Every Breath You Take

by Chris Marie Green

  When it seemed to look around the room—for what? Help?—I made the wrangler speak, even though I didn’t know if they were capable.

  “You’re done,” it said in a lovely lady’s whisper, still gesturing for my killer to come to it. “You’re mine.”

  “No.” It was the tiniest sound I’d ever heard from my murderer’s rusty-coffin-nail voice, and what happened next was inevitable.

  I laughed at its fear.

  I laughed because I liked how the tables had turned. I liked seeing that it was just as frightened as I’d been these past couple of days—no, strike that. During my entire death. I liked this sign of weakness in the thing.

  But laughing only pulled its attention away from the wrangler materialization.

  With a freezing tremble, I lost concentration, lost my grip on the reaper, and the materialization disappeared.

  It was my killer’s turn to laugh as it started to grow its essence.

  Twice its size.

  Three times.

  It loomed. It seethed.

  “Jensen Murphy,” it said in that quiet screech. “You’re mine, my Valentine.”

  I tried not to let fear scramble me, but my essence quaked, draining more by the second, dripping out of me as the dark spirit only expanded more, covering the ceiling now . . .

  Wendy’s voice broke through the shuddering air. “Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle—!”

  Saint Michael’s prayer again. It’d worked for her before, and I prayed it would now.

  But my killer only laughed at her, too.

  Then it stopped laughing. Just like that. And it was only when the blob started shrinking and wailing and thrashing around as it retreated from me that I realized what Wendy had brought to the room with her.

  She was holding a pyramid of orgonite, and the object was starting to sip at the dark spirit like soda pop through a straw.

  I would’ve shouted and pumped my ghost fist while its black blobby form went skinny and pulled farther and farther toward Wendy, but the dark spirit began to change in other ways while it shrieked.

  It grew a face.

  As I recognized whose face it was, I screamed, too.

  16

  The face . . .

  It was Daniel the hiker from Elfin Forest, with his beard surrounding the horrific O of his mouth as the pyramid kept reeling him in.

  “Jen . . . sen . . . !” he managed to say just before he got sucked all the way into the center of the purple, orange, and yellow pyramid.

  And . . . bloop.

  He was gone.

  Except for the echo of his last laugh hanging in the air, digging at the corners of the room until that was gone, too.

  My killer. Erased just like that.

  Daniel?

  As his identity burned into me, I should’ve felt withering relief, but that wasn’t exactly what was pushing me to the floor, forcing me into a pool of weakness, badly in need of a charge.

  Numbness. Disbelief. Confusion. They were stirring me up, making me feel like I would never, ever come together again.

  I made it to a wall outlet, pronged my hand and plugged in, feeling waves of redeeming energy wiping through me. As my form pulsed with a ghost’s sizzling lifeblood, I found Wendy and Eileen across the room.

  They were staring at the pyramid as Wendy held it away from her like it was a bomb. She stumbled toward the glass coffee table and dropped it onto the surface. Even from where I was I could hear the glass crack. Then the two of them looked at me.

  “Jen?” Wendy asked, her voice shaking.

  “Everything’s okay.” I could barely even hear myself talk. “Just give me a minute. Or a thousand.”

  “From the look on your face . . .” she said. “Did you know him?”

  I could only nod. Very numb. The name Daniel—suddenly it had a different sound to it, dirty and repulsive. A different definition, too, because this wasn’t the ghost I’d known in Boo World. Yeah, I hadn’t known him well, but still. . . . Shouldn’t I have sensed it was him?

  “He was a . . . a ghost from Elfin Forest,” I whispered, tired, so tired. “A hiker who . . . hung out there. He seemed normal, and this whole time . . .”

  I couldn’t talk anymore. The hallucination gone wrong, the fear, the shock—they’d all done their damage, and I just wanted to shut down.

