a cemetery and I needed her to look spooky, and she pointed out I knew absolutely nothing about fashion. In ordinary circumstances, the hat at least would have been an improvement but her hair had been the spookiest thing about her.
“You look quite elegant, Mrs. Dawson,” Adan said. He’d crossed into the Between with Honey and Jack through the gate in my condo. I wanted to strangle him.
“Thank you, my dear,” said Mrs. Dawson. “Men are in and out of here all the time, but you’re the first real gentleman to set foot in this house since my Robert passed.” She glanced at me and sniffed. I wanted to strangle her more.
“Jack’s a gentleman,” Honey said.
I glared at her. “You’re not helping.” I’d still never heard Jack say anything. I was beginning to wonder if he was a mute. At some point the Silent Bob act starts to get creepy.
“I beg your pardon, young man,” Mrs. Dawson said. “I’m sure you people can learn proper manners as well as anyone else.”
“Nice,” I said. “You’re even bigoted toward fairies.”
“I am not!” huffed Mrs. Dawson. “I don’t have a bigoted bone in my body.”
“You don’t have any bones in your body,” I said. “You don’t even have a body.”
Mrs. Dawson burst into tears-well, she no more had tears than she had bones, but she gave it her best shot. “You are so cruel,” she whimpered. “Do you think I like what’s become of me? Do you think I like being trapped here, separated for eternity from everyone who ever cared about me?”
“Gods, Domino,” Adan said. “Ease up a little.”
I tightened my lips and looked at the floor. “She could leave whenever she wants,” I muttered. “She’s just too damn stubborn!”
“So how are we going to do this? What’s our plan?” Adan asked.
“We get to the cemetery, Mrs. Dawson does the vengeful spirit bit. The rest of us use our glamour to remain hidden. When the ghost-hunter shows up, we grab him.”
“We grab him?” Adan said.
“That’s our plan?” said Jack.
“You’re not a mute!” I said. Jack shrugged. “Yeah, that’s our plan. I like to keep it simple.”
“What if he hurts me?” Mrs. Dawson said, her bottom lip trembling pitifully.
“He’s not going to hurt you. He has a crossbow, but we can grab him before he shoots you with it.”
“But what if something goes wrong?”
“Nothing’s going to go wrong. That’s the virtue of a simple plan.”
Something went wrong. It started with Mrs. Dawson herself. I hadn’t expected her to have any real acting chops, but it wasn’t unreasonable to expect a ghost to be scary. In fact, I’d seen it. The skeletal hag thing she’d pulled when she lost her temper with me had been a little scary. Problem was, she couldn’t fake it. At all.
Our first stop was the cemetery where I’d originally encountered Abe Warren, the one Antoine had formerly haunted and where his brother Keshawn still lurked. Keshawn might have provided an understudy in the event Mrs. Dawson bombed, but it seemed his ghost was deteriorating, fading. When I went to his graveside I could barely make out his shade in the darkness and his voice was a barely audible whisper. He didn’t have anything coherent to say, either. He couldn’t actually go anywhere without a Xolo to guide him, but that apparently didn’t stop him from decomposing. The ghost was dying and there was fuck-all I could do about it.
So it was all on Mrs. Dawson. I didn’t have a script-all she had to do was meet some basic standards of scariness. She just needed to haunt the graveyard and raise a little hell. We all got into position, the piskies hovering overhead, Adan and me skulking invisibly behind tombstones.
“We’re ready,” I said. “Show us the spooky stuff, Mrs. Dawson.”
She stood there clutching her purse and looking lost. “Well, I’m sure I don’t…” She cleared her throat. “Boo,” she said.
I looked toward Adan. I couldn’t see him, even with my fairy sight, but I knew where he was. “Did she just say boo? Tell me she didn’t fucking say boo.” The only answer was a choking sound that was frankly scarier than anything Mrs. Dawson had thus far produced.
“Mrs. Dawson,” I said, struggling to keep my voice even, “boo isn’t scary. I’m not sure it was ever scary, but it definitely isn’t scary anymore. Come on, give me some ghost. Express yourself. Let out that tortured soul.”
She just looked at me with a dazed expression on her face and shook her head.
