Touch The Dark

I thought my odds were better on my own, and for more than three years I'd been right. Until now.

I didn't bother to grab anything from the office except the gun: one thing about ru

Unlike last time, there was something I had to do before I caught a ride to yet another new life. I slipped out of the agency ASAP, just in case Tony's boys decided to fudge a little on the deadline, and avoided the front door by squirming through the bathroom window. It always seems so easy when people do that on TV. I ended up with a scraped thigh, torn hose and a bitten lip from trying not to swear. I finally managed it, ran down a dingy side street to a parking garage and cut across to a Waffle House. The trip was short but nerve-racking. Familiar alleys suddenly looked like perfect hiding places for Tony's thugs, and every noise sounded like a gun being cocked.

The Waffle House had bright halogen lights in the parking lot, making me feel terribly exposed as I crossed it. Mercifully, the bank of phones was in shadow near one side of the building. I parked myself in front of the one that worked and dug some change out of my purse, but no one picked up at the club. I let the phone ring twenty times while I bit my lip and told myself it didn't mean anything. It was Friday night—probably no one was able to hear a phone over the din, or had time to answer if they did.

It took a while to get there on foot, since I was trying to stay out of sight and to avoid breaking an ankle in my new, over-the-knee, high-heeled boots. I'd bought them because they matched the cute leather mini a salesgirl had talked me into, and I'd pla

It was one of those hot Georgia nights when the air feels like a heavy blanket against your skin and the humidity is off the charts. A thin mist showed up in the glow of the lampposts, but most of the available light came from the moon gleaming off rain-slick streets and turning puddles silver. The night had bleached the color from the buildings downtown, fading them a soft gray that blended into the shadows and hid the tops of the skyscrapers. The historic district was like something out of time that night, especially when I passed the Margaret Mitchell House on West Peach-tree. It seemed perfectly natural when one of the horse-drawn carriages that cater to the tourist trade came around the corner—except that it was going at a full gallop and almost ran me over.

I had a second to see the frightened faces of the tourists who were hanging on for dear life in the back seat, before the carriage ricocheted off the sidewalk and careened down the street out of sight. I dragged my mud-covered self out of the gutter and glared around suspiciously. Merry laughter from behind me explained how that fat old horse had been convinced to try for a new speed record. A trail of mist, almost indistinguishable from the light rain, drifted by. I grabbed it, metaphysically speaking.

"Portia! That wasn't fu

The laugh tinkled again and a pretty southern belle complete with swinging hoopskirts materialized in front of me. "Oh, yes, it was. Did you see their faces?" Mirth sparkled in what had once been eyes bluer than mine. Tonight they were the color of the churning clouds overhead.

I fished around in my purse for a tissue to wipe off my boots. "I thought you weren't going to do that anymore. If you scare off the tourists, who will you play with?" There aren't a lot of companies willing to pretend that Atlanta, like Sava

Portia gave me a pout so attractive that she must have practiced it in front of a mirror when she was alive. "You're no fun, Cassie."

I shot her an unhappy look as I tried to clean the mud-splattered leather, but all I managed was to streak it. Never once had I made a run for it looking chic. "I'm plenty of fun, just not tonight." It had started to rain, and the droplets were falling through Portia to spatter on the concrete. I hate that; it's like looking at a TV through too much interference. "You haven't seen Billy Joe, have you?"

I call Billy Joe my guardian spirit, but that isn't entirely accurate. He's more of a pain in the ass who occasionally turns out to be useful, but right then I wasn't feeling picky. Billy is what remains of an Irish American gambler who failed to lose the right hand of cards in 1858. A couple of irate cowboys, who correctly assumed they'd been cheated, shoved him into a sack and tossed it in the Mississippi. Luckily for him, he'd recently relieved a visiting countess of a large, ugly necklace that served as a sort of supernatural battery, collecting magical energy from the natural world and storing it until needed. When his spirit left his body, it came to rest in the necklace, which he haunted the same way other ghosts did more conventional things, such as crypts. It gave him enough power to continue to exist, but it was my occasional donations of living energy that made him as mobile as he was. I had found the necklace in a junk shop when I was seventeen, and Billy and I had been a team ever since. Of course, he couldn't take a message to the club for me so I didn't have to go in person, but he could serve as lookout in case any bad guys got too close. Assuming I could find him, that was, something that required a little ghostly help.

There are a lot of ghosts in Atlanta, and most are your run-of-the-mill, let's-haunt-something-until-we-work-through-our-issues-or-fade-away types like Billy Joe. There are also a few guardian spirits and an occasional psychic imprint, not that the latter are technically ghosts. Imprints are like a supernatural theater that shows the same movie over and over until you want to scream. Since it's usually something traumatic, ru