawmill’s only entrance, as all the windows and doors were bricked up.
Kian adjusted his grip on the dead man’s ankle, preparing to throw him over the wall. He swung and flung. Hannah watched the body go up, up…then hit the top edge of the concrete slab and come tumbling back down.
For a long second, they all just looked at the corpse crumpled ass-over-head on the ground.
“Out of curiosity,” Kian said, appearing so unbothered by the botched throw that Hannah had to admire his chill, “and mind you, I’m not saying I’d ever do this—but what would happen if we fed vampire brains to the zombies? Like, if that guy who killed you tossed your head up in there like he was making a free throw?”
Eddie pursed his lips. “If his accuracy matched yours, would it matter?”
“That’s cold, old man.”
As Hannah focused on the corpse and floated it upwards, Eddie said, “I suppose they’d crave brains and blood.”
With a grimace, Kian said, “Probably not a good combination.”
“Probably not,” Eddie agreed.
As soon as the body was over the wall, Hannah let it drop. She heard the dead weight crash through the branches and land with a thud. Low, hungry moans sounded from within. Quiet to her ears. Probably not to a werewolf’s.
With a shudder of revulsion, Kian took a step back. “That’s done, then. What now?”
“We take Eddie’s body to my cellar,” Hannah said, rubbing her forehead, trying to ease the ache settling in behind her eyes. “Then find his heart before the sun comes up.”
“Not you,” said Eddie. “You need more sleep. No offense, but you look more dead than I am.”
“Wow. Thanks. Absolutely no offense taken.”
“Listen, Hannah. I hauled you out of bed when you should have been sleeping off your shitty week. And not only can you not see in the dark, but the brothers can search more effectively for both my killer and my heart if they aren’t also keeping an eye out for you.”
Kian made an apologetic noise. “Yeah, that’s true.”
Fuck. Hannah knew they were right. But still, fuck.
“Okay. I’ll go home.”
“Good.”
“But you have to wake me up if anything happens.”
“I promise I will.” Eddie smiled and glanced up at the sky. “Truthfully, I’m looking forward to seeing my first sunrise in eighty years. Even if it’s a rainy sunrise.”
A painful lump clogged Hannah’s throat. In his early years, even the faint light after dawn temporarily blinded him. Eddie was old enough now that he could bear indirect sunlight for a short time, but the sun’s rays would quickly burn him to ash. The oldest vampires, however, only needed shade. And although direct sunlight burned them, it wasn’t fatal unless they were exposed for an extended time. Eddie had once told her that was why he liked the forest—because eventually he’d be able to spend all day beneath the trees, and simply dig a hole in the ground when he wanted to sleep.
But he wasn’t that old yet. So if his heart was exposed to the sunlight, there’d be no going back for him. And even though a cloud cover or shade might offer a little more time, it wouldn’t be much.
“We’ll keep looking until there’s nowhere else to search.” Beside her, Kian gripped his waistband and shucked his sweatpants. “I’ll change and take your body to the cellar. Hannah, you’re flying back?”
Keeping her gaze fixed firmly ahead, Hannah nodded. She’d rather not fly, but flying was better than making Kian stay by her side while she trudged her way back home. Especially since they had a sunrise deadline.
“Stay safe,” Kian said, the second word roughening into a growl as he transformed.
Though he was gone in the next moment, she replied, “You, too”—knowing he would hear it.
Then it was just her and Eddie’s ghost, and the zombies moaning.
Eddie floated upward a few feet, looking all too pleased to be flying again. “Ready?”
No. But that was normal. Hannah couldn’t remember the last time she’d been ready for anything that came her way. Instead her life seemed like a succession of days where she told herself, Let me just get through this one thing. And then never having a moment to prepare for the next thing.
With a sigh, she looked up into the dark, drizzling sky. “Let’s do it.”
***
By focusing on Eddie’s glowing form, she managed to make it home without crashing or dying. While still on the porch, she stripped off her wet and filthy clothes, then carried them inside. Somehow she made it up the stairs and gratefully climbed into bed—certain she’d lie awake, seeing Eddie’s mutilated body every time she closed her eyes, and obsessively reaching out to make certain the Lafferty brothers were all right.
Instead she was out like a light.
***
Something was coming.
Hannah opened her eyes to a darkened room and a sense of urgency pounding within her chest. She lay there, listening. Only silence.
