A Gift of Grace

by Sarah Wynde

  Dillon started to form another text message to Grace, but before he could complete it, the pressure that he’d been fighting against began to ease off. He stumbled forward, almost falling on top of Joe. Nadira and Misam were beyond Joe, Mona with them.

  Dillon glanced over his shoulder. Rose was holding a sobbing Sophia and she looked different. She’d never been a fader, but the pink of her sweater looked deeper, the gold of her hair brighter. She seemed denser, more solid, and almost glowing, as if she was lit from within.

  Dillon stopped pushing away from them. No answering tug began drawing him back.

  Nadira kept going, carrying Misam out into the street and down it. Dillon could see when she hit the edge of her range, because she leaned into the pull, bracing Misam’s head with one hand. It looked to him, though, to be about the usual distance that she could get away from Noah, not a response to the vortex.

  “Are we okay? I can’t feel it anymore.” Joe had his arms extended, as if to shelter the others from the pull, but he let them drop to his sides.

  “I think so,” Dillon replied. He looked back into the restaurant. The angry man was standing near Rose and Sophia, his mouth moving as if he were muttering his usual phrase. Some of the wisps and faders were also clustered around them. Chaupi was emerging from the kitchen, his expression mildly questioning, as if he had just noticed that something unusual was happening.

  “You need to leave,” Grace repeated, clutching her phone.

  Exhaling with relief, Dillon sent her another text.

  Her phone chimed. Grace blinked at her screen. “Oh. Okay. Maybe not.”

  “Okay?” Noah stared at her.

  Still staring at her phone, she asked, “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” Noah replied.

  Grace’s gaze flickered to him, then returned to her phone.

  She wasn’t asking about Noah, but about the ghosts, Dillon realized. She was waiting for him to answer. But he didn’t get a chance to send her a message before Joe grabbed his upper arm and hauled him out the door and into the street.

  “We need to talk,” Joe said, towing him toward Nadira.

  She’d turned to look back in their direction, but she wasn’t coming any closer. Her arms were wrapped around Misam, clutching him to her in a fierce hug. He wasn’t kicking to be let down, but his head was craned to look their way, too.

  Mona turned to the glass window at the front of the restaurant. “Vinegar,” she said. “I can get rid of these smudges.” With frantic energy, she began polishing the window.

  Dillon didn’t resist Joe’s pull, although he shot one last glance at Rose. She was patting Sophia’s back soothingly. Sophia’s sobs looked like they were slowing down, her body shuddering with gulping, shaky gasps.

  “What was that?” Joe asked.

  “How could Sophia open a gateway to Hell?” Nadira demanded as soon as they were close enough. “Is she a demon?”

  “No, no.” Dillon shook his head. “I don’t think there’s any such thing as a demon. Or at least I’ve never met any.”

  “Hell has demons,” Nadira said, her voice rising. “Pits of fire, scalding water, black smoke, burning wind. And demons!”

  Dillon patted the air with his hands, fingers widespread, trying to soothe her. It would be just his luck if he upset her so much that she turned into a vortex ghost herself. “It’s not exactly hell then.”

  “What exactly is it then?” Nadira asked, her dark eyes shooting daggers at him.

  “It’s…” Dillon didn’t know where to start. He should have told the other ghosts about the vortex weeks ago. But it wasn’t something he liked thinking about. Every time he remembered Chesney’s ghost — the feeling of his energy, that grimy chemical burn enveloping him — he felt both guilty and revolted.

  He’d hated Chesney, he really had. But he was pretty sure he’d destroyed Chesney’s soul and he didn’t much like having that on his conscience. Knowing that Chesney would have happily destroyed him and his parents didn’t make him feel any better about it.

  “It’s what?” Nadira snapped.

  “It’s another dimension, I think. An energy dimension. It’s not burning, but it’s…” Dillon bit his lip. He didn’t want to scare them. Or did he? They needed to be warned. “It’s very unpleasant,” he finally finished.

  “Hell is more than unpleasant.” Nadira’s grip on Misam started to relax as if Dillon’s words were reassuring her.

