Ghoul Friend Read online

  “If it’s a ghost, it’s just annoying,” Ezra pointed out. “Sounds like a repeater. It’s just walking the same path ‘round.” He yawned so widely, I heard his jaw crack. “Probably some old cowboy annoyed that his bunkhouse is all fancy now.”

  Oscar huffed a tiny laugh. “Still. I can’t just let them—”

  “Before you go getting out the equipment and filming another vlog entry,” I interrupted. “Have you considered it might be someone left over from the party needing a place to crash after too much to drink? Or,” I hesitated. “Or maybe a super fan trying to work up the courage to get a peek at his favorite web series star?”

  Even in faint light seeping in around the window shades, I could see Oscar making a face. “You think it’s Enoch out there? I haven’t even met him.”

  “Yancy seemed very determined to keep him away from you,” I muttered, slipping out of bed and shoving my feet into my sneakers, leaving the laces flopping. “Enoch’s a teenager, right? Fairly isolated out here in bumble fuck nowhere Texas, a celebrity—” Ezra snorted loudly at that. “Someone he admires,” I said, rolling my eyes, “is out here, on his little corner of the world, and he finds out…” I shrugged. “I’m just saying teenage brains don’t always work with all logic cylinders firing and sneaking out to bother his favorite medium after the household’s asleep might seem like a great idea to Enoch.”

  Oscar arched a brow in that way he had, that I was pretty sure I shouldn’t find very sexy but seemed to just do it for me, anyway. “Would it have been a great idea to you? When you were a teenager,” he clarified. “If your big celebrity crush popped up in town and you had the chance to meet them, would you have done that?”

  I made a face, my ears feeling hot under his knowing smirk. “No.” It was only a tiny lie. Mostly because my teenage-years crushes had all been historical figures or fictional characters, neither of which I would have had any chance with for obvious reasons. “But for a kid like Enoch, it might seem like a good idea. His brother seemed to think it was important you stayed out of his way, so either Yancy is weirdly protective or he’s worried Enoch might do something to make you uncomfortable if he knew you were here.” I tilted my head towards the door, where we could still hear someone moving around. “Like maybe sneak over at night to get a peek and maybe talk to you away from his overprotective brother.”

  The steps were still crunch-thumping around the bunkhouse in a steady rhythm. They didn’t speed up or slow down, and they never varied in intensity.

  It was kind of unsettling, truth be told. Oscar and Ezra both got out of their beds and shuffled over to join me in the small seating area. Something moved past the window, a dark shape against a dark sky, but I couldn’t make out anything more than mass, than the fact it was darker than the world around it. The steps thumped on.

  “I don’t think it’s Enoch,” Oscar said finally. “It feels like a ghost. There’s definitely someone wanting my attention.” He reached up and tugged his ear, like something was tickling it or making it ache. “Though… maybe? I don’t…” He shook his head, his face screwing up into a moue of frustration. “This is weird. I feel someone trying to talk to me but it’s like they’re on the other side of a thick piece of glass. And they’re not…” The steps stopped. “They’re not the ones outside.” He cast his gaze about the room. “I think it’s my party ghost.”

  “Your what now?” Ezra yawned. “You didn’t tell me there was a ghost at the party. Or is this more like a party ghost in that it brings over illegal substances and wears ski goggles even though we’re several hundred miles from the nearest mountain, calls you lovey-dear, and grinds their teeth too much?”

  “Er, the former,” Oscar laughed softly. “It’s a woman, and I’ve just heard her laughing, but this energy feels like it could be her. Maybe.” He frowned. “I think.”

  “Right, well. Y’all figure out what ghost Oscar thinks he saw or didn’t see and their party drug habits, I’m going to see who’s trying to scare us,” I muttered. “Wait here.”

  “What are you going to do?” Oscar demanded. “Go out and reason with something you don’t believe in?”

  “I believe in teenagers,” I shot back. “You worry about your bad connection, I’ll tell Enoch to give us some privacy and he can talk to you tomorrow.”

  Ezra let out a low whistle. “Hell of a time to pick to butch it up, Jules.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake…” I strode to the front door and, after a brief fumble with the lock, threw it open. The security light was on and had been for several minutes, something I wanted to point out to Oscar an alleged ghost couldn’t cause. Not if they were as ephemeral as I’d always been led to suppose. “Hello?”

