Cold As Death (The Mira Morales Series Book 5)

by T. J. MacGregor

  Adam Nichols was sharp, for all the difference it would make in the long run. “Anything else?” Finch asked.

  “Friend says your father did terrible things to you and now you’re paying the price.”

  “So we’re back to your imaginary playmate.” Finch rolled his eyes and laughed.

  “Since you don’t believe I really have a friend, she’s going to show you.”

  “Uh-huh. And exactly how is she going to do that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Of course you don’t. It’s all bullshit.”

  But as soon as he said this, Finch realized the room had gotten cooler. He wondered if the AC unit had malfunctioned. Since the hurricane, everything in the house was off-kilter. He went over to the closest AC vent and held his hands up to it. The air didn’t feel any cooler than usual. “Something’ wrong with the air-conditioning. I need to check the unit,” he said.

  “It won’t do any good.” Adam got up from the chair, pulled the blanket off the bed, wrapped it around his shoulders, sat down, and began eating his breakfast. “Friend’s doing it. If you’re going to stay in here, you’d better grab a blanket or a sweatshirt or something.”

  Finch ignored him and hurried over to the thermostat on the wall. It read forty-seven degrees, about twenty-five degrees colder than where he usually kept the thermostat.

  Impossible. He jacked the thermostat to eighty—and the temperature abruptly dropped another five degrees.

  This isn’t happening.

  He hastened toward the door, pressing the button on the clicker, but when he pulled on the handle, the door wouldn’t open. He yanked again, kept pressing the clicker. Nothing, nothing. Adam now huddled on the chair, knees up against his chest, the blanket wrapped tightly around him. How cold did it have to be for your breath to be visible? In the thirties?

  No fucking way this is happening.

  Teeth chattering, hands trembling, his mind slamming against a wall of impossibilities, Finch struggled to think. He couldn’t escape through the windows because the shutters were still in place, and the bathroom had no exit, except the skylight, which he couldn’t reach. Yet, he knew there had to be a way out of here. He wouldn’t be this careless.

  Think, think, c’mon, you know the answer to this.

  He ran back over to the thermostat. The temperature now registered a crisp twenty-nine degrees. Frost was forming on the windows. Adam had drawn the blanket over his head. Finch’s own head began to ache, to throb. Already, an aura nearly blinded him, a visual white noise. He blinked, shivered. He knew what it meant. Knew what was coming. Finch fumbled with the clicker and stared at the keypad, trying to make sense of it.

  Each button was coded to something. Number 1 for the door to Adam’s bedroom, 2 for the lights, 3 for the computer, 4 for the DVD player and the Xbox, 5 for the front door of the house, 6 for the garage door, and 7 for the AC, 8 for… “Yes,” he hissed, and pressed 8, the override that would allow him to open the door manually.

  Finch weaved toward the door, feeling as though he were drunk or stoned. The lights in the room went nuts, flashing off and on quickly, like strobes. Music blared from the computer, voices blasted from the television, and every sound pierced his temples like knives.

  He didn’t know what was happening in here. All he wanted to do was escape it.

  He pulled on the handle and stumbled out into the warmth of the hall. He jerked the door shut behind him, pressed 8 once more to cancel the override, pressed 1, and heard the telling click. He stumbled into the kitchen. Nausea gripped him, his stomach churned, he tasted bile in the back of his throat. The pounding in his temples spread across the top of his skull and then increased tenfold.

  It’s gonna be bad, real bad.

  The peripheral vision in his left eye went south. He winked it shut and studied the bottles lined up ever so neatly on the counter. Which one held the real meds? The prescription meds? He couldn’t remember and couldn’t see well enough to read the labels.

  You know the answer to this. Everything the kid said about you is true. Your kitchen is an anal-retentive’s wet dream. Then his body remembered, his hand reached. Second bottle from the left. He was supposed to take two tablets at the onset of any migraine symptoms. He’d gone way beyond symptoms.

  He gobbled three pills and fell onto the futon where he’d awakened earlier. Cool air flowed over him. AC air, not weird air, not whatever was going on in Adam’s room. Then the agony seized him, clutched his skull in a vise, paralyzing him, and he was gone.

