by Vivi Andrews
They were both silent, lost in their own thoughts, as the plane touched down.
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Halloween at the Haunted House
Jo loved Halloween—the one night of the year when everyone was a freak—and spending the holiday at a Victorian mansion that positively writhed with ghostly energy was pretty close to her idea of nirvana. Especially if she got a chance to kick some big, bad, ghostly talisman ass. This year, Halloween night was also the night of the full moon, adding an extra layer of spooky goodness to the holiday.
Jo left a message with Karma to bring her up to speed, but on Samhain night, her boss would be dealing with a thousand different crises in the non-ghost-removal sides of the business, so Jo wasn’t expecting the cavalry any time soon. Wyatt suggested waiting a few days, until they could bring in reinforcements, but Jo didn’t want to think about how many ghosts the talisman would collect by then. Not to mention the whole Wyatt’s soul detaching from his body if they didn’t remove Angelica and Teddy pronto thing.
Besides, Jo was ready to act now. She knew she could do it. Alone, if she had to. She felt like Superwoman, revved up and ready to take down any monsters that crossed her path.
The plane ride had been liberating—and not just because Wyatt Haines was a one-man orgasm factory.
When Jo realized that she gave herself more grief for being a freak than anyone else ever had, a weight had lifted off her shoulders. She had spent her whole life begging for approval, but now she felt free. She didn’t have to try to be normal any more. Who cared what the rest of the world thought?
Jo Banks was a powerful, badass ghost exterminator. No apologies. No excuses.
She smacked the crowbar she held against her palm. Ghosties beware.
“First stop, kitchen demolition.” Jo strode up the front walk to the Victorian, slapping the crowbar lightly against her thigh.
After a few quick stops on the way to the house, Jo was back in black and denim, with her goodie bag slung over one shoulder, ready to take on the world. She felt like herself again—only more herself than she had ever allowed herself to be.
Wyatt, shockingly enough, emerged from his condo wearing jeans with his usual dress shirt. But even holding the other crowbar, he still looked like he should be negotiating a merger rather than ripping up tiles. You can take the uptight executive out of the boardroom…
Jo made a face.
If only she weren’t three-quarters in love with a man who tolerated freaks remarkably well. For all that she felt bright and new and strong in terms of how she felt about herself, her feelings about Wyatt were even more jumbled than ever.
“This is depressing,” Wyatt grumbled beside her.
Jo silently agreed with all her stupid heart. Then she realized Wyatt wasn’t talking about their hopeless not-quite-love-affair. She stopped abruptly, spinning to face him. “What?”
“We’re about to rip apart the one part of the house that I actually managed to get fixed. I’m allowed to be depressed.”
“We are about to fix your ghost problem once and for all. My excellent ghost exterminating skills are going to be put to most excellent use as soon as we get rid of the talisman. You should be thrilled. Go on. Be thrilled.”
As she stood there, waiting for him to be thrilled, Wyatt just rolled his eyes and stepped around her, heading for the front door. “Let’s get this over with, my most excellent ghost exterminator.”
Jo decided to follow, but only because he had called her by the correct title.
She studied the house as they approached. The ghosts zipped around double time. Apparently they were a little hopped up on Halloween jollies, too. Or maybe the talisman really was stronger on Samhain. She glanced at Wyatt, looking for signs of strain. Angelica and Teddy flitted around inside him, but he wasn’t jumping around, starting at voices this time.
“If you start to feel all wonky because of the talisman, go wait outside, okay? No heroics, Mr. Haines.”
“That goes for you too, Ms. Banks. Or did you forget which one of us had to be carried out of here last time?”
She made a face at the reminder. “Strictly academic. I won’t be trying to open a portal and shove ghosts through and fight off the talisman all at the same time. In fact, I won’t be trying to do anything supernatural. I’m just the tile-removal expert tonight.”
Jo waved her crowbar for emphasis and Wyatt ducked away from the flying blunt object. “You’re an expert, all right,” he said dryly.
Jo stepped up onto the porch, humming a stirring battle march.