  But my brain kept going. Daniel had been there when Amanda Lee had first brought me to the Spirit Stalkers one day ago. Had he returned to San Diego from wherever he’d been, right at that moment, lured by the team’s interest in me? He’d been at the happy house, too, where I’d felt something malignant around me, thinking that my killer had been watching me, privately giggling with glee at what he was getting away with.

  I’d been right that whole time, and my form couldn’t stop fritzing because I was sick now, and all I could do was hold back a retch.

  But there was also something gagging at the back of my mind, like I needed to be thinking even more about Daniel than I was, like there was something else I still had to realize about him. . . .

  It wasn’t happening, though. The mist . . . The black mist was covering all my thoughts, and it was the first time I welcomed it.

  “Jen?” I heard Wendy saying. “Jensen?”

  Out of the corner of my gaze, I saw Scott float-crawling out of the fireplace, where he’d eased through the chimney. He joined Wendy as she tried me one more time.

  “Jensen!”

  I started to slip away into the nice, comforting fog of darkness. It was cold, yeah, but it shut out everything—my horrible death at the hands of a monster I’d known and, most of all, Daniel’s face as he’d been sucked into the pyramid. . .

  The sound of a gentle whoosh brought me back from falling all the way into the mist. So did Wendy’s and Scott’s gasps.

  I opened my eyes to see a real wrangler—not a materialization from me this time—descending from the ceiling with its veils, shroud, and faceless grace. Pretty, I thought uselessly. And not pretty.

  Eileen grasped Wendy’s hand. “What’s happening?” she asked as she looked around.

  She couldn’t see the wrangler. I wasn’t sure she’d seen anything, including the dark spirit. She’d only felt it all, and I wondered if that was scarier than really witnessing it.

  Wendy squeezed Eileen’s hand, silently telling her to be quiet, like that was going to make the three of them invisible to the reaper. Scott floated protectively above them.

  But the wrangler didn’t seem to care about them, anyway. It floated in sheer, dusky elegance over to the pyramid, picked it up in its gloved hands, then took a moment to sweep a blank, veiled gaze over to me.

  I thought I felt a terrible shiver roar through me, but I wasn’t sure because of the electricity from the outlet.

  The wrangler embraced the pyramid and . . . Weird, but was there a hint of its mouth under the veil?

  A grim smile?

  Fluidly, it floated up, up, through the ceiling, leaving a mark behind on the plaster like a huge cigarette burn, a liquid scar that faded, faded, faded away. I’d never seen a wrangler leave a burn, but maybe that was because of what it was carrying with it.

  Pure evil.

  I went back to charging up, leaving Wendy to answer the questions Eileen was shooting at her. It was just a bunch of mumbo jumbo to me, because the mist had hugged me again, rocking me to a place where I didn’t have to think about Daniel. . . .

  * * *

  “Jensen?”

  I heard my name through the fog. Who was bugging me?

  I didn’t want to leave this nice, warm haven. It was too much like the best bath ever, after a shitty day, when Calgon could take me away.

  But I did like the deep voice, whoever it belonged to.

  “Try again—you always get a rise out of her
,” I heard someone say. Wendy.

  The first voice—a guy—gave it another go. “Wake up, Jensen. I know you’re here. I can feel your chill.”

  This time, I knew who it was. The sunny rays that turned through me like a perfect day at a swimming pool were a dead giveaway, because whenever I was around him, that was how I felt.

  I opened my eyes to find Gavin kneeling next to me. I could tell I was invisible to him because he had that blind look nonseers get around ghosts, but at least he was here. Why did that make me think life was better now?

  I didn’t know if it was because of him or the outlet I was still plugged into, but I felt strong enough to materialize.

  “Hi,” I said softly.

  “Hi.” He smiled—this tough guy with the haunted, pale gaze, who looked like he’d be more comfortable in a street fight than in his own condo.

  My heart thing pounded while we didn’t say anything else for a moment.

  But then Wendy leaned down, putting her hand on Gavin’s broad shoulder. “Welcome back, Jen.”

  “Yeah,” said Scott, who floated on the other side of Gavin. “Welcome back. You gave us a scare. Again.”

