“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Cavendish,” I said, heading for the outlet again. The red pounding on my arm had spread farther, making me slightly numb.
Amanda Lee was off the phone, and now she yelled at me, the mellowness from today’s hallucination utterly kaput. “You didn’t have to go that far, Jensen! I could have grabbed her hand and written his name on that table!”
“And I probably could’ve manipulated her hand to do the same thing,” I said. “This way it looks like she did it. On CSI, they totally would be able to tell if someone moved her body, and we don’t want to screw with the chain of evidence or whatever.”
Louis was merely shaking his head as he kept powering up. “Yes, this way, the detectives will only wonder why she was moving after she died.”
Was CSI that good?
“But first,” I said, “they’ll be wondering why she wrote Tim’s name, and they’ll get busy investigating him.”
Louis clenched his jaw.
No time to argue. Now I had to charge up even more since going into Mrs. Cavendish had wasted me. While I did that, Amanda Lee called Ruben, even though chances were incredibly slim that Tim would find Nichelle at her house since she and Amanda Lee had no obvious connection. Then she went outside to wait for a patrol car. After I heard sirens, I couldn’t wait around anymore.
“Louis, I’m strong again. I’m going to try and catch up to Tim and Twyla. She might need help.”
“She can handle him, Jensen. Just rest some more.”
I looked at Mrs. Cavendish. I hadn’t done enough.
Streaming out the door, I headed for the freeway, hoping I could find Tim traveling southbound, driving toward the border with Twyla in pursuit. I even remembered the blue car parked in Mrs. Cavendish’s driveway, so I could identify it.
But things weren’t that easy. Ghosts—especially wounded ones—aren’t as fast as cars, and as hard as I tried, I couldn’t find the one I was looking for. My arm kept slowing me down most of all.
My frustration came to a head: Tim, the dark spirit, the injustice of how this universe worked.
I started to run out of steam, skidding over to the side of the freeway, close to Mission Bay, where the water spread like a gray tarp under the overcast sky.
Why couldn’t ghosts have unlimited energy? How unfair was that? I screamed at the injustice, just as Mrs. Cavendish had screamed when her ghost had seen her dead body. I almost started to cry, but I was too full of rage.
This had to be someone’s fault. I mean, who put monsters on earth to kill innocent women in the first place? Who just sat back in whatever cosmic throne they’d made for themselves and watched it all happen?
I knew of one entity that saw all the pain go by and had the power to do more about it than he was doing, and I couldn’t hold back from screaming at him, too.
“Dean, you son of a bitch, don’t just sit there watching this happen! Do something! Stop that bastard!”
And while he was at it, why couldn’t he deal with my own dark killer, wherever he was?
All I got in return was silence, except for the metallic roar of the cars on the freeway, the squawk of seagulls as they winged over me.
I shoved a middle finger at the sky, to wherever the star place was. “Is this fun for you, to see humans and ghosts and all us lesser beings thrown into chaos? Do you eat our pain, just like my killer wants to eat mine?” Then I went for a shot below the belt. “Do you want me to belong to him instead of you? Because that’s what he wants. . . .”
A whooshing vortex enveloped me as I spun skyward, pulled to a familiar plane.
The star place.
I had a body up here, so I panted and took in all the air I needed as I stayed on all fours, braced on that invisible floor that held me up from the purple, star-dotted sky around me. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a few glowing bodies suspended in the near distance—male and female, comatose and sublimely tranquil. Then I saw the standing white lotus pool sending up a pale glow.
A glare spot? A temptation to go into the light.
“Be my guest,” fake Dean’s voice said on my left. “I won’t stop you from going with your wrangler and taking that next step.”
As I moved, I winced. My arm keened like someone had taken a chomp out of it. And someone had.
I held my hand over the injury. “I didn’t come up here for that. You heard what I was saying down below.”
“Yeah, you’re pretty angry. At me, of all people.”
I almost told him he wasn’t a person. “You could’ve stopped Tim.”
Fake Dean had his thumbs in his belt loops, so casual, so careless. But then I saw the hurt in his eyes just before he closed his lids, opening them again and showing me the same cool cat as before.
He grinned. “There can’t be darkness without light, and vice versa, Jenny. I can’t stop darkness from operating.”
“You’re colder than I thought.”
He didn’t answer. Had I hit a bull’s-eye in him?
“Somewhere on the earthly plane,” I said, shakily rising to my knees, “there’s a killer on the loose. He wants to find his ex-girlfriend and hurt her. Hell, he wanted to hurt her earlier in the day, but someone took her place in a massive way. We can’t let him get away with that.”
“But he might get away. That’s the way of the world. It’s been like that since its inception, since the gods used humans in their games with each other, since man coveted another man’s piece of hunted meat. Someday, when everyone goes too far in their appetite for destruction, it’ll all end, but they have a ways to travel, Jenny.”
He was talking like he knew much more than he always claimed he did. He had to have the power to interfere with this one little thing. Why wasn’t he giving in to me?
Reading me, he said, “I don’t make exceptions. They tend to snowball. I’ve spent a lot of time learning risk management, believe me.”
