Page 107 of Dead Vengeance

“A ghost gave you that?” I rasp.

“Yep. He’d been lying dead in his house for ten full years! Rich as a king. His wife died before him, his grown children never came to check on him, couldn’t care less. They were just waiting for the inheritance. So when I heard the rumours about haunted estate grounds, I popped in, offered to help resolve a few things, and he was pleased as punch. No more sitting around lonely, wondering if his family would come back to him. No more fuming over how ungrateful they were. We redistributed his money with a fresh will which we back-dated to before his death. Some of that went to me, in a roundabout way, and he threw the car in on top of it as a thanks. No one was using it anyway. Kids didn’t even notice it was missing.”

The tsunami of words washes over me while I struggle to keep my head above it all. It makes… some kind of weird, perfect sense? I mean, I know ghosts are real. I know he’s a necromancer. I work for a ghost extraction business. How, at this point, is this even a stretch for me to believe? Yet I still murmur, “You’re joking.”

“All true,” he assures me. “There’s a lot of money out there if you know where to look. Especially in…” He raises both eyebrows at me expectantly.

It takes me several slow and overwhelmed seconds, but finally, “Antiques!” I shout at him.

“Exactly that!” he shouts back, clapping his hands together, catching me in his enthusiasm, like this is actually the greatest business plan ever. “The dead bring me things, or tell me where to find them, and, on occasion, well…” His lips twist into a mischievous grin. “How to steal them.”

“You steal them?” I wheeze, like a kid at a magic show.

“Well, it’s not really stealing, is it, if it belongs to the person I’m working for.”

“Archer!”

He waves my pathetic attempt at a reprimand away. “It’s a whole lot easier to take things if you have a ghost lookout. But if the ghost happens to be a poltergeist, the stuff just appears right here in the middle of the floor.”

I follow his outstretched hand to the massive pentagram beneath my feet. “They leave it here for you?”

“It’s not a satanic symbol, like a lot of people think,” he explains. “Not dark at all, if used the right way. It’s like a beacon to them. The end of a bridge between worlds. With this gigantic symbol, they can find me easily from wherever they are, so long as I’ve opened a bridge.”

‘Opened a bridge.’ It’s exactly what Helena referred to the other day.

“Helena?” is all I manage, hoping he’ll catch my drift, because I can barely string two words together with all of this.

He smiles, happy I’ve caught that much. “I tracked her down especially because I had a feeling she’d be pissed at the way the history books had left things. And I had a feeling she’d be stinking rich.” He winks then, and it’s really too hot.

He swishes across the room, his robe shifting around his body in a way that should be illegal. He pulls a few books off a shelf, which exposes a safe, and he doesn’t even seem to consider the fact that I’m still watching when he turns the little dial this way and that until it pops open with a satisfying snap.

When he returns, he’s holding long, gorgeously crafted, shimmering earrings, which he places gently into my outstretched palm. “Diamonds,” he reveals. “The lot of it. There’s a matching necklace, bracelet, and rings too. Made in eighteen thirty-four.”

I turn them over in my hands, dazzled by the glistening and glinting. “And she just took these to give to you as payment? From who?”

His grin turns sly, and his voice drops low. “She was buried in them.”

I almost drop the loot. “You dug her up?”

“No!” he gasps out, sounding perfectly offended. “No, of course not. She went and grabbed them for me.”

“From her own corpse?”

“Why not? It’s no different to walking through walls, you know.”

“Yeah. I guess not.” But somehow the shine’s gone off them a bit, wondering if her ears had completely rotted away by the time she took them.

“Don’t worry,” he says, watching me close, a large dose of humour in his tone. “I have washed them.”

“Yeah…” I still inspect them for corpse. “Yeah, of course.”

He leans against the desk, folding his arms in front of himself. “That’s why that article you read about her the other day referred to ‘new information that came to light recently…’”

My mind turns over, trying to remember the details. “New information that showed her husband was a brute?”

“Yes.” He nods like he’s a teacher, and I’m his student, and I’m trying really hard to not make that too hot in my mind. “And…” he probes.

“And that she was falsely put in Bedlam,” I report studiously. “Because he wanted to marry someone else and also keep her money.”