Touch The Dark Page 0,40
the door, really wanting to tell him off but not liking the idea of an audience. Billy was my ace in the hole and best chance of getting out of here. I didn't want anybody to know he was around.
He saw my expression and grinned. "Don't worry. Somebody put one doozy of a silencing spell on these rooms. Whatever they're planning, they're serious about not being overheard."
"Well, in that case: where the hell have you been?" My emotions came flooding back at the sight of him trying to look casual, as if he hadn't left me out to dry earlier.
Billy Joe, a hard-drinking, cigar-smoking card shark in life, was one of my only friends now that he was many years dead. But he'd screwed up on this one and he knew it. The big, tough gambler fiddled with his little string tie and looked embarrassed. I knew his reaction was the real deal and not another of his put-ons because he hadn't yet made a lecherous comment about my lack of clothing.
"I ran into Portia and she told me what happened. I went to the club looking for you, but you'd left already." He pushed up his Stetson with a nearly transparent finger, then solidified a bit more. "Did you do all that? The back room was a mess, and there were police crawling all over the place."
"Yeah, I'm in the habit of knocking off five vamps, then leaving the bodies for the police to have a fit over." Standard policy among the supernatural community was to clean up your own mess. In some circumstances, you could get in more trouble for leaving bodies lying around that might give a pathologist heart palpitations than for the actual killings. That didn't used to be the case, which was how a lot of those old legends got started, I imagine, but the more the human population expanded, the more the policy became vital. The Senate didn't care for the idea of seeing vamps chopped up in laboratories while some human scientist tried to figure out the secret to eternal life, or having freaked-out governments start a modern version of the Inquisition.
"What bodies?" Billy Joe solidified to the point that I could see a hint of red in his fashionable ruffled shirt—fashionable for 1858 anyway, the year the cowboys had given him an up-close-and-personal tour of the bottom of the Mississippi. "Blood was everywhere and it looked like a cyclone blew through, but there weren't any bodies."
I shrugged. I wasn't real interested in knowing that Tomas had a partner who'd called in a cleanup crew. If any of the other people I'd trusted had been lying to me, I didn't want to know about it. "Great, so make up for letting me almost get killed. What do you know about my problem here?"
Billy Joe spat a wad of ghostly chewing tobacco against the bathroom wall. It left a slimy trail of ectoplasm as it slid down, and I frowned at him. "Don't do that."
"Hey, are you nekkid under there?" He sat on the side of the tub and batted ineffectually at my bubbles. If he concentrated, he could move things, but he was only playing, so his hand passed through. I made him turn around while I got out and dried off. I know it's stupid, but Billy Joe hasn't been with a woman in 150 years and sometimes he gets distracted. It's best not to let his mind wander.
"Talk to me. What do you know?"
"Not a lot. I had trouble finding you. Do you know you're in Nevada?"
"How could I… wait a minute. Why did you have trouble finding me?" Most ghosts are tied to a single location—usually a house or a crypt—but Billy Joe haunts the necklace I bought at a junk store when I was seventeen, so he's more mobile. I'd purchased it because I thought it was only a piece of Victorian pastiche that might work for Eugenie's birthday. If I had known what came with it, I'm not sure I wouldn't have left it in the case. Since I hadn't, though, and since I was wearing it as usual, he shouldn't have had any problem locating me. As for travel time, well, let's just say he takes a more direct route than most.
"What have you been doing instead of checking things out around here?" Billy Joe looked guilty, a fact that did not keep him from trying to look down my towel. "Stop that." I had an epiphany.