Immortal ghost, p.1
Immortal Ghost, page 1
IMMORTAL GHOST
THE IMOGEN GRAY SERIES PREQUEL NOVELLA
LAURETTA HIGNETT
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
THANK YOU
CHAPTER 1
There are plenty of other things I’d rather be doing on a Friday morning than carrying around a dead ferret in my arms.
But I was on a mission. I was undercover, a super-secret spy, hunting for information I desperately needed. And if getting that information meant I had to assist a perky young man in Halloween-themed scrubs by mopping up dog pee and carrying dead rodents in my bare hands, then I’d happily put up with it for a morning or two.
“And over here, Imogen,” the young man said grandly, leading me over to the corner. He performed a graceful pirouette and waved his arms over the steel and chrome contraption like a game-show hostess. “This is where we incinerate the bodies. It only takes around an hour, depending on the size of the deceased, and mommy and daddy get to take their baby home in a nice urn. Bada-bing, bada-boom, we’re a one-stop shop for all your body disposal needs.” He thrust his chin towards me and grinned. “Go ahead, pop him in the tray, let’s get this baby nice and ashy.”
I nodded, impressed by not only the equipment, but also at his stunning lack of appropriate emotion, considering his grim job. “That’s cool, Daniel,” I said, shunting the dead ferret onto a little tray and glancing back up at him.
I could still hear the ferret’s owners sobbing in the waiting room. The sound was so pitiful it felt like my eardrums were being assaulted, but Daniel didn’t even seem to notice. “How the hell do you do this every day?” I asked him. “Candice said you have a full morning of euthanasia ahead of you.”
Candice was the director of the rescue wing of the Sweet Beans Animal Hospital and Rescue Center. As I was a new volunteer, Candice was supposed to be showing me around the hospital, but she’d handed me over to Daniel, the resident vet nurse, for this particular part of the tour, and disappeared into her office directly across the hallway from the treatment room. I got the feeling Candice liked animals a lot more than she liked humans, and her soft heart couldn’t take the misery of watching a beloved pet being put to sleep forever.
Daniel, it seemed, had no such issue.
I grinned at him. “There’s at least eight humans out there in the waiting room, all crying pitifully over their sick and dying babies,” I said. “How do you put up with that level of misery every day?”
The vet nurse gave me a dazzling, slightly manic smile, and waved a hand over his pert body in tight Halloween-themed scrubs. “Darling, I grew up this fabulous, on a farm in the middle of the Bible Belt. I’ve got nine older brothers; four of them are Baptist preachers. I moved out here to California to become a famous actor, and I’ve never even once gotten a call back for any audition I’ve ever done. I don’t feel anything anymore!” He swooped his arms up theatrically and struck a pose. “Not a thing!”
I chuckled. “I can relate.”
He gazed back at me sympathetically. “Mixed-race baby in a racist neighborhood?”
“Something like that,” I said, wrinkling my nose.
I wasn’t exactly mixed-race. Mixed-species, maybe. Part human, part… something else.
I didn’t know what that ‘something else’ was. Both my parents had died before letting me in on that little secret.
But I knew that I was cursed.
Along with a smart mouth, a short temper, a stubbornly average brain, and a little extra strength and speed, I had a body that painfully regenerated no matter what I did to it. For me, there was no such thing as a fatal wound. Just a painful one that healed fairly quickly but hurt like a bitch the whole time.
I’d been alive too long. Far too long. Essentially, I was a very grumpy old woman with no fucks left to give, jammed into a sexy young body of a twenty-two-year-old woman.
Frozen in time. Dancing on the edge of total insanity for eons. Falling over that edge a handful of times. Watching everyone I ever loved die around me. Being hunted by people all throughout history, dangerous bastards who coveted my immortality and thought they could somehow take it for themselves. Hell, I’d been periodically hunted and stalked and ripped to bloody shreds by a mystery creature no one has ever seen before, who hated me for reasons he kept to himself.
