Ghost Hold

by Ripley Patton

  “But how do they work, and where did you get them?” Samantha asked.

  “Someone made them for me, a friend. As for how they work, I don’t really know. But they block PSS from being detected by you. And by minus meters.”

  “Minus meters?” she said, her look piercing. “What do you know about minus meters?”

  “Well, I know the CAMFers use them to detect and extract PSS. I’ve been hunted using one, and I’ve even had one used on my hand, briefly, which is something I never want to experience again. Ever.”

  “They tried to extract you?” Samantha asked, appalled. “When? Why?”

  “It was a few weeks ago,” I said. “Where I lived before, in Illinois. And they did it because that’s what they do.”

  “No wonder your parents moved here,” she said. “And I guess I can understand why you and Passion have been so guarded. But The Hold would never let that happen in Indy. We protect our own.”

  “There aren’t any CAMFers in Indianapolis?” I asked, wondering if she was really that naive.

  “Oh, I’m sure there are,” she answered, “but they don’t move openly, and they wouldn’t dare try to extract someone. If they did, my father would take care of it.” The way she said “Take care of it” had undertones of The Godfather. And it was strangely comforting. Maybe The Hold really was a place we could all be safe. Maybe we could stop running from the CAMFers and fight back for a change.

  But there was no way Marcus would ever side with The Hold after what they’d done to his parents, even if it had completely changed since then and become less constrictive. He would never buy it. I wasn’t even sure I bought it. Samantha, and her friends, and her dad had been nice so far, but it was the kind of nice that felt like it had a very specific purpose behind it. I wasn’t sure how I felt about Mr. James suddenly finding out I had PSS that I’d been hiding from him. That was certainly weighing heavily on my mind, but so was something else.

  “What does my hand sound like?” I asked a little shyly. “Is it nice?”

  “I only got a short blast before the volleyball hit me in the face,” Samantha said, eyeing my dog tags. “Put those down for a minute and let me listen.”

  “Okay.” I hung the dog tags over the arm of my chair, careful not to let any part of them touch me.

  Instantly, Samantha cocked her head to one side like a dog listening to a whistle, peering at me with her one unbruised eye. “It’s strong, and loud, and a little bluesy,” she said. “I like it.” She smiled her approval.

  I didn’t think it would thrill me so much that she liked the music of my PSS, but it did.

  “But it’s going to be damn distracting until I can get home and play it,” she added, her fingers twitching as if they were already at the keyboard.

  “How do you handle all that music coming at you all the time?” I wondered out loud, as I grabbed the dog tags and slipped them back on over my head. “It must be overwhelming.”

  “It’s not that bad. The new stuff can be a little distracting, but as soon as I sit down and compose it, it fades into the background with the rest.”

  “But it’s always there in your head? That must be awful.”

  “It’s not awful,” she said, grinning at me. “It’s wonderful. It’s like having a soundtrack for your life. I don’t know what I’d do without my music.”

  I found myself wishing I felt that positive about my own PSS power. But my ghost hand didn’t pull out something nice like a soundtrack.

  “You and Passion don’t have to hide anymore,” Samantha interrupted my thoughts. “No one at Edgemont is going to bother you for having PSS. You’ll see when you come to the Eidolon. People admire us because we’re different. They want to be with us. They wish they could be us.”

  “You mean your ‘groupies?’” I couldn’t completely keep the distain out of my voice.

  “Yeah, so what?” she said, not missing my tone. “People admire and follow other people for all sorts of reasons. I have groupies who follow my music. My dad is a groupie who follows PSS art. We’re all someone’s groupie.”

  She had a point. Hadn’t I become somewhat of a Marcus groupie when I’d left Greenfield?

  “Anyway, I know you’ll love the Eidolon,” she said. “It’s a very freeing experience. And you should invite your brother and his friends. It would be good for them.” She pulled out her phone and started tapping out a text. “Do you want a ride home?” she asked. “I can call you a car.”

