Jenn Bennett - Bitter Spirits

The ghost was grotesque, his face an unearthly color. No life behind his eyes, yet he walked. And unlike the brutal shock Winter had felt when he recognized the ghost of Dick Jepsen, he felt something different now: a slow-building anger.

A few feet from Arnie, Aida blew out a hard blast of cold air and charged forward with one hand extended. The slap of her mortal flesh against his ghostly chest echoed off the tunnel walls. White sparks shot through his form. The tunnel lights dimmed and popped on and off.

“Arghh!” Aida jerked her hand back like it was on fire and shook it out. “That hurt!”

Enough of this bullshit. Winter grabbed her around the waist and pulled her backward, away from the ghost.

“He won’t budge,” she said, breathing hard as she twisted out of his grip and stood her ground. “Feels strange—solid, but unreal.”

“Move behind me or so help me God, I’ll put you over my shoulder. And do not touch that thing again. It’s dangerous, Aida. Jesus! Here he comes again. Move!”

“All right, I’m moving.” She ducked under his gun arm and started to shuffle past him, then grabbed his coat. “Buttons . . . Winter! Four of your buttons don’t match. They’re—”

He glanced down quickly, shifting his gaze back and forth from the coat to the approaching ghost. She was right—they didn’t match. They weren’t cabochon. In fact, they were embossed with dragon heads and looked as if they’d been hurriedly sewn, with loose threads sticking out like spider legs.

Four coins. Four buttons . . .

Some rat bastard had switched them out during dinner when he’d checked his coat. He’d been so desperate to get Aida’s clothes off—and back on, when the raid started—that he hadn’t noticed. That was careless and stupid.

Aida didn’t wait for permission. Just ripped them off and spun around to face Arnie. “After these, are you?” She held the fisted buttons above her head.

The ghost’s head tilted as dead eyes tracked the magic inside them.

“Ha!” she said triumphantly. “You want these, huh?” She shook the buttons in her hand like she was baiting a disobedient puppy.

Arnie’s bloated body lunged for her. So fast! Winter’s heart nearly exploded in shock.

She jerked away from the ghost but dropped one of the buttons. It bounced off a wall and skipped across the tunnel’s uneven floor.

Winter froze.

The ghost stumbled against the wall, lumbering, then bent to pick up the fallen button.

“Goddammit, throw the rest of them, Aida!” Winter shouted.

As the ghost stood up and refocused his attention on her, she shifted her gaze to some sort of sawed-off drainage pipe jutting from the wall where it was embedded. Dirty water dripped from the pipe’s hollow mouth. “If you want them, old man, you’ll have to find them,” she said to the ghost, then clamped her hand over the pipe and forced the buttons inside. They made a horrible racket as they clanged through the pipe—first sideways, straight into the wall, then down. Yes, definitely down below the tunnel.

Pulse pounding, Winter snatched Aida backward, ignoring her protests. He brandished his gun at the ghost and they both watched him, waiting for a reaction.

Arnie Brown walked to the pipe. Turned to face the wall.

And walked right through it.

“Mother of God,” Winter whispered.

“Unbelievable. Did you see that?” Aida said, unmistakable awe in her voice.

Yes, he damn well did, and he wasn’t sticking around to find out if the ghost was going to reappear. All he knew was that he didn’t have the damn buttons to attract it back and that was enough for him. He whisked Aida through the tunnel’s length, looking back over his shoulder a couple of times. It wasn’t until they climbed the steps to the House of Shields’ storage room and shut the tunnel door that he holstered his gun and allowed himself to relax.

He’d been stupid to let his guard down. Whoever wanted to scare him wasn’t finished. Was he going to have to endure the sight of every person he’d killed? The list wasn’t long, but he sure as hell didn’t want to relive it.

It came back to him again, the memory of Arnie Brown’s death. Winter hadn’t killed him—Bo had. Was the ghost gone now that the buttons were sitting under the street? What if the sorcerer sent another set of four Bo’s way?

“Did you know him?” Aida asked from his side. “Was he like the other ghost?”

Winter nodded as another dusty memory popped into his head. After Bo and Winter had watched Arnie Brown drown in the bay, they’d gone back home to his house on Russian Hill. The police were in his parlor, talking to Paulina as she stood in her robe and slippers while they hauled Mr. Johnson away in handcuffs. It was the cook. She’d blamed Bo, but it was the cook the whole time—one she’d brought with her from her mother’s house.

