Every Breath You Take

by Chris Marie Green

  She saw how stiff we all were and didn’t say anything, not even when J.J. and Sierra looked at each other, probably recognizing another ghost entrance when they felt one.

  “Is everything okay?” Amanda Lee asked Suze, watching me.

  “I’m . . . not sure. God, I feel stupid for calling, but I’m here in my apartment, and . . . Is Jensen with you?”

  “Right here,” I called, making my voice audible.

  “Oh.” Suze’s breathing came over the line. “I was hoping . . . thinking . . . Well, that it was you in my apartment, Jen.”

  Fuck.

  I brought up a travel tunnel, and it crowded the room with its pink, swirling innards, inviting me in. I dove to it and heard it crash closed behind me, and, within a few smothered heartbeats, I was in Suze’s parking lot.

  The tunnel popped away, and I didn’t even have time to make a plan as I zoomed to Suze’s door. Everything seemed normal enough: no flashes in the windows, no screeching from inside.

  But wasn’t Randy supposed to be watching Suze from a distance? My nerves took a breather. Maybe she was only hearing him floating around drunkenly?

  Since Suze had a mail slot, I slipped through it and materialized into her living room, with her family’s old couch and that out-of-date TV by the full bookcases.

  Deathly quiet. She’d said she was calling from here, right?

  I followed the pool of light seeping from her kitchen, and when I came around the corner . . .

  Oh God.

  Suze. Against the wall.

  She’d dropped her phone because her arms were spread, just like Elliot’s and Angel’s had been when I’d found them by Amanda Lee’s pool. Her saucer eyes were staring into the distance, and she was shivering like she’d been buried in snow.

  She was in the middle of a hallucination that the dark spirit must’ve been giving her.

  Horror fritzed through me. Today, when the dark spirit had gone into Eileen the cleaner’s body and joined in her hallucination with me, there’d been a surge of electricity at the end. If I hadn’t flown out of her so fast, what damage would I have done?

  Would two ghosts be too much for Suze to take? God, I wasn’t going to do anything to hurt her. So what could I do?

  Sitting here and watching my best friend being tortured by fear wasn’t an option—

  A blast of electric air came from the hallway, and suddenly there was Randy, as pale and weak as always, standing before me.

  And if my killer was in Suze, he couldn’t be Randy at the same time—

  “Jen!” he said in that drunken-sailor voice that sent a streak of comfort through me. “I heard a shound—a yell—at the back of the ’partment, ’n’ I went to . . .”

  He saw Suze and fritzed, opening his mouth, no words coming out.

  Dennis must’ve thrown sound to another part of the apartment to distract Randy, but we’d all been fooled by him at one time or another.

  “How do I save her?” I asked.

  “Don’t know.”

  Suze convulsed on the wall like she was in electroshock therapy.

  “I can’t go in and get him,” I said. “She might not be able to handle my energy, too.”

  “Maybe she can’t handle more of thish . . .”

  He was right, but what if my added electricity was enough to shock her to death?

  When she uttered a weak, mewling cry, I couldn’t take it anymore. I rushed to her, leaning against her hard.

  “Forgive me, Suze . . .”

  As I traveled past her flesh and joined with her brain, darkness hugged me until . . .

  A storm. Lightning hitting us until we scream.

  Pain . . . death . . . so close!

  A set of teeth flies toward us, and all of us yell.

  All of us . . . a trinity. Three in one.

  And the teeth know just where to strike as they open wide, coming at us like sharp white fog in a black storm, opening, opening—

  We hold to each other, gripping, bracing for the crashing bite that—

  When I barged out of Suze’s body, I wasn’t the only one.

  Another entity was wrapped around me, bound to me by the extra electricity we’d created in Suze, connected to me like a Siamese twin as I heard my best friend scream again.

  But I couldn’t see if she was okay, because my killer—I could feel it was him—was a part of me now, sizzling into me, a Frankenstein creation from our time together inside Suze.

