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Cain was scowling, and Henner let out a slow breath and nodded.
Was it a great plan? No. In fact, it was terrible. The likelihood of one of us getting shot was a lot higher than I was comfortable with. But we didn’t have many options. I was a medium, and a part time gumshoe. I wasn’t some skilled thief.
Still, with our combined powers, we should have been able to pull it off.
We would have.
Except that was when Magda Erepto showed up.
Chapter Fourteen
Magda didn’t look much like she had when I’d last seen her.
Gone was the carefree teenager hanging off the back of a motorcycle. She was still young, but she looked more like she had when I’d first summoned her. Scowling, grim, and frustrated, like I’d dragged her away from an important appointment.
But her hair wasn’t pulled back into a severe, no-nonsense bun. It floated around her head like she was underwater, flaring and twisting in ways hair shouldn’t have been able to. She focused on me almost immediately, and there was something off about her eyes. The pupils were too long, too thin to be human.
“I can sense it.” She tilted her head to one side in an oddly animal gesture. “I know it’s here.”
My mouth went dry, and I had to struggle to swallow. Something about this felt off, dangerous even.
Henner glanced between me and the ghost hovering in the hallway. Henner could see ghosts just as surely as I could. In fact, he’d been one of the only humans who could see me when I was still in my ghost form.
His shoulders were tense, but he was obviously waiting to see what I would do, and I realized that I’d never really told him the specifics of the case I was working, and yet he’d agreed to come with me anyway, and boy Henner was swell, and I needed to tell him that more often.
Cain was tense, his hand hovering over his belt where his service weapon used to hang when he was still alive. There was still an impression of a gun there, but it wasn’t real, and it couldn’t do anything. Ghosts couldn’t hurt each other, thank goodness.
Magda’s eyes further narrowed, her face pulling taught. I thought for a second that she’d hiss at me, which was kind of a weird thing to expect from a person.
“I spent my entire life looking after the clan, the family. And look at what’s happened now! They couldn’t hold it together even a day past my death.” Magda’s lips skimmed back off her teeth, which now looked a little too long and sharp for anything that fit a human mouth. “Now I’m even spending mydeathtaking care of them.”
She drifted closer to me, until our noses were almost touching, and even knowing there wasn’t anything she could do to me, I still had to fight the urge to take a step back from her. Something wasn’t right, here.
Her voice came out in more of a hiss of air than anything else. “Where is it?”
I couldn’t have made words come out of my mouth if I’d wanted to, but I did glance at the double doors we were standing in front of, just a reflexive twitch. That was enough for the furious ghost woman. She turned and stared for a moment before drifting through the door like a seriously cheesed off fog bank.
“Holy smokes,” I whispered to Henner. “She didn’t appear like that before!”
Where was the carefree ghost teen who wanted to experience some of the freedom she’d had when she was alive? A day ago, she’d been doing her best to live it up, making up for lost time, and now look at her.
I tried to peek through the little round windows in the doors, but I didn’t think I could manage without someone inside seeing me. What the heck was Magda going to do? She couldn’t grab the idol any more than Cain could. She couldn’t get it out of the building without our help, even. So why the determination to get to it?
And then I really thought about it and almost smacked myself in the forehead for being such a dunce.
Ghosts stuck around for a reason. No one ever became a ghost because they lived a good life and died peacefully. Me, I’d stuck around because I’d refused to accept that my life was done. I’d been cut down in my prime, just when everything I’d ever wanted was right there, within reach. I’d wanted my life back, and now I had it again.
But Magda was like Cain; she hadn’t stuck around by choice. She’d lived her life, and moved on when she was done. Cain hadn’t stuck around either, even though his death had been pretty violent. I’d never asked him about it, but I was sure part of him had always assumed he’d go on the job, so he hadn’t been terribly shocked by it.
Maybe being killed by a demon. I doubted he’d expected that part.
But Magda, she’d put in her years and then left with no regrets, or at least none that would make her stick around.
At least, not until Sophia had asked me to bring her back.
Because then she’d found out that her family was in danger, their idol missing, ready to plunge the entire clan into a civil war over the next leader, and Magda wasn’t about to let that happen on her watch. Or immediately after her watch.
I’dgivenher an obsession, something to hold her to the world. She was acting like a proper ghost now, all driven and infatuated, and oh, boy Darla, you sure can make a mess of things.
