No, thanks.
As I slipped out of the current’s tunnel, I shuddered, discombobulated, hanging in the air above a street that featured cookie-cutter ranch houses. I sensed that I was in the general area of where I’d been aiming—a neighborhood with grass yards shining under a warm spring, late-afternoon sun. I have to say that there was a sort of high I got as I floated onward, whisking close to humans who lay on lounges in their backyards or who washed the cars in their driveways, having no idea why it’d suddenly gotten chilly, only to immediately warm up again.
I tracked the address Amanda Lee had given me until I came to the one I was looking for: 297 Sajen Road. A cute white house with green trim around the windows, an old Toyota in the driveway, even a damned white picket fence. No kidding.
Then I focused in on the kids and the man behind the fence.
He was throwing a football back and forth with a teenage boy, probably his son, and a slightly older girl was nearby, practicing cheers with her red-and-white pom-poms, egging the team on.
Daddy sent her a fond smile, then sent a zinger to his son.
I didn’t know if a spirit’s heart could ache, but it sure felt like that’s what mine was doing, because the last time I’d seen Dean Morgan, it’d been almost six months before I bought it.
His hair had been surfer blond and cut straight to his chin back then. He’d been tan, his muscles lean on a streamlined body. His eyes were the color of a shot of whiskey, his smile enough to disassemble me and put me back together all in the space of a second.
“Don’t worry, Jen,” he’d said to me the last time I saw him while he stood in front of his beat-up Camaro, which had been loaded with milk cartons full of clothes and cassette tapes. “I’ll be coming back.”
But he never did. There’d only been graduate school across the country at Columbia and phone calls filled with the same promise. I’d believed him, though, thinking it was true love.
Maybe it had been, back then.
I blew out a breath, stirring the leaves of the elm tree I was hovering next to. A bird jumped to another branch with a frantic tweet.
The sound caught Dean’s attention, and for a heart-jamming moment, he looked up.
Straight through me.
If I’d had blood in me, it would’ve stopped. That’s what this spirit version of heartbreak felt like, at least. But then, second by second, as he went back to playing catch with the son he’d had with someone else, I saw that his hair wasn’t so blond anymore. He was a little older than Amanda Lee, gray, with a paunch and wrinkles around his eyes.
He was a different person who had moved on after my death, and I couldn’t feel a connection to him anymore. I wasn’t even sure I’d ever really known him.
As I retreated away from the tree, the bird chirped, like it was relieved I was going. Damned fucking bird.
Damned fucking whoever had killed me, because maybe, if I had run a little faster or if my friends and I had gone to the forest on any other night, I could’ve been in this yard today, with Dean. But my death had taken that from me.
It had taken everything, and every time I made one of these field trips, the pain of loss just got worse.
I had to get away, but just before I summoned a travel artery, I saw Amanda Lee’s Bentley down the road. She was behind the steering wheel, her hands resting on it, just as if she’d known I would happen on by and she’d been as prepared as always.
She power-rolled down the window, allowing me to slide inside the car, and I sensed her shudder as my cool essence raked by.
The radio, which crackled in my presence, was playing a low tune—something blue by a woman who sounded like she’d been crying into her drink all night.
“It’s not fair,” she said, “is it?”
“Dean forgot me. I think they all have.”
“No, I guarantee they still remember, and there’s no doubt in my mind that they miss you, Jensen. But they went forward because life allowed them to.”
“Life allowed that?”
At my anger, the radio buzzed, almost like a chain saw, and Amanda Lee shut it off.
I calmed down. “Was it life that spared them and cornered me by that tree in the forest?”
“No, it wasn’t.” Amanda Lee turned in her seat to look at me, and it felt good to have someone on this earth who knew I was still here. “A human monster made the choice to hurt you.”
“I wish . . .”
“What?” She still watched me as if I were real enough to matter.
She made it so easy for all my resentment to boil out. “I wish I would’ve been strong enough to fight back that night.”
“And if you could have fought back?”
“I would’ve killed him before he killed me.”
I didn’t even know if the murderer was a “him,” but that wasn’t the point. Him, her, it—I hated whatever it was.
Amanda Lee leaned back in her seat, her gaze on the windshield, like she saw a thousand psychic things outside that I would never see. And maybe she did.
“Would you have really gone that far?” she asked. There was a tiny tremor in her voice.
I didn’t even have to think about an answer. “Of course I would’ve.”
“Good. I knew you’d be a fighter. That’s why I tried so hard to find you. I would go back to that forest night after night, attempting to find the place where you would materialize. And I did, on your anniversary.”
The crackle of my surroundings—the electricity that’s all around us, whether we’re ghosts or humans—snapped over my essence, pinching me.
