by Multiple
If they didn’t kill each other first.
He gleefully rubbed his hands. Time for round two, in Hell’s mating game.
*
Meanwhile in a cell, several levels down in Hell’s notorious prison, an enormous hellcat licked its paws clean as a bloody heap whimpered in the corner.
Hurt his adopted mama would he?
Shifting to his man shape, Felipe stood over the jerk who’d watched Ysabel burn alive centuries ago. He wished he could have hurt Francisco more. How dare this sniveling piece of crap harm the woman who’d taken in a lonely kitten and given it a loving home?
“Next time you get a chance to escape,” he growled. “I’d throw myself in the abyss because if we ever meet again, I won’t be so nice.”
Morphing back into his furry skin, Felipe sauntered away and debated what to do next. With his mama now mated to a demon capable of caring for her, it looked like he’d have more time to play because unlike Remy, and other idiot males, no woman was ever going to put a leash on him.
The End
Don’t miss the next story in the Welcome To Hell series.
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Psychic Appeal
Michelle McCleod
Blurb
Psychic P.I. Sofa Parker never thought she’d date a ghost, but when she accidentally kills her boyfriend, the phrase ‘eternal love’ takes on an unwelcome meaning. Her ex doesn’t want a little thing like death to come between them and plans to haunt Sofia until she agrees.
Add a case that results in being stalked by a necromancer, betrayal by dragons and the meddling of druids and things get complicated, fast. But the latest Supernatural politics aren’t her biggest problem.
Sofia’s met someone and she can’t stop herself from falling in love. Life really hits the fan when her new relationship drives the lovesick ghost of her boyfriend to come back from the dead…anyway he can.
‘Bad breakup’ doesn’t even begin to cover it.
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“Sexy and fast, with a quick-witted heroine and a hottie hero.”
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Disclaimer
This is a work of fiction. All events depicted are fictional. Characters are consenting adults. Any resemblance to places and persons, living or dead, is unintentional coincidence.
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Chapter One
Gold can make you rich, but only if it doesn’t kill you first— something the gossamer-winged pixie fluttering in front me hoped I didn’t know.
She had dodged the line for the Salem Witch Museum that often snaked past the entrance, and entered the shop lugging a gold bowl taller than she was and so heavy, she could barely keep herself airborne. With a grunt that sounded more like it belonged to a three-hundred-pound strong woman than the Barbie-sized frame of a pixie, she heaved it up on the counter.
Panting, she said, “How much honey will you give me for this?”
I set aside the antique price guide I’d been paging through, and looked at the bowl. It was pretty and no doubt valuable, but the decorative scrollwork had sigils in it that I recognized as Sidhe. Humans with Sidhe gold never fared well, and, while most people would not have realized the gold was bad news, I knew better. This bowl would kill me if it could.
The pixie, counting on common human greed and ignorance, failed to consider I might not be common. Understandable since humans rarely had any innate magical ability, but I was one of the few exceptions to the rule: I was psychic.
It runs in the blood. My family’s roots predated Salem’s witch burning days when we escaped the noose by virtue of our genetic second sight. Although I didn’t have to use clairvoyance to be suspicious of the pixie. A degree in art history and six years as an antique dealer had given me a keen eye for forgeries, stolen goods, and the people who sold them. Plus, while it was August, she was sweating like she was in a sauna on high.
Looking at her flushed cheeks, the faint gold sheen to her skin, and over-bright eyes, I doubted she had even considered I might be a bad mark. She was obviously honeyed out of her mind, probably hadn’t planned much beyond scoring her next hit. The Sidhe had no moral or legal prohibitions against drug use and honey was their favorite recreational drug. One only humans could supply since there were no bees in Fairy. It hadn’t taken the Sidhe long to figure out that gold could buy them a lot of honey. The faker the better, at least initially.
Humans wised up once people started going to prison for fraud when their fairy gold turned to dust. There were several deaths too, because, sometimes, Sidhe gold came with a curse. Nowadays, we humans bartered honey in exchange for services like scrying or magical teleportation. It was safer that way.
By current law, I had a duty to confiscate the gold bowl. Same as people with bad credit had their credit cards seized and cut in half right in front of them. But the last thing I wanted was to deal with the police again. The red mark on my wrist still hadn’t healed from the last time I’d been cuffed. So I did the next best thing.
With a smile of false regret I said, “Sorry, I don’t have enough honey to buy this from you.” It wasn’t a lie; honey was more than fifty dollars an ounce.
The pixie’s lower lip began to tremble, and tears gathered in her eyes. “You don’t?” She looked past me to the small bottle of honey I kept on hand for Sidhe customers. Honey had helped me close many a deal, but the bottle was less than a quarter full. Not nearly enough to pay for the bowl. Although, from the desperate expression on her delicate face, if I offered it to her, she probably would’ve taken it.
“Nope, but I know someone who does.” And who would also be happy to turn her over to the police and the Fairy Intelligence Bureau (FIB for short). I gave her directions to Captain Joe’s Relics, an antique shop down by the wharf. We were friendly competitors, and he knew enough about my situation to understand why I would send the pixie to him instead of calling the police myself.