She wrapped a flannel robe over the bra and panties she’d fallen asleep in and hurried downstairs. The waxed floorboards chilled her bare feet, and she paused on the rug in the foyer to listen again. Filtering through the windows was the dim gray light that signaled the time after dawn but before sunrise. She was certain nobody was in the house. She’d have sensed anyone that close, whether human or ghost.
On impulse, she shoved her feet into her unlaced boots and stepped out onto the porch. Bradford House stood on a manmade rise overlooking the town. A lawn—once beautifully landscaped, but now mostly dandelions and crabgrass—stretched down the hill to the north and to the east until it met First Street.
The rain had stopped, but a faint wind shivered through her thin robe. Hannah pulled the thin flannel tight, wrapped her arms around her chest, and let her gaze slip over the familiar silhouettes of the general store, the post office, the school.
Nothing moved.
Remembering Eddie’s tornado, she looked to the sky. No green. Only black and gray, still covered with clouds and dark as midnight directly above, yet clearer and brighter at the horizon.
No storm approached. And instead of creepy, it was more like…pressure. Perhaps because she already had storms on the brain, Hannah couldn’t help but picture a weather forecaster in front of a green screen, arms sweeping as they indicated a high-pressure system moving in and blowing all the moisture in the air out in front of it. As if what she felt now was the psychic bow wave created by some oncoming presence, one large and powerful enough to rouse her out of a deep sleep.
She looked to the eastern horizon, now streaked with pink and orange.
Eddie was likely looking at it, as well.
Her phone was still charging on her nightstand. She couldn’t text to see if the Lafferty brothers had found Eddie’s heart or his killer yet—but if so, they hadn’t returned the heart to his body or brought him back to life, because she could still detect Eddie’s presence. Not as she once had, when he’d been a vampire, but as she did the other ghosts…who she now sensed were all clustered near him.
Hannah moved to the eastern side of the wraparound porch and saw them in the dim morning light—seven glowing figures, all atop the church’s peaked roof.
It was stupid, the pang of hurt that struck her chest. Stupid and selfish. She had supposed that, since Eddie mentioned wanting to watch the sunrise, he would also ask her to join him. But maybe he’d come into the house and saw her sleeping. He’d also known the other ghosts far longer than he’d known Hannah—and they were surely happier that she wasn’t with them.
That was probably also why they were on the church roof instead of at Hannah’s house. Situated on a hill as it was, the big Victorian offered the best view in Tranquility. Yet none of the ghosts ever came near her place—the one exception being earlier that night in her bedroom.
Hannah wasn’t Betty Bradford, and she wasn’t sure if the ghosts in Tranquility would ever forgive her for it. Hannah also wasn’t sure if she cared whether they did.
Though the silly ache in her chest said that maybe she did care. A little.
Or maybe she was just really, really tired.
None of it mattered now, regardless. The feeling that had awakened her hadn’t dissipated. Instead, the pressure was increasing.
For a moment, she considered asking whether Eddie and the other ghosts also sensed it. But if they did, surely they’d be looking around, searching for the source. She didn’t want to disturb them for what might be nothing and interrupt Eddie’s first sunrise.
Nothing could hurt the ghosts now, anyway. Hannah was the only one in Tranquility who could be physically harmed, but whatever she sensed coming didn’t frighten her. It wasn’t eerie or dreadful. It was merely…focused. As if something had turned all of its willpower in this direction. But that didn’t mean it was aimed at Tranquility. The town might simply be in its path—
The pressure burst.
Gusting wind whipped Hannah’s hair into her face. Metal shrieked. The boards beneath her feet shook as if something crashed into the house.
Grief slammed into her almost as hard. Not her grief, yet still a gut-wrenching blow. Gasping, Hannah staggered against the porch railing and dragged tangled strands of hair out of her eyes. Her frantic gaze swept over the town—not sure what she was looking for, but almost expecting to see a tornado ripping down main street—then froze when she looked back alongside the house.
The steel cellar doors had been torn off their hinges. One had been flung hard enough to split a wooden post supporting the porch’s roof.
The entrance to the cellar gaped open.
Eddie’s body is in there, Hannah thought dazedly, then cried out when rage tore through the grief, so hot and livid that it seemed to sear the surface of her brain.
Suddenly Eddie was glowing right beside her, babbling, “Holy shit, oh shit. Get inside, Hannah! I’ll explain to him—”
The rage burning in her mind erupted into an audible roar that thundered from beneath the house. Hannah reeled back, tripping over her untied bootlaces as she lurched for the door.
