Ghost Maker Read online

  Titles by Robin D. Owens

  Ghost Seer

  Ghost Layer

  Ghost Killer

  Ghost Talker

  Ghost Maker

  Heartmate

  Heart Thief

  Heart Duel

  Heart Choice

  Heart Quest

  Heart Dance

  Heart Fate

  Heart Change

  Heart Journey

  Heart Search

  Heart Secret

  Heart Fortune

  Heart Fire

  Heart Legacy

  Anthologies

  What Dreams May Come

  (with Sherrilyn Kenyon and Rebecca York)

  Hearts and Swords

  Ghost Maker

  Robin D. Owens

  INTERMIX

  New York

  INTERMIX

  Published by Berkley

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2016 by Robin D. Owens

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  INTERMIX and the “IM” design are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  ISBN: 9780698411593

  First Edition: October 2016

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  Contents

  Titles by Robin D. Owens

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Acknowledgments

  One of the earliest versions of the Counting Crows Rhyme was published, with variations, in M. A. Denham’s Proverbs and Popular Sayings of the Seasons (London, 1846):

  One for sorrow,

  Two for luck;

  Three for a wedding,

  Four for death;

  Five for silver,

  Six for gold;

  Seven for a secret,

  Not to be told;

  Eight for heaven,

  Nine for hell,

  And ten for the devil’s own sell (self)!

  Chapter 1

  Late September, Douglas County, Colorado

  “Just hold your hands out to me, Mrs. Stinton,” Clare Cermak told the ghost of the rancher’s wife who’d died a hundred and thirty-two years ago. Clare braced for the freezing cold. Ghosts always felt icy to her, but when she initiated contact, which she had to do to move phantoms on, the cold seemed to quadruple. Time to get this done.

  Her clients, the whole family—father, mother, and twin teenaged girls—sat on the tapestry couch watching her, so Clare spoke to the phantom aloud instead of mentally.

  Meanwhile, Miranda Stinton, the apparition, simpered at Clare’s sexy lover, Zach, the other person in the room who could see her without instrumentation. And, yes, a member of the local parapsychological association stood with sensor and recorders and what all behind a camera mounted on a tripod. That man grinned at her. “I’m ready!”

  Clare nodded. “Miranda,” she said softly. “It’s time to go.” Timing was important, always. In her first conversation with this apparition, she’d learned that the woman could pass on during a sunny evening after 7 p.m. She’d cherished the memory of her last sunset. That meant helping the specter transition in late spring, summer, or early autumn.

  “Your hands, Mrs. Stinton?” Clare prompted.

  The woman sulked, her hands remaining by her sides. With a sigh, Clare stepped the pace across the Persian rug, moved into the phantom, and grasped her frigid hands. The spirit twisted a bit, then subsided. Memories of the rancher’s wife inundated Clare, but she ignored them. Harder to evade the numbing cold. As always, this now became a race to transition the ghost on to whatever came next before the ice reached Clare’s heart and stopped it. That actually concerned her less than the worry about rending open the spectral wound an evil ghost had given her.

  The phantom she’d helped pass on two days ago had pulled at the injury, lacerating it. A gash in Clare’s etheric body that hurt like a tear in her physical body.

  Now she couldn’t feel her feet, and when she said, “Miranda Stinton,” her chill breath condensed in the air before her. Exclamations came from everyone but Zach.

  I’m not ready. Miranda’s words filtered into Clare’s brain.

  “I hear that you aren’t ready, but it’s time.” Good, Clare’s voice sounded all right. But she couldn’t rush, must be gentle and compassionate and convince Miranda to leave. Usually the ghosts who contacted Clare ached to be gone, away from the terrible featureless dimension after death.

  But Miranda, now haunting an elegant new home of a wealthy family outside Denver, craved attention. And pretty things. She enjoyed being in the luxurious house and upsetting the living.

  “Look, Miranda,” Clare said slowly, through frigid lips, forcing her numbed arm up to point to the corner of the room above the built-in rosewood bookcases. “Isn’t that someone waiting for you?” Everything around Clare had turned to sepia tones like an old photograph, browns and beiges. But she could also see a wavery patch of air, the portal to the hereafter.

  I hope it’s not my husband; I hated him. He took me away from Saint Louis, civilization, and put me in a terrible five-room cabin! Miranda sneered.

  Didn’t sound too bad to Clare, but she kept her thoughts veiled from Miranda. Blinking eyelashes that seemed heavy with frost, Clare saw a stout man, a gold chain straining across the paunch covered by his vest. “I don’t think . . . your husband. Your . . . father?” Clare asked.

