The Good, The Bad and The Ghostly ((Paranromal Western Romance))

by Keta Diablo

  With a noncommittal noise, she handed it back to him.

  They stared at one another for a long, silent moment. Somehow, Trip knew that speaking was the wrong way to go. Instead, he waited for her to nod so they might get started on their examination of the town.

  Whatever had sent that glass flying in the first place was big and ugly, and the sooner they got to work tracking it down, the sooner they’d be rid of it.

  Instead, Ruby Silver shook her head. "I'm afraid you've wasted your time," she said. "I work alone."

  Without another word, she lifted her chin, spun on her heel, gathered her horse's reins, and headed toward the largest, most imposing building in town—the bank—leaving Trip standing in the dust behind her, not certain whether he should chase after her, or simply admire her as she walked away.

  Chapter Two

  I hope he can't tell I'm trembling.

  Ruby was fairly certain the skirt would hide the shaking of her legs, and leading Lakota should keep her hands busy enough.

  Not that it should matter what he saw. She had expended quite a bit of energy—anyone would be unsteady afterwards.

  Anyone but her, usually.

  The cowboy had surprised her when he walked up behind her, and he should not have been able to do so. This had been the first time she had used her special skills since she had given up on reaching Flint after he passed to the other side, and it had taken more concentration than she expected.

  Not for the first time, she briefly considered, then put aside, the question of her motivations for avoiding most of her supernatural abilities since Flint's death.

  This time the use of her skills had been particularly draining, not merely from lack of practice, but also because she had encountered a competing force, blocking her own. Though far from the most powerful reaction she had encountered in her time, it had been stronger than most she had come upon in her days as a demon hunter.

  Admittedly, she and Flint had not often focused on the human afterlife, choosing instead to concentrate their attention upon those malevolent forces that might more directly cause harm to the living.

  "Broken glass on the wing might injure the unwary," she muttered aloud, much as she knew Flint would have, had she been able to have this conversation with him.

  Hitching Lakota to one of the posts in front of the bank—all of which were otherwise unoccupied—Ruby took a moment to tidy her appearance, carefully tucking her hair back inside her bonnet and straightening her skirt. Should she meet anyone inside, it would not do to look unkempt.

  Neat but plain.

  She concentrated on the phrase, attempting to embody the concept.

  It would be even better if she managed to look outright ugly. Grief had done its best in the last months to strip her of vitality, and that had actually made her first jobs with the Tremayne Agency simpler than she had feared.

  But as she continued to choose life over death month after month, continued to eat on a relatively regular schedule, to sleep most nights, her natural vigor began to return to her, and she knew it would not be long before men began to take notice of her once again.

  The thought caused her to glance over her shoulder at the man still standing in the street, watching her.

  Having Flint around to deflect others' attention had been useful.

  Then again, her former partner had been a mountain of a man, intimidating and prone to scowling at those he did not know. Few people had realized that the lines around his eyes were as much from smiles as from frowns or the glare of the Western sun.

  Blowing out a sigh, she moved inside the bank, welcoming the cool dimness of the shaded interior.

  * * *

  Ruby considered casting another glance at the man in the street, but she didn't want him thinking about her watching him. Something about his aura bothered her, and she had to wrap her arms around her upper body to keep herself from peering back over her shoulder to examine it more closely.

  It simply ... felt wrong.

  Everything about this particular assignment had felt wrong since the moment she rode into town.

  Since the moment she had taken the job, truth be told.

  Since the moment Flint left me behind to explore the afterlife without me.

  Tears welled up in her eyes and she blinked, hard, willing them back down to where they had been clogging her throat for the last month as she refused to let them out, tired of crying herself to sleep every night, alone.

  She could almost hear Flint's voice. Crying doesn't do any good, anyway. Everything will work out OK. It always does.

  At the back of the bank lobby, a short, portly, balding man in his late forties stood with his back against the tellers' cages, winding a pocket-watch as he waited for Ruby to make her way toward him.