“You’re fierce,” I offered. She wasn’t. Eventually, it got bad enough I was afraid the ghost-hunter would sniff out the trap even if he did happen to wander by. We hit the mist and relocated. Mrs. Dawson repeated her performance at Inglewood Park, Angeles Abbey down in Compton, Roosevelt in Gardena and Park Lawn.
By the time we got to Evergreen Cemetery in Boyle Heights, the night was wearing thin on multiple fucking levels. Honey assured me it was almost dawn, though I hadn’t noticed any change in the television glow of the Between. I’d never spent this much time in the shadow-world and I was beginning to imagine all the ways my body would protest the treatment when I finally got back into it. Most of all, I had a splitting headache that had started pinching my temples in Inglewood and got a little worse each time I used the invisibility glamour.
I crouched by a headstone, pressing the heels of my hands against the sides of my head. I tore one away long enough to wave it at Adan. I had to concentrate on keeping my ethereal brains inside my ethereal skull and steel myself to pull off the glamour one more time. Adan could coach Mrs. Dawson if he was up to it.
“Let’s do it,” Adan said, smiling at her. “Get angry. Think about Domino.” I growled at him, but he continued. “Think about her living in your house and…doing whatever she does. Come on now, let it all out.”
Mrs. Dawson’s face darkened. Her eyes narrowed and her lips tightened into a thin line. She began to puff up like she was going to blow. Adan looked over at me and nodded. “This is it,” he said. I ground my teeth, swallowed drily and tried to bring up that ice-cold juice from the Beyond I’d taken when I squeezed the changeling. Pain lanced through my head and hammered me to my knees. I gasped and looked desperately toward Mrs. Dawson. After all this, I was going to blow it because I couldn’t handle the glamour.
“Oooooo,” she said. “Wooooooo!”
Rage flared inside me and purged the pain in my head, leaving an empty and cold space in its wake. I stood up, drew Ned from the holster on my hip and stalked toward the ghost. I raised the gun, fully extending my arm in front of me, and placed the barrel against the center of her forehead.
“That’s it,” I said, my voice low and calm. “I’m done with you, lady. I’d gun you down right here, but shooting’s too good for you.” I moved the barrel down and pressed it against the bottom of her chin, tilting her head up to the starless cobalt sky. I leaned in until our noses were almost touching. “I’m going to banish you from your precious house, Maggie,” I whispered. “I’ll bind you across the street, where you can see it, but you won’t-”
“Nooooooo!” she screamed. Her face disintegrated like a sandcastle in the wind and her voice became a distorted, low-pitched moan. Her fleshless mouth stretched wide in a tormented snarl, revealing a blackness as thick as the bottom of a grave. Her head jerked spasmodically atop her gnarled spine and she reached for me with skeletal hands.
“Now that’s some scary shit,” I said. Then I turned and ran.
I didn’t even try to summon the glamour. I’d temporarily psychoed the pain away, but I was pretty sure it’d be back with a fucking party hat on if I tried the fairy mojo again. If it came back, I knew I’d go down. And if I went down, I’d have Maggie’s freaky ass all up on me. So I just ran, and screamed. Mrs. Dawson put me solidly in touch with my terrified inner child, so I didn’t even have to fake it.
Abe Warren appeared out of the mist directly in front of us with his crossbow in one hand and a small wooden music box in the other. The music box was open and it was playing “Frere Jacques.” The tempo was too slow, like the box was winding down, and the music was just slightly off-key. It was eerie, like the sound was being pulled from the bottom of a well, or pulled into one. The melody bent and turned in my mind and I could almost hear another song, a different song, in the spaces between the notes. If I could focus, if I could just listen, I was sure…
The sound froze Mrs. Dawson in place, her head cocked to the side, listening. Her form wavered and she was the little old lady in a seersucker suit again. Her wondering smile and bright eyes almost made her beautiful.
I watched in dreamlike fascination as Abe set the music box on the ground and lifted his crossbow. It was a plainly wrought weapon, a brutal tool without artifice, dark, unadorned wood bound in dull iron fittings. The bow was lashed to the stock with what looked like hemp cords. The bolt was short and heavy with a wicked steel tip and
