Ready & Willing by Elizabeth Bevarly

losing his soul.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because he lost that sucker a looooong time ago.”
    “Sucker?” Silas repeated, his expression turning puzzled. “What does candy have to do with anything?”
    Audrey opened her mouth to explain, then decided not to bother. Her sarcastic, melodramatic hallucination was also, evidently, way uncool.
    “Never mind,” she said. Then she remembered he’d offered to prove his existence. Hah. So she repeated, “The storage room? You were going to show me something there?”
    Silas nodded. “Meet me at the top of the stairs.” And then he was gone, as if he’d never been there.
    Well, that was one way to get rid of a pesky mental disorder , Audrey thought. Just agree to meet it somewhere else, and then don’t bother to show up. No way was she going to go upstairs to meet someone who wasn’t there.
    “Mrs. Magill!” a deep voice boomed from overhead, so loudly, she could feel it reverberating inside her brain. “I’m waiting!”
    She sighed. Fine. She recalled the old rhyme her mother used to say when Audrey was a little girl to make her laugh, the one about meeting a man on the stairs who wasn’t there. Paraphrasing, she thought, Today, I will go up the stairs and meet a man who isn’t there. He won’t be there again tomorrow, because . . .
    Because tomorrow, Audrey was going to get a complete medical workup. Starting with her head.
    As she rounded the first-floor landing, she saw him standing at the top of the stairs, just as he’d promised, looking more opaque now, thanks to the lack of sunshine. But that lack of light made him appear darker in other ways, too, ways that reminded Audrey of Nathaniel Summerfield again, and, just like before, something hot and needy erupted in the pit of her belly. She closed her eyes and forced the sensation out, then opened them again and studied Silas, who still glowered down at her. For a hallucination, he certainly was stubborn.
    “This way,” he said. And, without awaiting a response at all this time, he moved to the left and down the hall.
    With a soft sigh of exasperation, Audrey followed, trying not to think about being “visited” by a man who’d been dead for seventy-some years, even if he had once called the house home. Maybe she did believe in ghosts. Maybe, on some level, she didn’t think she was talking to a hallucination. Maybe, on some level, she really did believe a spirit had manifested in her house as more than a smudge on film. Maybe that was why she was going along with this as easily as she seemed to be. But if ghosts were real, she thought further, then why hadn’t Sean ever tried to cross the veil and come back to her? The way Silas had, manifested in all his glory, able to communicate as if he were flesh and blood?
    She pushed that thought away, too, as she topped the last stair and followed in Silas’s footsteps. But when she arrived in the storage-slash-Bellamy’s-old-room, he wasn’t there. So she ventured warily, “Silas? Where are you?”
    “Behind you,” came his voice from that direction.
    She spun around, and there he was, standing in a spot she’d just passed herself, where he hadn’t been before. She started to reach out a hand to see if she could touch him, then stopped herself. She still didn’t know what was going on—whether she really was being haunted, or really was losing her mind—and she wasn’t sure she wanted to know what would happen if she tried to push her hand through him. She remembered reading something somewhere about how there were supposed to be “cold spots” around ghosts. But even though Silas stood barely a foot away from her, the temperature in the room was in no way chilly. Was that more proof that this wasn’t a haunting? Or did it just mean ghost-hunters were full of hooey?
    The room in which the two of them stood was the one where Audrey had dumped everything she wasn’t sure yet what to do with or hadn’t had a chance to unpack. Boxes were stacked upon