The Voodoo Killings Read Online Free PDF Page A

of the living or, with a practitioner’s help, come through themselves.
    Nate, going to Damaged Goods. If you can swallow your ego for half an hour I’ve got a gig for us Sat. night , I wrote.
    At last, a reaction. Not interested, Kincaid , scrawled backwards across the glass in ghost-grey fog.
    Like hell he wasn’t interested. Nate never passed up an opportunity to schmooze with diehard fans. I’ll give you the next six episodes of Lost, I wrote. I wasn’t above bribery.
    As I left the bathroom and ducked into my bedroom, I saw that Cameron was able to track me. “Stay put,” I called, and closed the door.
    I pushed my queen brass bed frame to the side then pried the loose floorboard up and retrieved the white envelope. My stash of emergency cash. I pulled out the five hundred I needed for Mork and pocketed it. I counted what was left. Fifteen hundred. Shit. I knew it was going to be low, but not that low. If seances were sparse between now and Halloween, I’d be hard pressed to make rent let alone restock my brain slushie supply. Whoever raised Cameron was going to get one hell of a bill at the end of all this.
    I slid the paltry fifteen hundred back under the floorboard and made sure the brass bed was in place. Where the hell was I going to scrounge up more work? The cops were out until they lifted the ban on paranormal advisers. The university frat houses? Only if Nate got over his hissy fit.
    The door opened. I spun, grabbing my keys out of my pocket, wielding them like a weapon.
    Cameron stood there, calm and alert. In the time it’d taken me to retrieve the five hundred, he’d managed to slide the old jacket on.It looked better on him than it had on Aaron. “Jesus, Cameron, stop sneaking up on me,” I said.
    His brow furrowed as he took me in. “We know each other, don’t we?” he said, focusing on my face. “Is it Kincaid?”
    I sighed. “Yes. My name is Kincaid. You’re Cameron and we just met.” I walked over and did up the zipper on his jacket for him. “Come on.”
    “Where?” Cameron asked.
    “Out for dinner,” I said.
    —
    Not for the first time, I was happy the freight elevator had been left a wide-open safety hazard, not renovated into something small, modern, and enclosed. Zombies don’t do well in confined spaces. The elevator clanged to a stop on the ground floor. Before I opened the grate, I looped my arm through Cameron’s so I could steer him towards the door. Or that was the plan. As soon as he saw the art installations, he veered towards them.
    “Cameron, we don’t have time for this. You can look when we get back,” I said, and attempted to tow him along. But Cameron was on a mission. Ignoring every single garish sculpture in the lobby, he headed straight for the ornate standing mirror.
    The same young man in Renaissance clothing stared out in perfect mimicry of a ghost. The most striking feature of the work was the ghost-grey cast to the image; even his blue eyes had the right layer of grey to them.
    Cameron stopped just inches away from the Renaissance man’s face.
    “Cameron, be careful ,” I said. Not socializing with the artists in the building was one thing; pissing them off by breaking their artwork was something else entirely.
    Then I noticed something that I hadn’t seen before—a single word scrawled backwards across the glass, as if drawn in condensation.
    Help
    Maybe it was meant to be avant-garde, but the combination of the ghost man and the message…I shivered.
    Cameron brushed his fingers against the foggy script. “I don’t know why, but I like this one,” he said. “The others are trying too hard.”
    Well, Cameron’s memory might be a loss, but his aesthetic sense was intact.
    “It’s a good rendition of a ghost in a set mirror,” I told him. “You were a decent artist. Who knows, maybe there’s something to the whole realism-in-art thing…”
    I trailed off as the Renaissance man turned his head towards me and blinked twice.
    Son of a