Chapter Twenty-Nine
The ring of salt would have kept him contained, even if he had tried to run. At least for a while. And after the initial shock of his abrupt awakening, I was ready to fight.
But first…
“Joe,” I yelled.
I dove for Mila, yanked her into my arms, and threw her at Joe. He didn’t ask questions, just fled the room, the child in his arms. Keith and Leah at his heels. Then the bedroom door slammed shut, and I was in full fight mode.
In less than three minutes, Joe was back inside the bedroom, but I barely noticed. I was too busy trying to stake and ghost-trap a vampire spirit while keeping his teeth out of my body.
He hadn’t made the trip from human to vampire to ghost with his sanity intact. And I wondered briefly if any of them did. All he wanted was to eat, and that desire consumed him, the way the thirst for blood consumed a new vampire.
And the ghost would have no one to help him through it, to master him, to control him. He was just a crazy mad ghost lost not to bloodlust, but to lifeforce lust.
Either way, a vampire was always going to vampire.
Sick bastards.
“Kait,” Joe roared when he saw me hang in midair for a moment before being slammed to the bed. “What can I do?”
Joe couldn’t see it, but the vampire had grabbed me around the throat, shocking the hell out of me, and flung me to the bed. It didn’t matter that he was a ghost. He was vampire strong.
I put everything I had into keeping his teeth away from my throat. I had a feeling that if he bit me, I would begin to weaken immediately. In the chaos, Joe’s cell phone began to ring. I’d turned my cell off, so probably it was someone who’d called him when they couldn’t get me.
I heard him murmuring, then I heard him say Jared’s name, and I knew my alpha was worried that Voss had gotten to me. I’d rather have fought Gavin Voss any day of the week than a fucked-up vampire ghost who I could not only see but feel.
And then I heard him.
He didn’t speak in words, but grunts and moans and wheezes, and it was like I’d found my way into a horror movie.
He didn’t feel like a ghost.
There wasn’t time to wonder why, but later, later I would wonder.
Not surprisingly, I’d dropped the wand when the vampire had grabbed me, but I still held the trap. The magic inside it, tiny, swirling particles, would pull him like metal to a magnet. I just needed to get the mouth of the trap against the mouth of the ghost.
It would drag him inside out into the jar.
And that was easier said than done, especially when I was trying to hold him away from me as he clacked his teeth together, trying to get at me with his long, pointed fangs.
“The wand, Joe,” I said, my voice so hoarse and raw that I wasn’t sure he would hear me. He did hear me, though, and he shoved the wand into my hand, rubbing my skin away because the wand had to go between my palm and the ghost’s face—and that was a tight fit.
The vampire was just a few inches away from my face. I knew he wanted my throat, but he’d settle for any part of me he could bite. I had to release my hold in order to get the wand into his back, so I had maybe two seconds to stake him before he bit me.
With a yell of rage, I folded my hand around the wand and immediately shoved it into the hole in his back. Seconds. That was all it took.
But he was a vampire, and he was fast.
He bit me.
He didn’t bite my face or my throat, but my shoulder. On the back of that same shoulder was a daywalker bite that had never totally healed. It still caused me problems. And his bite was on the front of that same shoulder, directly across from the daywalker bite on the back.
And though he was weakening, dying, really, that bite went straight through my shoulder and merged with the daywalker bite, and that agony was like nothing I’d ever felt before.
I’d had more painful injuries. Like when Adam Thorne’s goons had filled me with liquid silver and then beaten the hell out of me.
But the agony from the vampire bite joining the daywalker bite was not just painful. It was…it was weird. There was nothing to compare it to. I knew without a single doubt that somehow, his bite was going to screw me up.
The witchwolf’s wand did exactly what I wanted it to do. It staked the ghost. His back arched and his teeth left my shoulder, and I slammed the ghost trap jar against his mouth as hard as I could.
He fought it, but the stake through his heart was doing what a stake through the heart of any vampire would do.
It was killing him. But I couldn’t keep the wand in place for long.
I had to get him into the trap to contain him forever.
The wand staking hadn’t made him disappear or explode into a thousand glitter pieces or caused him to cease to be.
And if I removed the wand, he would return.
He was a ghost.
Finally, with a scream of fury, I sucked him into the trap and slammed the lid shut.
