by Amie Gibbons
I scowled.
“What do you want to bet she just doesn’t want to see him since he upsets her by being a jerk and the friends are respecting that?” I asked Carvi mentally.
He tossed me a glance but didn’t respond.
“So, Dr. Williamson at Vandy,” Carvi said, standing up with a fluid motion most humans would need hands to help with. “Where does she live?”
Thomas gave us the address, we popped out of the grey swirling world to write it down with the last few we’d gathered, and gave it to Mender to track.
“Next,” Carvi said.
###
“Trey?” I asked, kneeling down next to the fourth victim.
We’d already talked to another handful of others, trying to get them in order of direction rather than time.
Each had a similar story.
Some were almost as bad as Thomas’, some were more like what we’d heard earlier where they really weren’t that bad, just didn’t work out.
But then again, the guys were the ones tellin’ the stories, so we were only getting their versions. And their version of bad was probably very different than the girls’ they’d used.
So far, all came with possible suspects, though none in Nashville besides Thomas’, that they knew of. Not one of them had more than one girl in mind though.
Seemed once they slept with a virgin and it went badly when they ditched her, they all learned their lesson never to do that again.
That was something at least.
“Hey,” Trey said.
No clue how.
He’d blown his brains out with a shotgun in the roof of his mouth. It took out the entire top of his head and his mouth didn’t move when he spoke. The actual body they were in the process of moving from the city morgue to our building around right now probably looked worse.
He was slumped against the edge of a couch, the rest of it and the room I assumed was around it all obscured by grey swirling glittery smoke.
“Do you know you’re dead?” Carvi asked.
I knelt next to the guy.
Just in case he needed comforting.
By now, we had this act down.
“Yeah,” Trey scoffed, what was left of his head not moving with it.
I think I might’ve puked if it did.
“Good,” Carvi said. “Some of the guys we’ve talked to didn’t.”
He ran through the quick explanation and finished with, “So, names of virgins you’ve fucked, and where they are now, if you know.”
I swear I could almost see Trey want to close his eyes against what he was about to say.
“I… oh man. I was fourteen.”
Wow, and I thought I’d started young.
“And she was too,” he said. “We… we didn’t know what we were doing. I felt so bad after. I… I didn’t know!”
My stomach sank. “Didn’t know what?”
“Didn’t know how much it hurt girls. She… she told me it hurt and I stopped, but then she said I raped her and…”
His voice caught.
“You stopped?” Carvi said. “You were actually in and it was your first time, and you stopped!”
“She told me to,” he said. “You have a girl crying under you that it hurts and to get the hell off, you do it.”
Carvi looked at me and I shrugged.
“No, no way,” I said. “You were fourteen, had never had sex, and you were in control and decent enough to pull out when she told ya to, and then she cried rape. I’m with you on this one. This doesn’t count.” I paused and stood up. “Unless you’re lying.”
“I’m not!” he said. “The second she said get out, I did. But her parents pressed charges. I had to go to court. The case was dismissed, and since I was a minor it was sealed, thank the Lord. But… I never…”
He sobbed.
“Sounds like he’s the one with the right to be upset here,” I said.
“But,” Carvi said, “remember Grant?”
I grunted and glared at him.
“If the girl thinks of it that way, even if he was a perfectly decent guy, then the ghost sees it that way.”
“But that’s only if this isn’t the girl who summoned the ghost.”
He frowned. “Good point. It’d be like you if he was just another victim and not the original target. If it was him as the original target, and the girl honestly believed after all these years she was raped, then the ghost would probably be going after rapists.”
“Is she in town?” I asked.
“No, this was back home in Montana. She goes to college there.”
“Did you guys stay in touch after all that?” I asked.
“We went to the same high school,” he said. “I had to see her. Every time I did, she’d give me this look, like I had ruined her life or something.”
“But she’s not here,” I said. “You’re sure?”
“She’s at a party in Montana tonight.”
I stared at him.
“I ugh, keep up with her on social media,” he said. “You know, just to make sure she’s not saying stuff about me now that I’m gone. I’m a freshman at Belmont. And… you know, I want to stay in touch, know how she is.”
“You care about her?” I asked.
“She was my first,” he said. “I… I thought I loved her.”
“Okay, no!” I said. “This isn’t fair! You were a good guy and it sounds like you were the one screwed! The others were either careless or plain walkin’ fudgesticks, but you’re a good guy. You don’t deserve to be here.”
“You’re assuming deserve has anything to do with it, lea,” Carvi said gently. “Maybe his guilt over this called the spirit. Maybe the fact that he was involved in a young lady losing her virginity and then not being with her after that is all the ghost needs to zero in, his fault or not.”
“Sounds about right,” a cold voice said from behind.
“Ah!” I jumped and whirled.
The smoke whirled apart and Grant stepped through it.
“Ryder,” he said, tone colder than the mist when I sat on the ground, “what the fuck did you do? Where am I?”
