The Cursed. Heather Graham

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      Hannah had hurried past the pool area and inside without looking back. Once there, she leaned against the door, just breathing.

      She still felt as though, even if she were pinched, she wouldn’t feel anything.

      He’d been real. The “ghost” in her yard had not been a ghost at all. At least, he hadn’t been a ghost when her guests had seen him. He had been real—he’d been flesh and blood and...

      Alive.

      But according to the medical examiner, nothing could have saved him at that point.

      And still, in her mind, she kept replaying everything about finding his corpse as clearly as if it were happening all over again. First the blood...

      And then the body.

      She’d rushed to his side, fallen to her knees while fumbling to get her phone from her pocket. She’d touched him, ready to do whatever necessary to help him.

      And then she’d seen his eyes.

      Dead eyes.

      Every corpse she’d ever seen had been laid out tenderly in a casket at a wake or a viewing.

      The dead never look right, never, no matter how good the mortician is, Melody had told her once.

      But they didn’t look like the dead man in the alley. Lying there as if he’d known death was coming, as if...

      As if he had tried to speak, tried to say something before succumbing to the darkness.

      If only she’d gotten there sooner.

      No. She couldn’t have gotten there sooner; she hadn’t had any idea of what was going on when Shelly and Stuart had started screaming, and it had seemed so cut-and-dried. Shelly, already on edge after the ghost tour, had thought she’d seen a ghost and Stuart had gotten carried away on the wave of her hysteria. And then she’d had to deal with all the other guests shrieking and shouting and just generally going nuts.

      There was nothing she could have done. Even if she’d run right out to look for a bleeding man with a huge knife in his hand, it would have been too late. He’d already been dying.

      “Keep telling yourself that,” she muttered drily to herself. She realized she felt incredibly guilty, which was ridiculous, because she hadn’t done anything wrong.

      But the man had been alive....

      And now he was dead.

      She pushed away from the door. She didn’t just feel guilty about the dead man, she realized. She felt guilty for suspecting her resident ghosts of being up to no good, which had been entirely stupid of her. They always looked exactly the same. Melody was always beautiful in her Victorian gown, and Hagen always looked like a handsome swashbuckler in his fawn breeches, boots and muslin poet’s shirt. They didn’t change clothing—and they didn’t run around with weapons, much less bleeding.

      She needed to do something, get busy. She couldn’t just stand there all day feeling guilty. But she’d already stripped all the beds in a fury and cleaned the house, powered by the adrenalin that had raced through her after the scare and the effort of getting all her guests settled elsewhere. By the time the sun came up, the Siren was ready for business. Too bad she didn’t have that much energy every day.

      In the kitchen she poured herself another cup of coffee and took out her scheduling book. Stuart and Shelly and their friends had been due to stay another three days. There were prospective guests who had wanted to come, but she’d had to turn them away. Several had left their numbers, though. Maybe she could call them and...

      And tell them that a dying man had walked through her yard before his death and scared everyone else away?

      The pages seemed to swim before her eyes.

      She thought she heard someone knocking at the back door. She rose and went to check.

      No one.

      She moved back through the house, looking out the windows as she went. There were people walking along the sidewalk out front, but no one was at her door or trying to get her attention.

      She headed back to the kitchen, but once she got there she felt a strange sensation creep along her spine as if she wasn’t alone.

      “Melody? Hagen?” she said. Her words were soft—and hopeful.

      But neither of her resident ghosts replied. They were angry—they had a right to be.

      But, despite their silence, were they here, watching her? Watching everything that was going on?

      “Guys, please, I’m really, really sorry,” she said.

      No one answered her. She decided she must be feeling off because of the bad night she’d had and all the people crawling around her yard, not to mention that she’d stumbled on a body this morning. She let out a soft sigh and tried to imagine her bank accounts in her mind’s eye, then decided on a course of action. She asked herself again whether she should call the potential guests who’d left their numbers or not. Maybe it was too soon.

      Too soon after discovering a dead man.

      Hannah drummed her fingers on the table. She was glad that Liam had come when her emergency call had gone through; he had been her friend for as long as she could remember. As for the FBI agent...

      She didn’t have anything against FBI agents. Her cousin Kelsey was an FBI agent. She wished fiercely at that moment that Kelsey was still in Key West, but she was in the D.C. area, part of a special СКАЧАТЬ