A Ghoul's Guide to Love and Murder (2 page)

It was a drizzly spring late afternoon in Boston when Heath and I walked into my office off Mass Ave, holding hands and smiling wickedly. Who's Heath, you ask? Well . . . that's where things get a little complicated.

In order to tell you who Heath is, I need to swear you to secrecy. Not the “Oh, I will only tell my eleventy million friends on Facebook—pinkie swear” kind of secret.

An. Actual. Secret.

See, the last time I checked in with you all, Heath was simply my boyfriend. My love. My partner in both the business and domestic sense, and yes, sometimes our domestic stuff is all about the “bidness,” but I digress. Or first, perhaps I must explain.

About eight months ago “the call” came in . . . and by that I mean that myself, Heath, Gilley, and
respective members of our
Ghoul Getters
cast were made rich, I tell you . . .
rich
!

The call was from a major motion picture studio, which had agreed to distribute a movie we'd made a few years back while on location for our TV ghostbusting show,
Ghoul Getters
. The individual episode and all of the extra footage from one particular ghostbust we'd done in Scotland had been purchased by a production company—Prescott Productions—but the production company had needed the backing of a major motion picture studio to green-light the distribution before the movie actually got funded and any of us got paid. For several years all that extra footage just sat on the shelf, but just when we'd all given up the dream, the call had come in that the movie was a go.

In fact,
The Haunting of the Grim Widow
was set to release in theaters everywhere a week after Heath and I got back from our trip. I hadn't actually seen the completed film yet, mostly because I'd barely lived through my encounter with the Widow and had no urge to relive it.

Still, we had captured some stuff on film that would make your hair curl, and luckily for us, some studio execs finally took notice. They were now all over the idea of promoting a “real” horror flick that was as creepy as
The Conjuring
, without all the special effects.

What that had meant for us, specifically, was a
considerable
signing bonus, with an additional amount due later in the form of a portion of the box office in royalties. In other words, the second we stopped taping our
last
Ghoul Getters
episode, none of us—the talent and our small crew—ever really had to work again if we were careful and invested wisely, of course.

Anyway, it'd taken about seven months to finish that last location shoot for
GG
, but at the end of the week, we each received our first big check.

Now, money will motivate you in a way that you might not think. It makes you do things impulsively, the way finding out you have only a short time to live does. Most of us did things that we might not otherwise have done if not afforded the freedom that a big pile of moolah gave us.

Gilley (my BFF and our tech expert on the shoots) proposed to Michel, our cameraman and Gilley's boyfriend, on the same day that Michel proposed to him. It was insanely cute to see the recap of the two flash mobs brought together at the same restaurant, not having any knowledge of each other, and have it dissolve into something resembling the Sharks and the Jets. In the end there were a
lot
of tired dancers and nearly a million hits on YouTube, and Gil and Michel were engaged, so it worked out okay.

Our director, Peter Gopher, funded a documentary he'd been trying to get off the ground and set off to Nepal to begin filming.

John and Kim, our sound guy and production assistant, booked a trip to Asia and were slowly making their way across the region, keeping us updated through Facebook posts and the like.

Meg, our adorable hair and makeup assistant, had
promptly gone back to college up in Montreal, and she'd also paid off her parents' mortgage.

And Heath and I got married. (You read that right. We got hitched.) By the way,
that's
the part y'all need to keep on the down low, because if Gilley finds out that I got married before him, well, I'm likely never to hear the end of it.

Our wedding was truly impulsive. Heath surprised me at the end of March with a three-week trip to St. Thomas. Have you ever been to St. Thomas? It's gorgeous.
Gorgeous!
Think aqua blue water, white sandy beaches, drinks in coconuts, genuinely lovely people, and romantic ambiance out the yin-yang.

On our second day there he left me a note asking me to be his for the day and to meet him for a romantic walk along the beach. From our cabana I traveled down a bamboo walkway and around a little bend to find my beautiful man, standing there with a rose in his hand. As I approached he got down on bended knee and said, “Em, will you be mine, not just for today, but forever?”