  When she was close enough for him to speak to her without his voice echoing through the marbled room, he said, "Miss Silver?" in a heavily German-accented voiced.

  Ruby nodded, but waited until she could respond without raising her voice. "I am. Mr. Schmidt? You contacted the Tremayne Agency for help?"

  "Ja." He paused for a moment. "But you have seen the poltergeist now, yes?"

  "I'm afraid I don't know that term." She kept her voice low and gentle. "I assume, however, that you mean the entity in the street?"

  Mr. Schmidt nodded, then paused, searching for other words. "It is a ... you say entity? A geist ... ghost ... of .... disturbance. Loudness. Noise. Yes. Noise." He nodded, certain in his description.

  "A noisy ghost?" Ruby glanced back toward the doorway and discovered that the other Tremayne agent had found his way inside, as well. She refrained from sighing, but only barely. "Yes, noisy ghost certainly describes what I saw outside."

  Stepping close to Mr. Schmidt, she gently placed one hand on his forearm. He jerked away slightly. "If I may? I would like to see what, if anything, I can determine about the spirit you are facing."

  Mr. Schmidt didn't try to pull away, but he was by no means comfortable.

  That's going to make tracking down the source more difficult.

  Everything was more difficult without Flint. Out of balance. When they had worked together, he had distracted the clients as Ruby had read them, learning how they remained connected to the spirits, how they kept the specters tethered to this world rather than allowing them to move on to the next.

  Now, all of Mr. Schmidt's attention remained on Ruby.

  The more he focused on her, the harder it was to follow the connections to the other side.

  Nonetheless, she felt the tether. Drawing in a deep breath, traced the glowing white cord that tied Mr. Schmidt to ...

  Not to one entity.

  ...but to many ....

  What is this?

  Ruby's concentration shattered into a hundred pieces. Clenching her teeth against the gasp that tried to escape, she focused on remaining still. Her eyes flew open, though, and she stared at the middle-aged man in front of her.

  "Are you OK?" The Tremayne agent's voice was so close it startled her.

  The term startled her, as well—it had been one of Flint's favorite slang words, its usage a habit of which she had attempted to break him.

  A smile crossed her face.

  As if Ruby had ever been able to break Flint of any habits he enjoyed.

  "I am well," she responded coolly.

  Turning to the town leader, he stuck out one hand in a friendly gesture. "Travis James Austin III," he said cheerfully. "Trip to my friends. I hope to call you one."

  He sounded more like a snake-oil peddler than a professional agent. Mr. Schmidt raised his eyebrows, but he took Trip's—Mr. Austin's—hand. As soon as he had done so, however, Austin dropped the overly-friendly act and began stalking around the bank lobby.

  "A noisy ghost, you say?" He rested one hand on the butt of one pistol.

  "Ja, but ..." the bank manager paused, turning to Ruby as if appealing for help, a frown crinkling his otherwise round face. "Pistols do not work against the d
ead."

  "That is generally true." Turning only her head, she spoke over her shoulder to Austin, who had wandered behind her and was peering at a chip in a marble column, where apparently the apparition had taken out some of the stone. "Did you hear that, Mr. Austin? Your guns will be ineffective against the phantoms haunting this town."

  If she had not been watching for it, she would have missed the flicker of his gaze toward her, the appreciative gleam in his eye. He frowned. "Indeed, Miss Silver? And are the good folk of Rittersburg certain of this? Have they, in fact, attempted to use my side arms against this disturbance?"

  Clenching her teeth against a shout of laughter, Ruby widened her eyes and looked inquiringly at Mr. Schmidt, who stammered. "Of course not. That is, not Mr. Austin's weapons. But others, certainly."

  "Hmm." Ruby nodded. "Yes, well. Please do keep in mind, Mr. Schmidt, that agents from the Tremayne Agency come not only well trained, but well armed. I am prepared to engage with the other side through a variety of methods, including capture, exorcism, and elimination, as is my co-agent." She didn't actually know if that was true. It was the spiel she and Flint had used when they had set out to convince a town or family to pay them to eliminate the monsters that had attached themselves to the unsuspecting.

