Page 1 of Ghost With the Most
1
It’s hard to look professional when you’ve just driven six hours in a hire car with a possessed GPS, an exploding travel mug, and a ghost humming 80s ballads in your back seat.
To be clear, I don’t normally drive around with tagalong spirits. It’s tacky. It invites questions I don’t want to answer, like why I’m arguing with thin air at gas stations or why my dashboard pentagram occasionally spins like it’s trying to summon something. But Phyllis had grown attached to me after her ex-boyfriend’s séance got interrupted by a raccoon attack (yes, a real raccoon), and she’d refused to move on until she’d gotten her revenge. On who, she wouldn’t say. Just that it involved Jell-O, betrayal, and ‘something too disturbing to say out loud in broad daylight’. I hadn’t asked for clarification. Some doors are better left closed, especially if they’re smeared in raspberry gelatin and trust issues.
So I rolled into Assjacket, West Virginia with my car smelling like stale coffee, road sweat, lavender salt spray (thanks to Phyllis’s insistence on me ‘cleansing the vibe’), and just a hint of charged energy. The kind that clung to you after a ghost had been humming Bon Jovi into the fabric of your upholstery for four counties straight. I was three curses past patience and just this side of giving up on humanity entirely when she hit the chorus of ‘Here I Go Again’ for the fourth time.
“Phyllis,” I snapped, one eye twitching as I tightened my grip on the steering wheel, “I swear on every demon in the seventh circle of hell, if you don’t stop singing Whitesnake I will trap you in a mason jar and bury you behind a Waffle House.”
She hummed louder whileI squinted up at the peeling sign on the edge of town.
WELCOME TO ASSJACKET.
“Buckle up,” I muttered, adjusting the rearview mirror. My reflection stared back at me, looking like she’d fought her way through a ghost-infested dive bar bathroom and lost. My hair was frizzed from southern humidity, my eyes were shadowed from too little sleep and too many late-night spirit consultations, and there was a smear of white chalk across my jawline from the protection charm I’d half-heartedly etched on the car at the last truck stop. I looked like a woman who had driven across state lines while arguing with an ethereal hitchhiker. Which, to be fair, I was.
I sighed and hit the blinker, turning off the main road like I was slipping into something darker.
The energy of Assjacket, West Virginia shimmered around me like a mirage I should’ve kept driving past. The road narrowed into a crooked smile of cracked asphalt, flanked by overgrown hedges that swayed even without a breeze, like they were whispering secrets to one another. A cornfield loomed off to the left. Dense, tangled, and no doubt haunted. I didn’t know how cornfields managed to radiate pure malevolence, but this one had clearly gone to school for it. The authorities really ought to ban cornfields altogether.
The air pushing through my AC vents smelled like mildew, honeysuckle, and unresolved trauma. That last one, I was intimately familiar with. The kind of town that clung to you like wet velvet and whispered about your business before you even parked the car. Sidewalks cracked here and there like broken teeth. Houses painted in peeling denial. Porches sagging under the weight of secrets, windchimes tinkling like nervous laughter. Assjacket didn’t just feel haunted… it looked like it had given up pretending otherwise a long time ago.
But underneath it all, beneath the rot and the charm and the low-level existential dread, there was power. Not clean, sacred, altar-burning power, but old, tangled, too-long-unchecked energy. It buzzed at the base of my skull and prickled the skin between my shoulder blades like a whisper meant for someone else. I'd been to dozens of ghost-plagued towns. Savannah itself had ghosts stacked on ghosts, playing poker in their mausoleums. But this place? Assjacket wanted to be felt. Loudly. Unfortunately, that was why I was here.
The funeral home on the edge of the other side of town was a sprawling, vine-covered relic straight out of a Southern Gothic fever dream. It loomed at the end of a gravel path like it had been planted there by the devil’s landscaper and left steeping in atmospheric dread. Three stories of decaying grandeur squatted beneath a canopy of gnarled oaks, their branches twisted like arthritic fingers scratching at the roofline.
