The Ghost Exterminator (2 page)

Chapter Two: Commando Barbie Does her Thing

Wyatt felt lightheaded, but ruthlessly suppressed the irritating weakness. She was messing with his mind. That was it. The house wasn’t really haunted. “There’s no such thing as ghosts.”

She tipped her head and looked at him as if
he
were the crazy one. “If you don’t think the house is haunted, why did you call Karmic for a Ghost Exterminator?”

Instead of admitting he had reached the point of blind desperation, he countered, “How do you know it’s haunted?”

“I can see it.”

Wyatt felt a headache starting behind his eyes. “You see a ghost.”

She shook her head, bouncing on the balls of her feet like a Goth cheerleader and growing more bright-eyed even as his headache intensified. “Not just one ghost.
Lots
of ghosts.”

Wyatt closed his eyes. “Lots. Of course. Lucky me. How many is lots?”

In the silence that followed his question, he opened his eyes to find her staring blankly at the house, her eyes a little glazed. “I’d say upwards of thirty,” she answered finally. “You’ve got one hell of an infestation, buddy.”

“Hell. So it
is
possessed.”

She made a face. “Figure of speech. No demons. Just ghosts. Good thing, too. I don’t do demons.” She tapped her forefinger against her sternum, drawing his attention southward again. “Exterminator. Not Exorcist.”

Wyatt worked his jaw and struggled to maintain a logical approach in the face of this lunacy. “You haven’t even been inside yet. How can you tell there aren’t demons?”

She tipped her head inquiringly. “You’re pretty hung up on demons, huh? That easier for you to believe than ghosts?”

He didn’t want to believe in either and he was going to stick with disbelief as long as he could manage it. “My secretary thought the Episodes…” It was all his secretary’s fault.
She
was the one who believed in ghosts and spirits and auras. Her desk had more crystals than post-its, for Christ’s sake.

“She an expert? No. I didn’t think so. Let the experts work, honey.”

“How does an expert tell?”

She shrugged, as casually as if they were talking about the difference between deep dish and New York style pizza. “Different energy. Demons are all angry red and pulsing. Ghosts are green and glowy. You’ve got green.”

He glared at the house. “I don’t see green.” He saw a money-sucking bastard of a house, but certainly no green.

“That’s because you’re insensitive.”

“Excuse me?” Now she was insulting him?

“I’m a sensitive. You’re not. Almost all children are sensitive, but as they grow up, it’s like they stop looking. Some adults continue to see ghosts as wisps of fog and most people will feel cold or a sort of static electricity hum in the air, but to see more definition and color, it takes either a really badass ghost or a sensitive. Or a near-death situation will usually do it.” She frowned suddenly. “Although, you have some pretty badass ghosts in there by the look of it, so even you should be able to see something. You don’t see anything?”

Even him. Charming. Wyatt glared at the bane of his existence—the inanimate one. “I see a house.”

“That’s it? No glow? No breathing?”

“
Breathing
?”

“Yeah. Your house is breathing. Weird, huh?”

Wyatt closed his eyes and cleared his throat repeatedly in an attempt to quell the urge to run screaming into the night. When he opened his eyes again, his personal ghost exterminator was watching him with a carefully neutral expression as if she were trying not to laugh. Wyatt was not in the habit of being laughed at, however silently. He ground his teeth together, trying to remember what patience felt like. “What happens now?”

She smacked one fist into her opposite palm, grinning with unholy anticipation. “I go in there, kick some ass, take some names, and you wait here. Easy as cake.”

“Pie.”

Jo made a face. “Yeah. I can’t make pie. My cousin got all the baking genes, but if it comes out of a box and has very detailed instructions, I can make an edible cake. Cake is easy. Pie’s a bitch.”

Since Wyatt had never stepped foot inside the kitchen in his condo other than to access the leftover pizza stashed in his fridge, he couldn’t really comment about the relative difficulties of pie versus cake. Frankly, it was not a conversation he’d ever expected to have. Certainly not with a Goth playmate who was supposedly going to rid one of his properties of a ghost infestation.