  “Yes.” Dillon sighed. “Akira used to think vortex ghosts destroyed other ghosts. But it’s not the ghosts so much as it is the energy. Too much spirit energy creates a hole that opens into…” Dillon spread his hands, searching for the right words. “It’s like an ocean. Of energy. It feels like chaos, but it’s a place of… of unbecoming.”

  “Of unbecoming?” Joe repeated, inching closer to Nadira and Misam.

  Dillon lifted his shoulder in a shrug, trying for a nonchalance that wouldn’t reveal his fear. “Maybe it’s the universe’s way of cleaning up leftover spirit energy. But we get sucked in and then, well, souls dissolve into nothingness there. Or get…” He swallowed. “Shredded.”

  Should he tell them that he’d been the one doing the shredding? But if they got more upset, they’d create more energy, and the more energy they created, the more danger they’d be in.

  Misam whimpered. “I don’t want to be shredded.”

  “Nobody’s getting shredded,” Joe said. He and Nadira exchanged glances.

  Dillon couldn’t tell from their expressions what they were thinking. Did they just not believe him? They’d felt the pull, the same as he had, but Noah had been dragging them around for years. Maybe the vortex hadn’t felt different enough for them to appreciate the danger. He didn’t want to frighten Misam, but he had to make them understand the risks.

  “Ripped apart,” he said. “Broken down into component bits.”

  He paused.

  They didn’t say anything.

  “Dead,” he added. “Really dead. Gone for good, no longer existing in any form. That kind of dead.”

  Joe put a hand on Nadira’s shoulder. “Okay, that doesn’t sound good.”

  Nadira snorted. Her grip on Misam had tightened again. “No. That sounds very bad.”

  Dillon nodded. “You guys must never have gotten really angry at one another.”

  “They argue all the time.” Misam wiggled to get free. Nadira set him down, but kept a careful grip on his hand. “All the time!”

  Nadira glanced at Joe. He seemed to realize he was still touching her shoulder and removed his hand, stuffing it into his pocket self-consciously. Nadira’s lips twitched as if she didn’t know whether she wanted to smile or scowl.

  “It’s not the same,” Dillon said. “My gran turned into a vortex ghost. When she died, she was... upset. Grieving and angry and lost. She couldn’t find me and she got stuck between the dimensions. And then later, I met this other ghost and he was threatening my mom. He made me mad.”

  Dillon dropped his gaze, staring at the sidewalk. He’d known better. He’d been aware of the danger. But his feelings had overwhelmed him and he hadn’t been able to control them.

  Softly, he said, “Despair is very powerful. And very dangerous.”

  “Okay,” Joe said briskly. “No despair. Got it.”

  “No despair,” Nadira agreed. She sniffed. “It is a great sin and I am not inclined to it, anyway. But if you have been to this other dimension, Dillon, why are you not—” She opened her fingers wide.

  “Disintegrated,” Misam finished for her.

  “I didn’t get trapped there,” Dillon said. “I started texting my mom and I sort of gradually faded back into this dimension.”

  Nadira’s eyebrows shot up, her expression dubious. “So to save ourselves from this place that is not-quite-hell, we must learn to text?”

  It was partly relief — that they believed him, that they weren’t asking harder questions, that Nadira was looking for solutions instead of g
etting upset — but Dillon gave a snort of laughter.

  “I suppose. But it would be better not to wind up there. We need to find a doorway. The other kind of doorway.”

  And they needed to find it soon. Dillon had wanted to help the other ghosts since the day he’d met them, but he hadn’t felt any urgency about it. They’d been trapped with Noah for years. What difference did another few weeks or months make?

  But if a vortex was a build-up of spirit energy being discharged into another dimension, maybe Noah wasn’t responsible for the accumulation of ghosts around him. Maybe the ghosts were forming their own whirlpool of spirit energy — enough to attract other spirits, but not enough to break through into the energy dimension.

  At least not until now.

  And if that was the case, even if Rose had managed to save them for the moment, one more ghost — or one more burst of intense emotion — could become the tipping point, the last straw that plunged them all into the void.

