“I’m dead!” she wailed. “I used to have fun and I used to have friends and then I got sick and then I died and I can’t do anything and I don’t know what going to happen to me and I’m scared!” She wiped at her face even though her insubstantial body didn’t seem capable of producing tears and she took a couple of shuddering breaths. “I’m sorry,” she hiccupped, “I didn’t mean to cry. It just hit me all of a sudden.”
“It’s all right, don’t worry about it.” I sat down beside her and carefully reached out to touch her shoulder, trying not to poke through her. “We’ll figure something out.”
“How?” she asked plaintively. “I’m dead. That’s never going to change!”
“Well –” I had no idea what to tell her. Even after we got her freed from Daraxandriel, what would happen afterwards was anyone’s guess. “I don’t know,” I admitted with a sigh, “but we can’t just give up.”
“I know.” Olivia tilted her head back to look up at the sky but the lights were far too bright to make out any stars. “It’s just hard. I wish I’d never met Lilith.”
“You’re not the first person to say that,” I noted wryly and her mouth quirked in a hint of a smile. “Do you want to go home?”
She was obviously torn but she finally shook her head. “No, I’d like to stay out a little while longer, if that’s okay with you.”
“A gentleman would never refuse a lady’s request.” I got to my feet and automatically held out my hand to help her up. She looked at it and then smiled and placed her fingers in mine and rose smoothly. For a brief moment, my fingertips felt cold. “Did you feel anything different just now?” I asked uneasily.
“I don’t think so,” she frowned. She pressed her hand down against mine and it passed right through, but a shivery tingle swept up my arm. “I felt ... something,” she said hesitantly.
“Maybe you’re starting to interact with things now.” I looked around for something to test my theory with and finally plucked a blade of grass from the lawn, holding it up between us. “Try moving this.”
I held my breath as she slowly passed her finger through the blade, watching the tip carefully. “Did it move?” she asked doubtfully.
“I’m not sure. Try again.” We both leaned closer, our heads almost touching, as she swept her finger back and forth. My hand wasn’t perfectly steady but I could have sworn I saw the blade twitch ever so slightly. “Did you see that?”
“I think so.” She grinned in delight and then realized how close we were. She backed up and brushed her hair behind her ear in awkward embarrassment. “So, um, what’s next?”
“Well, um.” I looked around but downtown Hellburn wasn’t known for its tourist attractions, even during the day. “It’s too late to catch a show at the Movieplex and Kimball Bend Park doesn’t have any lights.” That made it ideal as a make-out spot, of course, but she didn’t need to know that.
“What’s that over there?”
I turned to see what she was pointing at. “That’s the town library.” The all-too-familiar columned edifice was dark except for a dim glimmer of light behind a couple of the windows.
“It looks old.”
“That’s because it is.” Olivia started walking towards it and I followed along. “It’s closed,” I added, just in case she hadn’t figured that out.
“I know, I just want to look.” She stepped into the street without checking for cars but fortunately for my piece of mind, there were no vehicles in sight.
“Any particular reason why?”
“I like libraries. I used to read a lot after I got – when I couldn’t go out anymore.” She hopped up onto the sidewalk and then started up the steps to the front door. “It took my mind off of things for a while.”
“What sort of books do you like to read?”
“Fantasy, mostly. Anything that let me forget about the real world. Romances too, sometimes.”
“Viking, Highlander, or Victorian?” I asked wryly. She gave me a bemused look. “Mom likes Vikings, Susie does Highlanders, and Melissa prefers Victorian.”
“Oh. Victorian, I guess. I always dreamed about wearing a real gown and meeting royalty.” She reached the top and looked up at the doors. “Can we go in?” she asked hopefully.
“Remember the part about it being closed?” Her shoulders slumped in resignation. “There’s nothing stopping you from going in, though,” I reminded her. “It’s not like you’ll break anything.”
She perked up for a moment and then she let out a sigh. “But I can’t read any of the books. I need you to turn the pages.”
