Broken Moon by Laken Cane

Chapter Fourteen

By the time I got home, my stomach was roaring at me, but a shower and change of clothing would come before I ate. I was a very dirty girl—in a gross and bloody way.

Even before I left my car, I could smell food coming from inside my house, and I knew Lucille had cooked me up a feast. I would devour every morsel.

But when I lifted my kill kit from my car and climbed the porch steps, company was waiting. I didn’t carry a gun as humans weren’t a problem for me and supernaturals didn’t care about a gun. I did wish I hadn’t taken off my various belts and sheaths, as I was currently without holy water, stakes, or even salt.

I did, however, still have my trusty and wonderful demon blade. I gently placed my kit on the floor against the wall. Without saying a word or taking my stare from the shadowy figure at the end of the porch, and I drew my blade.

It came out with a sexy snick that gave me goosebumps, and once again I wondered at the strange attachment I had for the knife. I faced my silent visitor. “What do you want?”

He said nothing but moved forward, and it was only when I saw the air sort of wrinkle and shimmer that I realized he was only a spirit. I blew out a hard breath and slid my blade back into its sheath. Sometimes I’d see a dozen “ghosts” a day, and sometimes I wouldn’t see one for a week.

Some of them tried hard to talk, but some of them seemed to have lost their capacity for understanding what speech even was. This man seemed to be in the latter category. He simply stared, frowning ferociously, aware I could see him but upset that I didn’t know what was wrong. I should feel it, I was sure he believed, this poor dead soul.

“I’m sorry,” I said gently, “I can’t hear you. But I’ll help you. Do you know why you’re here?”

He stared at me for a few seconds, then slowly nodded his head.

“Sometimes we get lost and need help to find our way. Is that what happened to you?” I didn’t wait to see if he’d nod, shake his head, or ignore me. I dug my keys from my jacket pocket, unlocked the door, and picked up my kit. “Come inside,” I told the dead man.

The heavenly aroma of juicy meat and spices hit me hard when I opened the door, and I groaned. I was going to have to help this guy find his paradise soon or I honestly feared I might starve to death. Damn, I was hungry.

I didn’t have to turn and look to know the spirit followed me in. I could feel him like an ice-cold hand pressing against my back. I carried my kit to my bedroom closet, and he was waiting on the bed when I got there.

“Sometimes,” I chattered, as I put away my kit and pulled some pjs from a drawer, “people have unfinished business—usually revenge or the consuming need to tell someone something dire—”

He flew at me, his eyes wide and mouth gaping, and somewhere in my mind, I could actually hear him screaming.

“Okay,” I said calmly, waiting for my heartbeat to slow, “I understand. You need to tell me something important.” And I started guessing, even as I undressed and climbed into the shower. I wasn’t shy around dead people. If I had been, I’d never have gotten clean.  I continued guessing as I toweled off and changed into my pajamas. The first thing I asked was if he’d been murdered and he knew where his body was. Surprisingly enough, there were a lot of those.

I asked if someone else had been murdered, someone close to him, and he needed to take me to the body. No reaction.

He was young, early twenties, and because of that, maybe, I didn’t ask the one question I usually asked early on, and I didn’t ask it until I was sitting down at the dinner table, gobbling the most delicious foods I’d ever tasted. Lucille walked into the room, yawning. “I hope it’s not all cold,” she said.

“No, no,” I mumbled, my mouth food. “Good. So good.”

There were two steaks, three baked potatoes, warm bread, salad with just enough goodies in it to make me interested, and the largest apple pie I’d ever seen. There was a big bowl green beans with bacon and onion, thick slices of ham, and a platter of perfectly golden onion rings.

I was in heaven.

“Is it your child—” I started to ask, after I’d inhaled half a baked potato.

He slammed his ghostly ass down on my plate—on my plate—and got in my face. His eyes were wild as he gesticulated and silently screamed and begged me to help. To figure it out.

“I don’t have a child,” Lucy said. “I told you before I moved in that—”

“No, no,” I said, spearing a green bean through the dead guy’s leg, “I’m not talking to you. There’s a spirit in the room asking for my help.” I didn’t mind her knowing, for some reason. Lucille Shannon inspired trust, at least in me. Also, she apparently saw things herself, in her dreams. Though I’d kept my secret for years, it wasn’t the same as outing myself as a wolf. Hell, even the police knew I communicated with spirits—not that most of them believed it. That wasn’t a big deal. Being a vampire or a shifter, though, that was an entirely different thing. That was a secret I’d keep.

She made a perfect o with her mouth, and her eyes grew just as round. “What?”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “The girl who has spooky dreams is afraid of ghosts?” I took a drink of water. “I’m going to call him Jim. Makes things easier.”

