Netherworld: Drop Dead Sexy (31 page)

Then like a light switch, her eyes
flicked off. She dropped to the floor, twitched, and lay still. I
waited to see if her ghost would rise, but there was no sign of
afterlife.

Erica Ford was completely
gone.

I’d killed her. I tried to feel
something: guilt or horror. Even sadistic pleasure would have been
nice. Only profound exhaustion filled me.

Too tired to care, I drifted around the
room. The sensation of the thinnest bits of me dissolving into
nothing was unable to rouse my interest.

The sensation of cobwebs drifting over
me brought me around. I looked into the hint of a woman’s face. The
wraith was unrecognizable; I’d seen the pictures of all the Judge’s
other victims but I couldn’t have identified her. She seemed a
super-misty version of that agonized figure in the painting ‘The
Scream’. Only blurred gray pits where her eyes, nostrils and mouth
should have been suggested a face.

She seemed to nod at me when she
realized she had my attention. Then smoky tendrils of her drifted
around me, slowly wrapping around my essence. It was like being
embraced by silky strands of hair.

The suggestion of her head fell back,
and the gray hole of her mouth gaped wide as a thin whistle of a
scream scraped through the air. The next second a jolt zinged
through me, and substance returned to me, along with the sensation
of weight.

The wraith fed me her energy,
subjecting herself to the horrible pain of being
drained.

“Wait. Stop.” I didn’t spare a thought
to the fact I could talk again, that Erica’s magic had died with
her. I struggled against the wraith, and she shredded in places
where I pushed. I stopped fighting, but the electric thrum
continued even as she came apart. The smoky bits clung stubbornly
to me, insisted on bringing me back towards wholeness.

“Why are you hurting yourself?” I
cried, my voice growing stronger as she became less. “Stop
it!”

“The Ripper,” a low mumble said in my
ear. I turned my head – I had seemingly real body parts again – and
I faced another drawn, gray featured face. “Down there.”

The wraith who’d fed me disappeared. I
prayed she hadn’t sacrificed her entire existence just to pull me
back together. Murdering Erica hadn’t offered a single guilty
impulse, but my guts curled in horror to think I might have
cannibalized another spirit.

“Down there,” the wraith at my ear
muttered again. My gaze followed the direction she indicated, which
seemed to be the shadowed area across from the card
table.

Gentle pushes guided me towards that
part of the room. The other wraiths gathered around me and seemed
to be working together to move me where they wanted me to go. I
adjusted my ghost enhanced night vision to the dim corner and
realized a wooden crate sat there.

“In there. Lift the lid.”

Thanks to the one wraith’s sacrifice, I
had the strength to do so. A Stygian black casket lay inside. Holy
crap.

“He’s in here?” I asked. The very
modern casket didn’t fit the Judge. He belonged in a wooden box,
the kind used in medieval times. Scratch that. The bastard belonged
in the deepest pit of Hell.

That’s right. I said bastard. Even I
have a point where only a cuss word will do.

“Kill him.”

“Why me?” I asked. Yeah, I wanted
justice for us all, but the Judge scared me spitless. The Judge was
the Ripper, a coldblooded serial killer. A vampire.

“You’re the strongest. We’ll give you
what we have left.”

They gathered tight around me and I
realized what they planned to do. As God is my witness, I tried to
get away. I’ll swear it on a library full of Bibles. I really
tried.

“No, please!” I screamed, my voice
louder than all theirs’ combined. “Stop! STOP!”

I twisted and fought, but it made no
difference. They fed themselves to me, their pale shrieks ringing
in my ears until they dissolved into nothing and their voices
silenced forever.

I ended on the floor, my ghostly self
mostly restored. I sobbed without reservation this time, grieving
as I’ve never grieved for anyone before, including
myself.

As Dan said, we all cry for the
dead.

Chapter Eighteen

I don’t know how long I cried. When I
finally stopped, I noted with horror the reddish-orange light
filtering into the shack. The sun was setting, and the Judge would
be climbing into his body pretty soon.

