Fangtabulous (9 page)

After stashing the behemoth bag under the counter of Haunts, Rebecca turned with a winning smile. “Shall we?”

This time even the sound guy smiled back, but it was Ty she had eyes for.

I huffed. Ulric shot me an amused grin.

Bobby stayed silent. I wondered, if I were to glance over my shoulder, which Bobby I’d see looking back at me … the one I knew, or the stranger from earlier that evening. I shuddered just thinking about it.

Bryson motioned for Rebecca to proceed them. The Ghouligans fell in line behind her, leaving me to bring up the rear, totally ignored. It beat Bryson’s previous eagle-eye scrutiny, but not by much.

Apparently, the news that the Ghouligans were in town had spread like wildfire. Already, a few fans had gathered outside of Haunts. As we paraded out, they went from staring in through the windows and talking amongst themselves to following behind us like we were the pied pipers of Salem.

Since I was at the rear and clearly the least important of the group, fingers tapped my shoulders, voices stage-whispered earnestly. “What’s going on?”

“Is it about that girl?”

“Is it true it was a ghost?”

“This town is haunted. I knew it from the first.”

Ty dropped back, and the voices hushed as if in awe.

“You okay?” he asked, sending me a dazzling smile that dimpled his cheeks.

“Yeah, why?”

“You look a little shell-shocked, to be honest.”

“I’m … uncomfortable with all the publicity. I mean, the focus should be on that poor girl who was killed, and on finding out who did it.”

“You mean
what
.”

“What?”

“Exactly.
What
did it, not who. You should know better than anyone that it wasn’t anything natural.”

“So you’re a true believer, then?”

“Aren’t you? After what you went through?”

“I … guess so. The horror was real, but it’s like all the rest of it was some kind of nightmare I woke up from.”

“We get that a lot. The mind rationalizes away what it doesn’t want to believe. Of course, we also get the attention-seekers, the kooks, the lovely older ladies who don’t realize the things going bump in the night are the squirrels in their attics.”

I laughed. “Seriously?”

“Clearly we never get to this stage with those lovely old ladies.”

“What if it’s ghost squirrels?”

“Now you’re making fun of me,” he said, but his dimples didn’t disappear, so I didn’t take him for mortally wounded.

“Guess I don’t really have room to talk, huh?” I said. “Strangled by ghost hands.”

Ty’s attention was starting to make me a little nervous. Being who he was, I was terrified I’d give myself away. Did he believe in vampires as well as ghosts? I didn’t know and wasn’t about to find out. I remembered to breathe. I couldn’t do anything about the non-existence of my heartbeat, but most humans never noticed that sort of thing.

“Come to think of it,” Ty said, still amiably, “you sound great for someone who’s been strangled. Do you still have the bruises? They’d make a great shot.”

It was a test, and I’d walked right into it. Ty might be a lot more charming than his co-host, but he was no less observant. Or dangerous. I had to remember that and not let myself get distracted by a pretty face.

“They faded away, just like the ghost,” I said truthfully. “I don’t have anything left to show for it but my nightmares.”

He looked at me unblinkingly. “That’s unusual.”

“That’s me,” I answered.

I thought he’d let it go at that. “Very unusual. Most people would jump at the chance to be on television, especially young women as attractive as you are. You don’t have hopes of being discovered?”

“I have high hopes of
not
being discovered,” I said, from the heart. Then, to cover, “I’m kind of shy. I don’t want my friends back home to tease me for believing in ghosts.”

“Where’s home?”

“The Midwest,” I hedged.

“Me too. Where specifically?”

Man, he was
not
going to let it go. “Indiana,” I lied. It was close enough to Ohio. I’d been there once. I could fake it. Then I hastened my steps to catch up to Rebecca, who was busy getting tips from Bryson.

“Hey,” I said as I got close.

Bryson cut off whatever he’d been saying, something about not looking right at the camera, to acknowledge me. We were almost to the Old Jail and the site of my strangulation. We’d gained rather than lost followers, and we now truly looked like a parade … or a funeral procession. Anyway, we’d be there soon enough, and then everyone would hopefully be too busy for questions I didn’t want to answer.

