“From each other?” What was Suze doing?
“Right. She’s saying they need to cool off. Could it be because your friend has zero trust in men and she’s pushing back from Gavin at this slightest provocation? Or do you think she senses an even bigger problem between them?”
“The age difference?”
“No. Deep down, she intuitively knows that Gavin is much too interested in you.”
His eyes had gotten dark during those last few words, and something perverse inside me thrilled at that. I wasn’t sure if it was because there was a terrible part of me that wanted Gavin to be interested, or if I liked fake Dean’s jealousy. Either way, not good.
His voice went darker, too. “How does it feel to know that he might be free for the taking, Jenny?”
“How is it supposed to make me feel?”
“Ecstatic . . . if you’re a shitty friend.”
But I wasn’t—or, at least, I didn’t want to be.
I stared at him. Who was he, this special spirit? What was his game?
Then he pulled out the big guns: his face began to melt into another face, his body turning inside out.
He was switching shapes, like he’d done with me before when he’d replicated my dad and, once, even Gavin.
I braced myself. The only spirits I knew who could shape-shift were this one and my killer, who’d gained abnormal powers as a dark entity. He could imitate ghosts he’d stolen a piece of essence from, like Louis and Randy, which was way better than casting a material image of a ghost. I could tell the difference between a materialization and an essence switch real easy.
I shuddered to think what else he might’ve been picking up from the darker places in Boo World these past few weeks. . . .
But screw my killer. I had something more immediately worrisome right in front of me, and it had finally assumed the shape of a girl with her fists defiantly planted on her hips as she sat on the curb, green eyes fired up.
He’d turned into me.
“I saw Gavin first,” he/I said in my voice. “I was the one, not Suze, who got to know him—no, who was attracted to him first. Yeah, what we have with each other isn’t exactly healthy, but it’s sooo romantic. He’s my Byron, my off-limits, star-crossed crush. And Suze is the one who found him second. Shouldn’t she be the one to give him up to me?”
Hearing him talk like that made me realize what a whiny little Betty I sounded like deep in my soul. Because those bitchy thoughts had actually run through my mind before, and I didn’t want them to be there.
The spirit transformed again, his face swirling, his body waving in and out before resettling into the golden image of Dean. Then he lifted his face to the darkening sky as a parking-lot light went on.
“Ghosts. If all of you could only learn right away that humans and you don’t make for a happy household, you’d be so much more content in this afterlife.”
“But we don’t learn,” I said.
He raised his gaze to mine, and a quiver racked me. Yearning, wanting . . . not understanding why I had to be so difficult when all he was offering were stars and a dream-induced paradise.
“If it’s the last thing I do,” he said, low and dangerous, like a growl, “it’ll be to make you learn, Jensen.”
His voice . . . it hadn’t been Dean’s at all.
The unknown, lethal tone still dragged through me, like it’d reached inside and was trying to take me over, and I stepped away from whatever this entity was, finally realizing that I was playing with more than fire. This creature was something I didn’t understand. Something that was quickly becoming way beyond my control.
My essence began to flutter, and I was pretty sure it was because I’d never been so scared. Not even of the witch of Elfin Forest.
“I never want to see you again,” I said, backing away, ready to conjure a travel tunnel and get out of here.
He lowered his head, then looked back up. “So you say.”
“No, I mean it. Don’t ever visit me again. I . . .”
“What?” His eyes were full black now. “You what, Jensen?”
He started to rise from the curb, but it wasn’t just any normal person standing up. He almost seemed to unfold, and, for a second, I thought I saw him turn into a wolf that balanced on two legs. But in the next splinter of time, he grew taller, his face taking on the sheen of another face—this one with high cheekbones, a filmy white glaze over his skin, and slashing eyebrows.
With every stumble I took back, he strode forward, and the ground seemed to flinch under each footstep.
“What will you do to me, Jensen?” he said in what was now a black-velvet voice, caressing me through and through.
I fought it. I mentally raced through my mind for an answer. Then my thoughts snagged on something a human friend of mine had done once to chase away the dark spirit when it’d attacked me and my friends.
Wendy Edgett, Gavin’s adopted little sister. The wannabe cleaner who’d saved a lot of ghost ass with a simple prayer.
“Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle!” I whispered.
At first, the entity seemed petrified, and my form eased up on its electric shrilling. Was the prayer working?
Then he laughed and held up his hands, making fun of me. “Oh. Not that! Not the prayer of Saint Michael!” And he started to fall to the ground. “Help me—my heart, my soul, going, going, gone . . . ?”
He choked playfully, holding his neck.
Something told me to keep trying. Just keep trying . . .
I searched for the words, finally remembering. “Be our protection against . . .”
He started laughing, bent-over, clutch-his-stomach laughing.
Shit.
Between breaths, he rose back up to his full, glowing height and said, “Christian prayers don’t work on me, darlin’.”
Desperate, I just spoke what was in my heart, my soul. “I don’t ever want you to come around again, whatever you are! Stop interfering. I erase you. I banish you—”
I’m not sure what part did it, but he got a stricken look on his face, reached out for me, then simply shimmered away like a million pieces of glowing dust that pooled on the ground.
