Free Ghost Town by Jason Hawes Page A

to accept that a dead friend had spoken to her through a mirror than it was to accept that Mitch Sagers stood on a sidewalk in Exeter, staring at her, a woman in black at his side. It just didn’t make any sense. What was he doing there? It couldn’t be him. It had to be someone else, someone who just looked like him. But then she remembered what Greg had told her.
    There are nasty things in this town, and you’ve drawn their attention.
    An ice-water surge of panic raced through her, and her hand clenched tightly on Drew’s. She couldn’t imagine too many things nastier than Mitch.
    â€œWhat’s wrong?” Drew’s voice was filled with concern.
    Amber tried to answer, but she couldn’t manage to draw in a breath. Mitch stared at her for a long moment, his gaze blank andunreadable. Then the woman in black took him by the arm, and together they turned and disappeared into the crowd.
    â€œAmber?”
    Drew stepped around in front of her, and as soon as he filled her vision, her trance broke. She pulled in a gasping breath of air, threw herself into his arms, and began crying.
    Amber had looked surprised to see him. No, more than that: she had looked afraid . Mitch smiled with grim satisfaction. It was a good first step toward getting back the respect she owed him. But he still had more he wanted to do—much more.
    Which was why he was so confused to be walking away from her right then. And away from that wimp of a new boyfriend she had. He could snap that asshole in two like a pencil without even trying. The more he thought about it, the more walking in the other direction might seem to Amber as if he were running away, as if he were the one afraid of a confrontation. It was a sign of weakness, and if his daddy were there right then, he would pound the shit out of him for it.
    Mitch started to turn around, but the Dark Lady’s cold grip tightened on his arm, stopping him. He grimaced in pain. Damn, but she was stronger than she looked!
    â€œIt’s better this way. Give the fear time to grow within her. Meanwhile, there’s something I’d like you to do for me.”
    He wasn’t the kind to take orders from anyone, let alone a woman. But he listened as she whispered her plans to him in a voice like a midnight wind blowing across an empty field. And when she was finished, he thought, What the hell? Sounds like fun.
    They continued walking down the street, the Dark Lady’s whispers growing ever more sinister as they went.
    Connie Flaxman gripped her steering wheel tightly as the strains of Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G Minor wafted through her Mercedes.Mozart usually soothed her, but this day all it did was set her teeth on edge. She stabbed out a finger to turn off the CD, and the resulting silence came as a relief.
    She couldn’t believe she was doing this. She had left her house in Lincoln Park at five that morning, after a night of tossing and turning and getting almost no sleep. And now there she was, several hours later, getting ready to take the highway exit for Exeter, Indiana. As she drew close, she was tempted to press down on the accelerator and roar past it. She could find another exit, turn around, get back on the highway, and start heading home to Chicago. If she drove straight through, she could be home by early afternoon. She would have wasted half a day, but that was better than wasting the whole day, right?
    She almost did it. But in the end, she lifted her foot off the gas, hit the turn signal, and pulled off the highway.
    She had made her feelings quite clear to Drew when he had told her he planned to attend the so-called conference going on there that weekend. He had listened to her politely and said that he understood her viewpoint and that while he agreed that Esotericon wasn’t the usual sort of conference he attended, he had made a commitment to a couple of friends to be there, and he wasn’t going to let them down. And then