“Hey, yourself,” Bryson said. “You sure about this? No offense to Rebecca”—he flashed her a smile—“but you two are about as different as night and day. Usually when we do dramatizations, we try to choose someone who looks like the person involved.”

There was a plea in Rebecca’s eyes when she looked at me. She could save it—clear nail polish had more visibility on film than I did. Besides, the less similar my “double” looked, the less likely someone would connect us and come looking for me.

“I’m sure.”

“It’s a shame,” Bryson added. “Your dark hair and pale skin, those green eyes … you’d be a natural.”

Ouch. Words I’d always hoped to hear … meaningless now.

“Nah, Rebecca’s got it covered,” I said, swallowing the pain. “Besides, I’ve always wanted to be a redhead.”

Although so not with my skin tone. Red highlights, now … that might be hot. Or purple lowlights. Something to consider.

Bryson shrugged. “Suit yourself. You ready, Rebecca?”

“Absolutely!”

Thank you
, she mouthed to me when Bryson looked away. I gave her a nod and a smile, even though Bryson’s words ate away at my soul. It so sucked to have your dreams so close you could taste them, yet too far to touch. Sucked worse than being vamped at your senior prom and waking up three days later trapped in a coffin in a hideous dress you literally wouldn’t be caught dead in. If Bobby hadn’t been waiting for me with two brimming Macy’s bags when I fought my way out of the grave, well, eternal life might not have been worth living.

I stood back and watched the crew set up—the Old Jail in the background, the iron fence of the Howard Street Cemetery just visible beyond it.

I
did not
wallow.

People in the crowd held up cameras and cell phones, and suddenly there wasn’t even any time for not-wallowing. It was tough to prove that you’d taken a picture of someone who didn’t appear, but if anyone blogged, tweeted, or otherwise posted the weirdness online, we were goners. It was a sure bet that both the Feds and the fangs had some kind of Google Alert set up to monitor for such things.

I faded into the background, behind the cameraman and sound guy, behind the clipboard dude, Lloyd, who I assumed was some kind of producer or director or something. He looked over and saw what I’d seen. A look of irritation crossed his face. He started talking, and I thought at first it was to me, but then I noticed his headset and understood there was someone on the other end of it.

“I thought the police had agreed to send someone out for crowd control,” he barked. “Well, check on the ETA.”

“People,” he called more loudly, moving toward the crowd. I could only hope the person on the other end of his signal had disconnected. Otherwise, their ears would be ringing. “You’re welcome to the pictures you’ve snapped so far, but we’re going to have to insist on no pictures, video or still, once we begin filming. The material is proprietary, and Feldspar Productions takes any leakage of our segments very seriously. I’ll also have to ask you to move back, because we’re going to have to take establishing shots of the area. You’re welcome to stay and watch, but we’ll have to ask you to turn off all cell phones and silence all conversations.”

Clearly he’d given the speech before, but he didn’t take it any more lightly for the repetition. Instead, he made eye contact with as many in the crowd as he could, probably trying to send home the message that he was noting faces.

If I hadn’t been so totally bummed, I’d have been fascinated by the whole process.

In contrast, Rebecca was glowing, torn between listening to Kaleb-the-cameraman’s last-minute instructions on how to behave, stand, look, speak, etc. and angling her best side toward the crowd, which was still snapping some last-minute photos.

Two officers approached from the direction of the Old Jail, and Lloyd left off eying the crowd to go meet them. With my awesome vamp senses, I could hear them even over all the other conversations that hadn’t yet been silenced.

“We’re already getting calls in from the residents excited or worried about freaks flocking the place or plunging property values,” one officer was saying.

“Chief told them you had a permit,” said the other, who looked like he could bench-press his skinnier partner with ease.

“You’ve got crowd control?” Lloyd asked.

“Don’t worry, we’ll keep them in line,” the stick figure cop said. He held up a fistful of thin plastic stakes with twine strung between them, and they went to work roping off a good section of ground.

The ghost tours scheduled for tonight were going to have to give the place a wide berth. At least it ought to keep everyone safe if the murderous ghost was still in the area.

Lloyd noticed me watching, and gave me a grin and a wink as he got back to the rest of us. I gave him a shy grin in return. I wasn’t good at shy, but I was getting in lots of practice.

