I fought the urge to add another word to the end of that statement.

I lost. “Rewind.”

Damn it. I sucked at fighting. Urges or otherwise.

“It’s a good message,” she said when she came back to me, a microsecond before she started writing again.

“It is. And I have to tell you something else.”

“I’m all ears.”

I released a lengthy sigh and fessed up. “The whole regressive therapy thing? That’s actually secondary to the real reason I’m here.”

“Which is?”

I dropped my feet over Mr. Skarsgård and sat up to look her in the eye. Or the part in her hair. Either way, I wanted to study her reaction since I couldn’t feel her emotions. “Dr. Mayfield?”

“Hmm?” she said without looking up.

I cleared my throat and steeled myself. It had to be done. She needed to know the truth. To accept the things she could not change, so the prayer went, and there was definitely no changing this. Without further ado, I said softly, “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but you died two years ago.”

She kept writing. “Mm-hmm. And you can see me because…?”

“I’m the —”

“— grim reaper. Right. Oh, and a god, no less.”

Wow. I sat back. She took that really well. Either that or she didn’t believe me.

Nah.

I bit my lip while she continued to take notes, but my attention span was only so long. “So, yeah, I’ve been hired, in a manner of speaking, by the new leaser of this office. He’s been experiencing strange events. Just the usual stuff. Cold spots. Magazines moving from one corner on a table to another. Pictures falling off the walls.”

“I see. And he hired you because he thinks the place is haunted.”

“Actually, no. He thinks the landlord wants him to break the lease to use the office for his new juicing business, which is dumb because this would be a horrible location for a juice bar. But he thinks the landlord is trying to scare him off. To frighten him away. To send him fleeing in terror. In a word, he thinks he’s being punked.”

“But you disagree?”

“I do.”

“You think it’s really haunted?”

“Yes, I do. And I have to admit, at first, I thought it was you.”

“Naturally.”

“’Cause you’re dead and all.”

“But you’ve changed your mind?” She had yet to look up at me.

“Yes. I’m pretty sure it’s that kid crawling around your ceiling.”

She stopped writing, but she didn’t want to bite. I could see it in her expression. She looked at me at last. Eyed me a long moment. Probably wondered if she should give in. If she should feed my delusions by looking up. After a lengthy struggle in which I lost focus and contemplated the origins of marshmallows – seriously, what mad genius came up with that delicacy? – she slowly raised her lashes and looked toward the ceiling.

Thankfully, only I could hear her earsplitting screams. She dropped her pen and pad, fell to the ground, and crab-crawled backwards. In heels and a pencil skirt, no less. I was impressed.

In her defense, the kid crawling on her ceiling looked a little like that monochrome girl who crawled out of a television set in a horror movie I once watched about an hour before a DOA popped into my bedroom, wanting me to tell his wife where the insurance papers were, only the kid was a he. A he who looked about ten years old, with long black hair and a shiny black cape. An odd fashion choice for a boy of any age. And from any era.

The good doctor cowered in a corner, the look of horror on her face both sad and strangely amusing.

“Dr. Mayfield,” I said, easing toward her with my palms patting the air. “It’s okay. He’s perfectly harmless.”

Of course, the second I said it, the little shit landed on my shoulders and sank his teeth into my neck.

2

Insanity takes its toll. Please have exact change.

— MEME

I screamed. I had a small vampire on my back, and I screamed. I tried to fling him off, but he’d latched onto me like a leech. Only with teeth. I twisted and turned, knocking over chairs and a side table, as he sank his teeth farther into my neck.

Just as I got a handful of the little shit’s hair, I heard laughter from somewhere in the distance. Somewhere far, far away. Like three feet. So not that far.

I stopped, turned, and gaped at a thirteen-year-old gangbanger who’d died in the ’90s. Angel. He was one of my investigators. Not to mention the bane of my existence. And he was on the floor, laughing so hard he had to hold his stomach.

“What the fuck, Angel?” I asked, turning toward him.

I was now wearing the kid like a backpack, but at least he’d stopped biting me. The glass half-full and all.

The kid jumped down and doubled over laughing, too.

While I graced them with my best look of horror and disgust and betrayal, Angel stood, and the two urchins, who were clearly in cahoots, fist-bumped.

I rubbed my neck where the kid had bitten me. “That was wrong on so many levels.”

Angel snorted, and they doubled over again. I finally got a good look at the kid. He was closer to Angel’s age than I’d originally thought, though a lot shorter. But he really was made up to look like a vampire. His long black hair was real, and his face had been painted white with thick black liner and fake blood dripping from his mouth and down his temple.

When I folded my arms under the girls, a.k.a. Danger and Will Robinson – names I’d given my double Ds because of their propensity for inviting trouble – the kid explained. Or he tried to. His words came out muffled. Partly because of the laughter but mostly because of the fake teeth.