Ghoul Friend Read online

  “You, ah, your presence keeps him away?”

  “Back when she could talk more, Mom was kind of sure he just didn’t want to hurt a kid. He always waited till they were older, you know? Till they were grown-ups. But I think he’s getting desperate now. He’s almost done.”

  “Almost done with what?”

  Enoch sighed, sliding his glance to the woman—I couldn’t believe she was Deborah Carstairs, not if she was supposed to be dead. “Done getting revenge. He’s been killin’ off the families that killed him, you know? It’s just me, Yancy, Pops, and MeMaw left.”

  Chapter 12

  Oscar

  “Again, Oscar.”

  I sighed but did as Grandmere bid. Without stopping, I pulled three spirits forth into the circle Grandmere had inscribed on the floor. They were tired, old spirits, nearly worn through with time and their own sorrows. I suspected the man with the heavy, fur-trimmed cloak would be impossible to call next time I tried. None of the spirits seemed to see me, staring off at some distant point only they could recognize. One, a woman in a Regency-era gown, drifted towards Grandmere but it seemed unintentional. She didn’t reach for Grandmere or even pay her any mind. She moved towards the hearth, then paused, bent low, and flickered out of sight, reappearing a moment later in the spot she had been summoned to. The third shade simply stood there, expression deeply grieved, tears streaking their face. They were so worn out I could barely make out their features beyond being vaguely human. If I hadn’t known what I was looking at, I’d have assumed they were a trick of the light.

  “Now,” Grandmere ordered, “release them.”

  I nodded, letting the thin thread of power I had holding them in place snap. The woman, midway through her trek to the hearth again, looked briefly annoyed, but then she was gone, and it didn’t matter. “May I rest now, Grandmere? I’m quite hungry.”

  She sniffed and checked her watch. “It’s not quite time for tea, but I suppose you’ve earned a bit of respite.” She moved past me, breaking the circle with the toe of her shoe, and pressed the bell to summon a living human this time. Within moments, her housekeeper, Sinjun, appeared with a tea cart and a small smile for me. He knew I was always starving, especially when it came to the petit fours his wife Rebecca made and kept stocked in the kitchen. “I took the liberty of bringing tea a bit early, Mrs. Fellowes.”

  She nodded curtly. “Very well, Sinjun.”

  He set about arranging the small tea service, a relic of a much older and larger one that had suffered breakage and loss through the ages. Now, all that was left were a few cups and saucers, discreetly chipped but not good enough for guests to use. It was the one reserved just for Grandmere and me when we shared tea in her study, after my lessons.

  Whenever Ezra was over, we were relegated to the mismatched mugs and saucers Rebecca kept in the kitchen, ones that didn’t matter if two young boys chipped them when pretending to be pirates and ‘toasting’ one other a bit too hard with our drinks or knocked over while trying to wrestle a Nintendo DS from one another’s grasp to take a turn next. I felt a bit special, using this set with Grandmere. Like I was… not a grownup, really, but possibly someone she could respect when I was one. Today, it felt different. Sinjun arranged our tea and set out the plate of petit fours for me and a small dish of sliced fruit and cheese cut so thin it was nearly translucent for Grandmere before seeing himself out with a murmured promise to return for the items in a bit. Tea with Grandmere lasted precisely half an hour. No more or less. She’d been known to cut someone off mid-sentence if they clock hit the thirty-minute mark and they were still speaking.

  Grandmere enjoyed structure and was determined to ensure the world around her met her strict standards for order, whether it wanted to or not.

  Which, I suppose, is why she decided to start me early on my lessons in mediumship, as soon as it became apparent I not only saw ghosts but was quite the dab hand at calling them forth. I nibbled one of the confections—a little white cube done up to look like a present with a red icing bow on top—and wondered if maybe I could get Rebecca to make me a whole pike of these for my birthday coming up in a week. I was so intent on the fantasy of swimming in a pile of cakes so tall I could be fully submerged, I almost missed Grandmere’s pointed sniff.

  “Yes, Grandmere?” I asked belatedly, setting my petit four down.

  “When you brought the spirits forth today, it wasn’t difficult for you.”

