by Sarah Wynde
“I’ve always been a fan of the direct approach. Try saying, ‘I’m very attracted to you. Is the feeling mutual?’ And then when he says ‘yes,’ you say, ‘terrific, my place or yours?’”
Grace choked out a laugh. “And if he says ‘no’?”
Akira shrugged. “I can’t see that happening. I saw the way he was looking at you. But if he doesn’t manage an unequivocal yes, you just say ‘well, let me know if your feelings change,’ smile sweetly and move on. No big deal.”
“I don’t think I can do that.”
“Well, if it’s too soon for seduction, you should ask him out. On a date. A real date.” Akira spoke briskly, but then she paused. She frowned, nose wrinkling, and directed her words over Grace’s shoulder. “No go?”
Grace glanced behind her, even though she knew she wouldn’t see anything. “What is it?”
Akira lifted her chin toward the center of the room. “Nadira’s feeling the pull.” She sighed. “The shielding on the room must not be strong enough to break the connection. Back to the drawing board, I guess.”
“I was wondering...” Grace paused. Only one ghost in the room. Maybe this was the moment to ask Akira the questions she’d been thinking about.
“About?” Akira raised a brow.
“The whole unfinished business thing,” Grace started.
“Doesn’t work.” Akira shook her head.
“But Rose’s door — she only got it after Henry died, right?”
A hint of uncertainty creased Akira’s forehead. “I think that’s right. She and Sophia are watching movies at Nat’s, so I can’t ask her, but I’m pretty sure she said that.”
“So maybe the door had something to do with Henry, then.”
Akira rubbed her belly again, a rueful smile tugging at her lips. “It’ll be a long time before we can ask him. Even if he remembers anything, and I bet he won’t.”
“I wasn’t thinking about asking him,” Grace said. “I was wondering...” Grace couldn’t bring herself to say anything about Noah. What he’d told her, what she knew, it was private. It was up to him to decide what he wanted to share with other people.
But she had ghosts of her own.
“My dad suggested that maybe Dillon was a ghost because we couldn’t let him go. Because we were holding him here.” Her dad had specifically suggested that he was the one who’d trapped Dillon, but Grace wasn’t sure he was right about that.
Akira looked taken aback. She frowned. And then she seemed to have much the same reaction as Grace herself had had, flickers of expression — doubt, thoughtfulness, more doubt, rejection, curiosity, more doubt — crossing her face at high speed. “I don’t know. Wouldn’t everyone become a ghost, then? It’s not as if we ever want to let go of the people we love.”
“I’m imagining knots in a tapestry,” Grace said.
Akira shook her head as if to say she didn’t understand.
“The fabric of life, the plan, it is what it is.” Grace meshed her fingers together, like the warp and weft of threads on a loom. “Natalya can see the future because the future follows a pattern. Mostly. And then something happens.” She twisted her hands together, then pulled them apart. “A new path. But some of us, we fight the new path. We hold on. We refuse to let go. The threads become a knotted mess, instead of a picture.”
Akira wrinkled her nose. “You’re suggesting I might need to have more conversations with relatives, you know.”
Grace chuckled. “Sorry. Not what you want to hear. But I admit, I am wondering if there’s something we could do to open Dillon’s doorway. Not his unfinished business, but someone else’s.” She pressed her lips together, feeling a prickle at the back of her eyes.
“Not his dad,” Akira said thoughtfully. “He’s talked to Lucas. They’re good. Not his mom, either, or he would have gotten it after he met her. She definitely thinks he should move on. Ghosts kind of freak her out.”
“Really?” Grace blinked. She hadn’t noticed that — and she couldn’t imagine anything freaking Sylvie out — but she hadn’t spent a lot of time with her brother’s fiancée in the presence of ghosts other than Dillon. Not that she knew about, anyway.
“Little bit, yeah,” Akira said absently, frowning. “Makes sense, I suppose. In her line of work—” She shrugged. “No one wants ‘creating ghosts’ to be part of their job description.”
Her words trailed off and she frowned. “Nadira?” She pushed herself off the door she’d been leaning against since they entered the room.