  He is sick, feverish, and a hand touches his forehead, a light touch, loving and concerned. “Fever’s going down, Spense honey. It’s breaking.”

  “Stay with me,” he whispers, and of course she does. She slides into bed next to him, fixes the covers over them, slips her fingers back through his hair, massages his scalp, his temples, and tells him a story.

  “Once upon a time, there was a princess in a garden. She was very small, this princess, no larger than a flower, and she wanted to leave the garden and see what else there was in this huge and magnificent world. So she went to the king and asked for his blessing, but the king wasn’t happy about the thought of his only daughter venturing out into the larger world alone…

  When Finch came to, he was crying.

  Chapter 10

  Adam’s Room & After

  “What do you need?” Suki asked Mira.

  They stood just inside the doorway of Adam’s room, where everything had been disturbed since his disappearance. It wasn’t just that forensics had touched and rearranged every object in here, but that Suki, too, had been here, that she and Paul had fallen back onto this bed and made such desperate and violent love. Would Mira see all that? Would Mira see her weeping over the gray bear? Would she see her argument with Paul and all that had followed?

  Suki didn’t care. She only wanted to find her son.

  “I need something that’s important to him emotionally,” Mira said. “A stuffed animal, a T-shirt, book, DVD, anything personal. Metal and fabric are both good.”

  Suki opened the toy chest and brought out the gray bear. The Fids Bear, a toy that had been part of Adam’s life since he was a year old. Her cousin, an eccentric man whom everyone in the family referred to as Fiddlesticks, had given it to him. The bear looked his age—one ear hanging by a thread, his gray fur worn almost smooth along the back, an eye gone.

  “He got this when he was just a baby. Every year, the Fids bear has moved down farther on the bed. When Adam turned eleven, the Fids went into the toy chest. But it holds a lot of emotional history” Suki set the bear on top of the toy chest, now filled with spare linens. “I don’t know if it’s useful to you, but one of the things Adam and I always say to each other is A-Okay. Then we flash a thumbs-up.”

  Mira mouthed the words, nodding. “A mother/son mantra. I like that.” She sat down on the chest, next to the Fids bear, and looked around. “Tell me something, Suki. Yesterday morning, when Paul found me here and called the police, the air in here turned bitterly cold. Did he tell you that?”

  One more sin of omission. “No. He didn’t mention it. What do you mean that it got cold?”

  “The temperature plunged. I could see my breath when I exhaled. Frost formed on the windows.”

  “How’s that possible? We still don’t have electricity.”

  “Have you ever felt a presence in the house?”

  “You mean, like, a ghost?”

  “Yes.”

  “The house is haunted? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “It seems to be.” Mira slipped off her sandals and walked barefoot around the room, describing yesterday’s events. As soon as Mira described the blue flowered dress that Gladys’s ghost had been wearing, goose bumps broke out on Suki’s arms. She murmured that she would be right back, and hurried into the room where Gladys had slept whenever she stayed overnight. She threw open the closet door, rummaged through the clothes, and plucked out a hanger with a dress on it. She
practically ran back into Adam’s room. Mira now stood at the window, her fingertips sliding along the frame.

  “Is this the dress you saw?” Suki asked. Pale silk, with delicate blue flowers on it. Suki had bought it for Gladys’s last birthday.

  Mira turned. “That’s it.”

  “It… was Gladys’s favorite.”

  “The woman I initially saw outside came through Adam’s closet door and helped Gladys pass over. She’s the ghost here. The presence. And she may be connected somehow to what happened with Adam. She looked to be in her late thirties or early forties. I don’t know if that’s the age she was when she died or what. Anyway, when your husband was in the room, holding a gun on me, that woman returned.”

  Suki didn’t know what shocked her more—that a ghost had come through her son’s closet door or that Paul had pulled a gun on Mira.

  “I don’t understand,” Suki said.

  “Neither do I. But I think you should research the house, Suki. Find out who has lived here and who was living here when there was a fire. May I hold Gladys’ dress?”

