Kiss & Hell (Hell #1)
Dakota Cassidy
one
“Boo.”
You’re kidding, right?
“Uh, nope.”
Maybe you should try again—only this time, do it with more feeling.
“Okay. Here goes. Ahem . . . boooooooo.”
You’re not serious, are you? Like really?
“Completely.”
Wow, that’s too bad.
“What’s too bad?”
That you’re not kidding. If the plan was to scare me, here’s the thing—your scary skills suck.
“That was rude.”
Sometimes the truth is rude.
“Don’t you mean the truth hurts?”
That, too. And now it’s time for you to go.
Delaney Markham waved a dismissive hand behind her shoulder to shoo away the voice of the ghost she was chatting with in her head—the male ghost she was chatting with in her head. Occurrences like this happened more often than not. She was used to surprise visits from the other side—the constant interruptions—and sometimes even the errant, unwanted visitor when she was in the midst of trying to make a buck.
But tonight, she had other things to attend to so her supernatural buddy would just have to hang on to his drawers for a little longer.
Delaney resumed her séance position, latching back onto the hands of the family members who sat on either side of her—armed and ready to contact the dead. “Aunt Gwyneth? Are you here with us?” she asked nothing more than the thin air. The people gathered round her table shifted in their wooden chairs with expectation, the lone candle she’d lit highlighting their faces rife with the fear, expectation, and wonder of the unknown.
She could literally hear them not breathing. Aunt Gwyneth’s family was tense with a multitude of emotions—as most were during a séance.
Delaney’s wind chimes tinkled appropriately—much the way they always did when a spirit entered her herb store in the East Village of New York. For some reason, the spirits liked to play with the chimes to announce their arrival. The familiar shiver of reverence mingled with otherworldly anticipation raced along her nerve endings, settling deep in her belly. Eight hundred bucks was but a question or two away. The chimes fastened to her ceiling shivered once more.
Ding-dong, spirits calling.
She smiled to herself. Suh-weet. Aunt Gwyneth had arrived.
“Um, look, I said, boo as scary as I could. It’s all I got.”
And apparently, Aunt Gwyneth was keeping some pesky company.
Noted, and didn’t we just go over this? Delaney mentally whispered with building irritation to the voice that wouldn’t get out of her head. A voice now officially fucking with her much-needed paycheck.
“So why aren’t you scared?” the husky, not unpleasant voice queried. His words whistled in her head, swirling in a seductive, siren’s call kinda way.
Please. As if. It would take a shitload more than some disembodied voice whispering something as lame as “boo” to scare her. She knew scared—scratch that—she knew shit-in-your-pants, full-on terrified and she wasn’t going back. Because this happens all the time to me. It’s what some might say is my calling in life, and after the shit I’ve seen go down, not much scares me—especially a word as weak as boo. And one more time—for the record—I’m busy. Go away. Find another medium to stalk, she relayed mentally as sternly as she could.
Delaney cleared her throat and turned her attention back to the Dabrowski family and their desperate need to have questions answered by their beloved aunt Gwyneth. She asked once more, “Aunt Gwyneth? Your family is here and they have some questions for you. Come, talk to me.” She used her soft, “cajoling the dearly departed” tone to woo Gwyneth into communicating with her.
“Damn right I have some questions,” Gwyneth Dabrowski’s nephew Irv said, interrupting Delaney’s mojo with his gruff impatience. “I wanna know why the hell she left the vacation house at the lake to that fruit Leopold. What kind of a frickin’ name is that, anyway? A pansy name, that’s what. All playing with roses like they were his friends and doing weird girlie crap all the time. He was the gardener, for Chrissake! The lake house shoulda been mine, the piece of shit!”
Another rustle of chairs and the crinkle of an expensive leather coat greeted Delaney’s ears. “Irv! Shut up already, would ya? Didn’t Ms. Markham say we had to be quiet while she called on Aunt Gwyneth so as not to provoke or frighten the dead? Do you really want to piss Gwyneth off in death the way you did when she was alive?” Irv’s wife, Edna, chided him with her nasally thick New York accent. “Oy, Irv! You never listen. Now be quiet, and let the lady do what we came here for.”