by Anna Abner
“If she’s in trouble, then we have to help her.”
Exactly. But how? And would she believe him when he told her Tony was still on earth and needing to communicate? Most people, himself included, thought that when you died you were gone. To an afterlife or in the ground, but gone.
“Why is he still here?” David asked. “Why is he stuck like this?”
“Not everyone who dies gets stuck. Most people move onto the other side, but some spirits choose to stay. Or they have unfinished business.”
Business like a messed up little girl. “I get the feeling Tony really loves his sister.” Of course he’d stay for her.
David spooned eggs onto two plates, and Dani cut toast into triangles. He took the first bite and groaned in appreciation.
“Then he might hang around for the rest of her life,” Dani said, “if she’s all he’s got.”
Talk about depressing. “It makes me sad.”
“Me, too.”
“He’s kind of famous in Auburn.” Maybe living in a different city, Dani didn’t know they were dealing with a celebrity. “Or tragic, depending on your point of view. He was sixteen, a good kid, an athlete, and he got hit by a truck while talking on his cell phone crossing Gum Branch at night. People all over town were devastated. Me included.”
“I don’t know why things like that happen,” she confessed, the corners of her mouth pulling down. “Life and death. That’s bigger picture stuff. I wish I knew why a good person like Tony gets mowed down and the Carver is walking around taunting us.”
A Kelly Clarkson song burst out its melody from the phone in the bedroom. Dani jogged toward it. “That must be Willow’s text.” When she shuffled back down the hallway with the cell phone, she’d lost all the color in her face.
“Dani?” He dropped his fork and hurried to see what had spooked her. “What’s wrong?” His stomach knotted. Please don’t say Ryan. Please.
“It’s Cole.” She thrust the phone at him, and he nearly dropped it before reading the screen.
It was a text, “This is Nurse Hannah from OCMH. Cole escaped. Missing. Don’t contact me again. I don’t want anything to do with this.”
“What?” David read the text again. And twice more for good measure because when he’d left Cole Burkov, Dani’s friend had been unconscious and strapped, hand and foot, to a bed. How had he escaped from that?
“It must the Dark Caster,” Dani whispered. “They’re going to torture him to get to me.” And by the look on her face, it was already working.
“Hang on, let’s think about this. We don’t know what happened yet.”
Dani shot him a look and snatched her phone from his hands. “I’ll call Willow. We’ve got to hurry this up.”
She couldn’t think straight. “Damn it, Cole,” she grumbled as she dialed Willow’s cell phone. Just when she thought she’d gotten him out of the worst of it, he goes and gets himself abducted again. With no way of contacting the Dark Caster or any of his followers, she had to sit on her hands and wait.
Willow answered in a whisper as if she wasn’t supposed to be on the phone. Dani checked the bedside clock. Yep, she would be at work by now, which meant her boss was monitoring all her breaks and her personal calls. It was probably lucky she’d answered at all.
“Willow, it’s Cole again.” She’d try to be brief and keep her friend out of worse trouble. “He’s missing. The hospital thinks he escaped, but the Dark Caster has him. I’m sure of it.”
“Oh no, not Cole.” Willow’s voice cracked with grief. “That poor guy has the worst luck.”
“I need the angel spell. We don’t have a lot of time.”
“Yeah, but listen,” Willow said, “if your buddy is half as freaked out as you right now, he’s unstable. You both need to calm down and center yourselves. Without your magic, you can’t boost him, but you can support him.”
“Okay. And if you can do anything to find Cole. A locator spell. Something. Let me know.”
Willow sighed into the phone. “If the Dark Caster has him, locator spells won’t work. Cole already tried that to find you. But I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thanks.”
“I’m sending the spell marks and the Latin now. Sorry it took me so long. I had to do research.”
Thirty seconds later Dani’s phone chimed that she had a new text. She rushed into the kitchen where David had cleaned up their breakfast plates and the skillet. “Willow sent me the spell. You ready for this?”
“I don’t know.” He faced her and folded his arms across his bare chest. “Is it any different than the other spells I’ve cast?”
