Karen Chance: Tempt the Stars

But he was, and of the two of us, he was clearly the more interesting.

I accepted the inevitable and followed her inside.

Jonas must have done some dismantling, because nothing shot, stabbed, or grabbed me as I passed through the door. He looked pretty okay, too, if you ignored his habit of picking up random things and sticking them in the billowing mass he called hair. Or, in this case, on.

“He looks like Honeybun.” Laura giggled. She was talking about my childhood pet rabbit, the one we’d basically shared since animals can sense ghosts a lot better than people can.

And she wasn’t wrong.

“Did you find something?” Jonas asked, looking up from sorting through the mess on the desk. And sporting two outrageous tufts of white hair escaping from either side of an old fedora. It didn’t match his outfit, and he hadn’t had it on when we arrived. But I’d already discovered that trying to figure out Jonas only made my head hurt, so I mostly didn’t.

“He’s just fluffy.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Uh, no. Not yet,” I told him, trying to surreptitiously shoo Laura back out the door.

She crawled under the desk instead.

“Done already?” Jonas asked, looking at me over the tops of his glasses as I crawled after her.

“Uh, yeah.”

“Are you certain you didn’t overlook anything? It’s quite small, you know.”

“Pretty sure.”

What he wanted wasn’t in the outer office. I knew that because I knew where it was, but I needed him to take a few minutes to find it. Minutes that I could use to pry some secrets out of Laura. But Jonas wasn’t looking like he felt like giving them to me. For once, Jonas was looking focused.

“This is no time for games, Cassie,” he said sternly, as Laura crawled through his legs.

“Couldn’t agree more,” I muttered, grabbing for her.

Only to have her go abruptly less substantial, and my hands to pass right on through. And grab Jonas’ calf instead. “Is there a problem?” he asked dryly.

Yes, although the fading wasn’t it. Laura’s senses didn’t work as well when she wasn’t all there, so to speak, and she was curious enough to be back any second. The problem was worse than that.

The problem was that she thought I wanted to play.

“No, no, wait—oh, shit,” I hissed as she blinked completely out of sight.

“What?” Jonas tensed, staring around. “What is it?”

Laura giggled and reappeared over by the threadbare plaid sofa, where Tony parked his guests so he could watch them squirm on the tough old springs. “Can’t catch me!” she said, throwing out the usual challenge.

It had been fun when I was a child and didn’t have anything better to do. It was less so now. “No, listen—”

“I am listening,” Jonas said impatiently, as she disappeared again.

Damn it!

I crawled out from under the desk. “Cassie, what—”

“I’ll be back in a second,” I told him, through gritted teeth.

“Even for a Pythia, you’re acting a bit crazed,” he said mildly as I stomped out.

Not half as crazed as I was going to be if I didn’t find a certain playful ghost, I thought grimly, staring around the outer room.

Nothing stared back, except for an old portrait on the wall, some glowering relative of the family that used to own this place before Tony decided he wanted it. It was limned with moonlight, like everything else in here, which was a problem. When faded, ghosts were little more than silver smudges, and damned hard to spot in a chiaroscuro of old furniture, stuffy portraits, and leaping shadows. Lightning flashed outside, making the whites of the painted eyes stand out creepily.

“No fair hiding,” I called tensely.

But it looked like I was the only one who thought so.

This really wasn’t going to be easy. And what else was new? I thought savagely. If there was one thing I’d learned in the last three months, it was that nothing ever was. It was like living in Murphy’s Law.

Only no.

That would be a step up.

According to Murphy, if something can go wrong, it will. But that wouldn’t work for my life. I needed a new rule. Cassie’s rule. Something along the lines of “if something can’t go wrong, because it is completely impossible for it to happen in the first place, it will somehow manage to go wrong anyway.”

Case in point: most people would agree that having one’s father killed by a vampire mob boss was kind of unlikely. And that having the soul of said father end up trapped in an enchanted paperweight, because the vampire was an asshole who wanted to gloat over his former servant for as long as possible, was just plain silly. Add in the fact that the fate of the world might now hinge on that paperweight and the spirit it held and the whole thing edged into the ludicrous. And if the magical community managed to lose said all-important paperweight, because said bastard of a vampire ran off to Faerie with it . . . well. I don’t even know if they have a word for that.

But they need one. Because it happened anyway. Just like that, to me.

See the kind of thing I’m dealing with here?

But right now retrieving the paperweight of doom was Jonas’ problem. He was the one trying to save a world. I wasn’t that ambitious. I was just trying to save a friend.

And it wasn’t going so great.

I gave up on subtlety and pulled the world’s ugliest necklace out of my T-shirt.

A second later, a ghost appeared, like a genie from a bottle. Only this genie was wearing cowboy chic and looking pretty spooked. “No,” he told me flatly. “No way, no how. Don’t even think about—”

“I don’t have a lot of time here,” I whispered harshly. “And she can do this for hours. We had a game that lasted a whole week once.”

“And that’s my problem how?” he asked, glancing around nervously. “Damn, it’s worse than I remembered. This whole place is dripping with ectoplasm.”

“You know there’s no such thing,” I said impatiently. The ghost’s name was Billy Joe, and despite being among the life-challenged himself, he didn’t know crap about death. Maybe because he spent eternity watching cheesy old movies and driving me crazy.

We’d met when I was seventeen, and accidentally bought the necklace he haunted as a birthday gift for my governess. She’d ended up with some unhaunted hankies instead, and I got a nineteenth-century Irish gambler with a big mouth and a yellow streak. Some days, I still think she came out ahead.

“Oh, really?” Billy asked, his usual sarcasm overwritten by a tinge of panic. “Stop looking around like a human and check out Ghost Vision for a change!”

His tone gave it capitals when it was really just the way seers look at the world. Some people are double-jointed; we’re double-sighted, with that second set of eyes the kind that focuses on the spirit world. I usually tried to tamp it down, since watching others tends to make it more likely that they’re going to watch you back, and there’s some scary stuff out there. But it didn’t look like I was going to be finding Laura any other way.

“See what I mean?” Billy demanded, when I switched over. Only now, instead of a semitransparent cowboy in a ruffled shirt and a Stetson, he was a shining green column of vaguely cowboy-shaped smoke. And less distinct, instead of more as should have been the case, because he’d been right—the whole room glowed with the same eerie color.

It wasn’t just that the farmhouse’s previous owners had met a messy end. This place had started out as an Indian burial mound long before anybody ever built on it, and after that had been a battlefield in the Revolutionary War. And then there were the various rivals Tony had dragged back through the years, most of whom had ended up never leaving. And the vengeful spirits that had followed a few of the vamps home, wanting a little post-carnage payback. The final result was basically ghost central, with the glowing trails they left so thick on the floor and walls and ceiling that the whole room pulsed neon.