by Apryl Baker
“Why would I show it to Caleb?”
Dan closes his eyes and I get the distinct feeling he’s counting to ten, but then he does that a lot with me. “Mattie, Caleb would know if the only thing the tattoo does is keep ghosts from getting to you. What if it gave Silas a way to bypass the demon-proofing?”
“That doesn’t make sense,” I shake my head. “Why offer a deal if…”
“So you would believe he’s still trying to help you?” Dan suggests. “He wants you to trust him, Mattie. I just don’t know why. He needs you for something and we all know you won’t do anything unless you think you’re in control of the situation. By agreeing to a deal, you’ve still maintained control.”
My own eyes widen. “Fudgepops,” I whisper. How does Silas know me so well?
“Let me see it,” Dan demands. “We might need to call Caleb…”
“No!” I yell. I hadn’t meant to yell.
He raises an eyebrow.
“Look, if we call Caleb, he’ll bring Eli with him, and I don’t want to talk to him right now.”
“What’s going on with you and Eli?”
“Nothing,” I mutter.
“Mattie, when I mention him or Caleb, you look ready to jump out the window. Something is definitely going on.”
“Do we have to talk about it right now?” I ask petulantly and snuggle deeper under my fuzzy throw. If it weren’t for the warmth of the hot chocolate, my teeth would probably be chattering.
“Yes, we do,” Dan nods. “This is about your safety and you having a row with Eli…”
“We didn’t fight,” I whisper. “I just…”
“You just what?”
“Look, Dan, can we concentrate on what’s important here? I have Silas to deal with, a mob of angry teenage ghost girls trying to kill me, and maybe a brother out there somewhere. Oh, and let’s not forget Mary has developed the ability to suddenly hear ghosts. Isn’t that enough to worry about without adding a stupid boy into it?”
“Hold on, Mary can hear ghosts?” Dan asks, his mouth falling open again. He looks so much like Caleb in that second that I have to blink. I hope they can get past Dan’s mom and learn to be brothers. It would be good for all of them.
“Mattie!”
I blink and refocus on Dan. “Sorry, you just looked exactly like Caleb. It threw me for a second.”
“Yeah, well…when did Mary start hearing them?”
HA! Here he is fussing at me for dodging my problems, when he doesn’t want to deal with his own family. “I found out last night when another of the girls decided I had to pay for her death. Mary came into the room and could hear her. She had to concentrate, but she heard her.”
“You were attacked again?”
“Yeah, but I took care of it. Threw the little bugger into The Between.” Dan looks rather uncomfortable at that. “What’s that look for?”
“Maybe we should call Doctor Olivet,” Dan suggests.
“Not until you tell me about that look on your face,” I say. My stomach knots up in dread.
He comes back to the couch, falls on it unceremoniously and throws an arm over his face. He does not want to tell me this.
“Mattie, Doctor Olivet was concerned about you when we left New Orleans. It’s just easier if he explains it. I might mess it up.”
“What was he concerned about?”
“You throwing souls into The Between.”
“Why?”
Dan fishes his phone out of his pocket. “Let’s see if we can get him on the phone first, okay? If not, then I’ll do my best to explain it.” At my nod, he looks up the Doc’s number and then activates the speakerphone option.
Doc answers on the third ring. “Dan? Is something wrong with our girl?”
“Um, not unless you count the fact I’m being stalked by eight murderous teenage drama queens blaming me for their deaths,” I chirp, unable to keep from smiling.
I hear a chuckle and then, “Only you, Mattie.”
Pretty much sums it up.
“It’s a little more complicated than that.” Dan glares at me. “Do you have a few minutes to talk, Doctor Olivet?”
I roll my eyes at Dan’s formality. He refuses to call him Doc, insisting on proper manners and all that nonsense.
“Of course,” he replies. “I was only doing a bit of reading, anyway. What’s up?”
