by Vivi Andrews
Wyatt did not have time to be possessed. Or haunted. Or whatever the hell she called it. He was a busy man. He had the Grand Opening of a new inn to launch, the remodeling of the Victorian to oversee, and the daily operations of a multimillion-dollar corporation to head. There was no time in his life for ghosts in his stomach.
In his stomach, for Christ’s sake. Had she actually expected him to believe that?
After the debacle at the house, he’d gone home, drunk enough scotch to drown any ghosts in his stomach, and passed out in his bed.
At least, he thought he had passed out in bed. He’d woken up sprawled on the floor in front of the television with the SyFy channel blasting at an unholy volume. He never watched the SyFy Channel. He didn’t even know which channel it was. CNBC, ESPN, sure. But SyFy?
Wyatt had scoured the condo for signs that someone—perhaps a certain sexy Exterminator—had broken in to play a prank on him, but his scouring skills weren’t at their best, given the fact that he was still somewhat drunk from the fifth of scotch he’d swallowed only hours earlier.
The scotch provided an excellent explanation. Drunk and prompted by the previous day’s so-called ghost activities, he must have followed some subconscious cue to stop at a channel playing The Twilight Zone or The X-Files. Why he’d gotten out of bed to go watch television in the middle of a bender was still a mystery, but no cause for concern.
It didn’t mean he was possessed.
He’d been late into the office, which had his entire staff gaping at him in shock, including his flaky, new-age secretary who peered at him as if in fear for his soul. Since it was her usual expression, this morning it was actually somewhat comforting.
He’d grabbed the morning profit-loss reports and shut himself in his office with what was quickly becoming the worst hangover ever recorded in human history.
Then she had called.
When his secretary buzzed to tell him Karmic Consultants was on line one, he’d experienced a brief flare of something—not quite excitement, but definitely not dread—at the idea that it was Jo, but the voice on the other end of the line had none of her sassy brass. Although there was a healthy helping of sex appeal to make up for the lack.
Then what the woman was saying in that fuck-me-suck-me voice registered and Wyatt found himself growling into the phone like an untrained dog.
“I am not haunted!”
He hadn’t meant to shout. He winced, images of his sane, normal employees pausing in their daily routines at the unexpected verbal explosion from their boss’s office running through his head.
“Jo is very good at what she does, Mr. Haines,” Karma purred soothingly. “If she suspects there is spirit activity within your body, it is in your best interest to allow her to deal with the phenomenon.”
Wyatt could think of a number of things Jo Banks could do with his body, but none of them involved spirits or could be repeated in polite company. Although, she had mentioned that some of the Karmic Consultants worked in the nude. Maybe there could be some overlap between her professional life and what he wanted her to do to him personally. Wyatt shook away a very graphic image and focused on growling at her boss.
“Ms. Karma—”
“It’s just Karma.”
Wyatt rolled his eyes. Of course it is. “Karma. I have tried to be understanding. I think I have maintained a very open mind up to this point. I allowed your employee access to the house. I allowed her to do…what she did, and I have every intention of paying your bill.” The last thing he needed was Kooks-R-Us publicly suing him for non-payment. “I do not, however, have time to entertain fantasies about ghosts and spirits when I have a business to run.”
Wyatt thought he’d been very clear. Very final.
Karma simply purred, “You fantasize about ghosts?”
He nearly swallowed his tongue. “Excuse me?”
“You said you don’t have time to entertain fantasies. I’d say it’s safe to guess that doesn’t refer to the ghosts, but the ghost exterminator.”
Wyatt cleared his throat, but it sounded more like he was choking.
Karma’s voice hummed throatily through the phone even as she scolded him soundly. “Jo Banks is a professional, Mr. Haines. The sooner you realize that she is just trying to do her job—her legitimate job—the sooner I believe you will realize that this isn’t about fantasies or delusions, but about a very real concern for our client’s wellbeing. Your wellbeing.”
“I’m well. My wellbeing is fine. I don’t need her.”
