“Who the hell are you?” I snapped in return.
His blue eyes shot to my face with every evidence of surprise, which cut short his anger. The female vampire’s voice was frosty as she said to me, “Who wants to know?”
I opened my mouth to respond to both of them, when I realized that Adam wasn’t acting as if an aggressive man had just tried to start a fight. My mate hadn’t taken his eyes off the female vampire. He didn’t even look at the Irishman. Adam never ignored a threat.
For a second I worried that the vampire might have caught him in her gaze, but Adam knew better than to let himself be trapped so easily.
I replayed the last few moments in my head and almost groaned. We didn’t have a second vampire. We had a ghost.
“You can hear me,” the dead man said, his voice dropping to a purr. He paced forward, ignoring Adam and the woman, all of his attention on me—as if he were a lion and I was a gazelle who’d just thrown herself in his path.
Even now when I had proof positive, he didn’t feel like a ghost.
The clothes that he wore should have clued me in right away because they weren’t modern. They’d just blended so well with the theme of the reception room, period correct down to the handmade shoes, that I hadn’t taken note of them.
I’d always been able to see ghosts. I knew about them. Knew the difference between the repeaters—the poor remnants caught in emotionally fraught moments that they repeat endlessly—and the sentient ones. I could tell the difference between a ghost that was a fading record of the person they had been and one whose soul was trapped beyond death. A few times I’d seen ghosts that were so real-looking they could almost pass as living. This man was different.
Or maybe, I thought, a chill climbing down my spine, I was.
I hadn’t seen one of the real-seeming ones since the Soul Taker had ripped my mind open—except for Aubrey. Aubrey had been lifelike, too; but he’d been as influenced by the Soul Taker in his own way as I was. This ghost was a lot more like Aubrey had been than he was like any other ghost I’d seen. Maybe this was what one of those real ghosts looked like to my new awareness.
I was scared down to my bones, but not of the ghost.
“Mercy?” Adam asked without turning his head from the vampire, whom he perceived as the greatest threat in the room.
The vampire…she was looking at me with interest bordering on hunger.
And that was another weird thing. Ghosts, like cats and certain other sensitive creatures, avoid vampires to the extent that I can sometimes tell there is a vampire in the room because there are no spirits at all.
“You can hear him,” she whispered. “See him.”
Adam took a step back until I rested against his body. He gave the sort of grunt that told me he understood that there might be a second threat. One he couldn’t see. I patted him to let him know that a ghost wasn’t a threat. Or at least I didn’t think a ghost could be a threat to me.
I didn’t answer the vampire.
“She can, can’t she?” The Irish lilt was lighter when the ghost wasn’t angry. The dead man rocked back with a broad grin. “Hello, doll,” he said to me. “Aren’t you an interesting find, then?”
He was wearing a shoulder holster with a big pistol. A 1911, I thought, though I couldn’t pick out the make other than it was different from the 1911 model Adam carried as his backup. The ghost hadn’t been wearing a gun when he’d come through the doors, but ghosts could be changeable like that.
The vampire glanced toward the Irishman, looking a little high and to the right of him. She couldn’t see him. She took a deep breath—vampires didn’t have to breathe except to talk, but most of them are pretty good at maintaining the illusion.
She looked at Adam, tried to meet his eyes, I think. But Adam moved his head, tipping it so she was in his peripheral vision, making it harder for her to capture him—if that was her intention. My mate seldom made unforced errors.
Finally, she turned to me.
She pursed her lips. “I think it is time for introductions. I am Elyna Gray.”
“O’Malley,” said the ghost with a frown.
Her lips quirked up. “O’Malley.”
She couldn’t see him, but she could hear him. I thought about the last few minutes and changed that to she could hear him some of the time.
“But I go by Gray,” she continued. “I live—my home is in Chicago. I’m here because my good friend’s daughter is supposed to be getting married this weekend. Travel is complicated for people like me—vampires—so I came early, just in case.”
“Jack O’Malley,” said the ghost, extending his hand to me with a challenge in his eyes. “Also from Chicago.”
“Mercy Hauptman,” I said.
I stepped around Adam so I could take Jack’s hand. It felt real, solid and warm—and a breath later it felt like nothing, though I could still see it. Disconcerted, I let my hand drop back down to my side, rubbing my fingers together to let the feel of his flesh dissipate.
“Jack O’Malley, Elyna”—I dispensed with the last name issue by dropping hers entirely—“my husband, Adam Hauptman.”
“Hauptman?” Elyna said with a faint frown. “I didn’t see your names on the guest list.”
“We’re not attending the wedding,” I told her.
Adam made no effort to join in the conversation except for a faint nod of acknowledgment when I’d introduced him. Because I could deal with both of them, vampire and ghost, while Adam could see only her, he would play backup. Adam didn’t say that was what he was doing—but I knew my husband.
Jack bent to his wife. I didn’t see his lips move, but Elyna nodded. “He says you feel like Gary Johnson, the caretaker of the ranch up the canyon.”
Johnson? I thought. Really, Gary. You couldn’t have come up with something better?
“My brother,” I said.
“Is there a reason you’re here rather than at the ranch with him?” she asked.
“Yes,” I told her. “He’s not there. The rig he drives is gone, and I’m worried about him. We were hoping there might be people here who know more about what’s going on.”
Honest answer. It wasn’t my fault she—they—would get a few false impressions from that.
Something skittered behind me, and I glanced over my shoulder. It was only a big house spider running across the tiled floor.
I returned my attention to Elyna—but that spider had been in a frantic hurry.
“Gary was supposed to bring down the sleigh today for a dress rehearsal, but he didn’t make it,” Elyna was saying in a determined effort to pretend Adam wasn’t still treating her like the enemy. “Jack was pretty sure it was the weather. The landlines are out—”
I should have been listening. Spiders, the ones I was familiar with, didn’t hunt down their prey like a coyote did. They waited for prey to come to them. That spider wasn’t hunting anything. It hadn’t been a predatory run; it had been a get-out-of-Dodge run.
I turned to see what the spider had been running from. I half expected to see nothing, having hesitated long enough for anything of the insect variety to have disappeared from sight. Maybe it was something as simple as a hotel cat or, in this lobby, a falcon, though I trusted it wouldn’t be a Maltese.
But it was there, all right—the thing the small spider had run from. It was a bigger spider, a much, much bigger spider. I felt the quietness that overtook the others as, alerted by my sudden tension, they, too, saw the spider.
The last time I’d seen her, this spider had been on the tree at Uncle Mike’s.
A thimble wasn’t a big thing, but a spider with a body the size of a thimble was a very big spider. She wasn’t as large as some tarantulas I’d seen—there’s a kind of tarantula in South America that’s so big its legs could hang over a dinner plate. But tarantulas weren’t metallic silver, either.