Page 53 of Hot Ghost Summer

He won’t let me near his app, so I’m not sure how to help there. I’m also not sure that’s it, or at least not entirely it.

I was there when our boss threatened Hollis into taking the job that killed him, was the one Mr Pickett told to leave him to die, and I was also there when he shoved all Hollis’s worldly goods into a cardboard box and sent me home.

Hollis is ghost-hunting royalty, and Mr Pickett made the job we were sent on sound easy—child’s play, he’d called it. What if Hollis’s unfinished business is the haunt that killed him?

I let out a long and defeated groan. How am I meant to do that?

I need something to help me clear my head. My gaze falls on the top drawer of my nightstand.

seventeen

Ruin

Hollis

Theo slams his bedroom door shut. He isn’t as afraid as he should be. Good. It’ll keep him alive.

“I can sense youuu, Keeper, but you cannot stop meee. I have been inviiited.” That sinister and rasping voice seems to come from everywhere and nowhere at once.

Verdammt, Baby, of all things, you had to open the door for a wraith? Formidable because they excel at generating the exact conditions they need to feed, when the wraith pushed through the opening made by the séance, it instantly took over the environment. Dropping the temperature and layering the cold with menacing intent, Theo’s responding biorhythms became its fetter.

I had no other choice.

His fear was shrinking his heart, making him a victim, but his anger… I’ve seen it in Theo before; rage blows his heart wide open and makes him a threat. For his own survival, I needed him to hate me more than he might fear the wraith. As I sank every last shred of energy into manifesting in front of him, I tracked his anger like a lifeline when he curled his open, reaching fingers into a tight and hardened fist.

The shadowy wisp of navy-blue malevolence makes a sudden break for the bedroom, and its unwelcome presence triggers my possessive fury. Channelling high-density electrons into an electrified cage, I claim the space around Theo.

“You cannot keep me from hiiim. He’s miiine,” it seethes.

Crashing against my plasma membrane causes it pain, but it doesn’t stop. Over and over, it attempts to swarm my defences, and thunderous static booms each time it refracts on impact. It’s strong, this wraith, but I can’t let it pass. I won’t.

Lost to their own madness, wraiths are so set on vengeance that they’ve forgotten any original purpose or intent and seek only to drain a human host of their energy. Theo’s a vibrant target because he’s so full of life—and that life force is mine.

I can’t vanquish it, not like this. I’m not strong enough. When it charges at my shield again, I pull even more electricity through the circuits of Theo’s flat to keep him barricaded safely inside.

Shimmering arcs of ionised air flow around me, and I feel the shift in energy before I can name it. Heat blooms in my core, rushing through phantom limbs like sap through alpine roots. I embed myself within the underlying power grid and effortlessly weave its electricity like an extension of my own form.

This time, when the wraith lunges again, a weapon of solid light snaps into place at my fingertips and the world slows down. Seeing at the speed of light, I don’t just anticipate the attack coming but know exactly where to strike.

Spearing the wraith through the centre of its mass produces a seismic blast that tears the malevolent spirit apart and forces charged air into my spectral lungs. Curls of navy-blue ash cling to my arcane body, and I bring my hands in front of my face. Slick with another entity’s ruin, multiple glowing tendrils shift under my newly visible skin.

Upon the wraith’s final death, the door the séance had opened closes, and with it, my translucent edges sharpen into clear lines. A heart, long dead, strikes a silent beat inside my chest, and my hollow eyes fill with a hungry light as they land on Theo’s bedroom door.

His name on my lips had sparked a surge of wild, red energy that birthed my evolution. I’m stronger now, more formidable. Electric.

Testing a theory, I close my eyes and return to the circuitry that encloses the flat, then easily reform into a body I thought I’d lost forever.

A wicked smirk tugs at my mouth. All of this is only possible because of Theo and his inability to do as he’s told. I should thank him, but this brat has run up a serious debt this week, and now that I can do something about it, it’s time for him to pay.

His closed door is a message I have no intention of heeding. Slipping seamlessly into the wiring, I find Theo on his bed. Naked and panting hard, his foot is tangled in the corner of the sheet while the rest trails the floor.

Intoxicating shock holds me in place, but the deep crease in his forehead, the tight clench of his jaw, and the angry flush of his cock as he shuttles his tattooed hand over it, are a forbidden invitation to stay.

Unseen, I watch the gothic-style numbers inked on his abs tense and flex as he slowly works himself. His leg that isn’t bound by the sheet digs into the mattress when he lifts his hips. Tattooed on his thigh is a small sea turtle, and a crown sits just above his knee. Every mark on his skin is laid bare, and a twisted desire to add some of my own grows like a rabid pulse.

Corrupting the space between us, I block out everything that isn’t him.

Theo whines, his hand falling away in overstimulated, futile desperation. Littered around him are a bottle of lube, a box of tissues, and a few toys, but none of it’s working. He needs more. I could help—I don’t. A sexually frustrated brat is easier to teach. And Theo needs to learn.