Fake Dean was right behind me. “Lesson one for ghosts: You don’t have to hang around for every conversation ever spoken, especially if it’s about you. Spirits have drawn-out memories, and hurt feelings can last as long as you stick around this dimension.”
“That’s lesson one?”
“Maybe it’s lesson one hundred. But it’s a good thing to learn.”
We walked past a row of night-lit restaurants that had already closed. Indian, Chinese, Spanish—they’d left traces of curry and noodles and saffron on the air. Then we passed the cars driving down the street, filtering out of downtown after a long night. We passed unsuspecting people with light coats on as they left the more popular closing bars, passed a girl in a pink feather boa and birthday tiara who was weaving down the sidewalk toward me.
At the last second, she bumped me. Or maybe not-bumped is more appropriate, because even though I felt like I had a body, her shoulder still went through me with a dragging fizz.
“I’m freezing!” she yelled to her friend, grabbing for the girl’s jacket.
“Isn’t everyone,” I said.
As we passed a pizza place, the aroma of baking dough made me slow down. I stopped at the window, where the cooks were shutting down for the night in their white, sauce-splotched aprons, and I wallowed in a smell that seemed so much headier in this fake-Dean body than it’d ever been in life.
Dean stood behind me, and I felt him with an electric thrill in my veins, especially when I couldn’t see either of us in the window’s reflection.
“You miss the smells of a night downtown?” he asked.
“Okay, this is where it starts, isn’t it? Next you’re going to say that, if I give in to you, I’ll be able to smell these pizzas with wonderful human appreciation and hunger for the rest of eternity. I might even be able to have pizza in the coma that you put your stars into. But I only get those benefits if I become one of your collectibles.” I turned around, my thigh brushing his knee. A jolt of need pulled through me, warming my belly. “Then you’re going to remind me that I could be with my first and only love forever. You. Even though it’s not really you.”
He traced a finger over my forearm. Goose bumps—oh, how I’d missed them—spiked on my arm, raising the hair. I enjoyed every moment, even if I shouldn’t have.
“Why not have a little more fun than usual, at least for tonight?” he said. “This hasn’t exactly been the best day of your ghosthood. First off, you had a rough time with that Tim boy. You’re on constant watch with him. You ghosts are even starting to realize that there’s no hope for him.”
“There isn’t?”
He smiled down at me with that mouth—soft and kissable. So real right now.
“What do you think?” he asked, true to form. He wasn’t going to tell me about anything I couldn’t figure out for myself. As this higher being, whatever he was, he didn’t believe that enlightening me was necessary . . . or appropriate.
“I think Tim Knudson needs help,” I said. “That maybe he’s what they call a bad seed, and there’s nothing we can do.”
“You’ve debated with the others about terminating him. Taking his existence into your hands like you’re gods.” He stopped running his fingers up and down my arm. “I don’t have to remind you that you aren’t even close to that.”
His gaze had darkened. Was he about to go all mystery beast on me like he’d done twice before when I’d provoked him?
“It’s not up to us to kill him,” I said, anticipating what he was going to say next.
“Right. Just because you’re beyond death, it doesn’t mean you can take life, even indirectly, without consequences. You’ve dealt with that dark spirit—haven’t you learned a lesson from that?”
Wait—was he saying that we could kill directly, and the reason ghosts didn’t really do that was because of the consequences?
But I needed to know about the dark spirit first. “Are you implying that it killed a human and it got tainted?”
“No, it came out of a portal, thanks to your friend Amanda Lee. But when a ghost feeds on negative energy or even creates chaos, it can become just as black and cursed as this dark spirit that’s hanging around. You don’t want darkness marking you, Jenny.”
This, he wasn’t kidding about. “You’re telling me that we can still earn our way into heaven or hell as ghosts . . . if those places even exist?”
Fake Dean smiled, and I knew that was all he was going to give me. He’d told me before that he didn’t even know what was in store beyond the wranglers. Or, at least, that’s what he’d said.
“One more thing,” he whispered, stroking my skin again. “You were right about Cassie. She left this plane very happy.”
I let him touch me like this, loving the waves of heat that were skimming my flesh, making my libido rise. So easy to give in to him tonight, after seeing Gavin and Suze together. So dangerous.
And so stimulating.
“How did it feel to see her wrangler?” he asked softly.
“Nice.”
He traced my wrist, and I bit my lip.
“Just nice?” he asked, chuckling. “You’re telling me that the real highlight of the day was scaring the pants off that weenie boy Tim? How did that feel?”
“More than nice.” And I didn’t just mean the rush from the hallucination I’d given him, either. I’d been real pumped up on his fear.
Then I remembered what Dean had said about the dark spirit, and he seemingly understood before I could say anything.
“Don’t go too far with absorbing their fear, Jenny,” he said. “You can enjoy it. Just don’t depend on it for fuel.”
“Okay.”
He pressed his advantage, coasting his fingertip up my arm, brushing it over the inside of my elbow. I almost sighed but held it back.
“I scare you a little, don’t I?” he asked.
“Hardly.”
He leaned closer as, behind him, humans strolled past, beer-breathed and loud, clumped into social disorder. None of them could see us by the window, and that only added to the burning tumble in my stomach.