What the hell had happened that his life had come to this?

As if in response, a gust of wind came from the direction of the house, howling eerily. The blast of chill air plastered his suit to his skin and did
very
interesting things to Ms. Banks’ skimpy tank top, which Wyatt tried his hardest not to notice.

Jo whirled into the wind and planted her hands on her hips, shouting, “Yeah, you’ll huff and you’ll puff and I’ll knock your ass down! Settle, you punks!”

The wind died down instantly.

Wyatt’s eyes felt tight and he closed them as he asked incredulously, “Were you just yelling at my house?”

“You betcha. Gotta let ’em know who’s in charge.”

Wyatt winced, the throbbing in his head redoubling. “Of course.”

“So, you just hang here, try not to have an aneurism, and I’ll be back in a jiff.” A loud creaking noise emanated from the house. “Maybe two jiffs.”

Wyatt pried open his eyes and straightened his shoulders. There was no way he was letting her waltz into Hell House by herself, no matter how cavalier she was about the whole thing. “I’ll go with you,” he announced. Then he turned and forced himself to start walking up the path, toward the ominous moaning of the house.

He hadn’t lied when he said that he couldn’t see any glowing or breathing, but that didn’t mean he didn’t sense
something
from the house. It was as if the air around it was heavy and somehow
wrong
, pushing against his brain and clogging in his lungs.

The sound of rapid footsteps behind him distracted him from such fanciful thoughts as the consultant trotted up the path.

“Whoa, buddy! I work better alone,
capisce
? You should really wait out here.”

“My house. My rules. I’m coming.”

“Fine,” she snapped, her good cheer vanishing in another mercurial mood shift. “Just try not to get in my way, okay, buster?”

She quickened her pace and edged past him to take the lead, muttering something about stubborn pricks with no survival instincts, which he was clearly meant to hear. Wyatt frowned at her back, but held his tongue.

He followed her up the path, lengthening his stride to keep up. She didn’t mince or strut. There were no swiveling hips or dainty steps. Jo Banks prowled up the walk with a loose-limbed athleticism, unintentionally graceful and undeniably purposeful. The rear view had nothing on the front, but there was still something accidentally sexy in her obvious attempts to thwart her own femininity.

The pipes rattled strangely as they stepped up onto the front porch, sounding like laughter echoing. Jo stopped suddenly and Wyatt nearly plowed into her back, stopping himself with a hand braced on her hip. She was suddenly close and warm and she smelled like—fruit? Was that peaches? Whatever it was, he breathed it in. Then Jo looked down at his hand and shifted away, easing her hip out of his grasp. Wyatt let his hand drop, still feeling the warmth of the denim against his palm and smelling that teasing hint of peach.

She took a step forward and bent at the waist to peer closely at the etchings around the door. Wyatt didn’t bother pretending not to notice her ass extended toward him like a forties pin-up. There was definitely something to be said for the rear view.

The pipes laughed again, higher this time, like children giggling, jarring him out of his appreciation.

“Was this place ever an orphanage?” she asked without looking up from the doorframe.

“No.” Wyatt usually didn’t pay much attention to the history of the places he bought—he was more interested in the future than the past—but after the Episodes started, he had done a thorough background check on the Demon House. “It was built as a private home, a vacation getaway for an oil tycoon and his family. When the tycoon died, he bequeathed it to his youngest daughter who lived here until her death two years ago, at the age of ninety-four. Nice old lady. Went to church every Sunday. Gave to charity.”

Jo straightened, seemingly satisfied with the front door, but less than impressed with him. “Anyone can give to charity. Doesn’t make them a good person. Hitler probably gave to charity. I bet the Manson family was all about giving to the United Way.” She tried the door then jiggled it harder when it didn’t budge.