“Mary’s hearing ghosts,” I blurt out. All of a sudden, I don’t want to hear why Dan is so worried about The Between. My stomach already hurts just thinking about that unease on his face. It can’t be good and I don’t know if I can deal with too much more. Dan’s expression says he knows I’m deflecting.
“She’s what?” Doc asks. I can hear a thud that sounds like a book hitting the floor. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah, she heard the ghost in my room last night,” I say, ignoring Dan for the moment. “Mary’s been able to sense stuff for months, but only recently started to hear them. Could it be because of her having that, uh…what did you call it?”
“An out-of-body experience,” Doc mutters. “It’s possible she made more of a connection with the Ghost Plane than we originally thought.”
“Back up,” Dan interrupts. “Explain in layman’s terms please.”
“Do you remember me telling you that ghosts exist on a different plane than we do, one that runs parallel to our own?”
“Yeah,” Dan nods.
“When Mary was close to death, her soul left her body and traveled along that plane. It’s how she found Mattie. When people die and then come back from that plane, sometimes they don’t come back the same as they were before. You’ve heard of people waking up and knowing things they shouldn’t? Or suddenly having psychic abilities? That is all a result of tapping into the energies on the Ghost Plane. I think Mary was there for so long, that maybe a piece of her soul is linked to it and therefore she has an ‘in’ the same way that Mattie does.”
“So she’s like a Reaper now?” I ask, frowning myself.
“No,” Doc says. “That is an ability that’s rare and must be inherited. Think of a Reaper as being the driver of a car, but Mary would be more like a passenger, there for the ride, but not really seeing the same things the driver does. The driver has to pay attention to everything around them and the passenger is the one who idles away the ride fiddling with the radio, and irritating the driver. Make sense?”
“So she only has a peripheral view?” Dan suggests.
“Close enough,” Doc agrees. “Is that all that was bothering you kids?”
Dan and I wince at the word ‘kids’. Neither of us like being referred to as a child.
“Well, no,” Dan sighs. “There’s a lot that’s happened since we last saw you.” Dan goes on to explain about the dead girls, Silas popping up randomly, but when he gets to the part about my dad coming into the picture, Doc stops him.
“Her father?” he asks softly.
“Yeah,” Dan says. “My mom told us his name and her social worker contacted him. They ran a DNA test to confirm it.”
There is a long silence in which Dan and I both stare quizzically at the phone.
“Doc, something wrong?” I ask.
“No,” he says at last, his voice strained. He is such a bad liar. “I’m happy you found your father, Mattie.” Nope, he doesn’t mean that at all. But what does this tone of voice mean? Dan’s frown tells me he wonders, too.
“What else happened?” Doc asks, his voice almost back to normal, and then Dan finishes the story, from the ghost’s attempt to drown me, Silas’s tattoo—and the fact I’d thrown another ghost into The Between.
Then Doc mutters softly. That can’t be good. There’s a creaking and then footsteps. It sounds like he’s pacing. “Mattie, how hard was it for you to open that doorway?”
Odd question. “Easier than before, but I still had to concentrate. Why?”
“How often have you opened that door since you got home?” he asks instead of answering my question.
“Just the once when she attacked me. I was sick and tired of that crap. I almost died last time and wasn’t about to do it again. It wasn’t hard to close it the next morning.”
“The next morning?” he asks, horrified. “You left it open all night?”
What, did I break some kind of unwritten Ghost Rule? “Just a thin circle. I felt safer with a barrier between me and the ghosts.”
“Salt would have done that!” Doc roared.
“Um, no, Dan forgot to mention that…”
“What?” he asks, resigned to hearing something even worse, I think.
“If we salt the doors, Mattie can’t enter,” Dan tells him.
Doc heaves a long sigh. “I hadn’t foreseen this. How is your temperature, Mattie? Are you colder than you used to be?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I freeze all the time, even if we crank up the heat to ninety.”
“Your essence is becoming more a part of the Ghost Plane than this one,” he says. “You absorbed Eric’s soul. That, combined with your own energy was bad enough, but you died again, Mattie. You were on the Ghost Plane for a little while and your energy bonded with it. That’s why it’s getting easier for you to open the doorway to The Between. You’re becoming more Reaper than human.”