He planned to kill Tristan.

I jumped to my feet in an instant and
rushed at the casket. I struggled to open it. I might have regained
my strength, but my regular hum of energy wasn’t what I typically
used to move real world objects. This wasn’t going to be easy. Par
for the day.

I closed my eyes and homed in on the
steady pulse of the earth. Drawing in. Drawing in. Drawing even
more in until a little tingle twitched my fingers and
toes.

It wasn’t as good as a hit of computer
or camcorder, but it would have to do. I concentrated the energy
into my hands and sprung the casket open. I jumped back with a gasp
when the Judge was revealed to me, his black eyes wide open and
staring.

When he didn’t rise and suck me back
into a wispy wraith, I calmed enough to approach the casket again.
The Judge – the Fulton Falls Ripper – lay still, staring coldly but
emptily at the ceiling. Unfortunately, the last bit of scarlet
sunlight didn’t reach him at all. I would have loved to see him
burst into flames.

A wave of weakness surprised me.
Perhaps I still suffered the aftereffects of the Judge’s attack.
Maybe I’d been permanently damaged, as Dan had warned me could
happen. Or maybe simple grief and horror drained me.

No matter the reason, I was running out
of time. Dark spread in the cabin like an inkstain, held back only
by the dancing flame of the hurricane lamp. Forcing myself to be
calm, I drew on the natural magnetic pulse that now found its way
into the shack, re-energizing myself. My mind screamed for me to
hurry, hurry, but I knew I had to pull as much strength as
possible. I needed every bit I could get.

I reached the point of tingling again.
I continued to draw, trying not to notice the light slipping
through the boards of the shack had faded entirely. At last I made
one final pull, feeling a steady thrum buzz through my
body.

I hurried to the card table, climbing
on top of it to grasp the pointed broken board hanging loosely from
the ceiling. I yanked on it with all I had. The plank came easily,
so easily that I lost my balance. The board and I tumbled to the
floor.

“Way to go, graceful,” I muttered at
myself, scooping up the piece of wood after concentrating my power
into my hands once more. I straightened and faced the casket. I
screamed.

The Judge had sat up.

I almost dropped the stave. It took
only a millisecond for me to notice his eyes were blank, his face
expressionless. With the setting of the sun the lights had switched
on, but no one had come home yet. Nevertheless, that was the
world’s longest millisecond ever.

My relief proved short lived. The ghost
of the Judge hazed into existence beside his body, and his stare
lit on me in an instant. Fury suffused his features even as he
began to bleed into the corporeal tomb of flesh that held him
during the night hours. He struggled to remain free, knowing I had
the drop on him.

I took advantage of his distraction,
running up and plunging my hand into his smearing ghost. I yanked
energy from him, feeling myself go more solid, heavier, more real.
He screamed, his face a brutal rictus of pain just before his body
drew him in like a super-suction vacuum cleaner.

As his furious consciousness bloomed to
life in his eyes, I plunged the sharp end of the wooden board into
his chest with all the strength I’d leeched. I staked him with a
savage, animal cry, smashing through skin, muscle and bone,
knocking him back into the casket.

He animated quickly. “Meddling whore!
Take this out of me!”

“Don’t think so,” I snarled, my smile
brutal with triumph.

The victory didn’t last long. I hadn’t
staked him to the ground, which would have rendered him helpless.
He grasped the stave in his chest and pulled. It began to
reluctantly retreat from his body.

I backed off. Darn it, he would get
away, and then what? Without Erica, I thought the Judge probably
couldn’t touch me until he returned to ghost form, but Tristan
remained in immediate danger. And if Tristan went down, there might
not be anyone standing in the Judge’s way until he returned to
ghostliness himself, at which time he could come after me
again.

