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“Wait, I have an idea,” said Matt.

* * *

Bearpaw Springs Resort

One hour later

“I really hope this works before the rest of my staff quit,” Esperanza Ornelas said.

She wore a grim expression as she used her card key to open Room 444.

She was the Bearpaw Springs Resort Lodge’s Guest Services Manager, and Eddy’s younger sister, and she shared his aquiline features and iron-gray hair. Sophie’s first impression of her was of someone kind but very no-nonsense.

“This has been going on long enough,” Esperanza continued, “and we’re all sick of it. AndI’msick of Eduardo throwing a fit every time we try to tell him that this hotel is haunted.”

“I’ll do my best,” Sophie promised. “But I’ve never done anything like this before.”

With Chris and Matt at her heels, she entered Room 444.

She stood in the middle of the large room, so nervous that she wanted to throw up. As before, the room held a chill that made it feel more like the middle of winter than the middle of summer.

“Laura Tringstad!” Sophie called, hoping desperately that her plan would work. “Are you here?”

She waited.

The air all around them was charged with tension. Some of it radiated from Chris and Matt, who were steady, reassuring presences at her back. Some of it felt watchful and intent, a sign that Laura’s ghost was lurking somewhere nearby.

After what felt like an eternity of time, but was probably just a couple of minutes, Sophie tried again. “Laura? Please show yourself. There’s someone here who would really like to talk to you.”

She began to worry as another few seconds went by with nothing. She’d been so sure that this would be the solution to the haunting.

This has to work! I don’t want to fail Silvio…

His cold, prickling presence clung to the nape of her neck, just as it had during the drive from the Bearpaw Ridge Police Station.

It had been Matt’s idea to ask Silvio Ornelas whether he could leave the police station basement and ride along with them to the hotel, so that he could be reunited with Laura.

“Why don’t you try haunting Sophie instead of this cell?” he had asked.

Silvio had eagerly agreed, and Sophie and her two mates had driven straight to the Bearpaw Springs Resort Lodge, where Esperanza Ornelas had agreed to let them in the room.

A few wisps of what looked like fog began to drift into the space right in front of Sophie. Slowly at first, they spun and thickened in the still, freezing air of the room, until they assumed a vaguely human shape.

Moments later, they resolved into the semi-transparent shape of a half-shifted female werewolf, clad in the blood-stained shreds of what had once been a lacy nightgown.

Now that she knew how Laura had really died, Sophie guessed that at the moment of her death, the other woman had frantically been trying to shift so that she could fight off her attackers.

“Laura,” Sophie said. “Thank you for coming.”

“You can see me? Talk to me?” The ghostly wolf shifter sounded surprised. “No one ever could, before. Not even when I figured out how to get my revenge on them.”

“I can see you, too!” Chris said, from his place at Sophie’s left side.

“So can I,” Matt added, standing at her right side.

The monstrous half-human, half-wolf woman looked at them each in turn, studying them with her glowing golden eyes.

“What do you want?” she demanded, at last.