Not Dead Yet

by Jenn Burke

  Fair enough. I supposed it was something I was going to have to figure out for myself too. My friends could give me all the input in the world, but ultimately I was the one who had to live with the decision.

  My thoughts were interrupted by the sound of quick footsteps coming down the aisle toward our table. Hudson looked up and his face grew pale.

  “Shit,” he muttered.

  “Wha—”

  “Sorry I’m late.” A woman in a gray pantsuit slid onto the bench beside Hudson, breathing heavily enough to indicate she’d rushed here. She was about my height, had pixie-cut black hair, olive skin, and wide-set brown eyes, and wore an engaging smile that immediately put me at ease. She held out her hand. “Katrina Li. I work with Hudson.”

  “She’s my boss,” Hudson explained with a crooked grin.

  “Oh.” I shook Katrina’s hand. “Wesley Cooper. Wes is fine.”

  “Well, Wes,” she said as she sat back and cast a glance at Hudson, “it’s a pleasure to meet you. I’d say I’ve heard a lot about you, but that would be a lie.”

  I looked at Hudson, wondering how he was going to explain me. Even if he were out, “ex-boyfriend” wouldn’t work, because I seemed too young. I steeled myself for the “friend” designation.

  “My private life is private, Sarge.”

  “Not when you take off for coffee grinning like a moron, it isn’t,” she shot back with that happy, trust-me smile. “I thought you’d meet whoever-it-was at a nicer place than Stinky Dick’s.”

  I nearly spit out the sip of coffee I’d taken. “Is that really the name of this place?”

  “No. It’s Dickie’s. They stopped putting up a sign after it got stolen for the half-dozenth time. You get enough cops in here after shift, though...” She scrunched up her nose and waved a hand.

  I grinned. Okay, I liked Katrina Li.

  “So...details.” Katrina leaned over the table to look me in the eyes. Her smile didn’t waver, but it did grow sharper—as though she’d caught her prey and was now in the process of eviscerating it. “Who are you, what do you do for a living, how did you meet Hudson, are you two dating?”

  Uh...maybe I didn’t like her that much.

  “Jesus, Kat, back off. You’re going to make him run.”

  “Am I?” she asked, all innocence.

  Wait...wait wait wait. “Did you ask if we’re dating?”

  Katrina’s smile slid from her face. “That’s what this is, right?”

  “Wes is...” I waited for Hudson to finish that sentence, but he went in a different direction.

  “This isn’t a date, but it’s nothing to do with work, either.”

  I couldn’t hold it back any longer. “You’re out? Since when?”

  Katrina chuckled. “Since longer than I’ve been with the department.”

  “Oh.” Had the temperature of the diner dropped? I gratefully accepted a refill when the waitress came by with the coffeepot. I needed warmth.

  “Why do I feel like I dropped a bombshell?” Katrina muttered.

  “’Cause you kinda did,” Hudson said. “Bull in a fucking china shop.”

  The coffee did little to warm the ice lodged at the core of my being. Hudson was out. Hudson had been out for...ten years? Fifteen? It was hard to judge Kat’s age because of the energy she exuded, but she couldn’t be any younger than her late thirties—something further supported by her rank.

  The main point was that Hudson was out—and he’d never reached out to me to let me know.

  Yep, that was definitely a selfish thought, but considering why we broke up, I thought I could be forgiven for turning this revelation around to focus on me.

  Hudson sighed. “Well, thanks for ruining a perfectly good coffee break, Kat.”

  “Yeah. Uh.” She wrinkled her nose. “Sorry about that.”

  I’ll give her one thing—Katrina Li knew when not to push him. She got up, shot me a smile that was considerably dimmer than when she’d tornado’d her way into our conversation, and left the diner.

  “I can’t believe you’re out.” I leaned back into the creaky vinyl of the seat.

  For a minute or two, he was quiet. I could tell from the way his jaw worked and how intensely he stared at his coffee that he was trying to put his thoughts in order. “After,” he finally said, “I realized I couldn’t keep two secrets about myself. I tried to, but I started to crack.”

