The Ghost Exterminator (20 page)

Chapter Twenty-Nine: Badass Showdown

The kitchen looked like a tornado had hit it. Or rather, like a tornado was hitting it over and over again while she watched. Jo ducked as the ancient refrigerator flew past her and smashed into the wall. She forcibly shut down her second sight, cutting off her vision of the green vortex of ghost energy that was spinning madly through the room.

Hefting the crowbar in her right hand, she ran to the center of the cyclone. The center tile was hexagonal. Jo swung the crowbar up over her head and attacked that tile, screaming like a martial artist in a bad Kung Fu movie as she whaled on the tile with all the force in her body. The center tile shattered instantly, along with several of the surrounding tiles, but the reinforced plywood beneath barely showed a chip.

Jo hacked away at the wood. It came away in jagged chunks, but only revealed another layer of wood beneath.

“Dammit!”

This was taking too long. For all she knew, Wyatt was lying on the front lawn dying and she couldn’t get the damn floor up fast enough.

Jo flung aside the crowbar. The talisman may be growing stronger by the second, but it was feeding off ghosts and ghosts were
Jo’s
power. They were hers to control. Hers to wield.
She
was the biggest badass in this house, not some piece of charmed metal.

She had tools in her goodie bag, protection candles, purifying incense, but there was no time to set them up now. There was
no time
.

Jo flung open her arms and her senses, throwing herself headlong into the bruising tide of a thousand ghosts crashing in on her. For a moment, she was lost, all thought obliterated by the thunder of sensation. The energy was drowning her, smothering her, battering her on all sides. She felt herself shrinking, pressing in on herself, curling down as small as she could under the impossible weight of the ghosts.

In a single flash of pain, she broke. The energy was suddenly not around her but
in
her. She was not small, but enormous. A goddess. She was made of energy, powerful beyond belief, drunk on the wild, seductive roar of it pulsing through her blood. For the too-loud drumming of two heartbeats, she was only power and instinct, then a thought, more emotion than words, slipped through the haze.

Wyatt
.

Jo flung the ghost energy into the floor. It exploded. Plywood shrapnel cut into her arms and legs, but Jo didn’t feel it. Using the ghost energy, she called to the talisman and it flew to her hand.

It was small, an innocent-looking Gordian knot of silver metal cradled in her palm. Cool to the touch, it didn’t scorch or eat away at her flesh as malignant magics sometimes did. To her sight, it gave off a white light, the light of pure magic. Good magic. That light, she knew, was a lie.

Its maker had taken a single kernel of evil and wrapped it in a thousand good intentions until the evil was entirely obscured. Jo was not so easily deceived.

Somewhere inside this medallion, a flicker of ghost energy was trapped. Only then would a witch’s spell be able to draw ghosts. Jo knew ghost energy. No one could match her when it came to manipulating it. Witches’ ways were foreign to her, but she didn’t have to unravel the enchantment to destroy the talisman. All she had to do was find that ghost energy and release it.

In theory.

Jo closed her physical eyes and focused her second sight. The white light was blinding, but she braced for it as best she could. The sucky thing about paranormal vision was that she couldn’t squint. It was like staring directly into the sun with toothpicks propping her eyelids open. Jo tried to look past the white, tried to see the core of darker energy and the green that had to be wrapped around it, but the white light burned into her inner eyes, stinging and raw.

Going entirely by feel, she
reached
past the blinding white, letting the tendrils of energy flow over her, searching for one that felt familiar, one that felt like that ghostly after-impression of life that was somehow a part of
her
energy. She slid through the white, probing, and found herself mired by the sticky black tar of dark magic. It wrapped around her, suffocating and thick, an oozing pulse of oily muck. Words dripped from the black. The true words of the spell, not the key that Moonbeam had used to unlock it, but a hissing, dark voice speaking an unfamiliar phrase—
In turbo veritas.

Jo knew better than to push at the dark energy, it would only feed on the resistance, drawing her in like quicksand. Instead, she stopped questing through the layers of energy and remained still, a piece of herself locked inside the medallion now. Panic teased the fringes of her mind, the fear that a sliver of her soul would stay trapped inside the talisman forever, but at her core she remained calm, breathing in and out, waiting.

Ghosts had been drawn to her from the time she was six years old. She never called them and they never needed a guide to find her. Her energy, her very being, called to theirs. So she waited, knowing that whatever fragment of ghostly energy that was trapped inside the talisman would find the piece of her locked there.

It didn’t take long.

