by Sarah Wynde
“Don’t be silly, Dillon.” Rose clasped her hands together. “Just think how convenient it would be. They can fall in love and get married and buy a house and live down the street from Akira and Zane. And we can all stay in Tassamara together. Maybe they’ll come to movie nights at your other aunt’s house. And eat at Maggie’s, of course. It’ll be just like always, only with lots of company.” On her last words, she flung her arms wide and then spun in a circle, bright with happiness.
“He is not gonna marry my aunt,” Dillon said.
“Think what beautiful babies they’d have,” Rose said encouragingly. “His eyes, her hair. Or maybe her eyes, his eyelashes. Can you imagine? On a little baby girl? Oh, she’d be adorable.” She tucked her hand into his arm and leaned into him.
Dillon rolled his eyes, but his expression softened. Grace would make a really great mom. She deserved pretty babies, if she wanted them.
“He heard us,” Joe said abruptly. “Did you notice?”
“What?” Surprised, Dillon turned toward Joe.
“He heard us,” Joe repeated. He let his steps slow, falling farther behind Noah. “Twice. Did you see it?”
Dillon thought back.
“You always think that,” Nadira scoffed.
“He’s right, though,” Sophia said unexpectedly. “Joe’s right. Misam and me, we saw her when we were hunting for squirrels. We were coming back with her. He wasn’t looking toward us until Dillon said she was mad and then he did. I saw him.”
Nadira snorted. “Nonsense. So he looked around, so what? Perhaps he heard Dillon’s aunt approaching.”
“But that’s what happened with the bear, too.” Joe stopped walking. “I don’t know who saw it first. Mona, maybe? She was screaming.”
Mona drew herself up. “It startled me,” she said with dignity, in one of her rare moments of non-cleaning-related speech.
“It’s not right,” muttered the angry man. “It’s not right.”
“Well, maybe you saw it first,” Joe said to him. “It doesn’t matter who did, because it wasn’t Noah. He didn’t see it at all. He was busy kissing your aunt, Dillon.” The balls of light and shades were drifting around them as Noah continued moving away and Joe shifted to avoid one, waving at it irritably. “But when he stopped kissing her, he looked over his shoulder. He must have heard us. Why else would he have looked behind him instead of at her?”
“Perhaps he heard the bear,” Nadira suggested.
“Did you?” Joe asked her. All of the ghosts had stopped walking and were gathering around him, including Chaupi and the angry man. The remnants started to collect around them, too.
“I…” She paused, considering. “Not until it growled. It was surprisingly quiet for such a large beast.” She gave a shudder. “That growl, though. It made my blood run cold.”
“Do you have blood, Mama?” Misam asked her. He looked down at himself. “Do I have blood?”
Nadira patted his cheek. “It’s just an expression, dear one.”
“I don’t think I have blood anymore,” he said decidedly. “I would know.”
“Of course you don’t have blood.” Sophia hugged herself. “If you had blood, you could die and we can’t die. We’re stuck.”
Joe ignored the byplay between the younger ghosts, looking troubled. “I don’t think he heard the bear. I think he heard us.”
“Does it matter?” Nadira asked.
“Yes, of course it does,” Joe said with surprising vehemence.
“But you always said he could hear us.”
“I know, but… Can’t you imagine what that would be like for him? If he knows we’re here? To feel like there are invisible eyes on him constantly? That he’s never alone? It’s creepy as hell.” Joe leaned in Noah’s direction, tense lines appearing in his brow and around his mouth, as if he were fighting something unseen.
“Oh, come on,” Dillon said. “We’re not so bad.”
Misam began rubbing his stomach and Nadira shifted uncomfortably.
“We need to keep moving.” Nadira nodded toward Noah’s disappearing back. “This shall soon become uncomfortable.”
“Oh?” Rose glanced at Dillon.
He shrugged. He didn’t feel it, but the pull wasn’t as strong for him as it was for the others.
“We have to talk about this, though,” Joe said. “And not where Noah can hear us.”
“Why not?” Dillon asked.