  I nodded and ducked my chin, suddenly battling a lot of emotion I didn’t know what to do with.

  “You okay?”

  I started to nod again, but stopped. “You know what? No. I’m not.”

  “Wes—”

  “You refusing to even set a fucking toe out of the closet, enough to put on paper that I was an important person, was what broke us up. And now you’re—you’re—” I squeezed my eyes shut, more than a little mortified to discover wetness on my lashes.

  “The world changed. The year 2000 was not 1985.”

  “Fantastic. Incredible observation, Sherlock. I’m surprised you’re not the fucking commissioner.” Christ almighty, he’d been out for nearly twenty years.

  He scowled. “I made the best decision I could at the time. I wasn’t ready.”

  “But when you did come out...” I paused, unsure if I wanted to continue.

  Him being him and knowing me—still—he already knew where I was going. “Why didn’t I contact you?”

  Teeth clenched so they wouldn’t chatter, I nodded.

  “Because I wasn’t the guy who picked you up in the grocery store anymore,” he said, his voice soft and somber.

  “You think I would have cared about that?”

  He snorted. “You absolutely would have cared about that. I wasn’t fun anymore. I wasn’t happy, I wasn’t excited about life. I didn’t want to go out unless it was to find a donor.”

  “And how was that different than before? You hated going out.”

  “But I did it. And once we got to the clubs, I enjoyed it.”

  “Not at the end.”

  “No, because work was stressing me out. And when did we start to have problems?”

  I glared at him. “Our problems were not because I was pissy that you didn’t want to go out anymore.”

  “You sure?”

  Oh, now I was mad. “You have no idea what it was like for me. Every time you walked out the door, I knew if you got hurt, I’d never hear about it. It was eating me up.”

  “You and I have very different memories of that time.”

  “Maybe we do. But I’ll tell you this—there’s one incontrovertible truth.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Being a cop was more important to you than being with me.”

  Hudson opened his mouth...and closed it before looking away.

  “Thanks for the coffee,” I said with a sigh, and pushed my way out of the booth.

  * * *

  I woke up midafternoon with a pounding headache and Lexi using me as a body pillow. It took me a few minutes of lying silently, motionless, as I simultaneously tried to convince my stomach it should stay where it was and attempted to remember what the hell had happened after I’d left the diner.

  Pretty sure there’d been whiskey—a lot of whiskey. And a blubbering phone call to Lex. I didn’t feel better, but I felt calmer, at least. Less inclined to dive for the bottom of a bottle to numb shit.

  Progress? Yeah, let’s call that progress.

  I kissed Lexi on the forehead and slowly extracted myself from her embrace so I didn’t wake her. Every movement was agony—I needed aspirin. Or ibuprofen. I staggered to the bathroom for medicine and a shower.

  Once I was done, I felt marginally more human. The process of making coffee helped, and by the time Lexi stumbled into the kitchen wearing her boy shorts and camisole and looking adorably bleary-e
yed, I could actually smile at her.

  “I didn’t mean to wake you up.” I held out a coffee made how she liked it, sweet and light and lactose free.

  “You didn’t,” she said around a yawn. “Feeling okay?”

  I shrugged. “How incoherent was I last night, on a scale of one to ten?”

  “Eh, about a seven.” She grinned. “I think I got the gist of your trauma. Except I can’t figure out where the cat fits in.”

  “Cat? What the—” Oh. “No... Kat is his boss. She was the one who told me he came out years ago.”

  “That makes more sense. I thought for a bit that this old-new guy of yours was super kinky.”

  “Ew!”

  She dodged my hand as I swiped at her. “You are a messy, messy drunk, my boy.”

  “Ugh, I know.” I leaned over the counter and rubbed a fingertip against my temple. “It was stupid, but I was hurt and upset, and I thought I was—” I bit my lip.