“We do have other mediums. None are quite as proficient in this particular area as Ms. Banks, but if it would make you more comfortable to work with someone else—”
“No. It has to be Jo.” Wyatt winced and backpedaled as soon as he realized what his mouth had said without his permission. “It has to be a no,” he stressed, lamely covering his tracks. “I don’t need anyone. Ms. Banks was perfectly satisfactory,” every luscious, edible, mentally unstable inch of her, “but I do not require any further assistance from your company.”
“Of course there would be no charge for this as it would be considered part of the original service,” Karma persisted.
“It isn’t the money,” Wyatt growled. He’d resigned himself to throwing money after folly before he’d called Karmic Consultants in the first place. “I simply do not need any distractions right now and this fiasco can’t possibly be anything else.”
“Mr. Haines…”
“This is not negotiable. Our business is concluded. Goodbye.”
Wyatt disconnected with a finality that would have been much more gratifying if he hadn’t had the uncomfortable sensation that their business was not as thoroughly concluded as he might wish. He squashed the tiny little voice of doubt and took a deep, cleansing breath.
He was fine. Completely unhaunted.
Wyatt shoved all thoughts of Karmic Consultants from his mind and focused on the profit-loss reports. Almost immediately, the numbers began to blur and bleed across the page before his eyes. Wyatt groaned and pinched the bridge of his nose, squeezing his eyes shut and trying to battle back the hangover by sheer force of will.
It wasn’t a terribly scientific approach, but this morning it was surprisingly effective. The pounding receded slightly, but when he cautiously opened his eyes, the numbers refused to hold still, swimming in front of his eyes rather than sitting firm and stable in neat columns as they were supposed to.
God, he was so tired. Exhaustion swamped him suddenly, reminding him that he’d had no more than two hours of sleep and enough scotch to fell a horse the night before. The temptation to close his eyes and put his head down on his desk, just for a moment, was nearly overwhelming.
Wyatt grunted and shook his head sharply, trying to shake away the nagging exhaustion. For a moment, the world cleared, but within seconds he was nodding and bleary again.
Just for a second…not going to sleep…just closing my eyes…
“Wyatt!”
He jerked awake with a jolt. Shit. Had he fallen asleep at his desk?
Then reality sank in a little further and he realized he wasn’t sitting at his desk. He wasn’t sitting at all. He was standing in front of the sink in the three-quarter bath he’d had installed in his office for the nights when he couldn’t be bothered to go back to his condo.
Wyatt shook his head. If he was standing, he clearly hadn’t been sleeping. He was not a sleepwalker, never had been. So why did he feel as though he had just woken up from the deepest sleep of his life?
A pungent scent tickled his nose and he shook his head again to clear it. Had he been drugged?
Wyatt looked up and saw his secretary, whose shrill screech had woken him—except he hadn’t been asleep, so how could she have woken him?—standing over his shoulder, gaping at his reflection in the mirror. Slowly, she raised one finger, her mouth working like a fish, and pointed at his face.
Wyatt frowned, shifting his eyes from her reflection to his own. It took a moment to reg
ister that it was his reflection. The man frowning back at him had Wyatt’s eyes, his jaw, his frown, but thick black lines had been drawn across his face, making the features seem foreign.
Bushy black eyebrows were drawn in above his. Thick squiggles in a cartoonish imitation of a handlebar mustache marred his smooth shave. And to top it all off, wide black circles around his eyes, with a thick bar across his nose and lines extending toward his ears made him look like someone had drawn a caricature of Groucho Marx directly onto his face.
Wyatt’s hands fisted in anger at the thought of one of his employees drawing on his face when they caught the boss napping. He opened his mouth to demand that his secretary fire the prankster on the spot, but the feel of something clenched in his left hand stopped him. He glanced down, forcing his rage-curled fingers to unclench and his frown deepened as he tried to make sense of what he was looking at.
It was a marker. A black Sharpie with the cap off. The pungent aroma was the distinctive waft of ink. Permanent ink.
“I’ll call Karmic Consultants at once, sir!” his secretary called out as she ran from his office.
