Read Online Beneath the Mall of Madness (A Jaspar Windisle Mystery Book 1) by A.D. Folmer - Free Book Online Page B

see half a dozen more cheese wasps. Did I mention that being a necromancer can be a pain in the ass? Because it can.
    “I had no idea,” she said.
    “Were they in here while you were plastering?” I asked.
    “I couldn’t avoid it, there were so many,” she said. “It was a rushed job, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
    “I’ll lay them to rest too. If we burn them and scatter the ashes, they shouldn’t come back even if I spend the night here. High heat seems to eliminate the effect and so does breaking down the corpse.” Which was fortunate, because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to eat meat without an accusing audience.
    “How can you be sure you’ve got them all?” She asked.
    “I can’t,” I said. “It’s not like corpses hold up signs that only I can see. I can only see the results of my power along with everyone else.”
    “Hmmph. How much do you charge to use your powers?”
    “You want me to exorcise your attic?”
    “Yes. I can’t risk another necromancer coming in here and causing more trouble than you have.” I looked around. Digging out the psychic cheese wasp had left a crater in an already wretched plastering job. For someone who was already unsteady on her feet, it was dangerous. I shook my head.
    “Whether I contact the spirits or not you’re going to have to scrape this stuff off the floor.” She groaned.
    “I was hoping you would lie to me. Fine, but you’re helping me.”
    “What? Why?”
    “Because I wouldn’t have known about the dead bugs embedded in my floor if you hadn’t shown up,” she said. I couldn’t argue with that.
    “Fine, but don’t expect much. I’m not good at home improvement.”
    “I don’t mind,” Fiona said. “Even if we did a good job something else would come along to ruin my floor eventually.”
    We used trowels to scrape the plaster off and got rid of it by throwing it out the window.
    “I’ll clean it up later,” Fiona said. We found over a dozen more cheese wasps in the corners of the room.
    “How much of a hurry were you in?” I asked as I uncovered a whole pile of them.
    “A very great hurry,” she replied. “They were the biggest threat to the world ever to come through that portal on my watch.”
    We worked until dinner time and only cleared half the room. We ate leftover chicken, and I offered to come back the next day and help.
    “I’d appreciate it,” Fiona said. “All that crouching is difficult for me.” I thanked her for the food and left.
    When I entered the hotel, Mrs. Whateley jumped out of her chair at the sight of me.
    “Mr. Windisle, you might want to take a shower,” she said. “You look more like a ghost than usual.”
    I looked in the mirror behind her and realized that I was covered in plaster dust.
    “Wow.”
    “Were you building a wall?” she asked.
    “No, I was tearing up a floor. May I have some extra towels sent to my room?”
    “Oh, course.” She smiled at me. “Do you often tear up floors?”
    “No, today was the first time.” I went back outside and shook off as much plaster as I could. My clothes looked appalling. I stuffed them in a garment bag. I’d wear them to help Fiona tomorrow then send them to be cleaned. Until then I had one extra set of clothes until my new ones got back from the cleaners.
    ***
    I’d planned to spend the evening reading, but Steve called. He’d got his other experts organized and wanted to know if I could go back to the construction site and take another look around.
    “I thought you wanted me to come back after the geologist.”
    “That was before the chupacabra started eating my employees.”
    “Wait, the what?”
    “The goat sucker. It’s a legendary Puerto Rican monster that sucks the guts out of livestock.”
    “I know what a chupacabra is,” I said. “It was the whole sentence I had a problem with.”
    “Didn’t anyone tell you? The victims were eviscerated, and their internal organs are missing.”
    “That’s horrible,” I