“Is that a bad thing?” I ask, fear lancing through me. It sounds like a bad thing.
“I’m not sure,” he answers, sounding somewhat reluctant. “I don’t know enough to even make a guess. You’re the first living Reaper I’ve ever come across.”
“My dad says he can do what I can,” I say hesitantly. “Maybe he could shed some light on it?”
There’s another loud clatter. I think he dropped his phone because we can hear him scramble to pick it back up.
What is going on with him? I mouth at Dan who just shrugs, as mystified as me.
“Sorry, dropped the phone,” he apologizes. “Mattie, I feel I must urge you to be cautious. What Dan’s mother said about your father’s family…”
“Zeke has a different story,” I blurt, with this insane need to defend my father and don’t know why. Maybe because when Ezekiel Crane looked at me, I saw how much he loved me.
“That’s my point, Mattie,” he sighs. “We don’t know who’s telling the truth.”
Dan gives me a ‘he has a valid point’ look, but then again it is his mother who…Stop it, I tell myself forcefully. Dan is just looking out for me, not his mother. “Doc, you said it yourself. You don’t know what’s happening to me. My father might. I mean, if Dan and Eli are with me when I talk to him about it, I’ll be perfectly safe.”
Another long sigh and then Doc, sounding reluctant, says, “Just promise me you’ll be careful.”
“I promise,” I answer, and mean it. No games.
“Now, back to The Between,” Doc continues. “Mattie, you have to be careful. You’re a Reaper, meant to ferry souls through The Between, not to feed them to the monsters there.”
That stung. “I was only defending myself! The ghosts were trying to kill me!”
“I know that, Mattie,” he replies in a strained voice. “But it doesn’t change what happens to you every time you kill a soul that is meant to be ferried through.”
“What do you mean?” I ask. He just said he didn’t know what’s happening to me.
Dr. Olivet’s silence lasts only a moment. “You remember the research I did on human Reapers?”
I nod, then say “yeah” when I realize he can’t see me.
“There was a passage in one of the books that describes what happened to a man who used The Between as his personal weapon,” the doc begins. “It started out innocently enough. Like you, he was only defending himself. The problem was, every time he did that, he destroyed a piece of his own soul. By the time he actually died, his soul was gone, totally eaten away by the murder he’d committed over the years. His friend documented that he believes the man became one of the creatures in The Between. One of the monsters.”
“What?” I whisper, my heart thumping wildly.
“No one really knows how the creatures came to inhabit The Between,” Doc says softly. “The current theory is that they are the remains of human Reapers, those condemned to kill for an eternity for abusing their gift.”
“That’s not possible,” I cringe. No way. I will never become one of those things. I won’t.
“How did you feel when you opened the door and pushed the ghost through?” Doc asks.
That’s a stupid question. “What do you mean, how did I feel?”
“I should have been more specific. Sorry.” He cleared his throat. “Let’s look at it differently. Was there anything in particular you did to open the door? Any thoughts or feelings you focused on?”
This is hard to talk about, but I guess I have to if I want answers. “The door doesn’t just open. I have to think about all the bad stuff that’s happened to me,” I admit. “It takes me to a dark place where there’s nothing but pain and rage. Once I’m there, I go a little dead inside, cold.”
“Precisely,” Doc says. “You kill a little of your soul to do it, Mattie. You aren’t a Reaper yet. You’re still human. Only a full Reaper is supposed to open that doorway.”
“I won’t do it again,” I whisper. Never, ever again. I am not becoming one of those things.
“Mattie, I’m not telling you not to open it,” Doc sighs. “I’m just saying be careful. There may come a time when you need to open it to defend yourself like you did with Jonas in New Orleans, but for a regular old ghost? Don’t do it.”
All I can do is stare blankly.
“I think she’s starting to freak out a bit, Doctor,” Dan says, the worry plain in his voice. “She’s gone all pale.”
