by Adam Dark
“Okay…”
“And it’s a level one.” April just blinked slowly at him, and holy crap, he hated having to explain himself like this when he knew he just sounded like an idiot. “Lowest threat, according to Chase, which we’re also going to test. So I happened to see the guy eating cats in the green realm, and it happened to be one of the reported sightings on the list. It also happened to be one of the two we picked to test out before we give Chase an actual shot to do this with us. Totally coincidental, and I’m just rolling with it.” That last bit was hard to spit out, but how else was he supposed to convince her?
If she stared at him any longer, he’d probably start melting.
“Okay.”
“Okay?” It felt like a trap. Fair enough, because he was definitely lying.
April shrugged. “Yeah, I get it. Weird things happen, and this definitely isn’t the weirdest. I’ve had some dreams that were…” She looked up at the ceiling and nodded. “Way too coincidental. And I guess this is too. Probably means we should just do this one tomorrow like you guys planned.”
Ben tried to cut his sigh short so he didn’t sound so obviously relieved. “Okay.”
“Thanks for explaining everything to me.” She offered him a conciliatory little smile, and it crushed him. He could handle her suspicion, because it was founded, and he could handle having to slither his way through a half-truth explanation. Why’d she have to thank him for it?
“Any time.”
“Knowing about the cat-eating part, though,” she said, turning around to glance toward the front of the library, “I think we might have better luck if we asked for a little help.”
Oh, no. Please not Anita librarian.
17
“I’ll just sit this one out,” Ben said, pointing to one of the tables in the library’s lobby before he followed April too close to the checkout desk.
She turned back to look at him, her nose wrinkling over a smile of confusion. “What?” At least she looked like she’d gotten over her sudden urge to interrogate him about his abilities.
“She’s not the… friendliest… person.” He nodded at the desk, where he could just make out Anita’s forehead and the top of her rimless glasses as she leaned toward something on her desk. It took some effort to say something even that nice about her.
One side of April’s nose lifted, and she cocked her head with a pretty condescending nod, though it was obviously meant to be playful. “Did you forget to say please?”
“Did I f—of course I said please.” He snorted. “I’ve asked her for help before. A few times. And it just… it didn’t go well. I think she just really doesn’t like me.”
“That’s hard to believe,” she said, holding his gaze. “You’re a pretty likeable guy, Ben.”
“Well, thanks.” It sounded sarcastic, but he meant it a lot more than that. If anything, that might have been the start of him and April moving toward something again. Just the two of them. He waved at Anita librarian’s domain. “You’ll probably have way better luck than I did. I’ll be right here.” He was sending her off with a totally false sense of optimism. Peter had been the same way when he’d talked to Anita about returning The Lesser Key—until the woman had acted like she was talking to two of the world’s biggest idiots ruining her day.
Smiling, April shook her head and made her way toward the checkout desk.
Ben pretended to be super interested in the table under his hands for the first two minutes. That was about as long as he expected it to take for Anita librarian to say something just as demoralizing to April and send her stomping back to the table to tell Ben they didn’t need some cynical old lady’s help to find what they needed. Okay, he only imagined April stomping; he knew she probably wouldn’t. But she didn’t come back after what felt like two minutes, and then he heard her laugh.
Yep, that was April’s laughter.
He looked up and slowly turned to face the checkout counter. And yes, she was laughing at Anita librarian. No—laughing with her. What?
Ben didn’t even think the woman knew how to smile, or maybe she’d never had the necessary face muscles to begin with. Or that it was against her religion—which would have to be one he’d never heard of or researched for hours like almost all the rest of them, because he didn’t know any of them directly forbidding a smile. Anita was smiling. She looked human.
He couldn’t hear what they were talking about, but he saw the woman’s lips moving, then she glanced briefly at Ben. They laughed some more, talked some more, April made a few gestures he couldn’t begin to guess the meaning of, and then April reached out to pat the counter between them and grinned. The minute she turned around to head back to Ben’s table, Anita’s eyes went immediately back to her computer screen. But the smile remained on her closed lips. He wondered how long it would be there. Maybe April had just broken her.
April was already standing next to the table by the time he finally managed to pull his eyes away from the librarian’s eerily happy face. Then he looked up and had to blink a few times, because he’d been staring for so long, his eyes had dried out a little. “What was that?” he asked.
“What?”
“That.” He gestured toward the desk, but he wanted to fling his whole arm in that direction and jump out of the chair. “She was smiling.”
“It’s actually a common expression among people, Ben.” April smirked down at him like she’d just watched him eat ice cream for the first time.
“But what did you say to her?” He sounded like an idiot, yeah, but this might have been more shocking than seeing that cat still alive in the alley. Not as nauseating, but just as unexpected. Maybe alarming.
April shot him a playful frown. “I told her a little bit about what we were looking for and asked if she could point us in the right direction.”