If Noah could hear them, really hear them, not just vaguely sense them, they needed to talk to him. They could explain who they were, how they’d wound up with him, how he could help them. If Noah could hear them, maybe he could take them to a place where they could find a ghost with a doorway — a hospital, say, or a retirement community. A place where people died because death was inevitable, not because they’d been stupid or unlucky. Rose could point out the doorway, the ghosts could go through… Dillon gave a bounce, almost like one of Misam’s.
Joe started sliding forward, his feet not lifting off the ground. “Walk, but slowly,” he said, beginning to move his feet.
Nadira gave a grunt of discomfort and began moving, too, nudging Misam along in front of her.
“I hate this,” Sophia said bitterly. “Hate it, hate it, hate it.” She stomped off after Noah, her steps silent but her body language eloquent. Mona began hurrying through the brush, passing through bushes and tangled undergrowth in a straight line toward Noah. Chaupi and the angry man followed suit.
“What are you worrying about now?” Nadira asked Joe as the wisps and remnants began drifting after Noah, too.
“If he knows we’re here, if he knows we’re us…” Joe’s lips pressed together. “I don’t know how he’d react.”
Nadira’s lip curled. “Perhaps we should be afraid of what he might do, should he come to believe in our presence.”
“What do you mean?” Joe asked.
She shrugged and didn’t answer, but her glance at the top of Misam’s head was worried.
“Maybe he would think we are jinns. Instead of an exorcist to fix the jinn inside him, the one that traps us, the exorcist would get rid of us.” Misam looked up at his mother’s face. “What do you think would happen, Mama, if an exorcist tried to cast us out?”
“You are too clever by half, my boy.” Nadira paused, just long enough to scoop him up.
He wrapped his legs around her waist and leaned into her, his head peering out over her shoulder. “I do not think I would like to be exorcised,” he said, his expression thoughtful.
“Exorcism doesn’t work,” Dillon said with conviction, but he couldn’t help frowning. Misam’s words hit a little too close to his own experience with another dimension.
“How do you know?” Nadira asked.
“Akira said. Her parents tried it with her when she was little.”
“Perhaps they didn’t find a good exorcist. Perhaps it worked on the spirits around her but not on the jinn inside her. Perhaps…” Nadira tightened her grasp on Misam, but she didn’t finish her thought, adding brusquely. “We must hurry. If Noah starts his truck…”
Dillon grimaced. He remembered what it had been like when Akira had driven his car away without him. The pain had been agonizing. He didn’t know whether it would be the same for him with Noah: it was possible that the distance would simply break a tie that had never seemed too powerful. The ghosts with stronger ties to Noah would suffer, though.
“Do you want me to take Misam?” Joe asked her. “You want a piggyback, kiddo?”
“It’s all right. I have him.” Nadira broke into a trot, jiggling Misam and singing him a song in lilting Arabic.
“Noah wouldn’t exorcise us,” Dillon said as he and Joe and Rose fell behind the others. “Would he?”
“No, of course not,” Joe replied. “At least I don’t think he would.”
“What do you think he’d do?” Rose asked.
“I don’t know. But he’d try to help us, I’m sure of that,” Joe said.
“We’
re not so easy to help,” Dillon stuffed his hands in his pockets, hunching his shoulders.
In their first conversation after he’d learned that Dillon was a ghost, his dad had asked, his voice rough with emotion, “How can I help you? What do you need?”
Dillon hadn’t had an answer for him. He didn’t know what he needed, why he was still hanging around.
Akira, though, had been brisk, telling his father about her past experiences, all her failed attempts to find the mysterious white light of lore. She’d finished with, “Ghosts simply are. They’re not a problem that needs fixing. They’re people, usually ones who died untimely deaths, still working out their time here. That’s all.”
But Dillon had known from the expression on his dad’s face that he found her answer profoundly unsatisfying. He felt that way about it himself. Yeah, maybe he’d died too young, but why did that leave him trapped?
