Page 31 of Grave Curse

“It happened a long time ago, Ash. I screamed and got myself out of that situation, so no worries.” Though I couldn’t help but wonder how many other little girls hadn’t been so lucky.

“At this juncture I’ve got to say it seems kind of silly, putting up plastic monsters for Halloween.” Shiloh frowned at the oversized Grim Reaper in her hands. “The scary truth is, we’ve got real boogeymen lurking all around us, and they’re ready, willing and able to destroy as many Gravedigger lives as they can.”

“Because that’s what real monsters do,” Misty added, hugging herself as if suddenly freezing. “They hide in human skin, and when you least expect it—bam. You’re toast.”

Okay, I had to turn this doom-and-gloom bus around, fast. “Yeah, there are monsters all around us, but so what? We’re monsters too, and that’s why we’re going to go balls-to-the-walls on decorating for Halloween, and we’re going to use all the monsters we can dig up, because we are scarier than all of Hades’s boogeymen combined.”

“And you’re going to rethink that no birthday party idea?” Mabel added, eyes brightening.

“Mabel, it’s less than two weeks away.”

“Who cares? We’ll help pull it all together. It’ll be great.”

Oh, what the hell. “Okay, I’ll rethink that no birthday party idea. But first I do need to clear something up with Tyr. Is he in?”

“’Fraid not, honey.” Misty shook her brilliant blonde head. “He tore out of here shortly after opening and hasn’t been back.”

Shortly after opening. That meant shortly after our conversation. Ugh, typical. Stupid Tyr invited me to come see him, only to pull a disappearing act five seconds later. Swear to God, that man was about as reliable as a leaky rowboat in the middle of the ocean.

“Well then, let me just text Roxie to let her know she’s got the shop for this afternoon while we get the Halloween spirit kicked off right.” And I waited for Tyr to make an appearance.

With so many helping hands, it took only a couple hours to get the cavernous showroom looking festive. The most time-consuming part was messing around with the synthetic cobwebs, stretching it out so that it looked like actual webs instead of pillow stuffing. At long last, the scene looked appropriately scary in the two display windows out front, which already displayed aGhost Riderthemed bike, along with a chrome-covered chopper whose body seriously resembled the creatures in theAlienmovies.

The black and orange garlands edged all the walls, and every door got covered in either bloody handprint decals or yellow caution tape. After digging through the decoration boxes and finding a stuffed leg with a fussy-looking loafer attached, Ashtray insisted it had to go somewhere. Since putting it on the floor created a tripping-slash-lawsuit hazard, we finally decided to have it peeking out of one of the display saddlebags. Every time Ashtray looked at it, he got the case of the giggles, and that got the rest of us going.

All that was left was the oversized Grim Reaper with its oceans of black gauzy fabric, a decoration that was clearly meant to hang from an either very tall ceiling or tree. Ride Or Die clearly had the ceiling for it, so Misty sent off a quick text to her husband Lasso, hard at work in the fabrication shop outback. Within minutes Lasso had a large, freestanding ladder in the showroom. He then gave us all a quick lecture on safety—and wrenched a promise from his wife that she wouldn’t be going up because she was “terminally clumsy”—before hurrying back to the shop where he had a piece of material “in the oven,” whatever that meant. Since neither Shiloh nor Ashtray could manage a ladder in their conditions and clearly Misty would be a disaster going up, I volunteered to put the decoration we were now calling “Grimmy” where he belonged.

After digging through the detritus of the decoration boxes, Mabel found a roll of fishing line and immediately made a bunch of loops on Grimmy’s main body and black gauze train. Misty snagged a box of heavy-duty paperclips from her office to be used as hooks, and after a brief discussion on placement and how to affix the hooks onto the acoustical tile framework overhead, we moved the ladder to where Grimmy would go—fifteen feet or so from the main entrance, directly over the wide center aisle cutting through the heart of the showroom.

It was going to look epic.

Mabel and Misty secured the ladder at the base while I kicked off my high-heeled boots, since even I recognized that tall ladders and sexy high heels didn’t mix. Getting Grimmy up the ladder took some doing. First I tried hauling him up by myself but nearly died when my sock-covered feet got tangled up in the black gauzy train. Then Shiloh neatly twisted the train into a manageable snake of fabric and held it out of my way while I carried Grimmy’s lightweight plastic body up with ease.

Clearly, that old saying was true—teamwork made the dream work.

Finally I perched on top of the ladder. Okay, so far, so good. Taking care not to look down, I reached into my pocket for some paperclips already bent into sturdy hooks, threaded the fishingline loops through the makeshift hooks, then carefully reached up to the ceiling tile framework. Almost there…

Success!

“What the hell are you doing?”

Chapter Nine

Mute

I was going to die.

How ironic. Of all the nightmarish traumas I’d somehow survived, falling off a ladder hadn’t even been on my end-of-life bingo card. Embarrassing, really.

The bellow that had cracked out as suddenly as a gunshot still echoed around the cavernous showroom as my whole body startled. Instinctively I clutched at the ladder, but it seemed to suddenly go sideways out from under me. My sock-covered foot slipped, and to my horror I fell backwards.

Oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God…

My throat locked up, that terrible silence choking me. I flailed, one hand scraping along the ladder as I fell to help slow my momentum, but there was no denying this was going to hurt—a lot—when I did my meteor-crash into the ground. I balled up, trying to protect my head, just as my back hit something hard—but not hard enough to be the floor.

What…?

“Idiot.” Fierce arms clamped around me with all the gentleness of a hydraulic vise, crushing the breath from my lungs. My legs, now useless things filled with what felt like unset gelatin instead of bone and muscle, couldn’t seem to hold my weight. Helpless, I sagged against the man who had put me in horrible danger, then heroically saved me from it.

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