I had recently observed my six-month anniversary as an employee of Garden View Cemetery. On my own, this is not something I would have noticed, and if I did, it sure wasn’t anything I would have celebrated. But Ella being Ella…well, she made a big deal out of it. She took me to lunch and gave me a mini-review. In it, she pointed out that although I still had a long way to go when it came to mastering the ins and outs of the cemetery business, I had made what she called “great strides.” According to her, every day I knew more about the history of Garden View and the folks buried there and, she pointed out, I’d already planned and researched two tours on my own, written articles for the newsletter, and been an all-around team player. She even went out of her way to mention that ugly period the summer before when I’d been laid off from my cemetery tour guide job and still stepped in to do her a huge (and, as it turned out, dangerous) favor.

I was learning a lot, she told me, and though I wasn’t nearly as jazzed about all this as she was, I couldn’t dispute any of it.

One of the things I’d already learned was that I didn’t like to be in the cemetery by myself after dark. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a chicken. It’s not the dark part that bothers me as much as it’s the myself part. I have my Gift to thank for that. After all, I know better than anybody: Just because I’m by myself doesn’t mean I’m alone.

I thought about this as I listened to the main door to the office building swish closed and lock behind me. Automatically I checked the parking lot and the long, silent stretch of cemetery I could see beyond the glow of the nearby security light. One ghost at any one time was more than enough, and I already had Damon to deal with; I didn’t want to be waylaid by some other specter who needed my services.

The coast was clear, and breathing a sigh of relief, I hopped into my Mustang and locked the doors. I wasn’t fooling anyone but myself; I knew from experience that if they wanted to, ghosts could get past the locks and materialize in my car. But hey, whoever said hope springs eternal must have known something about avoiding pesky spooks.

There are no streetlights in the cemetery, and the roads through Garden View are as picturesque as the rest of the place. They sweep over stone bridges and curve through groves of trees. The road I was on wound its way through the newer sections of the cemetery, and I followed it for a while, then turned. I wasn’t headed for the front gate and the older sections where Cleveland’s once rich and powerful are buried with pomp, circumstance, and elaborate monuments, but down into the valley that borders one little corner of Garden View.

“Creepy.” The word whooshed out of me as, both hands on the wheel, I maneuvered the Mustang through a hairpin turn on a narrow stretch of road and went down, down, down. At the bottom of the hill, the valley opened up to a field where people from the surrounding neighborhoods brought their dogs to run. On my right was a line of tombs built into the side of the hill. Once upon a long time ago, they’d been showplaces. But years had passed since anyone was buried in any of them, and the families that had once carefully tended to their dearly departed were now dearly departed themselves. The Garden View grounds crew took as good care of these tombs as possible, but as Ella had enthusiastically pointed out, I’d learned a lot in the six months I’d been there. One of those things was that there would always be a certain amount of natural decay in a cemetery (no pun intended). The other was that no matter how hard anyone wished it would stop, it was impossible to eliminate vandalism. The tombs I passed had seen better days. Their front steps and pillars were cracked and patched. Their stained glass windows were missing or broken. The gaping holes left behind had been filled with cement, and in the gloom, the squares of lighter-colored material stared at me like unblinking eyes.

I told my overactive imagination to shut up and crept along carefully, following the map to Damon’s grave that I’d printed out at the office and left on the front seat next to me. It was dark and way too quiet in the valley. Exactly, I reminded myself, why Damon had been buried there, far from the hustle and bustle of the more active parts of the cemetery. According to what I’d read in our archive files, Damon’s business manager and agent, who’d arranged the burial, decided that the more out-of-the-way his grave was, the less likely it was to be overrun by fans.

In theory, it was a good idea. But that agent should have known that it’s hard to keep wild and crazy rock fans down. When I cruised up to the grave, there was a group of people standing around. I saw in a moment that these weren’t die-hard fans, though. They were carrying flashlights, cameras, and, oh yeah, Geiger counters.

