Ghosts Of Lovers Past

by Bethany Sefchick

  For a few moments, he allowed himself to drift in that fantasy world, where Rose had a living, breathing body, while he mindlessly allowed Elliott to lead him to the elevator and then escort him up to the penthouse level, where Dalton Bright’s set of private apartments was located.

  As they moved, Justin dreamed of his life as James Morgan, but now there were those other, newer and unfamiliar images mixing in too. Neither set of new images had Rose, so Justin pushed those aside. He only wanted a world with Rose alive and healthy, one where she was carrying his child.

  There were other, darker memories of his life as James but he pushed those aside, too. They might not be real. He certainly didn’t want them to be. They were ugly and so unlike him, unlike the man he was today. Justin didn’t even want to consider that he might have been that version of James. Instead, he simply concentrated on the good. When he did that, everything was right in the world again.

  He was still in a daze as Elliott led him to an overstuffed easy chair and helped him sit down. He was so wrapped up in his fantasy of a life where Rose was alive that he didn’t even notice that Tim and Mia were already sitting in chairs waiting for him.

  “The transfer went well, but he’s a little loopy,” Justin heard Elliott say. “I think his brain is having trouble processing both of his old lives at once. I wanted to wait, to do one at a time, but the Imperitas… Well, you know.”

  “How is Callie?” Justin heard Mia ask and he wondered why that was important. What did the Mimic have to do with Rose?

  Rose was with him, in his dream world. She was pregnant, just like she’d been when she’d died. She was healthy, as was their baby and he had all of the time in the world to devote to his family. Life, in Justin’s opinion, was good.

  “Weak,” was Elliott’s reply and again, Justin wondered what had happened to the other woman. “I left her with Reed but I’m going back down now to see if there’s anything more I can do. We have to get that damn bracelet off soon or she’ll die. It’s literally killing her.”

  Justin felt rather than saw Mia nod and he was vaguely conscious of the doctor moving away from the cozy little group. Not that Justin particularly cared. He was lost in his dream world with Rose. They were a family. They were happy. That was all that mattered.

  Chapter Twelve

  “Justin, wake up.” Tim’s words floated on the air around him, but like Elliott’s words, they meant nothing. He’d been hearing Tim’s voice call to him for quite awhile now, but he’d been ignoring his friend. He saw no reason to respond since he was happy exactly where he was. Rose wasn’t in Tim’s reality, so therefore Justin didn’t want to be either.

  Mia sighed and Justin laughed at the sound. How typical of Mia to be upset when everything was so good. She was never happy. He seriously thought she needed to get laid. It might improve her personality.

  “Justin, I need you to talk to me,” Mia demanded and Justin forced himself to concentrate on his boss. If she was angry, she might fire him. He might not get to see Rose anymore, which confused him, since she was already with him. Wasn’t she? Suddenly, Justin didn’t know. That was not good.

  He regarded the petite woman lazily and Justin wondered for a moment if this was what it was like to be high. He immediately decided he didn’t really care. All he wanted was for Mia and Tim to go away and leave him alone. In a flash of brilliance, he came up with the perfect solution to get rid of them both and quite possibly improve Mia’s mood in the process.

  “Take Tim into the back room and screw his brains out,” Justin informed Mia blithely. “Then you can feel like I do.”

  Justin’s field of vision darkened and he looked up to see Tim towering over him. “I don’t think any of us want to feel the way you do, buddy. Whatever is going on in that brain of yours isn’t good.”

  Justin frowned and then blinked a few times, hoping Tim would go away and he could get back to his vision of Rose. Right now, the ugly city and the coal mine were both hovering at the edge of his mind and he didn’t want that. Those weren’t happy memories.

  “Have you and Mia ever considered…” Justin didn’t get the rest of the sentence out before Tim hauled him to his feet and dragged him over to an open window.

  At first, Justin was afraid his best friend was about to toss him down fourteen stories to the pavement below. Instead, Tim pushed the window open farther and held Justin there, allowing the cool summer breeze and fresh air to wash over him.

