by Sarah Wynde
Thinking about that had been his first mistake.
The second — reacting too fast. Or maybe not fast enough.
Noah stuffed his hands into his pockets, clenching them into fists, trying to force his brain to shut up.
Shut up, shut up, shut up.
He didn’t want to think about Joe’s death. Didn’t want to remember the woman walking along the road, the moment her head turned and her eyes met his. The small boy by her side had been almost hidden by her black robes. Had she known about the IED?
She couldn’t have. Why would she have been there? He’d seen her, the woman in black, a glimpse of the boy, then all the memories turned into a blur. Bits and pieces, flashes of color and pain. The explosion. The jolting truck. The weapons firing. Flames and smoke, choking on the smells in the air.
Blood.
God, so much blood.
It poured down his head, spilling into stinging eyes. And it spurted between his fingers while Joe’s eyes stared up at him, confused, the light in them fading away.
Noah was gone, lost in another place and time, his heart racing, the pounding in his ears drowning out the guns, the screams, the…
“Breathe. Deep breath. Not too fast.” It was a woman’s voice, calm and even, breaking through the fog. “Stamp your feet. Feel the ground underneath them. Feel the air on your skin.”
Noah took a shuddering breath.
Shit.
He dropped his hands to his sides.
A younger, female version of the man who’d been speaking to him had taken his place. Her dark hair held no silver but was tied back in a thick braid. She had the same blue eyes, looking right into Noah’s, but her eyes held oceans. Like she’d seen everything and nothing could surprise her.
“Are you all right?” The man peered over her shoulder. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Do you need to sit down?” The woman asked Noah, ignoring the man behind her.
“But you don’t see them, right? Just hear them,” the man said, worry lines creasing his brow.
Noah blinked. Had he heard that right?
“Sound only,” the man continued. “It must be so confusing.”
“Dad.” The woman shot him an exasperated glance. “You’ve said enough.”
“Oh, right, right. Too soon.” The man’s worried frown didn’t change.
Noah’s heartbeat was slowing. He could hear again, street sounds, a breeze rustling the leaves of a nearby tree, and voices.
Lots of voices.
“It’s not right.”
“Is he okay?”
“Guardian angels God will lend thee…”
You look like you’ve seen a ghost. But you don’t see them, just hear them. The words were replaying in Noah’s mind. You don’t see them, just hear them.
Ghosts.
“Doing better?” the woman said.
Noah felt heat rising, tinting his cheeks. His voice was rough as he said, “I’m fine.”
“Exhaustion can be a trigger for flashbacks. You should get some rest,” she said calmly.
“I’m fine,” he said again. He looked between them, from one to the other. “I don’t know who you think I am, but you’re wrong. Coming here was a mistake.”
“I hope you’ll repeat it,” the woman said. She held up an envelope, cream-colored, sized like an invitation. “Don’t worry about the RSVP. I know you’ll be there.”
“I — what?” Noah took the envelope as she pushed it toward him.
“Come on, Dad.” The woman grabbed the arm of the man behind her and steered him toward the door of the restaurant. “You shouldn’t have said that,” she scolded him gently.
“But you knew I would.” The man followed her.
“Yes, but just think, you could have surprised me.” She pulled the door open.
“Is he going to be okay?” The man glanced back at the still motionless Noah.
She glanced back, too, and the smile she cast on Noah was warm. “Of course.”
Of course? Noah didn’t feel okay. He felt angry and confused and threatened and maybe a little lost. But he knew she was right. Of course he’d be okay.
As soon as he got the hell out of this crazy town.
5
Dillon
“We just got here,” Dillon said. “He can’t leave.”
Rose patted his knee affectionately. “Your aunt said he’d be back.”
She was sitting next to Noah, with Dillon between her and Joe in the cab of Noah’s truck. Nadira and Misam were on Joe’s other side. Noah had rushed to his truck and taken off like the hounds of hell were after him, so quickly that only the most aware spirits had managed to pile into the truck with him. The others were still being dragged along in the vehicle’s wake.