The first brush of green after-life energy teased her senses, just a whiff of the ghost. She didn’t reach or pull, just waited and it came back, just like all the other ghostly pests throughout her life. When it twined itself around the sliver of her soul inside the medallion, Jo carefully drew it into herself. There was no way she could open a portal inside the medallion, but she didn’t need one to transcend this small knot of ghost energy. She held the ghost—really just a fraction of one, siphoned off from the source and trapped now. Holding it tightly against her, Jo reached into the center of the green energy and slammed into it with energy of her own, punching a hole through to the tunnel, the white light, drawing on the force of the afterlife, the fierce, bright burn of transcendence. The ghost transcended in a burst of energy and the power of the talisman snapped in on itself, imploding now that the key element had vanished.

The magic of the talisman burst inward, slamming down on the sliver of Jo still lodged inside. The bright white energy broke through her minimal defenses and ignited like a firecracker within her senses, throwing open her second sight and searing it blind. Jo screamed, her physical body thrown to the ground with the force of the blast.

The house shuddered and rolled, the foundations groaning under the force of another earthquake, but Jo didn’t care. The white pain was a living thing, swallowing up her reality until the blackness came and drowned the pain and her along with it.

Chapter Thirty: Insanity Loves Company

Wyatt’s first conscious thought was to wonder which biker gang had jumped him and beat him with chains. His back hurt. His legs hurt. His forehead hurt.

His second conscious thought, after cataloguing the damage left by the biker gang, was to wonder where the hell Jo was and whether she had escaped unscathed.

“Jo?”

Wyatt opened his eyes and rolled to his side, then to his hands and knees. As he waited for the nausea the movement had caused to pass, he ascertained that Jo was not within a three-foot radius. As soon as he could raise his head without losing his lunch, he would widen the search.

The world felt like it was bucking and rolling beneath him. Wyatt shook his head once to clear it, but the sensation didn’t pass. Then he heard the groaning rumble from the direction of the house and realized the shaking wasn’t coming from inside his head.

“Jo!”

Wyatt stumbled to his feet and half-ran, half-staggered toward the house. He fell to his knees only once, when he looked up and saw the house shaking and pulsing a vivid green. Ghosts hung from every eave and he could see
every one of them
.

Either his sanity had officially cracked wide open or his reality had just blown up to double its original size, but Wyatt wasted no time deciding which. He shoved himself to his feet again and took the steps up to the porch in a single leap.

The front door hung open. Wyatt raced through, straight for the kitchen. The quaking had stopped, but timbers still groaned and shifted around him.

A harbinger of the destruction within, the swinging door to the kitchen lay across the dining room table, blown clear off its hinges. Inside, the kitchen had been reduced to a pile of rubble, appliances melted down to misshapen hunks of metal.

A body lay unmoving in the midst of the debris.

“
Jo.
” Wyatt’s heart plummeted out of his chest and down through the demolished floorboards.

She lay heartbreakingly still, only the slight rise and fall of her chest reassuring him that she still breathed. He yanked his cell phone out of his pocket, already thumbing the numbers 9-1-1 before he noticed the battery was totally dead. He swore and threw the useless piece of plastic against the wall.

Jo didn’t so much as twitch. He checked her pulse, more because he thought he was supposed to than because he had any idea what the hell her pulse was supposed to feel like. Her heart was beating. That much he ascertained.

“Wake up, Jo. Come on, honey.” He brushed her hair away from her face, feeling more helpless than he’d ever felt before. She was breathing, so he didn’t need to do CPR, did he? Was there something about pupils dilating? Should he check them?

The talisman
. A small, silver, worked-metal charm lay in her right palm. Wyatt grabbed the charm and a crowbar. With one swift blow, he shattered it.

He fell to his knees at Jo’s side, watching for her to blink awake, for those beautiful blue eyes to open, but nothing happened. Her breathing remained shallow, her eyes sealed shut. “Dammit.”

Prince Charming has to kiss Sleeping Beauty.

Wyatt jumped up, spinning around, looking for the voice that had just spoken. “Hello?”

A soft, childlike giggle was the only reply.

“Who’s there?”

Kiss her,
the voice urged again.

Wyatt froze. He was haunted. He not only believed in ghosts, now he could see them. And he was hearing voices. This was just a banner week for him. Happy Acres better be getting a padded cell ready for him. He had a feeling he was going to need it before long.

Snow White, Sleeping Beauty…the magic spell is always broken by True Love’s Kiss.

“Angelica?”

Well, if he was going to go around the bend, he might as well go all the way. It wouldn’t be much fun being sane without Jo anyway.

Wyatt bent and brushed his lips against hers. When he drew back, he was almost surprised that she didn’t open her eyes.

You have to
mean
it. True Love’s Kiss doesn’t count if you don’t believe in magic.