Wyatt stopped. “Is that the Mighty Mouse theme music?” he asked incredulously.
She realized that she had, in fact, been humming “Here I come to save the day!” and decided to run with it. “Yeah. You got a problem with that?”
Wyatt snorted, then coughed and carefully blanked his expression when her crowbar wagged aggressively in his direction. “No, no problem. Lead on.”
“That’s what I thought.”
Jo put an extra dollop of swagger into her walk, feeling like John Wayne at high noon as she faced the front door. It was bulging slightly, likely from the force of the ghosts packed inside. Jo glanced back over her shoulder at Wyatt.
“You doing okay? No weird voices? No ghosts being ripped from your body?”
“The voice is back and it’s loud as hell, but I’m dealing with it. Let’s finish this.”
“Whatever you say, boss. Just promise me that you’ll bail if the talisman starts controlling you.”
“If the talisman starts controlling me, I probably won’t be able to bail.”
“Don’t confuse me with logic. Just promise.”
Wyatt grinned at her, the expression so endearing that, for a second, she thought his teeth sparkled like a matinee idol’s. “I promise.”
Jo nodded once. “Let’s do this.”
She kicked open the door and walked forward, leading with the crowbar so when the door swung back to smack her in the face, it thwacked against the iron and rebounded again. Wyatt snorted behind her. “Nice entrance.”
The energy slapped her in the face as soon as she stepped across the threshold. The medallion must have been feeding off the energy of the ghosts somehow, because it was noticeably stronger now. She wasn’t even in the kitchen yet and already she felt like a buoy being tossed around on rough waters.
She wondered if non-believer Wyatt had even noticed the turbulence. Then the thud of something heavy hitting the floor sounded behind her.
Jo turned. Wyatt lay sprawled halfway across the threshold. His body bowed and contorted as the twin ghost energies inside him struggled to break loose.
“Wyatt!” The crowbar slipped from Jo’s fingers, clanking noisily to the ground as she rushed forward to kneel at his side. His eyes were wide open and staring, but he didn’t seem to see her. “Wyatt? Wyatt, look at me. Wyatt!”
His body bucked and a gurgling noise came out of his throat.
“Shit! Shit, shit, shit.” Jo grabbed his shoulders and began half-shoving, half-dragging him out of the house. The man weighed a ton and a half and he bucked and thrashed in her arms like a rodeo bull. “Hang on, Wyatt. You’re gonna be okay,” she murmured to him, the words tripping out of her mouth as much to reassure herself, since Wyatt didn’t seem to hear her.
She braced her feet on the wooden planks of the porch and hauled him across it. At the steps, she hefted his torso up against her chest and pulled him quickly down. From the thwack, thwack, thwack of his legs hitting the steps, he was going to be bruised from the waist down, but Jo didn’t care as long as she got him away from the talisman.
On the brick path, she stumbled, hissing as her weak ankle turned again. Wyatt’s body fell to the side of the path. He was still for a moment. Jo bent over him—to check that she’d managed to get him far enough from the house to stop the seizures rather than accidentally dropping him on his head hard enough to do him real damage. “Wyatt?”
His body convulsed again. His hea
d cracked against hers.
“Ouch! Dammit.” Jo didn’t waste the time rubbing her bashed skull. She wrapped her arms under Wyatt’s and began hauling him farther from the house. “Come on, Wyatt, snap out of it,” she urged quietly as she dragged him up the path. “Come on. You’ve gotta be out of range now. Say something.”
She was panting from the effort of hauling him nearly all the way to the street when his convulsions suddenly eased. Jo settled him gently on the ground, leaning over him to peer into his face. “Wyatt? Are you okay?”
His eyes were closed, which was only somewhat less disconcerting than the blank-eyed stare. His breathing was shallow and periodically his body twitched and shivered in an echo of his earlier fits.
“Wyatt? Come on, babe. You’re scaring me.”
He remained unresponsive. Jo shrugged off her pack, digging into it for her cell phone and a stick of cleansing incense. She hit the auto-dial for Karma even as she rummaged one-handed for a lighter for the incense.