“You’ll be able to do that yourself eventually,” I told her.
“Eventually,” she agreed glumly. She eyed the doors again. “I guess it wouldn’t hurt to look around. Are you going to be okay out here by yourself for a while?”
“I’ll be fine,” I assured her, taking a seat on the edge of the top step. “I’ll just pretend to be a homeless person if anyone asks me what I’m doing here.” She looked alarmed at that and I waved her on. “I’m kidding. Go on.”
She hesitated and then nodded. She faced the closest door, set her shoulders, and walked straight through like it wasn’t there. It was a bit disconcerting to see. Now that her color was starting to fill in, she didn’t really seem like a ghost, but there was no denying it. Olivia was dead and there was nothing I could do to change that.
What a day, I thought morosely. I came this close to losing Dara. If Mrs. Kendricks hadn’t come by when she did, it would have all been over. That whole situation was unbelievable, though. What are the odds that two people who fell in love nineteen years would meet up again in our back yard? That has to be some sort of record.
It’s strange they never tracked each other down, though. I mean, Prescott’s with the FBI, they have databases and stuff, don’t they? There can’t be that many people named Arial Kendricks out there. Unless that’s not her maiden name. No, she told me she never married Stacy’s father.
I wonder if that’s why she never tried to find Prescott. I guess it would have been awkward to tell her childhood sweetheart that she has a teenage daughter. That didn’t stop her tonight, though. Man, that kiss. She obviously still cares for him and he was still pining after her all these years. I’m sure they’re making up for lost time tonight. Little Peter volunteered an image of what they were probably doing right now but I pushed it aside firmly.
I wonder what they’re going to do when all this is over. I suppose he’ll head back to Philadelphia. Is Mrs. Kendricks going to go with him? Stacy’s off to college in a couple of months so there’s nothing really keeping her here. She probably still has family in Warwick. They’ll be glad to see her again. Or maybe not. It sounded like her mother never forgave her for whatever it was she did.
What happened? I can’t imagine Mom ever being so angry with me or Susie that she never talked to us again. It had to be something really serious. Mrs. Kendricks was only sixteen when she left, wasn’t she? What could a teenaged girl possibly do to upset her mother so badly? Wait a minute.
I blinked as the clues started coming together. Stacy’s heading to college in the fall. She turned eighteen over Christmas. That means she was conceived in March or April nineteen years ago.
“Oh my God!” I breathed. “She got pregnant!”
“Who got pregnant?”
I twisted around to see Olivia standing a short distance behind me. “Oh, uh, nobody you know. I was just thinking out loud. So you’re done already?” I asked hopefully.
“Yeah, it’s kind of dark in there. I couldn’t really see anything.” She sat on the step beside me and tucked her nightgown around her legs. “I feel sorry for that cat, though.”
“What cat?”
“There was a black cat sitting on that star in the floor in there.”
“A cat?” Susie never mentioned anything about there being a cat in the library. “Are you sure?”
“I know what a cat looks like, Peter,” she told me, rolling her
eyes. “I tried to pet it but it hissed at me and ran off down the hall.”
“I guess it doesn’t like ghosts. It must have snuck in when the library was open. I’ll tell Mrs. Kendricks tomorrow so she can keep an eye out for it.”
“Mrs. Kendricks?” Olivia frowned. “The witch?”
“And head librarian. This is where she works.”
“Oh, maybe the cat’s her familiar!” she suggested, perking up. “Witches are supposed to have familiars to help them with spells and stuff.”
“I don’t think she has any pets. Even if she did, she wouldn’t leave it locked up in a library overnight.”
“Maybe it’s guarding her magic books.”
“What magic books?”
“The ones with all her spells, duh.”
“So you’re an expert on witches now?”
“Every book I’ve read says witches have cats and magic books,” she insisted.