The production got underway. They tried it Rebecca’s way first—without the bonnet. I thought she was doing pretty well, but Lloyd called me in to show her again where I’d stood, how it had happened, how it had felt and all the rest. I turned to show them where the woman with the crucifix had come from when she’d rushed to my aid—and went still.

The light on the camera … it was green. I didn’t know a lot about film or digital recording or whatever, but I knew what green meant. Green meant “go.” It meant panic time!

“But you don’t have my photo release!” I cried, stunned, turning on the Ghouligans with my eyes blazing, as green as the go-light.

Lloyd hastened to reassure me. “Don’t worry, this is just for background, so we can listen later and add our color commentary.”

It wasn’t the listening I was worried about—it was the
looking
. This would be a whole lot bigger than some random blogger with theories and rationalizations. This was a nationally syndicated show
… internationally
for all I knew. And if they believed, they’d pursue. There was no way to keep a lid on things. We were sunk, and it was all my fault. I’d insisted on staying in town. I’d been the one to tell Bobby I’d think of something. Well, I suddenly had—stopping the production and destroying the footage. More like, we’d have to get the hell out of Salem before they could review the recordings. Oh yes, I was a master strategist.

I don’t know what I would have done right then—probably something desperate, like pretend all my grace had suddenly deserted me and crash hard into the camera, hard enough to destroy it—but a hair-raising scream went up from behind the twine barricades, cutting off into a painful gurgle. Other screams quickly rose up.

“Help!”

“He’s got her!”

“The ghost!”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the camera swing toward the crowd. That would have been my moment. With everybody looking the other way, I could have destroyed the camera and no one would ever know it had been on purpose, but I knew what that choked-off cry meant. I’d lived it.

I’d had near-invincibility on my side, but I knew this person was fearing for her life. My first impulse was to spring forward, to save her.

8

T
he police officers who’d come for crowd control rushed to the fallen woman. Girl, really—zebra-print tank top way too cool for the night under a wide-open black hoodie with the standard jeans, and sneakers with Day-Glo pink laces. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen. She was no longer struggling for breath … or at all. The skinny cop was lip-locked to her while the other was doing chest compressions, making me fear he’d crack a rib. Logically, I knew they were trying to get her breathing again, but it just looked so … abusive.

And camera guy had positioned himself to be sure he got it all on film. Just inside the shot, Ty and Bryson pulled out palm-sized gadgets that looked like something out of
Ghostbusters
.

“Is she okay?” I asked stupidly.

“Paramedics are on the way,” said chest-compression cop, out of breath like he was doing his best to breathe for two.

“Definite paranormal activity,” Bryson commented to Ty, who nodded. The latter’s gadget swung left and right, then seemed to stop on the skinny officer. Ty looked up, from his gadget to the cop. The look was inscrutable, but intense.

“You know CPR, don’t you?” Ty asked Bryson, his voice level … intentionally so, I thought.

“Yeah.”

“I think you should take over.”

They exchanged a look over that, and Bryson immediately hid his device away in a pocket. He dropped a hand to the shoulder of the cop doing the mouth-to-mouth. “Let me try,” he said.

“Too busy right now to step aside for you to play hero.”

I saw Bryson squeeze the shoulder and the skinny officer’s eyes go wide, then narrow. When he looked up at the Ghouligan, there was nothing of the protector in the cop’s eyes. There
was
something infinitely colder.
Evil
, if it could be defined as the complete absence of good rather than something that seethed and burned hot.

The cop pulled away from the girl, then, with a
be-my-guest
gesture to Bryson, likely knowing that it was already too late and willing to cover his ass about his failure to revive her by putting Bryson’s on the line.

I didn’t want to draw any attention, particularly not with the cameras on, but … one drop of my blood could mean the difference between life and death for the girl.
One drop
. How far was I willing to go to keep my own secret? Not that it was
just
mine.

I looked around for inspiration. Rebecca was nearby, clutching her bonnet in her hands. I could use that.