“I’ve never done it before,” she admitted. “But we’ll cast until we have to meet Tony’s sister. That’s like five hours.”
“It’s going to take that long?” His eyebrows leapt skyward.
“Maybe longer. Big spells are complicated, and you have to focus a lot of power.”
“Okay.” He clapped his hands together. “Let’s do it.”
* * *
After three hours on his knees in his garage casting in Latin and channeling Tony’s spirit power, David was exhausted and achy. And he had nothing to show for all his effort. If heaven had heard his plea, they hadn’t been vocal with a reply.
Disappointed, he showered and shaved before he and Dani drove to their meeting place.
Q’s Coffee Shop was a tiny Waffle House wannabe on Highway 24 on the outskirts of Auburn. The food wasn’t great, but it was cooler inside than the warm, sticky weather outside, and they kept the fresh coffee flowing.
At the front entrance, David held the door for Dani and then pointed at a booth near the register. Dani slid in first, and David squeezed in beside her.
“You’re doing a good thing,” Dani whispered.
“Thanks.”
Tony hovered at the end of the table like the most awkward waiter ever.
“Can you chill out?” David asked him quietly. “You’re making me nervous.”
The bell above the door jingled. “Here she is,” he announced, backing away like his sister couldn’t walk right through him.
A short, wire-thin girl with overworked hair, black tights, and kohl-rimmed eyes strolled into the shop and scanned the room.
“That’s her,” Tony whispered, as if afraid to spook her. “For God’s sake, wave or something.”
David smiled and motioned the girl over. As she flounced into the booth across from him, he saw that, despite her very mature exterior, she was only a child.
“How old are you?” David blurted out.
“I’ll be fifteen in a month,” she said, narrowing her eyes at him. “So, what did you find?”
“Okay, Emi.” Truth time. “No tricks. I’m just going to lay everything out.” He inhaled deeply and then dove in and swam. “I’m a necromancer. I communicate with spirits. Ghosts,” he clarified. “And I have been hanging out—no that sounds stupid. I’ve been talking to your brother quite a bit. He’s been helping me with some spells. But what he really wants to do is talk to you.”
Emi rolled her large, expressive eyes. “Nice try, but my mom is the one you want. She’ll write a check to anyone who says they can talk to Tony.” She scooted toward the end of the booth.
“She’s leaving.” Tony panicked, his hands shaking wildly in undirected anguish. “Just say everything I say.”
Tony spoke, and David echoed him. “Em, you’re screwing up. You’re gonna kill yourself. Or end up brain dead.”
The girl stared at David with wide, terrified eyes.
“I love you, Em,” Tony continued. “You’re the person I love most.”
After a nervous glance around the room, she settled back into the booth. “He’s here.” It wasn’t a question. “I can sense him if I concentrate. I used to feel him a lot more, right after.”
“I hardly recognize you anymore. Drugs, Em? Alcohol? And the boys. Jesus, so many different boys.”
Bowing her head, she flushed pink under all that
makeup. “You left.”
“I didn’t want to. If I had known that truck was coming around the bend, I would have stepped out of the street. I swear I wasn’t trying to get myself killed. But you, Em. You seem like you’re actually trying.”
“You left,” she said again.
“You have to do better, Em. You have to stop the partying and cut off the boys. You have to worry about school so you’ll graduate on time.”
Her narrow shoulders quivered. “I’ll try.”
“No. You have to say it. Say ‘I promise.’”
She glanced at David and then Dani and then at her hands. “I promise, Tony.”
* * *
Dani worked with children every day. Toddlers, mostly, but peripherally with infants and kids as old as ten who stayed at the day care before and after school. But a troubled fourteen-year-old girl with emotional issues as big as monoliths? Dani didn’t have training in that.
However, all it took was one look into the girl’s sad eyes and Dani was hooked. Emi might dress like a twenty-something emo rock star, but under all that wardrobe she was a fourteen-year-old kid. Dani had been fourteen years old once and alone and scared.
