The water was tepid by the time I finally hauled myself out of the bath, dried off with a towel, pulled on a clean tank top, and crawled under the covers.

According to the glowing red numbers on my clock radio, it was almost three in the morning. Midnight had long since come and gone. Halloween was over and I’d beaten its deadline with time to spare. Downstairs, I could hear the sounds of Mrs. Browne bustling about efficiently in her kitchen. From the warm, yeasty smells of bread rising through the vents, I could tell she’d already fired up her ovens for the first batch of the day. I was one of the few people who’d ever been privileged to witness Mrs. Browne at work in her bakery.

Oh, in case I haven’t mentioned the obvious, Mrs. Browne isn’t human. Mrs. Browne is a brownie.

Eyes closed, I inhaled deeply. It smelled like warm bread baking, it smelled like comfort, it smelled like normalcy; at least in Pemkowet, where Mrs. Browne bakes her supernaturally delicious crusty bread, meltingly flaky pastries, and cinnamon rolls like spicy clouds with cool drizzles of icing.

Curled against my side, Mogwai purred loudly in approval.

All was well with the world.

The gate between the realm of the living and the dead was closed. I was Hel’s liaison, and I had kept my town safe.

At last, I slept.

Forty-eight

For about a week afterward, Pemkowet was crawling with reporters.

To no one’s surprise, Amanda Brooks managed to spin the Tall Man’s return from beyond the grave to carry out the curse of the Cavannaughs into an enthralling, multigenerational ghost story, glossing over the finer points of how and why it had occurred.

At my insistence, she also made it clear that the episode was over and that Pemkowet’s days as a destination for ghost hunters had come to an end.

Okay, she may have hinted that the cycle could repeat itself in another generation, but I could live with that.

Although my image was out there, thanks to Stacey Brooks’s earlier ghostbusting footage, not to mention a handful of spectators who’d had the presence of mind to document the battle with the Tall Man, I kept a low profile. So did Cody, my partner in ghostbusting, and Stefan, whose skill with a broadsword was drawing a fair amount of attention in historical reenactment circles. In fact, everyone in the eldritch community kept a low profile. Whatever else may be true of us, none of us are media whores.

Well, in another day and age, Lurine may have been an exception, but times change. There’s a big difference between being immortalized in prose by John Keats and being outed by Gawker.

Anyway.

Once it was apparent that Pemkowet’s dead were staying put, interest waned and the town was left in peace again.