  Slowly, Justin started to come back to himself. His hazy vision cleared and the swirling shapes at the edge of his mind began to form coherent thoughts. He was also conscious of the things he’d just said.

  Finally, when he knew he was in his right mind again, Justin held up his hands in a gesture of peace. “I’m okay, Tim. You can let go of me now.”

  At first, his friend seemed hesitant but finally, Tim released him and allowed Justin to slump back against a wall, his breathing still uneven. Looking up, he saw Mia watching him from her chair, her eyes guarded and her expression neutral.

  Justin winced, knowing there would be hell to pay. “Sorry about that, Mia. I didn’t mean it.”

  Instead of snapping at him, as he’d expected, Mia waved a hand in the air, effectively dismissing what had just happened. “No big deal. You weren’t in your right mind.” She shrugged. “Job hazard.”

  She gestured to the chair Tim had hauled him out of moments before. “Whenever you’re ready, we can talk about what you saw.”

  Justin took a few more moments to gather himself and then slowly made his way back to the chair. Once he was settled in, he blinked a few times to clear the rest of his vision and then looked up, his gaze taking in both Tim and Mia.

  “I’ve lived at least two other lives, neither of them with Rose.” There was no other place to begin, at least to Justin’s way of thinking, so instead of trying to come up with some niceties, he simply dove right in to the heart of things.

  “How much do you remember?” Tim asked. “Are you sure she wasn’t there?”

  Justin shook his head. “When I was floating just now, I didn’t want anything to do with those other two sets of memories because she wasn’t in them. I don’t know how I knew. I just did.”

  “Then we’ll trust in that.” Mia tapped one bright red manicured nail against her chin. “If that’s what you felt, then I’m willing to bet it’s true. So how much do you remember?”

  “The details are sketchy,” Justin confessed. “After I was James Morgan, I think I was reborn as William Colton. He was a breaker boy in the hard coal mines. Not sure where, but it would have to be someplace around Scranton or Wilkes-Barre, I’d guess.”

  Justin studied his fingers. “I died young, in a mine collapse, I think. That part is kind of fuzzy. But there was no Rose. So I don’t think we can look for clues there.”

  “And the other?” Mia prodded.

  “That one is fuzzier yet.” Frowning, Justin tried to pull the bits and pieces of those images together in his mind. “I think my name was Paul McGinn. I was a laborer in some southern city during the Depression. I was poor and tired.” He paused. “And alone. I might have lived longer, but I still died alone. I’m sure of that.”

  Standing up, Justin crossed back to the still open window for more fresh air. “Damn it, why can’t I remember more?” He could feel the anger rising in him, but unlike when he was at Rosewood House, he was able to hold it back, get it under control.

  “The finer details will come in time,” Mia assured him, seemingly unconcerned. “That’s simply how these things work.”

  “I don’t think we’re any closer to the answers,” Tim chimed in. “If there’s no Rose in either of those lives, how can it help us?”

  Mia stood up and began to pace, her mind clearly in a whirl. “Actually, I think it tells us a great deal.”

  Curiosity piqued, Justin tuned back to his boss and his friend. “How so?”

  Mia picked up a note pad and pen, scribbling furiously while she talk
ed. “We know that there isn’t any trace of Rose in your current life until I sent you to Blue Spring and given what you’ve told us just now, she wasn’t in either of the other two lives you now remember. So we can assume that the key to freeing her and helping Sophia lies in your life as James Morgan. If your fate is linked to hers, and I think we all agree that it is, then there’s no other place for us to look except in your shared past.”

  Tim nodded thoughtfully. “Makes sense actually.” He looked at Justin, again, as if checking for signs of his earlier temporary insanity. “Do you remember anything else about being James?”

  At first, Justin was quickly ready to say no. After all, the images pressing on his mind just moments ago had been primarily from his lives as either William or Paul. If he really thought about it, however, he realized that there were snippets of his life as James mixed in as well.

  “A little bit.” The trouble was, Justin wasn’t sure how much of what he remembered was real. If what he was seeing in his mind’s eye was real, then he perhaps wasn’t the man he thought he’d been. Or rather, that Rose thought he had been. “But maybe I’m just imagining it.”