“And warts on their noses and pointy hats and broomsticks, I bet. You read fantasies, remember? And what word is the opposite of fantasy?”
She eyed me doubtfully. “Reality?”
“Exactly. I’ve met every member of the coven here and none of them look like that.”
“Well, you don’t have to be rude about it,” Olivia hmphed. “What do I know? I’m just a ghost.” She glared across the street at City Hall.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to insult you.” She shrugged. “Do you want to go?” She sighed, shook her head, and shrugged again. “I’m not sure what that means.”
“It means I don’t know what I want to do.” She wrapped her arms around her legs and rested her chin on her knees, staring out at nothing. “Last year I made a list of everything I wanted to do when I got better. It was really long and it had all sorts of stupid things on it but I wanted to have something to look forward to after I got out of the hospital.” She hugged her legs even tighter. “Except I never got better and now I can’t do any of them because I’m dead.”
“You might still be able to do some of them,” I said, trying to put a positive spin on things for her.
She rolled her eyes. “Right.”
“You never know. Name something on your list.”
“All right. I wanted to go skydiving.”
“Okay, that one might not work.”
“I wanted to see the Grand Canyon.”
“You could do that.”
“Sure, I’ll just hop on the next ghost bus to Arizona,” she grumped.
“Someone could take you,” I suggested. She looked at me appraisingly. “Not me,” I said before she got any ideas. “It’s too far.”
“Hmph. I wanted to feed a penguin.”
“A penguin?” I asked doubtfully.
“They’re cute, okay? I wanted to –” She stopped and blinked and then ducked her head.
“What?”
“Nothing,” she mumbled. “It’s personal.”
I waited but she just stared down at her toes. Who knew that cheering up a depressed ghost would be this hard? I wondered bemusedly. “So is there anything on your list we can do tonight?”
I thought she wasn’t going to answer but she finally stirred from her funk. “What we’re doing now.”
“Sitting?”
“Talking. I wanted to talk to a stranger and become friends with them.” A self-deprecating smile flitted across her face. “I told you it was a stupid list.”
“That’s not stupid,” I assured her. “So what do you want to talk about?”
“Well, you, that’s the point. I don’t know anything about you except that your name is Peter and you can see ghosts and you maybe have a girlfriend named Melinda.”
“Melissa,” I corrected her. “So what do you want to know?”
“Well –” She thought that over. “How old are you?”
“I turned eighteen last month.”
She looked at me askance. “Didn’t you say you still had another year of school? Did you flunk a grade or something?”
“No,” I sighed. “We moved around a lot after Dad got out of college. When He got the Chief of Police job here, the school district wouldn’t accept all of my grades from the last place so I had to repeat a year.”
“That sucks.”
“Being the only guy in tenth grade with a driver’s license helped,” I said wryly. “So how old are you?”
“Seventeen,” she said, a little too quickly.
“Really?” I asked skeptically. “When’s your birthday?”
She wouldn’t look at me. “October twelfth,” she mumbled.
“So you’re sixteen.”
“Almost seventeen!” she insisted.
“Four months isn’t almost,” I said, “but fine. What else do you want to know?”
She turned to face me, looking a bit more upbeat now. “Why are there demons in your bed? You never answered me before.”
“It’s a long story.”
“I don’t have anything better to do. Tell me.”
“Well, it all started with Susie needing untainted crystals for a spell.” I told her about cracking open Susie’s geode in our garage and accidentally freeing Daraxandriel from the prison Parathraxas the Sorcerer trapped her in four hundred and thirty years before. I explained how Daraxandriel tried to bargain for my soul by offering Melissa to me, although I skipped over the part where Melissa got drunk and passed out while trying to seduce me after prom.
I described the plan to bring in Dr. Bellowes to banish Daraxandriel, only to discover he was actually Parathraxas, his lifespan magically extended by the demon he enslaved. I recounted how I sold my soul to Daraxandriel for the power to defeat Parathraxas and then learned afterwards that I wouldn’t be going to Hell after all. Olivia listened to it all with her eyes wide and her mouth open.
