Free The Undead in My Bed by Katie MacAlister;Molly Harper;Jessica Sims

interesting. This one, however, I could quite happily never set eyes on again. I honed my glare on Nosty. “Don’t try to weasel your way out of this. You know full well that I’m here because you’ve been telling tales.”
    “Hello! Am I suddenly mute? I just told you two to leave!” Miles sputtered.
    Nosty edged away from me. “Tales? Me? I’d never do that, Gray, you know that. Especially not tales about you.”
    Miles breathed heavily through his nose. “The spirits sent me to this room so that I might commune with the deceased housekeeper. I feel that she has things she wishes to tell me, and she can’t bloody well do that with you two standing there bollixing away.”
    “You told Noelle about my mother.” I growled, stalking slowly toward the ghost.
    Nosty gulped and backed up, his hands out in a placating gesture. “I didn’t tell her anything about Lady Joan. Other than where she lived. But nothing else, Gray, I swear.”
    “I think I am being possessed.” Miles, now swaying in his chair, his eyes closed, started humming to himself. “Yes, I believe the spirit of the housekeeper is merging with my consciousness. What is it you want, dear lady? You want these people out of your room? Yes, yes, I completely understand. You wish for your privacy to be honored.”
    “That was enough to send her running over to the cottage to speak with my mother, whose very presence you neglected to bother mentioning to me. Shall I tell you what I do to those who annoy me, Nosty?”
    “You were never here!” the ghost shrieked, now backed up against the wall. He looked as if he was trying very hard to disappear into nothing, but I hadn’t spent my entire existence coping with ghosts without learning a trick or two. I made sure he was groundedand couldn’t dissipate his being. “How could I tell you if you never showed up at the Abbey?”
    “You’re bloody ’ere now, both of you, and you can just leave so I can get on with me ’ousework,” Miles said in a strong Cockney accent as he glared at us. “I’ve got an entire ’ouse what to clean and feed.”
    I shot him a look. “The only housekeeper who ever used this room was Czech, not British, and she spoke no English.”
    Miles blinked for a second, then collapsed back onto the chair, slumped down, moaning. “The spirits, so many spirits here, they are fighting to speak through me…”
    “If you so much as open your mouth to Noelle again—” I grabbed the ghost by the front of his robe and lifted him off the ground, shaking him as I did so.
    “I won’t!” Nosty babbled, his expression suitably frightened by my unspoken threat. “I swear by the saints, I won’t say another thing to her! I won’t tell her about Johannes, or Amaymon, or that night when your mother died… I won’t tell her about any of that.”
    “See that you don’t.” I slammed him against the wall before I released my grip on his robe. He slid down the wall to the floor, where he crumpled into a ball before disappearing into nothing.
    Behind me, Miles was humming softly to himself, occasionally tossing out a word of what was obviouslytourist Czech. I turned to tell him he’d have to do better than that if he wanted to convince anyone that he was possessed, but the sight of the woman standing in the doorway, her arms crossed and one lovely sable eyebrow cocked in question, drove all lesser concerns from my mind.
    “Johannes?” Noelle said, watching me avidly. Amaymon? Is that the demon lord who vitiated you? Why did your father kill your mother, and more important, why do you feel so guilty about it?
    For a moment, for the time it takes for one synapse to fire at another, I thought of running. I’d run my entire life—why not now? But even as I stood tense and poised to escape, the warm lilac scent that seemed to be permanently imbued in her skin wrapped me in silken tendrils, pulling me toward her.
    “I am now possessed,” Miles announced loudly in a quasi-Czech accent as