Men, women, a few children, all in a variety of clothing representing many periods of time. Some looked fresh, new is the only word I had for them, and others were faded like the silvery woman who’d directed me here. Many were dressed in army fatigues from eras gone by, their bodies still showing horrific injuries.

I took a deep breath, my exhale showing the heat of my body clearly in a puff of mist. Feish was shaking hard, and I didn’t think it was from fear. “The cold bothers you?”

“I’m a river maid. My body temperature picks up on the environment around me,” she said.

“Okay, let’s make this quick.” I dipped my voice low. “You all know I can see you?” One by one, the various ghosts nodded in my direction. “And you know that something bad is happening here?”

Again, they all nodded.

“Here’s the deal,” I whispered. “We have to get out of here. If there really is—” I didn’t want to say vampire out loud as if that would make it more real. Which was kind of ridiculous given that I was having a discussion with a roomful of ghosts. “—that fanged creature here, then we need to go. We need to tell someone.”

The ghosts looked at one another, then slowly parted and pointed to the window. Three strides took us across the room, and I shoved Feish toward the old glass. “You go.” And on a sudden gut feeling, I pulled Robert’s finger bone out of my bra.

“I need the book out of my bag, Robert.”

He stood up, between one blink and the next, swaying there next to me, my bag hanging over his shoulder. I reached for it, dug around in it and pulled out the spell book from the used book store. “I’ll keep this with me.”

Robert collapsed once more without me telling him, and I scooped him back up, handing him to Feish. They both needed to get the duck out of there.

Feish looked up at me. “Why are you staying?”

“Because I have to.” I had no good reason, but there were plenty of ill-advised ones. These ghosts clearly knew things. Something about Grimm, I suspected, and also about a vampire who may or may not be hanging out in the hotel. And they were hiding. Some of the most fearsome ghosts known to Savannah were hiding.

Feish didn’t require much more prompting, and I watched as she made it to the street and hurried off. When she rounded the corner, leaving my field of vision, I pulled my head back into the room.

“Okay, you all need to talk to me. Why are you in here? Are you hiding?” I faced the room of ghosts, waiting for one of them to volunteer information.

The Silver Lady stepped up, her form sliding in and out of transparency. Her hand lifted, palm out to me in a gesture that made me want to press my own hand to hers. I lifted my hand.

Ghostly skin pressed to mine, and the world around me evaporated. Suddenly people were rushing all around me.

“You have to get them out of here.” The Silver Lady spoke clearly, only this time she was very much alive and no longer the ghostly woman. Her skirts shushed around us as she hurried between cots of groaning wounded men. “Those that carry the plague are coming.”

A doctor who looked suspiciously like Tom closed his eyes. “Mercy will not find any of us if they catch us here with the wounded.”

Time passed, everything happening too fast, like a film put on high speed, people rushing around in front of me as if I weren’t there, and then the world slowed again.

The Silver Lady stood at the doorway, her eyes locked on it. “They are here. Go. I will stop them.”

She held an impossibly thin piece of silver, at least two feet long, in one hand, and in the other she held a hammer. A silver stake. A hammer. Holy duck, she was a vampire hunter.

She pressed the tip of the blade to the door, took a breath and hammered it through. An unearthly wail lit the air and—

I hit the ground hard, bouncing backward through the sea of ghosts. Hands hovered around me as if they’d help me to my feet.

“Okay, okay, so you’re a good ghost,” I said. “I get it.”

She nodded, then reached out and touched my side where I had the spell book. “This?”

Another nod.

I pulled it out and her hand floated over the book, the pages flipping back and forth like they’d done earlier. Maybe it hadn’t been the book. Maybe a ghost had controlled it.

The pages slowed and stopped.

Silver moon is the time for the demon skin to be found, and bound, and used to be bidden.

I grimaced. “Demon skin, really?”

She nodded and mouthed three words. Find the skin. What in the world demon skin had to do with her showing me how badass she was, I didn’t know. But my instincts said she was trying her best to help.

The sound of feet outside the door caught my ears, stopping me from asking any other questions.

The ghosts dispersed so fast that the room’s temperature shot up forty degrees in an instant, the sudden change causing sweat to break out along my spine. “Holy crap,” I whispered.

The door opened and the outlined figure was distinctly male. “Who’s in here?”

I knew that voice. And in a split second, I fell into my role playing and the story I’d prepped.