They ordered food and coffee and between bites of cheeseburgers and onion rings they learned that Emi was a freshman at Auburn High School. She wanted to go to college and be a veterinarian someday, but more of a country vet than a dog and cat specialist. She loved music, could eat her weight in breakfast foods, and used to be really good at competitive gymnastics before Tony died and she quit.
David opened his wallet. “This is my card. My cell phone number is on it. From now on we’re going to keep in touch.”
“It sounds corny,” Dani spoke up, “but we want to be your friends.”
“Okay. I guess.” Emi shrugged, and her tough girl façade snapped back into position.
“He loves you,” David added. “He loves you so much he’s staying here to watch out for you.”
“He was always a good brother.”
They promised to meet again in a couple of days, and David insisted on driving the girl home so she wouldn’t have to ride the bus alone.
“We could help her,” Dani said as David pulled away from Emi’s smallish home in old Auburn.
“We?” David clarified. “You’re going to help me?”
“Of course! She’s a good kid, and she just needs a little support to get back on track.”
He grinned at her, a very satisfied smile. “I think so, too.”
* * *
David had one more surprise for Dani when they made it back to his condo. While she checked her phone messages, he pulled another bag of goodies from his bedroom closet where he’d stashed it.
“While you were trying on clothes yesterday,” he announced, joining her in the living room. “I raided the mall’s drugstore.”
“Oh yeah?”
“I bought out their entire stock of protection.” He upended his bag and dumped four boxes of condoms plus spermicide, warming jelly, and a tin of mints onto the kitchen counter.
“Wow.” She set her phone down with a clunk. “All those condoms are turning me on.” She picked up the extra strong mints. “But what are these for?”
He popped one in his mouth, and then fed her one. “Come on, I’ll show you.” He tugged her into the master bedroom where he guided her onto the bed. Dani bounced on the springs, and then David knelt in the vee of her legs. As he removed her black stretchy top one inch at a time her nerve endings came alive to every movement, every whisper of fabric against flesh.
He bared her bra and tucked the right cup under her breast. Her breath came quicker.
“The mints,” he explained as he circled her nipple with his thumb, “make my kisses tingly.” He bent his head and pulled the peak of her breast into his mouth.
Dani’s head fell back, and she grasped his face with both hands. Yep. Extra tingly. She groaned.
Even focused on David, she heard the front door’s knob jiggle and a key turn in the lock.
She jerked away, yanking her bra up. David shot to his feet as the front door opened and his mother marched into the apartment, followed closely by Ryan. She glared at Dani as Ryan zipped around her and catapulted himself onto his dad’s waist.
“Mom,” David exclaimed, lifting his son onto his hip. “I told you not to come back until it’s safe.”
“My friend got the flu. I did the polite thing and cut our trip short so she can recover in peace.” She sent Dani a pointed look. A monkey would have picked up on her subtext. The woman didn’t like Dani and wanted her gone. Yesterday.
“I wish you’d called,” David said. “We could have registered you at a hotel or something.”
Joan sighed dramatically. “I just wanted to be home, son. Besides, Ryan missed you. Neither of us appreciates being shipped off to Siberia while you’re here—” She glanced at Dani. “—on your own.”
“Where is Mitchell?” he asked. “He was supposed to keep you in Savannah.”
“Right,” Joan said. “He told me to tell you he’s following a lead.”
David threw up his hands in frustration. “Mom, I’m worried about Ryan.”
“Let the professionals do their jobs, son.” She turned on Dani, sticking out her hand to shake. “I don’t remember your name.”
Dani didn’t buy it. And she didn’t shake hands. “Daniela,” she answered.
“Well,” Joan huffed, turning back to David. “I can see you have your hands full, and I’ve been driving all day. Take care of my grandson. I’ll call you in the morning.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
The front door clicked closed, and Ryan squirmed out of his father’s arms. “Miss Dani?” He grinned at her. “You’re here.”
“I missed you.” She wiped her moist palm on her leg before extending her hand toward the boy. He hopped on one foot and then, like in a dream, he clasped two of her fingers in his fist. Her heart thumped double time.