  Some of the mirth slipped from Lexi’s expression. “You thought you were what?”

  “Hearing things,” I admitted. “Every time I’m home alone, I swear I can hear the whispers.”

  “What whispers?”

  “The ones from that—that—thing. That trap.”

  Lexi narrowed her eyes. “What trap?”

  Oh shit. I hadn’t told her. “I, uh...”

  “Wesley.”

  God, the full name. I had no defense against it, not when she said it in that tone. I winced. “The one I got lured into the night you broke up with Marissa?”

  Lexi glared at me. “Out with it. The whole story. Now.”

  I told her everything, including how Hudson was able to reach into the otherplane and somehow interrupt the thing’s hold on me. Sharing what happened felt good—but also terrifying, because there were so many questions that needed to be answered.

  “You should have told me right away. God, I could have been researching—”

  “You had enough going on with Marissa. I didn’t want to have you worried about this too.”

  “I’m your best friend. I’m supposed to worry about you. Have you ever come across something like that before?”

  “No, never. I’ve always thought of the otherplane as being static. Unchanging. It’s a place in between places—it doesn’t have elements belonging to it, you know?”

  “I’ll take your word for it. As far as I know, you’re the only being who’s able to access it at will.”

  “Right. Even ghosts don’t belong there—they’re biding their time until they figure out how to move on.”

  “Could it have been a remnant from—what was his name, Cyril? Could it have been left behind when Cyril died?” She finished off her coffee and held the mug out for a refill.

  “I didn’t see anything like that at Meredith’s murder scene.” I got up to refill her mug.

  “But you didn’t get close to the body there, either.”

  “No—and I had no urge to. This scene was different. I didn’t want to get close to the body, but then I heard the whispers and I had to investigate.”

  Lexi was silent as I handed over her coffee. “That’s weird,” she finally said.

  “No shit.”

  “I mean, you’re kind of weird in general. You break a ton of magical rules. But that? That’s weirder than words.”

  “Great. I feel better.”

  “Did the whispers speak to you?”

  “Uh...they were whispers.”

  “Yeah, but were they directed at you? Did you hear your name?”

  I thought about it, revisiting my memory of that moment. “I don’t remember words. Only...sounds. But the sounds meant something, and I thought if I got closer, I would understand them.”

  “Classic lure,” Lexi said with a nod. “So now we need to figure out if it was aimed at you or someone—or something—else.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like Cyril’s spirit.”

  It was my turn to be quiet for a moment as the implications of Lexi’s statement sank in. “Are you saying someone might have wanted to capture his ghost?”

  “And found a purely magical way to do it—no weird scientific foot-pedal contraption required.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  She sobered. “No, I know. Let me do some digging, and I’ll see if there’s a spell out there that needs ghost essences.”

  Honestly, I didn’t know what was more terrifying—the idea that this trap could have been laid specifically for me, or not. My phone started ringing and I frowned at the Unknown Caller ID. Normally I’d let it go to voice mail, but there was too much going on for me to ignore random phone calls. What if it was Hudson calling from an unlisted number?

  “Hello?”

  “Oh, praise be, you picked up.”

  “Iskander?” I frowned deeply. Lexi mouthed who at me and I shook my head. “How did you get this number?”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “That doesn’t answer my—”

  “Urgently. Please, Ghost. I’ve got some information on the mystery meeting. You remember?”

  I did, and I didn’t like how out-of-control Iskander sounded. His voice was fast, jittery, like he couldn’t contain himself. Fear, excitement? I had no way to know.

  “Isk, I’m sorry, but when I cut off contact, I—”

  “I know. But—Ghost, I don’t know what to do with this. Okay? I—It’s not normal.”

  So much for Lexi’s assurances that whatever had affected Iskander couldn’t be magical. But then, “not normal” could mean a lot of other stuff too. There was a whole range of things between normal and magical.

  “What do you need?”