Just like that.
As my ghostly body returned to me, I stared and stared, the vibrations that had been shattering me calming, cooling now. And when a breeze came by to blow the dust into the air, carrying it up, up into the darkening sky with all its emerging stars, I backed up some more, past the stairway.
How had I made him go? And had it been for real, or was it just another one of the spirit’s tricks?
My thoughts ran around inside my skull, eventually slowing, settling, allowing my form to go back to its normal state, fizzing in the parking lot’s quiet.
But something was still wrong. I could feel it . . .
Was I being watched?
I glanced up to the top of the stairway, finding another ghostly image looking right back.
A strawberry blond girl, dressed in a flowing white nightgown that blew in the same wind that’d taken the fake Dean spirit away. And everything about her looked just like me except her face.
Because she didn’t have one.
As I opened my mouth in horror, she reared back her head and let out a scream that shook the windows on Gavin’s car and all the others in the parking lot. I covered my ears, but I could still hear her as the scream turned into a plea.
“Stop! Please! Why’re you doing this?”
It sounded like me, begging for my life at my death spot while my killer raised that ax—
Lights turned on in apartment windows as the ghost’s scream died and she reached up to her hair, grabbing it at her forehead and . . .
My form shuddered as she peeled off her scalp, the wet, sticky sound of blood and gore filling the atmosphere.
&n
bsp; This time, I screamed, even as she collapsed into a heap of nothing.
6
“That makes two times today that I’ve seen a creepy, unknown blond girl!”
I was restlessly stalking the one-room Rancho Santa Fe casita that Amanda Lee used to house me in before I’d started haunting my Elfin Forest cottage. The curtains that covered the shuttered windows stirred every time I passed them.
Amanda Lee was sitting on an antique love seat, her hands folded in her lap. “Then let’s talk this through to find any commonalities between them. One spirit was hiding from you behind a rock in Elfin Forest. The other—”
“Was screaming exactly what I was screaming at my killer right before I was murdered.” My form jittered, just like I’d downed more cans of Mello Yello. “I think my killer’s back, Amanda Lee, and he’s keeping his promise to haunt me by stirring up images of me in distress.”
I’d come to this conclusion shortly after speeding out of Suze’s parking lot and jamming straight here. I didn’t usually hang out at Amanda Lee’s these days, but I wasn’t about to go to my cottage in Elfin Forest after fake Dean had pulled his stunts today. I wasn’t so sure I’d banished him all the way. Not even. Especially not after that blond phantom girl had scalped herself right in front of me.
I hadn’t told Amanda Lee yet, but if it wasn’t my killer haunting me with the blondes, was it fake Dean? But he hadn’t even been angry at me earlier in the day, so why would he have conjured the first blonde?
“Jensen,” Amanda Lee said, “let’s not jump to conclusions. Boo World isn’t the most rational—”
“Neither is a dark spirit with a vendetta!” Or a psycho cipher like fake Dean.
She pursed her lips, then said, “If your murderer is back to haunt you, he’s doing a pretty quick and easy job of driving you crazy. And you know nothing would give him greater pleasure, so keep your head about you.”
“Easy for you to say when you didn’t just see a chick who almost took her own head right off.” I shivered, setting the computer screen at a nearby table to seething. “If I’d felt any kind of dark vibes from either blonde, I could be surer about what’s happening. Bad energy would mean a bad spirit was around, but I didn’t feel any of that today, in either case.”
I couldn’t believe that our only warning system telling us my killer was near was the vibe he left. Shouldn’t my ghost skills be more awesome than that?
“All right, then,” Amanda Lee said. “Maybe we need to think about calling in a cleaner for advice.”
“That’s just inviting trouble. A real cleaner’s going to want to help every ghost she meets to cross over to the other side, and I’m a ghost.”
“Not if we contact Wendy. She’s learned a lot these past few months, and she could help us explore our choices.”
“I really don’t want to bring her into this.” Gavin would throw a fit if we included his fifteen-year-old sister, and I couldn’t blame him. Sure, she’d started getting heavy into the paranormal after my haunting, and she was probably the most capable kid—or adult—I’d ever met, but she’d been through enough in her young life. I just liked the thought of Wendy sitting tight, as snug as a bug in a rug right now, away from the action, guarded from any darkness by another one of my spirit friends, Scott.
I’d thought about using a cleaner for fake Dean once, though, so maybe it wasn’t that bad of an idea, if we had no other options. . . .
A rap sounded at the door, and I jerked, my energy zinging. The computer hissed energy over in its corner, but good old Amanda Lee stayed calm. She went to the door and asked who it was.
A young female voice came through.
“Like, it’s Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy. We’re just looking for the rest of the Breakfast Club, don’t you know?”
Oh, yay. I definitely needed Twyla in my business right now. We’d both died in the eighties, but she was a true Valley Girl and I most certainly was not. Mostly.
“It’s Twyla and Mrs. C.,” I said to Amanda Lee, since Twyla’s voice was one of those she couldn’t clearly hear in Boo World. She’d gotten to know the new ghost’s, Mrs. C.’s voice, though.
