S. H. Marpel
In the days when people were owned by the land, two young girls found their power by becoming ghosts, then spirit guides.
This is their origin-story...
Their Dad had to raise them by himself, as Mother died shortly after birthing them. But as a spirit, she remained on Earth to watch over them. Sal and Jude could see her, and knew their Dad could feel her presence.
Efforts to enter the forest, to exploit its abundant
...It started with a dream.
In it, John Earl Stark solved the problem of a ghost he met. Or did he? It was a dream, after all.
The next day he meets two women who visit his cabin, arriving out of the blue, literally. (Well, one arrived with pitched black darkness which filled his cabin and made her cough.)
These two have an offer for Stark. All he really wanted was to enjoy the small
...I knew exactly why I was still here. To haunt whoever had pushed me overboard.
My only problem was finding them. And if they weren't still alive, they had relatives.
Meanwhile, I kept amused by haunting the ship's passengers and crew. And the cruise line didn't have a problem with it. Their "haunted cruises" were a big hit. Full capacity for this old boat and its evening dinner cruises out beyond the harbor.
"Misstep
...I'd been left out here, alone. By an oil-burning lamp. In the cold, uncaring desert.
It was my only comfort until dawn.
Just as the first of dawn started bringing the earliest glimmer of what I could see with my human eyes, I woke to some snuffling sound near my head.
Opening my eyes, not relishing the hot day coming, I saw the nose of an animal near my face.
"Rise, little one."
I sat up. And saw eye-to-eye
...A Sorceress appeared after being imprisoned for 12,000 years.
To escape, she tricked the oldest goddess still remaining on earth, and crippled another one shortly after.
Now the Ghost Hunters have to solve a problem they helped create. One who was more powerful than any they had faced to date.
Individually, she could probably destroy any one of them. Only working together as a team could she be stopped.
The
...Vampires aren't good at everything. For instance, they suck at haunting.
John Earl Stark continues his adventures in ghost hunting.
Encountering a female ghost who attacks him in a gothic Victorian mansion left him bitten, but alive. Sal and Jude, his employers and guides, came in from a nearby room, shocked.
Obviously, John was going to need more training to survive these attacks.
But this particular
...Things were going well, until we got arrested.
By our own security.
No lawyer, no rights read, even our own boss turned on us.
Because now we were being studied like the very people we were studying before.
Or trying to.
You see, we couldn't find any trace of those people, except for faint traces of biological material that were old enough to be historical.
Everyone was starting to think they
...8) Hermione
I'd been caught in a cross-fire. And just got saved from bleeding out.
Now my shape-shifting was on hold until I healed. But I was stuck in human shape, having to re-learn the human experience.
I don't know when I first appeared on Earth. Before recorded time somewhere. And for the last few centuries or so, I'd been happy as a library cat.
But then I got bored, and started helping out with simple missions.
Good
...10) Gaia
The Sum of the Whole is Greater Than Its Parts.
So Gaia was taught since she came into this existence.
But she was named after the Nature goddess. Long centuries and eons passed while she was submerged in rock beneath the thin surface layers that living creatures inhabited.
Now some imbalance had awakened her. She rose to the surface to claim her own, her rightful place in the whole world,
...Where I had come from, how I had got here, I didn't know.
All I knew were my powers, the one's I knew from my childhood. The one's I'd spent my youth learning and perfecting. Witchcraft that could kill someone, or save their life.
But now I was here in a strange world, different people, unusual customs...
I didn't even know if my spells would work here - or if they burned witches at the stake - or tortured non-witches.
And
...Facing a Fireball and living to tell about it wasn't in John's plans for the day.
But when he and his two female spirit guides were caught behind a red subcompact taking hit after hit of fireballs, some one had to do something. Because they could only keep taking those hits for so long.
Something in what he said made one of the girls step up and get the attention of whoever was throwing those fireballs at them. A distraction
...14) Harpy Spawn
Sunset found me trying to understand why the small herd I was caring for was nervous and bawling.
It wasn't long before I saw what they were looking up at. Or rather, who.
Three human-sized females, each with broad wings, were circling the herd, as if looking for their evening meal.
As I saw them, they spied me – and started dropping from the sky right toward the spot I stood on.
Since I couldn't outrun
...Gods and goddesses roamed the earth for millenia.
Some hold that they still do.
Two babes were born in the King's Forest, hunted by the King's soldiers and two Duke's armies. Life there was protected - and as pleasant as living among wild animals with only your father could be.
For their mother died in childbirth, and became a spirit-guide for that forest, keeping the land, plants, and animals in balance. Meanwhile,
...16) Harpy Redux
An old enemy found me, and left me powerless - when I was only trying to help her.
We'd met year ago, and she became trapped in the mystic world she'd created, on of evil and retribution for imagined offenses.
I had my own problems at the time, so became the target of her wrath.
When she disappeared, and became trapped for thousands of years, I had almost forgotten her.
Meanwhile, life had changed. Lessons
...17) Walkaway Mary
I felt like a ghost.
I'd only met him once, but was drawn to him like a moth to flame.
And didn't know why.
It was this author I wanted to see, but I didn't know if he wanted to see me.
He left me an autographed book of his, with his number.
But then I lost that book before I could call.
So I found he came to this diner often, a regular. It was where we first met. And It didn't take much to get his schedule from
...The result of all these civil wars was complete destruction.
Maybe we should have taken a hint from all those wars we fought "over there" and the footage came back showing entire cities now only towering, shattered icons that stood in piles of rubble.
Uninhabited. uninhabitable.
Yet this one woman stayed there. This was her new home, she repeated stubbornly. She wasn't leaving. Even though it meant eventual death.
If
...In the days when people were owned by the land, two young girls found their power by becoming ghosts, then spirit guides.
This is their origin-story...
Their Dad had to raise them by himself, as Mother died shortly after birthing them. But as a spirit, she remained on Earth to watch over them. Sal and Jude could see her, and knew their Dad could feel her presence. Father and Mother taught them all they knew.
Efforts
..."John, I just met a ghost who's dying."
I raised one eyebrow, waiting for the punchline from my favorite time-bender.
"No, it's not what you think. I haven't gone off the deep end. The government made him into something they call a ghost."
"Figure if the government's involved, then it's going to be screwed up... But a ghost - dying?"
"Running out of juice, actually. Kept alive on some sort of weird life
...