Free Spellbound by Michelle M. Pillow Page B

he hired me, he mentioned you all would have some input into the plans. I’m not sure what the problem is, but nothing has been finalized. We’re going to go over everything later today.”
    “You don’t know what I mean.” Malina hummed thoughtfully. She motioned to the table. “I’ll need all these.” Reaching into her small clutch, she pulled out several bills and placed them on the table. “Would you mind bringing them with you when you come tonight?”
    “Oh, ah, that will be,” Jane reached for the money and started to mentally calculate the total due.
    “Keep the change. Call it a delivery fee.” Malina smiled and pulled sunglasses off the top of her head. She winked before sliding them over her eyes.
    Jane glanced down at the bills and protested, “But this is three hundred dollars. I can’t—”
    Malina was gone. Jane leaned forward to look down the row of tables to the other booths but couldn’t see her.
    “Thank you,” Jane said, knowing the woman couldn’t hear her.

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    “ W hat’s this , little Jane?” The bean nighe did not appreciate the new hint of magick sticking to her human like mold to aging bread. And like mold, it would have to be cut off before the rest could be consumed. “What potions have you been drinking?”
    She tried to focus her attention on the country market, but the call of a nearby cemetery kept distracting her. Old death was often the most potent. Those were the spirits that lingered the longest.
    Hunger gnawed at her insides, slowly ripping her apart. Oh, what she wouldn’t give for a nice passenger train crash, confused souls just ready to be eaten and still full of fresh, delicious emotions. New ghosts were harder to find because the spirits did not call to her like old, musty death.
    Sanity was hard for the bean nighe to hold on to. Picking off her meals one by one, ghost by ghost, meant she’d only be conscious for short periods at a time before instinct took over. She had to feast upon a big tragedy to sustain any real length of sanity, but even then the hunger would find her eventually. It always found her.
    The bean nighe knew she needed to feed soon. Unable to handle the pull of the dead, she covered her ears and screeched. Her body sped through the trees, from limb to limb, moving without the direction of her consciousness. She stopped in the middle of a forgotten sunken graveyard. The weathered gravestones were hidden by weeds, except for a few stubborn markers that poked through in chipped defiance.
    An unaware ghost leaned over a divot in the earth, a tomb long forgotten as she mourned a dead loved one. The wailing of the spectral’s cries were needles to the bean nighe’s ears. With mindless purpose, the bean nighe endeavored to feed. The unsuspecting spirit didn’t even fight her fate.
    It started as a tingle in the bean nighe’s narrowlips, pulling the translucent mist of the ghost’s form. Against her will, she absorbed the lost soul, the bitter taste of ghostly pain choking down an unwilling throat. She hated this fate, this burning need to absorb death in order to live. If she denied it, her body forced her to do it. The wailing grew louder because it rang inside her head. So much pain was locked in that ghost’s residual moment. The bean nighe gagged and convulsed.
    When she again had control over her functions, she went to where the ghost had been kneeling and lifted the clothes left behind. They weren’t real clothes, but the residual leftovers the bean nighe could not consume that looked like the dead’s clothing. A new compulsion overtook her and she screeched as she moved through the forest to the little stream. There she would remain, scrubbing and washing the ghost clothing in the water until they dissipated, no matter how long it took. Cleaning up the dead was her one purpose. It was a purpose she longed to end.
    “ Salach, salach ,” the bean nighe whispered, the word keeping time with the scrubbing on the washboard she’d