Since the ghostbusters seemed hell-bent on looking at their instruments and nothing else, I slammed my car door to announce my presence.

“Cemetery’s closed,” I said. My voice echoed through the valley like a disembodied thing. “You aren’t supposed to be here.”

“You’re just saying that so you can do some ghost hunting on your own, right? You want to get the scoop yourself.” A guy who was apparently the leader of the merry band approached me, his hand out. “Brian,” he said. “And this is John, Theo, Angela and Stan.” The other ghostbusters barely spared me a look, which was fine by me because though I waved to be polite, I really didn’t care about them, either. “You must be investigating, too.”

“I work here,” I told him. “I’m not investigating anything.”

If I didn’t get rid of the ghost hunters, it would be true. No way could I chat with Damon while they were around. “I stayed late at the office and decided to leave the back way.” I waved in some vague direction to make Brian think I just happened to pass by on my way out. “What are you guys up to?”

“Looking for Damon Curtis, of course.” The answer came from Stan, who was holding a yellow Geiger counter. He pointed it right at me and took a reading. It didn’t beep or buzz. I was grateful. Stan lost interest. He did a circuit around the simple headstone I saw illuminated by Theo’s flashlight.

Damon Michael Curtis, it said. There were no dates listed and nothing about Mind at Large or platinum albums, world tours, and the adoration of millions of screaming fans. Behind the stone where Damon’s name was carved was another stone. This one was flat and as large as a twin bed, and over the years, the fans who’d been plucky enough to make the pilgrimage down there had turned it into a shrine. Candles winked from colorful glass cups, their light glinting off a bottle of Johnny Walker Black, a dozen Mind at Large CDs, a Styrofoam cup with the words City Roast printed on the side, and a bong.

“I’ve worked here for like forever,” I told Brian. “I’ve never heard one story about Damon Curtis haunting this place.”

“But he has to.” Angela caught wind of the conversation and hurried over. “A young rock star. A tragic death.” She was carrying a digital camera that she held to her heart. “This is the stuff great hauntings are made of!”

“Maybe, but—”

“You mean you haven’t heard anything about Curtis? From anybody?”

The question came from Brian, so I turned back to him. He was wearing one of those vests I’d seen fishermen wear, the kind with about a hundred little pockets all over it. Even as I turned, he patted down his pockets. He took out a notebook from one and put it back, a pen from another and put that away, too. Finally he found what he was looking for, a couple of AA batteries, and he handed them to John, who was standing nearby with a tape recorder that was apparently out of juice.

I did a double take. “Tape recorder?” I wondered out loud, and maybe ghostbusters are used to this kind of skepticism; John didn’t take offense.

“For EVP,” he explained, slipping the old batteries out of the recorder and popping in the new. “That’s Electronic Voice Phenomenon. Sometimes you don’t see a ghost or get any readings from the other equipment, but if you talk to them, they talk back. Not that you can hear them while it’s happening. But later, when you play back the recording…well, let me tell you, it’s wild. We’ve recorded some amazing things!”

A few months earlier, none of this would have worried me. Like most people of sound mind, I figured ghostbusters were nothing more than nutcases. Sure they were dedicated, and some were scientific, too. But in the months I’d worked at Garden View, I’d seen my share of them, and I knew what they were really all about was the equipment. Yep, techno-junkies, every last one of them.

And like I said, I wasn’t worried. I knew ghosts were real, but finding ghosts with the help of things that went beep in the night? Not a chance!

Or so I thought.

Until Dan Callahan bushwhacked me at a party.

Okay, a quick explanation is in order here. Dan is a brain researcher. At least I thought he was a brain researcher. I met him at the hospital after I clunked my head on Gus Scarpetti’s mausoleum and Dan told me that my brain scans were odd and that he wanted to study me. I thought he was nothing more than a nerd, but that was before the fateful day he saved my life. After that, he started following me around. Only I could never catch him at it and ask what he was up to. Until the aforementioned party.

