by Lissa Kasey
“Breathe, baby, breathe,” he whispered over and over while he rocked me, holding me in his arms, curled around me like a shield. “Breathe. That’s it. Deep. In. Long out.” He mimicked how I should be breathing, and I tried to follow. Sparkles decorated my vision, so even through the mild light of a nearby flashlight I couldn’t see his face. “That’s it, keep breathing. I’ve got you.”
What if it was a trick? What if it wasn’t really Alex but some monster? When had I started to believe in monsters? Dumb question. Two years ago on the hiking trail as I faced something I couldn’t recall to this day. Was this the same? How long would I be lost this time?
“Breathe,” Alex whispered. I felt his lips on my face. Light kisses that chased away the ice. If I could have crawled further into his embrace in that moment, I would have. And I couldn’t stop trembling if I tried. Again my brain struggled to decipher the voices around me. Odd as it had never been a problem before this week in my entire life.
“You’re freezing.” He rubbed my arms, and wrapped himself tight around me. “Breathe, baby, keep breathing.”
I let him hold me as the world began to refocus. The voices of the others took shape, but Alex showed no sign of letting go. He was still talking, though not to me. At some point my screaming had stopped, though I felt like a gaping fish, gasping for air, clinging to Alex with every fiber of my spirit.
“Call the police,” he instructed someone.
“Because we found their board?” Someone… wait I think it was Jonah said.
“And a broken phone,” Julie said.
“It’s Byrony’s,” Melissa said her voice sounding strained, like she was crying.
“The police will have more people and dogs who specialize in this sort of thing,” Alex pointed out.
“I don’t understand where they would have gone,” Melissa said.
“Maybe Joe did something,” Chad said quietly. There was a pause and then he defended his statement, “it happens all the time. True crime stuff is littered with lovers hurting lovers. Always stupid reasons, but it happens.”
“It’s always someone you know,” MaryAnn added.
“Joe would never hurt her,” Melissa said.
“I’ll go back to the trail and call the police,” Freya said, heading away from the group.
Alex continued to rock me, and I swallowed great gulps of air, feeling it cool, and deep within my lungs. The group was scattered around us, close but not standing over us. I admit to feeling a bit embarrassed by my breakdown, though the terror had been legitimate enough to still have my heart racing. Alex peppered my face with small kisses and ran his hands over my back and arms.
“Keep breathing,” he whispered. “You’re okay. We’re okay. I’m here.”
“What happened?” I asked, not sure he would know.
He rested his forehead against mine, his face and eyes barely visible in the pale lights of the flashlights. “Later. Just sit with me. Breathe. Focus on me.”
“Reverse of what I did for you,” I pointed out, reminding him of the cemetery in which he’d had a PTSD attack over finding a body. Fuck… “Is there a body?”
“No,” Alex said so softly I was sure only I could hear him.
I struggled to get up, pulling away from him now, anxious and scared but needing answers. He let me up, helped steady me as I got to my feet. When I looked around all I found were the obvious remnants of where Byrony and Joe had stopped. There was a backpack, a couple flashlights, a Ouija board, although the planchet seemed to be missing, and a handful of half-melted candles.
There were no signs of blood or even a struggle as the leaves and area surrounding their little camp seemed untouched. Alex reached for my hand, and I let him take it and pull me into a hug. His warmth began to seep through the cold still making me tremble, so I clung to him, breathing in his scent and basking in his heat.
“I don’t know why I’m shaking,” I told him. I was the rational one. Always had been. Anxiety happened, and I’d had a couple panic attacks in my life. Emotionally overwhelmed was how I liked to think of it. Too much to process at once. This was that, and more, like a loss of physical control. Physically overwhelmed perhaps? Too much sensation? I realized then that the bugs were gone. That familiar crawling ooze across my skin had vanished, leaving behind the cold and Alex’s body against mine.
“I felt something,” I whispered to Alex, gripping him in a brutal hug as the realization sank in. Whatever I’d encountered out here hadn’t been a simple shadow cast by light. “I think I saw something?”
“Hmm,” Alex hummed against my face, where he pressed his beard to help ground me. “We’ll talk about it later.”
I had seen something. That was what Alex was saying without saying it. His sight, vision, ability, whatever it was, was so much more in tune than mine. If I only saw a shadow what had he seen?
“Alex?” I had to know. Even standing there in the forest, heart pounding, ears filled with the sound of my own terror, I had to know. “What did you see?”
“Byrony’s ghost,” he told me quietly, whispering the words into my ear so no one else would hear. “She went right through you.”
I sucked in a breath so fast and hard that I choked. Alex continued to rock me, rub my back, and hold me tight. How could he be so calm? Byrony was dead? Was her body nearby? I had a million questions but couldn’t clarify a single one.
“Her body?” I asked after a few minutes of contemplating.
“No idea,” he answered. “I don’t smell blood. I don’t see anything nearby. But I’m keeping the group together. No one needs to find that.”
“What about Joe?” I wondered.
This time Alex paused. I could tell he was thinking, debating on something, but he didn’t answer.
“Alex?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “There was another… shadow? I don’t know. Not as defined. Maybe Joe? Maybe something else.”