  “It’s how I operate,” I said. “All or nothing.”

  Wendy added, “That dark spirit must’ve snuck through the patio door when it was open, and he was just waiting to spring. Hell, even the incantations I put up against him didn’t keep him away.”

  “His mentor,” I said. “He must’ve learned how to get around incantations from the best.”

  “But it was the orgonite that saved the day!” Wendy said, doing a victorious little dance move.

  Scott grinned, utterly charmed and in the best mood I’d seen him in for a while. It looked like he was all charged up, too.

  Eileen was standing a few feet away from all of us, her rosy-tan skin paler than ever, probably because she could see the materialized me. But she also had her hand over her heart, like she’d been invested in my recovery or something.

  “How long was I out?” I asked.

  Gavin was running his gaze over me like he wanted to memorize every curve, every inch. Yeah, I was definitely feeling better now.

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “I just got home.”

  Wendy said, “You’ve been in la-la land for an hour or so, but since you were charging up, Scott said you wouldn’t be going into a time loop. But who could blame you if you did? That was a real intense situation.”

  It all rushed back to me. Daniel. I couldn’t hide from the truth forever.

  Scott said, “We know whose face you saw on the spirit, Jen.”

  I nodded.

  “Well, don’t you worry, because he’s gone now.” Scott stuffed his hands into his ethereal jeans pockets. “Since a wrangler took him, that’s as sure a sign as any that he’s in hell or wherever he belongs.”

  The mist was scraping through me again, like it was all too willing to take me over. But . . .

  “The mist,” I said. “It’s still with me.” I sat up, my pronged fingers staying in the socket. “Why is it still with me if my killer’s gone?”

  Scott and Wendy exchanged glances. Gavin and Eileen just seemed confused.

  None of them had been around when Marg had figured out that my killer had sprayed me and Twyla with the mist. They had no idea what I was talking about. Heck, there wasn’t even any rule I knew of that said the mist had to disappear when my killer did—Amanda Lee had only been guessing about that—but it made too much sense for it not to be true.

  Mist wasn’t the only thing that’d been bothering me, though. “There’s just something about Daniel . . .” I said.

  Then, like a wave that came out of nowhere, a question smashed over me. “How could he be my killer if he was already in Boo World before the dark spirit busted through the portal?”

  Silence. Then, “Oh, shit,” from Scott. “That’s right. Didn’t Cassie know him?”

  Yes. Cassie was an old ghost friend who’d voluntarily gone with a wrangler a couple months ago, after the dark spirit had stolen her essence and made her far more depressed than she’d been when she’d committed suicide in life. She’d known Daniel in Boo World while the dark spirit had been in its limbo, so how did Daniel fit in with this murder mystery “solution”?

  “What if the killer was just putting on Daniel’s face to mess with me one last time?” I asked. “God, you guys, we’ve got to find the real Daniel just to see if the dark spirit took part of his essence recently and could impersonate him.”

  “Maybe,” Wendy said, “your killer just knew how to make you see Daniel’s face, and he didn’t even have to attack him.”

  “We still need to know,” I said, starting to pull myself away from the outlet.

  Scott held up a finger to stop me. “I’ll go to the woods.”

  But before he took off toward the chimney, he faced Wendy, and they looked into each other’s eyes. She reached out to touch him, but her hand only went through his.

  “Careful?” she said.

  He gave her a side smile. “Always.”

  I looked away from them. Unfortunately, I caught Gavin’s expression, but he could only see Wendy reaching out to the air, since Scott hadn’t materialized. Still, big brother didn’t look happy.

  Then Scott was off. If Daniel was in the Elfin Forest area, Scott would find him and hopefully get some kind of story out of him. And if nobody could track him down . . . ?

  No. Daniel couldn’t be my killer, not with what we’d just figured out about him knowing Cassie.