After Amanda Lee opened the door, two whooshes of charged air entered, then expanded into the grayish forms of Twyla and Mrs. C., or, as she wanted us to call her, Marg.
Amanda Lee shut the door, and Twyla planted a hand with black-painted nails on her petticoat-covered hip, checking out all the color I had because of my interlude with fake Dean. One side of her was all Cyndi Lauper, with rubber bracelets and her hair mostly shaved, the long part lightened and teased out. The other half of her was all long black, straight Goth hair. She’d put so much mascara on both her eyes that she came off like a raccoon. She’d died this way because the dumb-ass had fried herself with a hair dryer in a full sink during a fatal makeover in which she’d been comparing looks in the bathroom mirror. Genius, right?
Marg was her opposite, a middle-aged cougar, or whatever they called older women who attracted younger men these days. She’d died in her bathing suit with only a mesh cover-up to mask her hard body, but there was one feature that made her more horrific than Twyla: the big, dark X on her chest. The mark of a cursed ghost who’d gone against the rules and had actually killed a human being. Not that any of us were sure just what was ultimately in store for her, but even wranglers seemed to think she was naughty, judging by how I’d seen one tsk-tsk her after she’d killed the man who’d murdered her. He’d deserved to croak, though, seeing as he’d been the killer my friends and I had been trying to stop during our last big case.
“So, tell us,” Twyla said. “What’re the raised voices about? We could, like, hear you from outside.”
Marg hung back, still learning the ropes, taking everything in.
“Twyla,” I said, “just because you’re on guard for Amanda Lee tonight doesn’t mean you’ve got supersecret, awesome clearance to everything.”
“Excuse me, but if I’m spending my time here, protecting Amanda Lee from that dark spirit you two brought into this plane, I deserve some R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Marg and I could be Jungle Boy-ing at a party right now instead of hanging here, totally watching that boring shade of paint outside dry.”
I translated for Amanda Lee, who had taken a seat at the computer. The screen flickered with all the ghost activity while she tapped away on the keyboard. When I finished, she said, “I myself have no problem letting Twyla and Marg know what’s happening. We were only having a conversation about your exciting day. As usual.”
“Oh my Ga-od! Amanda Lee, like, sort of attempted a joke,” Twyla said, floating over to the love seat and hovering just above the back of it. She sat and swung her fishnet-stocking-covered leg.
“Jokes happen occasionally with her,” I said.
Marg laughed over in Student Ghost Land.
Twyla said, “So, we could hear you talking about some chick trying to scalp herself?”
“I’d say she was pretty successful.”
I told her and Marg all about it—except for the fake Dean and Gavin parts. A girl needed some privacy.
“Tubular,” Twyla whispered, looking at Marg. “We’ve got another case!”
Marg smiled slightly, but she was still bummed out, having that X on her and all. “I suppose some excitement is always welcome.”
Twyla pumped her fist. “Damn skippy it is!”
Never mind that we were dealing with some bad stuff. It was exciting! “The blondes aren’t our only concern right now.”
“There’s more?” Twyla asked.
“Damn skippy.”
The computer dinged, and Amanda Lee brought up a smaller text screen over the Spirit Stalkers Web site she’d been looking at. “Sierra just let me know that the team is still combing the woods and shooting footage. She hasn’t said if it’s for Jensen’s sake, though.”
Great. Now I had to
tell Twyla and Marg all about the whole ghost-hunter situation. Sometimes being a translator was a pain in the keister.
Afterward, I asked Amanda Lee, “Do you think Sierra and the rest of them really believed what you said about my death?”
“I do. I felt it. And as Ruben told me when I ran by his house, they sound like trusting, optimistic amateurs.”
“Other ghosts in the forest were calling them amateurs, too.”
Twyla laughed. “Those meddling kids!” She glanced at Marg and then me, seeking validation for her Scooby-Do humor.
I couldn’t stop a smile. Twyla had her moments.
Then I spoke to Amanda Lee again. “Shouldn’t you be with the ghost hunters in the forest right now, seeing as you’re consulting on the other legends they’re looking in to?”
“They’ll be doing the footwork,” Amanda Lee said. “I’ll be doing my job in my own way, in my own time. That’s understood.”
Marg settled by the window, looking out of the crack between the glass and shutters, which were drawn to keep out any lookiloo spirits. “I like Amanda Lee’s philosophy. Set your own terms. Be strong.” She leaned her head by the wall. “I would be that way, too, if I were in her shoes. If I had shoes anymore.”
She glanced forlornly at her bare feet.
“Aw, buck up,” Twyla said. “I keep telling you that Boo World is, like, so crunk. But it’ll take more than a few weeks for you to get the hang of it.”
Another wan smile from Marg.
I tried to shut out the image of her getting strangled by her killer. I’d been there for it, and even though it made me want to throw up, every day made the memory a little fainter. When it came to one another’s deaths, ghosts just dealt.
It became increasingly clear that Twyla had only busted her way in here because she’d gotten dreadfully bored outside, because she drifted up and toward the computer, watching Amanda Lee try to negotiate the suddenly snowy screen.
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