Shades of Gray

by Katie MacAlister

  “No, nothing like that, and the police promised that they’d keep an eye out for any more folks who try to disrupt the filming,” Noelle replied, dropping onto a small packing box the backpack that she had retrieved from where it had fallen on the pitted gravel drive. “Teresa, what do you know about this place?”

  Teresa looked puzzled. “What do I know about it? Other than it’s haunted, you mean?”

  “What do you know about the owners? Did the person you rented it from tell you anything about the family who lives here?”

  At a sharp look from the elegant Miles, Teresa took Noelle’s arm and moved off to the other side of the great hall, dark-paneled and prone to deep shadows that made one’s imagination run wild. Right now, with one of the two double doors open to let in light, it looked less intimidating.

  “Other than that it’s owned by a very old man who lives in the south of France for his health, no. I take it there is an heir somewhere, but he doesn’t spend time in the Czech Republic, so the house is available for rent. The agent did say that Ghosts, Goblins, and Ghoulies wanted to film here, but ever since the scandal with their host caught faking on-screen events, they haven’t had the funding to do much but film in the same old tired haunted spots like the Tower of London.” Her voice dripped with scorn, which amused Noelle no end, since she knew full well that there were two separate portals to Abaddon in the Tower grounds alone.

  “The heir—do you know how old he is? If he has lovely green eyes and a chin dimple that makes you want to bite it and is tall and incredibly handsome and quite likely very dangerous?”

  Teresa’s eyebrows rose. “No, the rental agent didn’t mention anything like that. I take it you’ve run into this tall, dark, and handsome man with a biteable chin?”

  “I have,” Noelle said with a loud sigh. She pulled forward one of the curule chairs flanking a stained coat of armor and pounded on the red-cushioned seat. A cloud of dust rose into the air, the sunlight streaming in through the door catching the dust motes and making a corona around her as she plumped down without ceremony. “I saw him, he kidnapped me, and then, when we were really having a quite interesting conversation, he ran away. It’s the story of my life. I tell you, Teresa, it’s almost enough to give me a complex.”

  “This handsome man kidnapped you?” Teresa’s expression would have amused Noelle if she hadn’t been so despondent. “You escaped?”

  “No, he let me go.” She sighed again. “It was all so very romantic and somewhat mysterious, too, and you know how I love a good mystery. But then I think I scared him because I said I wanted to kiss him, and he ran away. Sometimes I really wish I could keep thoughts to myself.”

  Teresa blinked. “So you know this man?”

  “Hmm?” Noelle looked up from where she’d been eyeing some faint tracks in the dust near the wainscoting. They looked like imp tracks. “Oh, no, I’ve never seen Gray before.”

  “Gray?”

  “Grayson. Isn’t that an interesting name? I like it. His cat had an interesting name, too. Unusual, rather.”

  Teresa passed a hand over her forehead. “The handsome kidnapper has a cat?”

  “Evidently not, no.”

  “Noelle.”

  At the note of frustration in her friend’s voice, she made a mental promise to check the house for imps just as soon as she could. The last thing she needed was for Teresa to catch the little buggers on film. “Yes?”

  “Start from the beginning. Don’t leave anything out, not the kidnapping, or the cat who isn’t a cat, or why you evidently told a complete stranger that you wanted to kiss him.”

  Noelle told the story, heavily edited, since Teresa hadn’t the slightest idea of what Noelle really did or that there was such a thing as the Otherworld, which included all of the immortal beings who mingled with mortals. She also left out the fact that Gray was what most mortals referred to as a vampire, and that she worked with demons, and even that the spirits that Miles had spent the last four days communing with didn’t actually exist.

  “. . . and right after I told him I wanted to kiss him, he had the most peculiar pained expression on his face, and then he just turned around and left. And the cat trotted after him. I tell you, it’s like I’m a blight when it comes to men.”

  “I wonder who he is,” Teresa said, a thoughtful expression wrinkling her brow. “You said he put a chain across the gate?”

  “I assume it was him, since it wasn’t there when I went to town early this morning, but it was when I came back.”

  “If the gate is chained, how are we to get out?”

