Free Charmed (Death Escorts) by Cambria Hebert

of the home. It was a shadow within a shadow.
     
    A low curse fell off my lips. As if this night hadn’t been screwed up enough.
     
    Making sure that no one outside paid me any attention, I made my way over into the darkness, away from prying eyes. I leaned up against the side of the house and looked around for more movement. He was there to my left, trying, I would guess, not to be seen.
     
    “I thought Ghost Escorts were supposed to be invisible,” I said flat. Ghost Escorts were another version of a Death Escort. Except they didn’t kill. Their job was to stay in their “ghost” form—meaning G.R. wouldn’t let them have a body—and they used their “ghost” status to follow Targets around and watch them. They also watched the Death Escorts and reported everything they saw back to G.R.
     
    A very colorful twist on a curse word came out of the dark, and I was impressed. But I didn’t show it. He was following me. If I wasn’t already on G.R.’s shit list, I would have killed him right then, but killing another Escort is definitely against company policy.
     
    “Why are you following me?”
     
    “Shit, man. You saw me?”
     
    “I think that much is obvious.”
     
    “Not again,” he muttered and I glanced in his direction.
     
    “You mean this isn’t the first time you got caught spying on someone?”
     
    “For the record, it isn’t spying when you’re being paid to do it. It’s surveillance. And yeah… I got caught before. On my last job.”
     
    “Which one are you?” It annoyed me that all the Ghost Escorts were black. I knew being so dark was what made them blend so well into the shadows, but it also made it very hard to tell them apart.
     
    “Storm.”
     
    “You were the Ghost assigned to Dex,” I said, my interest perking a bit.
     
    “Yeah. He was cool. We were gonna chill on a beach once his job was done. But then you screwed it all up for him and he got Recalled.”
     
    “ I screwed it all up for him?”
     
    “Maybe if you hadn’t been so hardcore after his Target, he wouldn’t have felt the need to protect her instead of kill her.”
     
    “I wouldn’t have been so hardcore if he’d just done his damn job.” I growled.
     
    “Guess it doesn’t really matter now.”
     
    “Why are you following me?”
     
    “Man, I don’t know what the hell you did, but G.R. is hating on you hard right now. So hard I didn’t even get a vacation between jobs. He wants you watched twenty-four-seven.”
     
    First he gives me a lecture, assigns me an impossible Target, stations me in this godforsaken iceberg, and now he’s having me followed? I was really beginning to hate that guy.
     
    “Yeah, well, I don’t want or need a babysitter. So you can just go on and spy on someone else.”
     
    “I don’t take orders from you,” Storm said, his voice going cold.
     
    “You’ll be taking something if I see you creeping around me again.” To prove my point, I shot my hand out toward the darkness where I could see just enough of where he was.
     
    When my hand didn’t go through him, but rather connected, we both froze.
     
    “What the hell?” I muttered. I hadn’t expected that at all. All I was trying to do was scatter around some of the mist that made up his form. It would only annoy him, but it was the only thing that you could really do to a guy with no body. But that was exactly my point. He didn’t have a body…
     
    So how did I just touch him?
     
    “Care to explain how a guy with no body is partially solid?” I asked dryly.
     
    “Nope.”
     
    “Really. I wonder what G.R. would say if he knew he was employing a Ghost Escort who is lacking the actual ghost qualities.”
     
    Another one of those colorful words slipped out and I grinned. This guy was pretty entertaining. “Where’d you learn to cuss like that?”
     
    “I grew up in Brooklyn.”
     
    “I’m from New York, too,” I said, thinking that things from my past just kept coming up