He then presented me with the most beautiful ring you've ever seen. But I'd have said yes if it was carved from a puka shell. They don't make men like Heath in abundance. I'm lucky.

So, we spent the first week of our engagement talking about our future, and by the end of that beautiful week, we both knew we didn't feel like waiting to call each other husband and wife.

We were married by a local justice of the peace in the waning light of the setting sun, with purple, pink,
and peach streaks coating the tropical sky and the sound of the rolling surf the only music to be had. I wore a soft peach sundress I found at a shop in town, and Heath wore a light blue shirt, white shorts, and a smile as wide as Texas. It was perfect.

The next week we had ourselves a proper honeymoon, and now we were back in Boston, wading through a steady drizzle and miserably cold temps, but our spirits were in no way diminished. “What time are we meeting Gil?” my husband asked as we came through the door shaking our umbrellas.

I nearly tripped over the small pile of mail that'd been shoved through the mail slot.

“Seven,” I told him, flipping on the light before stooping to gather some of the mail and glancing at my watch. It was ten to five. Traffic had been horrible—given both the weather and the onset of rush hour, it'd taken more than an hour to get from the airport to my office, a commute that normally takes only about twenty minutes. “We're meeting for dinner before he heads to the opening of the exhibit.” The studio was sponsoring an exhibit of items from the movie and our TV show to create some buzz for the actual premiere of the movie, which would be released the following week. The Boston premiere of the movie was going to be shown at the IMAX theater that was housed in a building adjacent to the Museum of Modern Science—and that was also the location for the
Ghoul Getters
exhibit.

Paranormal investigations weren't exactly considered “modern science” by the museum's standards,
but the studio had thrown a
lot
of money at them, and they'd come around. (Surprise, surprise.)

“You still don't want to go?” Heath asked.

“Gilley will be there to represent us,” I said to Heath. “And I'm way too tired to go to that thing. I'd much prefer a relaxing, low-key evening and a good meal.”

“It's probably not gonna be very relaxing if we meet Gil for dinner,” Heath muttered, but I'd heard him. And I could sympathize.

Gil had talked of little else but his wedding for months, and we were all well and truly sick of it. He was going big—as he had a nice big pile of money to play with—and no one could seem to rein him in. I'd decided early on to withhold any and all opinions, sage advice, judgmental looks, or mutterings on the matter. If my BFF wanted to be a diva, and a ginormous wedding would make him happy, then so be it.

“What's our plan?” Heath said, plopping into a chair in front of my desk.

“Well,” I said, extending my left hand to smile again at the wedding and engagement rings. “I have to hide the evidence for a little while. Just until I'm sure he's not going to be upset by the news that we got married first.”

“So, until after he gets married?” Heath asked.

I ducked my chin. “Maybe,” I said, swiveling in the chair to move aside a cabinet door that hid a small safe.

“Em,” Heath said, “he's not getting married until
September
.”

My shoulders sagged. This coming back to reality
was a real bummer. “I know, honey, I know. But you've seen how he can be. He'll perceive it as our upstaging him, and he's in such an emotional state as it is—”

“Only because he's turned into a groomzilla,” Heath interrupted.

I sighed, swiveling back to my husband with hands up in surrender. “Okay. How about we wait just a little while. Until we find a good moment to tell him.”

“We could always tell Michel and have him spill the beans.”

That made me laugh. “You are such a chicken,” I told him. “And no way are we doing that to poor Michel. Gilley is fully capable of shooting the messenger.”

Heath grimaced, but then he seemed to brighten. “You know, maybe it won't be so bad. Maybe he'll be happy for us instead of thinking we stole his spotlight.”

My jaw dropped. “Excuse me, but have you
met
Gilley Gillespie?”

Heath's grimace returned. “If he's gonna freak out about our being married, what's he going say about the fact that we're moving to Santa Fe?”

