Chapter 2
“What the fuck?”
I blink, and the man stares right at me. I shuffle forward, finger hovering over the trigger on my gun. The man doesn’t move, doesn’t flinch, doesn’t blink. And now I don’t think he’s staring at me so much as staring through me.
I swallow hard and inch forward, mind going a mile a minute. There’s a dead body next to me. Cops walked up and down this alley not that long ago, meaning whoever dumped the body could be nearby. I should go, call this in, and canvass the area for the murderer.
But there’s also what I think is a ghost hovering feet from me.
“Hey.” My voice comes out strangled, forced, but what the hell was I expecting when talking to a ghost. “Can you hear me?” If I weren’t so stunned, I would have rolled my eyes at myself for sounding so fucking lame.
The ghost flickers, reminding me of a video game character glitching before the whole game crashes. The air around me fills with heat, and the whispering is back, so close I can feel a breath on the back of my neck.
I whirl around, heart racing, but nothing is behind me.
I spin again, and the ghost is gone. Gun still raised, I take a step away from the body, keeping my back to the wall behind me so no one can sneak up and take advantage of my shocked state.
Blinking rapidly to try and clear my head, I exhale heavily and half expect my breath to cloud around me like it does in movies.
Though if the last few weeks have taught me anything, it’s that Hollywood knows shit about the paranormal. Jacques, on the other hand, is a walking—and flying—encyclopedia of the supernatural. My free hand jerks up to grab my phone to call him.
I’m at work. As a detective. A detective who, for the last few years, has proved over and over that the supernatural doesn’t exist. But things have changed.
Reaching for my radio instead, I call it in and go back to examine the body. Right away I know something isn’t right, and I mean other than the fact a dead guy is lying on the dirty alley ground.
His hair has been combed and styled. His clothes are clean. There are no obvious wounds, no blood staining his clothes, no bruises around his neck or wrists. Thick makeup coats his face, hiding the death pallor.
He’s been professionally embalmed.
I stand up, waiting for an officer to get here, and pull out my phone after all. But I don’t call Jacques, not yet. I dial the station and ask if any bodies have been reported missing from a local morgue.
One has, and it’s only three miles from here.
“I lied.” I put my Charger in reverse, eyes going to the backup camera.
“About what?” Hasan’s heavily accented voice comes through the speakers.
Explaining how cell phones work was hard enough, trying to get the guys to understand how you can connect it to Bluetooth and have the conversation “hands free” was pointless.
It doesn’t help that I don’t really understand it myself, but I at least don’t question it.
“I’m not coming home. Not yet.”
“Why?”
“Turns out there was a body, though he died of natural causes.”
“Then why are you there?”
I carefully back up, turning my wheel so I can get out of the spot I parallel parked in. “The body was stolen from the morgue.”
“Morgue,” he repeats, trying to place the word. For being over a thousand years old, and not having English as their first language, I have to hand it to the guys for picking up on things fast.
“It’s where they keep bodies and prep them for funerals.
The whole thing is weird.” I hesitate, knowing if I mutter the word “ghost” Hasan will take to the sky and come find me.
All of the guys are overprotective of me, which annoys me as much as I appreciate it.
Hasan was a badass warrior back in his day, and he’s never said anything, but I think he misses it.
It was his calling.
He was doing what he was meant to do.
Ridding the world of evil. Making it a better place. Fighting for a cause he believed in with his entire being.
Helping me fight crime is the next best thing.
“I’ll call you as soon as I know what’s going on. Do you want me to pick up pizza on the way home?”
“Do you have to ask?” he shoots back, making me laugh. I get a flash of his handsome face, and feel the longing for home grow in my heart.
And warmth grow between my legs.
“I’ll see you soon.”
“Be careful, Acelina.”
We hang up, and I speed to the morgue. Technically, I’m not responding to the call. Stolen bodies are all kinds of fucked up, but it’s not what I deal with. Though tonight, I need to find out more.
The morgue owner is inside with several officers, going over the security cameras. I stand behind them and watch, slowly going over the footage. There are exterior cameras on all the doors, along with one in the hall outside the room the body was stolen from.
Three minutes of footage are missing. The screen goes black, and when the picture comes back, the front doors of the funeral home are wide open.
“Ballsy,” I mutter, shaking my head. Whoever stole the body didn’t seem to be worried about getting caught. And leaving the doors wide open like that…it’s either a rookie mistake or done on purpose to get someone’s attention.
