The atmosphere reminded me of childhood expeditions to the haunted mansion at a traveling carnival, nerve-tingling but also sordid. I could not tell exactly what was causing it: the fae whose magic I could still sense, or the ghost who sat watching me from the big couch that took up the long wall of the living room.
I’d met Daniel before he became a ghost. Now the fledgling vampire sat on the middle section of the Shaker couch, absolutely motionless, as vampires often did. He sat near a big Tiffany floor lamp that was the source of the light reflected in the outside windows. That he did not cast a shadow in the light was the only real sign he was a ghost.
That’s not to say that he wasn’t creepy. His eyes were on me, white and pupilless, as they had been the only time I’d seen him alive. Or as alive as vampires got, anyway. He was, as he had been then, half-starved and frail, his hair only a stubble on the pale globe of his shaved scalp. Tears dripped slowly down his emotionless face.
Daniel was not a ghost I would have been comfortable living with—but Stefan didn’t know Daniel was still in his house. Or if Stefan did, it wasn’t because I’d told him about it.
I tried to ignore Daniel because too much attention from me strengthens ghosts. He was not what we were hunting here, and Stefan would not thank me for making his dead roommate more powerful.
Adam stopped in the center of the living room. He turned very slowly, taking his time peering into the shadowed hallway that led to the bedrooms, then at the open basement door. He didn’t see Daniel, but I hadn’t expected him to.
Adam moved without a sound, but not because he needed to. The splintering of the front door had been loud enough to alert anyone in the house who hadn’t heard our car drive up of our presence. It was an involuntary reflex he reverted to whenever there was danger about. I thought that he might have learned to do that before he’d ever become a werewolf, when he’d hunted and been hunted in Southeast Asia.
I felt like we were being hunted now. My impression that this was a trap had settled into an instinctive certainty. I just couldn’t tell if Adam and I were its intended prey—or if it had been set for Stefan.
I was going to feel really stupid if I was overreacting and Stefan and his people were at the seethe, or out on a team-building exercise. I made a mental note to ask Stefan if he did team-building exercises, then thought about what kind of team-building exercises a vampire might do and decided it might be better not to ask.
I told myself that the fact that Daniel was the only ghost I could see was good news—since I could not hear anyone in this house, which should have at least eight normal humans and a couple of fledgling vampires in it at this time of night. If they had been violently killed recently, there would be more than one ghost here. I put my nose to the floor and tried to pick up any hint of the thing we were hunting.
I made a full circle of the living room, a quick-time perimeter slink, with my nose on the floor, finishing back at Adam’s side. There were no sounds or scents to direct our hunt, so I paused to see where he wanted to go next.
I didn’t much want to move on to the bedrooms, where tighter spaces would make fighting anything nasty more difficult. As for the basement . . . spending some time in the basement of a black witch might have left me with just a bit of basement-itis, because I didn’t want to go through that dark doorway.
Adam took two steps forward so he could get a better look at the kitchen and dining area. I would have started heading into the kitchen, but Daniel’s whitewashed eyes caught mine. He wasn’t, had not been, one of the ghosts who interacted with the real world, so it caught me by surprise when he looked from me up to the vaulted ceiling.
I followed his gaze. I yipped a warning, but it was too late. Something pale the approximate size and shape of a VW Beetle dropped from the ceiling on top of Adam, flattening him on the floor with a boom that rattled the house.
I leaped upon its broad and smooth back, hoping to find a place I could get some teeth into, something that might get it off Adam. I’d expected to land on something soft, but the surface was as hard and cold as an ice-skating rink. My nails landed with a click, and I had to scrabble to stay on top of it as it moved under me because I could find no purchase.
The creature was near white with a greenish cast in the warm light of the floor lamp. It looked as much like a spider as it did like anything else I’d ever seen. Its body was divided into two rounded segments, one—the one I’d hopped onto—much larger than the other, and it had six long legs with two joints in each. If someone who had never seen a spider tried to make one based on a kindergartner’s description, it might have looked like this creature. Especially if the kindergartner was afraid of spiders—and couldn’t count to eight.