“Did it feel like your demons?” Like the djinn or whatever it had been who had already claimed Alex and seemed to stalk us wherever we went.
“No.”
I leaned into his embrace, resting my face in the groove of his neck. “This was supposed to be a holiday.”
“Still can be,” Alex acknowledged. “As soon as the police arrive, we’re handing it over to them.”
“What will you tell them?”
He shrugged and I understood. There wasn’t much he could tell them. They wouldn’t believe him if he said he saw a ghost. And if he did, they might even point fingers at him for doing something, though he’d been with the rest of the group the whole time. In fact, the entire group had been together all day. Perhaps Joe had done something and then killed himself? Of course my brain suddenly reminded me of dozens of news stories over the years of exactly that.
Alex kissed me on the cheek, and I turned my face to look up at him. “Stop thinking so hard,” he told me.
“Can’t help it. And you can’t say you aren’t doing the same.”
He nodded, lips pulled tight into a mild grimace. “True. But this is not our doing, okay?”
“If we had stayed home?”
“This probably would have happened anyway. Blaming yourself only brings you unnecessary pain.”
“Fucking truth bomb,” I grumbled at him.
“There’s a reason they say the truth hurts,” Alex agreed.
Chapter 11
By the time the police finally arrived we were all sitting on the trail, exhausted, adrenaline gone, and I really wished we could go home, like back to New Orleans home. At least the dead there I knew of only in historical references. Byrony and I may not have been friends exactly, but I’d known her for years. Had my misfortune cast trouble on her? If so, what about the rest of the group?
Alex released me long enough to show them where they had found the stuff. The police questioned everyone. Sad how I predicted what they would ask. Too many times having experienced the whole missing person thing. They didn’t
recognize my name, for which I was grateful. I instantly blamed myself, as though somehow my disappearance made it easier for those around me to vanish.
“So you haven’t known them long?” The detective asked me.
“I’ve known Byrony for a few years, but never all that well. More online friends than real life friends,” I said. We hadn’t really been friends at all. Byrony had a way of pushing people’s buttons, and she had always disliked me. “I never met Joe until late last night. Saw him for only a few minutes before heading back to bed.”
“They didn’t indicate they were going anywhere?”
“Just out here to the woods to play their ghost games and not disturb the rest of us who were trying to sleep.”
“Did anyone seem really upset with them? Like your host perhaps?”
“Freya?” I shook my head. “Annoyed mostly. I think we all were. It would have been different if we were at an actual hotel with very separated spaces. Though the group screaming might have woke people anyway.”
“And they screamed because they thought there was a ghost?” The detective confirmed.
“That’s what they said. I guess Byrony and the rest were doing scary stories or something. Alex and I went to bed. I think Jonah did too. And Freya came from the middle cabin where we do photoshoots for our craft stuff.” I tried to recall where everyone had been before they left. And couldn’t recall anyone being unaccounted for. “Melissa went with them. She probably knows more.”
“Did anything seem off about their relationship? Byrony and Joe?”
“Off how?” I wondered. “I saw them for two minutes.”
“Did she defer to him, or was there a lot of tension between them?”
“I don’t think so.” I hadn’t really been awake enough to notice. “Joe said something about they had rights at the B&B too. Like it was okay to keep everyone awake because they were, but that’s all I remember about him.” I glanced around trying to find Alex. He was a few feet away speaking to another officer.
“What about the rest of the group? Did you notice any tension between them and your friend or her boyfriend?”
“Everyone was sort of upset that they were playing. I think it was more that they’d been woken up. Sorry. I got woken up by screams and came running. My brain was a little slow to follow, so I probably didn’t notice as much as I would have if I’d been more awake.” I wasn’t sure I was catching all this either. The panic mode had faded a little, but sat just below the surface waiting to pounce again. Too much adrenaline still coursing through me, and my gut churned like a cement mixer with the memories of whatever it had been that I’d seen.
“A lot of people run away when someone screams,” the officer pointed out.
“Well my boyfriend reacted, and so did I. Maybe because he’s ex-Army? If it had been me by myself, I probably wouldn’t have gone running.” Admitting to being a coward wasn’t as difficult as it used to be. Years of living with the late night noises and people looking at me like I was broken while leading ghost tours around the city had taught me there were a lot of levels of brave, many synonymous with stupid. I considered myself a cautious sort of brave. Alex sometimes bordered on the other type. A mix of military training and white knight syndrome perhaps. Either way I wished he did less running headfirst into danger and spent more time thinking out other options. It just wasn’t in his nature.
“If you think of anything else, call, alright?” The officer said.
I nodded, and waited until Alex was free from his questions, standing a few feet away, rolling from foot to foot with impatience and exhaustion. The trickle of conversations only half made sense around me. Freya talking about the plans for the group for the week. Julie and Nicole about their scare the night before. Chad about his short encounter with Joe, which led to nothing more than a backhanded insult about Chad’s size. MaryAnn suggested that she’d heard the pair talking about meeting up with friends outside the group.
“Will you need a search party?” Alex asked the detective he was talking to.
