The Charlatan's Conquest Read online

  The Charlatan’s Conquest

  By Vivien Dean

  A Phantom Fixers Story

  With love and ghosts, the challenge is figuring out what’s real.

  Software engineer Cruz Guthrie needs money for his sister’s cancer treatments. He needs it so badly he’s willing to stand in for a ghost hunter friend and investigate a millionaire’s supposed specters. It should be an easy gig—after all, nobody thinks the haunting is real.

  Neurological researcher Brody Weber is furious that Cruz would take advantage of Brody’s father. But his mind changes when spirits manifest—and he realizes Cruz genuinely wants to help. When they learn the paranormal activity centers on Brody, Cruz is willing to fight to free Brody from the entities determined to make his life miserable. With a little help from friends and family—both living and dead—they must figure out why Brody is attracting spirits and how to banish them. Only then can they pursue a future together.

  Table of Contents

  Blurb

  Sneak Peek

  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

  By Vivien Dean

  Coming September 2017

  Don’t Miss Dreamspun Beyond!

  Visit Dreamspinner Press

  Copyright

  “Brody!”

  Still no answer. Screw it. Cruz tested the knob, but it turned easily, opening to the sight of a shirtless Brody standing in the en suite doorway, staring strickenly at his nightstand.

  Though the room was icy, Cruz marched straight for the music box and picked it up. It worked on a key mechanism, with no way to turn it off until it wound down. He would’ve loved to smash it against the wall to stop it, but Brody loved it, regardless of its current effect on him. The best Cruz could do was bury it under a pillow to muffle the music, grab Brody’s limp arm, and drag him out of the room.

  When Cruz slammed the door shut behind them, Brody snapped out of his fugue. His wide eyes swiveled upward, luminous with unshed tears.

  “Whoever these ghosts are, they’re assholes.”

  The incongruity of Brody’s observation startled Cruz into smiling. He threw an arm around Brody’s shoulders and guided him away from the door. “Did you try stripping for them when communication failed?”

  Brody glanced down at his bare chest as if he’d forgotten about his state of undress. “I was in the middle of changing when they locked me in the bathroom. So much for Etienne’s idea, huh?”

  Cruz had to agree. The ghosts weren’t interested in negotiating or coming to any accord. Their greatest joy seemed to come from taunting Brody, though why still remained a mystery.

  Chapter One

  “HOW would you like to make the easiest twenty grand of your life?”

  From anybody else, Cruz Guthrie would’ve dismissed the proposition as irresponsible hyperbole, most likely brought on by drunken rambling after a particularly long day at work. With so many people he knew struggling to make ends meet, trying to find ways to make quick money was practically their favorite pastime.

  But the question didn’t come from any of them, and this was a dry get-together since Cruz didn’t think it was fair to imbibe when half the party wasn’t allowed to drink. He couldn’t brush it off as nonsense when he knew full well it was meant to be taken seriously.

  Still, he wasn’t in the mood for dealing with reality, especially since reality had been kicking the asses of everyone he loved in recent weeks.

  “There’s no such thing as easy,” he said, flipping the lone burger on the grill. His portabella was already done, resting on the upper rack because even his barbecue timing was out of whack these days. “Are you sure you don’t want this medium-rare? We can eat right now if you give it a chance.”

  “You know my position on pink meat.”

  “‘Only on my knees,’” Cruz muttered, then sighed when his stomach rumbled. “C’mon, I’m starving here.”

  “I don’t recollect telling you to cook me dinner.”

  “Who else was going to do it?”

  No answer came, because they both knew there was nobody else. When it came to friends, Etienne Newman claimed only one—Cruz. He alleged it was because Cruz was the only guy north of the Mason-Dixon Line crazy enough to stick around. The truth was a whole lot more complicated, even with the fact that Etienne’s theory wasn’t completely off base.

  “I’m serious as a heartbeat about the twenty grand,” Etienne said, going back to his original question. “Aren’t you even a little curious?”

  “Does it have anything to do with your work?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then no.”

  Etienne huffed in indignation. “Since when are you so against what I do?”

  His mushroom was starting to wilt. Cruz scooped it up and set it in the middle of his plate of roasted vegetables, resting on the side of the grill, before lowering the cover in hopes it would speed up the burger’s cooking time. Only then did he turn around and face Etienne.

  “First, we both know I’ve got nothing against your line of work,” he said. “Never in all the time we’ve known each other have I judged you for it. But second, and more importantly, how on this good green earth can you expect me to listen to a job pitch when you literally just got home from the hospital after getting stabbed on your last job?”

  To his credit, Etienne blushed. Not a common response, since almost nothing ruffled him. But sitting in the deck chair with his crutches propped against the table beside him, the bruises still visible on his arms where he’d been battered around, he could barely meet Cruz’s gaze in the face of that particular truth.

  Something hot and wet smacked into the side of Cruz’s head. He jerked back to see his portabella land with a splat on the wooden deck.

  Etienne sighed. “Don’t be so childish, Simone. He’s got a point.”

  “And now only half a dinner,” Cruz said, snatching up a towel to wipe away the juices that ran down his cheek.