  Noelle shrugged. “I guess we’ll worry about that when the time comes. You said you weren’t going to leave during the two weeks you have the house, so it really doesn’t matter, does it?”

  “I suppose not, although it is annoying. Do you think he’s the owner’s heir?”

  “Possibly.” Or perhaps the owner himself, since Dark Ones frequently used such ruses as an absent parent to make it appear that property was being passed down through generations. “I wonder why he thinks we’re trying to destroy the house.”

  Teresa made a face. “Who knows? He’s probably crazy, and I have enough of that on my hands with you-know-who.”

  Noelle glanced across the room to where Miles now stood, arms outstretched, head tilted back dramatically, a low chant issuing from his chiseled lips. Raleigh, the cameraman who was filming the pilot and first two episodes of Haunted Miles, stood with his back to the open doorway, filming the scene.

  Miles turned his body just enough to make sure the camera caught his gorgeous profile.

  “He really is shameless, isn’t he?” Noelle whispered.

  “Yes, but I’m willing to put up with that, and his insistence that he be allowed to hold séances every evening and all of the other shenanigans he pulls, because the public is going to eat this show up with a spoon and ask for more.”

  “I suppose so, although I wasn’t aware that reality ghost shows were quite so popular.”

  “Haunted Miles will be different,” Teresa said with complacency. “We have you.”

  Noelle wrinkled her nose. “When I told you I’d help you for a couple of weeks, I meant more along the lines of helping out with the production stuff, not wrangling ghosts for you. Not that Miles has found one yet.”

  “He will. While you were gone into town this morning, he said he had a run-in with a poltergeist in the east wing.”

  Now, that was interesting. “A polter? Really? How many arms did he or she have?”

  Teresa stared at her as if she had turned into a five-foot-five rubber plant. “How many arms?”

  “Four? Three? I assume if he had two, Miles wouldn’t know he was a polter.”

  “What on earth are you talking about?” At a quick but pointed glance from her star, Teresa leaned in to Noelle and said in a softer tone, “I said a poltergeist, not a circus freak. You know, the noisy ghosts? The kinds that knock things around a room and rain rocks and stuff like that.”

  “Aports. The rocks are called aports, and—” Noelle bit off the rest, deciding that the truth about polters was probably not what Teresa needed to hear. “Never mind. So he found a poltergeist?”

  “One who is very active, according to Miles. That’s who he’s trying to summon forth now.” The two women watched for a few minutes before Teresa added, “Oh, so that footage we were just talking about, the one with you in the nun’s outfit? We’ll need to redo it tonight, if you don’t mind.”

  Little nun. Gray had called her a little nun. Her lips quirked at the thought, even as a warm glow spread out from the depths of her belly. No one had ever given her a nickname, Guardians being, for the most part, feared or avoided by most folk of the Otherworld. “All right, although you have to be sure that it is very clear that it’s being used as a re-creation and not doctored up to look like it’s ghostly footage.”

  Teresa patted her hand. “I told you when you got here that this show is straight-up. We don’t fake
anything, not one single spooky minute. It’ll all be real. That’s why this house is so perfect.” She looked around the hall and all but hugged herself. “It’s so gloomy, so Gothicly eerie, it just can’t possibly be without at least half a dozen ghosts and poltergeists.”

  Miles, now calling out an invocation to the spirits to come forth, moved toward the door and the better light, causing Raleigh to swing around and film him from the side. Teresa and Noelle hurriedly moved out of the range of the camera, toward the tall, curving stair that led up into the dimness of the second story.

  “I am your friend,” Miles said in a rich, BBC-newscaster voice that throbbed with sincerity. “I will listen to you. You are lost and alone, but now I am here. Speak to me. Tell me your tale. Show yourself to me.”

  Raleigh sidled out of the way as Miles stepped into the pool of light flooding the marble tiles nearest the doors, striking a pose that was meant to represent humility and caring. Noelle was about to make a whispered waspish comment to Teresa when, suddenly, Miles froze, his eyes alight with excitement as he said, “We have a manifestation! Right here! There is a scent that wasn’t here before! It smells of . . .” He took a deep breath, his eyes closed. “It smells of hellfire and demons, of the devil itself. It smells strongly of sulfur. It is a most powerful emanation. Hear me, oh being of the darkest bowels of hell! I feel your foul presence! I smell your nearness! Come forth and make yourself known!”