My mind racing and coming up with
nothing good, I continued to back away. As the Judge pulled the
board free of his chest, I bumped into the card table. The table
shook, and the hurricane lamp’s wobble sent crazed shadows jumping
along the wall.

Instinct overwhelmed conscious thought.
I grabbed the hurricane lamp and threw it at the Judge as he
crawled out of the casket. He dodged the lamp, and it crashed
against the ebony surface of his resting place. Glass shattered,
sending kerosene splashing on the casket and the
vampire.

Fire whooshed, setting my enemy ablaze.
The Judge screamed and spun like a top as he went up. Vampires are
very flammable even without an accelerant, and the flames consumed
my killer in an instant. I remained rooted to the spot, watching
him reduced to the spindly skeleton that still fought and jerked
until it was blackened as dark as the casket.

The shack was just going up when the
struggling framework of my killer collapsed into a pile of
ash.

* * * *

The Fulton Falls Ripper had met his
deserved end. Unfortunately, I knew his evil lived on. Weakened
once more from my exertions, I transported to the library, hoping
to find Dan so we could dash to Tristan’s rescue.

The main room we usually frequented was
empty except for Miss Gertrude, eternally reading as always. She
paid me no mind as I staggered drunkenly, exhausted once
more.

No doubt Dan searched for me, but I had
no idea where he might be looking. Tristan and Patricia had risen
by now and were probably under attack by the Judge’s allies. My
first instinct was to go to them and join in the fight. I assumed
the attackers were corporeal, probably vampires and shifters. One
dim, shaky ghost couldn’t hope to do much. I needed
help.

“The press conference,” I told myself.
“That’s where Tristan’s aides will be.”

I fixed the Old Courthouse in my mind
and prayed I had enough juice left in me to get there.

* * * *

The Old Courthouse where paranormal
folks’ trials are held is a grand old lady, replete with
ivy-covered columns and neo-classical architecture. Across the
large fountain-dotted courtyard looms the larger New Courthouse,
used for mundane human affairs. The more recent of the two is a
larger colonial-styled building and lovely in its own way, but
possesses none of the regal charm of Fulton Falls’ original
dispensary of justice. Tristan’s press conference had been staged
on the picturesque front steps of the Old Courthouse.

It resided between Rennings and Elder
Streets, where a collection of old Victorian homes, now the abodes
of legal practices, lined up like ladies-in-waiting. These former
houses and the Old Courthouse had been built in a time that knew
nothing of cars, let alone parking lots. The wide streets
accommodated both traffic and parking. Right now television news
crews choked the lanes. I saw local stations as well as those from
Savannah and Jacksonville represented, their vans congregating like
a herd of white hippos on the asphalt river. I was shocked to see
CNN had also shown up. Tristan was going nationwide
tonight.

The vans claimed my attention first and
foremost, not the podium crowded with microphones and surrounded by
Tristan’s staff, nor the crowds of curious onlookers and camera
crews. The local station’s setup was the closest to me, and I went
straight to it. The doors hung wide open, and all sorts of
equipment filled it, lighting up the interior like a Christmas
tree. For a starving ghost, it resembled a buffet of gi-normous
proportions.

Local reporter Amy Hoskins spoke to her
cameraman nearby as I scrambled into the truck. I had gone to high
school with her. We’d even been friends back in the day. She
managed to be a sweetheart but no-nonsense at the same time. I
frowned a little as I took in her appearance. The air had turned
her blond hair a bit flyaway and made her nose on the shiny side,
but in the heat and humidity of Fulton Falls, I couldn’t really
fault her slightly less-than camera-ready look. Amy was a great
gal.

As I eyed the banks of electronic
equipment, preparing to feast hard and fast, I heard Amy say, “Stop
bitching. You know these things never go off on time.”

I chose the humming stack of black
rectangles with plug-in cables running strands of black insulated
wiring in complicated loops. As I moved close to it, the cameraman
grumbled, “I don’t want Hector reaming me because we missed the ten
o’clock feed.”