“I care. There are things that I just like. Places I like to see. Addison should know better than to plop her ass down in a place like this. It’s not even up to her standards. When she’s with me, things are going to be put to rights. We’ll visit places together. Make our own rules.”
Dane just laughed at him. The man was getting on his last nerve, and he could not wait to get rid of him for good. Joel had been thinking about that too…ways to rid the world of this man. It wasn’t like he was going to kill him, but to shove him away was becoming more and more appealing all the time.
They looked around the area for several hours. Joel realized at one point that his feet didn’t hurt, nor was he tired. When he commented on it, Dane looked as if he was going to tell him he was dead again, a term he was tired of hearing, when one of the others with them spoke up.
“You don’t hurt for obvious reasons. But the fact that you’re not tired is something that I noticed about you too. I have to rest…which means that I have to go back to the place I died at and just hang out there. Not sure why about that, but when I leave, or when I can leave, I usually feel pretty good. But you don’t seem to need that.” Dane told him about Joel being shoved from the home where he had died. “Could be that. Not sure. But that book they gave you, ask it. I still after all this time refer back to mine.”
“I don’t have it.” The man, he couldn’t remember his name for the life…death of him, asked him if he’d missed his hook-up to get it. “No. Dane told me that I didn’t need it and to throw it away. I left it at the house.”
“Left it?” They all stared at him when Dane nearly screamed his question at him. “I told you to shove it away. Not leave it. Mother fuck, you left it? Where it can be found?”
“So?” Dane backed from him, as did the others. “What does that mean? What’s going to happen now?”
“If one of them necros find it, you’re fucked. And so is the rest of us. Mother cock sucker, this is bad. They’ll have it all, don’t you see? Not just the question part, but everything we have. News we have to be aware of. Things like a necro…them suckers are bad news, but it lets us know when they’re going to be near us. To keep…I cannot believe you just left it behind.”
Joel didn’t understand the difference and said so. The man that had been talking to him first just shook his head. It wasn’t just frustrating the way everyone thought he should know it all, but it was time consuming as well. To be asking the same question over and over until someone finally got around to asking him.
“You said you were pushed out of the place you were killed, right?” Joel nodded. “This ghost, did he just say for you to go away, or did he use his hands and say it?”
Joel tried to think. “He said that I’d overstayed my welcome. Put out his hands and said be gone to your own home, never to return. Yeah, that was it, he said I couldn’t return.”
“You’re not able to go to your resting place. When he used his hands, he sort of put a hex on you. Kinda like he said, fuck you, you’re not going to bother me again. You can’t ever go back, even if he leaves the house to move over to the other side.” Joel wished the hell there was a handbook. Then he remembered that he’d had one and left it behind, and wanted to scream out his frustrations.
“I’ll just go and get the book.” The man was shaking his head. “Why not? It’s more than likely still there. I can just sort of pop in and pop out with it. No one will even know that I left it behind.”
“You did though, didn’t you? And by now, somebody has found it. Might be lucky and it’s only a living human, but with the shit that has been going with you since your demise, I’d bet some necro has it about now.” Joel thought the man was right. His luck hadn’t been all that good since he’d died, and it wasn’t getting any better. When Dane disappeared, Joel figured he was scoping out the area, but when the rest of the men left him, Joel knew he was on his own.
Chapter 8
Billy waited for as long as he could before he decided he was leaving. He’d been checking out the Delaney house for several days now, and there wasn’t a ghosty to be found. Not even one that had been hanging around for a while. Just as he started back to the house, a woman came out and stared right at him before she started for him. Billy knew she was dead, so he waited.
“You’re here for this?” She put out the book and he looked down at it. He’d seen one like this before, but it had been decades since he’d even looked at it. “Some fool left it behind. I can’t read, but I know what it is. You want it?”
He took it but was careful to only touch it like she had, on the cover and not the pages. And Billy had an idea who it might belong to, but only slipped it into his pocket. His heart, if he had one beating, would have been pounding a mile a minute.