Chapter eight
“Me!” I said.
“You throw a temper tantrum, I see some ghost that looks like you in the mirror, it possesses me, and then I’m here,” Grant said. “Explain.”
His tone was flat and made me want to cry.
Or throw things.
“I ugh…” I looked at Carvi.
He gave me a look I couldn’t interpret and turned to Grant.
“Grant, how’s tricks?” Carvi said.
Grant gave him his stone look. “Am I dead?”
“No!” I said. “Not technically… or yet.”
I couldn’t meet his eyes.
“Your body is alive,” Carvi said. “We were able to pull you back from death, but your spirit had already been caught by whatever this is, and that’s why you’re stuck here.”
“And this is?”
Carvi did a palms up. “It doesn’t quite fit a ghost, or what we know about them, but it is acting like a ghost with a grudge and it does show up as EMF.”
Grant nodded, jaw working.
I lifted my eyes, trying to force myself to actually meet his.
But he stared straight through me and pounded his fist into his palm.
“Dammit, Ryder,” he finally whispered.
I waited.
“I think she’s going to need more than that, Grant,” Carvi said.
Grant took an obvious deep breath. “Carvagio, we do not have time for more. I seem to be the only one in here able to move, so I’ve been talking to the others. I can sense them. Most don’t remember what happened.”
“Do you?” I asked in a small voice.
“Yes,” he said.
“For the same reason you can move,” Carvi said.
Because Grant wasn’t fully human. Grant wasn’t able to be controlled quite as fully as the others.
Didn’t save him tho
ugh.
My stomach rolled up and I wrapped my arms around my belly.
“Ryder,” Grant said, voice low and so even I swear it was worse than the cold tone.
“Yes, sir?” I asked.
“You should have told me.”
My head jerked up and I actually looked him in the eyes.
I couldn’t read anything outta them.
“What?” I asked.
“You should have told me, you should have disclosed during your evals that you had a suicide attempt. You…”
He clenched his jaw and fist, pounding the fist into the other hand again.
“You have trauma from your past that has created an instability, Ryder,” Grant said slowly. “If you had disclosed it, we could have dealt with it before now. Before it became a problem.”
I looked down, nodding. “How much do you know now?”
“Enough,” Grant said.
I flinched. Don’t know why I expected him to answer that.
“Can’t fix that now,” Carvi said.
“True,” Grant said.
“We’re interviewing the men in here and taking the information back,” Carvi said.
“Any connection?” Grant asked.
So he didn’t know that part?
“Do you remember what the ghost said to you?” Carvi asked.
Grant nodded once, hard and strong.
“That’s the connection,” Carvi said. “Men who took virginity, and the girl felt betrayed after, usually because the guy left her. Do you remember anything else? Did the ghost say anything else to you personally? How it felt? Most of the guys don’t remember anything between they were in front of a mirror to right before they died.”
Grant shook his head. “My body moved without me, I couldn’t stop it. It didn’t let me go until right before I passed out from blood loss.”
I pressed my lips together. I wouldn’t cry. I would not cry.
“I was targeted because?” Grant asked.
I couldn’t look at him.
“Transference,” Carvi said. “Ariana covered the pain from her own experience by using you as a shield. You fell today to her, the shield was yanked away with what she felt is a betrayal, and all those feelings she’d been repressing came up, attaching to you. At least enough for the ghost.”
Grant nodded, taking a deep breath again.
“Ryder,” he said.
I flinched.
“What have you found so far?” Grant asked.
I blinked.
All work apparently.
Why was I surprised?
Grant was always about work.
Except the two times he wasn’t. Once was when he snapped cuz a serial killer pushed him into his cold place, and he seemed very close to molesting me, which I was fine with, and last July, when I was pushin’ him towards sex and he was a hair away from taking me.
“The guys all have stories about a girl losin’ it to them, and it was usually very bad for the girl, and the guys all ditched the girls after, except this guy where the girl claimed rape even though when she told him to stop, he did, so it seems to be based more on female perception than reality.”
Grant said something under his breath.
Carvi snorted.
“What?” I looked between them.
“Nothing,” Carvi said. “You don’t want to know.”
My heart lurched.
“From what we can tell,” I continued, “the guys are all trapped here. They have nothing in common except the situation. One guy was even drivin’ into town when it hit him and made him drive off a bridge into a lake, so he didn’t have the opportunity to come into contact with anything here all day, which seems to rule out a ghost attached to an object doing this. We’re kinda stumped, sir.”
“Means you’re missing something,” Grant said.
“Go back to the drawing board,” I said. “If we don’t get it, if things aren’t adding up, then it means there’s something we missed. There is a piece of the puzzle we aren’t seeing, or it’s a completely different puzzle.”
“So maybe you have learned something.”
I met his eyes, mouth falling open.