Blinking away tears, she squeezed his fingers. “I am so glad you’re back, Baby Bear.”
“Okay, Ry.” David scooped him up and flung him upside down over his shoulder. “Bath time and then bed.”
“I want to play with Miss Dani!” he squealed.
David lightly smacked his bottom. “You can play in the morning.”
The bathroom door closed, and the water ran in the tub. With their mumbled voices in her ears, she went straight for the sink and moistened a sponge.
Tidying up the kitchen settled her nerves. She hadn’t felt a child’s innocent, baby-soft skin in ten years. No hand holding. No hugs. No piggyback rides. Nothing. And being able to touch Ryan—sweet, energetic Ryan—had unsettled her. She feared she’d never be able to go back to the way things had been before the binding spell.
Growing up in foster care and group homes had instilled in her very early the importance of family. It was all she’d ever wanted, and then as she got older, it was all she wanted to give to others. Working at Happy Trails Day Care was the closest she could get to sharing the love in her heart.
Hurting Bailey Haas ten years ago had settled it—Dani would never get married. Never get pregnant. Never hug a child. She wasn’t such a tough chick that she didn’t cry every now and then over the loss. Because as great a friend as Georgie was—and as fulfilling as her work with the kids was—what she craved was a family of her own.
When David and Ryan emerged from the bathroom, David’s shirt was covered in wet spots, and Ryan was wrapped in a fluffy chocolate-colored towel.
“It’s past his bedtime, so I’m going to put him to sleep,” David called. “I’ll be out in a while.”
“Wait.” Dani hurried into the hallway. “Can I help? Please?”
“Are you sure you want to?”
She teared up again. Damn it. “Yeah, I’m sure.”
David must have recognized the truth in her eyes because he passed a wiggly and warm Ryan into her arms.
The little guy bounced against her hi
p. “Are you sleeping at my house tonight?”
“Uh.” She carried the boy into his blue themed bedroom, sidestepping the dinosaur toys spilling out of a wooden chest.
“Yeah, she is.” David pulled underwear and a pair of pajamas from the boy’s dresser. “Her apartment isn’t safe, but ours is.”
“Why isn’t hers safe?”
David got his son dressed for bed, and then the boy snatched up a T-rex and activated the battery-powered roar.
“Ah, ah, ah,” David warned, setting the toy aside. “Time for bed. You can play in the morning.”
He tried to lift up Ryan, but the child dodged him and leapt at Dani instead. She gladly carried him to the bed. David pulled back the blankets, and she tucked him in tight.
“Why isn’t your house safe?” Ryan asked, curling on his side like a puppy.
Before Dani could think of an answer, David said, “Her doors don’t have locks. Very dangerous.”
Ryan nodded. “You need locks, Miss Dani.”
“You’re right.” She ruffled his soft, fuzzy hair.
Plopping on the opposite side of the bed, David handed her a small cardboard book. “Is it okay if Dani reads the story tonight?”
“Yes.”
Trying to keep her voice even, though her heart had crawled up into her throat, Dani stretched out beside him on the twin bed and Ryan wiggled around until his head lay against her shoulder. She cleared her throat twice before she started Good Night Moon.
By the time she’d read the book, retucked Ryan, and both she and David had kissed his warm little forehead, Dani could not feel lighter inside without rising into the air and blowing away.
Quietly, she and David flipped off the light and pulled the boy’s bedroom door three-quarters closed.
In the living room David drew Dani close, his heartbeat echoing against her cheek. “You are so full of love, Dani. Like a…” He squeezed her tighter. “Like an overflowing glass of champagne. I can’t believe I ever thought you were cold. But you’re not cold,” he breathed into her hair. “Quite the opposite.”
“Take me to bed,” she whispered back. “And bring the mints. Let’s finish what you started.”
Chapter Fifteen
David woke from a deep, contented sleep to someone standing at the foot of his bed shouting. His heart pounding, he snapped into a sitting position, terrified something had happened to Ryan. Or that the Carver had returned.