Wyatt stared at his inked face for several seconds before the realization that he had fallen asleep and drawn on his own face sunk in.
No, the ghosts did the drawing, a little voice spoke in the back of his mind—his voice, not any ghost’s voice, thank God. He was not hearing voices. He was just drawing on himself. And had no memory of it. Sleep drawing. Surely that was a common phenomenon. Stress. Stress could bring on sleep-drawing. There were probably thousands of documented cases of stress-related self-impressionism.
Wyatt put the cap back on the marker, put it beside the sink like he might his toothbrush, and walked over to his desk to be ready for the call he was about to make. Every step of the way, he racked his brain for some explanation that did not include ghosts. It wasn’t entirely beyond the realm of possibility that he could have sleepwalked over to his vanity and drawn on his face in permanent ink. He was certain stranger things had happened. Just never to him.
“Karmic on line one, Mr. Haines.”
Jo. Jo will fix this.
Wyatt shook his head. She wouldn’t fix this. Because this was not about ghosts. There was a sane, rational explanation. He was not haunted.
Maybe she’ll fix it naked.
Nothing to fix. Not haunted. He was a sane, rational man. Who had just drawn on his own face while he took a little catnap.
Wyatt picked up the phone and punched the button for line one, trying to think of what he could possibly say that would sound sane and rational, and still get across the point that he was clearly losing his mind.
He wasn’t haunted. Clearly not haunted at all.
Stress-induced sleep-impressionism. Fine. Perfectly understandable. But the marker was in his left hand.
And that one little thought would not stop repeating itself in his clearly addled brain. Wyatt wasn’t even left-handed.
Chapter Six: Oh, How the Mighty Have Fallen
Karma smiled smugly as she hung up the phone after her second conversation with KC’s newest hysterical client.
Not that she took pleasure in her clients’ hysteria. Well, perhaps a bit, but certainly not an undue amount. It was always particularly gratifying to have them crawl back to her, begging and sobbing. The day the world learned to solve its own problems was the day she was out of a job, so she made a point of being amused by ignorance and gross incompetence whenever possible.
Karma’s smile faded.
Jo wouldn’t be pleased to learn she was going to have to deal with Haines again. Or perhaps she wouldn’t mind it too terribly much. Karma had a hunch that Jo and Wyatt were not quite as indifferent to one another as they would have her believe, and her hunches were rarely wrong.
The image-conscious Mr. Haines was not the kind of man Karma would have chosen for Jo, who had enough difficulties with her self-image already, but people so rarely let her tell them to whom they ought to be attracted.
Jo needed someone accepting. Someone who would be charmed by her apparent contradictions, paranormal skills and lightning-quick mood swings. Karma had only spoken to the man on the phone a handful of times, but she was quite certain Wyatt Haines was not that man. Quite the opposite.
And there was definitely something odd going on in that house of his. Jo’s recounting of last night’s events had set off a number of warning bells in Karma’s mind, not the least of which was Wyatt Haines’s suspicious involvement.
Still puzzling over the possible ramifications of last night’s anomalies, Karma picked up the phone and dialed Jo’s home number from memory. When her ghost exterminator answered groggily on the third ring, Karma belatedly recalled she had ordered her home to sleep.
“Sorry to wake you, Jo, but I need you back on Wyatt Haines.”
“Karma? What Haines?”
“Wy-att Haines,” Karma enunciated precisely, waiting for Jo to wake up fully. Due to her tendency to call her employees when she needed them rather than during normal business hours, this wasn’t the first time she’d caught Jo napping. She knew from previous experience that it would be a solid five minutes and a lot of repetition before Jo was firing on all cylinders.
“The stuck-up businessman?” Jo mumbled, and the sound of shuffling came through the line. Karma imagined her employee stumbling blindly toward the kitchen and hoped Jo had some coffee readily on hand. “D’you do a Vulcan mind-meld on him?”
Karma bit back a laugh. She did like Jo. Absolutely no verbal filter and the most fascinating leaps of logic. Karma tried not to have favorites among her many extremely talented employees, but there were days when Jo made that pretty damn difficult. Of course, there were days when they each made it difficult, in their own ways.