  “Yeah, that would be great.” Relief flooded over me. I’d thought she might press me to go back to her house and talk to her dad. I slipped my phone back into my pocket. “And I’m sorry about your face. Does it hurt a lot?”

  “Not too bad,” she said, “but the headache is getting worse. How’s your stomach? Should you take a barf bag in the car or something?”

  “Nah, I should be fine. My mom says I have a cast-iron stomach. I can count the times I’ve thrown up on one hand.”

  “Okay,” Samantha said, getting up and bringing the ice pack with her. “Let’s go. The cars should be waiting for us.”

  Sure enough, outside the front of the school, a familiar dark-windowed car was pulled up to the curb with Leo sitting in the driver’s seat.

  “Leaving school early again?” he asked dryly.

  “I got hit in the face with a volleyball,” Samantha explained, giving him a glimpse under the ice pack, “and Anne has the flu.”

  “Well, I’m going to have to drive you both,” he said. “The other cars are in for service and getting prepped for the big night.” Then he turned to me. “You gonna be sick in my car?”

  “No,” I promised, as Samantha pulled open the door and we climbed in, settling into the plush leather seat.

  “Thanks for the ride again,” I said, smiling at her. There was something compelling about Samantha, this rich, musical girl with the PSS ear, and as much as I’d tried to dislike her from the very beginning, I couldn’t.

  “No problem,” she said, smiling warmly back as Leo pulled away from the school. He took the first right onto the main road, heading toward Samantha’s house. But that didn’t surprise me. Her place was much closer than the McMansion, and he was getting paid to keep her safe, not me.

  We pulled up to a red light and I glanced out my window, looking across the intersection, and noticed a VW bug in the oncoming lane. It was the exact same color as my mom’s and, for a moment, my heart skipped a beat and my entire body tensed. But the lady driving it was way thinner than my mother, and she also had a shaved head and was wearing a pair of ridiculously large sunglasses my mother wouldn’t have been caught dead in.

  Still, it was weird. And as I stared at her, cars speeding by flashing her in and out of my vision, something began to sink in. I don’t know if it was the familiar shape of her face, or her perfect upright posture, or the way she tapped the steering wheel impatiently as she waited for the light to change, but a bolt of recognition suddenly zapped me to the core. This wasn’t a lady that looked somewhat like my mom driving a car like my mom’s.

  It was my mom.

  In Indianapolis.

  A thin, shaved-head, sunglassed version of my mom who was about to drive right past me the moment the light turned red.

  As if she could read my thoughts, she turned her head slightly, glancing in my direction.

  Instinctively, I ducked down, peeking above the edge of the window like a little kid.

  “Hey, are you okay?” Samantha asked. “Are you going to be sick? Leo, pull over.”

  “No,” I barked, sitting up but still looking out the window. “Don’t pull over. I’m fine.” My mother couldn’t see me because of the tinted windows. She had already turned back to watching the light, bored and impatient. The last thing I wanted was for Leo to pull off the road and draw attention to us.

  “Don’t you dare puke in my car,” Leo said, as the light changed to red and we surged forward.

  I watched my mother drive by, her car mere feet from
me, her familiar profile slipping past me and out of sight. She had no idea I was there. In that car. So close to her.

  There was only one reason I could think of for my mother to be in Indy; somehow she had found out where I was. But how? Emma couldn’t have told her.

  No one knew I was here, except for those of us following Marcus. Oh, and Mike Palmer. Shit. Mike Palmer knew exactly where I was. But how could it possibly serve him to tell my mother? And if he had told her, why hadn’t she gone straight to the McMansion and confronted me? Oh my God. What if that’s where she was headed right now? What if she’d just arrived in Indy and she was driving to the McMansion to get me? Well, I wouldn’t be there. And Marcus would lie to her and send her away. And I had no idea how I felt about that.

  I turned in my seat, looking out the rear window, and watched the pale blue VW recede into the distance, tears prickling at the corners of my eyes.

