“Envyyyy! I want what you haaave … I want to be youuu …”
This one was better-spoken than the others. Deegie wondered what it looked like, but resisted the urge to turn her head. It was obvious that Belinda couldn’t see it. She continued to chatter, her expression unchanged.
“Wish I had your hairrrr!” the ghost whined into Deegie’s other ear. “I wish I had your mannnn …”
“I have to go.” Deegie said, interrupting Belinda’s babbling. “It was, uh … nice meeting you.” She turned and headed for the door at a fast walk.
“Okay! You take care now!” Belinda’s parting words were tinged with confusion.
Outside on the sidewalk, the ghost hovered in front of Deegie’s face while she waited to cross the street. It varied in its transparency, first becoming nearly solid, then fading to almost invisibility. This one was female too, and oddly beautiful for a ghost. Its flaxen hair, nearly to its knees, seemed to take on a life of its own. Long tendrils of it waved and undulated around Deegie, coiling around her arms and caressing her cheeks. “I want to be youuu,” it whimpered. “I wish I were youuuu …”
Deegie swatted at it. “Back off, damn it!” she whispered. She focused on the crosswalk signal, willing it to change from a blinking red hand to a flashing green stick figure. Envy pressed closer, hissing and tickling.
“Your hairrr … your dresssss … oh how I wish I were youuu …”
“Cut it out!” Deegie swatted at the ghost again; her hands passed right through it.
A man with a ball cap and a bag of aluminum cans stopped at the crosswalk and looked at her curiously.
“Bugs,” Deegie said to him, feeling her cheeks heat up with embarrassment. “Just some bugs, you know, swarming in my face. Gnats, or something …”
The light turned green, and the man cut in front of her, walking quickly.
By the time she’d returned to the shop, Envy had vanished from sight. Deegie could still feel this latest annoyance, though, hovering just out of reach. “I’ll deal with the damn thing later,” she muttered as she put Bast in his carrier. “I have more important things to do right now.” She loaded Bast and the box of kittens into the van, then returned to the shop for a jar and the rest of the sweet grass. She didn’t sense Envy anymore on the drive back to her house, but she had a feeling it would be back.
Just as Deegie had suspected, Lisbet was delighted to have more kittens to watch over. She fussed and exclaimed over the latest additions to the family, coaxing them to drink their saucer of kitten formula and encouraging them to use the litter box afterwards. Deegie was grateful all over again for her ghostly friend. She left the kindly spirit to tend to her new charges, and went upstairs for a shower, taking a ghost trap with her just in case Envy should reappear.
As she was drying off, Deegie heard a stealthy thump and rustle in the hallway outside the bathroom. She paused in the middle of toweling her hair. “Lisbet, is that you?”
Rustle. Thump. Thumpthump.
“Bast? Kitty-kitty?” She put down the towel and slipped on her bathrobe. It certainly wasn’t the first time she’d heard weird noises in the old house, and she wasn’t afraid. In fact, she had a pretty good idea of what was skulking around in the hallway.
A quiet sobbing took the place of the rustles and thumps, and a voice said, “It’s not fair, it’s just not fair … I should have good things too …”
The jar and the sweet grass were still downstairs on the kitchen table where Deegie had left them; it had never occurred to her to bring a ghost trap to the upstairs bathroom. She would have to contend with this latest pain in the ass whining and fluttering around her head until she went downstairs to get it.
Deegie had left the old-fashioned four-paneled door open a crack, and now it creaked inward a few more inches. A light tapping sound, like fingernails on wood, came from the other side. “I wish it were meee,” the plaintive voice of Envy whispered. Gray, bony fingers, as fragile as winter twigs, slid around the edge of the door and gripped it tightly.
Deegie knotted the tie of her robe and yanked the door open the rest of the way. Envy thrust its weirdly beautiful face close to hers and screamed. Its icy breath, reeking of mildew and despair, blasted Deegie’s cheeks and tossed her wet curls.
“ENVYYYY!” An agonized howl tore from the ghost’s mouth. “SO ENVIOUS OF YOUUUU!”
Instinctively, Deegie brought her hands up, preparing to release a red-hot defensive blast. Magic didn’t work on ghosts, and anything she hurled at it would pass right through its body, but she’d just about had it with these damn things. Couldn’t a girl take a nice hot shower after work without getting screamed at by a whiny supernatural bitch?
The ghost went to its knees on the floor in front of Deegie, still bemoaning its envy-ridden existence. Its diaphanous body shuddered, and Deegie realized she could hear its bony kneecaps thudding against the floor. Wait … that’s not right. How could it thump like that? It’s a ghost!
Envy wrapped the fingers of one hand around Deegie’s ankle and squeezed. The fingertips—horribly solid now—dug into the meat of her calves. Its grip was like a spiked manacle. The rest of its body solidified with a final, convulsive tremor. It gasped and drew a breath into lungs that suddenly worked. The head lifted from the floor. The pale watery eyes blackened, shrank into bizarre raisins, and fell back into the eye sockets. The thing on the floor lost all resemblance to the sad, wispy beauty it had once been. Its other hand curled into a bird-like claw, lifted from the floor, and raked red furrows down Deegie’s thigh.
She managed to wrench her legs free and stumbled backwards, nearly tripping herself up in the bath mat. She regained her balance just as the crawling horror on the floor made another swipe at her. She fired off a wildly-aimed protective bolt, and it skimmed the side of Envy’s head. The bathroom was instantly flooded with the stench of burned flesh.
Deegie leaped over the prone ghost-thing and dashed into the hall. Envy scrambled to its feet with a terrible swiftness. Its clawed hands clutched at the air as it lunged for her. It isn’t a ghost … what the hell is this thing? What is it?
She heard Lisbet’s lilting giggle as it wafted up the staircase from the cats’ room below. She couldn’t let her see this thing. It had taken her long enough to start trusting Zach and Gilbert; she’d be traumatized all over again.
“Tiger! Tiger, I need you!” She held tightly to the rest of her magical ability as she screamed for her guardian. She could send out another bolt but she couldn’t afford to miss again. Best to wait until it was almost right on top of her.
A long, narrow mouth opened in the fleur-de-lis wallpaper, and the air around it rippled. With a sound like a rotten piece of carpet being torn in two, Tiger burst through the veil between the worlds.
“SO ENVIOUSSSS!” the ghost-thing roared again, and it lunged forward just as Tiger’s extended claws peeled the putrefying skin from its back. It tackled her, hitting her behind the knees and hurling her forward onto the staircase.
Tiger’s bellowing roar thundered in her ears as she fell all the way to the bottom.