  The rest of the world had developed a love of the Wild West, with its untamed land and native peoples.

  But Ruby knew that there were more horrors in the West than the rest of the world realized.

  Including the one that had killed her partner.

  And someday, she would track it down, too, and send it straight back to Hell.

  With a tiny shake of her head, she dispelled the thought. That day was not today, and until then, she had work to do—not least of all, learning to stay alive while she hunted down that demon, even without Flint at her side.

  Still, if Mr. Austin had noticed her pause, he had ignored it. He was going over the Tremayne Agency's rules—all the things that agents were not allowed to do for clients.

  For some reason, it bothered her, and she wasn't sure why. She and Flint had maintained a similar set of guidelines, even for the two of them, and she had never chafed against the strictures before.

  In part, she suspected it was the fact that the Tremayne Agency felt the need to specify their stance against divorce. Not that Ruby was particularly opposed to divorce. She was, however, opposed to marriage.

  At least for herself.

  No. She suspected that her desire to rebel against the rules the Tremayne Agency set out had more to do with her unhappiness at going to work for a company at all.

  "I'm no company man," Flint had said on more than one occasion. "Company starts telling you where to go, what to do, pretty soon you lose all sense of freedom. Next thing you know you'll be asking what to think. Someone starts telling me what to think, I might as well hang up my fiddle, stop hunting demons altogether."

  Guess I learned more from his tutelage than I realized.

  Ruby had also, however, realized when to remain silent. Now she began her own examination of the marble in the room.

  Much more of the stone was chipped than she had first noticed.

  This had not been the first ghostly whirlwind, then.

  Nor the second, either.

  The tellers' cages were also more fortified than she had initially anticipated.

  This town had been under siege for longer than Mr. Schmidt had cared to acknowledge in his communiqués with Ruby's new bosses.

  Pulling out a small sketchpad and a case of half-used charcoal pencils, Ruby began making notes of the placement of the chips in the marble.

  When Mr. Austin wrapped up his conversation, he joined Ruby and peered over her shoulder to see what she was drawing. "Our host tells me there is something resembling a boarding house—a guest house with a beer-garden, I believe he said, if my ability to translate German is up to snuff—where we can wait until our rooms are ready."

  "I won't stay in a brothel," Ruby replied without looking back at him. Not that Ruby and Flint hadn't stayed in worse, in their time.

  Austin raised his hands as if warding off an attack. "I would not dare suggest it." He backed away. "I have a suggestion. You finish your examination of ..." he paused, gesturing in a circle around the lobby, "...this room. I will ensure that our quarters are available and appropriate."

  Without bothering to ascertain if she agreed, Austin spun on his heel and marched out.

  Ruby made a few more charcoal strokes on the paper, then leaned her forehead against the cool, smooth stone. "Oh, Flint," she whispered. "How can I do this without you?"

  Chapter Three

  The new agent was an odd one. When the request had come through for his help training a new hire, Trip had expected someone green, an apprentice, not a gifted spiritualist. There were few enough legitimately talented diviners or psychics around, much less accomplished mediums.

  "I'd lay odds she's a demonologist, as well," he muttered to himself as he made his way across the dusty street to the boarding house, the Gasthof, that Mr. Schmidt had pointed him toward—the guest house that was almost certainly also a brothel, though the bank manager had assured him he and Ruby Silver would be the only guests there this week.

  So what was a woman like Miss Silver doing out here in the middle of nowhere, all alone? Back in St. Louis, she might have run an entire team. For all that the Tremayne P.S.I Agency maintained a veneer of respectability, all the agents themselves knew that the owner did not care if the agents were men or women.

  For that matter, no one really knew if Nat Tremayne, the head honcho, was male or female.

  "Or human, come to think of it." Trip was going to have to quit speaking aloud to himself, or that bad habit, combined with his unusual occupation, was going to get him strung up some day, put to death as one of the monsters himself.