The pixie gave a nod of thanks, and, stretching her thin arms back around the bowl, threw herself into the air with frantic flaps of her wings. For a second, she dipped out of sight below the counter, almost hitting the floor before recovering. I winced as she misjudged her clearance, and smacked a shin on the corner of a vintage armoire. Fortunately for her, she was feeling no pain and flew on without stopping.
I went back to my pricing guide. As far as first days back at work went, things were going pretty well. No reporters. No gawkers. No business either, but it had been more than six months since I’d flipped the sign from ‘closed’ to ‘open’.
A lot had changed since then.
The shop felt like a time capsule. A perfectly preserved snapshot of my life before it fell apart. I had been happy here. Before the accident, I had been in a serious relationship with a thriving business. After…well, I wasn’t lacking for dust bunnies. The store was dirty. Dust coated everything, and mold grew fragrant in my favorite coffee cup. The smell was so bad, I threw the mug away rather than clean out the fuzzy gunk inside.
Note to self: Always wash out the coffee mug. You never know when you’ll be accused of murder.
Boxes of inventory towered behind me, waiting to be processed, and a pile of paperwork—receipts, auction catalogs, correspondence, bills—covered the marble-topped bar that serve
d as a checkout counter. I’d been trying to figure out where to start when the pixie came in. Organizing the paperwork had seemed like a logical first choice, but I couldn’t focus on it. The memories were too overwhelming, reminding me that, if life was a ladder, I’d fallen from the top to the bottom, a bottom with a sinkhole underneath, waiting to swallow me whole.
Tossing the pricing guide in the garbage, I grabbed a rag and began dusting the jumble of armoires, dressers, and tables scattered about the shop. Maybe I just needed to work out my anxiety with elbow grease. As I dusted, I tried to keep my mind closed to the whispers of the past that tried to push through my fingertips to my mind’s eye.
Normally, I didn’t mind the constant barrage of history. Being psychic was a bonus in the antique industry, and I enjoyed the unique perspective on days gone by that my clairvoyance gave me, but there were a few recent events I didn’t want to remember. The youngest memories always had the strongest voice. If I let them, the walls would tell me all about my fall again. They knew exactly what had happened. After all, my downward spiral had started here, and the plaster, even the support beams behind as well as every other item in the shop, chattered with the knowledge of it.
Well, they weren’t actually talking. Inanimate objects didn’t have personalities, but they did soak up impressions and events around them. People didn’t just leave behind fingerprints when they touched something, but also bits of their energy, which then melded with objects, preserving some moments in time with startling clarity.
A sudden chill raised the hair on the back of my neck reminding me that, sometimes, a lot more than just energy was left behind. Even with the warning the temperature change provided, I still jumped when a familiar face smiled up at me from inside the oak table I was cleaning.
Mark.
Also known as my recently departed ex-boyfriend. Emphasis on the ex. As I liked to remind him, dead people don’t date.
He rose out of the table in a fog of gray vapor that coalesced into the shape of the muscular, sandy-haired man I had thought I would marry. Now I just wished he would leave me alone so I could forget the guilt and get on with my life. Whoever came up with ‘til death do us part’ knew what they were talking about. Sure, love beyond death sounded romantic, but it didn’t live up to the hype the vampire soap operas gave it.
Laughing, he raised his arms over his head and said, “Boo.” His blue aura twinkled with good humor. Yeah, ghosts have auras. I’d been surprised too. Even weirder, I didn’t have to squint to see his. It was just there, no blurry vision required. On living people, I had to practically cross my eyes to catch sight of someone’s aura.
I frowned at Mark. “That’s not funny.” When he’d been alive, one of the things I had liked about him the most had been his sense of humor. Now that he was dead, not so much. Maybe I’d just forgotten how to laugh.
“You act like you’ve never seen a ghost before,” he said.
I gave him a dirty look. The whole ghost thing was a sore point. Mostly because it wasn’t normal to see them, and all I wanted, after everything that had happened, was for things to return to some semblance of normal.
Taking the hint, he changed the subject. “I just came by to see how your first day back was going.”
I shrugged. “Okay.”
He surveyed the shop with raised eyebrows. “I can see business has been good.”
“It’ll come.” I forced a confidence I didn’t feel into my voice. “Could you get out of the table?” I asked, uncomfortable with the way it bisected him like a magic trick gone bad.
“Why?”
“Because it’s weird.”
He snorted and pointed to the door. “You want to talk about weird? Look who’s here.”
I turned to see a woman with blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail standing in the doorway. Her jeans hung loose on her bony frame and a too-big T-shirt in a soft, baby pink almost reached her knees. In her hands she carried a plastic container. When she saw me, she smiled. While thinner than I remembered, I recognized her instantly.
“Hello, Sofia,” she said, walking toward me.
“Hello, Marjorie,” I said cautiously. I hadn’t seen her since the night I tried to save her daughter…and failed. There was something about the rigid cheerfulness of her smile that put me on edge. I cast a glance back at my ethereal visitor to see what he made of Marjorie, but he had disappeared. Smart ghost. If only I could disappear too.
