Ghost Mysteries & Sassy Witches (Cozy Mystery Multi-Novel Anthology)

by Неизвестный

  GENRE: Urban Fantasy / Paranormal Mystery of 230 pages. This is the second book in a series, but you can read it as a stand-alone novel.

  WARNING: Contains some scenes and adult humor not appropriate for younger readers, but this series is mostly about fun adventure and contains a minimum amount of gore, violence, or coarse language.

  Turn the page to begin reading Bring on the Poltergeists or click here to return to this anthology’s Table of Contents.

  Bring on the Poltergeists - Ghost Hackers Book 2

  Chapter One

  Eli Carter drove home with the van’s heaters on high. It was a warm spring afternoon, not heater weather at all, but his clothes were soaked from the so-called decontamination shower.

  An hour earlier, Eli had accepted a job offer with Ghost Hackers, which was either an extermination business for infestations of a paranormal nature, or an appliance repair shop that dabbled in fraud.

  Although Eli had dealt with a para-electrical element named Donny the day before, and even been briefly possessed by the ghost, Eli wasn’t entirely sure he believed in ghosts.

  The microchip in Eli’s brain wouldn’t let him tell a lie to another person, but his brain was very good at pulling Eli’s leg, so to speak. It kept coming up with alternate explanations for paranormal things he’d experienced. Maybe ghosts weren’t real, and he’d been hallucinating for days.

  Eli nervously tapped on the steering wheel. If he wasn’t sure about this new job he’d accepted, how would he ever sell his girlfriend on it?

  He arrived home at sunset, parked his delivery van in the assigned spot, and stepped out into the chill of the underground parking lot. Six floors down, the air was so cool that a ghostly fog floated up from his damp body as he walked to the elevator.

  His wet jeans chafed painfully against his legs, making Eli feel terrible for soldiers. Whenever he had some small discomfort, such as a hangnail or stubbed toe, Eli would think of soldiers in the battlefield, and how much worse they had to endure. This didn’t make him feel better about getting to live his comfortable life. It only made him feel soft and weak.

  His posture slumped on the elevator ride up to the fourth-floor apartment he shared with his girlfriend, Brenda. She was the one who’d gotten him his decent-paying job at the delivery company, and she was not going to be happy to learn he was resigning to work for an appliance repair shop that possibly dabbled in fraud.

  Eli opened the door to the apartment and braced himself for battle. Tiny little redheaded Brenda didn’t look that tough, but she knew how to apply pressure. More than once, she’d threatened to use a fork or knife to drill into Eli’s head and dig around for his alleged—according to her—microchip.

  The truth was, Brenda was more bark than bite. She had punched him in the face once, but in a groggy state, half asleep. Eli had technically started it by accidentally dropping his elbow on her nose, and she’d only been reacting in her sleep when she gave him a black eye with her tiny fist. Eli was not a battered boyfriend. Badgered, sure, but not battered.

  He stepped into the apartment and prepared for a round with his little badger. He found her in the corner they called a kitchen, even though it wasn’t much of a kitchen. She had her strawberry blond-red hair up in a loose bun, and she wore a pink striped apron over a dress. She looked like a spokesmodel for apple pie.

  Eli’s jaw dropped. “Brenda, what’s going on?”

  She put her hand on her hip and gave him a coy look, batting her darkly-coated eyelashes. “Dinner’s ready.” She pulled an aluminum loaf pan from the large toaster oven they used for cooking.

  Eli swallowed hard and eyed the brown thing in the pan. Surely she was testing him, with another lentil loaf. The last one hadn’t killed him, but this one would.

  “Why does it smell so good?” he asked.

  Her eyes narrowed in warning. “I’m trying to be nice, so don’t ruin it.”

  He excused himself to get changed out of his damp clothes. His plans for breaking the job news to her needed more refinement. And maybe alcohol.

  In the bedroom, he chose a pair of sweatpants—all the better to accommodate the swelling of his digestive system as it tried to assimilate the horrors of a loaf made of lentils.