I grabbed it out of her hands and she cried out, more in surprise than anything. Then I jammed the nail of my index finger into my thumb under the cover of the bonnet, hard enough to draw blood. I had to act quickly, before the cut could heal. Already the white linen of the bonnet had started sucking up the little blood that flowed.

I dropped to my knees by the fallen girl’s side, landing between her two would-be saviors to shield myself from the camera, and used the bonnet to fan her so any attention would be drawn to my useless efforts and not to what they were covering for. It wasn’t enough. I stepped up my efforts, fanning for all I was worth, praying for some of my blood droplets to land in her mouth whenever Bryson paused in the assisted breathing. I restabbed my finger as needed. It was clumsy, but everyone had already discounted me.
Clearly
, I was acting more out of compassion than competency.

I
thought
they’d discounted me anyway. When I looked around to be sure, Ty caught my eye. And there was a glimmer in it I’d seen before. A
Gotcha
.

“You’re bleeding,” he said, quietly, but with everyone holding their breath over the fate of the girl, he might as well have shouted. Everybody looked at me.

Bryson stole the attention back. “It’s no use,” he said solemnly. “She’s gone.”

Someone in the crowd sobbed and tore away from the rest—another girl about the same age as the fallen girl, maybe a little older. Same coloring. Big sister? She fell on the girl, practically beating on her and insisting that she “Wake up—WAKE UP, dammit!”

In shock, Bryson and the cop doing the chest compressions momentarily froze, and I used the second of stun to reach across the girl’s body toward her sister, aiming a droplet of blood for the fallen girl’s lips before I grabbed her sister’s hands, firmly enough to still her panic-stricken abuse.

She stopped on contact and let out one great sob. I let her go so I could circle around her sister’s non-responsive body to offer a hug. Non-responsive.
Not dead
. I wouldn’t accept that. By
The Princess Bride
standards—another movie Bobby had made me watch that I hadn’t actually hated—the girl was only
mostly
dead. Meaning she could recover. Maybe. Probably. I had to believe.

The sister sobbed quietly into my shoulder, getting snot all over my shirt, and for a moment I was too absorbed by her grief to notice what anyone else was doing. Then there was a gasp and a cough … and all hell broke loose.

People screamed and pointed—one woman fell to her knees, hands clasped in prayer, proclaiming a miracle—and the dead girl sat up, gasping for air. I could practically hear her heart from where I stood, beating against her rib cage like a caged bird determined to break out.

The skinny officer rushed back in with his partner and tried to push the girl back down, telling her to relax, that the ambulance we could now hear in the distance was on the way. Her sister shoved me away to rush to her side.

Left behind, I looked around, thinking maybe now I could go for the camera, while everyone was dumbfounded with shock and awe. But the cameraman had never wavered. He was tightly focused on the recovered girl, ignoring her rescuers.

I felt eyes on me off to the right and turned to see … Ty, closer than I remembered him being. I didn’t like the look in his eyes—speculative, thoughtful.
Way
too observant.

It was totally imperative that we get rid of all evidence. And I knew just the man for the job—Eric, our resident mad scientist. What he couldn’t do with machines couldn’t be done. Period. He could literally do the impossible; it was his mojo. When we’d met him, he was tinkering with improbable inventions and thinking it was a conspiracy that no one would admit to being able to duplicate his results. As a man of science, a magical explanation had never occurred to him. Then we came along and rocked his world.

“Miraculous recovery,” Ty said, shooting me a sidelong glance to check my reaction.

“It sure was. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Oh no?”

I studied his face. Either he wasn’t very good at disingenuous or he wasn’t trying very hard.

Shitshitshit.
Time for diversionary tactics.

“Bryson must be a miracle worker. Isn’t that why you had him take over CPR from that cop?”

“No.”

“Then why?” I asked.

“I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours.”

“My what?” I asked, pulling back from him. He hadn’t struck me as a perv.

“Your secrets.”

I shrugged casually. “I’m an open book.”

He snorted. Very elegant. “Yeah, right.”

He waited for me to say something more, and I let him wait. And wait.

Finally, he said, “The instruments picked up some unusual activity surrounding that officer.”

“Wow, could you be less specific?”

He grinned, like he had me hooked, which, okay,
maybe
he did.