Not fast enough. Nothing could have been fast enough to evade the monster that burst from the cellar.
It caught her around the throat before she’d taken a single step. She was already off-balance even before the creature whipped her back around. As the world spun, she glimpsed Eddie’s horrified face, remembered how he hadn’t seen his murderer coming either, and how it had ripped off his head. In her shock and terror, she couldn’t focus on keeping her neck intact or even shielding her heart.
At least death would be quick. And she’d finally know what ‘home’ was.
But instead of dead, she found herself pinned against the side of her house with a red-eyed monster roaring a demand into her face.
“Where’s his heart?!” Long fangs bared, the creature slammed the flat of his free hand beside her head. The impact seemed as loud as shotgun blast even as he roared again, “WHERE’S HIS HEART!?”
“He’s got her by the throat!” Farmer Frank hollered.
Eddie also shouted while ineffectually trying to grab the monster’s thick arm, the other ghosts were yelling, and Hannah’s ears were ringing as she struggled to breathe. Oh, but the fucker should have killed her. He really should have. Because now he was standing still, and Hannah’s rising fury was replacing her terror and allowing her to focus. But she couldn’t just shove him away, not with the way he gripped her throat. He might take a chunk of her flesh with him.
He shoved his face close to hers. Her world narrowed to the clawed fingers digging into her neck, the glowing red of his eyes, and the words growled from between clenched teeth.
“Your scent is all over his body, woman. Yours and two wolves. Doubt not that I will find them next—and if they’ve eaten his heart, know that I shall tear them apart and fish out the pieces from their guts. So tell me, where is Edward’s heart?”
How he expected an answer while strangling her, Hannah hardly knew. But it didn’t matter anymore. He had hold of her throat, but her mind finally had hold of his fingers. She watched his crimson eyes widen as she forcibly pried open his grip.
Fuck being gentle. She viciously wrenched his fingers back, snapping knuckle and bone. The moment she was free, Hannah rammed her power into his chest.
He shot backward and slammed through the porch’s railing. Before he hit the lawn, Hannah flung him again—over the buildings on Main Street—then she collapsed, desperately dragging in air.
From beside her, Eddie said urgently, “Hannah, tell him—”
The red-eyed fucker was flying back. Already.
Though she was gasping out little sobs, barely able to see through her tears, Hannah caught him—then held his big body motionless, hovering in front of the house—wondering if she should just crush him to a pulp or rip him apart. Because holy shit, he was strong. He struggled against her telekinetic grip physically, but she could also feel his resistance against the surface of her mind. Hannah wasn’t sure if she could hold him for long.
“—‘fuck Hitler!’ Tell him, ‘fuck Hitler!’”
“Fuck… Hit…ler,” Hannah wheezed, and the words cut like glass shards in her throat. “Eddie says…fuck Hitler.”
The red-eyed fucker ceased fighting. She sensed his sudden confusion but couldn’t give the smallest shit about what he understood and what he didn’t.
“Mr. Sippy, I presume?” she rasped to Eddie, then regretted speaking because it hurt so much.
“Yes. Tell him—”
“You do it,” was all Hannah managed before the pain in her throat erupted into a coughing fit that hurt even more.
Touching a vampire’s mind wasn’t the same as touching a human’s. Most people (including werewolves) didn’t have any psychic awareness of Hannah at all, even when she was connected to them. Not so a vampire. They had their own psychic senses, so it was as if something reached back when she reached out. And because she had to open herself up to make the connection, it made her feel too vulnerable—even when her mental barrier was as thick as she could make it.
And this vampire had already blasted her with his grief and rage.
Yet she didn’t sense either now. The surface of his mind was hardened, as if his emotional barrier was as strong as hers now that the shock of finding Eddie’s body had passed. Good, because Hannah had no interest in what lay beneath his barrier.
Using only the lightest of touches, she reached out to establish the connection. He instantly grabbed on.
She felt a flash of astonishment through the link—probably because he’d just seen seven glowing ghosts appear. Hannah narrowed the connection as best she could, until she barely had any sense of him at the other end. Fortunately, she had a lot of practice doing this with Eddie…who launched into a rapid, scattershot explanation about Hannah, about being attacked in the woods, and of the search for his heart.