  “You’re the only one here who qualifies fungus as food.”

  Before Cruz could come back with a rejoinder, the mushroom rose in the air, floated to the garbage bin at the end of the grill, and plopped inside.

  “Thank you, Simone,” Cruz said automatically.

  “You can have my burger,” Etienne offered.

  “Nah, that’s okay. I bought a two-pack. I’ll just cook the other one.” He shot Etienne a smile as he headed inside. “It’s not like I don’t have time.”

  In the kitchen, he grabbed the portabella from the fridge and quickly cleaned it, but his attention kept getting diverted to the window and the sight of Etienne arguing with thin air. Etienne had been good about holding his tongue in the hospital. If the staff had seen this, he’d be in the psych ward now instead of nestled in his very private backyard. But half the reason Etienne had bought the six acres outside of Quakertown to call his home base was so he would never have to worry about what neighbors thought.

  Life was rough for a ghost hunter when few people actually believed ghosts existed.

  Cruz had made up his mind by the time he stepped back onto the deck, but Etienne spoke before he had the chance.

  “Forget what I said. I just figured since you won’t take any money from me, you might want the chance to
earn it yourself. But I’ve got no right to put you in harm’s way, even if I don’t think there’s any harm to be had. I’m sorry.”

  Cruz believed him. Most people did, actually. That was one of Etienne’s gifts. With his tousled blond curls and New Orleans drawl, he had a snake charm few could resist. Cruz hadn’t when they’d first met. That was why he’d agreed to go out with him, even though his gut told him they wouldn’t be compatible romantically. As it turned out, his gut had been right, but the friendship they struck instead made that sole date more than worth it. Each was willing to do whatever it took to protect and fight for the other. For ten years, Cruz had lived with the certainty that Etienne would never consciously let him get hurt. He had no reason to think that had changed.

  “So how do you get paid twenty thousand dollars without danger as part of the package?” he asked.

  The tension in Etienne’s shoulders eased. They didn’t need the words to understand that apologies had been offered and accepted on both sides. “By putting an old rich man’s paranoid delusions to bed.”

  With his food on again and Etienne’s checked, Cruz settled in the other chair and stretched out his legs. “Let’s hear it.”

  “About a month ago, I got an email from this Loren Weber fella in New York, asking me for a consult. I drove up, did a sweep, told him his place was clean, and came back home. Next day, he’s emailing me again, begging me to give it another go because he’s absolutely, one hundred percent convinced he’s got ghosts. I figure, maybe I was having an off day or maybe Simone was in a mood or something happened to give me the all clear, so I tell him, no problem. Same result. I even stuck around a few extra days to be sure.”

  Cruz wasn’t sure he liked where this was heading. “Please tell me he’s not the job.”

  “He emailed every day while I was in the hospital,” Etienne said. “Nothing I said could make him budge, so I finally told him I could do one last analysis after I got out and then threw a price on it I thought he’d never be willing to pay.”

  “And?”

  “He’s willing to pay.”

  Cruz stared at Etienne in disbelief. “Let me get this straight. You want me to pretend to be a ghost hunter, pretend to sweep this guy’s house for ghosts that don’t actually exist, and then not pretend to take his twenty thousand dollars? Since when do you put up with scams? You hate all the fakes out there.” They agreed on that last point, actually. Because the phonies made it harder for the few real ghost hunters, like Etienne, to be taken seriously, and ultimately, what Etienne did was for the good of all, ghost and corporeal alike.

  “It’s not really a scam.”

  “You want me to take money for faking a job.”

  “You won’t be faking it.”

  “You said he doesn’t have ghosts.”

  “And he doesn’t,” Etienne said. “A fact I’ve repeated over and over and over to Mr. Weber. He doesn’t believe me. But he’s so scared, he’s throwing money left and right, trying to make it go away.”

  “That doesn’t mean you need to catch it.”

  “Look.” Any frivolity vanished from Etienne’s tone. His gaze locked on Cruz, silent entreaty shining in its dark depths. “I don’t know what’s going on with Mr. Weber. I did my usual background check when he first contacted me, and he’s healthy as a horse. No sign of mental illness. A long history of stable decisions. Even though he retired five years ago, he still serves on the board of his company, and not one person there has a negative thing to say about him.”

  “And yet he thinks his house is haunted when you say it’s not. Does that sound stable to you?”

  “I think he’s exhausting his options. All he wants is one more sweep, and if it comes back clean, he’ll let it all go. He promised. His one condition, however, was that I couldn’t skip out after a couple days. I had to stay on for two weeks so I could see what he does. That’s why I put such a steep price tag on it.”

  “But I can’t do sweeps,” Cruz argued. “The only reason I even know Simone is around is because she knows you’re safe with me. She’d never act out otherwise, and I would never have been the wiser.”

  All true. When they’d first met at Lehigh University, Cruz had thought Etienne’s obsession with the supernatural was a Southern thing, cultivated from bouncing around foster homes in New Orleans. They’d been friends for more than a year before he started noticing the odd occurrences when they were hanging out alone together at Etienne’s apartment, how lights would sometimes come on by themselves, or the channel would randomly change on the TV. Cruz had made one bad joke about poltergeists, and the spare controller for the PlayStation had flown across the room and hit him in the head.

