Page 16 of Fire and Ice Cruise

A blonde in a flowing white gown rises up from the remaining crowd, floating several feet above the passengers’ heads. Her hair whips around her face as if caught in a wind that doesn’t exist, and her beautiful features contort into something primal and terrifying.

Oh, for the love of lava cake. I haven’t even gotten to the dessert table yet. And at this rate, I’ll find myself in an involuntary calorie deficit before we get to the first port.

The dearly departed bombshell opens her mouth impossibly wide and lets out a roar that rattles through my skull. It’s a cry that’s filled with rage and fury and something darker that makes every hair on my body stand at attention. Then she explodes into a shower of tiny pink stars and vanishes.

Murder isn’t just afoot on this ship.

It’s moved in, unpacked its bags, and made itself comfortable for the entire voyage—and so has that ghost.

CHAPTER 6

Day 2: At Sea

“If I eat one more waffle, I’m going to become a waffle. And honestly, at this point, the syrup situation might be an upgrade.” Nettie pats her stomach with zero regret while eyeing the stack still remaining on her plate.

It’s the very next morning after the murder, and we’ve claimed a prime table outside the Blue Water Café, where the breakfast buffet has been thoroughly attacked and left for dead.

My plate resembles a culinary crime scene—scrambled eggs, bacon, a chocolate croissant the size of my head, fresh fruit that’s probably just for show, and a cinnamon roll I grabbed in the name of due diligence.

Bess sits across from me with her own mountain of food, looking entirely too put-together for someone who witnessed a murder last night. Her red hair catches what little sunlight manages to break through the mottled gray sky, and she’s bundled in a peach cardigan against the cool, nippy air. It’s early spring in the North Atlantic, which means the weather can’t decide if it wants to be dramatic or just miserable. The wind whips across the deck hard enough to steal napkins and send them flying overboard, and the sky looks like someone smudged charcoal across canvas—all grays and darker grays with the occasional break of pale light.

“I’m just saying,” Bess continues whatever argument she started while I was contemplating my cinnamon roll, “if you’re going to flirt with the waitstaff, at least wait until they’re off duty.”

“I wasn’t flirting,” Nettie protests, her gray curls dancing in the wind. She’s eighty-something, going on twenty-five, dressed in a hot pink tracksuit bedazzled with rhinestones that spell out CRUISING in sequined letters across the back. She can be a bit of an attention-getter in more ways than one. “I was being friendly,” she insists. “There’s a difference.”

Bess blinks at her. “You asked if he came with the breakfast buffet.”

“As a conversational opener!”

“Nettie. You asked him if he was complimentary.”

“And he said yes.”

“He said yes to the coffee refill,” Bess corrects.

“Same thing.”

“Nothing about that is the same thing.”

I bite back a smile and wrap my hands around my coffee mug, letting the warmth seep into my fingers. I just finished teaching an art class less than twenty minutes ago to a group of enthusiastic women learning acrylics and how to paint an Icelandic lava field with a hot pink sky. My fingers still have paint under the nails, and I’m pretty sure there’s a streak of magenta in my hair.

“So.” Bess turns her attention to me, her sharp eyes missing nothing. “Have you seen the ghost yet?”

I glance around to make sure nobody is eavesdropping. The deck is relatively empty—most passengers are either sleeping off last night’s trauma or camped out inside where it’s warm.

Only a few people on the ship know about my supernatural quirk, and Bess, Nettie, Wes, and Ransom are the sum total of those people.

“I saw her last night. Blonde, white dress, downright beautiful, and she looked really angry about something.”

“Maybe she’s angry about being dead,” Nettie offers.

“Maybe so.” I shrug as I take a sip of coffee. “But I haven’t had any direct contact with her yet.”

“Give it time,” Bess says dryly. “They never seem to leave you alone for long.”

She’s not wrong. We all know the drill.

Here’s the thing: I see dead people. Not all the time, thank goodness, and it just so happens that I only see them around the time of a murder. The technical term is transmundane, further classified as supersensual, which sounds like something from a romance novel but actually just means I’ve got the world’s most inconvenient superpower.