That’s when Dan showed up out of nowhere and shoved a photograph under my nose. It was a picture of me, and in it I was standing with two misty white blobs.

They were ghosts.

I knew that, but Dan shouldn’t have, and though he didn’t come right out and say it, it was clear he did.

Disturbing, yes? Especially when I didn’t know there was a camera sophisticated enough to take a picture like that. When Dan left me at the party, he gave me some cryptic advice: I was messing with powers I couldn’t possibly understand, and it was dangerous, he said. More specifically, he told me that if I was smart, I’d back off.

Oh yeah, and that it was the only warning I’d ever get.

Good thing a shiver scooted up my back. It forced my mind away from worrying about what Dan was up to these days and back to the matter at hand.

Ghostbusters.

Who, if past experience meant anything, just might be lucky enough to capture evidence of a certain ghostly client of mine.

John and his tape recorder were already headed back toward Damon’s grave, so I turned back to Brian. “You haven’t recorded anything here, have you?” I asked him. “You’ve never seen anything or gotten any of these ESPs—”

“EVPs,” he corrected me. “And unfortunately, you’re right. We haven’t been lucky enough to catch anything here at Curtis’s grave. Yet. That’s exactly why we have to keep trying! If we’re the first to record some kind of evidence of his ghost, we’ll be famous. I figure they’ll put us on the cover of Rolling Stone.”

It was dark so he didn’t see that I crossed my fingers as I said, “There’s not one ounce of evidence of Damon hanging around.” Another thought struck and I added, “Not here, anyway.”

I was, of course, referring to the fact that though Damon had never been seen in Garden View, he had definitely been seen at the Rock Hall. By me, anyway. I hadn’t intended to distract them, but as it turned out, my offhand comment worked like a charm. As one, the ghost hunters’ ears pricked up. I found myself in a center of the circle of them and realized they were waiting for me to say more. The way I saw it, this put me in something of a pickle:

a. I could tell them the truth and swear no one had ever reported a Damon sighting in the cemetery. But I’d already tried that, and they weren’t listening.

b. I didn’t want to mention the Rock Hall, partly because if I did, they’d ask too many questions about how I knew Damon’s spirit was there and mostly because it hardly seemed fair to the nice folks at the Hall to sic a bunch of ghostbusters on them.

And

c. I had to get rid of them if I had any hopes of meeting with Damon without them catching wind of it.

I wracked my brain for a plan.

“It’s President Garfield’s memorial,” I blurted out. It sounded ridiculous, even to me, but I suppose by definition, ghost hunters are an open-minded bunch. Instead of telling me I was talking nonsense, they leaned nearer. I scrambled to put substance to my story. “Here’s the skinny,” I told them. “I’ve heard that Damon’s spirit hangs out over at the memorial just to bug the President. You know how those old hippies were, up against the establishment and all that.” I looked over my shoulder, up the hill, and toward the main part of the cemetery and the huge monument that dominated the landscape there. “When I drove by a little while ago, I saw another group of ghost hunters up there. I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t run into Damon’s spirit. Seems like a good night for it, don’t you think?”

Brian and the rest of them apparently agreed. They scrambled for their equipment and jumped in the SUV parked nearby. Before I could say Electronic Voice Phenomenon, they were gone.

I was alone.

In the dark.

Waiting for a ghost.

It was the beginning of October, and chilly. I wrapped my arms around myself.

“Damon!” I hissed, and in the dark, my voice sounded small and frightened. “Hey, I got rid of the ghostbusters. You can come out now.” There was no answer, and I looked all around. “Are you here somewhere?”

“Are any of us somewhere? Or are we lost, amoebae fighting the currents of change and time? Cursed. Driven to despair. Hollow men without morals. Dipped in blood.”

I recognized the lyrics of the Mind at Large song. And the voice. But I couldn’t tell where it came from.

There was no sign of Damon anywhere near his grave or in the field behind me. I peered into the dark beyond the flickering candles. “Come on, Damon. It’s been a long day. It’s kind of late for games.”