  Miranda actually took her attention from Zach, and glanced at the portal. Her features sharpened until Clare could finally see them well, and the dissatisfied lines around her mouth. Clare wondered if even heaven would disappoint Miranda.

  Papa! Oh, Papa! Miranda trilled.

  The other spirit on the far side of the threshold to the next world held out his hands. Come to me, baby girl. I have plenty of marvels to show you here. The portal around him turn
ed into beams of gold set with precious gems.

  And when Miranda ripped her hands away to run to her father—zoom to the golden door—she also tore the inner spectral wound in Clare longer and deeper. She gasped but managed to stay in her balance, sipping tiny breaths through the pain as she warmed again, fighting tears of anguish.

  The hurt of freezing she’d become accustomed to; having an injury yanked open brought another whole level of pain.

  She stayed as Zach ushered her clients out of the room. The parapsychological investigator who’d filmed the proceedings left, too, helping ease the family along by enthusing about the great readings and power surges and dim outlines of etheric matter and whatever—all that he wanted to show the family.

  After the room emptied, Clare staggered with cold, stiff legs to the sofa and fell onto it, pressing her hand against her side, hoping against hope that Zach wouldn’t return before she collected herself. She didn’t want to worry him, and upset their new life together again with unnecessary drama. She disliked drama.

  These few days of helping new clients—using her gift proactively instead of awaiting an assignment that fate sent her way—had wrung her out . . . and been bad for the wound in her spirit. One that may have been healing. Probably.

  Now, as much as she wanted to, she couldn’t hide from herself that the injury worsened, and wasn’t getting better.

  She was scared but didn’t want to show that face to Zach. In their relationship they’d tottered back and forth with being equal partners—at least to Clare it felt like that. It was important to her that she was strong. And calm. And drama free.

  But Zach didn’t mind a life full of ups and downs. He couldn’t have stayed in law enforcement for more than a decade if he had, could he? And he tended to be moody, while she prized a calm life.

  Earlier, and reluctantly, she’d promised Zach not to conceal how she felt, or deceive him into thinking she was fine. But she didn’t want him overreacting, especially not here in a client’s house, and not before they really understood how bad the situation was. Though, she thought they’d be having another ugly—no, distressing—conversation soon, perhaps even in the car to her new-to-her home, where they lived together, a recent decision. She hoped they wouldn’t argue. Again.

  Zach stormed in. A tall man with broad shoulders and bronzed skin that showed Native American somewhere in his heritage, and black hair kept a little shaggy the way she preferred, he gripped his cane in his left hand more like a weapon than an aid to walk. He wore his special shoes to help keep him balanced. Color painted his cheeks.

  “You’re not only cold, are you?” He snapped each word out. “Helping the selfish spook move on hurt your wound, didn’t it?” Even as he spoke, he strode across the fine rug, sat down beside her, and pulled her into his arms. Removing her fingers she held against her left side where an evil ghost had bitten her, Zach placed his own fabulously warm and much bigger hand against her torso. She sighed at the relief of heat.

  He slid closer so he propped her up to sit straight. She shouldn’t like that, that she leaned on him too much, but now that her fingers and toes thawed, lassitude washed through her and she didn’t have the energy to assert independence. “How are the clients?”

  “Very pleased. Especially the twin girls whose room Miranda haunted. Your fee has been transferred to your new business bank account.”

  “Okay, then.” Her lashes drifted down. She liked her head against his arm, rubbed it a little. So close, she could smell the scent of him, sage and the plains and Zach.

  “No, Clare, it’s not okay. Don’t go to sleep on me here. I think you’d like to walk out to my truck like a normal person. Let’s go home.”

  That stirred her a bit. Enough, she hoped. She placed her feet on the ground and stood, inhaled deeply and frowned. “Aren’t Mrs. Flinton and Mr. Welliam, her new significant other—”

  “Lover,” Zach interrupted.

  Clare didn’t think they’d taken that leap into such intimacy yet. That generation tended to move slower with relationships. “Anyway, aren’t they meeting us for dinner?” She glanced at a wall clock, saw the second hand hit 6:35 exactly. “At seven at a local restaurant?”

  “We aren’t going,” Zach stated. A vein throbbed in his temple, not a good sign. “In fact, I’m not sure we can make the forty-minute drive home.”

  She stiffened. “You mean you don’t think I can,” she said, glad her words didn’t slur. Irritation surged through her, diminishing her weariness, for now. “You’re being overprotective.”

  Zach rolled a shoulder. “I love you.” His blue green eyes had gone sapphire as he met her gaze, took her hands, and, yes, those remained warmer than her own.

  “I love you, too. I don’t want to fight, Zach.”