  Thinking fast, back to a science class in school, I hardened all of myself to one long blade, and Dennis’s electricity crackled into me as I conducted his energy into the floor beneath us.

  His enraged screech filled the room, and I had just enough time to see that Randy was doing his best to shield Suze, his arms shaped into knives, because that was the best he could manage with some of his essence stolen.

  Dennis recovered fast—before I could go back to regular form—and in his true, boyish guise, he gestured to Suze.

  Behind the sheer cover of Randy, she flinched as a welt appeared on her cheek.

  Poltergeist, I thought. This asshole knew every trick.

  “Run!” I shouted in a materialized voice.

  She stumbled away from the wall as Dennis motioned at her again.

  Suze crashed to the floor, her legs entangled, twisting around each other. She cried out as they kept bending into unnatural shapes, like invisible hands were turning them into pretzels.

  I made my arms into whips with blades on them and lashed out at Dennis. That caught his attention, and he bladed up, too, charged weapon against weapon as we prepared to go at each other.

  Suze crawled out of the kitchen using just her hands and arms as Randy zoomed over to help me, and I flashed him a quick look. Just go!

  Powerless, he glanced at Suze. He couldn’t do much to help her except urge her on, but when Dennis swung at me with his blade, I left Randy to do his own job. I heard a set of keys jangle to the floor and hoped he’d manipulated them to Suze for her car.

  Then it was all about Dennis.

  “Whoo! What a hallucination that was,” he said with a smile as I dodged another swipe. “Suzy-Q was almost ready to lose her shit, but it almost did the same to me! You just never know what you’re gonna get when you’re giving ’em bad scenes.”

  He laughed facetiously and backed off, circling me like he’d forgotten about Suze already.

  At that moment, I knew what he was doing. He’d enjoyed haunting her for a short time, but he’d wanted to get me alone, and now he was toying with me. I knew he could do a hell of a lot more than he was doing right now.

  “You came quickly,” he said. “But, then again, I thought you’d do just that for your bestie darling friend.”

  “I wouldn’t want to let you down.”

  “That’s what I like to hear.” More circling. “But I regret to inform you that Mrs. C. wasn’t able to track me here, so you’ll have no help on that end. She got into my travel tunnel with me, smart woman, but I kicked her ass out. Hopefully she found her poor way home to nurse her wounds.”

  At least she hadn’t ended up like Elliot and Angel. I hoped.

  “Where’s your demon?” I asked, circling, circling. “Aren’t you his . . . What do they call it today? His little bitch?”

  Dennis faltered, but went right back to circling. His light eyes held anger but not the giddy fever I’d seen when he’d murdered me.

  I wasn’t sure what was more dangerous.

  “I told you, I don’t always need that thing with me,” he said. “When I tell it to get lost because I want to take you down all on my own, it gets lost.”

  “What did you give to it in exchange for your education? Definitely not your soul, since yours isn’t worth anything.”

  Dennis slowed down, and I tensed up.
/>
  “I gave it my misery,” he said. “I gave it my service, bringing pain and terror to the world. Believe me, it appreciated that.”

  “Did it ever occur to you that you’re going to an even worse place than you were before?”

  “There is no worse place.” He smiled. “Maybe I’ll show you how bad it can get—”

  He raised one arm again, but I was expecting a blade.

  He gave me a tentacle instead.

  Caught off balance, I tried to flash out with my sharpened arms, but the tentacle snaked past my blades, sucking around me, raising me and slamming me to the floor.

  But how could he do that when I hadn’t hardened my essence?

  Why even ask anymore?

  As he used one tentacle to keep me down, he turned his other arm into an ax.

  Sparks hissed from me, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. An ax . . . the scariest thing I could imagine.

  And he was swinging it down, just like that night after he’d chased me, made me cower in the forest under the gaze behind that hag’s mask.

  But this time, instead of the blunt side of the blade hitting me in the head and making me black out, he corrected his aim.

  I screamed as the blade buried itself into my skull, splitting it.

