A Gift of Ghosts (Tassamara)

by Sarah Wynde

  Akira looked up, startled by his response. “How do you know that?”

  He looked her way again, and grinned. “What, you don’t think I’m a closet Buddhist?”

  She laughed. She knew some Buddhists in California, and it seemed unlikely. “Are you?”

  “Nah,” he shook his head. “But I’ve been doing some reading.”

  “About religion?” Akira asked, surprised again. That seemed even more unlikely than Zane being a burger-eating Buddhist.

  He shot her a tolerant look and said, “About ghosts. Now that I know they’re real, it seemed like a good idea to learn a little more about them.”

  Oh, of course. “Learn anything interesting?” Akira asked, curious. Years ago, she’d read ghost stories and traditions obsessively, trying to find anything that would help make her make sense of her world. But she’d given up: too many stories, too much conflicting information, and too little of it that fit with her experiences. Maybe nuggets of wisdom were buried in the myths, but most of them were from a time before modern science.

  “Lots,” he drawled. “Anything that’s true? I’ve got no idea.”

  “Probably not much,” she told him. “Although maybe I know less than I used to think I knew.”

  “How so?”

  On the plane, Lucas and Zane had quickly settled in to talking about business, which had been fine with Akira. She hadn’t really wanted to talk to Zane about ghosts. She wanted waffles. She wanted to go kayaking. She wanted to see her first real alligator in the wild. She—maybe—wanted to go swimming, if the day was warm enough and the water not too incredibly cold. What she did not want was to scare Zane off by seeming obsessed with death, a phrase that lingered in her memory like a bitter aftertaste from an otherwise utterly forgettable past lover.

  Now she shook her head, looking down at her phone again. “The little boy today? He took his father somewhere. The father, Rob, was saying that he couldn’t go and then they disappeared. Together. That has to mean something, but I have no idea what.”

  “Hmm, that’s interesting,” Zane answered. “Not a—?”

  “Don’t even go there,” Akira interrupted him, as he pulled up in front of the house. “It was not a white light. Or at least Rob didn’t see a white light. And Daniel . . .” She tried to remember his exact words but failed, and, mystified, added, “I don’t know what he saw. He said something like, ‘come this way,’ and then they disappeared together.”

  “So you’re thinking?”

  Akira shook her head again. “Let me get Dillon,” she said. “Would you mind driving?” She wanted to keep adding observations to her spreadsheet.

  Ten minutes later, they were on the road again, and Akira and Dillon were having a friendly argument accompanied by Zane’s interested silence.

  “But maybe if you helped me resolve my lingering issues . . .”

  “Psychobabble,” Akira interrupted Dillon. “I’ve tried that, really I have. And it doesn’t work. Unless ghosts are completely oblivious to their real issues and the ones I’ve tried to help were sending me off on wild goose chases.”

  “Okay, I’m not asking for a white light, but a door would be awesome.” Dillon was leaning forward from his usual spot in the middle of the backseat, cheeks flushed with ghostly excitement.

  “Dude, you’ve talked to your relatives. What exactly do you think you could say that would make a difference?” Akira wished she hadn’t given Dillon this glimpse of hope.

  “Maybe I need to talk to my Dad?” Dillon offered. “Or, you know, let my Dad talk to me? He’s probably pretty pissed off.”

  Akira sighed. “There was this one ghost. When I was in college?” she told him. “I returned her library books. I transcribed a paper for a class on English romantic poets for her. Seriously, I did everything she could think of that she hadn’t finished. It wasn’t fun. And nothing worked. It didn’t make a difference. She was still haunting the café down the street from the library when I graduated.”

  Dillon flopped back with a sigh.

  “No ghostly roads, huh?” Zane asked, turning onto a narrow road.

  “A road?” Akira asked, looking at him. Where had he come up with that idea? Daniel hadn’t said anything about a road, but then he’d been very vague.

  “Native American tradition,” Zane replied. “Ghosts stick around for a year, then take the ghost road in the sky. Maybe Dillon needs to look up at night?”