  A shaky breath cascaded across the line. “Fifteen minutes for a face-to-face. That’s it. I need to talk to someone about this and maybe find out I’m not crazy.”

  Blowing out a breath of my own, I gave Iskander the address of an indoor mall with a nice café in Yorkville. “Meet me there in ninety minutes.”

  “What the hell?” Lexi asked as I hung up.

  “Remember that client with the meeting he couldn’t remember?”

  Her eyes widened. “The one you cut off contact with? He hunted down your new number?”

  “Yep.”

  “And you’re going to meet with him?” She might as well have shouted are you fucking nuts?

  “Yep.” I sighed, knowing exactly where her worry was coming from. “He’s a good guy.”

  “But you thought he might have been influenced by this...whoever.”

  “Or I could be paranoid, and it could be that he’s stressed out and overworked.” I lifted a brow. “You said it couldn’t be magical.”

  “I could be wrong. What if the person who tampered with his memory is still influencing him? What if—”

  I put my hands on Lexi’s shoulders. “It’s a possibility, but... I don’t know. He sounded too freaked out to be faking it. You know?” She gave me an uncertain look and I squeezed her shoulders gently. “Don’t worry about me. If I see anything weird, I’ll ghost.”

  “You promise?”

  “Absolutely,” I said, wisely keeping to myself all of the things that might prevent me from slipping into the otherplane.

  I didn’t want to think of them, either.

  * * *

  The mall I’d directed Iskander to was a high-end one. Very yuppie. Wait—was yuppie even a thing anymore? Maybe “hipster” was the more up-to-date term. I tried to stay on top of these things so I didn’t sound my age, but the twenty-first century moved so damned quickly. Like I’d barely recognized “on fleek” as an actual bit of trendy jargon right as no one used it anymore.

  Whatever—yuppie, hipster, this place was definitely more upscale than I was. The stores were all brands I could splurge on if I wanted
, but good god, I would never pay that kind of money for clothes. I’d probably scream if I dropped mustard on a shirt that cost five hundred bucks. Nope.

  The café was as on-trend as the rest of the mall. It eschewed such mundane things as walls, and used palm trees and other foliage to delineate its boundaries instead. I think the trees were even real. Whatever their origin, they made for a quasi-private setting that broke up sound nicely, which made this place a good choice for clandestine meetings.

  I ordered a drink and wandered the tables, trying to spot Iskander. After one circuit, I hadn’t found him. I consulted my phone and confirmed that the meeting time I’d indicated had passed five minutes ago. Weird—Isk was normally punctual.

  My gut fluttered, but I tamped down the hinky feeling. Traffic could be a bitch, but the ninety minutes I’d given him should have been plenty of time to get here from Mississauga. Even so, there could be any number of reasons he was running late—an accident tying up the 401 or the QEW, or maybe he couldn’t find a parking space.

  I did another round—fruitless—and sat down to have my drink. My gaze flicked between my phone—no messages—and my surroundings, but there was no sign of Iskander.

  By the time I finished my coffee, it was about five thirty. Iskander was a no-show. I pulled up his number from my call log and dialed it, preparing to leave a “Let me know you’re okay” sort of message. Except the line picked up.

  “Isk?”

  Silence.

  My heart rate ticked upward. “Iskander?”

  “This is the one known as Ghost, yes?”

  My breath caught. That was not Iskander—the voice was too deep, too rough, with a slight accent I couldn’t place. I clenched my phone, torn between hanging up and finding out what the hell was going on. “Yes,” I answered cautiously.

  “You should have helped us.”

  “I—What?”

  “There’s a present in the parking garage for you.” Laughter sounded over the line for an instant before the call disconnected.

  I leaped to my feet and ran through the thin, end-of-day crowd toward the parking entrance. If there had been more people, I would have ghosted, but the few shoppers provided no camouflage for my disappearing act. Someone shouted behind me, ordering me to stop, but I ignored them. I had no idea what the fuck Iskander had stumbled upon, but I prayed the “present” wasn’t what I thought it was.