He’s mine, not hers. He was Jo’s number one.
But a tiny part of her said, Thaddie’s not feral. Not yet. Sometimes Jo had dreams about him with the Braydens. The three of them as a family.
Those dreams weirded her out, because she wasn’t in them.
Done with this, Jo snagged a chicken leg and stood. “I gotta blaze. Be back in an hour or so.” She swooped in to kiss Thaddie. “Mwah!” Then she whispered to him, “Bitch tries anything, you tit-punch her.”
He nodded happily. Smacking cornbread, he said, “Bye-bye, JoJo.”
MizB walked her to the door. “Out to pick pockets again?”
“Yeah, you want me to grab you anything while I’m out?”
But the woman grew really serious. “How can you touch a child so innocent and good when your hands aren’t clean?”
Jo shoved the chicken leg in her mouth, raising both hands. Around the drumstick, she said, “Clean as they’ll ever be.”
“That’s not true, Josephine. I think you’ve forgotten you’re just a little girl.”
“Little girl? I’ve been a lot of things, but that ain’t one of them. . . .”
Out on the street, Jo mimicked, “How can you touch him? Meh meh MEH meh meh.” She snatched a bite of chicken, hating how good it was.
She turned the corner. Stopped in her tracks and swallowed hard. The chicken fell from her limp fingers.
A gun barrel was pointed at her face.
Wally.
Behind him stood his trio of asshole friends. They all looked spaced-out, eyes crazy bloodshot.
Wally’s long, stringy hair had been singed, and sweat poured down his blistered face. “People been saying the creepy pale girl’s always fucking with me.” His words were slurred, and the gun shook in his bandaged hand. “People been saying she was sneaking around my place last night. So I’m gonna ask the creepy pale girl once: why’d my goddamned house catch on fire last night—with us in it?”
Oh. Shit. “You left your teakettle on again?”
“Wrong answer, bitch.” He squeezed the trigger, and all the world went dark.
Wally had shot Jo in the face! So how had she lived? And where was she? Damn, her scalp was itching like crazy. She scratched—
A crumpled piece of metal was sprouting . . . sprouting from her forehead! She stifled a cry as she scraped it out. Immediately her vision cleared.
She pinched the thing between her fingers. Recognition. A spent bullet had just come out of her skull!
She found others caught in her hair. Shed from her head too? She collected them with the two that had been in her mouth. In her cupped palms she held six slugs.
But I’m alive. I’m . . . bulletproof?
I AM a superhero. (Secretly she’d always known it!)
She pocketed the slugs, narrowing her eyes. It was payback time. She hopped down from the table, or tried to. She floated to her feet—feet that weren’t touching the ground.
She gaped down at her body. She was wearing her same clothes, but her faint outline flickered. She glanced at the table. Atop it, a zipped-up body bag lay flat. This was a morgue? Other bodies in bags were lined up on tables, waiting for whatever happened in fucking morgues.
Realization sank in.
I was in that empty bag.
Because I died.
I’m a . . . ghost.
Her gaze darted. How the hell was she going to care for Thaddie? Surely MizB had taken him home after the shooting.
Jo’s shooting.
Wally and his crew killed me! Those pricks! She squeezed her fists and screamed. The lights above shattered, glass raining down.
She’d haunt Wally until he went insane, would drive them all crazy! She needed to hurt them—NOW!
Suddenly she felt herself moving, as if she were being sucked into the air. She blinked; her surroundings had disappeared, replaced with the hood. She was standing in front of Wally’s still smoking house.
She’d . . . teleported here? Of course! Because she was supposed to get revenge. That’s what ghosts did. Once she’d finished with that, she’d go snag Thaddie; they’d find a spooky deserted mansion somewhere. Live happily ever after and all that shit.
First step: get a bead on Wally. She started walking/floating over cracks in the sidewalk. Why did this movement seem so familiar? Why was her ghostness not freaking her out?
There was something so right about her new form, as if she should’ve been freaking out about her existence all the years before.
Homeless kids and runaways, other street rats like her, peeked out from lean-tos and abandoned cars. Gasps sounded as she made her way along the street.
So ghosts were visible to people. Would she meet other ghosts?
She heard the kids’ whispers. They all knew Wally had killed her. Some had watched her body get bagged.
A prostitute on the corner didn’t see her coming and backed right into—or through—Jo. Their bodies got tangled, and suddenly Jo was inside her, sharing her movements as the woman shuddered.
It was as if Jo was a hermit crab in a hooker-shaped shell. She couldn’t feel anything through the woman’s skin, but she could make her move. Awesome!
When Jo backed out of the shell, disentangling herself, the woman turned around with a terrified look on her face.
A moment passed before she registered what she was seeing. “Oh God!” She stumbled back, making the sign of the cross. “You died! The Wall shot you.”
“It didn’t take.” Jo’s voice sounded ghostly and hollow. “Where’s Wally staying now?”
The woman sputtered, “F-few houses down from his old crib.”
Jo float-walked back in that direction. Others followed her at a distance, wide-eyed, as if they couldn’t help themselves.
She found the digs—with the dragon guarding the lair. Voices sounded from inside, Wally’s among them.
Her nails lengthened and sharpened. They were black, and they ached. Ghosts have claws?
She tried to teleport into the house, but her body didn’t move, so she float-walked up to the porch, stopping at the front door. Could she knock? They probably wouldn’t open for her. Maybe she could “ghost” into the house, as she had the hooker shell.
With a shrug, Jo floated forward—and passed right through the door. Score! Breaking and entering would now simply be entering.
In the den, packets of smack and guns topped the coffee table. They’d already replaced all the weapons and drugs. Bags of new clothes were strewn around the house.
These dickwads had set up a few doors down. Burning down his pad had done jack.
Jo clenched her fists. She’d only come here to scare the gang, to moan woo-woo and send them running. But rage took hold of her.
Her claws ached to slash someone.
When the lights flickered, Knuckle and the two others glanced up. Saw Jo. Their mouths moved wordlessly—
They lunged for the guns.
With a shriek, she flew at Knuckle. “You gonna shoot me?” She slashed out with her claws. She half-expected her fingers to pass through his torso—yet four deep gashes appeared on his belly.
She gasped. Her claws dripped with his blood. She could become solid when she wanted to?
He clutched his bloody stomach, but guts slithered out between his fingers like eels. His knees met the blood-wetted carpet, and then he collapsed.
I just dropped a dude! Superheroes didn’t kill people. Not even bad people.
She should be screaming, yet all this felt natural. This is me. I ghost. I hurt bad guys.
No, I hunt them.
Realization struck her. She’d always been hunting.