  But I was still conscious, and all I could do was flicker in shock. It couldn’t be a hallucination, could it? Or had the more powerful demon taught Dennis a way to do one on a fellow ghost?

  “This is how it should’ve happened,” he said, and now his eyes were crazy and ecstatic, just like they’d been right before I’d died. “I’m going to enjoy this. . . .”

  As I shuddered in creeping trauma, fear pulsed out of my head wound, uncontrollable. And he was devouring it, his form coloring up.

  His eyes turning a fervent shade of beastly blue.

  He pulled his ax arm out of my head as I jerked, losing energy with every passing instant. He raised the weapon again.

  Then I remembered something . . . Wendy. She’d told me about fending off darkness and finding a more powerful spirit, a good one who could beat the bad one. . . .

  I grasped at the only option I could think of.

  “Dean . . .” I whispered brokenly. “Fake Dean . . . Help me?”

  21

  My words seemed to drift in the air, suspended, rising until they were nothing.

  And in that endless second between my killer bringing down the ax on me and the scream that was just starting to push out of my throat, I knew fake Dean wasn’t coming.

  Had he decided I wasn’t worth his time? Or was it all about his banishment?

  Or maybe he had never been a positive spirit and he couldn’t have helped me, anyway. . . .

  As the ax swung down toward my face, I thought, Maybe the glare would be better than this. Maybe I am ready.

  Then something snapped in me and, mindlessly, I gathered the last of my energy, raising my bladed arm.

  I wasn’t going to go that easy.

  Everything sped up again: my arm met the stem of the ax like steel against wood, embedding itself into Dennis’s weapon arm as he yelled, maybe in frustration, maybe in something else.

  Either way, my arm quaked as I stared up at him and he put all his energy into pushing down the ax until its blade was a breath away from my ghost face.

  “Just go to the glare,” he said between his tiny teeth. “Dammit, why’re you so stubborn?”

  Yeah, why did I want to “live”? My mom and dad were dead and off beyond the glare, I’d alienated myself from my best friend, and I was alone.

  But then I thought about all the other victims I could try to help, the ones who’d been coming to me and Amanda Lee. And there was something else that eased into me only now, as that blade shook closer and closer toward my eye.

  I did have a family here. Louis, Randy, Wendy, and even Amanda Lee. And I wanted to see them again, couldn’t stand the thought of just calling for my wrangler to escort me to a glare without even saying good-bye to them. . . .

  Closer . . . closer came the blade . . . Electricity was still flowing out of the first cut to the head Dennis had made, and I didn’t know how long I could hold out.

  “Die the right way!” he said, and there was a worry in his voice that hadn’t been there before.

  This wasn’t turning out as he’d planned.

  The realization gave me more strength, and as I levered the ax back at him, his gaze took on some amazement.

  “Where’s your demon now?” I asked between my teeth.

  Button . . . pushed. Dennis Smith, a boy in so many people’s eyes, wanted to be a man. He wanted to carry this through on his own, completing a murder that hadn’t gone how he wanted in the first place.

  “Die the right way!” he said. “Go to the glare, damn you!”

  Not tonight.

  I cried out so loudly that a cuff of wind swirled around us. I forced myself up, swinging at him with my other bladed arm. Unsteady, Dennis reared away.

  He laughed, thinking that was the only card I had to play.

  Using the momentum from my swing, I went for the other side of his ax handle—the part of his essence he’d hardened—and buried my blade so solidly that I had a firm hold of the entire weapon now.

  As he tried to pull his ax arm away from me, his other arm, the tentacle, waved high in the air, ready to smack me down. But then, out of nowhere, an iron rod flew through the air like a javelin, cutting through Dennis’s soft part.

  He screeched, dissipating from the iron ghost poison, but he couldn’t go anywhere until I let go of his hardened ax arm.

  But if I kept him here, what would I do with him?

