Page 21 of Rattling Bone (OutFoxing the Paranormal #2)

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Nigel had a moment of confusion, the sound of airbags and the crunch of metal against unyielding wood.

Then silence. Stillness.

He blinked, reality setting in. “Is everyone all right?”

Chris’s eyes were wide, but they nodded.

“I’m okay,” Tina said. “But my glasses fell off.”

“I’m fine,” Oscar chimed in. “Dad?”

Scott stared fixedly at the cracked windshield. “That was a ghost,” he said hollowly.

No shit, Nigel wanted to say, but didn’t. The man was trying, at least.

“Yeah, Dad, it was,” Oscar soothed. “Are you all right?”

“I…I think so.”

Nigel clicked on his flashlight and unclipped his seatbelt. His chest ached where the belt had caught him, but there wasn’t much he could do about that now, so he tried to ignore it. “Hold on, Tina, I’ll find your glasses.” At least his had remained on his face.

“Does anyone have a cell signal?” Oscar asked.

Tina squinted at her phone. “No.”

“Me neither,” Chris said. “We didn’t get far enough out to call for rescue.”

“So we start walking?” Scott asked, voice shaking.

Nigel spotted Tina’s glasses sticking out from under Oscar’s seat and snagged them. “No,” he said as he handed them back to her. “We aren’t remotely prepared for a long hike in the snow. If we go back, we have the generator, the tent, and of course the shelter of the deserted buildings.”

“But the ghost is back there!” Scott’s voice held the edge of hysteria.

“She’s out here, too, in case you didn’t notice,” Nigel snapped.

Oscar spoke in a soothing tone. “She doesn’t want us to leave, but she also wants the Corbetts gone. This has cost us time, and the walk back won’t be quick in these conditions, but if we can convince them to move on before midnight, hopefully she’ll be satisfied and move on as well. At the very least, she promised not to kill me, and I believe her.”

Nigel cursed himself silently. Why had he agreed to this plan? All they’d done was waste time, time Oscar needed to work.

But he knew the answer. He’d done it in the hopes of getting Oscar clear of the danger, of keeping him safe from a relentless ghost who had stalked the family for a hundred and fifty years.

He should have known she wouldn’t give up that easily.

“Let’s grab anything we might need,” he said unhappily. “The sooner we get back to the distillery, the sooner we can get to work.”

* * *

It took them nearly an hour to return to the tent. The snow had slacked off, thankfully, so they were able to follow the tire tracks back without worrying about getting lost in the woods on top of everything else.

Oscar’s mind raced as they walked, trying to come up with a plan for dealing with each ghost. After about fifteen minutes, he realized he didn’t have to do it all on his own. “Hey, everyone?”

He looked behind him. Dad and Chris were next in line, then Tina and Nigel brought up the rear, both of them looking miserable in the cold. Even though they were walking in the tracks cutting through the deep snow, it wasn’t an easy hike, and breath steamed in clouds through the bitter cold night.

“Yeah?” Chris asked.

“We need a plan for taking care of each ghost. I have some thoughts, but if anyone comes up with an idea, we’ll discuss it back at the tent.”

“I don’t understand,” Dad said. Maybe it was the lighting from their flashlights, or maybe it was the stress of the last few hours, but he looked old. As if he’d aged years since he arrived. “How can you fight something like…like that?”

Poor Dad—it was hard, even for people who believed, to be confronted with something as terrifying as Agnes.

“Her name is Agnes,” Oscar said, hoping putting a name to her would help calm some of Dad’s fears. “And yeah, she’s scary. And so are the ghosts in the distillery, but we have equipment. We’ve done something similar before. We can do this.”

“But what if you can’t?” Dad asked. “Will they kill you? Us? Are we going to die here?”

“Mr. Fox.” Nigel’s voice floated out of the darkness at the end of the line, firm and a bit cold. “Oscar is a professional. He has gifts that neither you nor I possess. However, they rely heavily on his mental state, so undercutting him shortly before he has to face these ghosts isn’t helpful.”

Dad looked as though Nigel had slapped him. “Oscar is—”

“Not the traumatized child you remember.”

“It’s okay, Nigel,” Oscar said, because the last thing they needed was an argument. He knew Nigel was only trying to stick up for him, but the way he was going about it wasn’t helping the situation either. “Dad, we’ve got this. We’re a team, okay? Just like when I was playing football.”

“Except now you’re the star quarterback,” Chris said, probably trying to lighten the mood.

Oscar shuddered theatrically. “No thanks.”

Football was the one thing he and Dad always had in common. “Heh, I bet you’ve showed Nigel videos of all your old plays, yeah?” Scott asked, joining in on the attempt at levity.

“No, Dad.”

“Why not?”

He didn’t want to say it was only ever a means to an end, not when it had meant so much to his father. “Because I didn’t peak in college.”

“I have seen a lot of spreadsheets,” Nigel called from the back. “So many spreadsheets.”

“Hey, spreadsheets are important for keeping track of income and expenses,” Oscar protested.

“You sit up late reading the tax code.”

“It’s interesting!”

Dad laughed weakly. “Did you know he offered to do our household budget when he was ten?”

“No one appreciates me,” Oscar muttered.

The beam of his flashlight showed the trees falling back, then caught on the tent and van. Thank god. He checked his watch and silently cursed. It was going on eight o’clock now.

Four hours to get everything together, go into the distillery, and remove three separate ghosts.

He pushed the thought aside. Fretting about the time wouldn’t change anything. Either they would get the job done before midnight, or Agnes would try to kill him.

* * *

Oscar’s muscles ached as they left the tent behind and made for the distillery. The fall in the woods, combined with the car crash, had left him with an assortment of bruises and scrapes, all of which he had to ignore for a few more hours at least.

Dad had wanted to come with them, determined to help in any way he could. Which was an improvement…except that Oscar had to gently let him down. It was too dangerous to have an amateur in the mix tonight, so they left him behind with Tina and a canister of salt. The snow had dissolved the big circle around the tent, but if it got anywhere near midnight, or if Tina spotted anything suspicious on the outside camera, she could at least create a smaller one inside for just the two of them.

Snow clung to the old stone of the original building, like frosting on a cake. It would have been beautiful as a postcard, or as a print to sell on their website, but in the freezing night, under a deadline set by a vengeful ghost, it lost its charm.

They made their way to the main building and slipped through the rotting door. Oscar stamped the snow from his boots and shook it off his jacket.

“I don’t know if the thermal is going to pick up anything in this weather,” Chris said as they followed suit. “How much colder can a ghost make it?”

Nigel took off his glasses, fished a microfiber cloth from his pants pocket, and wiped off the clinging snowmelt. “It isn’t something that’s been studied. Presumably at some point there isn’t enough ambient energy in the air for a ghost to draw on it effectively, but when?”

Oscar stepped from the hall to the distilling room and stopped. “It doesn’t matter,” he said quietly. “I see him.”

Jeff Corbett stood on the uppermost catwalk, looking down. He had a thin, flat aspect to him, like an old black-and-white film strip projected onto mist. Even from a distance, Oscar could see the small, satisfied smile as he gazed down on the ruined distilling room, perhaps seeing it not as it was, but as it had been.

Then Jeff’s arms flew up, he stumbled—and plummeted over the side.