  “Ha,” Dillon replied from the backseat. “He forgets how much time I’ve spent in a parking lot. Not much to look at except the sky. No, I’d know if there was a road. It’s okay, Akira. My life—well, or whatever you want to call it—is good these days. I don’t need a door or a road.”

  Akira looked over her shoulder, and smiled to acknowledge what he’d said, then glanced at Zane as he pulled the car to a halt. “No roads in the sky either.”

  Zane grinned at her. “I’ll keep reading.”

  “You do that.” Akira unbuckled her seat belt and turned, reaching for the door, a smile tugging at her lips. Maybe in a different mood, at a different time, she would have been worried that he was researching ghosts, anxious about what he might be thinking, but right now, today? Today, it felt sweet.

  And then she stopped, hand on the door, smile gone as if it had never been.

  The house.

  Oh, shit.

  The house.

  She’d been half expecting it to be ostentatious, but it wasn’t: a big white farmhouse, it was two stories with shutters on the windows and a wide porch extending half the length and then bending around the side, and lovely landscaping, with plenty of the bright flowers that made Florida so colorful.

  It should have been beautiful.

  And it would have been, if it hadn’t been so very, very haunted.

  The house in North Carolina had shimmered with energy; this house roiled with it, a crackling, snapping power as if it was trapped amidst a storm cloud that only she could see.

  Fear surged within her. She felt her heart racing, her throat closing, a fuzzy feeling in her legs that let her know her knees wouldn’t hold her . . . and then it doubled, trebled.

  “Dillon,” she gasped, but the name was nothing but a puff of air he could never have heard, even if he wasn’t already out of the car, strolling toward the porch, unconcerned about the deadly vortex that would rip him apart when he got too close.

  “Dillon,” she tried again, louder this time, but he was too far away, farther every second, and the door was closed. She looked at him, looked at the house, and then she turned to Zane.

  “Drive,” she ordered. “Drive!”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Zane recognized the tone.

  He moved without hesitation, sliding back into the seat that he’d been half out of, smoothly restarting the car, backing, turning, accelerating away, all without a single pause or wasted movement. Akira, still in the passenger seat, had her eyes closed, her clenched fists held to her mouth.

  Was she in pain? He couldn’t tell but he didn’t ask questions.

  He just drove.

  Once, with Lucas, he’d heard the same order, delivered in the same voice. It was a routine job, or as routine as any job with Lucas ever was. They’d been in the Pacific Northwest, helping out on a DEA case. Zane had pinpointed the location of a stash of drugs using a low-level drug dealer as his link, and Lucas had gone in to take a look around. Returning to the car, he’d snapped out his orders. Zane didn’t notice the blood seeping down Lucas’s arm until they were a mile down the road and Lucas had called in reinforcements.

  Now he glanced at Akira. Her lips were moving, but he couldn’t hear the words. “Do you need a hospital?” he asked, trying to calculate distances and times. He could call Nat, get her to meet them at the nearest emergency clinic.

  “No,” Akira snapped. She half-turned in her seat, craning her neck to look behind them, then turned even farther, lifting one knee onto the seat so that she was almost fully shifted. “Oh, God, D
illon,” she murmured. “Why did I make you practice stretching?” And then she grimaced as if in agony, clapped her hands against her ears, and fell back into her seat.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she babbled. “I’m sorry.”

  “Akira, what the hell is going on? What do you need?” Zane asked, a little desperately. She was acting crazy, but something was happening that he couldn’t see, he was sure of it. But not seeing left him feeling helpless. What could he do?

  She shook her head. “Are you okay?” She was talking to the backseat.

  Zane couldn’t help being a little annoyed. He didn’t like feeling helpless, he didn’t like not knowing what was happening, and he didn’t like that she was talking to his nephew and not to him.

  “I’m sorry,” she said again, “But that house is haunted!”

  All right, maybe she had gone crazy. Her house was haunted, her car was haunted, her whole damn life was haunted. What was her problem with one more ghost? But chalk up another point for Max’s serendipity. He’d been saying the house was haunted for years, since right after Dillon and Mom died.