  Noelle clapped a hand over her mouth to stifle the laughter that threatened to break free. Next to her, Teresa doubled over, her shoulders silently shaking, while Raleigh, with a mouthed “Sorry” to Teresa, waved a hand behind his rear.

  “This is so juvenile, but I can’t . . . can’t . . . he smells s-s-sulfur,” Noelle managed to whisper before having to clasp a hand over her mouth again.

  Tears rolled down Teresa’s face as she buried her face in the tail of her shirt.

  By evening, Noelle could look at Teresa without the pair of them bursting into hysterical laughter, which made for a much easier time when it came to dealing with Miles, who was in one of his prima donna moods when Teresa told him she couldn’t use the footage just shot.

  “I don’t see what was wrong with it,” he repeated for the third time after viewing a playback of the footage yet again. “I wasn’t making it up, if that’s what you think. There was a foul odor there, something horrible and truly demonic.”

  Raleigh quickly left the room, his shoulders shaking with silent laughter.

  Noelle had to bite her lip as Teresa, with a telltale quaver to her voice, tried to explain that the public might put a different interpretation on the scene, finding it comic rather than dramatic.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Miles snapped. “How could anyone help but be impressed by the contact I’ve made so far? We have indisputable proof that some demonic being has been in our presence, and what’s more, I fully intend to have a materialization at the séance tonight. Now, if you don’t mind, I need quiet for my meditation time so that I may attune myself with the spirits found within this house.”

  Miles claimed the only comfortable (and clean) chair in the hall, closing his eyes and humming softly to himself. Noelle and Teresa exchanged glances and quietly walked toward the door, making it that far before Miles interrupted his communing to ask, “Where are we sitting?”

  “I thought we’d try the west wing tonight, since we’ve been focusing on the east wing the last few days. Noelle thinks the west wing has a lot of potential.”

  He frowned. “Your friend is mistaken. This is what comes from letting amateurs mess around with scientific research; they meddle in things they don’t know the first thing about. I will not have this show be made a laughingstock because of your shoddy research techniques and planning. You’re the producer—produce! Leave the research to those of us who are experts.”

  Noelle bit her lip again as Teresa tried to calm him. “Noelle’s family lives in a house that is supposed to be one of the most haunted in the county, so she knows all about ancestral spirits and gray ladies and all sorts of other things that go bump in the night.”

  All of which, Noelle thought to herself, were pure fabrication and imagination. She ought to know; her mother was perfectly capable of calling forth a spirit, had any lived in the family home.

  Miles refused to be soothed. “The west wing is intact. No ghost in his right mind would stay there. I’ve told you before, woman, spirits love ruins, and it is in the ruined wing that we must look for them. The demonic presence in the hall excepted, all of our contact has been made in the ruined wing.”

  Noelle thought of pointing out the fact that Miles’s idea of contact wasn’t exactly especially valid but decided to leave the handling of the star to Teresa.

  “We’ll try the west wing tonight, and if we have no luck, we’ll go back to the east side, all right?”

  Miles harrumphed. “It will be an utter and complete waste of my time.”

  Teresa uttered a few more balms to his wounded pride before hurrying down the unlit hallway toward the inhabitable side of the house.

  “Maybe I should bow out of being your temporary assistant,” Noelle said as they passed the music room that presently served as a communal sleeping quarters, where, at Miles’s insistence, they had all set up sleeping bags and air mattresses. Miles claimed it was to minimize their impact on the ghostly beings in the house, but Noelle couldn’t help but feel he had a less noble reason for wanting to avoid sleeping alone.

  “Not on your life! Just ignore Miles when he gets that way. He’s rather protective of his role as ghostly expert. Now, let’s see, what room looks good to you?”