“We’d rather everyone stay out of the woods until we’ve had a thorough search ourselves,” the detective replied. “While there is some concern, we don’t know there is actually anything wrong yet.”
Only we did. Alex saw her ghost. I felt something…
I sucked in air, recalling the cemetery a month earlier and the mess of blood and bone. Lukas had questioned me at length about that night, thinking that somewhere in that mess lay answers to where Alex had gone. I remembered things a lot more vividly than I thought they’d actually been. A muddied mess of blood and a mangled corpse. Not the sort of thing people saw ever, even in the semi-realistic dark horror of movies. I’d had trouble shaking that memory. Not the first body I’d ever seen. But the only unnatural death I’d ever witnessed.
If I had to acknowledge the facts of what I’d seen, it had looked like one of those glass dolls, arms and legs normally made breakable, but wrapped around a fabric core. Only the limbs broken, smashed and mangled, center mass mostly intact, though twisted. A few seconds glance had been all it had taken to burn it into my memory for life. Like when people posted animal torture pictures as memes to ‘warn’ people that some asshole was doing something awful. Two seconds and the brain committed that horror to memory. I so didn’t want that again. I was a simple tour guide and craft shop owner, not a medical professional or even a military member, former or otherwise. Death and destruction was not in my skillset.
“We will let everyone know if we need help with a search or have more questions,” the detective told Alex. “You’ll all be at the hotel for a few more days, correct?”
“Yes. A week or so. The convention we came for starts in a few days,” Alex said. His focus fell on me. “Is it okay if we head back to our cabin?”
The officer nodded. I reached for Alex’s hand and let him pull me into a sideways hug as we walked back to the B&B together.
“You okay?” Alex asked as we emerged into the backyard of the B&B.
“No,” I told him honestly. I had a million questions while being so tired I could barely stand. Did I really want to know the answers? Find out that Byrony was dead somehow? Where her body might be? If some sort of ghost had touched me? The last question brought a million more, some based in legend, others in philosophy, a rolling tide of thought, emotion, and internal noise.
No. I was far from okay. The trembling hadn’t stopped, not even when the adrenaline finally crashed leaving me exhausted and shaken. It had been years since I felt this… broken. Not since after my return from wherever and moving into a new place to hear whatever it was that continued to torment me. Those first few months I’d hid, burying myself beneath covers, and barely sleeping. Mind adding to the tricks the world around me played. The unease soaked into my skin in the same way it was right now. Leaving me constantly on edge. I had thought I’d finally gotten past it. Another lie my brain conjured to lull me into complacency.
Alex paused, pulling me into his arms and holding me. I didn’t realize I was crying into his shoulder until he steered us away from the group. I heard the others protest behind us, but didn’t care. No one needed to see my tears. I hated being vulnerable in front of anyone. Except Alex. He never seemed to judge me. I had no desire to join the group in the main house where I was sure they’d be debating Byrony’s disappearance all night.
“Shh,” Alex whispered. “You’re safe. I’m here.”
Was I ever safe? What was safe? Anything? Nothing? Alex’s warm embrace made me feel safe mostly because I wasn’t alone. He would face whatever I did, head on, if given the chance. That didn’t mean he wasn’t afraid. I’d seen fear in his eyes on more than one occasion. Though what terrified him was more my loss than things that went bump in the night. Was that the difference between us? He ran into danger to keep from losing those he cared about, and I hid from danger for fear of losing myself. Though if I were being honest with myself, the idea of losing Alex again, that would break me.
> I’d unraveled too while he was gone. Lukas had come apart at the seams leaving me thinking more than once that he wouldn’t survive the death of his twin. Many days I’d spent comforting Sky, assuring her she wouldn’t lose Lukas over Alex’s disappearance. Everyone spoke like Alex was dead, I suspected they’d done the same thing when I was missing, and it was brutal to hear. But I had been so focused on Sky and Lukas, that when I had time to myself, to think about how he’d been dropped into my life, a storm of humor, apprehension, and adoration, only to be ripped out just as suddenly, my world spiraled into chaos. Free time had not been my friend. The fine balance I’d walked since my own disappearance became an impossible dance while I teetered on the edge of a full breakdown. How often had I contemplated that I was the curse? That he’d been taken because of me? It was a heavy burden to bear.
Now I clung to Alex, like he was the last thing that could keep me from shattering completely. He held me, rocked me, kissed my face and hair, not caring at all what anyone else thought. It was one of the things I liked best about him.
“The middle cabin is open for you two,” Freya said from somewhere to my left. “I finished the piece I was working on. And the cabin is all set up. Keys are on the table inside. Just lock up when you’re done.”
I heard her walk away and felt a thousand things all cluttered in my head. Cosplay was the last thing on the list. Even the elation of having Freya make me something was absent in the wake of all the internal noise.
“Well that’s exciting,” Alex said. “What does a cosplay cabin look like?” Alex pulled me toward the middle cabin instead of ours. I should have resisted, insisted we curl up together for the evening, hide from everything, but that wouldn’t end the noise. And I knew that despite being exhausted, I’d be unable to sleep. Too much noise in the middle of all the silence.