  “If they’re new images, then they’re probably real memories,” Mia said gently, trying to coax the information out of him.

  Blinking again, Justin looked up at her. “What if I don’t like what I see?”

  “Then we deal with it.” Tim’s voice was steady and sure and instinctively, Justin knew he could trust his friend to help him. “So? What did you see?”

  “A lot of yelling.” Justin really didn’t want to do this in front of either Tim or Mia, but he knew it was necessary. It felt as if he was exposing a part of his soul and he didn’t like that at all. Yet he knew he had to because somewhere in the twisted parts of his mind might lay the key to helping Rose.

  “And?” Mia prodded, genuine concern in her eyes. “You have to tell us, Justin or we can’t help you. Or Rose.”

  That got him, her words striking fear into his heart. Sinking back into the chair, Justin closed his eyes and began to spit out every last nasty little secret he remembered.

  “Rose’s memories of me are wrong. At least I think they are. I wasn’t always a nice man,” he began haltingly. “My father beat me and I thought I was worthless. It colored how I saw the world.”

  Tim cleared his throat, obviously uncomfortable but willing to listen. “What, exactly, did you do?”

  Justin just squelched his eyes closed tighter, as if to ward off the bad memories that were assaulting him. “I don’t know all the details, but I do know some. I used women. A lot of them. You, Tim, when you were Jonah, told me not to, but I did anyway.” He scrunched up his face. “Rose, though… I didn’t want to use her like the others. She was different. She was this untouchable goddess I could never have. But I wanted her, oh, did I want her.” He looked at the ceiling as waves of remembered desire washed over him.

  “At some point, you got her,” Mia reminded him. “You married her. That’s why we’re all here.”

  “She pursued me. It was almost like she was infatuated with me,” Justin confessed. “And I wanted her so much because I believed she could heal me. So when she came to me one day, looking for a little fun, I took her, just like the rest of the whores I used to associate with.” Tears glistened in his eyes at the shame of the memory, but Justin knew he had to get the whole ugly truth out. He pinched his eyes shut once more, not wanting his friends to see his raw pain.

  “I made it impossible for her family to refuse my proposal of marriage. I used her to get what I wanted, but she didn’t care. It was what she wanted, too.” Justin paused. His heart beat rapidly in his chest as if waiting for the sordid tale to be completed. “I cared though. More than I ever let on. What I did was wrong, but I did it anyway because I wanted her so much. Wanted her to make me clean again.”

  Justin slowly opened one eye. “I did love her, though. I really did. That much wasn’t a lie.”

  “Anything else you can remember?” Mia asked her question without judgment in her voice and Tim, for his part, said nothing. Justin had, at the very least, expected mild condemnation.

  “Not really,” he sighed, the memories now starting to fade away like the tide going out in the ocean. “I know there’s probably more, but I can’t see it. I can’t imagine any of it is any nicer or any better than what I just saw.”

  He sighed and slumped even deeper into his chair. “If I was so horrible, why does Rose seem to think James was a saint? If we had this great love that transcends time, then why were we kept apart?”

  “I don’t know.” There was a tinge of exhaustion in Mia’s voice and she rubbed her brow in frustration, earning her a worried glare from Tim. “Maybe her memories of the past have been altered as well.” She rubbed her eyes, as if she hadn’t slept in quite awhile. “I read Josh’s report about Rose’s aura so I feel certain that magic was involved. Maybe that changed how she saw the past when she woke up as a ghost.”

  Justin sighed. “All we have are a bunch of questions, with no real answers. I thought downloading these memories would help, not make things worse.”

  Restless, he vaulted out of the chair and began to pace the room, his earlier sickness forgotten. As he looked out the window, he realized that the sun had long since moved across the summer sky and was beginning to set as evening approached. Justin hadn’t realized that so much time had passed. He thought of Rose and his promise to return to see her that night.

  “I need to get back to Blue Spring,” he said, rotating his neck and shoulders to stretch out the kinks. “Rose is expecting me.”