I just wanted him to stop. I wanted it all to stop.
I took a deep breath, squashing down the panic that rose in my chest whenever I thought about the misery of my existence.
This time was different. It had to be different, or I just might lose my mind for good.
It would work, I was sure of it. I had an Ultimate Goal, and I’d worked out every step. I was almost manic in my focus.
That was the reason I was here, volunteering at an animal rescue. I’d come up with a cunning plan to track down the one person who might be able to tell me what I am – the one person who could help me break my curse.
My father.
The reincarnation of him, anyway. He’d been happily bouncing back and forth on the mortal coil, living each life as a happy little ordinary human, dying, and coming back again. I’d found him a handful of times over several millennia, but I never managed to get the information I needed out of him.
This time, I would. I could feel it. Like I said, I have a plan. Many plans, in fact, and for the first part of the plan, I needed a blood witch to do a spell to find my father.
Blood witches need blood, of course, to power their spells. The worst ones would use freshly tortured human blood, but those witches are insanely powerful, and I’m not stupid enough to tangle with a witch that strong all by myself. A good witch teetering at the precipice of blood magic might use animal bones or skins, but they didn’t hold near enough power to perform the location spell I needed to find my father. No, I needed a witch that had started her downward descent into corruption – someone sullied enough to use warm animal blood, but not powerfully evil enough to be dallying with human sacrifice just yet.
That’s why I was here. Animal shelters were fantastic places to snatch up an unwanted pet or two. I figured that the shelter would keep good records of who was adopting these animals. All I had to do was check the lists, see who had adopted more than a couple of large pets, and check them out to see if those pets were still alive. If the animals were nowhere to be seen, I’d investigate a little further.
I’d find a blood witch.
But I had to find the damn computer to get those records first. The first part of my plan was proving a little more difficult than I thought.
I gazed around the vet clinic while Daniel, the vet nurse, snapped the dead ferret into position in the incinerator and hit a lever, locking it in, while keeping up an intense monologue about the gay dating scene in rural Alabama.
“So of course,” he said, pushing a few green buttons on the side of the incinerator. “After that kind of consistent, ongoing trauma, I find it hard to be scared of anything anymore.” He turned and locked eyes with me, widening them dramatically. “Not even our new resident ghost.”
I smirked. “A ghost?”
“That’s right. We’ve got our own brand-new ghost haunting the clinic,” he announced proudly.
I let out a snort. “Okay.”
He cocked his head. “You don’t believe in ghosts, darlin’?”
“Nah. Of course not.”
Ghosts were definitely real, but Daniel didn’t need to know that. That poor kid was entirely human, and like most humans he was blind to the magic of the world. He had no idea of the supernatural element that lived amongst us. Ghosts, vampires, shifters, various species of fae… they were all real, and they all lived amongst us, hiding in plain sight.
Of course I believed in ghosts. I, myself, was hardly human.
I’d seen a bunch of ghosts in my long, long life. Low-vibrational spirits from the lower astral plane often leaked through to our dimension, drifting and moaning forlornly. Occasionally, a more violent spirit would wiggle its way through the telluric field and trash a few knick-knacks in their great-grandkid’s duplex. But no ghost ever did much damage to the mortal plane, so they weren’t worth worrying about. I only ever worried about the things that could hurt me, and that itself was a long enough list.
“Well, spend a few days around this place and it will soon change your mind. There’s evidence everywhere. You’ll see,” Daniel said, smiling conspiratorially. “Candice keeps coming into her office and seeing papers tossed all over the room. There’s a terribly evil smell of sulfur that wafts throughout the clinic at times. Wendy, the emergency vet, had an episode on Monday. She was hallucinating monsters coming out of the walls. But that all didn’t start out of nowhere.” He leaned forward, lowering his voice. “It started with a dead body.”
I smirked again. “Let me guess. A hamster? A labradoodle, maybe?”