“I wondered if you had abandoned the shop. You haven’t been here in what? Months?” She ran a finger along the top of a walnut buffet table from the late 1800s and showed me the dust.
I did my best to smile. “I plan to be open regularly from now on.”
Marjorie nodded, rubbing her hand on her jeans. “Onward and upward. Forgive and forget. Leave the past behind.” The litany of clichés rolled off her tongue so easily, I knew she’d been subjected to the same well-intentioned, yet meaningless phrases I had. After awhile, I’d heard them so much it was hard not to parrot them back. I’d even caught myself starting to tell someone that ‘time heals all wounds’. Stupid, banal words that did nothing except highlight how no one understood the pain of loss.
“Something like that.” Wanting to put some distance between us, I moved behind the bar.
“Here,” she thrust the plastic container at me, “I brought you something.” When I didn’t move to take it, she set it on the counter. “I wanted to thank you for finding Nikki.” Her voice fell to a murmur at the end as if she didn’t want to say the words. In her place, I wouldn’t have.
“Okay.” Her gratitude seemed misplaced, since I hadn’t found her daughter until it was far too late to save her. By the time I regained consciousness, Mark had been dead two days and so had Nikki, murdered by her kidnapper. All because of my psychic powers. Powers that should’ve saved lives ended up taking them instead. My karmic balance sheet was not pretty.
“It’s not much. Just some cookies, but I wanted to do something.” Her smile wavered and became apologetic. “I know how hard things must be for you. I followed the story in the papers.”
“Thanks,” I said as I shifted my vision out of focus so I could see her aura. I didn’t do that very often because it made me effectively blind to the real world, but something was off, Marjorie was just a little too happy to see me. The dark streaks and empty spots in her aura confirmed my intuition. She was unbalanced and mentally unstable.
Unaware that I could see right through her, Marjorie dismissed my gratitude with a wave of her hand. “I have to give you credit for sticking around and keeping the store open. I’m leaving tomorrow. Going south to stay with my sister. Everything here reminds me of her and it hurts too much.” Her eyes glimmered with unshed tears and she looked up at the ceiling, blinking rapidly to hold them back.
“Good luck.” I understood the urge to leave. If I thought it would’ve helped, I might’ve considered it myself, but ghosts didn’t care about geographic distance. Mark would find me no matter where I ran, my own personal cloud of guilt.
“Well, I guess I’ll be going now.” She didn’t wait for a response, just spun on her heel and marched out, her back stiff.
I watched her go with mixed feelings of envy and relief. Envy that the solution to her grief was to simply leave the state when I still had no clue how to handle mine, and relief things had gone so well. Based on her aura, I would’ve expected her to launch herself at me, ready to claw my eyes out, not bake cookies. At least I wouldn’t have to face her again, and the fewer reminders of my failure, the better.
Thinking to drown my sorrows in sugar, I opened the plastic container and stared at the perfect rows of chocolate chip cookies, bile suddenly rising in my throat. I’d had a flash of sight when I touched the box, an image of Marjorie adding rat poison to the cookie batter. With a sigh of resignation, I threw the cookies in the garbage. What a waste of good chocolate.
I couldn’t really blame her, though. I had considered killing me too, but knew the afte
rlife wouldn’t provide the revenge Marjorie sought or the escape I needed.
I had the ghost haunting me to prove it.
Chapter Two
The next evening, Mark floated into the bathroom just as I finished lathering my legs in preparation for a close shave. It’d been a long day at the shop with too few paying customers and a never-ending chorus of ‘just looking’. All I wanted was to relax, but Mark had other plans.
“Someone’s coming,” he said coming to hover at my side and watching my twice-weekly hair removal ritual with interest— something I had never let him see in the year we dated. Being able to pass through walls and doors provided him carte blanche access into the realm of female beauty secrets. Not exactly what I would call an on-the-haunt perk, but he seemed to enjoy it.
I had liked it better when he couldn’t walk through closed doors.
I glanced down at my legs which were covered with cucumber melon scented foam and the purple towel wrapped around my body. I was not ready for company. “Who?”
“He wants to hire you as an investigator.” A gleam of anticipation shone in his eyes and made the white streaks in his aura shine extra bright. He loved clients. “Hurry, or you won’t have time to get dressed.”
I frowned. I didn’t want to investigate anything. Moonlighting as a psychic PI was part of the reason my boyfriend was now a ghost. “Mark, we discussed this.”
“I know, but this guy really needs your help.”
“How do you know?”
“Look, just hear him out. It took everything I had to get him here.”
“What do you mean by that? You’ve been guiding people my way?” My voice rose as I spoke and I looked at Mark through narrowed eyes.
He stuffed his hands in his pockets with a shrug, and leaned against the wall, only to disappear into the linen closet before he could respond. I rolled my eyes at the interruption and ran more bath water to rinse off my legs while I waited for him to reappear.
He popped into the tub a few moments later, brushing against my foot. I jumped, not expecting an ice-cold draft to hit me through the warm water. “Hey, careful!”