She held her head in her hands through most of it, the heels of her palms pressed against her eyes, willing herself not to bawl. Now wasn’t the time for it. She needed to shower and dress instead of shivering in a thin robe and scanty underwear on her porch. She needed to contact the Laffertys and find out how the search for Eddie’s heart was going. She needed to google what kind of first aid should be administered after a strangulation.
But she just felt done. So done. And she didn’t want to move or think or anything.
Eventually she’d have to. There was always something that needed doing, always someone who needed help. Right now, that someone was Eddie. And Hannah would do anything for him. But at that moment, she couldn’t make herself do a single thing—except lift her head and finally get a look at Eddie’s friend.
Jarrow.
He stood on the edge of the porch, framed by the splintered remains of the railing that she’d blasted him through. She’d barely seen him in the rush of the attack—she’d only gained the impression of a giant monster with red eyes and fangs coming at her. Now she saw almost all of him…yet still saw almost nothing, because he’d covered himself in a thick layer of mud.
Protection from the sun, most likely. Eddie had a story about that, too—of using mud as an emergency sunscreen. And although the sun hadn’t risen yet, if Jarrow had flown from the east, he could have been exposed to daylight for hours.
His clothes were no protection, because aside from some raggedy fabric around his hips that concealed his dangling bits, he didn’t wear any.
No wonder Hannah hadn’t recognized him as the vampire from Eddie’s stories. For fuck’s sake, Eddie had once described him as ‘dapper.’ Combined with the white hair he’d mentioned a few times, somehow she’d formed a mental image of the Monopoly Man crossed with Colonel Sanders, but all trim and slim and proper. But the giant in front of Hannah was as far away from dapper as a man could get—and nothing about him was trim. Not the muddy ropes of hair that hung to his waist, not the intimidating breadth of his shoulders, not the thick muscles of his arms and thighs.
She was also certain there’d been no mention of red eyes. Not just blood-red irises; what should have been white was glowing crimson, too. Maybe older vampires’ eyes were like that, though. It might explain why he’d withdrawn from society. Those eyes could stand out even in a city like Portland.
And every time she looked up at his face, Jarrow’s eyes were fixed unnervingly on her.
He wasn’t ignoring Eddie. He nodded now and again to indicate he was listening. Yet his focus never wavered from Hannah.
Maybe he was wary, since she’d broken his grip and thrown him across town…but Hannah doubted that Jarrow feared what she might do to him. She’d mangled the shit out of his fingers, yet when he lifted his hand, no sign of injury remained.
“Hold, Edward.” His voice was no longer an enraged growl, but a low and deep rumble. “Your friend is hurt, and it was my doing.”
No shit.
Hannah held that reply inside, but scrambled to her feet with her back pressed to the side of the house when Jarrow started toward her. Eddie fell silent. She didn’t spare him a glance. Her entire focus narrowed on the approaching vampire, preparing to fling him away again.
“You have nothing to fear from me, Hannah Moore,” he said, which she knew from very recent experience was a big fat lie. A lie reinforced when he stopped in front of her, and Hannah realized that she stood on eye-level to his armpits. He was huge.
No, not scary at all.
Also not scary: he lifted his right hand to his mouth and casually ripped open his index finger with a fang, then brought his bleeding finger up to her face.
Hannah stared at the welling blood in disbelief. It was clear what he offered. To keep people from noticing holes in their necks, vampires healed their bite marks. One swipe of vampire blood and a human’s owies went bye-bye. But to heal internal injuries—like, say, a bruised windpipe—the blood had to be taken internally, as well.
To save her throat, she whisper-hissed, “You expect me to lick that?”
Apparently insulted by her tone, Jarrow stiffened and looked down his mud-slathered nose at her. “My blood can heal your neck.”
“Then kill me with some nasty disease? Your finger is disgusting.”
His lips peeled back from his fangs before flattening, as if silencing a snarl of irritation. “I would undo my error.”
His error? As if grabbing someone by the throat was on the same level as butt-dialing the shitty hookup you ghosted three months ago.
“You can’t undo it. But you could apologize.”
Definitely irritated, because he was growling again through clenched teeth. “All that I scented and saw led me to believe you were responsible for my friend’s murder. I am sorry that I was mistaken and assaulted you.”
For fuck’s sake. Now she was beyond done.
Shoving his hand away, Hannah stalked past him to her front door. She’d barely stepped through before realization struck.
She spun back around. “How did you get into the cellar?”
Though Eddie was beside him—with his face in his hands, as if he also couldn’t believe how obtuse his oldest friend was—Jarrow’s red eyes were still on her.