“Stop that!” she said sharply. “Don’t! Wait. No!” She was turning, watching something Grace couldn’t see, her hands lifting, fingers spreading wide. “No, no, no, no!”
Lurching forward, she grabbed for the door handle. “This way. Go this way!” She yanked open the door.
“What’s wrong? What is it?” Grace said.
Akira turned to her. Her eyes wide, she opened her mouth before gasping and clutching her stomach. Dropping her head to her chest, voice rasping in her throat, she choked out, “Get Noah. Run!”
Grace ran.
33
Dillon
“If I had a superpower, I would like to fly,” Misam was saying.
“You’re invisible and you can walk through walls, dude. Isn’t that good enough?” Joe replied.
“No, it’s boring. I can’t do anything. If I was really invisible, maybe I’d rob a bank.” Misam had his arms spread wide, Superman-style, leaning forward against the tug of his attraction to Noah, letting it pull him along. “Would you rob a bank if you could, Joe?”
“Nah, probably not. My mom wouldn’t like it,” Joe replied.
“Your mom wouldn’t like it either,” Dillon said, turning and walking backward so that he could see Misam while still following Noah.
“Maybe she would rob a bank with me.” Misam abandoned his flying posture and skipped a few times to catch up with them. “If the bank belonged to bad people, she might.”
“Pretty sure if you use your super power to rob banks, you’re a super villain, not a super hero,” Joe said, sounding amused. “No matter who the bank belongs to.”
“All right, no banks.” Misam sighed, before offering more hopefully, “But maybe Mama would like being a super villain.”
“She’d have to wear a super villain costume,” Joe said. “Spandex.”
Dillon gave a snort of laughter, picturing Nadira’s reaction to that idea. And then he froze.
Something had appeared in the hallway behind them.
“Uh, guys?” Dillon said, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. He stopped walking.
An amorphous cloud was drifting toward them, a mass of patches of light and dark, plumes of shadow trailing off behind it.
Joe turned his head to look at him, then followed his gaze. “Shit!” He grabbed for Noah’s arm, his hand passing straight through and closing into a fist, then jumped in front of Misam, as if he could guard the little boy from the approaching darkness.
Misam looked, too. “What is that?” he started, before his mouth dropped open. “Mama?” he whispered the word, then shrieked it. “Mama!”
He hurled himself past Joe at the cloud. He passed right through it, his momentum toppling him over on the other side.
“Oh, no. Oh, no,” Dillon murmured the words like a mantra, like a prayer. The Faraday cage hadn’t worked, at least not the way they’d wanted it to. The bond between Nadira and Noah hadn’t broken, but Nadira had been shredded. Her energy must have been drawn through tiny holes in the mesh that surrounded the room. She wasn’t disintegrated, the way she might have been in the vortex, but fractured into hundreds, thousands, of particles of light and dark and color.
“Mama.” Misam rolled over and gazed up at the cloud above him. She’d stopped moving.
The cloud hummed. Not words, not that Dillon could distinguish, but a blur of sound. Maybe it was Misam’s name. Maybe it was just a hummed M.
“What is it? What’s happening?” Noah was st
aring blindly down the hallway.
Grace appeared at the end of it. “Noah,” she called. “Come back. Akira needs you!”
Noah didn’t hesitate. He plunged straight through the Nadira-shaped cloud that he couldn’t see and over Misam’s prone body, racing down the hallway to Grace. The two of them disappeared around the corner.
The ghosts didn’t move.
“Nadira?” Joe croaked. “Is that you?”
The hum got stronger.
“This is not good,” Dillon said, his mouth dry.
“Way to understate,” Joe muttered. He stepped past Dillon, approaching the vapors, then crouched on the ground. He held out his arms to Misam and the little boy crawled into them. Joe rose, taking a step back, holding Misam.
“Mama?” Misam looked toward the cloud, before giving a tiny whimper and burying his face in Joe’s shoulder.
“Nadira?” Joe repeated.
The hum sounded impatient this time. And somehow distinctly like Nadira. There were no words, but the tone was right.