Wyatt came up behind her and reached over her shoulder, jangling his key ring. She sidled out of the way—a waft of peach, there then gone—as he worked the ancient lock. The new, state of the art lock he’d ordered installed had jammed so often, he’d finally had to have it removed again. As soon as the old lock gave way, the door swung slowly inward, creaking dramatically.

Jo snickered, although Wyatt couldn’t imagine what she found so damned funny. She grinned at him. “Are you
sure
no kids died here?”

“Positive.”

“Huh.” She stepped past him, into the dusty foyer. Construction dust mingled with the much older dust of the house and swirled around her feet. “They didn’t build over an old graveyard or anything? Use the house as a hospital during the war?”

“No graveyard and what war? This house was built after the civil war.”

“Battle site, maybe?” she asked then frowned, shaking her head before he could answer. “No. Wrong part of the country. And that still wouldn’t explain it.”

Wyatt stepped into the foyer behind her and the door swung shut of its own volition, creaking all the way. Jo turned her head and grinned at it in a friendly way that made Wyatt almost as uncomfortable as the fact that it moved on its own. It clicked shut. He thought he heard the snick of a lock, but shook away the idea.
Impossible
.

“Explain what?” he asked into the echoing silence that filled the foyer.

She tore her attention away from the door and focused on him. “Explain the ghosts.”

“What’s to explain?” He didn’t really want to know, but if she kept talking about ghosts, he could pretend they were just having a theoretical discussion. Anything to delay the reality of the ghost extermination—
surely that couldn’t be a reality
.

She looked at him with a slightly martyred expression, as if exerting a great deal of effort to be patient with an extremely stupid student. “Ghosts don’t just pop up wherever for no reason,” she explained. “Most hauntings occur where the ghost lived or died or in a place of particular importance. There are some people, mediums, to whom ghosts are naturally drawn—like my cousin Lucy—and other people, channels, like my boss, who can help direct a ghost to a specific site or person as they are first crossing over, but for the most part, ghosts are going to latch onto the familiar. So unless you had an apartment fire or something in this house, there is no reason for you to have this many ghosts. Especially since I’m fairly certain you’re being haunted by the ghosts of children.”

“Children? Children can be ghosts?”

Jo nodded and began moving around the room, peering into the shadows. “It’s actually fairly common. See, there are two primary reasons why a spirit will get trapped between this world and the next in the form of a ghost. Either they have unresolved issues from their mortal life that they need to face before they can enter the white light, or they just got lost or confused on the trip and sort of ended up as ghosts, stuck between here and there. Kids tend to be in the latter group.”

She bent and peeked under an antique desk, flipping up the dust cover and then letting it flutter back down again. “Luckily, there’s an entire organization of mediums who work full time to help lost ghost kids find their way on.”

“Is that what you do?”

Jo made a face. “Not quite. My talents are a little less subtle.”

“What makes you think my ghosts are kids?” Wyatt winced a little when he realized he had just used the phrase “my ghosts”, but Jo didn’t appear to notice. She was too busy crawling behind the broken door to the closet under the stairs. The same stairs that had nearly collapsed under contractor number three. “Jo? I’m not sure that staircase is stable.”

She waved a hand at him in what she probably thought was a reassuring gesture. It just made his blood pressure spike all the higher, but then she crawled back out again, dusty but whole. “Little buggers are hiding from me.”

“Excuse me?”

“The ghosts. They’re hiding. When I was standing outside, I could barely look at the house, it was so full of ghosts, and now they’re all playing least in sight. Even the one who opened and shut the door managed to stay just on the edge of my vision.”

“And that makes you think they’re children?”

She made a humming sound in her throat and continued to prowl the room. “That and the giggling. And the pitter-patter of little feet, and the fact that you’ve had dozens of incidents, but no injuries and no sightings. Playing pranks, then hiding out to make sure your parents don’t catch you and punish you. Sound like kids to you?”