  Nothing but the rumble-snort of cattle in the nearby pasture and night bugs making a racket.

  “It’s not Enoch,” Oscar hissed. “Shut the door before you let those awful mutant crickets in.”

  “You mean the cicadas?” I asked as the rattle of the big insects built to a fever pitch outside. I shut the door, though, and turned to face both him and Ezra. “What’s going on?”

  “I just hate those things,” he muttered, edging closer to Ezra. “That’s all.”

  Ezra was rubbing his arms again, even though the chill from the window unit wasn’t nearly as pronounced as all that. “I’m not feeling well,” he murmured. “Maybe I ate something weird.”

  The cicadas fell quiet, a sudden silence like the world had been shut off outside the bunkhouse. The quiet lasted only a second, though, before it was broken with a reverberating crash that made the windows rattle and the door shake in its frame. “Holy shit!” I gasped, staggering back from the door as the second thump fell. Oscar groaned, clapping his hands over his ears and going to his knees even as Ezra flat fell onto the floor, his eyes wide and his lips parting in on a quiet scream. He arched and gasped, fingers scrambling at his hair, his throat, his chest, then he fell limp.

  The cicadas roared back to life after another few moments.

  Oscar scrambled to Ezra’s side. “Julian, help me here. He’s fainted or something! Ezra. Ezra, wake up! Ezra!”

  I crouched on Ezra’s other side and checked his pulse. “It’s strong and steady,” I said. “Is he breathing normally?”

  Oscar hesitated, then nodded. “When… when I first got to him, it seemed like he was choking a little, but he’s steady now.”

  I carefully moved Ezra into recovery position, just in case he got sick. “Does he have epilepsy? Any recent head injuries you haven’t told me about?”

  Oscar shook his head, eyes bright and wet. “No, no, and no. Not as far as I know, anyway. He’s never… This is new.” He scrubbed at his eyes with the heels of his hands as he added, “He’s fainted before—he’s like one of those goats, I swear. But it’s never been like this.”

  I nodded, remembering how he passed out at Hendricks House, just dropping stone cold to the ground. There hadn’t been anything like we’d just witnessed, and Oscar had seemed to take the faint in stride, worried for his friend but not on the verge of panic as he was now.

  Ezra stirred, a low, guttural groan rumbling up as he struggled to sit. “Just a sec,” I soothed, pushing gently against his shoulder. “What happened? Can you tell us?”

  Ezra turned wide, unfocused eyes on me first, then Oscar. “What…” he stared at Oscar for a long, long moment. “You glow. I didn’t realize. You glow so much.” His smile was crooked and boyish as he reached out one long finger and brushed it in the air beside Oscar’s face, turning it to look at the pad as if he’d gathered up something and wanted to examine it further. “So much.”

  “Ezra, what are our names?”

  He stared at Oscar for another open-mouthed second before his eyes narrowed, then opened, and his body shuddered with an in-drawn breath. “Oscar Michael Fellowes, my best friend and platonic life partner. And you are Julian Pain in my Ass Weems, Oscar’s man crush and the guy who makes him make those disturbing noises when you think I’m asleep
in another room. Sidebar, mate, your apartment walls are thin as paper, and I can definitely hear everything.” He slid his gaze to Oscar. “Everything. You’re both dirty, dirty boys and I’m kind of into it.” He closed his eyes again and groaned. “What the hell happened?”

  My face was hot as I remembered, a bit unwillingly, the last time I’d had Oscar in my bed back home and just what Ezra probably heard us doing and for how long. I cleared my throat, and he smirked. “That’s what we’re trying to figure out. What do you remember?”

  Ezra sighed. “The car breaking down, the party…” he frowned. “Kind of hazy, but I’m pretty fucked up right now. I remember everything, even the footsteps a few minutes ago, the banging… But it’s like watching it happen to someone else.”

  I sat back on my haunches, considering. “I think maybe it might not be a bad idea to go to the emergency room. You had what appeared to be a seizure out of nowhere and—”

  “And,” Ezra cut me off, “we’re most likely an hour or more away from the nearest emergency room. I’m not terribly familiar with the world out here but I’m willing to bet it’s a small-town ER, so they’d shunt me on to a big city one, which would be even further out. I’m feeling better,” he continued, turning to Oscar. “I promise. It was just a weird episode and I’m fine.” His smile was shaky and didn’t reach his eyes. “How about I promise if it happens again, we go straight to the nearest ER even if you have to, I don’t know, fucking helicopter me there?”