  “Then let me take care of you.” He paused. “You’ve taken care of me when I’ve needed it.”

  She wasn’t quite sure of that but said, “Currently I’m recovering rapidly. Mrs. Flinton and Mr. Welliam are waiting to hear how I handled the latest client, the second one on the list Mr. Welliam gave me.”

  “Not anymore. I told them the ghost aggravated your wound when Miranda went on. I canceled dinner. There’s a chain motel nearby. We’re heading there.”

  Tears threatened. She’d been looking forward to talking to the chipper older couple, and perhaps getting some advice, particularly from Mrs. Flinton, who’d lived with a psychic gift all of her eighty-something years.

  Clare sniffed hard, but refused to cry. Just a little too emotional right now, and not experiencing the usual satisfaction she had when she’d helped a spirit move on. She took out a handkerchief she’d started carrying and blew her nose. “You don’t get to make those decisions for me, Zach.”

  “I do when you look like death warmed over.”

  She flinched at that. He took her arm, began to propel her out of the house. When they exited the room, she could hear excited voices coming from another area talking about what the camera and instruments had captured. Something, at least.

  The soles of her feet had come on line and her gait steadied by the time they reached the door. Zach opened it and went out first, cop sharp, so concerned about her that he’d fallen back into his old habits. He held the door open with his hip, his gaze scanning the drive, the expensive homes in the distance. His left hand held his cane, but he kept his right free for his weapon.

  Clare let out a sigh too quiet to catch his ears. Zach in uber-protective mode.

  But she couldn’t let this pass. “I need food—fuel—it will help banish the cold and, I’m sure, aid my healing, too.” She tried an easy, normal smile. “And I wanted that gourmet steak dinner.”

  His cool stare slid over her. “Are you losing weight again?”

  She couldn’t lie at a direct question, yet still wanted to minimize his concern until they were private and could really work the problem. “Some.”

  He grunted. “I’ll think about that until I get out to the main road.”

  Stepping out into the warm September evening, the temperature in the upper seventies soothed her. She’d soon be sweating, as she had when Zach drove them over. She wore several layers to try to minimize the effect of the cold: silk, wool, cashmere.

  Zach clicked the locks open on his black truck and she marshaled the strength to haul herself up into the passenger seat. It retained the warmth of the sun and felt so good she wanted to moan. As it was, she let herself wilt, then closed her aching eyes. Every part of her hurt.

  ***

  His muscles felt hard, inflexible as he got into his truck. Looking over to Clare, he saw she drooped in the leather seat. So beautiful, but pale under her golden tan. Strands of the deep red in her dark brown hair caught fire in the sunlight. His gypsy woman he hoped to free from her buttoned-down years as an accountant. The situation had been going well, particularly in bed, but now she appeared near
ly too fragile to touch.

  Zach freaking hated this, that Clare was hurt and he couldn’t do any-damn-thing about it. A tear in her etheric body that sucked away her life force? How the hell could he fight that? Neither he nor Clare had a freaking clue.

  He forcibly loosened his jaw to stop grinding his teeth.

  Clare glanced at him, her lashes half down, only showing a portion of her hazel eyes. “Starting up a business that uses my gift this week might not have been a wise decision,” she murmured.

  “That is exactly right,” he replied. “You should’ve taken more than a day off between jobs.” Though he hadn’t said anything against the plan.

  “I wanted to begin as soon as I got that list of clients from Mr. Welliam.” She sniffed. “I recall that we discussed options. We decided that me coming out of the closet as a person with a psychic gift was a good thing.”

  “Yeah, so?” He retained the clipped tone and attitude, though he knew where this was going. He’d let dear, logical Clare lay it out.

  “Unlike you.” Another sniff. “You remain in the closet with your psychic ability.”

  He tried to stay reasonable. “I won’t go crazy or die if I don’t use my gift, unlike you.” Sucky terms for Clare. Yeah, he hated that, too. Use your newly inherited psychic gift or die. Rough. “And I have a vocation as a private investigator outside of my psychic gift that I enjoy and intend to practice.”

  “Until you’re old and decrepit,” she muttered. “But let me tell you, Jackson Zachary Slade, that if I ever find you looking like death warmed over, I will claim the same right you did. To make decisions for you. On your behalf because they’re good for you.”

  Well, he didn’t like that, but said, “Fair is fair.”

  “That’s right. And we have a partnership.”

  He grunted.

  “Yes, Zach? A partnership?”

  “Yes.” He rolled his shoulders, glanced in the rearview mirror, and saw no indication of Clare’s spirit guide, a minor entity who posed as a ghostly Labrador dog. “Speaking of being partners and teamwork, where’s Enzo?”