The Keeper (Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper Book 8)

  Contents

  Title

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Also by J. L. Bryan

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  From the author

  The Keeper

  Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper,

  Book Eight

  by

  J.L. Bryan

  Copyright 2016 J.L. Bryan

  All rights reserved.

  This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to my wife Christina, whose grandparents kept a lighthouse in Wisconsin.

  I appreciate everyone who has helped with this book. Thanks to beta readers Daniel Arenson and Robert Duperre, and Rhiannon Frater. Thanks to my proofreaders Thelia Kelly and Barb Ferrante. Thanks to Claudia from PhatPuppy Art, who created the great cover art for this book, and her daughter Catie, who's done all the lettering on the covers for this series.

  Thanks to my agent Sarah Hershman and to everyone at Tantor Media who have made the audio versions of these books. The audio books are read by Carla Mercer-Meyer, who does an amazing job.

  Thanks also to the book bloggers who's supported the series, including Heather from Bewitched Bookworks; Mandy from I Read Indie; Michelle from Much Loved Books; Shirley from Creative Deeds; Katie and Krisha from Inkk Reviews; Lori from Contagious Reads; Heather from Buried in Books; Kristina from Ladybug Storytime; Chandra from Unabridged Bookshelf; Kelly from Reading the Paranormal; AimeeKay from Reviews from My First Reads Shelf and Melissa from Books and Things; Kristin from Blood, Sweat, and Books; Aeicha from Word Spelunking; Lauren from Lose Time Reading; Kat from Aussie Zombie; Andra from Unabridged Andralyn; Jennifer from A Tale of Many Reviews; Giselle from Xpresso Reads; Ashley from Bibliophile’s Corner; Lili from Lili Lost in a Book; Line from Moonstar’s Fantasy World; Holly from Geek Glitter; Louise from Nerdette Reviews; Isalys from Book Soulmates; Heidi from Rainy Day Ramblings; Kristilyn from Reading in Winter; Kelsey from Kelsey’s Cluttered Bookshelf; Lizzy from Lizzy’s Dark Fiction; Shanon from Escaping with Fiction; Savannah from Books with Bite; Tara from Basically Books; Toni from My Book Addiction; Abbi from Book Obsession; Lake from Lake’s Reads; Jenny from Jenny on the Book; and anyone else I missed!

  Most of all, thanks to the readers who've supported this series. There are more books to come!

  Also by J.L. Bryan:

  The Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper series

  Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper

  Cold Shadows

  The Crawling Darkness

  Terminal

  House of Whispers

  Maze of Souls

  Lullaby

  The Keeper

  The ninth book in the Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper series will be available in 2017.

  The Jenny Pox series (supernatural/horror)

  Jenny Pox

  Tommy Nightmare

  Alexander Death

  Jenny Plague-Bringer

  Urban Fantasy/Horror

  The Unseen

  Inferno Park

  Science Fiction Novels

  Nomad

  Helix

  The Songs of Magic Series (YA/Fantasy)

  Fairy Metal Thunder

  Fairy Blues

  Fairystruck

  Fairyland

  Fairyvision

  For Judy

  Chapter One

  In every relationship, there comes a time when you have to step back and consider whether the whole situation is really healthy for everybody concerned.

  Maybe one of you is not so great for the other.

  Sooner or later, each of us reaches that point where the evil ghost that's been stalking us since childhood is trying to murder everyone we care about, and that ghost was last seen possessing our significant other, his eyes fiery and laughing as he tried to burn us and a few friends to death in the center of a large, dry corn maze.

  Okay, maybe that's just my relationships.

  Anyway, it was pretty clear that I was the destructive one here. As I drove away from Savannah, toward the hospital out in Rincon where Michael had been unconscious for the past few days, I couldn't help feeling terrified of how he'd react when he saw me.

  I'd hurt him, put him into that state. While Michael was possessed by Anton Clay, a pyromaniac ghost who really wanted to burn me to death, I'd summoned a dangerous horseman ghost to attack him. I'd saved myself, my friend Stacey, and the life of a client by doing that, but I had sacrificed Michael.

  I wondered if Michael would remember and understand what I'd done, and what he would think of me.

  On the way out of town, I passed a boarded-up gas station by the side of the road. It had been known by several names over several decades, last going out of business under the name Abner's Gas N' Get several years earlier. Graffiti covered it now, and weeds grew up between the empty concrete islands. A barbed-wire fence backed up to several parallel railroad lines.

  It was hard to believe it had once been the site of a lavish plantation house, home to Anton Clay, who grew cotton and also negotiated trades at the port on behalf of a number of more distant inland planters, making him quite wealthy in the antebellum nineteenth century. Clay was an accomplished violinist and dancer who threw extravagant parties and was gleefully brutal with his slaves.

