“What, like it was personal?” she snorts.
“Maybe it was,” I reply. I want to get out of here. I want to drop my mom’s car off and have Carmel take me to wake up Thomas. I think I’ll rip the mattress right out from under him. It’ll be fun to watch him bounce groggily on his box springs. “Listen, let’s just get away from here, okay? Follow me back to my place and we can take your car to Thomas’s. I’ll explain everything, I promise,” I add when she looks skeptical.
“Okay,” she says.
“And Carmel.”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t ever call me a ghostbuster again, all right?” She smiles, and I smile back. “Just so we’re clear.”
She brushes past me to get into her car, but I grab her by the arm.
“You haven’t mentioned Thomas’s little blurt to anyone else, have you?”
She shakes her head.
“Not even Natalie or Katie?”
“I told Nat that I was meeting you so she’d cover for me if my parents called her. I told them I was staying at her place.”
“What did you tell her we were meeting for?” I ask. She gives me this resentful look. I suppose that Carmel Jones only meets boys secretly at night for romantic reasons. I run my hand roughly through my hair.
“So, what, I’m supposed to make something up at school? Like we made out?” I think I’m blinking too much. And my shoulders are stooped so I feel about half a foot shorter than she is. She stares at me, bemused.
“You’re not very good at this, are you?”
“Haven’t had a whole lot of practice, Carmel.”
She laughs. Damn, she really is pretty. No wonder Thomas spilled all my secrets. One bat of her eyelashes probably knocked him over.
“Don’t worry,” she says. “I’ll make something up. I’ll tell everybody you’re a great kisser.”
“Don’t do me any favors. Listen, just follow me to my place, okay?”
She nods and ducks into her car. When I get into mine, I want to press my head into the steering wheel until the horn goes off. That way the horn will cover my screams. Why is this job so hard? Is it Anna? Or is it something else? Why can’t I keep anyone out of my business? It’s never been this difficult before. They accepted any cheesy cover story I made up, because deep down they didn’t want to know the truth. Like Chase and Will. They swallowed Thomas’s fairy story pretty easily.
But it’s too late now. Thomas and Carmel are in on the game. And the game is a whole lot more dangerous this time around.
“Does Thomas live with his parents?”
“I don’t think so,” Carmel says. “His parents died in a car accident. A drunk driver crossed the line. Or at least that’s what people at school say.” She shrugs. “I think he just lives with his grandpa. That weird old guy.”
“Good.” I pound on the door. I don’t care if I wake up Morfran. The salty old buzzard can use the excitement. But after about thirteen very loud and rattling knocks, the door whips open and there’s Thomas, standing before us in a very unattractive green bathrobe.
“Cas?” he whispers with a frog in his throat. I can’t help but smile. It’s hard to be annoyed with him when he looks like an oversize four-year-old, his hair stuck up on one side and his glasses only on halfway. When he realizes that Carmel’s standing behind me, he quickly checks his face for drool and tries to smooth his hair down. Unsuccessfully. “Uh, what are you doing here?”
“Carmel followed me out to Anna’s place,” I say with a smirk. “Want to tell me why?” He’s starting to blush. I don’t know if it’s because he feels guilty or because Carmel is seeing him in his pajamas. Either way, he steps aside to let us in and leads us through the dimly lit house to the kitchen.
The whole place smells like Morfran’s herbal pipe. Then I see him, a hulking, stooped-over figure pouring coffee. He hands me a mug before I can even ask. Grumbling at us, he leaves the kitchen.
Thomas, meanwhile, has stopped shuffling around and is staring at Carmel.
“She tried to kill you,” he blurts, wide-eyed. “You can’t stop thinking about the way her fingers were hooked at your stomach.”
Carmel blinks. “How did you know that?”
“You shouldn’t do that,” I warn Thomas. “It makes people uncomfortable. Invasion of privacy, you know.”
“I know,” he says. “I can’t do it very often,” he adds to Carmel. “Usually only when people are having strong or violent thoughts, or keep thinking of the same thing over and over.” He smiles. “In your case, all three.”
“You can read minds?” she asks incredulously.
“Sit down, Carmel,” I say.
“I don’t feel like it,” she says. “I’m learning so many interesting things about Thunder Bay these days.” Her arms cross over her chest. “You can read minds, there’s something up there in that house killing my ex-boyfriends, and you—”
“Kill ghosts,” I finish for her. “With this.” I pull out my athame and set it on the table. “What else did Thomas tell you?”
“Just that your father did it too,” she said. “I guessed that it killed him.”
I give Thomas the eye.
“I’m sorry,” he says helplessly.
“It’s okay. You’ve got it bad. I know.” I smirk and he looks at me desperately. As if Carmel doesn’t know already. She’d have to be blind.
I sigh. “So now what? Can I possibly tell you to go home and forget about this? Is there any way that I can avoid us forming some peppy group of—” Before my mouth can finish, I lean forward and groan into my hands. Carmel gets it first, and laughs.
“A peppy group of ghostbusters?” she asks.
“I get to be Peter Venkman,” says Thomas.
“Nobody gets to be anybody,” I snap. “We are not ghostbusters. I’ve got the knife, and I kill the ghosts, and I can’t be tripping over you the whole time. Besides, it’s obvious that I would be Peter Venkman.” I look sharply at Thomas. “You would be Egon.”
“Wait a minute,” says Carmel. “You don’t get to call the shots. Mike was my friend, sort of.”
“That doesn’t mean you get to help. This isn’t about revenge.”
“Then what is it about?”
“It’s about … stopping her.”
“Well, you haven’t exactly done a great job of that. And from what I saw, it didn’t even look like you were trying.” Carmel has her eyebrow raised at me. The look is giving me some kind of hot feeling in my cheeks. Holy shit, I’m blushing.
“This is stupid,” I blurt. “She’s tough, okay? But I have a plan.”
“Yeah,” Thomas says, rising to my defense. “Cas has it all worked out. I’ve already got the rocks from the lake. They’re charging under the moon until it wanes. The chicken feet are on backorder.”
Talking about the spell makes me uneasy for some reason, like there’s something that I’m not putting together. Something that I’ve overlooked.
Someone comes through the door without knocking. I barely notice, because that makes me feel like I’ve overlooked something too. After a few seconds of prodding my brain, I glance up and see Will Rosenberg.
He looks like he hasn’t slept in days. His breathing is heavy and his chin is lolling toward his chest. I wonder if he’s been drinking. There are dirt and oil stains on his jeans. The poor kid’s taking it hard. He’s staring at my knife on the table, so I reach up and take it, then slide it into my back pocket.
“I knew there was something weird about you,” he says. The scent of his breath is sixty percent beer. “This is all because of you, somehow, isn’t it? Ever since you came here, something’s been wrong. Mike knew it. That’s why he didn’t want you hanging around Carmel.”
“Mike didn’t know anything,” I say calmly. “What happened to him was an accident.”
“Murder is no accident,” Will mutters. “Stop lying to me. Whatever you’re doing, I want in.”
I groan. Nothing is going right. Morfran comes back into the kitchen and ignores all of us, instead staring into