  “No, ma’am. It wasn’t.” This wasn’t news to her. She just wanted to make sure I was being truthful. If I hemmed and hawed, said it was a little hard, tried to be modest about it, she would send me upstairs to practice until I was exhausted, just to teach me not to lie.

  She nodded to herself before taking a sip of the bitter, dark brew she preferred. “There’s a soiree at the Davises’ next Thursday evening. They have requested my presence. I’ll be bringing you so you can learn how to do what I do.”

  “I thought I was learning,” I protested. “My lessons—”

  “Your lessons are preparing you for this,” she said sharply. “You will do as I do. I will teach you how to do this safely, effectively. You will not be like some of the others, inciting fear and… and…” she set down her cup so hard, it sloshed. I’d never seen Grandmere so flustered, and it made me nervous. “When you’ve finished your tea, go to your rooms and start your academics. I’ll not have you falling behind because of this. Is that understood?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  I snuck two of the cakes with me, not minding at all they were smashed when I got them out in my room later.

  A few days later, at the Davis soiree, I made my debut as a medium, a small mimic of Grandmere.

  And that’s how I stayed until she died, and I realized maybe there was more to being a medium than polite messages from dead relatives…

  “Oi! Oz!”

  I jerked awake from my uncomfortable half-doze. “Sorry. Christ,” I muttered, scrubbing my hands over my face and feeling the rasp of stubble and an embarrassing sticky patch of drool. “When did they bring you back?”

  “A few minutes ago,” Ezra said, yawning. “I didn’t think getting brain scans would make you sleepy but here we are.”

  “It’s not the scans, it’s what led to them,” a nurse said, bustling into the room to check Ezra’s vitals and make a few notes on her tablet. “The doctor will be by on rounds this evening and can go over results with you then but in the meantime, we’re keeping you under observations, alright? Someone from the labs will be by in a bit to get more blood.” She offered us a tight, professional smile, and hurried out to head to her next room.

  “I feel like a pincushion,” he muttered, shifting carefully on the bed. “Oz—”

  I knew what he was about to say. “No. You’re not leaving here until they’re sure it’s all okay.”

  “You know they’re not going to find shit on those scans,” he groaned. “There’s no test for being possessed, is there?”

  “Ez, you know there isn’t. But what if it’s not that? Or,” I spoke over his protest, “what if what happened did some damage, hm? We’ve never experienced this before. Maybe it hurt you somehow.”

  He huffed a breath but was quiet for a long moment. “I know what you’re planning, and I don’t want you going by yourself. I’d rather you take me with you, if you don’t have Julian in tow.”

  “I might—”

  “He hasn’t answered his texts, has he? Or calls.”

  “Don’t look so smug about it,” I muttered.

  “If you’re going off to hunt him down, then I’m coming with you.” He started to move, but the IV in his arm tugged and he hissed. “Fuck my life.”

  “Ezra, I promise you, I’m not going to do anything stupid.”

  “One might argue that talking to dead people is exceptionally stupid, especially when one of them is actively murderous.”

  That brought me up cold. “What?”

  “Fuck. Okay. I didn’t want to tell you
because—”

  “Because you’re a massive bell-end,” I muttered.

  “Because,” he pressed on, ignoring me, “I thought I was making it up the first time. Like maybe my head was just throwing that out there. But in the square… Ozzy, this ghost, he wants to hurt people. Specific people. It wasn’t just I’m angry and want to do bad things. He had a focus. An intention. And he wanted to have a body to do it.”

  “I… How is that possible? Even in the few rare cases of possession documented, the spirits can’t force the host to do something entirely against their will.” And I did mean rare—mediums pass information around. We have our little cliques, sure, where we shit-talk the others sometimes, but general knowledge, like the fact spirit possession is so rare as you can count cases in the past decade on one hand with fingers left over, and what most people think of as possession is channeling, which is a different beast altogether.