  I didn’t have to decide, because he’d made his ax go soft as his gaze locked on the entrance to the kitchen, where Amanda Lee, Sierra, J.J., and Twyla waited.

  Sierra raised her hand, revealing a bunch of rock salt gleaming there, and I wanted to tell these humans one more time: Salt actually doesn’t hurt ghosts!

  But when she threw the grains at him, his essence burned like acid had just hit him, and he began to whine and squirm.

  “For the demon in you,” Amanda Lee said calmly, lifting her own hand to show that she had another launch of salt ready to go.

  “Fuckers!” Dennis hissed, his essence burning and separating. But that didn’t mean he was stupid enough to stick around.

  He rolled out of the room in a black mist that moved in splotches, like he was trying to get himself back together . . . real unsuccessfully.

  The moment he was gone, J.J. gathered battery-operated appliances that Suze kept on the counter, plus a small TV with a long extension cord that was still plugged in. He turned on the TV and placed all of the appliances on the floor in the center of me, and I ate up the amps.

  “You were right!” Sierra said to Amanda Lee. “That little jerk said the demon was attached to him, so that thing must’ve left part of himself in Dennis. God, if the salt hadn’t worked . . .”

  “It did temporarily,” Amanda Lee said. “Until he comes back, like he always does, to haunt Jensen. That’s how he works, and he’ll pop in and out until he succeeds in driving her insane. But next time, I’m going to know how to banish him. I’ll have to.”

  For the first time in . . . ever . . . she cracked an optimistic smile at Sierra, and they exchanged a look that made me think Amanda Lee would be changing her mind someday soon about living with a broken heart from the love of her life, dead Elizabeth.

  Twyla, who’d stayed on the sidelines, probably because she’d been instructed to, said, “He is extremely not done with you, Jen. If he was, you’d totally be . . .”

  “Not in a time loop,” I whispered.

  Amanda Lee took it from there. “Dennis said that putting Jen into an imprint phase was a waste of time, since I pulled her out of one before.
He was pushing her to the brink, driving her to the glare, I assume, by recreating her murder?”

  She gestured to the split in my skull, which was starting to close slightly, thanks to the electric infusion. It’d be a while before I was back to normal, though.

  “So . . . question,” Twyla said. “Why hasn’t he, like, just taken Jen’s essence, like he did with Louis, Randy, Elliot, and Angel?”

  I whispered with effort. “That might’ve . . . been next on his . . . agenda . . .”

  “Jensen,” Amanda Lee said. “You need to rest. Please.”

  “And . . . you need to be . . . at the happy house.”

  “Oh, we wouldn’t have missed this for the world.” She smiled again, but it was ruthless this time.

  I had more to say. “Dennis the Menace . . . said that Marg . . . came into his . . . travel tunnel. He kicked her out. . . .”

  “I’m sure she’s safe,” Amanda Lee said.

  Sierra leaned against a counter, adjusting her glasses. Her black windbreaker was unzipped halfway, making her look like she’d just gotten off a hip-nerd motorcycle. “Marg rocks.”

  Twyla rolled her eyes, but in a way that said she still adored her ghost buddy. “Whatever. Maybe she’ll make for the happy house. Like, the word’s out, and everyone’s meeting there.”

  I remembered something Wendy had said about gathering a ghost army. From the mouths of babes.

  “Then we should go,” Amanda Lee said. “Can you move to the car, Jensen? I brought two new batteries when we realized what was happening with Suzanne.”

  “I’m . . . copacetic.” My body wasn’t on high speed, but at least my brain was still working. I thought about 10’s body, which had been lying on Amanda Lee’s floor when I’d blasted out of there.

  “Landry?” I whispered.

  The humans paused. Then J.J. said, “We ended up not calling Ruben about her. Sierra and I . . .”

  Sierra interrupted, looking grim. “No matter what, we were a team, so J.J. and I’ll be going back to the casita to call the cops and make up the best story we can for them. They’d never believe this one. Then . . . Well, she wasn’t close to her parents, but we need to call them.”