He widened his eyes, drawing out the moment for dramatic effect. “No. Human. One of our volunteers was found dead right here,” he stage-whispered, pointing to the ground. “It only happened a week ago, last Friday night to be exact. Wendy and Candice opened the clinic on Saturday morning and found him here, bled out on the floor. Dead as a doornail!”
I frowned. “That’s not good. Suicide?” I had to work to keep the wistfulness out of my voice.
“Th e police aren’t sure, and they’re staying very tight-lipped about it. Wendy touched the body, just to check for a pulse, but left him alone and called the police when she realized he’d been dead for a few hours. Apparently, there was a fair bit of blood.”
“Wow. That’s crazy.” I glanced up at Daniel, still grinning wildly, and smiled back at him. “You look terribly upset about your colleague’s death.”
He chuckled. “Oh, I barely knew him. He kept to himself. He was damn weird. Always creeping around quietly behind you.” He pursed his lips. “Bad vibes, you know what I mean? He started volunteering here only a couple of months ago, and I tried to avoid him as much as I could. Wendy suspected he might only be volunteering so he could steal ketamine from the clinic pharmacy. I guess he broke in that night, thinking he would steal some gear, but cut himself on something and bled to death instead.” Daniel’s eyes widened again, and he put on a spooky voice. “Now, we’ve got ourselves a ghooooost in the clinic.”
“A ghost throwing papers around? Making your emergency vet hallucinate? Doing sulfur farts in your general direction?”
“Scoff all you want; these things have been happening! Wendy was talking about getting her local priest in to do an exorcism. She was seriously freaked out.”
The door opened. Candice stuck her head through. “Daniel,” she said, her voice disapproving. “You’re not telling Imogen stories, are you? Honestly, we won’t have any volunteers left at this stage.” She bustled her curvy body through the door and pushed her blood-red hair out of her face. Candice seemed to embrace the plus-sized pin-up girl aesthetic, and it suited her. Not that she gave any impression she gave a shit about what anyone thought. From what I could tell, she only cared about the animals.
“They’re not stories if they’re true, Candy, baby,” Daniel cooed at her. “I’m just keeping Imogen up to date on current events.”
“You’ll scare her away!”
“Ah-hem.” I cleared my throat. “I’m not too bothered about this place being haunted, if I’m being honest.” I wasn’t going to stick around long enough to be worried about some weirdo poltergeist. I just needed to get my hands on Candice’s computer, and I’d be out of here.
Daniel raised his brows. “See? She’s not scared.”
“Everyone else is,” Candice muttered. “We got a dead body in the clinic, paperwork scattered everywhere, the stench of hell and damnation wafting through the place, and things going bump in the night. I have enough to worry about.” She glared at the vet nurse. “Stop gossiping, Daniel.”
He pouted. “I live for this drama. Don’t take it away from me, Candy.”
Candice gave me a look. I shrugged back. “I’m not bothered in the slightest.”
She rolled her eyes and sighed. “Fine. Come on, Imogen, I need to show you the crate room. You’ll be cleaning out the small animal cages this morning.”
I grimaced slightly, but followed her out the door, only half-listening to her as she explained the layout of the hospital, the rescue center, the pharmacy room, the treatment rooms and the reception area.
She didn’t really need to show me anything. I knew my way around, because I’d broken into Sweet Beans Animal Hospital and Rescue Center twice already.
The first time, I was so drunk I could barely stand up. It wasn’t my finest moment, I’ll admit, but my cunning plan had just hit me, and I was eager to put it into action immediately, despite having drowned my sorrows in almost five bottles of top-shelf whiskey.
It all started, as these things do, with a bad date.
The worst date, in fact. My depression and loneliness had gotten so bad that I decided to try out Tinder for the first time, and on a whim, I met Andy, a cute young I.T. specialist, at a bar downtown.
