The Ghost Exterminator

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Book: Read The Ghost Exterminator for Free Online
Authors: Vivi Andrews
might wish. He squashed the tiny little voice of doubt and took a deep, cleansing breath.
    He was fine. Completely unhaunted.
    Wyatt shoved all thoughts of Karmic Consultants from his mind and focused on the profit-loss reports. Almost immediately, the numbers began to blur and bleed across the page before his eyes. Wyatt groaned and pinched the bridge of his nose, squeezing his eyes shut and trying to battle back the hangover by sheer force of will.
    It wasn’t a terribly scientific approach, but this morning it was surprisingly effective. The pounding receded slightly, but when he cautiously opened his eyes, the numbers refused to hold still, swimming in front of his eyes rather than sitting firm and stable in neat columns as they were supposed to.
    God, he was so tired . Exhaustion swamped him suddenly, reminding him that he’d had no more than two hours of sleep and enough scotch to fell a horse the night before. The temptation to close his eyes and put his head down on his desk, just for a moment, was nearly overwhelming.
    Wyatt grunted and shook his head sharply, trying to shake away the nagging exhaustion. For a moment, the world cleared, but within seconds he was nodding and bleary again.
    Just for a second…not going to sleep…just closing my eyes…
     
    “Wyatt!”
    He jerked awake with a jolt. Shit. Had he fallen asleep at his desk?
    Then reality sank in a little further and he realized he wasn’t sitting at his desk. He wasn’t sitting at all. He was standing in front of the sink in the three-quarter bath he’d had installed in his office for the nights when he couldn’t be bothered to go back to his condo.
    Wyatt shook his head. If he was standing, he clearly hadn’t been sleeping. He was not a sleepwalker, never had been. So why did he feel as though he had just woken up from the deepest sleep of his life?
    A pungent scent tickled his nose and he shook his head again to clear it. Had he been drugged?
    Wyatt looked up and saw his secretary, whose shrill screech had woken him—except he hadn’t been asleep, so how could she have woken him?—standing over his shoulder, gaping at his reflection in the mirror. Slowly, she raised one finger, her mouth working like a fish, and pointed at his face.
    Wyatt frowned, shifting his eyes from her reflection to his own. It took a moment to register that it was his reflection. The man frowning back at him had Wyatt’s eyes, his jaw, his frown, but thick black lines had been drawn across his face, making the features seem foreign.
    Bushy black eyebrows were drawn in above his. Thick squiggles in a cartoonish imitation of a handlebar mustache marred his smooth shave. And to top it all off, wide black circles around his eyes, with a thick bar across his nose and lines extending toward his ears made him look like someone had drawn a caricature of Groucho Marx directly onto his face.
    Wyatt’s hands fisted in anger at the thought of one of his employees drawing on his face when they caught the boss napping. He opened his mouth to demand that his secretary fire the prankster on the spot, but the feel of something clenched in his left hand stopped him. He glanced down, forcing his rage-curled fingers to unclench and his frown deepened as he tried to make sense of what he was looking at.
    It was a marker. A black Sharpie with the cap off. The pungent aroma was the distinctive waft of ink. Permanent ink.
    “I’ll call Karmic Consultants at once, sir!” his secretary called out as she ran from his office.
    Wyatt stared at his inked face for several seconds before the realization that he had fallen asleep and drawn on his own face sunk in.
    No, the ghosts did the drawing , a little voice spoke in the back of his mind—his voice, not any ghost’s voice, thank God. He was not hearing voices. He was just drawing on himself. And had no memory of it. Sleep drawing. Surely that was a common phenomenon. Stress. Stress could bring on sleep-drawing. There were probably

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