The Gravedigger's Brawl (19 page)

“What? No, we can't ask you—”

“It's not asking if we volunteer.” Wyatt turned and found Caleb and Noah talking in low voices. “Noah.”

Noah stopped mid-sentence and glared at him.

“We could help out here, right?” Wyatt said.

Noah's expression changed to one of amused surprise. “That's what I was just telling Caleb,” he said, jabbing his finger at the man.

Caleb looked dubiously at Ash. “If they stay here to take your place, will you go home and get some sleep?”

Ash glared at Caleb, then at Noah, then at Wyatt, the rest of his body not even twitching with the movement. For some reason, Wyatt found Ash's annoyed look incredibly sexy.

Noah was right; he had it bad.

“Fine,” Ash said. Wyatt began digging in his pockets to find his keys, but Ash stopped him. “I'd rather me walk home now than you walk to my place at two in the morning.”

“But—”

“I've got my phone and there are people around. I'll be okay. I'm not weak and infirm.” Ash grabbed his bottles and slid past Wyatt behind the bar to put them up, then walked over to Ryan to let him know he was leaving.

“He'll be fun when you get home,” Caleb said to Wyatt almost sympathetically.

Wyatt just grinned at the thought. “Going home to him sounds pretty good regardless.”

Ash started getting edgy as he walked home alone. He sought out the source of every rustle. Jerked his head at every movement in his peripheral vision. He was so twitchy by the time he got a few blocks away from the bar that he was afraid he'd be mistaken for a drug addict and get picked up by the cops.

He closed his eyes as he walked, rolling his head back and forth and exhaling to release the nerves. His foot hit a bit of uneven concrete and he pitched forward, barely catching his balance before he fell. His house keys went flying off into the dark.

He stopped short and hung his head, cursing under his breath. Finally, he looked up at the night sky and shook his head. “Did I fuck karma in the ass without lube or something?”

A pair of women walking down the other side of the street giggled, glancing over their shoulders at him.

“I'm sorry,” he called.

One of them waved him off and smiled.

“Do you need help?” the other asked with a laugh.

“I'm good,” he said dejectedly. “Thanks.”

“Hope your night gets better,” she said, and they went on their way.

Ash watched them until they reached the well-lit crossing, then turned back to look for his keys. A man was standing at the other end of the street, maybe ten yards away, watching impassively. Ash managed not to jerk in surprise. The guy was wearing a long coat and, if Ash's eyes weren't mistaken, a black top hat. Ash had seen too many strange outfits over the years to think twice about the fashion choice, though.

“You look lost,” the man said in an oddly scratchy voice. It had a faraway quality to it that made Ash's spine tingle.

He swallowed hard and shook his head, his pride not letting him back away. Not yet. “No,” he said curtly. “No, not lost.”

“I think you're lost,” the man said, his voice getting deeper but still hoarse and eerily distant.

Ash retreated a step, frowning as he risked a glance over his shoulder to see if anyone was around. When he looked back, he found that the man had covered half the distance between them. He gasped and took another quick step away.

Though the street was reasonably well-lit, the stranger's face remained shadowed.

“What do you want?” Ash asked breathlessly.

“I seek the lost.” He moved toward Ash with measured steps. He inclined his head, revealing his face. The light struck his eyes, making them appear a milky, luminescent blue.

Ash's breath left him as if he had been punched in the gut. It was the same face he'd seen in the mirror behind him at the bar. He backed away another step as cold terror flooded him, putting his back to the nearby building.

The man darted faster than Ash had ever seen a person move, and a gust of wind seemed to slam Ash against the building. He squeezed his eyes shut as his head banged against the brick. When he opened them, the man was in front of him. His cold fingers curled around Ash's biceps, lifting and pinning him, his toes barely touching the ground.

A horn honked on one of the main roads and the cold fingers released him. Ash dropped to the ground and took off at a dead run toward the corner. He didn't look back until he'd run out into the road itself.

The side street behind him was empty.

He stood in the middle of the road, panting and shaking all over. Cars moved on either side of him.

“Are you okay?” someone called from one of the cars.

“Get out of the road!” another voice shouted as a car honked.

Ash spun around, stunned. How had he not been hit by a car? He could have been killed.

“Christ.” He picked his way through traffic to the other side of the street, where he fumbled for his phone and called the bar. His keys were somewhere in that alley and he had no intention of finding them until morning. If ever.

When Caleb answered the phone, Ash shakily requested that someone come get him and bring along their keys to his place. He hung up as Caleb was still demanding to know what had happened.

Ash put his back to the wall of the building behind him and slid to the ground, his eyes on the alley and his entire body still trembling.

Just minutes later, Wyatt's blue Civic passed by him and then screeched to a halt. It backed up, and Wyatt jumped out of the car, leaving it running in the middle of the road.

“Are you okay? What happened?” He knelt in front of Ash and began pawing at him as if checking for injuries.

“Do you believe in ghosts?” Ash whispered.

Wyatt frowned and then shook his head as he helped Ash to stand. “Let's get you home.”

Hours later, after the others had shut down the bar, Ash was curled on his couch with Delilah beside him, her arm around his shoulders and her fingers smoothing over his hair. He had a blanket draped around him and a cup of tea cooling in his hands. Wyatt, Caleb, Noah, and Ryan were sitting around his little dining room table talking.