This was going nowhere. There had to be something I could do. But how far would I go?
I thought of Tim’s bloody dreams, his fantasies that had starred all those brunettes who substituted for his mother. He’d seen his domineering mom’s face as he’d strangled Mrs. Cavendish, and I knew he would take his frustration in not being able to control her and Nichelle out on a lot more women if he wasn’t stopped.
“He’s going to get good at hunting,” I said to fake Dean. “He’s dreamed about it.” I thought of Tim’s first dream: the chase through the forest, the woman screaming for mercy. He’d wanted to hunt and kill all along, and he’d gotten the chance for the last wish today.
“You’re taking it too personally,” he said. “You’re relating Tim to your own murderer.”
“And why wouldn’t I?”
“You shouldn’t.”
Fake Dean dropped the cool act and walked over to me, getting to his knees and looking into my eyes. He gently removed my hand from over my wound and replaced it with his own.
Warmth and serene energy rushed into me, and I held back a content moan at the relief. And the desire.
I strengthened my voice. “You know that I met my killer today. Did that give you a thrill?”
“No.” He held my arm tighter. “It slayed me to watch it happening.”
I spoke before thinking. “Are you hoping my dark killer is going to push me into your arms? Was that your plan all along?”
“Jenny . . .”
“No—let me answer that. There’s no light without darkness and there was nothing you could do to interfere.”
“I wish you actually understood that. Do you think it gave me happiness to see that abomination taunt you today?”
He sounded tortured, gripping my arm harder. I almost melted into him, and I might’ve if I didn’t always suspect that he was playing one of his games to capture me.
“My killer’s also going to haunt me,” I said. “Isn’t that rich? He’s going to make sure I’m always looking over my shoulder. It is almost enough to make me want to go into the glare, but the
re’s that whole thing about me wanting to kick my killer’s ass before that happens.”
Dean smiled. “That’s the spirit.”
“Oh, you approve?”
“I do. That thing is off licking its wounds and building itself back up again, but I would banish him back to wherever he came from, myself, if . . .”
“You were allowed to. I know.” I reveled in his dizzying touch some more. “Can you at least tell me why he doesn’t have a wrangler who recaptures him and takes him back to wherever he came from?”
“Amanda Lee invited him back into this dimension. It’s up to her to put him back. The wrangler already did its job once, and it’s not its fault this one got away.”
“Sounds very bureaucratic, wherever it comes from.” I breathed, letting his touch pulse through me. “Today, I thought that dark spirit might be you. He used Cassie’s facade from when he reached into her yesterday.” I stopped, then said, “Did that thing get a part of me, too, back at the séance when it stabbed me?”
“No.” Dean smiled. “It was new to this plane back then, and it only learned recently that it could steal essences.”
“Can we regular ghosts do that?”
“You can’t.”
At least he could tell me that. “You like to switch your appearance, too. It sort of made sense that the dark spirit might be you, for a minute.”
“Dark spirits aren’t what you humans refer to as the devil, but they’re still deceivers.”
“You’re not?”
“Oh, I am. But I’m not altogether dark or light.”
When he took his hand away from my skin, his imprint stayed behind, like I truly belonged to him.
I looked at my wound and it was gone.
“Sometimes more light than dark,” he said, smiling again.
How I wanted to give in to that smile. . . .
But that’s not why I was here. “It seems that a creature with more light in them would want to stop a killer.”
“Jenny . . .”
“What about a trade?” What was coming out of my mouth? “What if I said I’d go along with your reindeer games if you’d just do this one thing for me?”
He tilted his head, narrowed his eyes. “Are you offering yourself to me?”
Now that the words were still ringing in the air, I couldn’t take them back. Actually, I didn’t even want to.
“Yes, I am,” I whispered.
22
Fake Dean began to glow at my yes.
His skin became as ethereal as the stars he’d collected all around us. His eyes darkened with pleasure, affection . . . whatever it was that an entity like him felt.
And I basked in that glow. It wasn’t only because he resembled my old Dean—to tell the truth, I was sick of comparing the two when they weren’t the same at all. I had developed some kind of bizarre relationship with this entity. He made me feel, and I could believe that he wanted me for the sake of me.
But that didn’t mean I would become just one of his stars.
As he cupped my face in his hands, I almost gave myself over to him, though. His light brown eyes . . . they promised a beautiful, perfect world where pain and loss didn’t exist. The world of his seduced stars.
I wrapped my fingers around his wrists. “Before I promise anything else, I want to hear you tell me that you’ll bring Tim Knudson to justice.”
“And what about your killer?”
“Why ask when you can’t do anything about it?”
He gave me a touché look, but then his gaze took on the darkness around his irises that meant there was something much deeper and complicated going on inside fake Dean. I burned with the want of him. Damn it all.
“You told me yes,” he said. “But you didn’t really mean it, did you?”
“I did. Just not in the way you were thinking.” I lowered his hands away from me. “You want me? Okay then. It would be for a night.” What was I doing bargaining with him? And offering a night? Damn, I sounded like a skeez.