  Suki removed the dress from the hanger, handed it to Mira, and tossed the hanger on Adam’s bed.

  Mira drew the fabric across her cheek, ran her hands over it, shut her eyes, and stood very still for a several minutes. It seemed to Suki that she hardly breathed. “She had bad arthritis in her knee,” Mira said finally, and rubbed her own knee. “The right knee.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  Now she dropped the dress and reached for the Fids bear. She pressed the stuffed animal to her chest, sat down on the bed, and stretched out, the bear cradled in the crook of her arm. Suki noticed that Mira’s breathing changed. It deepened, slowed, and she flipped onto her side, one leg thrown over the other, a perfect copy of the way Adam slept most of the time.

  “I’m dreaming,” Mira said quietly. “It’s a good dream. Then I hear something, a noise. Is it in the dream?”

  Mira snapped forward, suddenly started screaming, then slammed back against the mattress as if someone had pushed her. She grunted, kicked, shrieked, writhed as though someone held her down against the bed, pinning her there, a butterfly under glass.

  Suki realized she was seeing a reenactment of what had happened to Adam and stood there, horrified.

  Mira’s legs jerked in toward her body, then shot outward, as though she had kicked someone. She rolled across the mattress, her shrieks erupting in gasps for air. Suki pressed her knuckles to her mouth, powerful, almost crippling emotions sweeping through her. Then she rushed forward, toward Mira, and wrenched the teddy bear out of her grasp. “Stop. Please.”

  Mira blinked, the wildness gradually bleeding from her eyes, her face, and swung her legs over the side of the bed. She was rubbing her neck. “He injected Adam with something.” Her arm came up, pointing at the door. “Then Gladys hurried into the room and… he shot her.”

  The bedroom door suddenly slammed shut, the bureau drawers snapped open and shut again, and then the bureau skated across the floor with such speed and power it left dark scrapes on the tile. A chair snapped backward and crashed against the floor. The closet door swung back and forth, a wooden pendulum.

  “Sweet Christ.” Suki scrambled onto the bed next to Mira. She pulled her legs up onto the mattress, whispered, “What’s happening?”

  Mira wrapped her arms around her legs, hugged them to her chest. “Stay still.”

  The closet door slammed open, crashing against the wall as if an invisible person inside the closet had lunged out into the room. The hangers trembled, shook, banged against each other, and clothes slipped to the floor. Mira grabbed the top edge of the quilt and pulled it around them. The bureau drawers kept shaking and rattling until they crashed to the floor, the closet door slammed open and shut, the screen in the window suddenly popped loose and fell outside. The window itself slammed shut so hard the glass cracked, fissures racing through it until it looked like a spider’s web.

  Now stuffed animals leaped from the toy chest and, like miniature supermen, took flight, soaring, dipping, then crashing into walls, diving into the closet, bouncing off the doors. The cord that held the model airplane in place abruptly snapped and the plane took off, soaring silently through the air, wings dipping one way, then the other. It swept in low over the bed and vanished through the open window.

  The room crackled with energy that made their hair stand straight up, as though a tremendous charge of static electricity filled the air. When they pulled the quilt more tightly around them, static sparks jumped from the quilt’s fabric.

  The sparks seemed to trigger a chain reaction of events. A tremendous humming swelled in the air, a sound that grew in intensity and pitch until Suki could feel it in her teeth, the back of her throat, inside her skull. Everything that was still airborne abruptly dropped to the floor, the fissured glass in the window exploded inward, and the shards strewn across the floor lifted en masse, like a horde of shimmering locusts, and shot straight toward them.

  Mira jerked the thick quilt over their heads and shouted for Suki to cover her legs as well. But she wasn’t fast enough. Dozens of sharp missiles stung her lower legs. Mira threw herself toward the open toy chest, and pulled out more blankets and quilts. She tossed one over Suki’s legs, pulled the other over herself. The humming reached a higher note. Suki gritted her teeth against the sound, but found it nearly unbearable. The inside of her skull felt as though bones were splintering; her eyes ached and burned and teared.

  “Get out!” Mira shouted.