  Something was weird, though. His mouth was watering. He inhaled deeply and walked back out to take his seat at the table where they ate. This loaf didn’t smell at all like Brenda’s cooking. It smelled like food.

  “How was your day?” he asked tentatively.

  She sat down across from him and said, very plainly, “I missed you last night. Did you miss me?”

  Eli had spent the previous night on someone’s sofa, after facilitating a reunion between a father and his deceased son. He’d been in contact with Brenda by phone throughout the weekend, but he hadn’t thought about whether or not he’d missed her.

  “I didn’t not miss you,” he answered.

  “Oh, Eli.” She rolled her eyes. “I missed you so much, I made you real meatloaf, with dead cow in it.”

  “I thought I smelled dead cow. It smells really good.”

  She whispered, “There’s chutney, but it’s on the side. It’s optional.”

  “Optional,” he repeated, his voice thick and deep in his chest like a growl.

  “I really missed you,” she said.

  Eli smiled at this. Two nights away from each other, and she was sweeter than shortcake.

  He leaned to the side and looked at her bare legs sticking out from under the flower-covered dress. He did love those pale legs of hers, and the rest of her. Brenda was a ferocious little badger, but she was his ferocious little badger.

  “Did you really see a ghost?” she asked.

  “I didn’t see him so much as I felt him.” He pulled his gaze away from Brenda’s wonderful legs and turned to the equally wonderful loaf of dead cow. “It could have been the power of suggestion,” he explained, “but whatever happened, it felt real. I swear I was reading text messages off the panel of the old man’s microwave, and then the words were just in my head, coming out of my mouth. Donny wanted his father to stop waiting for him to come back to the farmhouse. Or… maybe that was what I imagined. I could have looked around the room, felt the name carved into the desk, and figured out the rest.”

  Brenda added some salad to Eli’s plate. He shoveled down the meatloaf rapidly. Usually, he would eat the salad first and save the best for last, but there was no holding back tonight. The dead cow meatloaf was so good. He looked up at Brenda, at her familiar, pale blue eyes. She really did have pretty eyes, especially right now, because the lighting was… different?

  Eli blinked and looked around the apartment. All the lights were out, and they were eating by the glow of a dozen candles. He hadn’t noticed when he’d walked in.

  “Candles,” he said.

  Brenda smirked. “Honestly, Eli, I could dye my hair blue and trade all the furniture with the neighbors, and you wouldn’t notice for days.”

  He turned in his chair and eyed the living room furniture with suspicion. “Where did that chair come from?” he demanded.

  “That’s your chair. I just tidied up and put new covers on the throw pillows.”

  “Oh.” He returned to his meatloaf for two bites, then whipped his head around to give the chair another suspicious look. The chair looked weird. But he couldn’t think of what it was supposed to look like.

  Brenda snapped her fingers to get his attention. “Hey, you left out all the good parts of your story. What happened to Donny, the old guy’s son? How did he die?”

  “I don’t kn—” Eli’s voice caught in his throat, the way it did when he tried to say something that wasn’t true.

  A warm sensation tickled over his skin, followed by a chill that made him shudder at the rapid temperature shift. The ghost of Donny had been inside his body for only a few minutes, but something remained. A residue.

  Eli hadn’t noticed the residue until that very moment. Now there were things in his head that d
idn’t belong to him. He did know how Donny died. He felt it happen, felt the bullets burn through his knee, his guts, and then his lungs.

  Eli pulled back from the pain, and pulled back through time, to the day before Donny got shot.

  The feeling that was both hot and cold kept pulsing through Eli, and the only thing that calmed it down was talking. He began to tell Brenda about Donny, and the words flowed from him easily. The simpler he told the story, the more real it became.

  Donny and a pretty girl had shared a room in a decrepit boarding house. He loved the girl. She loved him, but she loved drugs more. She always promised she’d go to rehab, if only they had the money.

  One day, Donny decided to show her how much he loved her. He told her to wait in the room for him, and he would return with all the money they needed to make their dreams come true.