  Ezra blew out a breath that made his fringe flutter and shot me his best, most exasperated, glare. “I know what I felt. And I could hear him thinking, ‘Start with the root to kill the tree,’ and I know he had a specific person in mind, not just… Not just murder for fun or something.” He fidgeted with his sheet for a second before admitting, “When you told me you had a ghost talking to you, I was scared. I thought maybe it was the same one, maybe it was trying to trick you somehow and use me to get to you.” He glanced up and asked in a small voice, “Oz, you promise me you’re not gonna follow this ghost blindly and get yourself hurt? Or… or…”

  “I just… I don’t know what this ghost is doing, Ez. And the fact he can talk to me even when I have this block going on? I don’t know what that means. And that scares me, frankly, but I don’t think he wants to hurt me. Or, for that matter, you.”

  Ezra fiddled with the sheet again, frowning. “Maybe it’s not so much your abilities are muted but he’s not the kind of ghost we’re used to.”

  “What does that mean? I think we’ve literally met every type of ghost it’s possible to meet.” I hadn’t kept an official ledger, but I had a decent idea of the variety I’d encountered on my own, with Grandmere, and then later with Ezra. Not to categorize them overmuch, but there were some fairly broad groups I could sort them into, and one of those groups were the unquiet dead.

  The dead who were angry, even in the afterlife. So angry they could affect the world around them.

  So angry they could cause physical harm to the living.

  The ghosts in Bettina had been in that nebulous category. To be fair, they weren’t alone in that. There were stories the world over, from across virtually all eras, of ghosts harming the living somehow. Usually through things like thrown objects and occasionally scratching or striking. The one common denominator, though, was that the ghosts didn’t kill anyone in these stories.

  There was a smaller category though, one that people loved to consider for horror movies or made-up stories on camping trips or wherever this sort of thing seemed like a good idea. Ghosts who actively tried to kill.

  Ghosts who had so much anger, so much hate in them, they were able to manifest enough energy to not only attack the living but end their life.

  I’d never known it to happen in my personal experiences, but Grandmere had. One day, towards the end of things when she’d had less control over her filter, she’d told me the story of her girlhood neighbor, a sweet older man who had lost his wife to some wasting disease. It took a year of the man being bruised and scratched and terrified in his own home for the truth to come out: he had murdered her, and her ghost wasn’t about to let that go. She killed him with a shove down the stairs, and Grandmere was the only living person who knew it hadn’t been an accident because the man told her after he died.

  The dead wife knew Grandmere knew and threatened her regularly until Grandmere moved away and never returned to the house in Chelsea.

  She had feigned indifference to the incident, but I knew she feared angry spirits. Perhaps that’s why she preferred the old lady and poodle party circuit. Far less a chance of murderous spirits during cocktail hour.

  An uncomfortable thought occurred to me then, watching Ezra avoid my gaze. Had her fears led her to limit my education? Had she held back because she wanted to make sure I was safe, that I could only do the same thing she had? Grandmere had been powerful, perhaps one of the strongest mediums in Europe, but from the moment she knew I was like her, she focused her teaching on showing me how to hold a séance, how to be ‘what they want to see, dearest.’ I glanced down at my attire and felt a bitter twist of humor in my gut. How much of me was me and how much had been carefully nurtured into Oscar Fellowes: Medium by a scared old woman who feared the extent of her own powers, who feared the ghosts who sought her help?

  “Oz?”

  I shook off the growing fugue and forced a small smile. “I need to go back, Ez.”

  “Don’t let’s do this again,” Ezra groaned.

  “I need you to trust me, Ezra,” I urged. “And know that I know what I’m doing.” Though I wasn’t entirely sure I did now, not after that disturbing little thought about Grandmere’s teaching.

  “Do you have a plan of attack here, or are you just going to wander about until you see your fanboy?”

  “I was thinking… hoping, really…” I trailed off, raising a shoulder in a shrug.

  “Asking the ghosts,” Ezra sighed. “Of course.” He rubbed a hand over his forehead absently. I don’t think he was even aware of the gesture. “Um, look—”

  “I’m not summoning, only asking passively,” I promised.

  “And your block?” he asked, voice flat. “Did it miraculously vanish, Oscar?”

  “No,” I muttered. “But that… spirit who has been talking to me doesn’t seem bothered by it. He’s been able to talk to me…”

  “Can’t you talk to him here?” Ezra demanded on a whine. “I’m having a really awful feeling about this, Oz. Like, a feeling.”