“I tore off the doors.”
That was a reply worthy of Farmer Frank. “Obviously,” Hannah said impatiently. “But the cellar is part of my house. And I didn’t invite you in. So, how? Does a cellar not count?”
The vampire frowned. “It does,” he said and glanced down at Eddie, who also frowned and shook his head.
Well, she hadn’t invited Eddie in, either. “Did Betty Bradford let you in?”
“I have never met the person you speak of. Nor have I ever been to this house.”
Eddie’s frown cleared. “Ohhhh. It wasn’t Betty, Hannah. It was you.”
“Bullshit.”
“No, it was.” Eddie smirked, clearly enjoying this now. “I once said I hoped Jarrow would return in your lifetime so you could meet him. And you said—and I quote—‘Mr. Sippy will always be welcome here.’”
Oh fuck. She had said that.
“Well…” Hannah struggled for a comeback. It didn’t help that Jarrow also looked amused. “I wouldn’t have said that if you weren’t such a liar. That is not Mr. Sippy.”
“He is,” Eddie said, affection warming his voice as he looked up at Jarrow. “If he wasn’t, he wouldn’t have come so quickly.”
Jarrow’s expression darkened, and grief flooded through their link. As if he’d suddenly remembered Eddie was dead. As if he’d remembered why he’d come.
Hannah only hoped he hadn’t sensed her own grief. Because she’d forgotten, too. But she had no intention of sharing her feelings. Not with anyone.
But especially not him.
Though Jarrow wasn’t even looking at her now. For the first time, he turned his attention fully to Eddie.
“Will you show me where it happened? I did not detect on your corpse the unusual odor you mentioned. The wolves’ scent overwhelmed everything else.”
“Probably because Kian carried me here. And I’ll show you where, but…” He trailed off and gestured to Hannah.
“You need me to go with you,” she said, forgetting to whisper on the first word, but the ripping pain reminded her. She was glad to drop the psychic link, because she didn’t want Jarrow to feel that, either. “See?”
Though Hannah still saw Eddie, Jarrow wouldn’t. A moment later she established the connection again.
“You cannot maintain the bond over a distance?”
“No.” At least, not as far as she knew. She’d never had reason to try—and wouldn’t start now, when everything from her heart to her throat felt raw.
“Then you shall show me where Edward was killed.”
Apparently this might take a while. Hannah leaned her shoulder against the doorframe and crossed her arms over her chest. “Ask nicely. This isn’t the seventeenth century, when you just get to snap your fingers and order women around.”
“Oh boy.” Eddie sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose.
Did ghosts develop headaches? Hannah didn’t know. She heard Traveling Travis’s “Oh, we did that in the twentieth century, too,” and the laughs of agreement from Mobster Melvin and Farmer Frank, along with Schoolteacher Sally’s disapproving hmmph, but she didn’t take her gaze from Jarrow.
He stalked toward her, stopped at arm’s length, and swept his enormous body into a deep, elegant bow.
His smile was all fangs when he met her eyes again. “Forgive the imposition upon your patience, Miss Moore, but I humbly beseech you to guide me to the accursed spot where my friend was slaughtered, so that I might retrieve his heart from his slayer, whose flesh I shall rend from his bones.”
There was nothing humble about that. But since Hannah also wanted the flesh rent from the bones of Eddie’s killer, she wouldn’t push any further.
“Before anything else, I need to find out where the Laffertys are and whether they’ve discovered anything.” Also necessary were coffee and a shower. “Eddie has his first sunrise in eighty years to watch, which will happen any second now. And you’re basically naked, so you should probably get dressed. Though I don’t have anything that could fit you.”
“Might be something in the general store,” Melba said—surprising Hannah, because the only thing that ghost usually stated was a preference for not bothering herself with anyone else’s concerns. “Betty bought a bunch of outfits and stored ‘em there, hoping one day she’d figure a way to dress them kids.”
Planning to clothe zombies sounded like the silliest, most dangerous scheme Hannah had ever heard of, but she kept that opinion to herself.
“Take anything you like from the general store,” Hannah said to Jarrow, who’d straightened up from his bow to tower over her again. “But you’ll have to find a different place to wash, because your muddy ass isn’t taking one step past my front door.”
Aside from a nod, Jarrow didn’t say anything, only watched her as she entered the house. Hannah stopped just inside and looked back.
“And in case it wasn’t clear, Mr. Sippy—you are officially disinvited.”