“Davin, what the hell? Here I am in the middle of a ghost hunt, and I think I had a ghost ready to talk to me, and you just bang down the door like some thug?” I stormed toward him, shoving him out of the way. Bravado was my best bet here. And since he knew I didn’t much like him, I cringed and wrinkled my nose as I passed him. “You smell.” Actually that was true, he really did stink.

“What?” He stumbled away from me as if I’d kicked him in the shins. Also, not a bad idea.

I wrinkled my nose again. “You smell like”—I sniffed the air as if I were indeed scenting him, but a different smell caught my attention—“fresh grave dirt? Is that a thing? Because you smell like it.”

Davin’s eyes narrowed. “What are you accusing me of?”

I lifted both hands, turned, and walked into a cravat I’d seen earlier. Roderick looked down at me, his face a careful neutral, and the smell of whatever cologne he wore dispelled the odor of fresh grave dirt. I put a finger to his chest. “This guy smells good. You should ask him for his cologne. Or Corb. Corb’s cologne is also lovely.”

“It’s because of what Corb is that he smells that way. No one can duplicate it,” Davin snapped. As if maybe he’d tried and failed? Yeah, I could see Davin trying to pull off Corb’s allure.

I was about to ask just what he meant by that, but Roderick stopped me with a lifting of his hand. The third guy from earlier, the one who wasn’t a goblin, burst through the doorway leading to the stairwell. His eyes were wild with anger, and the intensity that rolled off him was enough to steal my breath. That had to be Bruce, the last council member Feish had named.

I couldn’t take my eyes off him, and not in a you’re so damn hot, my panties are on fire way. No. More in a holy crap what demon have you made a deal with to give you all that dark energy kind of way.

I kept looking at him, but his face didn’t stick in my mind. Like from one second to the next, I couldn’t have told you what he looked like, only that he was there. “Who the hell is that?” I pointed at him, but Roderick and Davin ignored me.

Roderick focused hard on me. “Where is your friend?”

The words were spoken in a neutral tone, but they vibrated through my bones with a power that spoke of deep magic that even I, a relative newbie in some ways, could recognize. I gritted my teeth and looked up at him.

“Mage?”

He gave me a subtle nod. “One of the best.” No arrogance there at all. I tried to look at the third council guy, but again, his face seemed to slide away. Every instinct in me said to keep my eyes on that one, to try to pin him down.

I gritted my teeth again as my eyes were drawn back to Roderick. “She didn’t like the feeling of the ghosts, so she left. Too cold. River maid.”

“And yet you stayed?” Roderick’s words continued to knock through me like a tuning fork shaking the inside of my bones and turning them into jelly.

I do not like this, Sam I am. I do not like Rod’s bing-bang-bam.

Maybe I had a little bit of Dr. Seuss in me after all.

“Working. Ghosts.” Whatever magic Roderick possessed, his power pulsed through me in a way that made the hair on my neck want to crawl off. That alone was reason enough for me to try to defy this macho crap and give him sideways answers.

“On a ghost hunt?” he asked, and the power in his voice just about set me back on my ass. He frowned and shook his head. “Why are you fighting me?”

“On principle,” I whispered. It was taking everything I had to keep my thoughts to myself. Except . . . was that even the right thing to do? Shouldn’t I tell the council about the vampire and the ghosts being afraid? Should I tell them what the Silver Lady had shown me?

No. Somehow I knew I had to keep it to myself for now. They couldn’t know, or something bad would happen. Just like I couldn’t tell Crash.

Secrets abounded, and I was keeping most of them.

“She is difficult. I told you we should bring her in and let the council have a round at her,” Davin said. “She thinks she’s something special. But she’s nothing but a washed-up divorcee. She’s only here because she had nowhere else to go and nowhere to hide. I heard the bank has her address now. It won’t be long before they take everything, including that house of her gran’s. Terrible pity that, but once they have everything she owns, she’ll be forced to move on.”

My eyes shot to him, his words slamming the final pieces of the puzzle into place. I was the queen of guessing, and I had a real doozy to drop. “You helped Alan, didn’t you?”

His smile said it all and the rage that shot through me repulsed Roderick’s magic as if I’d taken a stick and walloped him a good knock to the noggin. He stumbled back from me. “Dav, I don’t think you should piss her off.”

The third council member crept closer to Roderick. “What is she?”