  The new agent now... she was definitely human. And all woman. His first glimpse of her hadn't been terribly promising, wrapped as she had been in far too many layers of clothing.

  But for an instant, as she had walked away from him, the wind had lifted her skirt and revealed a glimpse of close-fitting trousers underneath. Hair the color and texture of corn-silk had floated out around her, and when she glanced back at him inside the bank, her eyes flashed a bright white-blue that matched the color of the lightning that had surrounded her outside.

  With a grin, he picked up his pace, eager to begin to solve this latest mystery.

  And maybe even learn why a talented medium had taken on a greenhorn ghost-hunter's job.

  * * *

  An hour later, he took a long swallow of what might be the best beer he had ever consumed. Technically, he wasn’t supposed to consume alcohol on the job. But somehow he didn’t think his German hosts would put beer into that category.

  "Tell me, Mrs. Baumgartner, what is your secret?" He flashed his most charming smile at the round woman shaking her head at him as she wiped down the tables—but she didn't chase him off.

  He should be able to glean some useful information, as long as the proprietress continued to view him as something of a charming rogue—certainly no one to take too seriously. "What secret?" she asked, standing far enough away that he could not wrap his arm around her waist, as he suspected many of her patrons tried to do. He had, however, winked at her.

  "You are terrible," she had said, but she was laughing. "My husband is enormous. And when he returns home, he will crush you like die Traube."

  "Then I reckon I had best make my move now." He raised an eyebrow.

  Smoothing her hair down under a cap reminiscent of much European fashion, Mrs. Baumgartner practically giggled. "I have five lovely daughters, Mr. Austin, and many nieces who also live here. You should not attempt to court an old woman like me."

  Trip threw his head back and laughed. "Somehow, I don't think they're actually your daughters and nieces, Mrs. Baumgartner."

  "Indeed not." Ruby Silver's cool voice swirled around him—rather like being dun
ked into a cold horse-trough on a hot summer afternoon, both refreshing and shocking. "Nor," she continued, stepping down into the courtyard-style garden and nodding at the proprietress's offer to bring her a mug of beer, "would I exactly consider any interactions with those girls courting."

  "It's not even flirting any longer," Trip muttered into his own mug.

  "Pardon me?"

  He would have sworn he had seen a flicker of amusement in her gaze as she glanced at him, but by the time one of the girls had brought a drink for her and thumped it down onto the wooden-plank table before her, the look was gone—and more than that, it was entirely belied by the expressions of concern she turned to the girls.

  "Are you well treated here?" she asked one, placing a hand on the girl's arm.

  "Ja," the girl laughed. "Frau Baumgartner ist sehr gut to us." Miss Silver peered deeply into the girl's eyes and glanced briefly around the small group of smiling, round, fresh-faced girls. She did not pursue the line of questioning. If they were in fact whores—and Trip was fairly certain they were, for all their language of family and "girls"—they were well fed, clean, and smiling the kinds of smiles that made it all the way to their eyes. He didn't think they were likely to be complaining.

  Ruby Silver must have been satisfied with their appearance, as well, for she simply moved her mug of dark beer to a chair at the end of another trestle-table, set her sketch pad and charcoal pencil beside it, and swept her skirts to one side to sit down. She had changed her clothing since the events in the street, and he overheard her arrange in a murmur to have one of the girls remove her clothing and launder it.

  Wonder if that includes the pants?

  For a brief instant, he imagined her standing before him wearing nothing but the pants and tight, form-fitting shirt, while her gold-blond hair swirled out behind and around her.

  Taking a drink to help wash away the image, Trip gathered his wits about him. He suspected he would need them to actually speak to this woman.

  "What do you know about this town?" she asked as he moved to sit down across from her.

  "Very little. Recent settlement, German immigrants." He glanced around the enclosed garden space. "Fairly closed to outsiders, though happy enough to take travelers' cash. Did the folks at the home office tell you anything more?"