Another One Bites the Dust Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  ONLY THE GOOD DIE YOUNG

  “A charming introduction to what with luck will become a long-running series.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A wonder . . . talk about a book worth reading. The characters are sad, lonely, fun, happy, interesting, unique . . . and that’s just an overview. The real upside is that this is the first in a new series that has proved it will be a true treasure trove of imagination to come.”

  —Suspense Magazine

  “Only the Good Die Young is one fantastic series starter. . . . [Jensen Murphy] may be a ghost, but she is also a spirited (pun intended) character who shows a lot of courage and spunk in the face of her predicament. The mystery is complex enough to keep the pages turning faster and faster.”

  —RT Book Reviews (top pick)

  “Fast-paced, impossible to put down, and incredibly well plotted and pieced together, I very highly recommend this one!”

  —Candace’s Book Blog

  “Only the Good Die Young breathes fresh life into the genre with its original premise and thoroughly engaging protagonist. . . . The pace never lags in this narrative infused with a substantial level of suspense and just the right touch of humor.”

  —Bitten by Books

  “A pretty solid start to a new series. . . . [Chris Marie Green] delivers a lively . . . tale of mystery and betrayal.”

  —Owlcat Mountain

  “If you’re dying for a great ghost read, look no further than Chris Marie Green’s Jensen Murphy, Ghost for Hire series!”

  —A Great Read

  PRAISE FOR THE VAMPIRE BABYLON SERIES

  “A dark, dramatic, and erotic tone. . . . Fans of Charlaine Harris and Jim Butcher may enjoy.”

  —Library Journal

  “An intriguing world that becomes more complex with every turn of the page . . . kick-butt action.”

  —Huntress Book Reviews

  “A book to die for! Dark, mysterious, and edged with humor, this book rocks on every level!”

  —Gena Showalter, author of The Darkest Lie

  “A killer mystery. . . . Bring on book two!”

  —Kelley Armstrong, author of Counterfeit Magic

  “An exciting, action-packed vampire thriller. A fantastic tale that . . . provides book lovers with plenty of adventure and a touch of romance.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “Dawn makes a spunky vampire slayer.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A kick-butt ride from start to finish with plenty of twists, turns, and surprises.”

  —Monsters and Critics

  “Green writes a complex story featuring well-defined characters and more than enough noir mystery to keep readers enthralled.”

  —School Library Journal

  “A fast-moving urban fantasy filled with murder, mystery, and a large dose of the supernatural. The vivid characterization and danger at every turn will keep readers engaged.”

  —Darque Reviews

  “A dark, edgy, and complex series.”

  —Romantic Times

  “A dark and thrilling paranormal tale . . . a gritty and suspenseful ride.”

  —Romance Reviews Today

  “Chris Marie Green does a wonderful job of bringing this gritty, dark novel to life.”

  —The Best Reviews

  ALSO BY CHRIS MARIE GREEN

  The Jensen Murphy, Ghost for Hire Series

  Only the Good Die Young

  The Vampire Babylon Series

  Night Rising

  Midnight Reign

  Break of Dawn

  A Drop of Red

  Path of Razors

  Deep in the Woods

  The Bloodlands Series (Writing as Christine Cody)

  Bloodlands

  Blood Rules

  In Blood We Trust

  ROC

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014

  USA|Canada|UK|Ireland|Australia|New Zealand|India|South Africa|China

  penguin.com

  A Penguin Random House Company

  First published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  First Printing, November 2014

  Copyright © Chris Marie Green, 2014

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  ISBN 978-1-101-60084-9

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  To everyone who buys books, whether they are in print or digital—you make every author’s world go ’round.

  Contents

  Praise For Only The Good Die Young

  Praise For The Vampire Babylon Series

  Also By Chris Marie Green

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  In the Beginning . . .

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  In the Beginning . . .

  “I know you have no idea who I am,” said the college-aged girl standing on Amanda Lee Minter’s porch, “but I really need your help.”

  The psychic and medium was looking through the peephole at her visitor as the morning sun burnished the girl’s straight, dark brown hair. Her eyes were a cherub’s blue, and she had on a long-sleeved, baggy gray shirt that covered the top half of her jeans, the light jersey material swallowing her hands. She had a solid form and didn’t appear to be a materialized version of one of the invisible spirits who had been knocking on the doors and windows lately.

  Spirits who were terribly curious about the woman who had worked with a ghost to bring down a murderer nearly a month ago.

  Since Amanda Lee was clearly dealing with a human, she opened the door. The girl hitched in a breath, then launched into an introduction.

  “My name’s Heidi Schmidt. I’m here because I know Wendy Edgett from some forum boards online—”

  “Wendy Edgett?”

  Heidi bit her lip, then nodded.