Dillon joined the others. He reached out, his fingers brushing against and then through the dark wisps that might have once been Nadira’s shoulder.
“I’m gonna guess, you’ve never seen anything like this?” Joe said.
Dillon shook his head, feeling nauseous as he remembered the times that he’d let his car drive away without him. What if the airport walls had been shielded? What if he’d ever gotten far enough away from his car to visit his aunt in her lab? This could have been him.
“What do we do?” he said.
“We don’t panic,” Joe said firmly. He was patting Misam’s back, with short quick strokes. “She’s still here. We just need to… to put her back together. Somehow.”
“Do you think it—” Dillon glanced at Misam and bit back the words. He remembered how much it hurt when Akira drove away from the airport. The pain had been like nothing he’d ever felt before. And then there’d been the few brief moments when his grandmother’s vortex had ripped him away from his car. That had been agonizing while it lasted.
Whatever had happened to Nadira, it had definitely hurt, but Misam didn’t need to hear that.
“Do you think—” he started again, looking for an alternative ending to the words.
“Shit!” Joe exclaimed. Tendrils of Nadira were drifting away from them, back in the direction from which she’d come, like curls of smoke blowing in a breeze they couldn’t feel. “Noah’s gone too far away, he’s pulling us. Dillon, run, tell him to get back here.”
Dillon nodded and took off down the hallway, veering to the side to avoid crashing through the pieces of Nadira. He didn’t think they would stick to him, not like Chesney had in the vortex dimension, but he really didn’t want to find out that he was wrong. Not that Nadira would feel like Chesney — her essence would probably be spicy and warm and tart, maybe something like a lemon ginger cookie — but the thought was still horrifying. He didn’t want to carry little droplets of Nadira away from the rest of her.
“Noah,” he called as he ran. “Noah!”
He caught up to Grace and Noah at the doorway to Natalya’s scanner room.
“A chair, let me get you a chair,” Grace was saying to Akira. “You need to sit. Or lie down, maybe you need to lie down. The scanner table?”
Akira waved her away. She was folded over, gasping in sharp pants of breath, one after another, and then she exhaled in a long, slow sigh and straightened. “Okay, totally rethinking the natural childbirth thing.”
“Are you okay?” Noah demanded. “Should we call someone? An ambulance?”
Akira snorted. “For Braxton-Hicks? No.” But she rubbed the side of her mound of stomach, her expression worried. And then her eyes widened and she said, “But Nadira. Is she okay?”
“Not,” Dillon interjected. “Big-time not.”
Akira looked past Noah and saw him in the hallway. “What happened to her? I opened the door, but it was too late. She was being squished through the wall like it was a tube of toothpaste and she was the toothpaste.”
Dillon shot a quick glance over his shoulder, making sure Misam wasn’t in earshot. “She’s vaporized.”
“Vapor — what?” Noah spun to face Dillon. “What are you talking about?”
“You need to come back,” Dillon told him. “And not move away from her. Pieces of her are drifting around like, like I don’t know what. Like smoke. We need to put her back together somehow.”
“How are we supposed to do that?” Noah said.
“What can we do?” Grace asked at the same time.
Akira shook her head, biting her lip. “I’ve got no experience with this. Vaporized implies particles, though. Particles should attract? Like diffusion versus condensation, maybe? Or maybe something to do with cohesive forces. Van der Waals? Zero-point energy? That could imply fields. Aether, maybe? Could ghosts be a form of aether? Maybe energy’s always been nothing but a bad metaphor. But stronger bonds are better, of course. What could make an attractive force stronger?” She’d started off talking to the others, but by her last words she was muttering to herself more than to anyone else.
“What do we do?” Grace repeated.
Akira lifted her shoulders in a helpless shrug and stepped out into the hallway. She looked in the direction from which Dillon had come and grimaced. “Shit.”
“Is it bad? Is she — what do you see?” Noah asked her.
Dillon looked, too, but the other ghosts weren’t visible yet. At least not to him, but Akira had always been able to perceive their energy within her visible spectrum. He’d never even seen his grandma’s energy, much less realized it was dangerous.