  Oscar made a wet, sad sound. “Don’t even joke about that, arsehole.” He flung his arms around Ezra and the pair of them fell into an embrace, murmuring to one another low enough that I couldn’t make out individual words. Feeling superfluous, I pushed myself up and went to check out the front door one more time.

  The cicadas were rustling back to life, and the soft lowing of the cattle was oddly comforting. If they weren’t afraid, then nothing was amiss, I thought.

  Though what was there to be afraid of? A drunk party guest who lost their way? A fanboy teenager? I shut the door and locked it behind me, turning to face Oscar and Ezra who had curled up around one another like otters on one of the beds. I wasn’t jealous—I knew their relationship was nothing carnal or even vaguely romantic, but I did feel a pang of something. Something that felt like loneliness, or maybe it was some form of envy. “I’m going to go back to bed,” I announced.

  “Okay,” Oscar said on a yawn. “Good night, Julian.”

  I nodded. “Yeah. Night…”

  Chapter 6

  Oscar

  Breakfast came at seven a.m. Whether I liked it or not. A paper-thin voice just loud enough to tease me out of sleep notified me of that at exactly five till the hour. “Wakey wakey,” they whispered, still no visible sign of him but his voice close to my ear. “Breakfast is about on the table, and I bet you’re hungry. You had a shit day yesterday.” He sounded almost sympathetic, at least as much as someone can while being, you know, dead and also whispering.

  I groaned and rolled onto my back. It took a moment for me to realize it wasn’t Ezra I was hearing, but someone who wasn’t there, not in the flesh. “Why can I hear you and no one else?” I complained, so groggy I wanted to cry a little. The weird, muffled feeling I’d been dragging for days was persisting “And why are you whispering? No one else can hear you.” Hell, I was verging on shocked that I could, but I wasn’t going to let on.

  He snorted softly. “You’d like to think so, huh? But get up, get up, get up,” he sing-songed in that raspy whisper. “You’re gonna need food in your belly to deal with the bullshit comin’.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He was quiet for a long time, but his presence was there, pressing against the thick, muffled wall around me, waiting. “Mason Albright’s all het up,” he finally said. “He’s angry and he… he wants to hurt someone.”

  Ezra shifted on his bed and cursed under his breath. With a soft swear of his own, my new ghost-friend disappeared. The sudden lack of his presence left me feeling weirdly bereft. Not being able to use my abilities as usual was like missing a vital part of myself. These little visits from my new friend were teasing me, I thought bitterly. Reminding me of what I was unable to do and making me feel less-than in ways I had never imagined possible.

  Ezra got up and started dressing, talking under his breath as he looked for his clean clothes and disappeared into the bathroom for a few minutes for morning necessities. For a few moments I thought I could burrito myself in the quilt and doze, miss breakfast entirely, and let them get me when CeCe arrived, but Ezra had food on his mind.

  “Come on, I’m starving,” Ezra moaned, pulling on my arm until I sat up. I hadn’t really gone back to sleep after his episode, not entirely. I’d drowsed, ears keen for any sound that was outside of the normal. The footsteps, the laughter, none of it came back. I couldn’t shake the watched feeling, though, or the unsettled feeling being unable to sense any ghosts was giving me.

  “Gimme a minute,” I mumbled, rummaging for a change of clothes. The bathroom door was shut, so I assumed Julian was in there doing his morning routine, having slipped in there after Ezra, which somehow always took forever but ended with him smelling really good and his face being super smooth and… well. I’d save my thoughts on what I liked to do with him first thing in the morning for later. After we were in a hotel room with a door between us and Ezra. Finally dressed, I met Ezra in the sitting area.

  “You’re wearing that?” he asked, checking out my skinny jeans and deep red cut-away velvet frock coat. “Aren’t you going to sweat to death?”

  “I never have before.” Doing a little spin to show off the way the tails flared, I gestured to the bathroom. “Once he’s out, we can get going.”