He laughed. “One night. Unless I’m mistaken, weren’t you the one asking for a favor from me?”
I boldly went where no one probably went before. “Also, I want to know your name.”
For a flaring second, his irises expanded all the way, two burnished suns, temptation blazing in him like he wanted to agree to everything I was asking for.
“If I give you my name,” he said, “I give you too much power.”
“What would I do? Use it against you?”
“It’s been done before.”
In his eyes, I could also see all the years this entity had lived, could see eons of coveting and collecting and having his heart broken because this was all there was for him—a continual fight against eternal boredom.
As well as the need to survive.
I don’t know why I did it exactly, but I touched his face with my fingertips, feeling skin, the bristle of stubble, alluring warmth. All so real in the glow of the stars.
He smiled, and I knew in my heart it was sincere, aching, needing. But then he took my hands away from his face like I’d done to him earlier.
“No deal,” he said. “There’ll never be a deal like the one you want, Jenny. You see, I’m into this little thing called self-preservation, and everything you’re asking for goes against that.”
His rejection twisted inside me like a drill making me bleed drop by drop. Why, though, when I wasn’t supposed to care for him?
He helped me to my feet, and when I wobbled, totally unbalanced by my reaction to him, he slung an arm around my shoulders, walking me over the invisible floor that held us up above the stretching expanse of purple and stars.
“If there’s one thing you really should learn about this dimension,” he said, “it’s that you never overplay your hand with an entity who’s more powerful than you are.”
That drill in my chest began to hollow me out. This was starting to sound like a dismissal. Was he about to send me back to the earthly plane now, empty-handed? And why did it matter more than it should’ve?
We stopped over a cluster of stars miles below us, so far away that I couldn’t make out their bodies as much as their glows.
He pointed to them. “My newest bunch. I brought them here nearly twenty years ago in your time. I haven’t had any new ones since. These came in a cluster—a traveling group of bons vivants who had so much joy in life that it took me two of your decades to experience everything they had to offer. In the star world of their suspended minds, they keep living the good life over and over again, for as long as they want to. They kept me happy for a long time.”
Once, he’d asked me to stay with him here, just like this group. He’d wanted to give me never-ending happiness in a limbo where I wouldn’t remember my death or the pain of my old life, only the good. He’d even admitted that he would feed off my happiness until he got bored and wanted a new star.
“Why’re you showing them to me?” I asked.
“Because I want you to know that you were the first ghost who caught my attention in a while. You, however, won’t be the last.”
That drill inside me finished its job, leaving nothing behind but total emptiness. I didn’t know how I’d let fake Dean become this important to me. Hadn’t even known that hearing him say something like this would matter.
“It’s okay,” he said, squeezing my shoulder. “We can still be friends.”
He was imitating what my old Dean would’ve said if he’d actually broken up with me and our relationship hadn’t just faded away over time and distance.
I stepped back from him. “Is this fun for you?”
“That’s what you think I’m doing, having fun?”
“Yes. And all I wanted was help in making the world right. . . .”
“You wanted to make my world wrong. And that can’t happen, Jenny.”
So this was it. I was on my own, along with help from my friends. Us against the world.
I fought back the sinking pierce of disappointment t
hat threatened to rush up from my chest and into my throat, tightening it.
“You need to let me go now,” I said.
Was that sadness in his eyes again? Couldn’t be. Not from an entity that could only concentrate on his own needs.
“I see what’s going on here,” he said. “You’re jealous that I’d like to move on from you. But you can’t tell me that you were the ideal relationship, so what else do you expect from me?”
“Stop it with the games. If you’re trying to make me jealous, I don’t have time for it.” I motioned downward, to wherever the earthly plane was. Focusing on that instead of what was going on in my heart was so much better. “Let me go so I can get on with my responsibilities.”
He closed his eyes in what looked like pain, then smiled, the gesture barely there.
“I truly wish you good luck then, Jenny,” he said softly as the floor circled open like a swirling hole beneath me.
As I fell back to my dimension, my body turned to electricity and air, my heart going invisible. You could even say I didn’t have a heart anymore—at all.
At least he sent me to above Tim’s house, as the afternoon burned off with a gray cast into an equally colorless evening.
I wouldn’t think about him, I kept telling myself. Too many things to do. Too many lives to vindicate . . .
But I kept thinking, anyway.
As I descended, I noticed how, below me on the neighborhood street, the cops were at Mrs. Cavendish’s, blocking the area with yellow crime scene tape and patrol cars, authorities going in and out of Tim’s house. Neighbors had gathered outside the barriers, their arms crossed over their chests as they traded the news about Mrs. Cavendish and the suspect, Tim Knudson.
Amanda Lee was one of the crowd, even while standing apart from them. She almost blended with her Southwestern gypsy gear and the gray streaks running through the front of her red hair. I could tell she was listening to everyone talk around her, picking up vibes and sorting through them. The ghosts hovered around her like they were waiting for her to give them some direction.
I floated down and down, wanting more than anything to go to them as my nonexistent heart told me one more time to forget about fake Dean.
Another One Bites the Dust Page 28