  Amanda Lee’s hand slid down the door. Fifteen-year-old Wendy Edgett. The last time Amanda Lee had seen her was . . .

  Shame breathed over her. It had been the night of the séance in the Edgett mansion—an event that had flushed out a dark spirit that had disappeared and never returned. Not yet, at least.

  A chill covered Amanda Lee’s shame like a shadow crawling over a patch of heat. She searched her yard—the late spring–leaved trees, the path
way to her house. But everything was as seemingly safe and as perfect as ever, no darkness looming.

  “You are Ms. Minter, right?” Heidi asked, no doubt wondering why Amanda Lee was acting so strangely. “Because this is really embarrassing if I’ve got the wrong house. I used a reverse phone number lookup on your address because you haven’t been answering my calls, so . . .”

  “You have the right one. Did Wendy . . . send you here?” Why would she do that? She had been avoiding Amanda Lee like the pox, in spite of the apologetic phone calls she’d been making, revealing her real identity to Wendy, telling her that she had only wanted to make the world right again by catching a killer during the séance.

  Heidi was shaking her head. “Wendy didn’t actually send me, Ms. Minter.”

  “Is she all right?”

  “Yes. It’s just that she didn’t want to come with me.” Heidi shuffled her sneakers. “She’s still not up to seeing anyone socially. She said she and her brother moved to one of his other properties, and she’s doing schoolwork from home. She doesn’t even go on the chat board anymore, but she sends e-mails to me. I think I’m the only one she really talks to. It’s the grief, you know? Seeing her sister Farah kill her brother because he knew too much about the murder she committed, then dealing with the knowledge that Farah was evil . . .”

  Amanda Lee gripped the edge of the door, her knuckles whitening. “If she didn’t send you, then why are you here?”

  Heidi pulled at her sleeves. “Over a month ago, Wendy started posting on a social San Diego paranormal chat board I hang out on, too—you know, the kind for fans of reality ghost shows and stuff? Well, back then, she said she couldn’t believe it, but she thought there was a spirit in her house. The last time she checked in with us as a group, just before the crap hit the fan with Farah, Wendy said there was a psychic coming over to help make contact and see what the entity wanted. It was all so cool to her.”

  “You want me to make contact with a spirit, then.” Amanda Lee itched to close the door, shut herself in among the antiques and the dusky rooms where the shades were drawn. It was only intuition that had told her to respond to the doorbell, and she always listened to her inner guide, even if it occasionally steered her in odd directions.

  Heidi rushed on. “Wendy said that you hang with the ghost who was haunting her old house, and during one of your phone messages, you told her that the ghost is the one who uncovered Wendy’s sister as a murderer. This Jensen ghost girl went inside all the suspects’ heads and figured them out, then flushed out the true killer. It’s true, right? This ghost drove Farah to a confession?”

  “Yes,” Amanda Lee said, her heartbeat quickening for some reason she couldn’t pinpoint yet.

  “Wendy . . .” Heidi’s face was red. “She said that you would help me because the two of you owe her.”

  Oh.

  Amanda Lee took that in, realizing just how true it was. Obviously, this girl had seen Wendy’s ghost adventures on the chat boards, asked for her help, then come here because something was scaring her and she needed Amanda Lee and “her ghost” to intercede.

  Was this fate’s way of granting absolution for everything Amanda Lee had done wrong with the Edgetts?

  All she had wanted was a reckoning for the woman Farah Edgett had killed—Elizabeth Dalton.

  God. Her Elizabeth . . .

  But there were also many other spirits in need of justice. Jensen, the ghost Heidi had been talking about, was one. Was Heidi leading her to another?

  Fear of ruining more lives during an investigation made Amanda Lee’s heart beat even faster. Fear in general had been keeping her inside the house, full of doubt, frozen. But at this girl’s anxious expression, Amanda Lee stepped outside, feeling the sun on her skin for the first time in weeks. Now that she was closer to Heidi, she could sense the girl’s nerves screeching.

  “Why is it that you’re on edge?” she asked.

  Heidi seemed relieved that Amanda Lee wasn’t shooing her off. “I’m really worried about someone I care about, and I can’t go to the cops about it. And I definitely can’t go to my best friend Nichelle because she’s the one in trouble, and she won’t accept that reality.”

  Yes. A chance for absolution had arrived on Amanda Lee’s doorstep.

  Heidi took a deep breath, exhaling harshly. “After I heard what you and your ghost did, I realized that I could use at least one of you to go inside the head of Nichelle’s boyfriend to see if he’s capable of killing her.” She swallowed. “Because I’m pretty sure that’s what’s going to happen if nobody does anything about it.”

  To any other person, it would have been a nearly insane request, but Amanda Lee understood perfectly.

  She closed the door behind her, then placed her hand on Heidi’s shoulder, leading her to the little casita at the side of the bigger house.