“Ryder,” he said, some emotion creeping into his voice, “you can’t fall apart. You can’t get offended. You have a job to do. You’re hurt? Fine. Put it aside. Deal.”
“I… I… can we talk about-”
“No,” Grant said, crossing his arms. “Job. To. Do. Go do it. I’ll find out what I can in here.”
He turned and walked into the mist, disappearing.
My heart ached and I sniffed, tears filling my eyes.
“Not now, lea,” Carvi rubbed my arm.
“I don’t know how to put it aside,” I said.
“Sure you do,” he said, “you did it for eight years. Obviously you know how to suppress. Just do it until this case is over, until you’re safe, and then, instead of leaving it tied up and gunny sacking it, deal with it then.”
“I don’t know how to deal with it.”
“That’s tomorrow’s problem. Can we go save poor guys who probably don’t deserve to die?”
Right.
God, how self-centered was I?
I so didn’t want to go there right now.
Wait, since when did Carvi care about random humans dying?
“Carvi, why do you care?” I asked. “These guys aren’t anything to you.”
He squeezed my shoulder. “They aren’t. You are. And the more people who die, the more you’re going to blame yourself. I can’t have a drowning in depression psychic. You’re no good to me that broken.” He shrugged. “A little broken’s good, makes you more willing to do kinky shit with me in the future.”
He winked and I couldn’t even feel enough to appreciate the joke or smile.
“Hey, we’ll see ya later,” I said to the dead guy who’d just been watching this whole thing patiently.
“Not like I’m going anywhere,” he said.
###
We hit a few more and it was all the same. I was beginning to think we were wastin’ our time because it had to be Thomas’s ex, but Grant’s voice rang in my head.
Sayin’ we had to be thorough. Don’t assume. Run down every lead so we didn’t miss anything.
The guys all had similar stories. Some of them were jerks who got virgins into bed for sport. Some were guys who had girls flip out on them and threaten to say they were raped after what they’d thought was perfectly consensual, if not good, sex. And some said they thought it was casual and the girl wanted it and afterwards the girl wanted more and was broken hearted when they didn’t get it and the guys felt bad.
All ran the spectrum of how big a jerk the guy was, but all hit the common theme of the girl losing it and it going bad in some way.
“Is it possible for a ghost to latch onto an emotion?” I asked after we were near the end of the guys.
I’d honestly lost count.
“Not that I’ve heard of,” Carvi said. “But most of these girls aren’t even in Nashville. So it wouldn’t be latching onto the girls’ emotions about it. And some of the guys feel bad and some don’t, so it’s not latching onto their emotions about it.”
“I’m lost,” I said.
“Yeah, well, after we finish this up, we can start looking in the real world.”
Carvi rubbed his face with his hands and I touched his arm. “You okay?”
He shook his head. “Lea, it has been such a long fucking day. And you… you can take energy.”
I pulled my hand away and he offered me a weak smile. “Not an insult. Just… Ariana, right now, the headspace you’re in, you are wallowing, and you are dragging me in with you by sheer mental force of that blackhole you’ve let your pain become.”
I… everything in me sunk and I wanted to curl to the ground.
“Don’t you dare,” Carvi said.
“Mind reader,” I shot at him.
“Yeah. Don’t even think about giving into the blackhole. You d
on’t get the luxury. You are sinking into depression, you are bipolar, I get it, but suck it up.”
I stared at him.
“No,” he said, “that’s not usually helpful with people who are depressed, but I know you, and it is helpful to you. Because you can take a step back and see the bigger picture and know you are needed. So you can step up and suck it up. And, I also know you realizing that helps bring you out of your depressions when you fall into them.”
I took a deep breath and nodded. “I don’t want to be the person people have to tiptoe around. I don’t want to be a delicate snowflake that falls apart. I don’t want to be the person that can’t do what’s necessary because of my feelings. So… fake it til ya make it. I decided after I slit my wrist eight years ago that I did not want to be that person and I did what I had to to get better. I was way worse off then, so I can do this now.”
“There’s my girl,” he said. “Happiness is a choice. And most days, most days you choose to be happy. Right now, you need to choose to at least not be sad.”
I nodded.
We walked up to the next glowing spot.
The misty world wasn’t as far apart as the real Nashville, but we still had to do a few minutes walkin’ between the men.
“Hey,” I said, sitting down next to the guy on the side of a bed I could only see half of.
He looked perfectly normal. He lay in the swirls of mist on the bed and didn’t move more than his head over to look at me, but nothing on him was obviously the cause of death. He looked like he went to sleep in a pair of sweatpants and was just lounging in bed.
He was built like Grant, at least six feet tall with broad shoulders, built arms that I would’ve wanted to bite in different circumstances, and a clean shaven square face. He had thick lips and a square jaw and sharp brown eyes behind square black glasses.
He blinked at me, mouth working.
“Sir?” I asked. “Um, Edmund McNab?”
“What?” he whispered. “I don’t understand, where am I?”