“That’s not the point,” Dillon grumbled. He supposed it didn’t matter one way or another if Noah left now. They’d found Rose and that was the important thing. But he would have liked a chance to see his parents and to spend a little more time with his relatives and Akira. If all went according to his plan, it might be his last chance to say good-bye to them.
“I don’t think he should be driving.” Joe leaned forward to shoot a worried look at his friend’s face. “He’s tired. He didn’t get any sleep. He shouldn’t have stayed up all night.”
“You worry like a new mama.” Nadira had Misam in her lap.
“Or like an old mama?” Misam wiggled, giving her an impish smile.
Nadira pursed her lips in disapproval. She tightened her arms around the little boy, holding him close. “We’re going very fast. I don’t like it.”
The trees on the side of the road were blurs of brown and green, their details lost as the truck whizzed by them. Noah was definitely breaking the speed limit. Dillon angled his head, trying to see the speedometer. Seventy. He was pretty sure the limit on this road was forty.
Movement flickered by the side of the road ahead. Dillon saw Noah start to react and braced himself, grabbing for Joe as Noah slammed on the brakes.
“Whee!” Misam chortled as he and Nadira slid through the windshield and along the hood of the truck. Rose gasped as she tumbled forward and out the door.
Noah lurched against his seatbelt, the tires squealing as he fought the truck to a standstill. But it was too late, too fast, the truck still moving as they skidded past the spot where Dillon had seen motion.
The motion was a deer, Dillon realized. No, two of them, three. Lifting their elegant heads, watching from enormous dark eyes, stepping away on their spindly legs.
Dillon’s sigh echoed Noah’s. Carefully, Noah pulled over to the side of the road. He put the truck in park and turned the key in the ignition. His head fell back against the headrest and he closed his eyes.
Sophia burst into the cab and the angry man fell through after her.
“I hate this!” Sophia yelled.
“It’s not right.” The angry man seemed to be agreeing with her. “It’s not right.”
With the truck at a standstill, the other ghosts began drifting forward, too, bobbing white lights and wisps clustering around Noah.
“Sleep, my love…” the singing woman crooned, her expression as blank as ever.
“Ugh,” Joe grunted, waving his arm around his head as if shooing off insects.
Outside the truck, Nadira planted her hands on her hips in disgust. “I told you he was driving too fast,” she called to Joe.
“That was fun!” Misam jumped up and down. “I want to do it again. Let’s do it again!”
Dillon pushed his way through the truck’s door to Rose. “You okay?”
“Of course.” She brushed off her pink skirts as if they could have gotten dusty, and shrugged at him, eyes sparkling. “This is so exciting, Dillon. This is the best day ever.”
He grinned at her. He liked these new ghosts — the lively ones, anyway — but it was good to be home. He’d missed Rose. Meeting her had made his afterlife so much more interesting.
But she was
looking past him, toward Noah. Her smile faded. “Not so great for him, though, is it?”
Joe was climbing out of the truck, too, moving forward to Nadira and Misam. The abrupt stop couldn’t hurt the ghosts, of course, but their ties to Noah meant they could be jolted and dragged in ways that weren’t exactly comfortable.
“We ought to help him,” Rose said.
“Him?” Dillon snorted. He’d spent a month trying to get Noah to come to Tassamara. He’d missed Akira’s wedding. He’d had to listen to the damn singing lady’s off-key lullaby about a zillion times. And he hadn’t done it for Noah. “We need to help us.”
“Pfft.” Rose brushed off his words. “You could get away if you wanted to. The pull can’t be that strong.”
“I could, maybe,” Dillon agreed. “But what about them?” He nodded toward the other ghosts. “They’re stuck and they’ve been stuck for years.”
Rose gave him a sideways glance. “A decade or two is nothing. I spent half a century in my house. And the boys were there even longer. Forty years before I passed, they were there. They’re still there, still trapped.”