  Stacey and I had set up cameras and microphones inside that old convenience store, searching for the lost ghost of Anton. He wasn't where he belonged, in the place where he'd originally died: the site of my old house, which his ghost had burned down, taking both my parents' lives along with it. And my dog Frank. Never forget Frank.

  Anton might have been haunting the site of either of his two main properties from life, his plantation home or his town home, but there was a third place he could be—still inside Michael, still possessing him.

  And now Michael was awake.

  The day was clear and bright, and the sun would have blinded me without my sunglasses. I raced westward as fast as I could, gunning the engine of the old black Camaro I'd inherited from my dad.

  I glanced in my rearview at the boarded-up gas station. A man now stood there in the high weeds of the parking lot. I was sure he hadn't been there when I'd driven past. He wore a long, ratty coat, maybe burned, maybe just heavily stained. He stood at the front
edge of the shadows, as if afraid to step out into the sun.

  A horn blared. I looked away from the rearview to see a large van charging toward me, only inches from my driver-side door. Cartoon dogs and paw prints decorated the rapidly approaching hood, dancing around the words BATH-BARK BETTY in Comic Sans font.

  I'd stared too long into my rearview at the disfigured man by the gas station, and I'd driven right through a red light and into an intersection. Now a mobile dog-grooming van was flying toward my face at about fifty miles an hour. Some badly misfiring part of my brain wondered whether they bathed cats, too. I'm a cat owner. You couldn't fit a dog in my apartment.

  I swerved, hoping not to die, and veered off into a strip mall whose entrance formed one of the intersection's four sides.

  The strip mall featured a bail bonds place, a pawn shop, and a stretch of empty storefronts in between.

  One business that remained was an outdoor table shaded with a canvas roof. Straw baskets of seasonal produce were on display, mostly greens, but also some pecans and cauliflower.

  An elderly, bearded man in a straw hat—which matched the baskets almost perfectly—stood behind the table, watching with huge eyes as my Camaro charged toward him.

  I slammed the brakes and brought my car to a screeching halt. The nose of my car thumped against the table. A basket of collard greens overturned and spilled across my hood.

  "Are you okay? I'm so sorry!" I kicked open my car door and jumped out to check on him. All four of my tires smoked, filling the air with that lovely burnt-rubber stink.

  "Stupid horseface!" the mobile groomer lady screamed out her window at me. She'd stopped in the middle of the intersection. Her quick reflexes had saved the day. If she'd been paying slightly less attention, she would have killed me.

  "Sorry! Totally my fault." I stepped toward the intersection, where a couple of cars were blowing their horns now.

  The dog groomer shook her head and punched the gas. A large tail attached to her rear bumper whipped angrily as she completed her turn and drove away.

  I looked back up the road at the old gas station. The shadowy man was gone now. I supposed there had been enough time for him to duck behind the building, or maybe hop the barbed wire and wander away among the train tracks. I suppose he could have just been a regular old creepy, shadow pedestrian.

  Or he could have been something else. Something dead and burned, watching me as I passed the location of his old home. Waiting for me. Maybe even showing up just to taunt me and tempt me into going in there alone.

  But I wasn't going to fall for that. Was I? I stood there flexing my fists for a moment, looking at the spot where he'd been. The traffic at the intersection returned to its normal flow, the near-collision quickly forgotten.

  "What year?" asked the old man in the straw hat.

  "Oh, I'm so sorry," I said, my attention snapping back to the poor guy I'd almost killed. I ran back toward him. "Are you hurt? Should I call for help?"

  He looked from me to the small basket of collards spilled across my hood. A torn piece of paper taped to the basket gave the price as three dollars.

  "I'll buy those greens from you." I tested the table. "Doesn't look like anything was hurt."

  "What year?" he asked again, nodding at the spilled collards.

  "I'm sorry?"

  "My cousin had a '74. Fire red. One yellow racing stripe. Used to take her ripping out through the mud. Thing was tougher n' a tractor."

  "Oh...you mean what year is my car?"

  "My cousin's wadn't nothing like this bag of tinfoil. In those days, they made 'em out of real steel. You could fight a war in a '74 Camaro. Win it, too. But not this little...what year did you say?"

  "1992."

  "1992." He repeated the year like it offended him. "Dang thing was probably made in China, out of old newspapers and horse glue. Not like my cousin's '74 Camaro."

  "I'm sure his was much nicer. Are you sure you aren't hurt?" I held out three bucks from my purse, but he made no move to take them. He leaned against the hood of my Camaro as though he intended to stay a spell.

  "We used to take it down to the old swimming hole. My cousin was older, would bring a couple girls with him, bottle of blackberry wine from Uncle Elbert's cabinet. Uncle Elbert made it himself, you know, and he got sore if he caught a bottle missing. That's what we'd drink, blackberry wine, and go swimming with those girls. Well, we went one time. I showed the girls my impression of a hunting dog eating hot peppers, and my cousin didn't invite me back after that..."