It was over.
Joe sat beside me on the bed, gingerly, and took the wand and the trap and dumped them into my bag. “Are you okay, boss?”
I felt my shoulder where the ghost had bitten me.
My shirt was not torn, and there was no blood.
But the pain was still there. My shoulder throbbed with it, and I could barely lift my arm.
It was lessening, and the strength in that arm was returning, but slowly.
“He bit me,” I said. “So weird. It’s painful, and my arm is weak.
If I hadn’t been able to get him off me…
” I shook my head. “I don’t know that I would have survived it.
I felt that bite trying to force its way through my body. ”
“But it’s contained now to just your shoulder?” he asked, then continued when I nodded. “How did that little girl survive it, Kait?”
I shuddered. “God only knows. That poor kid.” And the thought of her lying there month after month with his fangs in her neck finally got me up.
“I could feel him, see him, hear him. That’s why it was so hard on me.
Mila couldn’t feel him. He was feeding from her, slowly. Sipping. He didn’t want her to die.”
Joe helped me stand, then slung my bag over his shoulder. “Let’s go home. You’ll need some food and rest.”
“I’m feeling stronger by the second,” I told him, relieved. “The pain is fading. I’m okay.”
But there was that lingering feeling inside me that something wasn’t right.
I shoved it away, straightened my spine, and left the room. “Joe,” I said as we headed downstairs. “That ghost. He was a vampire.” The words sounded wrong, though they were true. “He’d been staked. Someone gave him his true death, only…he didn’t get a true death. He became a spirit.”
He gaped at me, missed a step, then grabbed the railing to keep from tumbling headfirst down the stairs. “What?”
I nodded. “Yeah. I know.”
“You mean…” He closed his mouth, unable to finish the sentence.
“Yes,” I said. “I think vampires have a different afterlife. They’re not meant to linger here. But for whatever reason, maybe some freak accident or rip in the fabric, tonight’s attacker didn’t go wherever he was supposed to go. Good or bad for vampires, I don’t know. I just know it’s true.”
He didn’t speak, and I could understand that. He needed a moment to process.
We found the Kellys in the huge family room I’d glimpsed when we’d followed Keith through the house.
The nurse was there as well, and from the expression on her face, she was both disbelieving and overjoyed. She leaned over Mila, a stethoscope to the girl’s chest, smiling one second and frowning the next.
She looked up and saw me walking toward them. “I’ll call the doctor,” she murmured, and hurried away.
Mila was sitting between her parents, and her eyes were open. It would take a while for her to bounce back after what had happened to her, but she would. Already, there was a bright spark of life in her eyes, and her cheeks had a hint of color. When she saw me, she smiled.
“Already,” Leah said, her voice full of tears, “she is improving.”
I crouched in front of the couch and took Mila’s hand.
“You’re going to be just fine,” I told her.
No way did I want her to know that a ghost had been in her room, taking her life.
That shit would traumatize a person for life.
She’d be afraid to sleep alone. She’d always be looking over her shoulder, wondering if a ghost was following her.
Her childhood would be ruined, and it would change who she was and who she would become.
No.
She didn’t need to know what had happened to her. She didn’t need to know ghosts existed.
“Thank you for making me feel better,” she said. “Can you be my nurse from now on?”
I laughed. “Sweetie, you’re not going to need a nurse now.”
“She’s healed,” Keith said, and pressed his knuckles against his eyes.
“I’m hungry,” Mila said.
Leah gasped and tears sprang to her eyes. “I haven’t heard her say that since—”
“Since she got ill,” I interrupted, and shook my head just slightly.
“Don’t worry,” Keith assured me. “We know what to do.”
I stood, and after he leaned over to kiss his daughter’s forehead, Keith stood as well. “I’ll walk you out.”
“Keith,” Leah called as we walked away.
“I know,” he said.
He gave me a check that was ten times the amount I charged—and that was a lot. “You have allies for life,” he told me soberly. “We can never repay you for what you did, but if you ever need anything, anything at all, you have only to call. And I mean that with all my heart.”
Despite the now-gentle throbbing ache in my shoulder, the night had been a huge success.
Dawn was coming, so Joe and I went home.
Home to Silverwood.
And maybe it was my imagination, but the entire drive there, I felt like I was being watched.