  “Are you okay?” Samantha asked, concern in her voice.

  “Yeah, I’m good.” I turned back to the front. “Just got something in my eye,” I said, brushing the moisture away with a fingertip.

  Why had my mother shaved her head? She’d had beautiful chestnut hair down past her shoulders. She’d always worn her hair long, because my father had liked it that way. Why in the world would she hack it all off like that?

  But even as I asked it, a little voice in my head was already answering. You know why. She did it because of you. You were all she had left, and you abandoned her.

  25

  MEETING MR. JAMES AGAIN

  When we pulled up to Samantha’s house, Leo parked the car and looked over his shoulder at her.

  “I’m running low on gas,” he said. “I’m going to have to let you both out here, and I’ll come back and get Anne after I’ve filled up. I wouldn’t want to make you feel worse,” he said, speaking to me, “by exposing you to all those fumes.”

  It wasn’t a question. I wasn’t being given a choice. And that’s when I realized that Samantha had been on her phone texting almost the whole way in the car, and I’d been too distracted about my mom to realize what that meant. Until now.

  I had a sinking feeling I was about to have another talk with Alexander James, and that Leo would not be back to take me home until Mr. James was satisfied with my answers. That whole thing about the other cars being in the shop—probably a load of bullshit. And I’d been having such warm fuzzy thoughts towards Samantha only minutes before. Dammit, I was sick and feverish. Why couldn’t they just take me home and leave me alone? Except, if they did that, I might run smack into my mom. Maybe it was better to go along with this and see what I could find out.

  “Come on,” Samantha said, hopping out of the car. “We can get you something to help with that fever while you wait.”

  I looked at Leo and he stared back at me, his dark eyes framed in the rear view mirror.

  I slowly opened my car door and climbed out.

  As we entered the house, I grabbed Samantha’s arm and said, “Listen, you can cut the crap. I know why I’m here.”

  “You’re here because we care about you,” Samantha said earnestly. “You have nothing to be afraid of, Anne. My father just wants to talk to you. That’s all.”

  “Okay, fine,” I said, letting go of her arm. “Let’s get this over with. Honestly, I have a few questions of my own.”

  Ten minutes later, I found myself sitting outside Alexander James’s office in a comfy chair with a glass of water in one hand and several Advil in the other. Samantha had handed them to me when she’d come out after briefly chatting with her father, and then she’d been whisked away so the family doctor could check out her face. Before she’d gone though, she’d assured me again that I was perfectly safe and would be returned home as soon as her father and I were done talking. Even so, one of the security goons had remained behind, looming over me.

  “Cheers,” I said, raising my glass to him and downing the painkiller.

  He didn’t even blink.

  “Anne,” Alexander James said, making me jump and inhale the water down the wrong tube. I hadn’t even heard him open his office door, but there he was holding it open for me. “How nice to see you again. Please, come in.”

  I stood up and handed the half-full glass to the security guy, coughing the water out of my lungs as I followed the spider into his parlor like an obedient fly.

  Mr. James took a seat at his desk and indicated that I should sit in the chair on the other side of it, facing him, which I did. He sat back, scrutinizing me, his eyes lingering on my gloved right hand, and he put his fingers in that familiar steeple.

  “I understand that you have had a hard time of it,” he began. “Samantha has shared some of your story with me. I’m sorry to hear that you and your family had a run-in with CAMFers in Illinois. I want to assure you that this will never happen to you in my city. The Hold protects its own.”

  “I’m not a member of The Hold,” I said, letting my snarkiness get the best of me.

  “Of course you are.” He smiled patronizingly. “The day you were born with a PSS hand you became a member. The Hold is not a religion or cult, as some would describe it. It is a genetic family. You don’t have to sign up, or even believe in your own heritage to join. You are born into it and you belong to it, whether you like it or not. It isn’t a matter of belief. It just is.”

  “So, I don’t have a choice?”