“Oh my God!” she exclaimed when my tale finally came to an end. “That’s – that’s – incredible! You made all that up, didn’t you?” she accused me. “Things like that don’t happen to real people.”
“It’s one hundred percent true, I swear. This is what caused all that trouble.” I pulled the Philosopher’s Stone out from under my shirt and held it up on the end of its chain. It gleamed cherry red in the moonlight. “Dr. Bellowes sold his soul for it, Dara took it back when he reneged on the deal, he stuck in her in that geode as punishment and then did it again when he found out she still had it, and she gave it to me to grant me the power I needed to send him to Hell.” I shivered even though the night was still warm.
“And this is the thing that’s keeping me here, right?” She poked it with her finger and the Stone jiggled on the chain. “Oh! I made it move!” She tried again and sent it swinging back and forth. “Look!” she said excitedly.
“I’m looking,” I assured her uneasily. “Just don’t break it, okay?” Mrs. Kendricks claimed that Philosopher’s Stones were indestructible but maybe that rule didn’t apply to ghosts.
“That is so cool. Let me try moving something else.” She got up and hunted around for something to experiment on. “Help me find something, Peter!” she insisted impatiently.
I sighed and got to my feet to help her search but the area was devoid of any suitable test objects. I finally dug into my pockets and pulled out my handkerchief. “Here, try this.”
I shook it out and Olivia reached out with his finger, catching her lower lip between her teeth in concentration. Then she paused. “Peter,” she asked carefully, “what is that?”
“It’s just my –” My heart lodged in my throat as I realized the article dangling in front of her was triangular instead of square, with a tiny bow on the front. “Oh my God!” I dropped it and jumped back and we both watched Melissa’s panties flutter to the ground.
“Why do you have girl underwear in your pocket?” Olivia backed up and crossed her arms protectively across her chest, as if she thought I was planning to ravish her on the library steps.
“I can explain!” She looked at me with wide, worried eyes and I heaved a resigned sig
h. “No, I actually can’t. It’s just something that keeps happening to me for some reason.”
“They’re not yours, are they?” she grimaced distastefully.
“What? No! They’re Melissa’s. She, ah, dropped them,” I added, as if that somehow justified their presence in my pocket.
Olivia looked from me to the panties and back again. Slowly, she bent down and carefully pinched the lacy edge of the waistband between her thumb and forefinger and lifted them from the ground, keeping them at arm’s length. She silently held them out to me and I took them from her, jamming them back into my pocket.
“So,” I said, clearing my throat, “you’re a poltergeist now.”
“I guess.” Neither of us wanted to meet the other’s eyes. “That’s pretty neat.”
“Yeah, definitely.” There was nothing like unexpected undergarments to turn a celebration into something awkward. “So what shall we do now?” I asked brightly.
“Well –” Olivia looked around doubtfully and then shrugged. “Maybe we should just go,” she said glumly. She started down the steps and I followed her, trying to think of some way to cheer her up again.
Maybe this is how apparations turn into wraiths, I thought uneasily. They get depressed and frustrated and they decide to take it out on the living. Olivia didn’t seem like the type to go on a murderous rampage but now that she could move objects, she could really cause a problem if she suddenly went rogue. “So what else is on your bucket list?” I asked.
She glanced over her shoulder with a frown. “My what?”
“Your bucket list. The things you want to do before you kick the bucket.” She looked shocked and I suddenly realized what I’d said. “No, not bucket list,” I said hurriedly. “I mean the opposite of that. Your unbucket list.” Now she looked confused. “The things you want to do after you kick the bucket.”
Olivia blinked at me and then snorted. “You are such a dweeb,” she said, shaking her head.
“You wouldn’t be the first person to think that,” I muttered. I caught up with her and we walked side-by-side down the sidewalk towards the Mustang.
Soul Mates Page 29