“Pick up, pick up, pick up.”
The ringing clicked over to voicemail and Jo swore viciously. Her hand closed around the lighter as she waited for Karma’s purring voice to run through the familiar instructions. She hurriedly lit the incense, shoving it under Wyatt’s nose. The tone beeped.
“Karma? Something’s wrong. Like really, really, bat-shit wrong. Oh shit, I think it’s happening. I think his soul is separating. We’re at the house. Oh, Jesus, Karma, he isn’t moving. The talisman is all amped up on ghost power and it’s doing something to him. I don’t know what to do. What do I do?”
Jo dropped the phone to the ground, not even sure she’d hit the End button. She patted Wyatt’s cheek, waving the incense in his face. “Come on, Wyatt.”
Jo scanned him with her second sight. The two ghost forms inside him were zipping frantically through his body. Jo tried to grasp them. She tried to quiet them or even just yank them out, but her focus was shattered by panic. “Dammit!” She was not going to let him die.
Jo looked back up the walk at the house. It panted and creaked, the ghostly energy giving it a sense of life. The damn house looked more alive than Wyatt did.
All at once, Jo’s fiery panic cooled and hardened into an icy knot of resolve. “You do not know who you are messing with,” she hissed at the house. Surging to her feet, Jo swept up her goodie bag and stalked toward the front door, collecting the pair of fallen crowbars as she went. “Ready or not, here I come.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Badass Showdown
The kitchen looked like a tornado had hit it. Or rather, like a tornado was hitting it over and over again while she watched. Jo ducked as the ancient refrigerator flew past her and smashed into the wall. She forcibly shut down her second sight, cutting off her vision of the green vortex of ghost energy that was spinning madly through the room.
Hefting the crowbar in her right hand, she ran to the center of the cyclone. The center tile was hexagonal. Jo swung the crowbar up over her head and attacked that tile, screaming like a martial artist in a bad Kung Fu movie as she whaled on the tile with all the force in her body. The center tile shattered instantly, along with several of the surrounding tiles, but the reinforced plywood beneath barely showed a chip.
Jo hacked away at the wood. It came away in jagged chunks, but only revealed another layer of wood beneath.
“Dammit!”
This was taking too long. For all she knew, Wyatt was lying on the front lawn dying and she couldn’t get the damn floor up fast enough.
Jo flung aside the crowbar. The talisman may be growing stronger by the second, but it was feeding off ghosts and ghosts were Jo’s power. They were hers to control. Hers to wield. She was the biggest badass in this house, not some piece of charmed metal.
She had tools in her goodie bag, protection candles, purifying incense, but there was no time to set them up now. There was no time.
Jo flung open her arms and her senses, throwing herself headlong into the bruising tide of a thousand ghosts crashing in on her. For a moment, she was lost, all thought obliterated by the thunder of sensation. The energy was drowning her, smothering her, battering her on all sides. She felt herself shrinking, pressing in on herself, curling down as small as she could under the impossible weight of the ghosts.
In a single flash of pain, she broke. The energy was suddenly not around her but in her. She was not small, but enormous. A goddess. She was made of energy, powerful beyond belief, drunk on the wild, seductive roar of it pulsing through her blood. For the too-loud drumming of two heartbeats, she was only power and instinct, then a thought, more emotion than words, slipped through the haze.
Wyatt.
Jo flung the ghost energy into the floor. It exploded. Plywood shrapnel cut into her arms and legs, but Jo didn’t feel it. Using the ghost energy, she called to the talisman and it flew to her hand.
It was small, an innocent-looking Gordian knot of silver metal cradled in her palm. Cool to the touch, it didn’t scorch or eat away at her flesh as malignant magics sometimes did. To her sight, it gave off a white light, the light of pure magic. Good magic. That light, she knew, was a lie.
Its maker had taken a single kernel of evil and wrapped it in a thousand good intentions until the evil was entirely obscured. Jo was not so easily deceived.
