have been doing as soon as we got here. Thankfully there didn’t seem to be any ghosts on this floor. So of course we made our way up.
Every horror movie I had ever seen began playing in my head. Well, to be honest, I never really watched any horror flicks—life is scary enough without adding to it, so it was more like every horror movie trailer I had ever seen began playing in my head. It turned out to be completely anticlimactic because there wasn’t anything on the second floor, either. I was sure we were going to make it out alive and I could start talking the man into giving me the ring when he opened a door that led up to the attic.
The man wanted to go up into the bloody attic. Notice lack of italics: when doing something that stupid you begin to wonder if he really is the man. Also note the use of the word bloody. I am not British or any variation of, but I do spend a lot of time watching British television. Not only do I learn all kinds of slang nobody in America understands, but I get to feel superior when I use it.
I stood at the foot of the steps watching him go up, and upon further examination of his perfectly rounded arse (the use of italics when referring to him was hereby reinstated), I followed him up.
Every stereotype of an attic that you can think of, this one had in spades: the cobwebs, the old trunks lying around, the thick layer of dust. I immediately regretted my decision when we discovered the ghosts were hiding there. Well, not really hiding—more like examining their loot. And yes, in case you were wondering, they still floated. My mind had not been playing tricks on me; they were, in fact, ghosts.
Well, actually they weren’t really ghosts, they were constructs created by an evil warlock who had endowed them with the ability to glide through walls and other ghostly powers as well as the ability to evidently steal jewelry, but I didn’t find that out until later. At the moment, they were still ghosts in my eyes. Ghosts that I was pretty sure were going to kill me and the man.
I stood there staring at them, waiting, positive they were going to swoop down and kill me at any minute, but nothing happened. They ignored us. It was like they couldn’t see us, just like the other customers hadn’t been able to see them. By that point my whole ghost encounter was seriously losing out to all the things my imagination had come up with and I was extremely disappointed.
“Well, this sucks. They can’t even see us!”
I might be mistaken, but I’m pretty sure the man dropped his head in his hands and groaned when I said that because as soon as I did, the ghosts, whom I thought couldn’t see us, turned and gave us their undivided attention. Evidently they hadn’t paid any attention to us because they were so used to people not being able to see them.
“Crap.”
“You think?”
Sarcasm is not the most attractive quality when you’ve got half a dozen ghosts bearing down on you, intent on adding you to their ranks. I was all prepared to run but he decided to make a stand. I didn’t know how he was going to fight them, but I decided to stay and find out.
What really happened was my feet froze and while my mind was screaming at them, “Get the hell out of here,” they were saying, “Huh?”
When the first ghost was just a few feet away, the man snapped his hand out, his fingers spread apart, and a bolt of bottle-green lightning shot from his fingertips and vaporized the ghost… construct… whatever. I’m pretty sure bottle green is the correct shade. It was a bit too light to be described as pine and too dark to be described as spring, so I’m going with bottle green. Too busy trying to come up with the correct shade of green the man was shooting out of his fingers, I didn’t notice until it was almost too late that while most of the ghosts had decided to gang up on him, one of them had decided to come after me.
When I finally did notice my imminent demise, I shrieked and instinctively my hands came up, making the same motion the man’s were. White lightning shot out of my fingers and vaporized the ghost, who was almost as surprised as I was. White lightning. Ha. Probably a leftover from all the moonshine I drank during my rebellious youth.
Anyway, back to the epic ghost battle going on. I had just vaporized one ghost and there were four more bearing down on the man. So I turned to ride in like the cavalry saving the day, but I was too late. He had already taken care of the rest of them. I was all revved up with no ghosts to kill.
Disappointed in the lack of available ghosts to take care of, it took me a minute to realize that the man was staring at me. Normally I’m all for a gorgeous man staring at me, but I couldn’t decipher what he was thinking. Based on the surprise covering his face, he wasn’t thinking anything flattering.
“What?” I crossed my arms over my chest and tried to act like I shot lightning out of my fingers and fought ghosts every day.
He just shook his head and began gathering up all the jewelry the now-vaporized ghosts had taken, shoving it all back into the bags they’d used. Once the jewelry was stored, he turned and walked down the stairs, not even asking if I was okay. Perturbed now, I followed after him, planning on demanding answers, but he was out of the house and already halfway down the block by the time I made it outside.
I began to seriously reconsider if this was actually the man or just another jerk, gorgeous butt or not. I followed him back to the store, this time not bothering to run, still planning on demanding answers and causing a scene if he didn’t give them to me. There was also the matter of the ring. I needed one more chance to look at it to make sure it really was what I thought it was. With the man acting like an ass, maybe I’d messed up and the ring wasn’t anything special, either.
The store was complete chaos when I arrived. People were running around screaming, women were crying that their perfect day had been ruined, men were standing around looking helpless, and the man was being led into a back room by the store manager. I ran after them, though, honestly, what was I going to say? Hey, I know he had bags of the store’s jewelry, but he didn’t steal it, honest. Ghosts did. Yeah. Totally believable.
First, I had to make my way through the hordes of people. Seriously, where had they all come from? There were two brides in the center of the store, both wearing the biggest, puffiest white wedding dresses ever to make it out of the 80s, screaming at each other until one of them made a running leap and tackled the other. They were on the floor, rolling around, fake nails and hair extensions flying. The grooms were trying to separate them when one of them “accidently” groped the other’s bride and then they were at it, too.
The staff, who would normally keep this kind of thing from happening, had been giving their statements to the police and now turned to them to stop the two fights in progress. The two cops present were older, overweight men, and it was obvious stopping the fights was the last thing they planned on doing. I could just hear them telling each other that they were too old for this shit.
I had to walk around the outside of the room, weaving between the spectators, until I made it to the door that the man had been led through. When I opened it, there was a short hallway filled with filing cabinets and boxes and then a doorway into what must be the manager’s office. I snuck up to the door and peeked inside, waiting for the perfect moment to step in and save the day.
The man was standing in front of the store manager, yelling at him. I was momentarily distracted by a vein popping in his neck—why was this man selling jewelry? I shook myself out of my fantasies and focused on what they were saying. I needed to know when to jump in and rescue him, though I still hadn’t thought of a plausible excuse for why he would have the jewelry. I’d think of that when I had to.
“You are so full of it, Steve! You saw the same thing I did—someone had to go after them and get the jewelry back; you know who owns this place. Do you think he would have been happy to know we didn’t stop his store from being robbed?”
Steve was a balding, middle-aged man with a paunch; him I could see working at a half-wedding, half-jewelry store. His face was purple and there was sweat beading on his forehead when he yelled back, “I k
now exactly who owns this store—the same man who set the whole damn thing up. You’ve worked here long enough to notice nobody buys the jewelry here. We’re losing money hand over fist, so he set this up to try to recoup some of those losses.”
That effectively shut the man up; I couldn’t see his eyes from where I was crouching, but I imagined they were all flinty and hard as he figured out what Steve was saying. All I could see was his back and I’m guessing the lightbulb moment was when it went ramrod straight and he leaned forward and grabbed Steve by the front of his shirt.
“Why didn’t you tell me he set up an insurance scam? I was hired as security, to stop incidents like this from happening; if he was planning on setting it up himself I should have been informed. Do you know what this means? Do you have any idea how furious he’ll be with me? I’ll have to go underground to hide from him and the only place for me to escape is to go through the Barrier, and if I happen to survive that, it still might not be enough.”
Steve yanked himself out of the man’s grip and backed away from him, moving behind the beige metal desk that was in the center of the room. “I told you to stay in your section. I stressed it. I couldn’t very well tell you ‘If some constructs come in today