  She kissed him goodbye, a sad look in her eyes.

  He prowled the neighborhood and found a gas station to rob. He borrowed a gun from another guy at the boarding house, in exchange for a share of the robbery proceeds.

  He took the gun and did what he felt he needed to do.

  With cash stuffed in his pockets, Donny returned to the room at the boarding house. He arrived fourteen minutes before the police, but he didn’t know that. He didn’t know he was about to die.

  His hands were shaking as he got out the key for the room. He was happy. Nobody had gotten hurt at the gas station. He had the money. Life was good. They were going to get cleaned up in rehab, then he would take her to see the farm where he grew up. They’d stay there with his dad until they were ready to start their life over.

  With a shaking hand, he opened the door, stepped one foot inside the dim room, and saw the love of his life slumped over limply, the needle at her side. Her eyes were open, but the wrong kind of open. He screamed down the hallway for someone to get help. Maybe he screamed words, or maybe he just screamed.

  He left the door ajar, and ran to her side. His training kicked in, and he tried to bring his pretty girlfriend back to life. He’d taken lifeguard training years earlier. Now he let his tears blur his eyes so he could pretend it was the practice dummy he was working on.

  She was cold, her face drained of color, but he kept working. He would keep doing compressions until he collapsed, or so he told himself. When someone banged at the doorway to the room, he yelled for them to come in.

  The men who came in were police, not the medical assistance he’d been hoping for. They were on high alert, weapons drawn. Donny remembered the gun he still had tucked into the back of his jeans. He reached for the gun.

  They told him to freeze.

  He knew what would happen next. He knew.

  His beautiful love was already gone, and his lips were cold from hers.

  He knew what would happen, so he stood and faced the police. He reached for the gun, which wasn’t even loaded, and turned it on them.

  The bullets stung and burned, but not for long.

  And then Donny was a ghost. Time passed. He couldn’t find her. He looked everywhere. He lost her name. He lost her face. But he still felt her, like a hole in his soul. Sometimes he forgot what or who he was looking for, but he kept looking.

  More time passed. Donny forgot he was a ghost. He tried to flag down taxis, tried to eat at restaurants. Everyone was so rude. He held onto hope that when he found the pretty girl he was looking for, she would understand.

  More time passed, and he finally got a call from her. She told him she’d followed his directions, and she was at the farm. Where he’d grown up. His father needed him, she said. The old man was just as stubborn as Donny, and he wouldn’t listen to her. He pretended he couldn’t see her, couldn’t hear her.

  Donny went to the farmhouse, where he was reunited with his love. She’d forgotten her own name, and they laughed and held each other and didn’t care about things like names.

  She teased him about the posters on the walls of his childhood room, and laughed over how he’d carved his name into his desk a dozen times. He said the desk needed one more carving. He worked for months, etching the name he now called her, Pretty, next to his on the desk. He joined the two names by surrounding them with a heart.

  The carving took ages, because he had to concentrate so hard to move a physical object. Some days he felt like he was going mad, especially when he forgot who he was.

  His father still wouldn’t budge from the farmhouse.

  It was Donny’s girlfriend who figured out how to send messages through the appliances. They worked together, trying to get the attention of the housekeeper, but she was too scared to listen.

  They’d nearly given up on helping the old man when Khan and Eli showed up. Then… Eli knew the rest. And now he knew it from all angles. He felt Donny’s frustration, anger, and longing. He felt his joy at being able to communicate with his father after so many years, and how it felt to say goodbye.

  Eli felt what it meant to be dead, and from that, what it meant to be alive.

  Chapter Two

  Someone sniffed. Brenda was crying.

  The fog in Eli’s head lifted, and he saw her, mascara-darkened tears spilling down her pale cheeks.

  “That’s so beautiful,” she said.

  He picked up a napkin and reached across the table to catch her tears. Tonight was not going at all how he’d expected.

  “Brenda, he never told me those things. It’s all in my head now.” He rubbed his temples. “This is so crazy.”