Somewhere inside this medallion, a flicker of ghost energy was trapped. Only then would a witch’s spell be able to draw ghosts. Jo knew ghost energy. No one could match her when it came to manipulating it. Witches’ ways were foreign to her, but she didn’t have to unravel the enchantment to destroy the talisman. All she had to do was find that ghost energy and release it.
In theory.
Jo closed her physical eyes and focused her second sight. The white light was blinding, but she braced for it as best she could. The sucky thing about paranormal vision was that she couldn’t squint. It was like staring directly into the sun with toothpicks propping her eyelids open. Jo tried to look past the white, tried to see the core of darker energy and the green that had to be wrapped around it, but the white light burned into her inner eyes, stinging and raw.
Going entirely by feel, she reached past the blinding white, letting the tendrils of energy flow over her, searching for one that felt familiar, one that felt like that ghostly after-impression of life that was somehow a part of her energy. She slid through the white, probing, and found herself mired by the sticky black tar of dark magic. It wrapped around her, suffocating and thick, an oozing pulse of oily muck. Words dripped from the black. The true words of the spell, not the key that Moonbeam had used to unlock it, but a hissing, dark voice speaking an unfamiliar phrase—In turbo veritas.
Jo knew better than to push at the dark energy, it would only feed on the resistance, drawing her in like quicksand. Instead, she stopped questing through the layers of energy and remained still, a piece of herself locked inside the medallion now. Panic teased the fringes of her mind, the fear that a sliver of her soul would stay trapped inside the talisman forever, but at her core she remained calm, breathing in and out, waiting.
Ghosts had been drawn to her from the time she was six years old. She never called them and they never needed a guide to find her. Her energy, her very being, called to theirs. So she waited, knowing that whatever fragment of ghostly energy that was trapped inside the talisman would find the piece of her locked there.
It didn’t take long.
The first brush of green after-life energy teased her senses, just a whiff of the ghost. She didn’t reach or pull, just waited and it came back, just like all the other ghostly pests throughout her life. When it twined itself around the sliver of her soul inside the medallion, Jo carefully drew it into herself. There was no way she could open a portal inside the medallion, but she didn’t need one to transcend this small knot of ghost energy. She held the ghost—really just a fraction of one, siphoned off from the source and trapped now. Holding it tightly against her, Jo reached into the center of the green energy and slammed into it
with energy of her own, punching a hole through to the tunnel, the white light, drawing on the force of the afterlife, the fierce, bright burn of transcendence. The ghost transcended in a burst of energy and the power of the talisman snapped in on itself, imploding now that the key element had vanished.
The magic of the talisman burst inward, slamming down on the sliver of Jo still lodged inside. The bright white energy broke through her minimal defenses and ignited like a firecracker within her senses, throwing open her second sight and searing it blind. Jo screamed, her physical body thrown to the ground with the force of the blast.
The house shuddered and rolled, the foundations groaning under the force of another earthquake, but Jo didn’t care. The white pain was a living thing, swallowing up her reality until the blackness came and drowned the pain and her along with it.
Chapter Thirty: Insanity Loves Company
Wyatt’s first conscious thought was to wonder which biker gang had jumped him and beat him with chains. His back hurt. His legs hurt. His forehead hurt.
His second conscious thought, after cataloguing the damage left by the biker gang, was to wonder where the hell Jo was and whether she had escaped unscathed.
“Jo?”
Wyatt opened his eyes and rolled to his side, then to his hands and knees. As he waited for the nausea the movement had caused to pass, he ascertained that Jo was not within a three-foot radius. As soon as he could raise his head without losing his lunch, he would widen the search.
The world felt like it was bucking and rolling beneath him. Wyatt shook his head once to clear it, but the sensation didn’t pass. Then he heard the groaning rumble from the direction of the house and realized the shaking wasn’t coming from inside his head.
“Jo!”
Wyatt stumbled to his feet and half-ran, half-staggered toward the house. He fell to his knees only once, when he looked up and saw the house shaking and pulsing a vivid green. Ghosts hung from every eave and he could see every one of them.