  “More and more,” I said, “this is feeling like a cosmic joke that my killer set up.” Then another thought crashed into me. “But, like Scott said, a wrangler came to collect the dark spirit, so . . .”

  Wendy’s voice was soft, like she was more worried about Scott than she let on. “There’s no way a wrangler would be involved with your killer. Is there?”

  Oh my God. What if, what if, what if?

  Eileen said, “Aren’t wranglers neutral? If that’s the case, why would one of them be your killer’s bad mentor . . . ?”

  None of us were calling Daniel the killer now. Dammit all, we were back at square freakin’ one. And, worse, we had more questions now than we did before, especially about how wranglers worked. Scary questions, too.

  Wendy was already on her way out of the room. “I’m calling Amanda Lee again to tell her about this. Gavin, make sure Jen relaxes until we have a plan. Eileen and I might be on the phone a while.”

  Eileen followed her into the hallway, leaving me and Gavin alone. The ghost and the haunted. Or maybe the haunted and the haunted.

  We had so much to say to each other that I wasn’t sure we knew what to say to each other. So he started off easy.

  “My sister,” he said. “She’s pretty good at this paranormal life, isn’t she?”

  “She’s great.” And that was no exaggeration.

  He glanced at the hallway, then back at me. His short-clipped brown hair made me want to run my hand over it, feeling the texture. God, I just wished I could.

  “I’m trying to accept her new life,” he said. “And that new boyfriend I can’t even see unless he shows himself. The good thing is that Scott does that most of the time. He says a lot of sirs and pleases, too.”

  Gavin was trying to cheer me up. Nice of him.

  “She could’ve fallen in with someone who treats her worse,” I said.

  “I decided I can’t stop her from any of it. I tried that before, and she defied me at every turn, so why fight the inevitable? It’s like teenage drinking—do you want them to do it out of the house, where they can crash a car, or inside, where they’ll be safe?”

  “Wendy drinks now?”

  “Nah. She’s pretty straight edge, and I’m sure Scott will keep her that way.”

  How open-minded o
f him. Then again, that’s how a lot of humans seemed to be these days. Also, Gavin wasn’t exactly a stranger to getting cozy with ghosts.

  “Paranormal research is just what Wendy was meant to do.” I tucked some phantom hair behind my ear, self-conscious, way too close to Gavin. “She’s a seer. You can’t fight that.”

  “There’re a lot of things you can’t fight.”

  Oh man. What did he mean? Was he talking about Wendy? Or . . .

  I hoped he wasn’t talking about him and me. Actually, I did hope he was talking about us, but it wasn’t going to happen. Not if I wanted to be a true friend to Suze.

  The mist inside me disagreed.

  As we sat there, he shivered at my nearness but he didn’t take his gaze off me. The intensity of his focus sent a whirl through me that had nothing to do with the outlet electricity I was feeding off.

  “You look terrible,” he finally said.

  Well, if we weren’t going to be together, I guessed that was as good a start as any.

  “Thanks?”

  “I mean that you’ve been put through the wringer. Wendy told me about what happened. Too bad there isn’t a place where you could go to get away from reality.”

  The way he was looking at me told me he was being facetious. He knew there was a place, and he could take me there, even just for a short time, allowing me to recover my mental bearings and then charge up again.

  He got up and went to one of the cavernous chairs, and sat and rested his hands on the armrests, leaning back his head until his neck arched. His Adam’s apple strained, and I wanted to run my fingers over that, too, feeling his skin, his warmth.

  “It’s been a long day,” he said.

  His invitation couldn’t have been clearer. He wanted me to come into a dream, to be with him in the only way we could manage.

  Don’t do it, my better instincts screamed. Think of Suze.

  Do it, said the mist.

  Heaven help me, but all I wanted was a safe place right now. Still, when he closed his eyes, I didn’t move. I only watched him, yearning, battling myself.

  I stayed that way for a long time. Long enough for his breath to even out, for his head to roll to one side, until he looked as innocent as a beaten angel. It was his damned long eyelashes that made him that way.