“And the alarm never went off?” one of the officers asks.
“No,” the owner says, shaking his head. Thin black hair is combed over his forehead, in a similar fashion to the dead guy’s. I bet he was the one who styled it, and I distantly wonder if he thinks it’s weird to style dead people’s hair like his.
“It went off when I stepped inside. We have motion sensors. I just don’t understand.” He looks at us, expecting answers. “You heard the guy from the alarm company. They didn’t detect a single disturbance. How is that possible?”
“How did you know the door was open?” I ask. “It’s the middle of the night.”
“The wife thinks I stopped smoking,” he admits guiltily. “I go out every night for a cigarette. I guess my cover’s blown now.”
His fingernails on his right hand are yellowed, and he smells like smoke. I’m sure his wife knows he never stopped.
I step away from the computer screen and look around. The entire place is stuffy, with bouquets of plastic flowers placed in every corner and red-and-black patterned carpet that was last updated before I was born.
There was nothing significant about the body stolen.
Mr. McGregor’s service is set for tomorrow, and “the usual turnout” is expected.
He was seventy-three when he died of cancer, which he’d been battling for the last ten years.
A retired school teacher, beloved by his late wife and children.
I can’t see any sort of immediate connection to the House of Horrors downtown.
And seeing his ghost? That makes even less sense, though nothing about ghosts makes sense to me.
Whoever broke in and stole the body is good. They left no fingerprints, no scratch marks on the locks. They slipped in and out, completely unnoticed by the cameras and the motion sensors.
I spend an hour combing over the place, walking up and down the path from the morgue to the front door over and over again.
And I find nothing.
Instructing one of the officers to check nearby buildings for cameras that might have picked up on something, I head back out, phoning in an order of four large pepperoni pizzas to one of the only places around here open this late at night.
I’m yawning by the time I pull onto the gravel driveway of my large brick estate. I park and get out, going around to the passenger side to grab the food.
“You got pizza?” Thomas’s voice cuts through the night a second before his feet hit the earth.
If I couldn’t sense his presence a moment before he spoke, I would have startled. His arms fold around my waist, pulling me away from the car. I spin in his arms, hooking mine around his neck. He brings his head down, kissing the side of my neck.
“You smell weird,” he says, but it doesn’t seem to bother him. His tongue lashes out, making me shiver in the warm, humid air.
“That would be from the funeral home.” I arch my back, pressing my core into him, and run a hand down his bare chest. He folds his wings closer to his back, moving his head up to kiss me before pulling away and taking the pizza from the car.
“Do they always smell like that?”
“The ones I’ve been in do.” I go up the stone steps and open the front door. Light from the TV in the living room spills into the foyer, but it isn’t enough for me to see where I’m going. I take off my shoes, then slide my hand up and down the wall as I feel for the light switch.
I take the pizza into the living room, where Hasan and Gilbert are glued to the TV. I swear I’m going to have to set a timer on that thing. Leaving three boxes on the coffee table, I take one outside onto the back porch and wait for Jacques to swoop down from the top of the roof.
“Acelina,” he says, landing without a sound. My grimoire is in his hand, along with a pen and another notebook. “I trust everything went all right.”
“As all right as a murder investigation could go. Only there wasn’t anyone there who was murdered.” I sit on the edge of the porch, folding my legs up underneath me. Jacques leans against the stone railing, impressive wings held out slightly behind him.
“Why were you there, then?”
“The whole thing was weird, and weird is kind of my thing.”
He sets the books down, waiting for me to go on. I open the pizza box, take one slice, and motion for him to have the rest. He reaches down at the same moment, and his hand brushes against mine. My physical interactions with Jacques have been limited, but I’ve fucked him in my dreams many times.
And I’m pretty sure he’s fucked me in his, even though he says he doesn’t dream.
A chill runs through me, all the way down my spine, which bursts with heat at the thought of his touch. Forcing away my attraction to him, I gulp in fresh night air and look down at the piece of pizza in my hand.
“The room was covered in blood, as if someone took buckets and literally threw them at the walls. It was too much to be from one person, I know that for sure.” I take a bite of pizza, chewing slowly as I consider my words.
“What do you know about ghosts?” I ask, deciding to cut right to the chase.
“Not a whole lot. Why?”
I set the pizza down in the box, wiping my hands on a napkin. “I think I saw one tonight.”