“Too late for laboring love. Or changing zebras into moon-dark creatures. Too long overdue. Pressure. Sin. No remorse for death.”

“Yeah, yeah. I recognize that song, too.” I wanted him to know I’d just about had it, so I sighed loud enough for him to hear. “Come on, Damon. We’ve got work to do.” A shiver snaked up my back. “And it’s getting cold out here.”

“I could keep you warm. You could heat my body.”

These weren’t song lyrics. At least none I knew. I spun toward the voice that had whispered in my ear, but, big surprise, Damon wasn’t anywhere near. Not that I could see, anyway.

“We don’t have to go through this again, do we?” I asked. It was better to focus on the fact that he was pissing me off than it was thinking about the way his voice tickled my ear—and my libido. “I thought we got it out of the way this afternoon. I showed up. You played hard to get. I told you I wasn’t putting up with the bullshit. Now here we go again, and I just passed on a real, live, honest-to-goodness date with a real, live, honest-to-goodness guy for this, so let me tell you, if you’re going to screw around, I’m not going to be happy about it. I mean it, Damon, if you don’t get your ghostly butt over here by the time I count to three, I’m gone. One…two…”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a shimmer of white about twenty feet away. I turned toward it, but there was nothing there but darkness. Or was there? Another shimmer, like moonlight on pavement, and Damon appeared. He was wearing skintight black leather pants and a white shirt with wide sleeves. It was unbuttoned to his navel, and his bare chest looked as if it had been chipped from marble.

“It’s about time,” I said. It was a less indiscreet greeting than hubba-hubba. “Get over here. I don’t want to talk too loud. In the dark, my voice will carry, and I don’t want those ghostbusters to think there’s anything going on down here.”

He didn’t move.

I groaned and marched over to where he stood. “Come on,” I said. “At least we can sit down over there.” I was talking about the flat stone behind Damon’s headstone, but I don’t think he knew it. When I looked that way, he didn’t.

In fact, as I closed in on him, I realized he wasn’t looking at anything at all. His eyes were blank and glassy. He was staring straight ahead into the dark.

“Hello!” I waved my hands in front of his face. “Earth to Damon! Anybody home?”

His voice was as flat as his stare. “You don’t have a joint, do you?”

Had he bothered to look my way, he would have seen that my smile bristled. “Even if I did, you couldn’t smoke it. You’re dead, remember?”

Damon winced as if he’d been slapped. “Of course I remember,” he said. “Let’s go. We’ll talk in your office.”

“I don’t want to go all the way back to my office. Come on.” I moved toward his grave. “I’ll bet that big stone is still warm from the sun this afternoon. We can sit there.”

“Or not.”

I was halfway to his grave, and I turned to see Damon hadn’t budged an inch.

And that’s when it hit me. Like the proverbial ton of bricks.

I sucked in a breath of astonishment. “You’ve never been here, have you?” I asked him. “You’ve never seen your own grave. That’s why you’re so reluctant to get close. You’ve never—”

“I—” Damon’s shoulders rose and fell. “No, I never—” He looked away, and when he turned to me again, there was a glint in his eyes, as if he was just daring me to prove him wrong. “My things are at the Rock Hall,” he said. “I stayed with my things.”

“Your things are at the Rock Hall, sure. But your body is buried here.” I listened to my own words and had another aha moment. “You do know you’re dead, right?” I asked him.

“I know it.” Damon’s voice was a growl. “I’ve known it all these years. It’s just—”

“That there’s a difference between knowing something in here…” I pointed to my head. “And admitting it. In here.” I pressed my hands to my midsection.

His silence was all the proof I needed that I’d hit the nail on the head. My anger dissolved beneath some other feeling I couldn’t name. It slammed into me, right about where my hands were clutched.

“Come on,” I said, strolling back to walk alongside him. “You don’t have to look at the grave alone, I’ll be with you.”