“Not if Noah goes near them,” Dillon retorted. Rose’s house — the house where Akira and Zane lived — was a big old Victorian with a turret room and a wide front porch. When he’d first been there, it had been haunted by four ghosts: Rose, her friend Henry, and two young boys, faders, perpetually playing in the backyard.
“Ooh, good point.” Rose clapped her hands enthusiastically. “We should get him to stop by. If they were out in the world, maybe they’d wake up a little.”
Dillon screwed up his nose. “Not likely.” He waved toward the faders drifting around Noah. “They’d probably just be like those guys.”
Rose pouted, before sighing. “You’re probably right. I wish…” She didn’t finish the thought, whatever it was. “Well. If wishes were horses.”
“If wishes were horses, Noah wouldn’t be haunted,” Dillon said. Noah was pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes, as if he had a headache. Dillon didn’t know what had happened back at the restaurant when Noah had frozen in place, but he didn’t think it was good.
“Probably not,” Rose agreed cheerfully. “So how were you planning on getting him un-haunted? Akira says that whole unfinished business thing doesn’t work, you know.”
“I know.” Dillon kicked the ground. He’d hoped, more than once, that he’d find some unfinished business of his own and complete it. He’d thought it might have been his grandmother’s ghost, waiting for him. And then he thought maybe helping his mom and dad would work. He’d even secretly wondered if getting his dad to smile again would do it. But nothing he’d tried had ever found him a door of his own. If he had unfinished business left, he didn’t know what it was.
“I bet it would be pretty hard to find out what she needed to finish.” Rose nodded toward the singing lady as she came toward them, her eyes empty, still crooning her lullaby.
“All through the night…”
“Not to mention some of the others,” Rose added, giving a doubtful look to the bobbing white lights.
“We don’t need to solve everybody’s business, though.” Dillon eyed Rose cautiously. He hadn’t had a chance to explain his plan yet. At Maggie’s, they’d been busy with introductions and catching up. He’d barely managed to explain the problem. And he wasn’t sure how Rose was going to feel about this part of his plan. “We need a doorway, like the ones you and Henry had, and my gran.”
“But you don’t have one yet.”
“No. But you could find one for us, couldn’t you?”
“You should get your own doorway.”
“But I haven’t. If you found a doorway for us, we could go through it. All of us.”
“All of us? What do you want to do that for?” Rose sounded dismayed.
“It’s how you got un-stuck,” Dillon reminded her. Rose had followed Henry through a passageway to another dimension. Maybe they’d gone to heaven but Rose was vague about the details. When she’d come back, though, she’d no longer been trapped in her house. She could go anywhere, visit any place. She still mostly stuck close to home, but it was her choice, not her fate.
“Well, yeah, but it’s awfully permanent. Your way was better.”
Dillon snorted. Rose hadn’t been there when his grandmother’s spirit ripped him loose from his car. It hadn’t felt better to him. He’d been terrified and that was before he’d even visited the vortex dimension. Now that he knew what it was like, he wanted no part of it. “A doorway is safer.”
“Pfft.” Rose waved away the idea. “This is fine.”
“Not for him.” Dillon pointed to Noah.
Rose sighed. She twirled a lock of blonde hair around her finger, watching Noah.
“And I don’t want to turn into one of them.” Dillon waved an arm at the wisps.
“You won’t.” Rose said the words, but she didn’t sound entirely sure of herself.
“I might. You might, too.”
“I don’t know.” Rose looked undecided. She opened her mouth, then closed it again as Nadira came around the side of the truck.
“Come on, Nadira, don’t be mad,” Joe said, following Nadira to where Dillon and Rose were standing by the door.
“We could have been killed,” she grumbled.
“We’re already dead, Mama.” Misam skipped next to her.
“It’s the principle of the thing,” she said. “He should be more careful.”
“He doesn’t even know we’re here,” Joe said.
“That’s not the point.” Nadira grabbed Misam and boosted him into the truck, ignoring Noah’s living presence. Misam scrambled over Noah and she climbed after him.
