Page 3 of Ronen
Charlie rolled her eyes, as I saw her safely to her car. “You need to go home, Ro, and get some sleep. You need to be at work in a couple of hours, not buzzing from a sugar high. I should have stopped way before I did, but I was in the zone.”
“Eh, I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” I joked. “I don’t need to be that awake to check books in and out. I’ll be fine.”
“Yeah, but you need to be on your A game to deal with our illustrious sheriff,” she giggled. “How many books has he lost now?”
The thought of Sheriff Mason Caldwell heated my blood, and it had nothing to do with how stupidly sexy the man was.
“Too many! I swear, he sits at his desk and thinks of excuses to use for why he has lost another book. He’s fucking infuriating. I should suspend his privileges but I can’t in good conscience do that to someone that reads as much as he does.”
My peripheral vision caught the flicker of movement at the side of the parking lot, and I turned to see who it was. Staring back at me was a man who looked startlingly similar to my alpha dad, Jamie.
His once midnight hair was all gray, his eyes icy blue. He was tall and broad, with a stern yet undeniably handsome face. He flickered in and out, before his form steadied into something a bit more solid. I could still see through him to the street and shrubbery behind him though.
“Ro, what?” Charlie’s concerned eyes followed to where mine were fixated.
“No one,” I pointedly said to the spirit, my tone crystal clear that he wasn’t wanted here.
Charlie lowered her voice, even though there was literally no one around besides us and some ghosts, and whispered, “Who is it?”
Even though I had been able to see, and communicate, with spirits since I was seven, it still tended to freak my family out. Which was valid.
Turning from the man, who was waving his hands and doing his level best–like he always did–to get my attention, I rolled my eyes. “Just William. Like I said, no one of importance.”
“Ew.” Charlie wrinkled her nose adorably. “Why is he here?”
“Fuck all if I know.”
Once she was buckled safely in, I shut her car door. She rolled the window down, her eyes flickering back to the spot I had been staring at, even though she couldn’t see him.
“Go away!” she yelled, and I barked out a laugh. Charlie was tiny but she was as fierce as they came when you got herriled up. “You’re not wanted here! Don’t make me…I don’t know, throw some salt on you. Be gone, Demon!”
Blinking at my cousin, while also laughing, I choked out, “Pretty sure he’s not actually a demon, and I don’t think throwing salt on ghosts does…well…anything.” If it did I would have invested in a salt mine years ago.
She shrugged, turning her car heater up full blast, “Weren’t those Winchester guys in that old show always going on about salt?”
“It’s a salt circle for protection.”
“Well, then it should protect us from William’s cooties.”
Shaking my head at her logic, and wondering how I could be related, and besties, with someone who dared to call the magnificent creatures that were Sam and Dean Winchester those “Winchester guys”, I ordered, “Text me when you get home. Thanks again, and I love you.”
“Love ya, Ro!” She waved a hand out her open window, before she rolled it up against the cold, and pulled out of the parking lot. Hands shoved in my pockets, I started for the sidewalk that would take me to the front of the shop where I had parked.
“No,” I pointed a finger at William, figuring I was safe enough from prying eyes at this time of the night–or morning, however you wanted to look at it–and no one would think I was a loon for walking and talking to myself.
“I just want–”the apparition, who was the ghost of my dead grandfather, William Sinclair, insisted before I cut him off.
My Jeep beeped as I unlocked it, then hit the remote start. The remote start had been a gift from my older brother, Matty, last year, but I honestly forgot I had it half the time. Hencewhy I hadn’t started it before now and my Jeep was going to be freezing.
“Let me make this as clear as I can, William,” I stressed his first name, because the man had been dead since my dad was ten years old, and I didn’t know him. As far as I was concerned, Allan Rafferty, one of my grandma Mary’s mates, was my grandfather. He was the only grandfather I had ever known, and he’d been a great man in my eyes. I still missed him, and that wasn’t going away anytime soon.
Besides neither my dad nor my three uncles had much good to say about their alpha father. He’d fucked each of them up in some way that took them years to work past. William Sinclair wasn’t a good guy, and I really wished he’d go haunt someone else.
“No one, especially me, has anything to say to you. I’m tired, I’m going home, and I’d really appreciate it if you would stop fucking haunting me.”
The ghost shot me a dirty look, that looked eerily familiar, then disappeared.
Fuck all, I’d rather dream about king cobras attacking me, or sexy sheriffs losing library books, than deal with my long dead grandfather’s ghost.