“We call it a shadow. Think of it like this—all life has a certain energy, even plants. Tests have been done on exposing plants to different kinds of music and monitoring—”

“CliffsNotes version?” I asked. “Unless you’re trying to tell me the cop is some kind of photosynthetic-American, in which case I’m down with diversity and all.”

“No, what I’m trying to say is that people give off a measurable energy, a wavelength that can be measured. All living things do. Have you ever done a wave experiment, say sound waves? One consistent tone gets you one uniform wave. Two and there’s interference, crisscrossing crests and valleys.”

“Okay, so you’re saying his wavelength or aura or whatever is choppy?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

“But what does it
mean
?” I might be getting it, but I didn’t know what it was I’d got.

“A spectral presence—either hovering very near, potentially whispering in his ear, or even temporarily in control.”

I stared at him. “You mean, like, in
possession
.”

“Basically.”

I felt a chill, but I didn’t think it had anything to do with the weather. All I could think of was Bobby’s eyes earlier, their usual deep blue darkened almost to black, like all the light had gone out of them. Eclipsed? Another presence taking over control?

“You said temporarily.”

“Most spirits don’t have the energy to maintain control for long. It takes a vast amount of power.”

“Like the kind of power it would take for a ghost to physically strangle someone?”

Ty’s eyes flashed. “More. Like the kind of power a spirit might
gain
by stealing a life, through strangulation or whatever.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. Not any part of it. “It isn’t possible to keep possession, like,
permanently
, is it?” I asked.

“It isn’t common. Usually it takes too much energy to fight for control with the soul already present. But sometimes a spirit might find a body very close to death, the soul already fled or on a very tenuous tether, and
snap
!”

He snapped his fingers to prove the point, and I had to keep myself from jumping. All I could think of was Bobby, and all my unanswered questions about the state of our souls. What if vampires didn’t have them? Maybe they’d gone the way of our heartbeats and our ability to withstand the sun. What if one of Salem’s resident spirits had found itself a hot new home in which to set up shop?

But Bobby still had a will, a consciousness, a code at the very least. He could still love—me in particular. That had to count for something.

“Let’s say someone was possessed. How would you fight it?”

Ty’s eyes flashed and his gaze intensified. “You know someone like that?”

“Let’s say hypothetically.”

“Exorcism.”

The word alone nearly did me in. Crosses, holy water, casting out the devil and whatnot … Bobby would never survive.

“You okay?” Ty asked.

“Fine. I just need to … make a call.”

He didn’t look at all convinced. Given the crappiness of my performance, I wasn’t surprised. I was probably paler even than usual, as I drifted off beyond the edges of the gathered group and fiddled with my cell phone, just to put on a show while I gave Bobby a mental shout-out.

There was no answer. I had to hope he was in the middle of leading a tour, that it wasn’t that the lights were on but no one was home. I had a sudden fear that the Feds and fangs didn’t need to track and kill us—Salem would do the job for them.

Since Bobby was unavailable, I used the phone the way it was intended—to call Eric and beg him to do something about the Ghouligans’ footage. Back in Florida, he’d built the machine the vamps had used to mind-swap Nelson into his current Cro-Magnon form. He’d also built the portable electromagnetic pulse machine that had helped us take out the Feds’ sick supernatural testing facility. Problem was, we couldn’t exactly use it here … at least not unless we could lure the Ghouligans and their gadgets to some deserted place. If we pulled something like that in a crowded area like this one, anyone with a pacemaker or other implanted electronics would suffer for it.

This was a hot mess. I was starting to worry about whether the team would be better off without me. I was a liability, making mistakes that could get us all killed. I thought wistfully of my old life back in Mozulla, Ohio, where the biggest thing I’d had to worry about each day was what to wear and whether Marcy and I might clash, an issue that required serious nightly discussion.

Eric didn’t answer my phone call, so I left a message and thought about my next step. Bobby’d always been my go-to guy, but I was suddenly afraid to share my theories with him. How did I know which
him
I’d be talking to? Would I be tipping my hand to the enemy? Was I imagining things?

Gah, I wasn’t used to so much self-doubt. It sucked worse than strawberry shakes with chunks of the fruit lodged in the straw.