“You know what? I think I’ll come to Charlotte. I have a speaking engagement I have to finish up here in Berkley, but I’ll catch the first available flight out Friday night. We can sit down and have a long talk and sort everything out, okay?”
“That might be a good idea.” Dan picks up the phone, turns off the speakerphone and walks into the kitchen. Then I hear the microwave. When he comes back, he swaps my cold hot chocolate for a new cup. “It’ll be okay, Squirt.” He smiles and gives me a brief shoulder-nudge. “I promise.”
“Will it?” I ask. Nothing ever seems to work out for me. Why should this be any different?
“Focus on the good stuff,” Dan says, sitting beside me. “You have people who love you, people you can call family. You’ve got me and Mary and you found your dad. He might not be on the up and up, but he loves you. Eli said even he could see that…”
“Wait, when did you talk to Eli about my dad?” I ask.
“Last night,” he says. “Remember I told you I had to swing by their place before I went home? Eli and I had a long talk about your father.”
“You two are trying, then?”
“Sorta, kinda, maybe?”
“Isn’t that my line?” I smile at him.
He shrugs. “You ready to tell me what’s going on with my little brother?”
“You’re like a dog with a bone, gnawing away.” I give him a grumpy glare.
“I just need to know if I need to beat the snot out of him or not.”
I laugh, snorting hot chocolate through my nose and onto the carpet, which only makes me laugh harder.
“The white carpet!” Dan wails and runs for the Folex. It’s the only thing we’ve found that could get stains out of his precious white carpet. He throws me a paper towel before soaking the chocolate spots on the carpet. “Now that you’ve ruined the carpet and cost me my security deposit, you have to spill the beans.”
“Dan, I spilled red Fanta all over that carpet. If you got that out, a few drops of hot chocolate isn’t going to ruin it,” I say dryly. Really, it’s just chocolate.
“Spill, Mattie!” he barks. He really has been spending time with Meg. That’s one of her favorite things to shout at me. I sigh. I really do miss her.
Giving up on the inevitable, I rehash everything
I’d overheard Caleb and Eli talking about. Just hearing myself say it out loud makes me nervous.
“Let me ask you a question, Mattie,” Dan says after I’m done. “Do you like Eli? And don’t dodge the question. I know you like him, but is it more than that? Do you have real feelings for him?”
“I don’t know,” I admit miserably. “I haven’t known him long enough to even know what I feel.”
“Tell me what you do know,” he urges.
“I want to hit him on a regular basis.” Then I smile. “He makes me laugh and I get butterflies in my stomach just thinking about him. He feels familiar to me, like I’ve known him forever, but that doesn’t make sense. I feel safe with him too, not like I do with you, but safe nonetheless. When he looks at me, I blush and I never blush, Dan. And when he kisses me…‘Wow’ isn’t even close…” I close my eyes and shudder at the emotions washing through me at just the memory of his kiss.
“It sounds to me like you’ve got some very real, very serious feelings for Eli,” Dan finally says in a low tone.
“But how?” I ask. “How can you have feelings for someone that quickly?”
“Mattie, remember you said that growing up without having people care about you didn’t teach you what it meant to be loved? You’re confused because…well, love is strange, difficult, and crazy. The feelings are a new experience, and you don’t understand them. I wish you could see your face when you talk about Eli. You’d understand.”
“He was really nervous when he realized I’d heard the whole conversation with Caleb.”
“What did you say?”
“Nothing.” I look down sheepishly. “I ran.”
“Of course you did,” Dan laughs. “You tried that BS with me a couple months ago, too. And what did I tell you?”
“That you were in it for the long haul,” I answer.
“That’s right, Squirt. Me and you, we’re in it for the long haul. I was nice about it, though.”
“So?” What’s he getting at?
“So…I don’t think my brother is going to be as nice about it.” Dan smirks.
‘What do you mean?” I ask warily.
“I mean Eli has a very possessive streak in him and won’t put up with your BS. He’ll corner you and tell you how it is.”