“Why exactly did you want to find me?” I asked.
Amanda Lee looked at me again with that everything-will-be-fine smile. “The moment I heard your story, I wanted to bring your soul peace, dear. I still do. But there’s more to it.”
I thought of how, when I’d touched Amanda Lee the very first time, she’d been so cryptic. I’d had the feeling that she was purposely shutting me out.
“What have you been keeping from me?” I asked.
“Nothing nefarious.” Her smile dimmed. “As a psychic and medium, I used to have my share of people who invited me to dinner parties and afternoon teas. And every time, I realized I was there only because I sensed the dead and read the future.”
“And?” I still didn’t understand the direction of this chat. “Are you going to drag me to a luncheon so I can entertain your friends?”
“I don’t have many friends.” Amanda Lee offered a self-aware shrug.
I almost reached out to her, but thought better of it as she went on.
“I’d never fully connected to a spirit before you came along, Jensen. I would pick up energy from others, or I would hear their voices, but they would only give me fragments, pieces of conversation that didn’t always make sense. I also went to my share of death scenes, trying to find someone just like you.”
“A fighter,” I said.
“Yes. But none of them was nearly equipped to do what I’m about to ask you to do.”
I had a bad feeling about this. “Go on.”
Amanda Lee took a deep breath.
I had a real bad feeling.
“A while ago,” she said, “I was approached by one of the only true friends I do have, and he begged for my help.”
“Doing what?”
Amanda Lee’s voice was like a flatline in a quiet room. “Justice for a murder, just as you want justice for yours.”
I could feel myself blipping, like that TV on the fritz.
Justice?
Amanda Lee sat up, rushing on now that she had my complete attention. “I know the person my friend suspects as a killer is guilty—just as guilty as whoever took your life. And, just like your murderer, this one is getting away with it.”
“Why?” It sounded like a disembodied cro
ak.
“Because this man thinks he’s above the law, and I have to agree. I’m sure he covered his tracks damned well.” Amanda Lee’s gray eyes were wider than I’d ever seen them, brimming with her belief.
It was almost like . . . well, like Amanda Lee had had something bad happen to her in the past, and she was identifying with this friend all too well.
My mind spun, and Amanda Lee took advantage of that.
“The victim’s name,” she said, “was Elizabeth Dalton.”
I didn’t want to hear this just as much as I did want to hear it. I turned away from Amanda Lee, gazing down the block, in the direction of Dean’s house. I imagined myself, all happy and joyful and human on the lawn with him again.
And for the first time, I heard in my head something new from the night I’d died.
Stop! Please! Why’re you doing this?
My voice, begging.
My last words?
I didn’t like the thought of having to plead like that. I didn’t like the idea of ever letting someone evil have so much power over me or Elizabeth Dalton or anyone.
Amanda Lee took a photo out of her purse. It showed an older gentleman dressed in a gray suit, his silver hair clipped and neat. He was standing in front of a fountain in Balboa Park, his arm around a much younger woman who beamed, her teeth white against her deep red lipstick, her blond hair in a slicked-back pixie cut.
“My friend Jon tells me that Elizabeth was a good person,” Amanda Lee said. “He left the country after she died, retreating to a cottage outside London, just to forget her. He can’t stand the reminders here.”
“What was she like?”
“She smiled a lot, told funny jokes to cheer up whoever needed cheering . . . But about three years ago, a killer found her. And he stabbed her, once, twice . . . thirteen times. When that wasn’t enough for him, he cut her up in . . .”
As she trailed off, I felt something like a stab, too, and I glanced away from the picture of Amanda Lee’s friend and Elizabeth.
Amanda Lee swallowed. “They found her pieces by some hiking trails near the beach. And when they brought the killer in for questioning, he denied it. He had a weak alibi—said he was working late by himself—but he had all the motivation in the world.”
“Why?”
“Because Elizabeth Dalton had broken off an engagement to him, and he was jealous when she found someone else to love. My friend.”
A crime of passion?
I didn’t want to think about Elizabeth Dalton as the cops had found her, piece by piece. You know why?
Because deep inside, I suspected that’s how they would find my remains one day, if they ever did.
A burning sensation crisped the fringes of my shape, searing into me, and I knew that I was only feeling the unfairness of it all.
Amanda Lee lowered her voice to a whisper, just like the one she’d used on the night she’d rescued me from the time loop in Elfin Forest.
“It isn’t right that the killer goes on without a punishment while Elizabeth’s friends and loved ones suffer.” She shook her head. “People like him should live with the ghosts of what they do. They should literally have the truth scared out of them.”
As she waited for her meaning to seep into every bit of my essence, I thought about the unknown killer in Elfin Forest with blood on his hands.
My blood.
And I had to agree.
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