  “You don’t understand,” Akira said.

  “That makes two of us,” Zane muttered, turning off the narrow road that led to the house, and onto the busier road that led back to town. He wasn’t sure where he was going, but he’d head back to Akira’s house for the moment.

  He felt more than saw her glance at him, so he looked in her direction. She was looking pale again, dark smudges under her eyes. He felt a pang of concern. Tired was okay—they hadn’t gotten a lot of sleep the night before—but she looked more anxious than he’d seen her in weeks.

  She was so not his type, he thought. He liked easy. Not sexually (although he didn’t object to that) but emotionally. Uncomplicated. Cheerful. Go to a few movies, out to dinner, hang out with friends, maybe spend some time outside at the beach or the springs. And in a few months, when they were both a little bored, move on as friends. This business of worrying about whether a woman was hurting was just not his style.

  “Talk,” he ordered. “And put on your seat belt.”

  She smiled faintly, and buckling up, said, “I warned you. The very first time we met. I told you to stay away from the ghosts that are all red around their edges.” That must be directed to Dillon, Zane realized. She’d definitely never told him anything about red ghosts. Really, they’d barely talked about ghosts at all.

  “There is! Inside!” she insisted. “You’re just lucky you didn’t get past the door.”

  Zane’s phone started vibrating and he glanced at it. Lucas, he’d guess. Wondering what had just happened. If Zane knew, he’d answer the call, but since he didn’t, he ignored his phone, and kept listening to Akira’s one-sided conversation.

  “Well, stopping because your dad came outside saved you then. If you’d gone inside, the energy would have ripped you apart. It’s like being caught in a whirlpool or a tornado.”

  A tornado? He’d read about something like that, hadn’t he? Zane tried to remember what he’d seen about ghostly tornadoes.

  “Yes, of course, I know what I’m talking about. I’ve seen it happen.” Akira’s voice was almost angry, as if Dillon was arguing with her.

  Vortexes, that’s what he was remembering. Some ghost hunter site had said that it was one of the common types of ghostly experiences. But there was nothing about them being dangerous.

  “Okay, fine, red like an aura, yes. No, not like an evil halo. Dillon, could you focus? This is serious.”

  Zane’s lips quirked. He was almost able to imagine what Dillon was saying from Akira’s responses. His nephew had always been curious, sometimes too curious for his own good. But the inadvertent memory of Dillon’s experimentation lit a spark of sadness, and Zane sobered, as Akira continued, “Dangerous, dangerous. How many kinds of dangerous are there? It’s a ghost that will rip you to pieces if you get close.”

  Okay, that didn’t sound good. But it also didn’t make any sense. “If there’s a ghost in the house, it’s my mom,” Zane interrupted. “She would never hurt Dillon.”

  He glanced at Akira. She was chewing on her lower lip again, the way she did when she got nervous. “It’s not—I don’t think I’d call it your mom.”

  “I’ve lived in that house most of my life. It was definitely not haunted before my mom died.”

  “Maybe it started as your mom, but red ghosts, they’re not conscious. They’re not like people. They’re not aware of what they’re doing. They’re just dangerous energy.”

  “But why?” Zane asked. “If it started as my mom’s spirit . . .”

  “Anger, sometimes,” Akira answered him. “Angry ghosts lose control. Ghosts that want revenge go red, I think. Or, um . . .” she glanced at the backseat. “Despair, grief.”

  “That medium said—huh.” Zane paused, remembering what had happened to the medium. He frowned, thinking back.

  “Right. That medium.” Akira was no longer chewing on her lip. Her chin had firmed and if he had to label her expression, he would have called it a glare. “Let’s talk about her for a minute. So some medium shows up, tells you there are ghosts in your house, and then just goes away again?”

  “Not exactly,” he said.

  She started to nod. “I knew it. I knew it. It’s the only way a ghost gets that powerful. Damn it, you took me to a house with a killer ghost in it. You took us to a house with a killer ghost! Don’t you realize what could have happened?”

