Maggie grinned. She’d figured out how to zap the locks on the holding cells. So convenient that the Agency was in love with high-tech and psy-tech! Plain old-fashioned locks would have been beyond her ghostly hands, but she could put anything that involved a computer on the fritz. Psy-tech was more challenging, since she hadn’t suddenly acquired magical abilities upon her death, but the combination of magic and computer chips was inherently unstable—so eventually the lock system had caved.
Now to get the attention of the cheetah dual huddled in the corner, let her know the door was unlocked. The guard shift was changing, and there was a brief window where someone as fast as a cheetah dual might be able to run for it.
Unfortunately, Maggie could pop the lock, but she couldn’t actually pull the door open, and she couldn’t make the dual see her. Alive, Maggie had been the type who blended into the woodwork at parties. Now she really did.
As she tried brushing against the prisoner, who, huddled in misery, seemed to think she was a draft, something tapped her on the shoulder.
Which was quite a trick, since living hands passed right through her.
She turned around to see a fellow ghost, one she didn’t recognize as one of the regulars in the compound—all people of various species who’d been killed by the Agency. “Excuse me, Miss?” the ghost asked politely.
“Doctor,” she said instinctively. Not that titles mattered when you were dead.
Then she did a double-take.
The compound had more than its share of ghosts. But this man, she thought, came from an earlier era. The compound was on a military base dating from World War II. Maggie was no historian, but the ghost’s uniform looked to be that vintage. To her, he appeared translucent, but vividly colored, which was how she knew he was a ghost. Most living people looked faded and blurry around the edges.
And he was hot—a big, blond, blue-eyed young man with broad shoulders and an outdoorsy, sun-kissed air, even in death. Kind of like that superhero she’d always fancied, the one who’d started out as a weak but brave kid who wanted to fight Nazis.
Some instincts never fade. Maggie smoothed her hair, even though she knew it was stuck in the disheveled state it had been in when she died, sucked in her belly, drew herself up taller. One of the few plusses to being a ghost was that she could be a little taller. In life, she’d barely made it to five feet tall, but she could cast a bigger illusion.
In life, a guy that handsome wouldn’t have looked twice at nerdy Dr. Maggie Krantz, but the dead-people dating pool here was limited, and most of its members weren’t human. Maybe she had a chance.
“Doctor, then,” he said, smiling. “Do you need some help getting the lady’s attention? I’m pretty good getting living people to notice me.”
“Please.”
The uniformed ghost changed consistency. Thickened. At the same time, his colors faded, so he looked like a movie special-effects ghost.
“Miss?” Maggie heard. “Miss? The door’s open.”
The cheetah, lost in her despair, didn’t look up.
He reached somewhere—no place physical, Maggie was quite sure—and drew out a bouquet of roses. They were fresh in his hand, deep, almost glowingly red.
He drew one from the bouquet and tossed it at the cheetah woman.
It became dried and faded when it struck her chest and stayed solid only long enough for her to jump, see it, and look up.
The soldier pointed at the door.
The cheetah sprang to her feet, darted to the door and pushed. The door swung open. Quick as thought, a cheetah stood where the woman had.
“Follow us,” the man in uniform said, gesturing.
More solid, he led the way while Maggie made sure any surveillance cameras en route met with electrical trouble.
By the time anyone noticed a problem, the cheetah was sprinting toward the forest surrounding the compound. Good luck catching her there. With cheetah speed and human smarts, she’d be halfway to Ithaca, the nearest city, before anyone noticed she was gone.
Maggie turned to her companion. “Thanks. I couldn’t have gotten her out without you.”
“And without you, I wouldn’t have been able to do much except keep her company as she willed herself to die.” The blond ghost shook his head. “You’re amazing. How does that thing you do to the cameras?”
“As best I can figure, we ghosts are largely made up of electrical impulses and spirit. Physics never was my strongest subject, and I’m no electrical engineer, and don’t ask me about metaphysics because I didn’t even believe in ghosts until I turned into one, but if we’re energy, we can turn ourselves into little lightning storms and fry inconvenient electronics. It’s a hoot once you get the hang of it. There are limits I haven’t figured out yet and some of the tech around here is powered by magic, which is an entirely different problem, but that’s the basic gist. Understand?”