“Noah wouldn’t do anything that would hurt us,” Joe said, but his voice was grim. Dillon wondered if he was trying to convince himself, but Joe continued, “But if he can hear us…” He shook his head and then took an angry, wild swing at a tree trunk ahead of him, his fist sliding right through it and then his body following suit. He wasn’t making any attempt to go around the plants, just shoving through them as if they didn’t exist.
“If he can hear us?” Rose prompted.
“It explains so much,” Joe burst out. He glanced at Dillon. “I know I said he could hear us, but that was mostly just to annoy Nadira.”
Rose’s eyes went wide. “To annoy her? On purpose?”
Dillon had spent enough time with the other ghosts that he wasn’t surprised. “She probably claimed he couldn’t hear you just to annoy you,” he said dryly.
“You know how it is.” Joe’s dimples flashed. “Being dead is boring. Arguing with Nadira makes life — uh, afterlife — a lot more interesting.”
Dillon rolled his eyes, but Rose laughed.
But Joe’s face sobered. “But if he can hear us, then—” He waved an arm wide to indicate the wisps scattered ahead of them in the forest. “No wonder his life sucks. He should be in school, getting a degree. But how would he study if we’re always talking around him? He should have a girlfriend. But if he can hear the kid asking questions every time things start heating up, of course his hook-ups are never going to turn into anything real. He should have a life, damn it. He’s still alive. But he doesn’t and it’s because of us. It’s because he knows we’re here, even if he’s never admitted it.”
Dillon skirted a tree as Joe marched through it. Maybe Joe was right. But if so, they needed to talk to Noah. They needed to explain. “We should tell him we’re here. Who we are.”
“No.” The easygoing joker in Joe had disappeared, leaving a hard-eyed soldier adamant in his place. “Not you, but Nadira, Misam, and me? He’d blame himself. We need to be quiet around him. Dead quiet. And somehow we’ve got to get the rest of these ghosts away from him. We need to find one of those doors you talked about and soon.”
Dillon exchanged glances with Rose. She frowned and opened her mouth, as if to say something, but at that moment, Noah must have started his truck. Joe gave a startled yell and disappeared in a whoosh of wind as the gentle pull that Dillon had previously felt tugging at his core turned into a yank that had him tumbling into the air.
The last thing he saw as he was drawn away was Rose cupping both hands around her mouth and calling out, “I’ll catch up with you!”
11
Grace
Olivia was standing behind the reception desk, her cheeks pink with excitement. “That was amazing! Are you all right? That was—” She let the words drop off and spread her hands wide as if to say that she couldn’t encompass all that she’d just seen.
Amazing. Yeah, that was a good word for it, Grace thought.
“It looked huge,” Olivia continued. “How close were you? On the screen, it looked like it was right there next to you, like you could almost touch it. And when you didn’t notice it and it was getting closer and closer, oh my God, it was like a horror movie.” She clapped a melodramatic hand over her heart.
Oh, right. Olivia was talking about the bear. Grace had been thinking about that kiss.
“It was pretty big,” Grace replied.
Noah Blake’s kiss was like hot chocolate on a cold day, the kind made with real milk and good chocolate. Except plain hot chocolate didn’t have the right sizzle. No, Noah’s kiss was like Mexican hot chocolate, with chili peppers and maybe topped with whipped cream and scrapings of dark chocolate.
“Were you scared? You didn’t look scared. You looked…” Olivia stopped talking. She pressed her lips together in a smirk.
Grace arched a brow and waited.
“Sorry, ma’am. Just remembering what you said earlier. You know, about creating a hostile work environment and all,” Olivia said. She took her seat behind the reception desk, her expression demure, her eyes dropped.
Grace choked back a chuckle. Olivia didn’t do demure well. Grace could still see the mischief hiding behind her half-smile.
Olivia’s gaze flickered up to Grace. She must have seen Grace’s amusement, because she added, “But does he kiss as good as he looks? Because that was…” She fanned herself.
Grace laughed. Then she tried to make her expression repressive. “That was inappropriate of me.”
