Kelley Armstrong - Haunted

"Ghost at ten o'clock," I murmured to Jaime. "And it's a ripe one."

She turned and gave a tiny groan, then sank into her chair.

"Not a first-time visitor, I'm guessing," I said.

The man strode up to the table. His gaze cut to me.

"What are you looking at, spook?" he snarled.

"Exactly what you want me to be looking at," I said. "Kill the theatricals. The necro is not impressed, and neither am I."

"Oh, does the horror of my death offend you? Well, excuse me. Next time, I'll make sure I die all neat and tidy." He slammed his head onto Jaime's salad plate. "There. Better?"

Jaime's cheeks paled. I swung my gaze up to glare at the ghost… only his eyes weren't there, which made the move slightly less effective. I glowered down at him.

"She's not talking to you until you put your head back on," I said.

"Fuck y-"

"Put your goddamned head back on now."

He crossed his arms. "Make me."

I slammed my open palm into his ear. His head flew off the table, rolled across the floor, and settled in front of a seeing-eye dog. The dog lifted its muzzle, and its nostrils flared as it picked up the whiff of decay.

"Yum," I said. "Go on, boy. Take a bite."

The ghost's body flew across the restaurant, plowing through tables and diners. Beside me, Jaime made muffled snorting noises, stifling laughter. She mouthed, "Thank you."

The decapitated ghost stomped back to the table. Only he was decapitated no more, having apparently decided his head was safer attached to his shoulders. He'd also freshened up his wardrobe. This would be his normal ghost self. The headless accountant look was a glamour, a trick some ghosts used to revert to their death body-the condition they'd been in when they'd died-either to play on a necromancer's sympathy or to scare the bejesus out of humans with a little necro blood.

"Now, doesn't that feel better?" I said.

"Oh, you thought that was funny, did you?" he said, advancing on me. "It's always funny to pick on those less fortunate than yourself. Maybe when you're done here, you can go back to paradise, and have a good laugh, tell them how you abused the earth-spook."

"Earth-spook?"

"I'm a spirit in torment," the man said, his voice rising like a preacher at the pulpit. "Condemned to tread the earthly realm until my soul finds peace. For five years-five unimaginably long years-I've been trapped here, unable to move into the light, seeking only a few minutes of a necromancer's time-"

Jaime thudded face-first onto the table and groaned. The elderly woman at the next table inched her chair in the other direction.

"See how she treats me?" the man said to me. "She could set me free, but no, she's too busy going on talk shows, telling people how she helps tormented spirits find peace. When it comes to an actual spirit, though? In actual torment? Who only wants to avenge himself on the driver who ended his life, left his wife a widow, his children orphans-"

"You don't have any children," Jaime said through her teeth.

"Because I died before I could!"

I leaned toward Jaime and lowered my voice. "Look, the guy's a jerk, but if you helped him, you could get him off your back-"

She swung to her feet and strode toward the door. When I jogged up beside her, she said in a low voice, "Ask him how he died."

The ghost was right behind me, and answered before I could ask. "I remember it well. The last day of my life. I was happy, at peace with the world-"

"There's no Oscar for death scenes," I said. "The facts."

"I was driving home after a business meeting," he began.

"A meeting held in a bar," Jaime added as she turned into an alley.

"It was after office hours," he said. "Nothing wrong with a drink or two."

"Or five or six." She stopped, out of earshot of the sidewalk now, and turned to me. "Coroner reported a blood-alcohol level of at least point two five."

"Sure, okay, I was drunk," the man said. "But that wasn't the problem. The problem was a seventeen-year-old kid joyriding in my lane!"

"You were in her lane," Jaime said. "Got a police report to prove it. Who killed you? The idiot who got behind the wheel of his convertible, so pissed he couldn't even fasten his seat belt. That kid you hit will spend the rest of her life wearing leg braces. And you want me to help you exact revenge on her ?"

I turned on the man, eyes narrowing. He met my gaze and took a slow step back, then wheeled and stalked away.

"Don't think this is done!" he called over his shoulder. "I'm coming back. And next time you won't have your ghost-bitch bodyguard to protect you."

"You want my help, Eve?" Jaime said. "Make sure he doesn't come back. Ever."

I smiled. "Be glad to."

THE NIX SNIFFED THE AIR. IT REEKED OF HORSE AND human, the sweat and shit of both. That hadn't changed. She stood in the intersection of a street wide enough for four or five buggies to pass. Metal rails were embedded in the road, and a strange horseless carriage glided along them. Wooden poles lined the street, with wires strung from pole to pole, crisscrossing over the rows of brick buildings three, four, even five stories high.

Gone were the bustling markets, the narrow cobbled streets, the pretty little shops she remembered. The last time she'd walked the earth, this New World had been nothing more than a few bleak settlements on a wild continent, a place to send murderers and thieves.

The Nix rolled her shoulders, twisting her neck, trying to get used to the feel of this new form. In all the years shed inhabited Marie-Madeline, shed never quite grown accustomed to the stink of it, the pain and tedium of a mortal existence. Still, there had been a freedom there that she'd never known in her natural form-the freedom to act in the living world and wreak her own chaos. But now she was in another shape, somewhere between human and demon, a ghost.

A horse and coach veered toward her. She reached out, fingers curving into claws, ready to rip a handful of horseflesh as the beast ran past. The horse raced through her hand without so much as a panicked roll of its eyes. She hissed as it continued down the road. Even a human ghost should be able to spook a horse. Once, her very presence would have put such fear into the beast that it would have trampled anyone who came near. She closed her eyes, and imagined the chaos she could have created. And now what? After two hundred years of damnation, had she escaped only to moan and lament what she had lost? No, there had to be a way-there was always a way.

The Nix took a few steps down the road, sampling the passing humans, tasting the thoughts of each. The men's minds were now closed to her. She'd learned that soon after her escape. Having died in the form of a woman, her powers were now restricted to that gender.

Her gaze slid from face to face, looking for the signs, searching the eyes first, then the mind. Sometimes humans hit on a moment of profundity more complete than their dim minds could comprehend, and they took that nugget of truth and dumped it in the refuse for the bards and the poets to find, and mangle into yodeling paeans to love. The eyes were indeed the windows to the soul. Clear eyes, and she passed by without pause. A few wisps of cloud behind a gaze, and she might hesitate, but likely not. Storms were what she wanted-the roiling, dark storms of a tempest-tossed psyche.

She made it halfway down the street, finding nothing more than a thundercloud or two. Then she had to pause before a woman with downcast eyes. In her late twenties with a plain, broad face, the woman waited on the sidewalk outside a store. A man exited the store, swarthy and rough-skinned, dressed in the clothes of a working man. As he saw the woman, a smile lit his face.