Joe gave Rose and Dillon a wry smile. “She doesn’t like it when Noah takes risks,” he said, keeping his voice low. “You should have heard her when we came under fire. You’d think Misam was, you know, really four.”
“He is really four,” Nadira said, sticking her head out through the window. “He will always be four.” She pulled her head back inside, still speaking, but the words incomprehensible.
“What’s she saying?” Rose asked.
“It’s Arabic,” Dillon answered, already familiar with Nadira’s habits from the weeks he’d spent with them. “She does that sometimes.”
Joe cocked his head, listening. “She’s cursing Noah’s ancestors.” His brows raised. “Ah, and now she’s on the government.” He stepped up into the truck, saying, “You know, Nadira, bullets can’t hurt Misam and a fast stop’s just going to bump him around.”
In the cab, Noah dropped his hands. His voice was hoarse as he muttered, “Man, I’m tired. I’ve gotta sleep.”
“Come on,” Rose said to Dillon, following the others into the truck. “Let’s go.”
It was like a clown car, he thought. Ghosts on top of ghosts.
She stuck her head back out the window. “Hurry,” she said. “You don’t want to get left behind.”
Dillon wasn’t sure that he would get left behind. Rose might say that the pull was nothing, but he hadn’t made any serious attempts to get away from the drag. Still, being tugged along would undoubtedly be a lot less pleasant than piling into the cab, so he joined the rest, wedging his way in between Noah and the door, as Noah started the truck.
“The nearest motel is off the highway, about ten miles away, or there’s a bed-and-breakfast in town,” he told Noah. “It’s a lot closer.”
“He doesn’t hear you,” Nadira snapped.
“My grandpa said…” Dillon started.
“I do not care what your grandfather thinks he knows. We have been with him for endless days. Years!” Nadira’s voice rose with each word. “He does not hear us.”
Rose and Joe and Dillon exchanged glances. Joe gave a tiny shrug, the merest hint of a movement of his shoulders as if to say, “I don’t argue with her when she’s this mad.”
“I saw that.” Nadira glared at him.
“Don’t be angr
y, Mama.” Misam reached up, putting a small hand on either side of her face, and patting her cheeks. “I liked stopping fast.”
For a brief second she held her glare, then she softened. Shaking her head, she said, with affection, “You.”
“Me!” he agreed.
“What would I do without you?” She nuzzled Misam’s nose with her own, then began tickling him as he giggled furiously.
Noah pulled onto the road. As he headed back into town, he drove at a more reasonable pace.
Rose, sitting mostly on his lap, said, “I hope we stay at the bed-and-breakfast. It has a really nice television. Nothing compared to the one at your aunt’s new house, though. She’s got a real movie theater.”
“Nat?” Dillon asked. He hadn’t seen the house his aunt had bought yet. He’d visited her in the hospital with his parents after she got shot, but he’d been away ever since.
“Uh-huh.”
They started talking about the theater in Natalya’s new house and the television shows and movies Rose had been watching as Noah drove. Sophia and Joe chimed in, offering their opinions, while the other ghosts sang or muttered or worried, repeating their eternal loops.
Noah evidently had seen the sign for the bed-and-breakfast on the way into town, because he headed almost directly there. The one time he paused, seeming uncertain, Rose leaned toward his ear and whispered, “Turn right.”
Nadira rolled her eyes, shaking her head, but Noah turned right. He came to a stop in front of the bed-and-breakfast. It was hidden behind a white picket fence and overgrown hedges with branches arching out into the street, but a small wooden sign, with lettering burnt into the wood, revealed the name. Sunshine B&B.
The ghosts flowed out of the truck, the clown car in reverse, as Noah opened the door and got out himself. He grabbed a duffel bag from behind his seat and headed for the gate. Dillon and Rose trailed behind him, still talking, but Misam darted ahead of them.
“I like it,” he announced from the other side of the fence.
“Oh, it’s nice,” Sophia said, sounding surprised.