  I nodded slowly. Ezra’s abilities lay more in line with strong empathic ability than anything else, but they weren’t always ‘on.’ When they were in gear, though, he was dead-on. “I promise—”

  He heaved a sigh. “You can’t promise me you won’t do something stupid, Oz. Because I know you, and I know us. I know ‘doing something stupid’ is kind of our MO. So, get out of here. Just promise me one thing… bring me some decent food later because if hospital food here is anything like it was in New York, it’s gonna suck.”

  “Shit.”

  “Problem, sir?”

  I glanced up at the young man behind the desk and smiled tightly, the effort hurting my head. “I just realized I don’t have a way back to the place I’m staying. I don’t suppose your town has an entrepreneurial minded wanna-be taxi driver hiding in the ranks?”

  “Um, no? But we do have the Brandon twins. They’re starting a ride share business. I think one of them is on duty today!” He reached for the desk phone, then paused, his face falling. “Oh, dang, sorry, I forgot. Both of them are at UT for the game this weekend.”

  “It’s alright. I’ll figure something out.”

  “Oscar?”

  Yancy, looking as if he’d just climbed out of the grave himself, stood between me and the exit, jingling his keys in his hand.

  “I heard you lookin’ for a ride out? Y’all are leaving.”

  It was a flat statement, not a question.

  I nodded. “Yes, as soon as I grab our things and Julian, we’ll be gone.” Julian… Fucking hell… Yancy didn’t look interested in my freak out, and I doubted he’d care about the fact I couldn’t get Julian to answer his damn phone, much less a simple text. Now would be a really good time for you to pop in with some good news, mystery ghost. And oh god, that was another crisis, wasn’t it? My ‘friend.’ He wasn’t a ghost at all. My head throbbed with an ice pick-sharp pain, making me hiss and grab at my temple as if I could protect myself from it. The smothering feeling pushing against my abilities was growing excruciating, a physical pain as I forc
ed a smile at Yancy and asked, apologetically, “Could I please get a ride back to the ranch? You won’t even see us leave. We’ll be gone before you know it.” Please don’t let me be a liar. “I’ll even ride in the bed of your truck, and you don’t have to talk to me,” I added desperately. Yancy sighed, wilting in on himself for a moment before making an angry gesture towards the parking lot. “C’mon. The sooner this is all over…”

  I nodded, scrambling after him a bit too much like a puppy for my liking. He didn’t slow down, his long legs getting him to his dusty red truck first. He had the AC blasting by the time I fumbled the passenger side door open and climbed the wobbly metal step up into the cab. “Thank you,” I breathed, jamming the seat belt into place. “This—”

  “I don’t want to talk about a damn thing,” he snapped, his usual friendly tone long gone. “Everything was fine until y’all showed up, you know? It was fucking fine!” He swung out of the parking lot and nearly fishtailed, sending me rocking against the passenger door. “Now MeMawis… Fuck, she might be dead, okay? She hit her head real bad when she fell. And Enoch is still out there somewhere! What the Hell…” His breath came in a short, choked sob and he shook his head. “Just don’t talk to me, okay? I’m done with this ghost shit. Enoch, his whole life, okay? His whole damn life, he always believed Mom that he had some woo woo special abilities. We all seen Mason Albright, so yeah, we all got it I guess, the whole damn town, but that’s not what she was on about. She told him he was so damn special because he could touch other people. He had this stupid idea he was psychic or something. Said he could talk to ghosts, talk to people…” He sniffed hard, braking at a stop sign and sliding me a sharp glare. “Enoch’s not right, okay? In the head. He’s… he’s always been a little different but we just kind of ignored it because he didn’t have the easiest time growing up. He didn’t fit in at school, didn’t catch on to a lot of stuff like other kids did. He’s real trusting, you know? A sweetheart of a kid. And when Mom died… God, I thought he was gonna off himself. Or just kind of cease to exist.” Someone honked and Yancy jammed on the accelerator, jerking us across the intersection and off onto the curving road that led to the ranch. “Enoch worships you, you know?”