“What does Jim want?” she asked, her voice hushed. “What is he saying? Where is he?” She cut a slice of pie and began eating quickly, as though she were too excited to just sit there doing nothing.

“I can’t hear him. It’s rare that I can hear what they say although…”

She stared at me, her cheeks bulging with pie. “Yeah? Although?”

“When a certain type of person dies, I can hear them.” I couldn’t tell her that ‘certain type of person’ was a wolf. I’d heard my former alpha’s mate after she’d died and come to me. Of course, I’d been a ten-year-old child then and maybe I’d changed as I’d grown older. No dead wolves had come to me since, so I really didn’t know.

That had been a fun time. Only not really.

He’d been full of grief at losing not just his wife, but his mate. Wolves could marry and have significant others without ever finding their honest to God fated mate. But Adam Thorne had found his. Her death had been a blow he had never really recovered from, and when she’d come to me and insisted I go to him with a message, I hadn’t hesitated.

I’d never told another living soul about that encounter. Not even my mother or father knew I could communicate with the spirits of the deceased, and I’d never told either of them about my visit from our dead female alpha.

Her message had been succinct. “Tell him this exactly. There is no promise. Only threat.”

Then she’d disappeared and I’d never seen her again. The alpha had been angry at me. Disgusted. And so very hateful. I didn’t think he’d believed me when I’d told him she’d come to me—I only knew that from that moment on he seemed to hate me. He’d lost the love of his life and maybe he’d thought I was messing with him.

The details had grown fuzzy over the years, but I still remembered how he’d watched me after that, watched me with a darkness that had made me lower my gaze and run away every time I found myself near him.

Two years later, he’d killed my father and banished me from the pack.

I believed, as the doctor believed, that he hadn’t banished me just because of my father’s attempt to gather followers to help destroy him. I believed he’d never forgiven me for telling him that I could talk with the dead—worse, his dead mate. The love of his life.

The spirit—Jim—had become agitated, and I pushed my plate away to tend to him. “Don’t throw this food away,” I told Lucy. “I’ll be back to finish it off.”

She nodded, darting her eyes around the room, hoping to catch a glimpse of the dead man.

I stood and faced him. “You need me to find a child. Is it your child?”

“Wait.” Lucy jumped up and ran around the table toward me, then hesitated, grabbed a chair, and put it between her and where she thought the ghost might be. “I had a dream.”

“A dream about a child?” I asked.

“Yes. Usually, I write my dreams into a sort of internal dream notebook, then lock them up in a file cabinet where they won’t bother me. But sometimes, like with you, I pay attention because I know…” She shook her head. “I know there’s something I can do. That it’s close. Sometimes I have trouble separating what might be a telling dream from a dream I have because I’ve seen something on TV…do you know what I mean?”

“Just tell me about the dream, Lucille.”

“There was a child. A little boy, maybe five or six years old. I didn’t see him, but I felt the urgency of his circumstances. And the one thing that I did see—the only thing, really, is the date September seventeenth.” She stopped and looked at me expectantly, but she wasn’t the one who had my attention, really.

Jim was going nuts. Seriously nuts. Blinking in and out, screaming silently, whirling through the room—and then he stopped with a disorienting abruptness right in front of my laptop, which was sitting on the countertop. He pointed.

“Okay,” I said. “That date, the child…this is why he’s here.” I glanced at her. “When did you have this dream?”

“Just now,” she told me, “before you came home. It was what woke me up.”

“Could you have had it because he was in the house? In your room?”

She shuddered, paled a little, then nodded. “I suppose I could have.”

I strode to my computer. “That date will be when the boy was kidnapped, I have no doubt. Let’s find out who he is.” I quickly keyed in “September 17 Jakeston kidnapping” and waited to see what would come up.

“Son of a bitch,” I whispered. “Of course. This is Mayor Hedrick’s little boy, Noah. This just happened a couple of weeks ago.”

“Oh my God,” she said, her hand over her heart. “How do we find him?”

“That’s why it’s good to see ghosts,” I told her grimly, my stare on the dead man. “He’s going to show me where the child is.”

“Kait,” Lucy called, as I walked across the floor. She tossed me my jacket when I glanced back. “It’s freezing out there.”

The spirit walked to the kitchen door, calm now, and held out his hand. Come with me.

I shrugged on my coat, grabbed my cellphone off the table, and then took the hand that only I could see. This had never happened before. I wasn’t sure if I was getting stronger, I just knew life was about to change—for the mayor, the little boy, and the kidnapper.

For me. Certainly, for me.

God please,I prayed. Don’t let me be too late.

With the spirit of the dead man leading me on, I went to see if I could help save a little boy’s life.