The cute young I.T. specialist turned out to be a two-hundred-year-old goblin wearing a very convincing glamor over his wrinkled green skin and pointy batwing ears.
Despite all my experience, I have zero intuition and I am terrible at reading people, so it took me a little while to figure it out. After a couple of beers and some awkward small-talk, I cursed my luck as I realized Andy’s slight strangeness had nothing to do with nervousness or neurodivergence, but was more likely to do with the fact he was trying to figure out the best way to rob me blind.
Goblins were coveting bastards – they loved to collect rare trinkets and priceless artifacts. I didn’t know it at the time, but Andy the I.T. specialist had sensed my rare immortal curse the second he met me and decided immediately to try and steal it for himself by eating my heart.
Not particularly logical, considering I’d had my heart removed many times, and it kept growing back. But he tried anyway, attacking me in the alleyway as we left the bar.
He wasn’t a very good fighter. I almost felt sorry for him. Goblins are tough and strong, but I was faster. Plus, I had a few millennia of martial arts training under my belt, and my muscle memory is a heck of a lot better than my brain memory. Almost reluctantly I gave him a couple of quick swipes with my trusty Kabar knife, and he ran off.
I wrote the night off as a lost cause and crashed a wake at an old-fashioned pub two blocks over to drown my sorrows. After almost fifteen hours of solid drinking with a lovely bunch of elderly Irish ladies, the idea came to me.
Goblins almost exclusively ate small live animals, particularly rodents and cats.
Blood witches, too, needed small animals to sacrifice to power their spells.
Where would one get a surplus of small animals from?
An animal shelter.
The idea came to me fully formed, while I was on stage, sharing a microphone with an elderly Irish gentleman, deep into our second rendition of Curragh of Kildare.
First, break into an animal shelter. Find the computer, and get into the list of adoptions. Then, see who had adopted a bunch of animals. Track them down. Find a blood witch. Threaten the witch with bodily violence until they agreed to perform a location spell so I could find my dad.
Find my dad. Find out how to become mortal.
Die. Finally.
Vaguely aware that I was blind-drunk at a wake, I loaded my pockets up with egg salad sandwiches from the buffet and blearily looked up the closest animal shelter on my phone. As it turned out, Sweet Beans was the closest animal shelter, so I made my way there, zigzagging through the streets.
I had to wait an hour or so for it to close. I sobered up a little, munching on egg salad sandwiches until I saw a curvy redhead lock the front doors. Then, I made my way around the back, congratulating myself for avoiding the security cameras above the back door, and slipped through an unmonitored window at the side of the building.
I dropped down into the treatment room of the hospital, accidentally setting off the oscillating fan. Then I clattered around the incinerator a little, thinking it was a high-tech computer, but giggled like an idiot when I realized it was not. I skulked around the rescue center for five minutes and set off a wave of barking in the kennel.
Too late, I realized I was far too drunk for espionage. I couldn’t even find the clinic computer. After only a few more minutes, I gave it up as a bad job and slithered my way back out the window.
It was a good plan, though, so the next night, I tried a different shelter, a smaller place without a vet hospital attached. Even though I was a lot slicker, quieter, and far more sober, I couldn’t get into the computer records. Foiled by a simple password.
I was determined not to give up. The next day, I showed up to the shelter as a volunteer, and after a couple of days shoveling kitty litter, I managed some alone time with the clinic records.
There were only three people on their lists who had adopted multiple animals, and I managed to visit them all in one night. One was a reptile enthusiast who had been feeding his giant python guinea pigs and live streaming the carnage for extra cash, which was pretty despicable, but not what I was looking for. The other two were just crazy cat people.
Dejected, but not quite defeated, I decided to head back to try Sweet Beans Animal Hospital and Rescue Center again, and I broke in for the second time. This time, I was a lot quieter, despite the fact I set off the oscillating fan in the treatment room again while I was slipping through the window. I never saw the ghost while I was there, so Daniel was probably full of shit.