That's another big change that I forgot to tell you about. Heath and I had decided to retire from Boston and move to Santa Fe to be closer to his family. It'd be a big adjustment for me, but in recent months I'd grown closer and closer to his mom and his cousins. They were such lovely, warm, and welcoming people, and now that they were also my family, I wanted to be near them.

“We'll cross that bridge when we come to it,” I told him.

“Like when Gilley and Michel are off on their honeymoon?” Heath said hopefully.

I pointed at him. “Exactly.” Then I turned away to bend over and fiddle with the dial on the safe. “Honey, could you hand over your ring?”

“I think I'm going to hold on to it, Em.”

I looked over my shoulder at him. He was tugging on his wedding ring, about to take it off. “You sure you don't want me to put it in here where it'll be safe?” I asked, a bit worried he'd lose it.

“Yeah,” he said, still tugging. “It's my good luck charm.”

That made me smile, and I went back to focusing on the combination to the safe. After opening it up, I took off my rings and was about to place them on the bottom shelf when something inside the safe caught my eye.

Or rather, it was the absence of something that caught my eye.
“Ohmigod!”

Heath came around the desk and over to me. “What?” he said. “What is it?”

I pointed inside. “The dagger! The dagger! It's gone!”

Heath stared first at me, then inside the safe, and the color drained from his face.

For the past few years we'd kept an extremely rare and incredibly dangerous relic in our safe: a dagger once owned by a particularly evil and quite deadly Turkish warlord named Oruç.

Heath and I had first met at a hotel in San Francisco, where we'd been hired as the talent on another cable TV show, a special called
Haunted Possessions
. We were two of the four mediums hired as the talent to assess various objects that were said to have been possessed by evil spirits. Of all the objects put in front of us, only Oruç's dagger had truly been possessed by something evil—and evil he was.

Oruç had lived several centuries earlier, and he'd developed a lust for killing young women by stabbing them with his dagger.

After he was murdered by a woman he tried to kill—with the dagger—his ghost figured out a way to use the dagger as a portal, which is a sort of gateway between our world and the lower realms, where evil things lurk.

Oruç's ghost was a crazy powerful spook in his own right, and his ability to completely possess anyone who handled the dagger was a very scary thing. His spirit could completely overtake the person in question and force him or her to commit murder.

If that weren't reason enough to lock the dagger away, it came with an added terrifying bonus: The dagger was also the portal for a demon that I don't think was ever of this world.

Oruç's demon was truly a monster. I'd never actually seen it, but I'd sure as hell felt it, and I had the scars on my back to prove it.

Its presence was big, like . . .
big
, and it would strike by swiping at us with its three talons. We knew they were talons because everywhere the demon struck it
left that distinctive three-line gouge—in walls, in furniture, in flesh. It had been somewhat neutralized back when we'd first encountered it, meaning that it hadn't been powerful enough to ever show its true form, but one of my biggest fears was that someday, that demon would figure out a way to escape the dagger again, and if it ever became powerful enough to do that, then there was no telling what harm it might cause.

After first encountering the dagger and its horrors, we'd had a hell of a time putting those two genies back in their bottles, so to speak, and sadly, not before more than one person had been killed. Since then, however, we'd taken every precaution with it, securing it with powerful magnets that blocked the portal's gateway and wouldn't allow anything from the lower realms to come through.

Essentially, we'd sent Oruç and his demon back to the lower realms where they belonged, and as long as we had possession of the dagger, I knew with some certainty that the warlord and the demon were sufficiently shut down. But now the dagger was missing, and my first thought was one of panic, because in the wrong hands that thing was—at best—deadly. “Ohmigod,” I whispered as I continued to stare at the inside of the safe. “It can't be gone. It can't!”

Heath moved a little closer to me and began pulling other things out of the safe. There was a wad of cash for emergencies, the lease for our office, and a few other odds and ends, but no dagger. No magnets either, but that hardly mattered with the dagger missing.