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"Exactly what you want me to be looking at," I said.
"Kill the theatricals. The necro is not impressed, and neither am I."
"Oh, does the horror of my death offend you? Well, excuse me. Next time, I'll make sure I die all neat and tidy." He slammed his head onto Jaime's salad plate. "There. Better?"
Jaime's cheeks paled. I swung my gaze up to glare at the ghost...only his eyes weren't there, which made the move slightly less effective. I glowered down at him.
"She's not talking to you until you put your head back on," I said.
"Fuck y--"
"Put your goddamned head back on now."
He crossed his arms. "Make me."
I slammed my open palm into his ear. His head flew off the table, rolled across the floor, and settled in front of a seeing-eye dog. The dog lifted its muzzle, and its nostrils flared as it picked up the whiff of decay.
"Yum," I said. "Go on, boy. Take a bite."
The ghost's body flew across the restaurant, plowing through tables and diners. Beside me, Jaime made muffled snorting noises, stifling laughter. She mouthed, "Thank you."
The decapitated ghost stomped back to the table. Only he was decapitated no more, having apparently decided his head was safer attached to his shoulders. He'd also freshened up his wardrobe. This would be his normal ghost self. The headless accountant look was a glamour, a trick some ghosts used to revert to their death body--the condition they'd been in when they'd died--either to play on a necromancer's sympathy or to scare the bejesus out of humans with a little necro blood.
"Now, doesn't that feel better?" I said.
"Oh, you thought that was funny, did you?" he said, advancing on me. "It's always funny to pick on those less fortunate than yourself. Maybe when you're done here, you can go back to paradise, and have a good laugh, tell them how you abused the earth-spook."
"Earth-spook?"
"I'm a spirit in torment," the man said, his voice rising like a preacher at the pulpit. "Condemned to tread the earthly realm until my soul finds peace. For five years--five unimaginably long years--I've been trapped here, unable to move into the light, seeking only a few minutes of a necromancer's time--"
Jaime thudded face-first onto the table and groaned. The elderly woman at the next table inched her chair in the other direction.
"See how she treats me?" the man said to me. "She could set me free, but no, she's too busy going on talk shows, telling people how she helps tormented spirits find peace. When it comes to an actual spirit, though? In actual torment? Who only wants to avenge himself on the driver who ended his life, left his wife a widow, his children orphans--"
"You don't have any children," Jaime said through her teeth.
"Because I died before I could!"
I leaned toward Jaime and lowered my voice. "Look, the guy's a jerk, but if you helped him, you could get him off your back--"
She swung to her feet and strode toward the door. When I jogged up beside her, she said in a low voice, "Ask him how he died."
The ghost was right behind me, and answered before I could ask. "I remember it well. The last day of my life. I was happy, at peace with the world--"
"There's no Oscar for death scenes," I said. "The facts."
"I was driving home after a business meeting," he began.
"A meeting held in a bar," Jaime added as she turned into an alley.
"It was after office hours," he said. "Nothing wrong with a drink or two."
"Or five or six." She stopped, out of earshot of the sidewalk now, and turned to me. "Coroner reported a blood-alcohol level of at least point two five."
"Sure, okay, I was drunk," the man said. "But that wasn't the problem. The problem was a seventeen-year-old kid joyriding in my lane!"
"You were in her lane," Jaime said. "Got a police report to prove it. Who killed you? The idiot who got behind the wheel of his convertible, so pissed he couldn't even fasten his seat belt. That kid you hit will spend the rest of her life wearing leg braces. And you want me to help you exact revenge on her?"