He laughed. “Not even a little. Nebraska farm boy here. Didn’t even finish high school. I could fix a tractor or a car in my day, but that was about my limit. This new-fangled technology is way beyond me. But I’d like to learn if you’d like some help fighting these creeps.”
“Gorgeous, good-hearted, and eager to be useful too? How come I never ran into anyone like you when I was alive?”
Maggie froze as the words popped out. Even dead, she retained her patented lack of social graces. Pretty soon Mr. Dead Hunk in Uniform would remember he had someplace else to haunt.
Instead, he laughed. “Gorgeous? Did you misplace your glasses when they killed you, pretty doctor? I’m just a big lout of a Midwestern boy. Must be the uniform you like.”
Be still her beating heart—okay, her non-beating heart that would be racing wildly if she was still alive. Could he actually be flirting back?
“Every woman likes a hero.”
To her astonishment, the self-described big lout blushed. Then he faded so she could barely see him, though his voice, when he spoke, came through clear. “Seems that you’re the hero. I’ve been watching you since you were still alive. Saw you stand up to that evil man who’s in charge around here. Saw him kill you. I tried to stop him, but guys like that don’t scare easily. And I’ve been watching you since. You’ve been fighting people who are doing truly evil things. I’ve been moping around since I died because I missed my chance at fighting the Nazis but you...you’re doing things to help, even dead.”
She thought of glossing over the truth, but she couldn’t. She’d been a lousy liar in life—part of the reason she was now dead—and now that she was dead, she refused to even try to hide behind a lie.
Even though she really, really wanted to look good in this handsome soldier’s eyes.
“I’m no hero. I’m a woman who realized one day I’d been conned into doing terrible things. I could only get out in a pine box. Been trying to make up for it ever since.”
The soldier eased back into visibility. “I’m not sure if that’s sadder or better than being all gung-ho to fight Nazis but getting killed in an accident in basic training. Better, I think. At least you got a chance to try.”
“If, in place of Nazis, you’ll take people who pretend to be defending the All-Human American Way or whatever their bullshit line is, but are actually up to dirty tricks that Hitler might think were too creepy, I can help you out.”
He actually whooped. “You’re on! I hate seeing my country going backwards like this, as if duals and magic-users and normies aren’t equal. Private Bill Wade at your service, miss...that is, Doctor.”
“Dr. Maggie Krantz.” She extended her hand and he took it. Ghost to ghost, his big hand felt solid and warm. Trustworthy, she thought, a strong hand that was used to working hard and still retained that memory, even though Bill Wade had been dead far longer than he’d lived. “But you can call me Maggie.” People didn’t use first names as freely back in his day, if she remembered her grandmother’s stories correctly, and she wanted more than she cared to admit to hear him say her name.
“Maggie it is, then. Pretty name, pretty lady.” Bill raised her hand to his lips and kissing it.
If she’d still had a body, she’d have shivered all over and wondered how good those lips would feel on her nipples or clit if they felt that sensual brushing the back of her hand.
As it was, she still shivered all over. The all over included places she couldn’t name despite her knowledge of anatomy, places that she thought might be more real now than they were when she was alive. She hadn’t believed in souls then, but she couldn’t very well deny them now.
The thought made her uncomfortable.
So did the look in Bill’s eyes. It was too admiring, too warm, too interested. A hunk like Bill, alive, would gaze that way at an extroverted prom-queen type of girl—and he’d stare right through her scrawny, geektastic self to do so.
“Okay, I’ve got to ask,” Maggie flailed, desperate to change the subject. “What’s with the flowers? You don’t look like a flower-pelting kind of man.”
“Rolled the damn Jeep on Valentine’s Day. I was supposed to have a date that night. I’d already bought the flowers.”
“That just adds insult to injury. Poor Bill. You missed the war and missed your chance with the girl.”
Wonder if he was looking for a substitute Valentine?
Right. If he was, it wouldn’t be her. The woman for whom he’d bought the flowers, the Valentine’s Day sweetheart, had probably looked like a 1940s pinup, fresh-faced and curvy and innocently sexy.
But Maggie would bet she wasn’t a certified genius, or capable of frying circuits to fight the bad guys.
Bill wanted a chance to fight back against the evil in the world. She could give him that.
If she got a bit of flirting with it, that was a pleasant side benefit. Alive, Bill was no doubt the kind of guy who flirted with every female between six and ninety-six and meant nothing by it.
But a ghost could dream, couldn’t she?