A Gift of Ghosts

by Sarah Wynde

  ***

  Zane unlocked the door, torn between insisting that they go see Nat and letting Akira have her way.

  Could she have fooled him? Could she be delusional? Could the ghosts she saw simply be hallucinations, products of a traumatized mind?

  She wouldn’t have deceived him maliciously. There was no way he would believe that. But part of his job as head of GD’s special affairs division was to hire people with psychic abilities, the ones who worked on GD’s special projects. He knew many people with gifts, but he’d also met some incredibly skilled fakes.

  Could Akira have an innate, even subconscious, ability to do a cold read that had been good enough to trick him? And the rest of his family?

  He led her through the foyer and straight up the stairs to the second floor, his brain churning. He was trying, for the moment, to set aside his horror at the idea that her father, the man who should have been protecting her, had been beating her instead. Beating her because she had seizures!

  Back when he’d first learned about the broken bones, he’d sort of assumed that her father had abused her. Natalya had said most of the breaks happened long ago, and even he realized that most abused children are abused by their parents. But every time she’d mentioned her father, it was with such obvious affection and love that he’d stopped thinking about it. Maybe he should have tried harder to learn about her past, but he hated it when she stiffened up. It had been easy, too easy, to let it slide, to not ask painful questions.

  Zane was fiercely glad that the man was dead. He wanted more than anything right now to find him and hurt him like he’d hurt Akira. But he needed to let that go, he knew. He wouldn’t know how to help Akira in the here-and-now until he understood what was going on. Did she really have a gift that let her see ghosts or was she insane? In the back of his mind, a thought was pushing at him, fighting to rise to the surface, but he ignored it, trying to focus.

  She’d known Dillon’s name. But it wouldn’t have been hard to find that out. Anyone in town might have shared information about the Latimer family on her first visit without thinking anything of it. Rose’s name, though, that would have been harder to learn. Zane had looked it up soon after Akira had moved in, and a teenage girl named Rose Harris had died at that address back in the 1950’s.

  But even though the name was right, how could Akira have learned it casually? Or by accident? It seemed almost impossible.

  When he’d been reading about ghosts, there’d been an article about people who believed they were possessed. The symptoms fit into the same diagnostic group as people with multiple personalities. “Dissociative identity disorder,” he said aloud.

  “What about it?” Akira asked, as she caught up with him at the top of the stairs.

  He looked down at her pale face and tried not to frown. Could she have multiple personalities? Really? She’d never behaved erratically, never acted like a different person. But to know Rose’s name, she would almost have to have researched it. “You could have that,” he offered. “Multiple personalities. It was in an article I found about ghosts.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Great,” she said. “Good to know.”

  He sighed and gestured toward the door of Dillon’s bedroom.

  But say she had multiple personalities, his thoughts continued. She would still have to be an incredibly gifted cold reader. She’d known such subtleties. How could she have found out Dillon’s musical taste? She couldn’t have, which meant that it had to be a guess, but a perfect guess. What could have clued her in?

  Akira stepped forward. He was watching her intently, still trying to think through the implications of what she’d told him, still trying to analyze every experience of ghosts that they’d had together over the past several trusting months, so he saw the movement of her throat as she swallowed, and the seemingly involuntary shudder of her shoulders as she placed her hand on the door.

  “Seizures, by the way?” she said, not looking at him. “Five continuous minutes will damage neurons. Thirty minutes has a decent chance of killing me.” She turned the knob, and pushed the door open, and stepped into the room, just as his thoughts crystallized around an idea: door, ghosts, North Carolina, bodies.

  Hell.

  Sure, some skillful guessing might have gotten her a lot of information about Dillon and some research might have provided her with Rose’s name. But she’d found two bodies in North Carolina that the local police and the FBI had spent days searching for. That wasn’t just a lucky guess.

  “Let’s not do this,” he started, following her into Dillon’s bedroom. “At least let’s talk about it a little more.”

  But it was too late.

  Akira’s head arched back as if she’d just been hit in the face, and her whole body went stiff, then she crumbled forward, falling against the floorboard of the bed and then to the ground as if she was a marionette whose strings had just been cut.

  “Akira!” He jumped to her side, just as the thought that had been pushing at the back of his mind jumped full-blown to the forefront: if she wasn’t insane, she wanted him to rescue her from ghostly possession by hurting her.

  Hurting her badly enough to break her bones.

  That’s what he should have been paying attention to. That’s what he should have been worrying about. Wondering whether she was crazy was just a way of avoiding thinking about what she wanted him to do.

  He turned her over gently. She’d hit the bed exactly wrong. Blood was running from her nose, he realized, just as her muscles started to spasm.

  Fuck.

  The ghost would get stronger.

  She wanted him to hurt her.

  She needed him to hurt her.

  And he didn’t think he could do it.