“Hey, he doesn’t work here. You should go for it.”
Grace sobered. Her father had told her to hire Noah. Instead she’d chased him off.
“So who saw that?” she asked. Her hand drifted to her mouth, her pinkie nail slipping between her lips.
Olivia didn’t meet her gaze. “Oh, just me and Jensen. And, ah, well, your dad had just come in. He’d stopped by. And then the other guys came running when the alarm went off, of course, and so…”
“The company, in other words?” Grace realized she was biting her fingernail and pulled it out of her mouth.
“I won’t say anything, not if you want it kept quiet, but you should probably tell the guys to keep their mouths shut, too.”
“I think I can survive a little gossip,” Grace said. But could Noah? If she could somehow convince him to take a job with General Directions, how would his co-workers react? Would he get hassled for having kissed the boss?
Damn it. Kissing him had been an impulse, driven as much by her annoyance at her brother as attraction. Not that she regretted it, not really, but it might have been a mistake.
Olivia’s smile was sympathetic. She picked up the paper on the top of her in-box, “I’ll just get back to work. On, um…” Her brow furrowed. “A purchase order for the quantum teleportation guys. Why do they want us to buy them cats?”
“No cats.” Grace snatched the paper away from Olivia. “They’re trying to sneak that one by you because I already said no. I’ll talk to them.” She glanced down at the paper and shook her head. “Why couldn’t Schrödinger have theorized about goldfish?”
She crumpled the purchase order as she headed to the door. She needed to get to work. She had too much to do to obsess about Noah Blake. But her father met her at the door to her office.
“Did you hire him?”
“Not exactly, no.”
Grace opened her door. Her father followed her into the room.
“No? But you looked—”
Grace raised a finger. “Do not start with me, Dad.” Reaching her chair, she looked down at her shoes. They were toast. There was no way she’d ever get them clean. With a sigh, she slipped them off and dropped them into the trash can under her desk. Barefoot, she sat down in her chair.
Her father crossed to the front of her desk.
She looked up at him. “Something you need?”
“I need you to hire Noah Blake.” His tone was the patient parent-to-small-child tone that she remembered well from her childhood. He might have been telling her to clean her room.
“He has to want to be hired.” She turned away and hit the power bu
tton on her computer with more force than it needed.
“He seemed to like you.”
Grace’s lips twitched with the beginning of a smile. Despite her worries about the consequences, the glow of a really good kiss was still warming her. Noah might come with warning signs and flashing neon lights of danger, but she wasn’t sure she could muster the right amount of regret for kissing him.
“Possibly not as much as I liked him,” she muttered to her keyboard.
“Oh, no, just as much,” her father said cheerfully. “Trust me, I know.”
“What do you know, Dad?” Grace demanded, turning back to him. So far he’d refused to say more than that he wanted her to hire Noah. “Is this about Dillon?”
Her father’s cheer faded. He turned away from her, walking to the shelves that lined one wall of her office. Although he ran a hand across a line of book spines, she didn’t imagine he was looking at their titles when he paused by a shelf of framed family photographs.
“Do you remember the day he died?” he asked.
“I wasn’t here.” Grace’s reply felt automatic, although the memories immediately leaped up to engulf her. The phone call, the pause after her mother said her name. Grace had known that something was terribly wrong before any more words were spoken.
In those few brief seconds, she’d imagined what she thought was the worst. Car accident, heart attack, cancer.
She hadn’t even come close to the reality.
She would never forget — could never forget — the image tied to the memory. She’d left dirty dishes in her sink from the day before. A red Fiestaware cereal bowl, a single spoon, a glass flecked with dried orange juice pulp. She’d been thinking she should have rinsed her glass when she answered the phone, and still looking at it when her mother said the words that changed the world.
Something about the incongruity burned, as if the universe had punished her for her carelessness. But she knew that thought was silly. Life didn’t work that way.
“I was so angry at your mother,” Max said, his back still turned to Grace. “She refused to help me. It wouldn’t have made a difference, of course. I know that now. But at the time…”