Wyatt gritted his teeth, not particularly keen on being scolded by a know-it-all child who’d been dead for half a century or more. He wasn’t sure what it meant that he could now hear the ghosts inside him and right now he didn’t care. Jo could explain it to him, just as soon as he woke her up.

He cradled her jaw in his hand and bent to kiss her again, but this time he closed his eyes and put every ounce of faith he had—in Jo, in magic, and in love—into it. He put his soul into the touch of his mouth to hers. He made it a promise, a vow and a confession all in one, the opening of his heart and mind to her.

He kissed her until he felt her lips curve beneath his and she sighed against his mouth. Wyatt drew back slowly, still cradling her face. “Jo?”

She smiled groggily. “Happy Halloween, stranger.”

“Halloween,” he winced. “Shit.”

“No. Halloween. Candy. Trick my treat.”

Relief washed through him. She sounded like herself. “How do you feel?”

“Like I just got my ass kicked.” She groaned and propped herself up on her elbows. “How ’bout you? Last time I saw you, you were doing a damn fine impression of an epileptic.”

“My brains are a little rattled. I’m hearing things. And seeing things.” He nodded toward the ceiling where a host of ghostly spectators hovered. “Green things. So much for not believing.”

Her eyes popped wide. “Ghosts? You’re seeing ghosts?”

“And hearing them,” he grimaced. “I wouldn’t have had a clue how to wake up Sleeping Beauty without the voices in my head.”

Jo’s stunned expression suddenly turned serious. “You can hear Angelica and Teddy? I don’t think that’s a good sign, Wyatt. We need to get them out of you.
Right now
.”

“No, no, no.” He caught her shoulders when she tried to sit up all the way, easing her back down. “You’ve had a hell of a night already. You were unconscious. We’ll get you to the hospital, get everything checked out.”

“I’m not going to the hospital.”

“Yes, you are. The E.R. doctors can take a break from X-raying candy and checking out kids with tummy aches to make sure you don’t have any permanent—”

“
No
, Wyatt.”

She was in no shape to be doing anything, especially not helping his sorry ass. “The ghosts are just going to have to wait a few days.”

“They
can’t
wait.” She shoved his hands away, sitting up again, shaking her head. “You don’t understand. The barrier that kept the ghosts separate from
you
, from your spirit, Angelica described it as clouds. She couldn’t see or hear through the clouds.”

“So?”

“So if she can see and hear and talk to you now, then the barrier between your spirit and theirs is getting thin. Soon, I won’t be able to get them out of you, without taking part of your spirit out too. We can’t wait, Wyatt. We need to do this
now
.”

Wyatt took in her serious expression. Serious and utterly drained. Heavy shadows surrounded her eyes, as if she’d been sucker-punched by a raccoon. Her face was too pale, her lips almost blue. He weighed the urgency in her voice against the strain in her eyes. It was no contest.

“No.”

She blinked at the finality in his tone. “No?”

“We’ll risk waiting. I don’t want you pushing yourself any more tonight.”

Jo’s jaw dropped. “Excuse me. I don’t believe I asked your
permission
to do my goddamn job.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t remember asking you to kill yourself on my behalf.”

He couldn’t let her take such a chance for him. His heart had all but stopped beating when he saw her lying there on the floor. He was in love with her. No two ways about it. The inn, all of the Haines Hideaways, his professional reputation—that was all just business. This was personal.

She’d slipped into every corner of his life and every dark, neglected cranny of his heart. He didn’t care if the world thought he was just as crazy as he’d originally thought she was. Wyatt hadn’t really lived until he met her. If anything happened to her now…

“No,” he repeated emphatically. “Absolutely not.”

Her eyes narrowed threateningly. “We are going to discuss this tendency you have to think you’re in charge all the time. Later. Right now, you have a decision to make. You either walk up the stairs to the attic with me right now, or I will have the ghosts take over your body and you can get it back when I’ve taken them out of you. Now, which would you prefer?”

“No one is going upstairs until I get a construction team in here. After that earthquake, I don’t trust the stairs.” Visions of the rotted boards collapsing beneath her sent a shudder through his body.

“That wasn’t one of the options I gave you.”

“Twenty-four hours, Jo,” he insisted. “I’ll have the house looked over. You’ll be rested. It’s so much more logical.”

“Then isn’t it lucky I’m not driven by logic. You have five seconds to decide.”

“Jo. This is ridiculous—”

“Four.”

“I’m not going to—”

“Three. Any last words?”

“Dammit, Jo.”

“Two.”

A wave of exhaustion hit him like a freight train. Wyatt was asleep before he heard, “One.”