The porch wilted on one end like it had given up on ever being repaired, its railings overgrown with ivy. Not the charming, Pinterest-ready kind, but the kind that looked sentient and slightly hostile. The windows reflected back too much dark, and the whole structure leaned as though it were trying to eavesdrop on your sins. The paint had once been pristine white, but now was something between ‘grave rot gray’ and ‘malevolent drywall’. The wrought iron weathervane spun lazily despite the still air, shaped like a crow or maybe a winged demon with excellent posture. Either way, it was glaring at me like it knew what I’d done last solstice.
I put the car in park and killed the engine. Phyllis faded with it, humming one last high note like a parting shot. The silence afterward felt loaded. Like the town had noticed me and was deciding whether I was welcome.
Spoiler: I wasn’t.
And of course, waiting for me on the front steps like a glitter-drenched greeter from witchy hell itself, was Zelda. Part goddess, part menace, and entirely too comfortable wielding power like it was a designer clutch, she radiated the kind of energy that made small children behave and grown men forget their own names. Officially, she was Assjacket’s shifter whisperer. Unofficially? She was the protector of this weird little town, the carrier of both light and dark magic, and the only person I knew who could pull off thigh-high boots and threaten to hex your spleen in the same breath, and somehow make it sexy.
She looked exactly how I remembered her. Beautiful, fierce, and dressed like Stevie Nicks had raided a BDSM boutique. A pair of designer bangles clanked with every flick of her wrist like judgment rendered in sterling. Her Saint Laurent boots sparkled with the menace of someone who chose violence, and her wild mane of auburn curls was being artfully tousled by an unnatural breeze that of course affected no one else. The rest of the world was wilting in late-summer humidity, but Zelda looked like she’d just stepped off a supernatural runway. Her green eyes locked on mine with the intensity of someone who’d seen too much, fought harder than she should’ve had to, and still managed to show up looking like a Pinterest fever dream of witchy motherhood and hot-girl chaos.
Zelda wasn’t just power and poise, she was scars wrapped in sequins. A former magical cell-block babe with a vocabulary that could peel paint, she’d clawed her way from maternal rejection to magical badass, and now she spent her days healing others’ wounds… literally. Her gift let her feel the pain of every shifter or witch she healed, and still she gave without hesitation. She’d been chosen, in line to become the next Baba Yaga, and yet there she was: standing on her porch, clutching a cold coffee in one hand, probably muttering a potty-mouthed incantation under her breath, and looking like the feral, fiercely loving goddess she was. She wasn’t just the heart of this town. She was its guard dog, its glitter bomb, and its last line of defense.
She didn’t wait for me to park. Didn’t wait for the gravel dust to settle. Didn’t even give me time to check the mirror and make sure I hadn’t grown a second head during the drive.
The moment she clocked me, she quirked a manicured brow in my direction. “You’re late.”
I stepped onto solid ground slowly, letting my spine unfurl from the shape of the car seat with a satisfying pop. My knees cracked in protest. “No, I’m just dramatically on time.”
Zelda grinned like a cat who’d hexed the canary, devoured it, and then billed it for the privilege. “Same difference.”
Then her left hand sparked. Just a flicker of light at her fingertips, the color of overripe plums and electric defiance.
“Uh…” I started, raising a hand instinctively like I could somehow stop whatever was about to happen.
Too late.
A bolt of pinkish-purple light shot from her palm, hit a cracked porch column, and transformed the wood into a three-tiered wedding cake. Buttercream. Ribbons. Fondant roses. It was disturbingly realistic, down to the faint aroma of almond extract and a bitter pre-nup.
Zelda blinked. “Huh.”
“You’ve redecorated,” I said flatly, eyeing the now structurally-unsound dessert architecture. One corner of the top tier was starting to slump under the weight of the frosting.
Zelda rolled her eyes and snapped her fingers with theatrical flair. The cake exploded in a puff of glitter and citrus-scented mist, leaving behind only a fine dusting of powdered sugar on the porch boards and a lingering note of lemon meringue. “It was supposed to be a minor aura cleanse,” she said, brushing non-existent crumbs off her hip. “This place is cranky.”