  “Oh. He left like half an hour ago,” Ezra said, brows drawing down. “I thought you heard him?”

  Oh. “Well. No use waiting around then. I hope they have tea.”

  Ezra inhaled as if he wanted to say something, but thought better of it, grabbing his overnight bag from the coffee table and opening the door to wave me through first.

  “How are you this morning?” I asked as he slogged through dew-damp grass and surprisingly slippery mud on the way to the main house. The space where the massive tent had been set up the night before was empty, the grass and mud churned up as the only evidence it had ever existed. It made the space seem strangely lopsided, the huge house on one side but nothing more than kicked up dirt and divots of grass where the party had been. “After that incident last night—”

  “I’m glad he didn’t wait for us,” Ezra blurted. “I know it sucks, and it hurts your feelings and whatever is going with the two of you isn’t as subtle as you think because I can absolutely see how you’re both trying your damnedest to fuck this up before it even gets going, but I need to talk to you and if him going off in a snit this morning because something crawled up his arse last night is what it takes to get you alone for a minute, then I’m sorry but I’ll take it.”

  I stared at Ezra. “Feel better?”

  He nodded. “A bit, yes.”

  “So, what is it you wanted to talk about?”

  “You’re going to ignore the rest of that? Seriously?”

  “It depends,” I shrugged. “Is that what you wanted to talk about and you’re suddenly terrible at lead-ins, or is it something else and you’re trying to avoid the topic and hope I pick an argument about what you said regarding Julian and me?”

  “The former.”

  “Well. How about if I promise to be in a snit later, then?”

  “Okay. That works.” He closed the distance between us by another few steps and lowered his voice to a whisper. “I think… I don’t think I’m alone.”

  “Um. You’re demonstrably not,” I hedged, though a sinking feeling had opened in my gut and was rapidly becoming a whirlpool of anxiety.

  “You know that’s not what I mean, damn it. When we stopped last night, out on the road… I felt strange. Julian did too. I could tell
. He got all spacey while the two of you were talking, didn’t he?” When I nodded, Ezra made a satisfied little sound. “I can’t explain it but it’s like… like a buzzing in my head. And I don’t feel like it’s mine.”

  “Ezra,” I said softly, “are you saying you’re… possessed?”

  He barked a laugh. “No! Oh my god, how awful would that be? I’m saying… I’m saying…” he flapped one hand at the house, at the world around us. “I’m saying this place is strange, and something is happening. I was fine until the car crapped out, but now I feel so weird, Oz. I don’t feel like myself anymore.”

  I nodded. “Okay. Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to talk to CeCe—”

  “No, Oz, listen—”

  “No, you listen. Watching you last night, hearing you this morning… Something is wrong, Ez, and I’m not going to trip along blithely like it’s not. Your health is not worth it. This show is nothing compared to making sure you’re alright. Either CeCe will get that, or we’ll have to break our contract.”

  “Oz,” he groaned, “it’s not that bad…”

  “Don’t lie to me. Don’t pretend like you’re not scared, Ezra.”

  A low buzzing rumble came from somewhere to my right, growing louder by the second. Ezra sighed. “Company.”

  “I’m talking to CeCe when she gets here,” I muttered. “I love you, you twat.”

  A shadow of his usual smile creased his lips. “I’m the only twat you love, you giant—”

  “Hey!” An ATV stopped yards away from us and a teenage boy swung off the seat, his grin so wide it must’ve hurt most of the muscles in his face. “You’re really you! Oh my god!”

  “You must be Enoch,” I said, forcing my own smile. Beside me, Ezra made a choked chuckling sound, and I stepped on his toes to shut him up.

  It didn’t work.

  Enoch approached rapidly, on legs so long I wondered how he could possibly move without tripping over himself. Sticking one hand out, he introduced himself. “Enoch Carstairs. My Pops owns this place,” he said, gesturing with his free hand as he pumped mine hard with his other one. “I heard y’all were here and—” his grin faded a bit. “Well, I overheard y’all were here and figured I’d come out to make sure y’all knew breakfast was on. We’re having some horses delivered today, and I was supposed to go help at the stables, but I wanted to… to…” His face flushed a deep pink. and he did that awkward teenager-facing-a-person-they-like shuffle that would’ve made me tilt my head and say awww, bless if it wasn’t directed at me.