  Tim looked as if he was going to say something and then changed his mind. “If that’s where you feel you need to be, then by all means.”

  Justin knew that Tim rarely censured anybody’s behavior and was unlikely to start now. However, his friend’s choice of words wasn’t lost on him.

  “I know you think I’m spending too much time at Rosewood, but that’s where the answers are. It’s where I need to be.”

  “And when she’s not there any longer?” Tim’s quiet question struck deeper into Justin’s heart than an angry one would have.

  “I’ll deal with it then. For now, though, that’s where she is.” Truthfully, Justin didn’t even want to begin to think about a day when Rose would no longer be in his life. He also didn’t like the fact that Tim had even brought it up in the first place.

  Mia, who had been silent for the last several moments, spoke up. “It’s okay, Justin. Go. Be with Rose.”

  He hesitated, however, still unsure of Tim’s reaction. “Maybe I should check on Callie first.”

  But Mia shook her head. “No. After today, Callie is also dealing with something very personal and difficult.”

  “The Imperitas?” Justin guessed.

  “Partly,” Mia confirmed with a nod of her head, “But it’s more than that. I can’t say more but trust me when I tell you that Callie is better off locked away with Reed than with ten staff members checking on her. You can see her tomorrow.”

  Justin nodded, though he would still have liked to see the other woman for himself. He didn’t like knowing that his actions had, at least in part, caused whatever was wrong with her.

  Uncharacteristically, Tim said nothing, merely nodded in agreement with Mia, though whether he truly agreed with her or not was open to debate.

  “If you see her before I do,” Justin said as he moved towards the elevator, “tell her I’m sorry and that I’ll make it up to her.”

  “I will,” Mia promised and for a moment, Justin thought he saw a glimpse of humanity shimmering just below his boss’s hardened surface. Then it was gone just as quickly and he had to wonder if he had really seen it at all.

  The ding of the bell announced the elevator’s arrival and, with a small wave to both Mia and Tim, he got in and took the car back down to the building’s underground garage.

  Once inside the safety of the elevator, Justin slumped against the wall a
nd closed his eyes, a wave of tiredness washing over him. He knew he shouldn’t really drive anywhere, but he also knew that Tim would refuse to give him a ride back to Rosewood House.

  Justin had recognized the look in his friend’s eyes a few moments ago. He’d seen it often enough over the last few years. Tim thought Justin was being impetuous and foolish, and maybe he was. However, Justin didn’t care; all he wanted was to be with Rose.

  It was like a fire in his blood, an itch he couldn’t scratch. She was the focus of his world and there didn’t seem to be any way to change it, nor was he inclined to any time soon.

  One day, probably sooner than he’d like, Justin knew he’d have to deal with the reality of Rose’s existence, that she was a ghost and he a human. At the moment, though, he didn’t care. He felt as if he had crossed time to find her and maybe he had. In the end, she was with him now and that was all that mattered.

  Deep in his gut, however, he knew that trouble was on the horizon. Something was not right about the whole situation. He just couldn’t put his finger on it. However, he was afraid that when he did finally figure this mess out, he would lose Rose, not just for this lifetime, but forever. He wasn’t sure he could live with that.

  Chapter Thirteen

  By the time Justin reached Rosewood House, his head was pounding again and he felt slightly queasy. He wondered if he should have asked Elliott for something to ease the pain but then dismissed the idea. The doctor would have given him pills and told him not to drive. That wouldn’t have worked. Justin needed to be with Rose. Any medication would have just gotten in the way.

  He had, however, taken the bottle of purplish black liquid Reed had prepared for him. A small bottle of the foul smelling stuff had been sitting on his desk when Justin had returned for his car keys, obviously left there by the chemist while Justin was meeting with Tim and Mia. The accompanying note said that it was designed to prevent the house from affecting Justin’s mind and allowing him to slip back into the James persona. However, Reed made no guarantees as to the potion’s effectiveness, saying that it might work only for a short time or perhaps not at all. At best, he might have a few hours of reasonable sanity before the house started to work its evil magic on Justin’s mind.