  The story went on, and after a while it became apparent that it wasn't really going anywhere in particular. I placed the three dollars on the table, pinning them down with a basket so the wind wouldn't blow them away, while he went on and told me about a high school football game where he'd caught a long pass.

  "Anyway, for my money, a Mustang's better than a Camaro," he concluded, which I thought might end the conversation, but didn't. I was torn between my hurry to reach the hospital and see Michael and my desire to be reasonably polite to a man I'd almost flattened with my car. The man hadn't mentioned that once. "Remember those commercials?"

  "I sure do." I nodded along, with no idea what he was talking about. "Well, it doesn't look like I hurt your table here...so...I should probably run..."

  "Swimming hole ain't there anymore," he said. "Dried up. Got some trash in it. Don't know where the water went."

  "I'm sorry to hear that."

  "Too old for it now, anyway. Cousin's dead."

  "Okay...sorry to hear that, too."

  "I always wanted a Mustang."

  I eventually disentangled from him and got on the road again.

  The near-crash had my nerves raw, and the memory of the strange man at the gas station didn't help, either. Maybe it had been Anton, in his burned-corpse form, stepping out to greet me. Maybe just a real person who happened to be there, possibly looking to shoot up heroin in the disgusting old bathroom of the abandoned gas station, as so many people apparently did. The place was a magnet for misery.

  Time and miles only made me feel worse, not better. I parked outside the little brick hospital in Rincon and tried to prepare myself as I looked up at Michael's window.

  He was awake. I was sure that had not been a dream, but an experience of my unwanted new ability to slip out of my body and float free like a ghost. That was the fault of Kara Volkova, my new boss who looked like a starving fashion model. She'd ripped my spirit right out of my body, mainly just to let me know she could. The memory of that made me queasy.

  Maybe I'd been wrong, but I didn't think so. It was time to go in and see Michael, confess what I'd done, and let him judge me.

  It was possible that we would never speak again after today. If that was his choice, I was ready to accept it. It was the best thing for him, anyway. For his safety, and for the safety of his younger sister, too.

  I locked my car and walked toward the glass front doors of the hospital. They slid open silently, and I stepped inside. While I waited for the elevator, someone out of sight kept howling at the top of his lungs, again and again, as if he were in terrible pain, or maybe slowly changing into a wolf.

  Chapter Two

  The waiting area closest to Michael's hospital room was quieter than usual. It was no mystery why—the little knot of Savannah firefighters who'd kept a rotating watch, individual members coming and going every few hours, were gone. The cluster of uncomfortable plaid chairs they usually occupied sat empty.

  Something had definitely changed.

  I could hear their voices as I approached the open door to Michael's room. It was usually dim during the day, but the light was on in there now.

  "...so I told her we'd go fishing on my boat," one of them said. "I guess she got the wrong idea. Should have known as soon as we pulled up to the pond and I carried the bait bucket out to the canoe. She thought we were going out on the ocean! I said, hey, do I look like I can afford a yacht? I don't even have a washer and dryer. I got a s
ink and a rope."

  A couple of guys laughed, and one said, "Yeah, I remember that apartment. With your indoor clothesline."

  "Hey, it doubled as a room divider."

  I approached the doorway cautiously, not announcing my presence. I recognized the three firefighters who stood around Michael's bed. There was Pete, the rookie, a sandy-haired kid who looked about fifteen. Brend, a little older, in his mid-twenties like me, was a friend who'd been at Michael's side more than I had. I'd been busy hunting ghosts. And the huge red-haired guy dominating the conversation was Cherry, who really liked to hear himself talk.

  Michael was presumably in the bed, but I couldn't see him because of the three firefighters plus the young nurse who stood close to the head of the bed, by the heart monitor. She was smiling down at Michael. I couldn't see whether he was smiling back up at her.

  "You're doing so much better," she told him.

  "Hey, throw me in a coma if you get to have a nurse like that," Cherry said. "Don't wake me 'til Christmas."

  Pete the rookie laughed, and the cute nurse blushed, and I moved quietly into the room. The nurse was petting Michael like a dog, brushing her fingers through his shaggy brown hair. He was awake, looking at the guys. He looked pale and not particularly happy.

  "I'm glad you're up," I said, startling everyone in the room. Michael looked at me, looked at the nurse, and she pulled her hand away from him.

  "The doctor should be here in a few minutes," the nurse said to Michael, suddenly distant and professional like she'd just been taking his blood instead of trying to get cuddly. She looked me over quickly as she left the room, as if sizing up the competition.

  The guys went silent as I entered the room. I knew they'd pretty much decided as a group that I was trouble. They'd asked me what happened to Michael, and I'd been shell-shocked enough to try telling the truth, that he'd been attacked by a ghost. They'd acted pretty suspicious of me since then.