“Actually, he came around on his own. Some sort of incident involving a permanent marker, although I couldn’t quite make out exactly what happened. He was a trifle distraught.”
“A trifle. Yeah, that sounds like him.” Jo paused for a loud slurp of coffee. “Was he clearing his throat a bunch? He does that.”
“I didn’t notice. Would you care to tell me why you felt it was necessary to mention Ciara’s condition to him?”
“What?” Jo’s confusion came through readily. “I didn’t…oh, wait, I did. He was giving me shit about my combat boots, so I volunteered to strip.”
“Very professional,” Karma commented dryly.
“Yeah, well, he was being an ass. I didn’t say anything about Ciara. Just that some of our people work naked.”
Ciara Liung was an extremely sensitive psychic who specialized in finding lost and stolen items—sports cars, jewelry, you name it, Ciara could find it. Human lo-jack. However, the nature of her gift was such that, while she was working, the touch of anything on her skin, even her own clothing, was distracting to the point of pain. Her weakness was a well-kept secret at KC. The local FBI office had a man whose entire job it was to liaise with Ciara and even he had no idea that their best finder spent most of her time floating naked in her pool.
“You aren’t going to tell Ciara, are you?” Jo asked, interrupting Karma’s musings. “If she’s pissed at me, I’ll never find my keys again.”
Karma ignored the whining. “Do you have Haines’ office address in the dossier I gave you? I need you to get there as quickly as possible.”
Jo followed the change in subject without missing a beat. “What am I supposed to do when I get there?”
“Get his permission to re-inspect the house and remove the ghosts from his body.”
There was a long pause, then Jo gave a thoughtful slurp and mumbled, “Huh.”
“Jo? You can remove the ghosts, can’t you?”
The extended silence that met her question was far from comforting.
“Jo? Can you?”
“Maybe,” Jo piped up finally. “Probably,” she amended, although if anything she sounded less sure. “I definitely have some ideas. This isn’t exactly well-charted territ
ory we’re covering here. But don’t you worry. I’m gonna boldly go where no ghost exterminator has gone before.”
“Been watching much Star Trek lately?”
“Fell asleep watching the SyFy channel. It’s Trekkie month. This week is all Shatner awesomeness and next week the TNG kick-ass marathon begins. SyFy channel rocks my world. Even if they did stupidly change the spelling of their name. They are Trek-tastic so I must forgive them. How could I survive with only USA and TNT to quench my syndicated thirst?”
Karma refrained from mentioning that she had never seen a single episode of Star Trek. She needed Jo out helping Wyatt Haines, not storming into the office to force Karma to view the Shatner awesomeness.
“How quickly can you be at Haines’ office?”
“Warp speed, baby.”
“Good.”
“No, no, Karma. Your line is ‘Make it so’.”
Karma coughed to hide her laughter and then obligingly commanded, “Make it so, Banks.”
Jo gave a squeal of delight and shouted, “I need more power, Captain!” in a terrible Scottish accent as she threw down the phone. Karma gave in to her laughter as soon as she heard the line go dead.
Warp speed turned out to be eighteen minutes and thirty-seven seconds. Jo timed herself. Considering she had to throw on a fresh T-shirt and yesterday’s jeans, drive halfway across town, find parking, and take the slowest elevator on the planet up nine floors while listening to Muzak, eighteen minutes and thirty-seven seconds was pretty damn awesome.
She stepped out of the elevator to escape the most painful synthesizer version of The Phantom of the Opera she’d ever heard, only to find herself in a beige office suite so sterile surgery could probably be performed on any flat surface.
The receptionist, wearing a white button-up shirt and khaki skirt, was nearly as colorless as the rest of the office. She smiled blandly, and said in an expressionless monotone, “May I help you?”
Jo didn’t need to double check the name engraved on the wall behind her to know that she was in Wyatt’s office. The receptionist had about as much personality as the average droid. “I’m here to see Mr. Haines. Jo Banks. Karmic Consultants.”