“Like… you told her the truth?” There was no way the truth about what they were looking for would make anyone laugh all buddy-buddy like those two. They’d really chummed it up in those five or six minutes.
She shrugged. “Not exactly.”
“Come on,” Ben said. “You gotta give me something more than that.”
The corner of April’s mouth twitched a little in an obvious attempt not to laugh. She licked her lips and turned toward the library section they’d just left. “I told her you’ve been having nightmares about ghosts eating your family pet. That you’re convinced it’s going to happen and that you’re kinda desperate to find out how to stop it.” Before he had a chance to say anything, she headed quickly away from the table and back toward the bookshelves.
“I don’t have a family pet,” Ben said.
“I know.”
He pushed himself up from the table and jogged a few steps to catch up with her. “And that was funny. You both thought it was funny?”
April grinned, turned her head toward him a little, but didn’t meet his gaze. “I might have mentioned something about the stress of your last semester.”
Ben literally had no reply. He might have been a tiny bit insulted that she’d used him as her scapegoat with something so ridiculous and maybe that she and Anita librarian had been laughing at his expense. But he couldn’t get over the fact that April had formed some kind of weird bond with the woman—okay, yeah, at his expense—or that she’d actually gotten Anita to be helpful.
‘I want her on our team forever.’ Ian sounded almost as disturbingly impressed as Ben felt.
Don’t even go there right now.
He turned toward the World Religions section—or what held the most books closely related to that subject—but jerked to a stop when he realized April wasn’t going that way. “Uh, don’t we need to be here?” he asked, pointing to the shelves.
April shook her head. “Anita recommended Indigenous Cultures.”
Oh, so they were on a first-name basis, were they?
‘The woman’s wearing a nametag.’
Whatever. And what the hell kind of recommendation was that?
A crap recommendation—that was what it was. Because they found absolutely nothing. The only thing they managed to find in the next three hours even remotely related to ghosts or eating cats or how to help a combination of the two “move on” from a wacko obsession was that some indigenous people way deep in the Amazon had been documented—briefly—to call that kind of obsessive eating disorder of uncooked and living flesh a form of possession in and of itself. Self-possession, most likely, which Ben, in all his years of experience struggling with how much the topic didn’t apply to him, could just have attributed it to one thing. Being straight-up crazy. He wasn’t, but the indigenous peoples described in two frickin’ pages of the fifth book he picked up and the man’s spirit he’d seen eating that cat in the alley definitely were. Maybe that was the issue. They had to help a verifiably if not clinically diagnosed insane person move on from his compulsions. The dude had probably been doing the same thing when he was alive.
So how much experience do you have with crazy spirits? he asked Ian, glancing up briefly to watch April frown at the stack of hopeless books in front of her.
‘Even less.’
Good, so Ian was about as useful as this section of the library.
‘Watch it.’
It’s true.
It was just after 10:00 p.m., and while they could have taken advantage of the Mugar Memorial Library being open until two in the morning, that would clearly also be even more time wasted. And April looked like she was about to pass out at the table.
“Should we call it?”
April looked up at him and blinked slowly. “I mean, we’ll find something eventually. Won’t we?”
Ben shrugged. “I have no idea. Honestly, I’m starting to think The Lesser Key was the only book we’ll ever find that actually had anything we could use.”
“Maybe.” She nodded, got caught in a massive yawn, and sighed. “Anita seemed so sure we’d find something here.”
He wanted to tell her that her faith had been seriously misplaced on multiple levels. One, the story she’d given the librarian was a completely misleading mix of lie and truth—understandably, but obviously to the wrong effect. Two, Anita librarian knew April was here with Ben, so for all they knew, the woman had probably been laughing not with April but because she’d known full well she’d be wasting their time by sending them on a wild cat-eating-ghost chase and paying Ben back for the unforgiveable crime he’d committed of just being alive and in the campus library. It would have felt so good to just tell April, ‘I told you so,’ but he hadn’t in the first place. And it would only feel good for like three seconds until she exploded in rage and stopped talking to him and refused to come with them on any more projects so their chances of death by demon mishap rose exponentially.
He took a deep breath.
“Well, we tried,” he said instead.
“Yeah.” April rolled her neck from one shoulder to the other and took a deep breath. Some of her blonde hair had fallen out of her ponytail and draped down the side of her face. Ben kind of lost himself in how much he wanted to tuck it behind her ear. He might have, but then she looked at him with an exhausted smile. Who was he kidding? He wouldn’t have just reached out to touch her hair. “What about tomorrow, then?” she asked. “We just show up in that alley and wing it? Hope something sticks?”
“Uh, yeah,” Ben replied and offered her what felt like a smile of resignation. “I mean, it’s not like we’ve never gone in unprepared before.”
She laughed a little. “That’s very true.”
“Hey, thanks for coming with me to at least try. Sorry I wasted your time. I know you’re busy.”