“What?”

He glanced down at Aida’s confused face. Had he said that out loud? Maybe seeing Arnie Brown had unnerved him more than he wanted to admit.

“Nothing,” he said. “I have to . . . I need to check on Bo.”

IT WAS ALMOST MIDNIGHT WHEN THE TAXI DROPPED HER OFF AT Golden Lotus and immediately sped Winter away to God knew where. To find Bo, he’d said after he’d briefly explained how Arnie Brown had come to his grisly end. And to warn his men about the raid.

She wanted to go with him, but he was a bull about refusing her. Said he wasn’t dragging her into danger. When she protested, he kissed her soundly—an unfair trick. “I’m not going to sit around worrying about you,” she’d said grumpily when he left.

And she didn’t worry about him . . . not much, anyway. She actually meant to, no matter what she’d said, and she stayed up for an hour or so, in case he called needing her for another ghost. But as soon as her back hit the creaking Murphy bed, she was out. Probably Winter’s erotic exertions in the hotel room that did it. That was certainly what she was dreaming about when the telephone rang the following morning.

She almost never got calls. Especially not before noon, and the little pink Westclox by her bed said it wasn’t quite ten, so the call couldn’t be for her. But as she laid her head back down, it rang again. She snatched the earpiece off the hook.

“Hello?”

“Were you sleeping?” Winter. His low voice hummed through the line.

“No, no . . . not sleeping.”

“You were.”

“Yes,” she admitted with a laugh. “Wait—is everything okay? You’re not calling from a shady doctor after some gangster pumped a few bullets into your legs, are you?”

“Nothing that dramatic.”

“Bo is okay?”

“Yes, fine. I’ll tell you everything that happened over breakfast, if you’ll join me.”

“For breakfast?”

“You have heard of this meal, yes? The one served before lunch?”

“I’m usually too busy sleeping to bother.”

“Well, you’ve done yourself a great disservice, because breakfast is the best meal of the day. My absolute favorite meal. There are few things I like more than breakfast. Very few.”

Aida twirled the telephone cord around her finger and smiled to herself. “You don’t say?”

“Pancakes. Bacon. Eggs.”

“All right. I might be able to crawl out of bed for bacon.”

“That’s my girl. You work tonight?”

“Eight o’clock show.”

“Did you have plans this afternoon?”

“Not a single one.”

“How about breakfast first, then we spend the afternoon having spectacular sex.”

She dropped the earpiece and fumbled around in the sheets to retrieve it.

“Aida?”

“I’m here,” she said as her racing pulse tripped.

“I’m going crazy for you. Please don’t say no.”

“Okay. Yes.”

He made a small, satisfied noise. “I’m at the Fairmont in Nob Hill. California and Mason. I had a long night, so I just got a room here rather than go home. I’ll call Jonte to come pick you up—”

And have the driver gossip to the rest of the Magnusson staff that he took Aida to Winter’s hotel room? “I can take a streetcar,” she said quickly.

“Are you sure?”

“I take them every day.”

“Be careful and keep an eye open for—”

“Ghosts?”

He grunted. “That’s a smart mouth you have, young lady.”

“You liked kissing it well enough last night.”

“Mmm, I liked kissing all of you last night.”

Aida flopped back on her pillow and grinned wildly at the ceiling.

He gave her the suite number. “Just come straight up. No need to stop at the desk.”

An hour later, stomach somersaulting with nervous energy, Aida was stepping off a streetcar into a terrible storm that came out of nowhere. The skies were perfect and blue when she left her apartment—a genuine summer day, for a change—and now she was dashing through puddles as a black sky opened up and hurtled torrents of rain. By the time she’d skidded onto the marble floor of the Fairmont’s column-lined lobby, she was drenched from head to toe and completely miserable. Her reflection in the glass door was not kind. What in the world was she doing here, anyway? Racing across town to meet a man in a hotel . . . it was disgraceful.

She considered going back home, but the lure of promised spectacular sex overrode both her pride and shame. She shook rain off her thin coat and cloche hat, ran fingers through her dripping hair, and marched past staring eyes to the elevator. Everyone knows what I’m doing here. A few minutes later, she was standing in front of his room, teetering somewhere between a mild nervousness and a raging panic. She knocked on the door, prepared to flee if he didn’t answer in five seconds, four seconds, three—