“A lot of very upset ghostly energy, heading this way,” Akira replied. “And it’s getting stronger by the second.” She curved both arms protectively around her midsection.
Joe, still carrying Misam, rounded the corner of the hallway. There was no sign of the cloud of Nadira smoke.
Akira chewed on her lower lip and then her expression lightened. She took a hasty couple of steps backwards, back into the scanner room, and gave Grace a gentle shove toward the door. “Hey, I’m sorry about this, but I can’t risk having a seizure, not with Henry. Lack of oxygen is not exactly best-practice prenatal care. And since I’ve recently discovered that EMF shielding works on spirit energy, I’m going to leave this one to you guys. Knock when it’s safe for me to come out.”
“Wait, what?” Grace started, but Akira was already pulling the door closed behind her.
Dillon breathed a sigh of relief. At least he didn’t have to worry about Akira and Henry. They’d be safe in the scanner room.
“All right.” Grace pressed her hands together, holding them before her mouth in a gesture almost like a prayer. “Disintegrated ghost. And we need to re-integrate her somehow.” She looked at Noah. “Any ideas?”
Dillon had an idea. Not much of one, and he wasn’t sure he liked it, but it was better than nothing.
“I could try doing what Rose did with the other ghosts,” he said to Noah. “She gave them some of her energy. It made them solid.”
It was the obvious solution. And how different from texting could it be?
“Didn’t that make her start fading?” Noah responded.
“Yeah.” Dillon swallowed. How faded could he get before he started losing himself? Before he became stuck on one sentence, one idea? And what would his fixation be? He hoped he wouldn’t become some future ghost’s angry man or singing lady, more annoying than human.
But Rose hadn’t diminished, at least not yet. She was still as lively, with just as much personality, as if she were solid. He’d been watching her, hoping to see signs of deepening color, evidence that she was regenerating her own energy the way new ghosts could, but apart from the one day in the garden, he hadn’t noticed any.
Still, he was a reasonably young ghost and he could get plenty upset. If he gave Nadira so much energy that it made him fade, it might freak him out enough to make him so
lid again. And it was worth a try.
“Who’s fading?” Grace asked.
Joe and Misam were moving toward them, but slowly, walking backward. And now bits of Nadira were appearing, too, even more diffuse than when Dillon had first seen them.
“Dillon’s suggesting he share his energy with Nadira. The way Rose did.”
“But Rose isn’t really a ghost. She’s got that whole angel thing going on. Can’t she do any sharing that needs to be done?” Grace was tapping her foot on the floor, a nervous, impatient jiggle of the leg that told Dillon she wanted to get moving, do something, anything.
“She’s not here,” Noah answered. “She and Sophia were watching movies at your sister’s house.”
“Besides, she’s already too faded,” Dillon added.
“Well, let’s get her here,” Grace said, not hearing Dillon, of course. She shot a glance at the closed door behind her and added, “Actually, that’s an excellent idea. Let’s get Nat here, too. I left my phone upstairs. Can I borrow yours?”
“Yeah, sure.” Noah pulled out his own phone, unlocked it and handed it to her.
Grace stared at it. “Shit.”
“What’s wrong?” Noah asked.
She thrust the phone back in his direction. “I don’t remember her number. I never dial direct. I need my phone.”
“Right.” Noah took his phone back. “Go. I’ll—” He opened a hand to the hallway.
Grace raised her own hands and spread her fingers wide. She patted the air in a gesture that combined ‘stop’ with ‘slow down’ and maybe had some ‘be careful’ mixed into it, too. “I will be right back. Don’t do anything drastic.”
She paused, as if torn about leaving them, but Noah gave her a slight nod, and she shook her own head in response, then hurried away.
More of the Nadira cloud was drifting around the corner and Joe had stopped walking to wait for it. “Dillon?” he called. “Any ideas?”
“Akira says we need to make her stronger,” Dillon replied, returning to Joe’s side. “Stronger bonds attract better or something like that.”