  17

  Grace

  Dillon wasn’t answering. Grace stared at the screen of her phone, feeling her breath tight in her throat. Was he all right? The last text — Nvm, it’s ok— stayed steady on the screen, no new letters forming. It certainly implied that he was fine, but damn it, why couldn’t he share a few more details?

  “Are you okay?” Noah asked.

  Grace glanced up to meet his frown. She’d been staring at her phone for too long, she supposed. Long enough that he’d realized something was wrong.

  “I’m fine.” She stuffed her phone in the side pocket of her bag. She could try talking to Dillon again but she was reluctant to do so in front of Noah. The guy was a skeptic. He wanted a logical explanation for everything, including Maggie’s ability to know what people wanted to eat before they even walked in the door. He didn’t believe in auras and when she’d hinted at her sister’s gift, he’d practically rolled his eyes at her.

  Okay, maybe he hadn’t been quite that bad, but he’d definitely made his distrust clear.

  And it was more than doubt, it was distrust. Grace almost wished Lucas were here so that he could read Noah’s mind and tell her what was going through his head. If she was going to fulfill her father’s wishes and hire him, though, she couldn’t afford to scare him off by having conversations with the empty air.

  She gave him a bright smile. “Let me just pay.”

  Noah nodded and stepped outside.

  Grace paused for a moment until she was sure that he was waiting by the door for her, then headed back to the counter.

  Maggie came out of the kitchen carrying a bag. She passed the bag to Nat. “Here you go. Irish stew, side salad, soda bread, and a caramel apple crisp. You might want to pick up some vanilla ice cream to go with the dessert.”

  “Yum!” Mitchell had been sitting obediently on his stool, but he jumped down and reached for the bag. “I love stew.”

  Maggie winked at him as she stepped to the cash register. “Must have been your night.”

  At the counter, Kenzi gave a sudden shiver. “Ooh, sizzles,” she chirped. She spun her stool around. “I have sizzles again.”

  “Sizzles?” Natalya shot a sharp glance at her daughter. “What kind of sizzles?”

  Kenzi was jittering, almost dancing in her seat. “Good sizzles,” the little girl said, sliding off her stool.

  Grace put a hand over her phone, feeling its reassuring solidity, the angles under the soft leather of her purse. Were those good sizzles similar to the ones Kenzi had felt at the wedding?

  Natalya passed her credit card to Maggie, but both of them were watching Kenzi. The little girl looked around the restaurant, and then, like a homing beacon, headed straight to the booth holding Kaye Mulcahey and Abe Voigt.

  Natalya frowned. Grace slipped her phone out of her purse, thumbed it on, found the text messages she’d received from Dillon, and tilted it so Nat could see the screen.

  Her sister’s brows raised and then she nodded. “I should have guessed.”

  Grace’s answering smile was wry. Natalya could see her own future in as much detail as most people remembered their own pasts, but ghosts threw off her ability. According to one of the mathematicians in GD’s materials-modeling department, ghosts were a random variable introducing chaos into a dynamic system.

  Life might be predictable, at least as much as the weather was predictable — not necessarily from moment to moment, but in general strokes — but ghosts were the equivalent of the unstable air in a thunderstorm forming a tornado or the tectonic shifts that created tsunamis. If Natalya was surprised by Kenzi’s behavior, it was because ghosts were influencing the material world in unexpected ways.

  “He reacted,” Grace said softly. “He said he had to leave, got up to go.”

  “He? Oh.” Natalya shot a quick glance at the door. Grace was tempted to turn and look herself, but if Noah was watching, she didn’t want him to think they were talking about him, even though they so clearly were. “Yes, I suppose that could be.”

  “Could he feel it, do you think?” Grace asked. Akira could feel the vortexes. In fact, she’d been killed, albeit temporarily, when she’d encountered one. If the same was true for Noah, he might be in as much danger as Dillon could be.

  “Hmmm.” Natalya took her credit card back from Maggie. Her murmur didn’t sound like a yes or a no, just a noncommittal acknowledgement.

  Grace held back the sigh that wanted to escape. Why must her family be so frustrating? Was a straight answer really too much to ask for?