They were treating him like a child scared by the bogeyman, but did he give a fuck? Hell no.

Ryan and Caleb filled Wyatt and Noah in on the incident with the man in the mirror. Ryan also discussed the banging and the music they'd heard, but then explained it away by saying that the batteries in the radio had been ruined and so was the refrigerator.

“So he's seeing things,” Wyatt said grimly. “We should take him to the hospital.”

“You don't believe in ghosts?” Caleb asked.

“No. Especially when the person seeing them might have brain damage.”

“Hey, we saw some of those things too,” Delilah said. “The night the music was playing, it did not feel right in there.”

Ash shook his head as a shiver ran through him. If it had been just one instance, he'd be willing to chalk it up to the head injury too. Give him bleeding on the brain. Give him hallucinations. Anything but ghosts. But it hadn't been just one fleeting shadow or strange sound. Concussions did not slam people into walls.

They continued their discussion as Ash stood and flopped the blanket onto Delilah's lap. He walked into the dining room, and everyone fell silent.

“I'm okay. I don't have a concussion, and I don't want to go to the hospital,” he said. They all continued to study him and Ash rolled his eyes, raised his glass, and then headed for the kitchen.

He stood at the sink, rinsing the glass out. He could feel one of them standing at the entryway watching him, but he didn't turn around. He didn't want to see that doubtful, ready-to-pounce-and-call-an-ambulance look in their eyes. Instead he grabbed a paper towel and looked out the window above the sink.

His fingers went numb. His glass clattered to the sink. The man from the mirror was in the alley behind his building.

He was still in the long black coat and a top hat, leaning against the corner of the building, hidden in shadow.

Wyatt hurried over. “Ash?”

The figure outside raised his head, looking up into the window. His eyes seemed to flash as the light hit them, and he held up a set of keys.

Ash backed away from the sink, heart racing, lungs frozen. Wyatt reached him and grabbed his elbow.

“Do you see him?” Ash asked, unable to tear his eyes from the window.

Wyatt turned to look out the window and shook his head. “There's no one down there.” He sounded frustrated.

The others crowded into the galley kitchen. Ash pressed himself against the wall and tried to catch his breath as they all looked out the window in turn.

“He was there. He had my keys.” Ash put his hand to his chest and tried to gulp in air. His entire body was shaking. His head began to swim.

“Calm down.” Delilah's hands were cold when she put them against Ash's cheeks, and he flinched away from her touch.

“He's having another panic attack,” Caleb said, voice remarkably calm as he grabbed his keys off the kitchen counter and left.

“Fuck, we have to get him to a hospital,” Ryan said.

Wyatt and Noah both nodded. Ash shook his head in protest even as he was overcome with wooziness.

“He hates hospitals,” Delilah said, sympathy and worry clear in her voice.

“It's not . . . he was there,” Ash said desperately, looking at Wyatt, begging him to believe him.

“I know,” Wyatt said, but he was speaking in that condescending manner people used with children, animals, and the mentally unstable. He slid his arm around Ash's shoulders.

Ash opened his mouth to respond, but nothing came out. He couldn't catch his breath and the dark around the edges of his vision was closing in.

“Breathe, Ash, breathe,” Wyatt said somewhere in the distance. Ash's world went bright, and then even Wyatt's soothing voice was gone.

“You did the right thing, bringing him in,” the doctor told Wyatt and Caleb as the others sat in the waiting room out front. They'd given Ash a CT scan and had him on twenty-four hour watch. He was curled on his side in an ER bed behind a curtain, finally calm enough to sleep, and the doctor kept his voice low as he spoke. “He has some minor swelling.”

“Could it be causing these visual disturbances?” Wyatt asked.

“I don't believe so.”

“He's very sure that he's seeing these things,” Caleb said.

“Typically, hallucinations are not associated with a head injury,” the doctor said. “But everyone reacts differently to trauma. It could even be a post-traumatic stress reaction to the original attack.”

Caleb ran his hands through his hair and shook his head, and Wyatt frowned as he looked at the curtain.

“He's not that type, doctor,” Caleb said. “He's not . . .”

“Weak?” the doctor supplied with a knowing smile. “PTSD doesn't mean you're weak, physically or mentally. It's your brain's way of coping.”

Caleb closed his eyes and nodded.

“You said he was seeing things at his place of work?” the doctor said as he flipped up the chart and scowled at it.

“Yeah. Until tonight, and then it followed him home,” Caleb said.

“Is he happy with his work?”

“He loves it,” Caleb and Wyatt answered in unison. They glanced at each other, and the doctor raised an eyebrow.

“Well. Hallucinations are typically associated with something deeper.”

“We've been talking about hauntings for an exhibit at the museum,” Wyatt said. “And about the history of the bar where he works. It's . . . sordid, to say the least.”

“Well, perhaps that explains why his mind has gone there,” the doctor concluded.

“And the bar's haunted,” Caleb added.

The doctor wrinkled his nose. “His mind may be creating something out of these recent conversations. The biggest worry, then, is why these stories are suddenly moving out of their origin and following him around.”