  “That medium died of natural causes,” Zane answered her, hands tightening on the steering wheel. It had been strange, that was true. But still, Akira was saying that his mother—his mother, of all people—was a murderous ghost. No way. That just wasn’t possible. “They did an autopsy. It was an aneurysm.”

  “Of course it was. Because medical examiners are so eager to write ‘murder by spirit energy’ on a death certificate,” Akira snapped.

  ***

  “I’ll call you.”

  Damn it, Akira thought as she watched Zane’s car pull away. She hated that phrase. Not just the words, but everything they encompassed. Both the sub-textual, “Yeah, you’re a little too weird for me,” and the implied, “And don’t call me.”

  Not to mention the passive-aggressive dishonesty of the lie. He wouldn’t call. She’d see him at work next week, and they’d both pretend that Friday night had never happened.

  With a sigh, she picked up a box that was resting by the front door, then turned and sat down on the porch steps. The early evening was still warm, the air soft and fragrant. The orange blossoms that Meredith had promised had flowered weeks ago, but a vine twining its way around the porch had developed little white flowers. Akira was almost sure it was a weed, but the smell reminded her of jasmine and she liked it.

  She was hungry. It had been a long day. She ought to go inside and make herself some dinner. But the thought of a solitary meal, probably pulled out of the freezer, nuked for five minutes in the microwave, and then eaten in front of her computer just wasn’t appealing.

  “You really think my grandma is a crazy ghost?” Dillon asked, hiking himself onto the railing next to her.

  “I don’t believe in theorizing ahead of the data,” Akira answered gloomily. “It’s bad science. But we can’t exactly ask for introductions, so yeah, my best guess is that your grandma is a ghost.”

  “Another ghost?” Rose asked, appearing on the porch behind them. Akira barely jumped. “We should invite her over.”

  “Not this one,” Akira sighed. As Dillon told Rose the story, she reflected on their ride home. Zane didn’t want to believe that his mom was a malevolent ghost. Fair enough. She couldn’t blame him for that. But he hadn’t been happy to learn that ghosts could be dangerous, either. He hadn’t been rude about it, but his silence was decidedly stubborn.

  “That’s too bad.” With a careful flounce of her full skirts, Rose sat down next to Akira. With a perceptive sideways glance, she added, “That’s not why you’re sad, though. W
here’d the dreamboat go?”

  “He’ll be back,” Dillon said. “He just needs to talk to my family.”

  Akira pressed her lips together. She didn’t want to tell Dillon he was wrong, but she didn’t think so.

  “Men,” Rose’s voice filled with disgust. “Rats, every one of them. Except Henry, of course.”

  “Hey,” Dillon protested. “What about me?”

  Rose waved a dismissive hand in his direction. “You would have turned into a rat, too. You wouldn’t have been able to help yourself. I know your kind.”

  Akira felt the corners of her mouth pulling up in an involuntary smile. Had she thought her meal would be solitary? She’d been forgetting the crowd that lived at this house. Rose would be happy to talk her ear off while she ate, with Henry and Dillon providing an alternately encouraging and protesting chorus.

  “What kind is that?” Akira asked. A neighbor, passing by on the street, glanced at her, face curious. Akira nodded, bringing her hand up to her ear to tap her headset. Oh, hell. She wasn’t wearing it. She forced a smile, and the woman smiled back and walked on.

  Right.

  Tassamara.

  The only small town in America where talking to yourself just made the neighbors think you were one of them.

  “Men! They’re all just out for one thing and once they’ve got it . . .” Rose snapped her fingers scornfully. “Except for Henry,” she added again.

  “Why except for Henry?” Akira began picking at the tape on the box. It was from Amazon, but she couldn’t remember ordering anything.

  “Henry was a wonderful boyfriend,” Rose answered. “So sweet, so polite. Always a gentleman. My parents didn’t approve, of course, but that wasn’t Henry’s fault. And he had nothing to do with—” Rose paused, and shrugged one shoulder, “—with what happened later.”

  Akira’s brows went up, her eyes widening, her mouth dropping open. Henry? Rose and Henry had been boyfriend and girlfriend?