  That was when he learned about Simone.

  In life she’d been Etienne’s older sister, his sole relative in a world that wanted little to do with orphans who weren’t babies. When she was killed in a hit-and-run at the age of fifteen, six-year-old Etienne had been inconsolable. He’d lashed out, been thrown back into the system, was labeled a problem child for months until he saw her again as a ghost. The system put him into psychiatric treatment, but Simone was more persuasive than the doctors, convincing Etienne to play along because most people would never understand.

  She’d been with him ever since, looking out for him, acting as an aide when he chose to make his life’s work helping ghosts who insisted on remaining on this plane of existence.

  And she still threw stuff when she got mad or annoyed. Cruz had the mushroom-scented hair to prove it.

  “I’ll teach you what you need to know,” Etienne said. “The hard part is the evictions, and you don’t have to worry about that because there’s nothing there. Then all you have to do is keep an eye out. If he starts claiming things are there that you’re not seeing, let me know so I can pass it along to his son. At that point it’ll be his problem, not yours.”

  “But twenty thousand dollars for what’s essentially a babysitting job? You don’t see anything wrong with that?”

  Etienne fidgeted, then winced and put his hand to his side, where he still had stitches from the stabbing. “I can’t say I’m totally comfortable with it, no,” he admitted. “But if I don’t send you to do it, I have to pass, which means he’ll go looking for someone else. Someone who probably won’t be as ethical as us about taking his money. And if he’s just going to toss twenty grand at the problem, why can’t it be put toward something good? I know you’ve been working triple shifts to take some of the load off your parents. Think of how far this money could go, and you wouldn’t have to accept my charity to do it.”

  There was the rub. The three tenets that had guided Cruz’s entire life, that his parents had striven endlessly to instill in him and his four younger siblings, were honesty, hard work, and compassion toward others. He’d come out at the age of fourteen, as soon as he realized he was gay, because the thought of lying to his parents made him physically sick. He’d worked three jobs to supplement his loans so he could get a college degree in computer science, and only gave up two of them after he graduated because he’d long ago decided to pass along any extra money he made to his family. Those efforts accelerated when his youngest sister, Mariana, was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia last December. The Guthries had health insurance, but the family wasn’t wealthy by any means. His father was a warehouse manager, and his mother ran the bakery at their local grocery. Mariana had come first, but the added costs made their already difficult lives that much harder. The first two rounds of treatment had put her in the hospital for almost three months, and though she was in remission now, her maintenance therapy was still intense and almost as expensive as her chemo had been. Short of taking money from Etienne, Cruz did everything he could to lessen his parents’ debt.

  Twenty thousand dollars could make a huge difference.

  A flare from the barbecue reminded him of their food. Rising, he pondered Etienne’s proposition as he checked the doneness, his thoughts elsewhere even while he plated both the bur
ger and the portabella.

  Would it be so bad to say yes? Etienne wouldn’t lie about the potential for danger, and if he’d been as straight with Weber as he professed, it wasn’t like Cruz would be actively misleading anyone.

  Weber will think I’m a ghost hunter too. That definitely counted as stretching the truth.

  “How would you explain the fact that I’m going and not you?” he said as he passed Etienne his dinner. “It’s your expertise he’s paying for.”

  “I’ll tell him the truth. He knows I was in the hospital, and I obviously can’t do any traveling, so you’re the person I’m recommending for the job.”

  “And you really think you can teach me enough about the sweep to make it convincing?”

  “You’re smarter than I am. Of course you can do this.”

  Cruz still didn’t like it, but the pros were fast outweighing the cons. He only had one more question. “What does Simone think about this?” Living or dead, she was the most candid person he’d ever known. If there was a downside to this he wasn’t considering, she would voice it.

  Etienne grinned. “It was her idea.”

  Warmth suffused him. Sometimes Simone behaved very much like the teenager she’d been when she died. At others, she displayed an empathy that ran deeper than her love for her little brother. To know she was thinking about the struggle his family was going through and wanted to alleviate it dispelled the last of his doubts.

  “I guess that settles it, then,” Cruz said.

  “So you’ll do it?”

  “Do I have much of a choice? Simone will give me a concussion if I say no.” He laughed as a pillow from one of the other chairs was lobbed through the air, landing harmlessly against his arm before falling to the deck. “I rest my case.”

  There were still obstacles to overcome. He’d have to ask his boss about working remotely instead of coming into the office, though he wasn’t too worried about being turned down. They were a small company, and his manager constantly told anyone who would listen that Cruz was the hardest worker she’d ever employed. He could keep up with the rest of the team virtually, as well as he could sitting right next to them. Then there was the matter of explaining the windfall to his parents without giving too much away about Etienne, not to mention mastering whatever training Etienne deemed necessary to pull it off. In spite of those hurdles, however, for the first time in weeks, Cruz actually felt like the future wouldn’t fall apart if he looked at it too long.