“When you were alive,” he whispered against my ear, his breath bathing it to tingling awareness, “you never went for the bad boys. Dean was a surfer, a smart guy, a college boy, but there were times you wished . . .”
As fake Dean slid his other hand over my stomach, I ached between my legs. It’d been so long since I’d experienced this immediate, physical desire from anyone else that it felt new again.
He finished his thought. “You wished that he would’ve had you in unexpected places, even just once. There were times when you’d go for a burger after surfing, and you’d hope that he’d take his hand under the table and touch you where you wanted to be touched.”
When I felt him unbutton the snap at the waist of my jeans, I gasped.
Oh, God, what was he doing? What was I letting him do? And was it because I was hurt from seeing Gavin with Suze?
The buzz of my zipper coming down made me hold my breath, and now that I could be touched, I let it happen. I needed it, wanted it, had already accepted that I couldn’t have it as a ghost, and to have it happening right now?
It was more of a turn-on than anything.
Dean kept whispering as he finished with the rest of my zipper. “You wanted to sit in the booth with him, pretending like nothing was going on underneath that table as everyone around you laughed and ate their food, as the waitress came by and brought you sodas. You always wondered what it would feel like to have a little bit of bad in you.”
Behind him, the crowd had thickened with college kids, pushing at one another, never noticing the spirits among them. And when Dean slid his fingers into my fly, over my white cotton underwear and over my achiest parts, I reached back with one hand, noiselessly slapping the window with my palm. As I slipped down the window, he stroked me, and I gripped his T-shirt with my other hand.
“That’s a bad girl,” he said, pressing harder.
I moved my hips wit
h every motion, leaning my head against his shoulder. He smelled so much like Dean, with his clean shirt, his sun-warmed skin. His hair, longish and cut straight near his chin in surfer style, brushed my face like a hundred kisses.
But I knew damned well this wasn’t my old Dean. And I still let him go on.
He dug his free hand into my hair, cushioning my head from the window, using his leverage to turn my mouth toward his so he could crush his lips to mine.
I fell against him a little farther, weak-legged, bones of water, lost in dizziness as we kissed and kissed and the humans walked right by us. He ran his hand from out of my jeans and up my belly, over my stomach, pulling up the tank top under my blouse and inching his fingers over my skin until they got to my bra.
When he skimmed his fingers into the cup, making contact with my bare breast, I sucked in oxygen like I’d never experienced breathing before.
His lips stayed on mine as he talked. “You taste like honey,” he said. “I knew you would. Strawberries and honey, just like the color of your hair.”
Thanking him for the compliment seemed dumb, so I went the wordless route instead. It wasn’t like I was able to speak, anyway, especially when he tugged down my bra so he could circle my nipple with his thumb.
I missed this belly-somersault, fuzzy-headed foreplay so much, and he was the only way I’d have this kind of contact with someone again. So big deal if I was enjoying it. How many more chances would I get?
He gave me another slow kiss that made me feel like honey while still caressing my breast.
“I was jealous,” he murmured against my mouth, “watching you watch Gavin. Seeing how you wanted to touch him.”
“You get off on that or something?” I whispered.
“I get angry.” He tightened his fingers in my hair. “And then I get what I want.”
I get what I want. Just like I was a collectible for sale.
It was then that I fully realized I was standing on a street with people streaming past and fake Dean’s hand in my bra. I wasn’t on display, but I may as well have been with the vulnerability that suddenly enveloped me.
Bracing an arm against his collarbone, I put some distance between us. He was all too humanlike except for the darkness that was surrounding his light brown irises like rings of black flame.
In a near panic, I pushed back at him with more force. “You can’t always get what you want. Ever hear that?”
“I’m making pretty good strides.”
I pushed again, and he lifted both hands, backing away from me, that shit-eating grin on his face. The jerk even rubbed his fingers together, like he was letting me know that they’d been caressing a part of me that no one had gotten to touch for well over thirty years.
Zipping up and then putting my bra back into place, I buttoned up all the need and desire, too. What had I been thinking? Or not thinking?
“Jenny, Jenny,” he said. “You let your emotions get the best of you, don’t you? But even if you’re angry at yourself for letting this go too far, you still liked it.”
I hated when he could see right through me. “You took advantage of me.”
“I don’t think that’s an easy thing to do, darlin’. You’ve got a strong will. Too bad that’s one of the qualities that drew me to you.”
“My activity is another quality, I know, I know. But you’ll get over it.”
“Maybe I will.” His grin grew. “Maybe I won’t.”
I glared. “It was a moment of weakness, okay? And you know that damned well, because you sat there watching me with Gavin. You saw how frustrating that was for me.”
Fake Dean hooked his thumbs into his jeans loops. “Go ahead. Tell me all about your tragic feelings for him. You’ve got a ghost crush, Jenny. That’s all it is. And what you refer to as ghost ADD is going to wipe that crush away soon, then you’ll be bored and ready for something new—the kind of something you just had.”