Damon drew in a breath and let it out slowly. Just as slowly, we inched toward the headstone where his name was engraved. Without the ghostbusters’ flashlights, it was too dark to see much of anything, so I grabbed one of the candles from the makeshift shrine and held it in front of the letters etched in granite.

“Damon Michael Curtis.” His finger followed the light, skimming over the words as he read them. “I guess this makes it official.”

It did, and although he’d had more than thirty years, I gave him another minute to get used to the idea.

I took a seat on the flat stone and watched as he studied the stone with his name on it. “It was a good life,” he said. “I had one hell of a time.”

“And now?”

When he looked at me, the glow of the candle flame flickered in his eyes and made them spark. He looked very much alive. He wasn’t, and when he rounded the headstone and came to sit at my side, I reminded myself not to forget it.

“My life was one constant happening,” Damon said. “I got a buzz from performing. And expanding my mind. I loved the women!” He tipped his head back. Whatever he was remembering, it made him grin. “Man, life was a trip! Now…” His smile faded. “I’m bored, Pepper. I’ve been bored for more than thirty long years.”

I could have come back with a smart-aleck comment about sex and drugs and rock and roll, but the look of quiet desperation in Damon’s dark eyes stopped me.

It also helped me make up my mind about taking on his case.

“Then we’d better do something about it,” I said. I thought back to everything he’d told me that afternoon. “It sounds like we need to start with Vinnie.”

“Vinnie Pal, right. If we can stop him from holding my spirit on this plane, I can pass to the Other Side.”

Let’s face it, in theory, this sounded reasonable enough. But on closer examination, there were gaps in Damon’s logic.

“Don’t get me wrong,” I said, “it’s not like I don’t believe you or anything. But I can’t believe Vinnie can just call you and you go whooshing over to wherever he is. If it was that easy, everyone would do it. You know, people would keep loved ones with them. Or somebody would figure out how to make famous scientists and doctors stick around so they could keep doing all the good things they were doing while they were alive. Shit, my mom would have hung on to Louise, her cleaning lady, long after the poor woman was dead. Mom always said no one could clean a bathroom like Louise.”

“But if you told people it was possible, that they could call up the power and do exactly what Vinnie’s doing, do you think they’d believe you?”

Damon’s voice was thoughtful, and it made me think, too. “They’d say it was bull. They’d say it was nutso. Like believing there’s such a thing as—”

“Ghosts?”

I had come to accept my Gift, even if I wasn’t one hundred percent comfortable with it. “I used to think I was crazy,” I told him.

“You mean the first time you ran into one of us.”

I nodded. “I thought it was because I hit my head on Gus’s mausoleum. After that, that’s when he started showing up.”

“Then you realized that it was true. That it truly is a Gift.”

My laugh was skeptical. “Not a Gift I want.”

“You’re kidding me, right?” Damon twisted so that he was facing me. “But you should be totally stoked! It’s wild, what you do, talking to the dead. And a girl as smart as you—”

“Smart? Yeah, right.”

As if it would help him see me better, he narrowed his eyes. “You don’t think you’re smart?”

“I think most people see my body. Not my brain.”

“Your body…” We were sitting close, so when Damon skimmed a look from my face, down my neck and lower still, I swore I could feel the heat. “You’re awesome,” he said, and he made it sound like it wasn’t any big deal, just the honest truth. “But come on, every guy you meet must realize that there’s more to you than just a dynamite body. You’re smart and you’re funny and from what I’ve heard, you’re not afraid of anything. You took on the mob for Gus.”

Before Damon could see that my cheeks were on fire, I turned to look the other way.

“Come on, little girl, crave the possibilities.” They were the lyrics to the most famous of all the Mind at Large songs, and Damon didn’t say them, he sang them. His voice was a rumble that tickled my skin with a feather’s touch. “Laugh and run, naked in verdant meadows, drunk with your power.”