  When she opened the door and guided Heidi into the antique-rich room, the girl peered around, as if intuiting that something was off about it. As if feeling a coldness that wasn’t coming from any air conditioner.

  She obviously couldn’t see the ghost who’d looked up from her spot near the car battery on a table, getting a charge from it, her normally grayish color high, her energy strong.

  “Heidi,” Amanda Lee said, her voice more animated than it had been for a while. “Meet Jensen Murphy.”

  1

  When I’d encountered Amanda Lee for the first time a month and a half ago, I’d already been dead meat for about thirty years. Supposedly, I’d only gone missing but . . . nope. It was more like I’d been murdered in the early eighties after a party up in Elfin Forest in North County, my killer unknown, my body never found.

  But now, as Amanda Lee stood next to this Heidi girl, giving me the basics about why an unexpected visitor was in my casita, Amanda Lee was the one who came off like the dearly departed, garbed in a dark ruffled skirt and boots, with a matching blouse hanging limply from her tall frame. Her usually perfect red hair with the white streaks framing her face was even as drab as a black-and-white B-horror movie.

  And why not, when the woman was as haunted as anyone I’d ever met?

  I could tell Heidi wasn’t sensitive enough to see me, because she kept peering around the room, her eyes wide. The only humans I knew who could get a lock on me were Amanda Lee and Wendy Edgett. It’s not like I would’ve made any kind of awesome impression on Heidi, anyway—I’d died in tennis shoes, jeans, and a pale blue button-down rolled up to my elbows with a white tank underneath. Just your average twenty-three-year-old American girl with my strawberry blond hair, green eyes, and freckles. A Tom Petty song in the flesh . . . or not.

  By this point, I had a few questions for Amanda Lee. And, by the way, it’s pronounced “A MANdaley” with a Southern flair she’d brought with her from Virginia when she was young. Quirky as hell.

  “So Wendy’s been talking to this chick?” I asked her. I’d mostly been concentrating on the Wendy parts of the story I’d just been told.

  “Yes,” Amanda Lee said. “They’ve exchanged e-mails.”

  “I noticed that Wendy does spend a lot of time on her computer.” I’d been watching over her and her older brother Gavin, who I’d nearly driven insane while trying to decide whether he was guilty of killing Elizabeth Dalton. That’s mainly why Wendy was pissed off at me, and I didn’t know if she was ever going to forgive me. Even so, it was my duty to see that the two of them were okay, that the dark spirit Amanda Lee had summoned during that asinine fake séance was leaving them alone.

  I wasn’t all that sure it would stay away from them since I had a bad feeling that Amanda Lee had accidentally released their very deceased craphead father from wherever naughty people went after they died. Being a ghost, you’d think I’d know exactly where that was, but no. No matter who I asked, no one ever had a good explanation.

  Boo World wasn’t exactly a place where every question you’d had as a mortal was answered.

  Speaking of sketchy things Amanda Lee had done
, I should mention that she’d also lied about why she’d recently resurrected me from the residual haunting phase I’d been in for nearly three decades—a time loop where I’d been living my death over and over again because I’d been so traumatized by it. She’d wanted me to haunt the truth out of the man she’d suspected of murdering her lover, Elizabeth Dalton. See, Amanda Lee had told me she didn’t know Elizabeth, that she was only seeking justice for a friend. None of that turned out to be true, because Amanda Lee had been very close to the victim, indeed; she’d been manipulating me—the dumb new ghost—the entire time only to make me do her bidding.

  Needless to say, trust wasn’t exactly high on my Amanda Lee To-Do list.

  I float-walked closer to Heidi, and she crossed her arms over her chest, warming herself.

  “I meant to ask before,” she said to Amanda Lee. “Exactly how much do you charge to help people?”

  “Charge?” Amanda Lee and I asked at the same time.

  “Yes, I want to hire you.”

  I didn’t need money, and Amanda Lee’s spine straightened at the very mention of it because she was what was known as “affluent.”

  “There’ll be no charge,” she said.

  “Oh. Okay. I only thought . . .”

  “No charge,” Amanda Lee repeated, and she said it with such dignity that I knew the topic was as dead as disco.

  While Amanda Lee was bristling, something caught my attention at the window. Movement, outside. And when I saw an old man’s grayish, bearded, ghostly face peering in, I flew over and waved bye-bye.

  Dammit, there’d been ghosts swirling around here a lot lately, drawn by all the rumors of what me and Amanda Lee had done with the Edgetts. Apparently, we were high entertainment for the bored denizens of Boo World.

  The old man stuck out his tongue and zoomed away. In the meantime, the curtains were stirring with the wind I’d caused. Heidi looked ready to do a Major Tom and shoot into space, fueled by fear.

  I have to say that her fear did charge me up a tad.