I laughed. “You know what you sound like? One of those guys who keeps a harem. ‘I promise you riches and love beyond your dreams.’ Then there’s the part where a girl becomes a part of his collection, forgotten now that the chase is over.” I pointed at him. “You like the chase, and after it’s done, you put your conquests into storage.”
The black flame had receded from his irises, and his hands lowered from that cocky belt-loop stance. “You’re wrong, Jenny. So very wrong.”
He’d told me how much he cared for every star up in his collection, and if I let myself believe the tenderness in his gaze right now, I’d be a goner.
He said, “You still have such a human conception of love. In my world, it’s never-ending. I have the capacity for—”
“Smooth talking.” Who was he trying to fool? “And, to think, back in that pub, you called Gavin a smooth operator.”
“He is, but not with every woman. He’s feeling close to Suze, and you know it.”
I shut my mouth. How could I argue with that when I’d felt it with every charged cell in my body?
“You can see it happening before your very eyes,” he added, tilting his head, “because Gavin doesn’t have anyone to really talk to these days. No one except for her. You’re going to end up bringing them together. Ironic, isn’t it? Because I know you’d love to keep them apart right now.”
“He’s not good for her,” I said. “He hasn’t told her about his past, and when Suze finds out that he’s got just as much darkness in him as . . .”
“His father?” Dean sighed. “You know that’s not true. Gavin has killed before, but it was out of protective instinct for Wendy and Farah. It wasn’t planned.”
His father’s death had been an accident, yes, but still, his past was something that could very well put a wedge between Suze and Gavin. And if my instincts about their body language and the way they responded to each other were genuine, Suze would need a wedge to avoid another bad relationship.
Dean narrowed his gaze at me. “You’d sabotage your best friend’s pursuit of a guy?”
“No.” Dammit, did he have to be so all-knowing?
“Your emotions are making you think of doing it. And if you can’t admit that, then you need to do a hell of a lot of soul-searching.”
I didn’t know what to say. He casually returned my stare, then smiled slightly, hooking his thumbs back into his belt loops.
“Ah, parting is such sweet sorrow, isn’t it? I should tell you that Louis has been calling on you, so you’d better go to him. After all, who am I to keep you from saving the world?”
“Hey, don’t—”
But he did, disappearing into nothing. My temporary body went right back to air and electricity, making me a real ghost again.
Making it real easy to search my soul when that’s all there was to me now.
17
Right after I flew in through an open window to Tim’s family room, Louis met me, his hands in his factory uniform’s pockets.
I said, “I heard you were calling.”
“We’ve got trouble.”
He led me to the hallway outside Tim’s bedroom, where I could see him and Nichelle sleeping like two larvae, wrapped in their sheets and facing each other on their bed, her arms reaching toward him as he huddled with a pillow.
Louis waved me inside. “On the surface, everything looks hunky-dory, but I’ve been checking in mentally with Tim since you left, mostly with my empathy.”
“And?”
“He’s been quiet on that front, mainly thinking about what he just watched on TV, as if he was trying hard to put his mind in the serene state that we wanted him to find in the first place. And I think the hallucination did make him try to behave. But then he fell asleep, and I figured I’d see how he was doing deeper down in the old soul cave.”
This sounded ominous, and I didn’t know if I was up for it. Dean had left me in a real mood, and all I wanted was for this one thing to go right. But I was getting a bad feeling in the pit of my essence . . .
“Louis, please don’t
tell me that we made things worse with the hallucination we gave Tim this afternoon.”
He moved to the side of the bed, standing over him. “Then I won’t tell you that. But I will tell you that what’s going on inside of him is uglier than ever.”
“Shit.” I stared at Tim sleeping peacefully while he cuddled his pillow like it was one of his broken basement toys. Why couldn’t he always be so rested and blank? “Did I accelerate the inevitable in him by frightening him to more violence when I took over the haunting?”
“I don’t think it has anything to do with you. He might be, as they say, wired this way. Heidi wouldn’t have gone to the lengths she did to consult Amanda Lee if there hadn’t been something serious she’d noticed in him. He’d gotten to the point where she was already worried.” Louis put his hands in his pockets again. “If we can’t sway him to the good side by going into his dreams or showing him what kind of harm he can cause, what else can we do?”
Twyla’s voice came to me. Let’s just, like, kill him.
“Louis,” I said, “I had a talk with my . . . you know. Fake Dean?”
He looked unsettled as he nodded.
“What Twyla said about just getting rid of people like Tim? It’s not an option. It might bring real darkness to us, and there’s no telling how we’d have to pay for that in the end.”
Maybe that was why some ghosts never called their reapers, I thought. Because they’d done stuff in Boo World that they would need to pay for, and they knew it. The only thing I wasn’t so worried about was what might happen when a bad seed like Tim made it into Boo World—I didn’t think we’d have to deal with him because, from my experience with Farah Edgett, dark forces sucked them out of the dimension right away.
Unless they found their way through a portal . . .
Louis’ velvet tone soothed. “Jensen, we can still stop Tim from a bad future. I absolutely believe that, so don’t worry about what Twyla says. And don’t let this setback with Tim make you feel responsible. We’ve got to be on the right track in helping him.”
It was so like Louis to be the optimist. I wanted to believe the same thing.
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