  Suki leaped off the bed, holding the quilt over herself, and tore toward the door. Glass struck the quilt, her feet, her ankles, and seconds before she reached the door, it sprang open and she raced into the hail.

  The door slammed, she heard the lock click into place, and she spun, realizing that Mira hadn’t made it. Behind the door, the humming now rose to a fever pitch. Suki banged on the wood with her fists, kicked at it, shouted for Mira. But the door held fast, Mira didn’t answer, and the humming now throbbed in Suki’s head.

  “I’m going to get help!” Suki hollered.

  She dropped the quilt and took off up the hail, her ankles and lower legs bleeding from dozens of pricks in her skin.

  For seconds after the door slammed shut, Mira stayed motionless beneath the quilt, her body braced against the assault of sound. The humming seemed to rattle inside her bones, in the fillings of her teeth. She stuck her fingers in her ears, but the sound penetrated the pores in her skin. Her entire body vibrated in rhythm with the humming, muscles and tendons strummed faster and faster by invisible fingers.

  She never had intended to flee the room. She thought she could deal with this energy if Suki weren’t present, but wished now that she’d run like hell. Mira frantically scooted back on the mattress, working her way toward the headboard and the open window, her closest exit. The intensity of the humming increased until her head throbbed, her ribs rattled, her larynx felt like it might explode.

  Her back hit the headboard and she pushed up against it, felt something squish into the small of small of her back, and pulled it out.

  The gray teddy bear. Help me, Adam. This whole display is about you, so help me out here.

  The horrendous humming escalated to a shrill shriek that threatened to burst her eardrums. Mira leaped off the bed, the teddy bear clutched in one hand, a pillow in the other, and a brilliant light exploded directly in front of her, nearly blinding her. It elongated rapidly, like some special effect in a movie, and stretched and stretched until it narrowed into a horizontal funnel that shimmered and danced with pale green and blue light.

  The same sensation she’d experienced outside in the driveway yesterday morning swept over her again. Was she in the throes of a massive breakdown? Was this a mirage? A hallucination? Was she dreaming awake? Was the funnel a physical or a psychic construct? She had no answers. So she approached it cautiously, and noticed that the intense cold and shrieking noise immediately diminished. Her teeth and
bones stopped vibrating.

  She held her hands in front of her, right hand still gripping the teddy, and touched the light. It felt warm and solid, yet when she exerted just a little pressure, her hands passed through the light—and into the long funnel. It felt strange, as if she had thrust her hands into a bowl of chilled Jell-O. Alarmed, Mira jerked her hands back toward her body, tucked the teddy under her arm, and extended her right leg. She allowed her foot to slide through the wall of light. Same sensation.

  Hands again. This time, they vanished up to the elbow and she experienced an overpowering urge to step completely inside the light.

  As she did so, she felt an excruciating pressure against her head, pressing down against her skull, squeezing at her temples, tightening along the seam of her jaw. Her ears popped, as if the barometric pressure suddenly had changed, the pain in her head eased, and she saw him.

  Adam Nichols.

  He was fiddling with something, but she couldn’t see what it was. Mira shouted his name. He didn’t look up, apparently couldn’t hear her. Am I unconscious? Tranced out? Is this physical? What? She moved a little farther into the funnel and her vision expanded.

  Details: a large room, with shuttered windows. Hurricane shutters? A laptop, bureau, bed, cracked bureau mirror. She sensed the building was on or near water. Let me see it from the outside.

  Her ears popped again, she felt a rushing sensation—and immediately found herself standing barefoot in warm sand, her toes digging into it, and a vast, shimmering expanse of water stretched out in front of her. Ocean? Canal? The air smelled salty, but it smelled that way everywhere in the Keys. The sun was so bright it burned away details. Mira turned and drank in the sight of the house. It stood on stilts, had two stories above it, lots of vegetation in the yard. Address, I need an address, c’mon, please…

  Before anything could happen, she felt that bizarre rushing sensation again, but seemed to be hurling backward through time, space, dimensions. The funnel vanished, the air whooshed from her lungs, and she found herself flat on her back on the ground, blurred faces hovering above her.