“You didn’t waste my time.” She said it almost immediately, her blue eyes looking wide-awake again now. “I know it wasn’t… well, like a date or anything. But I’m glad we got to hang out for a while.”
Hoo, boy. Ben had to check to make sure his whole body wasn’t trembling as he fought the urge to jump over the table between them and kiss her right then—for real this time. Mostly because it wasn’t the right time and a little bit because he wasn’t a superhero or an acrobat and would probably end up falling off the table and crashing into her instead. Not quite as smooth. But she was glad they got to hang out. And she’d actually referenced a date they hadn’t had, which might have implied there was still an opening for one in the future. Unless he’d read that all wrong. April was still gazing at him with that ‘I’m not going to tell you what I want, but I think you’ll be able to figure it out on your own, so good luck’ look in her eye, and for a minute, he just kind of froze.
‘Do it already.’ For the first time under non-demon-involved circumstances, Ian said the right thing.
“Me too,” Ben told her. “Can I make it up to you with one of those aforementioned dates?” Okay, he really hoped that sounded suave and confident, because it felt like he was roleplaying as some kind of jerkwad debutant.
April pressed her lips together and took just one or two seconds too long. “I think so.” But she didn’t sound very convincing at all. Or convinced herself.
A nervous laugh escaped him. “Oh, really? Not quite sure?”
Her eyes drifted down to the table, and then that stray bit of hair he’d been eyeballing got tucked behind her ear by her own hand. “There’s just a lot of stuff going on right now. So I’m not quite sure about when. But I’m pretty sure I’d like you to make it up to me.” April bit her lip and looked up at him then, and the uncertain shyness in her creased brow nearly made Ben fall out of his chair.
“I can live with pretty sure,” he said. Was he grinning? It felt like he was grinning.
18
Turned out they’d parked in the same student lot, so they had the chance to leave the library and spend another ten minutes walking together across the mostly quiet Boston University campus. Ben had no idea what he said in those ten minutes to make April laugh so much, but whatever it was definitely worked. Somehow, their time spent in the library and the slightly tense conversation about Ben’s methods had cracked the ice thickening between them for almost a week, and things almost felt like they had before the night they’d banished the Guardian and so many things had changed. And when they stopped at April’s car, he was a lot more prepared for the second hug she gave him that day. It was a little longer and definitely less awkward than the first. Only by the time she’d pulled her car out of the parking lot did Ben fully realize she’d kissed his cheek before removing her arms from around his neck.
Then he had one heck of a time finding his own car in the parking lot, despite the fact that it wasn’t nearly as full as it had been when he’d arrived.
He’d been a little high-strung in the library, partly because of the eaten-cat discovery and partly because he’d been there with April. When he got back to his apartment, Ben thought he could have eaten everything in his kitchen, which no longer smelled like grilled cheese. Instead, he settled for sticking a frozen pizza in the oven and eating the whole thing in under ten minutes.
Lying in bed, he replayed the best parts of their time in the library and mostly their walk back to the student lot and that hug. Yeah, they’d be dropping by the alley between Monk Street and Peters Street tomorrow to pay a little visit to the spirit snacking on strays, and none of them really had a clue how they were supposed to go about banishing it, or helping it move on, or just getting it to stop that super nasty after-death habit. Plus Chase would be there, and their lack of experience with ghosts was probably going to make them all look like a bunch of posers who just happened to stumble upon unlikely solutions while they flailed around blindly. That wasn’t really very far from the truth, but Ben liked to think they were at least improving somewhat. Even with all that in their immediate future, he hadn’t felt this optimistic in a really long time.
But he’d spent half his life at this point mastering his tendency to analyze and expect the worst-case scenario of seemingly positive situations. So naturally, he realized he didn’t actually kno
w what April had been referring to when she said she was pretty sure she’d like him to ‘make it up to her.’ Yeah, caught up in the surprising moment, he’d assumed she was talking about their library not-date. Now, he couldn’t help but think she could have been talking about the way he’d reacted—and by that he actually meant Ian’s reaction—to her kissing him after banishing the Guardian and the fact that it had ripped a hole through whatever was building between them. And if Ben wanted to patch that back up into something real, he definitely had to explain what had really happened. Ian sharing his body, the glowing-green-hand thing, how he knew what he needed to do when they faced the next project. And how deep the entire lie had buried him over the last few months.
That explaining had to come sooner than later. Ben wondered if he had it in him to break his own record and just sleep for the next twenty-four hours instead.
When he woke up the next morning—unfortunately only twelve hours later—he found a text from April that she’d sent right before 8:00 a.m.
—6 pm work for everybody?—
Well, it was nice to know she’d been thinking about him that early, even if it was just to ask about when they’d be closing in on the ghost tonight. He knew she had a full day of classes, and he didn’t want to run the risk of interrupting her with texts before he had all the details. Mostly, he didn’t want to somehow leave the impression that he could care less about her schedule. Even though he kind of did.