  She pulled her own credit card out and handed it to Maggie.

  “Everything okay?” Maggie asked as she slid the card through the reader.

  Grace couldn’t tell from her expression whether the question was a pro forma courtesy or a worried acknowledgement of the shattered lightbulb and her hushed conversation with her sister.

  “Lunch was delicious, as always,” she replied. “As for anything else…” She shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  Maggie shook her head. “I swear this is your father’s fault,” she muttered. “As if a haunted restaurant is nothing. No one wants to be thinking about death while they eat dinner. Not to mention the implications. I don’t want my customers wondering whether my cooking kills people.”

  “If it did, they’d die happy,” Grace offered.

  Maggie did not smile. “Lima beans. And…” She paused, head tipped to one side, face screwing up with vague disgust. “Cod with cheese sauce? Who would do that?”

  “Oh, yuck.” Grace put a hand up in protest. “My college dorm cafeteria. Every Friday. Please, no.”

  “Baked, maybe.” Maggie stopped in the act of handing Grace’s credit card back to her, eyes unfocused. “With goat cheese. Chives. Maybe some lemon zest.”

  “That sounds delicious,” Natalya said.

  “Which would defeat the point.” Maggie pushed Grace’s card the rest of the way in her direction.

  “No ghosts, I promise,” Grace said quickly. “Not that I have anything to do with it. Them. Ghosts. I don’t know anything. About anything.” She took her card, lifted her shoulders in a shrug, and offered Maggie a conciliatory smile.

  Natalya’s gaze was on Kenzi as the little girl patted Kaye Mulcahey’s hand. “I don’t think you need to worry about losing customers. Not today, anyway.” She glanced back at Maggie and added, “And Dad was miserable when you were angry with him. I’m sure he’s learned his lesson.”

  Maggie pursed her lips, but her eyes were amused. “Good.” She nodded toward the bag that Mitchell still held. “Enjoy your dinner.”

  “Always.” With a wave, Natalya rounded up the boys, called to Kenzi, and headed for the door.

  Grace was about to follow suit, but as she started to say good-bye, Maggie indicated Noah with a tilt of her chin. “And enjoy the rest of your date. He’s quite something.”

  “It’s not a date,” Grace said quickly. “He’s not — we’re not — I’m going to hire him. For GD.”

&nb
sp; “A scientist?” Maggie’s brows shot up.

  “Security, probably. Or Special Affairs.”

  Maggie frowned in Noah’s direction. “Special Affairs? Huh.” She gave a snort, followed by a sigh and a glance back in the direction of the broken light bulb. “Ah, well, I guess Max is off the hook, then. He’s like Akira, is he?”

  “Something like that,” Grace replied vaguely. Inwardly, though, she winced. Maggie was no gossip, but information flowed through Tassamara like water through a sieve. It was like osmosis: what one person knew, the whole town knew within days. Grace suspected it was an inevitable side-effect of living in a town of psychics, but maybe it was just a small-town thing. Either way, she still had no idea what Noah knew about his situation, if anything. It seemed a bit unfair that in the very near future, the entire town would know more than he did.

  She said good-bye and followed her sister to the door. Noah was waiting for her outside. Natalya and the kids had already disappeared down the street.

  “Thanks for lunch,” Noah said, unsmiling. His expression was opaque. Grace had no idea what he was thinking.

  “Time for your tour of GD?” She intended the words as a statement, definitive and assured, but somehow an interrogative lilt escaped, turning them into a question.

  “I don’t think—” he started.

  She interrupted him. “You want to meet Akira. You really do.”

  “So I’ve heard,” he responded dryly. A corner of his mouth lifted.

  He had a really nice mouth, Grace noticed, not for the first time. She smiled back at him. “First step. Visit the company, let me show you around, see how you like the place. It can’t hurt.”

  She waited, holding her breath, as he considered. “We don’t bite,” she finally added, a hint of exasperation in her tone. After all, how many job offers came with no questions asked? Plenty of people would be delighted to get this kind of welcome from General Directions.

  “No?” he responded with a flash of humor in his eyes.