  “I think it’s amazing. You just told me… all that stuff… and I didn’t have to drag it out of you one piece at a time. You’re finally coming out of your shell.”

  He gave her a suspicious look. First the meatloaf, now the flattery. What was Brenda hiding? Had she thrown out a stack of his comic books to make room for more plastic boxes?

  His pulse rate sped up. Had she discovered the ring he kept hidden in the secret compartment behind the bathroom mirror? A drop of sweat ran down the edge of his forehead.

  “This ghost experience you had is a good thing,” she concluded. “I just wish it hadn’t been so sad, with Donny’s girlfriend leaving him like that.”

  “She didn’t leave. She died of a drug overdose. It was ironic, I think, because it was the day before she was going to get clean.”

  Brenda blinked and gave Eli a look—the schoolteacher look she got sometimes, when she knew something and was hoping to beam it into Eli’s head so he could think it was his own idea.

  “Think about it,” she said.

  “The whole thing is sad. I don’t want to think about it anymore.” He rubbed his scalp vigorously, as though a massage might help push away these new memories.

  Brenda rose from her chair and came over to sit on Eli’s lap. She pulled his hands from his head, and then smoothed down his hair.

  Her cool fingers felt good against his skin.

  “Donny’s girlfriend didn’t want to go to rehab,” Brenda explained. “It wasn’t an accident.”

  A wave of sorrow rose inside Eli. She was right. Donny had known it as well, and the truth ran beneath the memories.

  The truth hit Eli hard. Not every tragedy is decided by fate. Sometimes humans are their own creators and destroyers. The sorrow filled Eli and spilled over. He nodded forward and rested his cheek against Brenda’s shoulder.

  She wrapped her arms around his neck and rocked him. The world washed over both of them. He took her hand and kissed the jagged scars on her wrist. She kissed the top of his head.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  Eli knew she wasn’t apologizing for kicking him in the kidneys the other day, or for any of the mean things she’d said to him during the week.

  She continued in a whisper, “I wish I didn’t understand these things.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” he said. “We’re not like them. Not like Donny and his girlfriend. Our story isn’t a tragedy.”

  “Not yet.” She sniffed.

  “Not ever, because I’m your big, stro
ng Eli, and you can’t get enough of me.”

  Her sniff turned into a giggle. She massaged his upper arms. “You do feel stronger today. Did you work out?”

  He flexed his biceps. “You like that?”

  He hadn’t worked out, except for two nights of fighting for his life against the alleged cat wraith.

  “Such big muscles,” she cooed.

  Eli flexed again. He did feel stronger.

  Brenda dried her tears and leaned in to lick the side of his neck, from his shirt collar to his earlobe.

  “I missed you,” she whispered.

  He looked into her cool blue eyes. “Did that demon thing come around on Saturday night? The cat wraith?”

  “No.” She looked alarmed. “Is it real?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, because he really didn’t. “Maybe we should set up a camera in the bedroom, to see if we can catch any action on video.”

  She gave him a playful look. “You naughty boy.”

  “Not like that.” He chuckled. “I meant—”

  He was cut off by Brenda’s lips against his. They kissed, and he ran his hands down and then up her bare legs. He stood from the chair, and she squealed and clung to him, wrapping her legs around his waist.

  The talk of other people’s tragedies infused their kissing with loss and urgency.

  Eli carried Brenda down the hallway to the bedroom, where they lit a fire bright enough to keep away the darkness for one more night.

  Chapter Three

  The cat wraith returned before dawn.

  It had been chasing rats in the nearby alleys for hours, and was played out, ready to come home.

  Eli and Brenda both looked so appealing in their blissful slumber, like two soft dumplings on top of a delicious stew.

  The cat wraith sniffed them as it circled the bed, feet tick-ticking on the floor. The taste of rat was still in its mouth, along with bone fragments. After a moment, it slithered under the bed, where it found something fragrant between the plastic bins—Eli’s socks. The cat wraith breathed deeply, taking in the delicious perfume and purring.