Chapter Nineteen
Quite impressive,” Bones said from behind me.
I turned around to smile at him, relieved that it worked, only to notice that Fabian, too, was now gone.
“Fabian!” I exclaimed.
He materialized in front of me moments later, an expectant look on his face.
“What can I do for you?”
Guilt stabbed through me. If he was making that offer of his own free will, it would be fine, but Marie’s blood changed the balance between us. Friends shouldn’t be able to compel their friends into doing things whether they wanted to or not.
“Fabian, you don’t have to do anything for me,” I told him. “You can make up your own mind about what you want to do or not do.”
“Whatever you say,” he replied, still looking at me expectantly.
A stifled snort came from Bones. Okay, so this wasn’t as easy as it looked. Damn Marie for making me drink her voodoo juju blood.
“I order you to do only what you want to do,” I tried again, more strongly this time.
Now a slight frown stitched between his brows. “I’ve made you angry. Tell me what to do to make you happy again.”
I threw up my hands even as Bones’s snort became a full-blown laugh. “Kitten, I’m sure there’s a way to fix this in the future, but right now, we’ve more pressing concerns,” he said once he’d controlled his chuckles. “Ask our mate what can help repel ghosts. Can’t have you stopping to do that same speech every few hours, and while New Orleans might be one of the world’s most haunted cities, it’s not the home of every spook on the planet.”
I shook off my guilt and frustration over Fabian’s sudden lack of willpower enough to absorb Bones’s point. New Orleans did have an unusually high ghost population, which I’d always attributed to its history of disease, war, malaria, natural disasters, and native predators. But Bones was right. If Marie’s blood called to ghosts—and obviously it did, judging from my new popularity with the living-impaired—then the Big Easy should have tons more spooks than it did. Here’s hoping the dampener to Marie’s spectral siren song wasn’t just a natural geographical perk, like an overabundance of alligators. That would be cause for even more notice than a huge posse of ghosts trailing me everywhere.
Even though Fabian would have heard Bones, he didn’t offer up any information on the topic. Just continued to look at me with an eager expression. I sighed, thinking Ghost Dominatrix probably fit me better than Ghost Whisperer with my new condition.
“Fabian, if I wanted to try to keep ghosts from following me everywhere, what could I use?”
He looked worried. “You want to get rid of me?”
“No, of course not,” I replied, mentally cursing Marie once more. “You’ll always have a home with us; I told you that. This is only for a short time until the situation with Apollyon is fixed. You need to get back to Dave in the meantime, anyway. He’s in danger without you.”
I assuaged my conscience by reminding myself that Fabian had agreed to accompany Dave before, when he had control over his own actions. This wasn’t ordering him to do something against his will; it was just sticking to the plan.
I still felt like a heel.
“Ah, I understand,” Fabian said, smiling again as he stroked one of his sideburns in contemplation. “I can think of two things that, when combined, are hard for many ghosts to be near because they make the air feel bad. One of those is garlic. Not just a few cloves, but many.”
My mouth sagged at the irony. The plant most fabled to repel vampires was actually part of a ghost’s kryptonite?
“The other is the plant some people smoke,” Fabian went on. “When large quantities of that and garlic are present in close proximity, most ghosts can barely stand to be near it.”
“You mean tobacco.” Wow, guess cigarettes weren’t healthy for anyone, living or dead.
“Not that plant,” Fabian said, frowning. “The other one that makes people act silly when they smoke it.”
“Weed?” I burst out. “You’re telling me marijuana is part two of the ghost repellent formula?”
I couldn’t be more shocked, but Fabian nodded serenely. “Yes. If you have a lot of garlic and marijuana on you at all times, it should help keep most ghosts away from you, though I am strong enough to withstand it,” he added with obvious pride.
I couldn’t stop shaking my head. Who would ever guess that garlic plus ganja equaled ghosts-be-gone? On reflection, I had smelled a lot of pot and garlic while in New Orleans, but I thought the latter was from the Cajun and Creole cooking, and the former was just a reflection of the city’s party atmosphere. Who knew it was Marie’s way of keeping the ghost population from becoming so large that vampires and ghouls would have to realize something was going on? She must have a pot and garlic field surrounding wherever her house was.
“Smashing, I’ll get right on procuring both of those,” Bones said, appearing not at all thrown by the idea. “Kitten, tell him he’s to report to Mencheres from now on. Shouldn’t be us anymore, not with all the herbs you’ll soon be sporting. He says he’s strong enough, but we can’t risk the possibility of delaying an important message from him.”
I repeated that to Fabian, still feeling weird over how he seemed to wait for me to say the same thing before reacting to it. Now I knew how Sigourney Weaver’s character must have felt in Galaxy Quest. “Computer, do we have a beryllium sphere on board?” I muttered under my breath.
“What’s that?” Bones asked.
“Nothing.”
“I will return to Dave now. It shouldn’t be hard to locate him. He said he wouldn’t change hotels again until I came back,” Fabian said.
I stared at him, wishing I could give him a hug goodbye and once more hating how everything I said hijacked his free will. “This won’t be for long,” I told him, brushing my hand over his face even though it went right through him.
An incandescent palm covered my hand, no weight or pressure in the gesture.
“I will not fail you,” Fabian said, and then he disappeared from sight.
I stared at the spot where he’d been with a sort of grim resolve. Damned if I’d fail him, either. I would find a way to give Fabian his free will back, beat Apollyon without martyring myself—which would also get the ghoul hit men off my tail—and then talk some sense into my senselessly stubborn family.
I just had no idea how I’d do all those things.
“Don’t fret, Kitten,” Bones said quietly. “In addition to knowing how to keep most ghosts from flocking to you, we might have had another spot of good luck. I checked my mobile, and Timmie texted me this morning. Thinks a large nest of Apollyon’s ghouls might be gathered in Memphis, according to curious events his sources reported to him.”
That was good news. It just sucked that we needed to nab one of Apollyon’s minions now more than ever, but according to the headless ghoul from the hotel, they’d vamoose at the first sight of me. Too bad I couldn’t clone myself and have Fake Cat be a decoy somewhere else, making the ghouls feel safe, while the real me snuck up behind them. That would solve a lot of problems, but as cloning had only been accomplished scientifically with sheep, to my knowledge, I was shit out of luck.
Still, a modification of the same thing wasn’t totally far-fetched. Maybe one of Don’s scientists could design a replica of my face and we’d slap it on a woman of similar height and build. It worked in movies, after all . . .
“Of course!” I said, feeling a renewed surge of optimism as another idea struck me. “We’ll call Dave and tell him where Timmie’s got a nibble on the ghouls, plus I have to tell him Fabian’s on his way back. We’ll send Ed and Scratch to Memphis, too. Between the three of them, someone has to run into A-hole’s minions before too long. Then we need to test out this garlic and weed combination to make sure it’s enough to keep the majority of ghosts at bay. Once we know that, we’re heading to Memphis, too.”
His brow arched. “You sound like you have a plan, luv.”
“Yes I do,” I said, the wheels continuing to spin in my mind. “Part one involves me drinking your blood again. I’ll need all the power I can get. As for part two . . . well, I’ll need to make a couple phone calls.”