This Side of the Grave (#5 Night Huntress)

To my dismay, the first two people I saw when I came upstairs later were Mencheres and Kira. They sat next to each other in what I guessed was
the living room, my cat sedately curled in Kira’s lap.
Both of them looked up, so it was too late for me to run. For once, I was grateful for Mencheres’s trademark stoicism as I met his impenetrable
expression. If he’d waggled his eyebrows knowingly, or crossed his wrists in a mime of bondage, I might have jumped right out the nearest window.
“Let me say right off that if I could avoid you two for the next decade, I would,” I got out in a rush. “But since I can’t indulge in a little modestysalvaging
me time right now, I’ll just offer my sincerest apologies and hope we never mention what happened again. In fact, you know that amnesia
spell you put on me when I was sixteen, Mencheres? I’d love another one.”
“You erased her memory when she was a teenager?” Kira asked in surprise.
“That’s a story for another time,” he smoothly answered her before turning that charcoal gaze back to me. “Unfortunately, Cat, my ability to erase
your memory was predicated on your half-human status. Vampire memories can’t be altered. At least, not that I’m aware of.”
“Just my luck,” I muttered. “Well, then let’s go with Plan A: Pretend it never happened.”
“Pretend what never happened?” Kira replied with deliberate emphasis even as she gave me a purposefully blank look.
I flashed her a grateful smile. “Exactly.”
Something hazy caught the corner of my eye. I turned to see Fabian floating in the doorway, watching me with a mixture of happiness and
wariness.
“Hey,” I said in surprise. “Aren’t you supposed to be with Dave? He’s not here, too, is he?”
“He’s still in Ohio.” Fabian came nearer, almost twitching in either excitement or agitation. “Are you well, Cat? Can I . . . do anything for you?”
There went that tingling in my cheeks again before I reminded myself that Fabian couldn’t mean anything suggestive by his question. He wasn’t
solid, which was a definite requirement for what I’d needed before, my smutty lack of preference as to who provided it notwithstanding.
“I’m fine,” I said, trying to cover my lingering embarrassment with a businesslike mentality. “But why’d you leave Dave? Did something happen?”
Maybe Dave had to stop trying to infiltrate Apollyon’s ghouls because of something going on with Don or the team?
Fabian seemed to shift uncomfortably even though his feet didn’t touch the floor. “I thought you needed me,” he mumbled. “So I found you. Dave
still hadn’t come across the ghouls and it seemed okay to leave him—”
“What do you mean, you found me?” I interrupted, trying to make my voice calm instead of accusing. Fabian already looked like he might burst
into tears, if that was even possible for a ghost. Still, if anything had happened to Dave because he hadn’t been able to send Fabian for help . . .
“He means you seem to be a spook magnet now,” Bones supplied, coming into the room. “Dozens of ghosts followed you from New Orleans to
Tepesh’s and then even here. I suspect Mencheres has been sending them away lately, or you’d have woken up with some perched next to you in
the cell below.”
Mencheres gave a concurring shrug even as Fabian looked more miserable. “So you just . . . found your way to me with no one telling you where
I was?” I asked the ghost in disbelief.
He nodded, almost boyish in his dejection despite the fact that Fabian had been forty-five when he died. “Don’t be angry. Dave tried to call you
but it went to voice mail, and I just felt like you were reaching out to me. I rode a few ley lines, not sure where I was going, but somehow I ended up
here.”
Ley lines. Spook highways, Bones had called them once. I still didn’t fully understand how they worked, but I knew ghosts used them to get places
very fast because they contained some sort of magnetic energy they could ride on. Like bullet trains for the dead, but invisible.
And these ley lines had led Fabian to me because he felt like I was “reaching out” to him. Him, and a bunch of other ghosts, from what Bones had
said. Marie’s blood was the gift that kept on giving, it seemed, and each new revelation about its effects only mired me deeper into trouble.
If I’m a ghost magnet, it won’t take long before more than ghosts find me, I thought with dismay. Aside from how I didn’t like that some of them
might be Marie’s spies, this presented another problem, too. For the lethal cadre of ghouls out to stop Apollyon by killing me before tensions
reached a boiling point, I’d just made myself a much easier target. Nothing said, “She’s over here!” quite like a line of ghosts following after me
wherever I went.
“Fabian, I’m not mad at you,” I said in a soothing way, because he was flitting around in obvious agitation and it hadn’t been his fault. How could
he know I now had the ghostly version of a dog whistle going off in my veins? “But I’m going to need your help. Are those other ghosts still nearby
now?”
He glanced at the windows, which, due to the glare from the lights inside and the darkness outside, were harder for me to see through.
Especially since I was looking for people who were transparent, anyway.
“Yes.”