When I turned back to him, I had every intention of making a smart-ass comment about not being a fan of oldies. A better plan than begging him to find a way for flesh-and-blood me to get it on with his ectoplasm. I would have done it, too, if I didn’t find Damon’s mouth just a hairbreadth from mine.

“You’re dead,” I told him and reminded myself. It would have been more convincing if my voice didn’t choke behind the sudden ball of anticipation that tightened my throat. “We can’t—”

“Oh, but if we could!” He backed away, and though there was a smile on his lips, I couldn’t help but notice that his eyes were filled with regret. “So what’s the deal with this guy who wants to date you?” he asked.

It took me a second to remember to breathe. And another before I had any idea who—or what—he was talking about. Quinn. I dismissed the whole thing with a lift of my shoulders. “Just a guy.”

“And you’re not interested?”

“I am, but—”

“He’s not your type.”

“He is, but—”

“You’re afraid to get hurt.”

I would have liked nothing better than to argue this point with him, but it was kind of hard considering that it was true. Rather than lay my pathetic love life out on the line, I opted for the quick-and-dirty explanation. “I was engaged once,” I said. “He called it off.”

“And you’re going to let that stop you from enjoying every second of your life?” Damon laughed, but not like it was funny. More like he couldn’t believe what a dope I was. “Believe me, you’re hearing this from somebody who knows. Grab every bit of life you can hold on to and never let go. Enjoy yourself, girl. You only go around once!”

“And if it turns out to be the wrong thing to do?”

He grinned. “Right or wrong, it doesn’t matter. All that matters is the doing.”

I wasn’t so sure. I’d done the doing and all it had done was do me in. “Joel is a weasel,” I said, though why I thought it important to point this out, I’m not sure. “All he left me with is emotional baggage.”

“Then you should be sending him a dozen roses to thank him.”

When I looked at Damon in wonder, he laughed. “Don’t you get it, baby? The emotional baggage, that’s what it’s all about! It’s what gives us our edge. It’s what propels us through this lifetime. Without it, you’d be an empty shell.”

“A happy empty shell.”

“Are you telling me that you wish he would have stayed around?”

Instead of answering right away, I thought about the last time I’d seen Joel. That morning, I’d gotten a voice mail from our florist saying that she was sorry we wouldn’t be working together and reminding me that, so close to the wedding date, there was a fifty percent cancellation fee. Baffled, I’d stopped at Joel’s office to tell him about the weird call. I was just in time to hear him on the phone, telling the harpist who was scheduled to play at our reception that we wouldn’t be needing her services after all.

“He’s a liar and a creep.” I knew this in my bones.

“And that’s why you wanted to marry him?”

“Of course not! I wanted to marry him because…”

Try as I might, I couldn’t remember why I wanted to marry Joel Panhorst, and when I admitted it, Damon’s smile was sleek. “Screw this new guy,” he said. “Get it out of your system.”

“You’re a true romantic.”

“Romance is for books. This is real life.” Damon rose to stand in front of me.

Call me shallow, but looking at the zipper on those tight leather pants while we were having a conversation about screwing and getting guys out of my system didn’t do much for my self-composure. I stood, too. “You’re cynical,” I told him.

“You’re scared to take a chance.”

“You’re awfully nosy considering none of this is any of your business.”

“I know better than you do. After all, I’m dead.”

“And you think—” He hadn’t come right out and said it, but then I suppose an artistic type like Damon would never simply lay things on the line. We were back to the whole simile and metaphor thing, and I was left to read between the lines again. “You took that overdose because of a woman.”

His eyes flashed “I told you, it was an accident. Believe me, I never took a woman that seriously. Not any woman. I just screwed them all to get it out of my system.”

“Did it work?”

“No.”

I hadn’t expected him to be so blunt or so honest, and I wasn’t prepared for any more of his advice. I knew it was better to stick to my case. “Is that why Vinnie is stealing your songs? Was he jealous? Maybe you messed with some woman you shouldn’t have messed with?”