  The two women spent some time poking their heads into the various rooms on the ground and upper floors of the wing that remained mostly intact. Noelle kept a wary eye out for imps and other denizens of the Otherworld that she didn’t wish brought to the attention of the general public, making note of which hallways and rooms showed signs of recent occupation by the little troublemakers.

  Luckily, the imps had seemed to confine themselves to the first and second floors, not venturing farther upstairs to the servants’ quarters. Noelle, dutifully trying to find the spookiest room possible, finally settled on a small attic room, once belonging to a housemaid and now containing nothing but a broken-down metal bedstead, a cracked washstand, and two partially broken wooden chairs.

  “This is it,” Noelle announced after having examined the heavy layer of dust for any signs of tracks. There were none, not even from four-legged rodents.

  “This?” Teresa frowned as she looked around the dark, small room. “Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely. This room is haunted right up to my armp—” Noelle had been in the act of raising her hand to gesture, when a man suddenly appeared out of nothing, grabbed her hand, and pressed a smacking kiss to it.

  “Ah, me beauty, ye’ve found me at last, have ye?” the man said.

  Noelle stared in shock at him, while Teresa, after freezing for a second, ran screaming from the room.

  “Good Lord. There really are ghosts here,” Noelle said, blinking in surprise at the somewhat transparent man. He was clad in a kilt and ruffled shirt, a broadsword strapped to his hip. Despite his ghostly state, there was a distinct roguish twinkle in his eye that left Noelle with the impression that he was greatly enjoying himself.

  Teresa reappeared in the doorway, her eyes huge. “That’s a . . . that’s a . . . he’s a . . . holy Mary, mother of God! That’s a ghost!”

  “We’re preferrin’ the term ‘spirit,’ ye ken, lass,” the ghostly man said in a heavy Scottish accent. He waggled his eyebrows at Teresa, then made her a courtly bow, losing his translucence as he shifted to a solid form. It took him only a second to sweep up Teresa into a passionate embrace.

  “Erm . . .” Noelle didn’t know if it was polite to interrupt a ghost when he was kissing someone, but she knew this had to be a shock to Teresa. “Excuse me, but who are you?”

  The man finishe
d his kiss, setting Teresa upright on her feet again before saying, “Ah, but ye’re a bonnie lass, too. I’m Jock, Jock McTorgeld. What be yer names, me beauties?”

  “A ghost!” Teresa whispered, her eyes never leaving the man as she waved toward the door behind her. “I should film . . . Raleigh should be here . . . Miles . . . holy Mary, a real live ghost! Noelle! Can you see him, too? I’m not going insane, am I?”

  “I can see him, too. That’s Teresa,” she told the ghost, “and I’m Noelle.” It struck her that for a Scotsman, his accent was awfully broad, almost exaggerated in its rolling of Rs and gargling of vowels. “Do you . . . er . . . live in this room?”

  “Here?” He looked around with a curl of his lip. “Nay, lassie. ’Tis but a servant’s room, this. Jock McTorgeld roams where he pleases, when he pleases, and that’s always where the bonnie lasses are.” He leered at her, no doubt trying to drive home his point.

  “Teresa,” Noelle said slowly, having taken full measure of their new acquaintance. “Why don’t you go get Raleigh and Miles so they can meet our friend from Scotland?”

  “Yes,” Teresa agreed, her eyes huge as she nodded quickly. “Yes, Raleigh, Miles. We should film Jock. A real ghost. We have a real ghost. Holy mother . . .”

  Noelle closed the door as Teresa drifted off muttering to herself. She eyed the ghost, who was striding toward her with a devilish glint in his eye. “All right, she’s gone. Now, who are you?”

  “I’ve told ye me name, my heart. Now ye’ll be thankin’ me, as is the way of me people, and if ye’re as sweet as ye taste, I may be lettin’ ye see what I’ve got on under me kilt.”

  Noelle had a hard time not rolling her eyes, but by dint of an almost superhuman effort, she managed it. “You can stop with the phony Scottish bit, too. I’m British, not Czech, and I know what a real Scot sounds like, and you aren’t it.”

  The ghost came to an abrupt stop, his eyes narrowing on her. “Ye’re daft, lass. I’m as Scottish as the wild thistle that grows above the burn.”