Free Demon Hunting In a Dive Bar by Lexi George

the windshield, her pale face stretched in a horrible death mask. She plunged through Beck and out the other side. It was like being doused with a bucket of water on the inside. Icy, cold water dipped from a never ending well of despair.
    “No . . . cussing . . . on . . . my . . . bridge,” Hazel had said, punctuating each word with an icy pass through Beck’s body.
    With a final shriek, Hazel flew out of the truck and dived back into the river. Beck doubled over, rubbing her aching midsection. She would have peed her pants, but her bladder was frozen.
    “Oh, yeah. Probably should’ve warned you. Hazel can’t abide foul language,” Toby said in his lazy, country drawl. “She was a Sunday school teacher at the First Methodist Church until she died in a freak boating accident. I wouldn’t cuss no more on her bridge, if I was you.”
    “Thanks,” Beck had muttered. “I’ll remember that.”
    That had been her one and only attempt at ghost hunting. Sixteen years later, the memory of Hazel still made Beck’s insides quiver. Spectrophobia was an “abnormal and persistent fear of ghosts.” She’d looked it up. And, while her fear of ghosts wasn’t quite that manic, she had no desire for another Hazel-ectomy.
    Bringing her thoughts back to the present, Beck eyed their ghostly hitchhiker with unease. One ice water enema in a lifetime was enough, thank you very much.
    To her relief, Junior Peterson showed no inclination to swoop.
    “You’re Rebekah Damian, the owner of Beck’s Bar, right?” he said, giving her a gentle smile.
    His serene, slightly wan manner reminded Beck of Leslie Howard from Gone With the Wind, only younger and better looking.
    “Uh, yeah.”
    The ghost turned his eerie, shining gaze on Conall. “And you’re one of those demon hunters, aren’t you? I’ve met one of you a few weeks back. Big blond fellow.”
    “My brother Ansgar,” Conall said with typical brevity. “What do you want?”
    “A job.” Junior Peterson returned his attention to Beck. “You were at the wedding tonight. Did you enjoy the music?”
    “Yes, it was real nice, but I’m not sure what—”
    “I’ve heard that Beck’s is a place for our kind,” the ghost rushed on. “I was hoping maybe I could play piano there sometimes. In the afternoons, during the cocktail hour, maybe. You know, before the rowdies come in wanting something a little more lively.”
    Beelzebubba’s raucous country rock sound was certainly more “lively” than the highfalutin music Peterson had played at the church. The kith would jump in the river if he started playing that classical stuff.
    Not necessarily a bad thing, depending on the kith. Beck liked most of her customers, but there were a few she could do without, like the Skinners. Look up the word “trouble” in the dictionary and you’d find a picture of the Skinners; God’s truth.
    “It’s a bar for supernaturals,” she said. “Not ghosts.”
    Junior sat up straight. “So what am I, dog poop?”
    “He has a point,” Conall said. “In my opinion, the disembodied spirit of a dead person certainly falls in the category of the supernatural.”
    “Nobody asked you,” Beck said.
    “You wouldn’t have to pay me.” Junior’s pale eyes glowed. “I’d work for free and a place to stay.”
    What he meant was a place to haunt . Logically speaking, a ghost at the bar shouldn’t bother her, not when she had a dead guy working the door. But it did. The incident with Hazel had scarred her. I’m prejudiced against ghosts, she thought. So, sue me.
    “I thought you lived at the church,” she said aloud, hedging.
    “Heavens, no.” Junior gave his cuffs an affronted twitch. “Evie invited me to play at her wedding, but I haven’t had a place to stay since my house burned.”
    The lightbulb went off in Beck’s head. “Whoa, you’re one of those Petersons? The ones with all the money and the—”
    She broke off with a little cough of embarrassment.
    “—scandal,”