He shrugged like it was no big deal. “She was his wife. He got over it. That’s not why he’s channeling me. He wanted to get rich.”

“Did it work?”

“Oh, come on!” Damon paced off into the darkness and back again. “Mind at Large was as big as they get. As big as the Stones or the Doors. Bigger than the Beatles for a while. Without my songs, no way they could have stayed on top of the charts that long.”

“Which still doesn’t explain how Vinnie makes it all happen.”

Damon scraped a hand through his hair. “It all started back in sixty-five or sixty-six,” he said. “We were touring in California. That’s when we met Melicant and Badnor.”

“They were a rock group?”

“They were witches.”

“Whoa!” I put up a hand and backed away. “You’re creeping me out. Are you saying—”

“That we dabbled in magic. Sure. All of us. We tried a few spells and hosted some pagan gatherings. Most of it was mildly interesting; some of it was mind-blowing. But it turned out to be like everything else. After a while, it got old. We all lost interest. Except for Vinnie.”

“He’s using witchcraft to make you write his songs?”

“Not witchcraft. Not exactly. At least not the kind of witchcraft we played with. Vinnie was best at it, see. We did it for fun and to see women dance naked around bonfires.” He gave me a wink. “Vinnie, he was a true believer. He went a step further.”

I swallowed hard. “You’re talking black magic?”

When he moved, Damon’s white shirt shimmered like starlight. “I guess that’s what you’d call it. Whatever it is, he’s wicked good at it.”

“And you want me to tell him to stop?”

“I want you to tell him that whatever happened between me and his old lady, it don’t matter anymore. He’s got to let me leave. Before…” As if there was electricity sparking through them, Damon flexed his hands. “I can’t be in the world and not be part of it,” he said. “Not for much longer. It’s killing me.”

“You’re already dead.”

“It’s killing my spirit, Pepper. Don’t you see it?” He held his left hand in front of my face, and for the first time, I noticed that it looked a little different than the rest of him. I could almost see through it. “If I can’t cross over soon, I’ll disappear completely. Not in this world. Not in the Other World. Will you help me, Pepper?”

I didn’t have a chance to say I would. An SUV coasted down the hill. The ghostbusters were back.

“Nothing up there at the monument,” Brian called out to me before any of his compatriots piled out of the car. “We didn’t see that other group of ghost hunters you talked about, either. We figured maybe they headed down here, so we thought we’d give it another shot. Have you seen anything?”

I refused to look at Damon. “Not a thing.”

“But something’s going on!” Stan’s face glowed with excitement. He pointed his Geiger counter right at Damon. It crackled like a son-of-a-bitch.

Brian signaled to Angela to start taking pictures. Her flash went off in my eyes and blinded me. “Here, grab this.” He shoved an electronic thermometer in my hand. “Get a reading.”

I did. When my eyes adjusted to the darkness again, I saw that the spot where Damon stood was colder than the surrounding area. I flicked off the thermometer. “Not a thing,” I told Brian. “And I wouldn’t hang around here too long if I were you. Security makes its rounds here in another few minutes. We should all get going.”

Damon got my message. While the ghostbusters were stomping around calling out readings to one another and looking as excited as can be, Damon walked off into the dark.

Stan’s Geiger counter stopped making noise. He turned it off, then on again, just to see if it was working. “What happened?”

I shrugged and headed for my car and, funny, I wasn’t feeling nearly as negative about this case as I had been that afternoon.

Not even the idea of talking to a guy who was really good at black magic discouraged me.

The afterglow of all Damon had told me radiated from my smile. I was smart and I was brave and I never quit.

“Come on, little girl, crave the possibilities.” I sang the tune under my breath as I got in my car and pulled away. “Laugh and run, naked in verdant meadows, drunk with your power.”

I was already up the hill and out the side gate that led back to the real world when the lyrics to the rest of the song hit me and caused my temperature to soar.

“Open to me. Give your body. Your soul. Your love. Your all.”