  “Oh, you have all kinds of choices.” Alexander James leaned forward. “Probably more today than you’ve ever had before,” he said, opening up a thick file on his desk and shuffling through it.

  Was it a file on me? Or was he using it to ignore me and tip the balance of power in his direction? I looked away, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of seeing my curiosity.

  “What is it you really want, Anne?” he asked, his voice earnest. “To be surrounded by people who understand you? To live without fear? To live without being feared? The Hold can offer you that.”

  I looked up at him. Fuck. This guy was good. He’d only met me a couple of times and he’d already sized up my biggest insecurities. But why such a hard sell? He hadn’t gone after Passion like this when he’d found out about her PSS. He’d been playing it cool until now. Either something had changed, or he wanted me for his little people collection even more than he wanted Passion with the PSS blood. And that didn’t make sense.

  “What I really want are some answers,” I said. “I want someone to be honest with me for a change.”

  “I see,” he said, sitting back. “People have lied to you. They have betrayed your trust. And you think I’m lying to you now. That is understandable. So, let us be honest with each other, Olivia.”

  I jerked my head up and found his eyes boring into mine. He had called me Olivia. He knew who I was.

  “This,” he said, holding up the folder he’d been looking at, “is a very thorough file on a missing girl from Illinois with a PSS hand named Olivia Black.”

  “Where did you get that?” I blurted, but I already knew.

  “Your mother gave it to me.” He dropped the file onto his desk with a heavy thwack. “She was here, only half-an-hour ago, begging me to find you.”

  “Why would she come to you?” Shit. I was screwed. This guy knew everything about me. My mother hadn’t been heading to the McMansion. She’d been driving away from Samantha’s house.

  “Several reasons,” Mr. James said. “First, because I am the leader of The Hold and I make it my business to find and protect all members of my family. Second, because I was once business acquaintances with your father, and your mother remembered this and thought I might be willing to help her. And finally, I believe she was offering me a chance to redeem myself, because your parents once asked this very favor of me, long ago, and I failed them. I could not find your missing sister Kaylee for them, and it has haunted me ever since.”

  I couldn’t move. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t stop that last sentence from bouncing around in my head. I had a
fever. That could make you hear things, right? Or hallucinate? Or go stark raving mad?

  “I don’t have a sister,” I exhaled, looking around the room for some way to escape this. “I’ve never had a sister.”

  “They decided not to tell you,” Alexander James said gently. “It happened six years before you were born. And they didn’t want that pain and grief to cloud your world. They wanted you to be happy.”

  “Happy?” I said, and it came out all mangled and shrill. Six years before I’d been born, my parents had lived in Manitou Springs, Colorado. That’s where they’d met. They’d told me stories about how my mom had worked in an art gallery, and my dad had displayed some of his earliest work there. She’d bought one of his pieces, mainly because she thought he was cute, and when he found out, he’d asked her out. A year later, they were married. Then the story always flashed forward to moving to Greenfield and having me. All that time they had been lying to me. All my life. This is what Marcus had been talking about. But how in the world had he known?

  “Your sister was born with PSS two years before Thea Frandsen in Norway,” Alexander James went on assaulting me with the truth. The truth I’d demanded. The truth I’d been begging for. “Doctors knew nothing about PSS back then. It had never been seen before. And she had it on over 80 percent of her body. Her birth was kept very tightly under wraps. They didn’t expect her to live. And they didn’t know what to do with her when she did. So, they kept her at the hospital. Your parents were in shock. It didn’t help that they were barely allowed to see her.

  Then when she was seventeen days old, someone took her. We don’t know who or why. But she was never seen again. The authorities didn’t ever want the story of the ghost baby getting out. It was too unbelievable, and they thought they’d be made a laughing stock. And so, they tried to erase it. They tried to erase her.

  That is when your parents came to me. I followed every lead. For years, I followed every rumor or hint of a rumor, but when your father sold me the painting, he asked me to stop looking. They wanted to forget and move on. They wanted to love you without the ghost of your sister hanging over you.”