Only the Good Die Young

18

I took the quickest way out of the mansion to catch Amanda Lee—the broken window.

I didn’t even think about what might happen if that dark spirit was waiting outside. Didn’t even stop to remember how my new friends had told me that meeting bad ghosts was rare and, good God, what was this one doing here?

I exited just in time to see Amanda Lee’s car tear out of the driveway and onto the road. I had to haul ass, but as she squealed around a corner, I hitched onto her roof and hooked my essence into the thin crack that she’d left in her window.

Then I leaned against the glass, shaping part of myself into a fist and banging.

“Amanda Lee!”

When she heard me, she jumped in her seat and swerved the steering wheel, almost veering into the next lane, where a car was coming.

For an endless split second, it felt like this was a replay of that car accident hallucination I’d given her the other night, with the headlights coming straight at us… .

Amanda Lee hit the brakes, skidding to a beach-view turnoff near a guardrail, dust rising as she cut the engine and fell against the steering wheel.

Still against the window, I watched her weeping, her proud figure collapsed into an emotional mess. But I was weak enough to lose my posture, too. That dark spirit had scared me, and I was just now feeling it.

Sinking over the edge of the window, then down the inside of it, I hunkered into the backseat, letting Amanda Lee cry great wrenching sobs.

She spoke around them. “I have no idea what I let loose tonight… Goddamn it, how could I have been so arrogant?”

Because you always believe that your way is the best way, I thought. And it backfired.

I didn’t think I needed to tell her that, though.

She shook her head, swallowing, coming up to wipe a hand over her face and push off those glasses. “What did I do, Jensen? Oh God, Liz would hate me. I wouldn’t ever have summoned something that dark, even by mistake, when she was alive. I wouldn’t have gone to these lengths, but it’s just that…” She glanced in the rearview mirror as I rested in back. Her eyes were red. “Sometimes I’m the one who feels dead and emotionless without her here. I don’t even recognize myself anymore.”

She trailed a hand down her face so hard that she left long, faint red marks from her fingernails, like she was punishing herself. But she seemed to realize that she was crumbling, and she drew in a quivering breath, taking really good stock of me behind her in that mirror.

“But just look at you,” she said. “You’ve lost all the color you had. Goddamn me, I’m so, so sorry.”

“I’m fine.” I’d been through worse.

“You’re barely fine. That… thing attacked you. It came out of nowhere.”

I didn’t tell her that I planned to make matters better by rising to the power lines in a minute, just for a mini-fill-up. And I wouldn’t stay too long here in the car with her because the cleaner was coming to the mansion, and I had one last chance at Gavin, because I was sure this ghost chaser would spirit-proof his office and car and wherever else he was going to be, too.

When Amanda Lee had calmed down, I injected some levelness back into our conversation. “Can you tell me what that dark thing was?”

“I don’t know. Maybe an entity that was attached to the property, a relative who’s still clinging to the family… I was going to ask if you saw more of it than I did. Did it look like it might be your fake Dean?”

“No.” Then again, how could I be sure? I had no idea what that “keeper, not a reaper” looked like under its facade.

She began shaking her head again and wouldn’t stop. “I opened a portal. When Wendy mentioned it to me before the séance, I was so sure I could keep everything under control, but something was waiting to come through. It happened so fast, and if that something hadn’t been hanging around…” A sob shuddered through her. “Do you think it was Liz, and she became so angry in the afterlife that she’s a dark sprit now?”

Oh my God. “No, Amanda Lee. It couldn’t have been Elizabeth. She loved you and would never do that to you and…” Should I tell her? Could I trust fake Dean’s information enough?

Like that mattered anymore.

“I know that Elizabeth moved on after she died,” I said. “Don’t ask me how. You just need to believe what I’m telling you.”

She turned to me with her tearstained face, hope filling her eyes. “Do you think it’s true?”

Without hesitation, I nodded. “With my entire heart.”

Who was lying now?

The news seemed to strengthen her. Maybe, later, she would come to doubt me, but sometimes we believe what we need to in order to go on.

As the occasional car drove by on the road behind us, I expected the hard-core general to take Amanda Lee over again. But her voice was still unconfident, shaky.

“That dark spirit truly wanted to announce itself tonight.”

“It did the job. But what interests me is that message it left. ‘You will pay.’ Who was it talking about?”

Amanda Lee sent a slow glance to me. “Any one of us in that room. Me. You.”

Gavin? I thought.

But if the dark spirit wasn’t Elizabeth, why would it be after him?

A terrible notion nudged me. “What if Wendy was right on? What if her mom came back and…”

“What?”

“I don’t know. That family is so damned cold and messed up that there could be a million scenarios.” A million family secrets that we hadn’t uncovered yet.

“The spirit flew out of the house, though, didn’t it?” Amanda Lee asked, still fixated on the dangerous part. “It did leave.”

“Yeah. I think you expelled it. And the Edgetts seem to believe that I was that spirit and the house is now free of a haunting. But their live-in maid talked to them after you left and she’s calling a cleaner to make sure the mansion is extra safe.”

Amanda Lee nodded, giving me another mortified glance in the mirror. “I’m glad the cleaner is coming. I shouldn’t have done what I did to Wendy, and not only will a cleaning keep her safe, but it’ll put an end to any poltergeist speculation.” She sighed. “It was one thing for me to talk about collateral damage during a haunting, but actually seeing what happened tonight when that spirit crashed the séance… it’s not just talk anymore. It’s real.”

“No shit. By the way, I was trying to stop you from framing Wendy.”

“I noticed, and I almost didn’t carry through. Then…”

I took an educated guess. “Then you thought of our mission.”

She nodded, the tears teeming in her eyes again.

“Amanda Lee,” I said. “I want to stay here with you, but the cleaner’s going to be there soon, and that limits my time with Gavin. I can still—”

“You’re not going back there.”

Um… what?

She was shaking her head again, this time harder. “That dark spirit changes everything. It could harm you in so many ways.”

“But what about bringing closure to Elizabeth?”

She wiped her nose. All the makeup was getting smudged—lipstick, mascara, extra foundation and contouring. “Liz wouldn’t want you to go back there. There’s something evil in or near that house now, and there’s got to be a better way to see that Gavin gets his just deserts one day.”

She was being emotional, not thinking things through. So was I the one who needed to solve this mystery now? Somehow it had taken the place of my own murder, showing me that, someday, I could get closure for myself, too. It gave me hope.

“I’m not scared to go back,” I said, meaning it. I’d died a victim, but that didn’t mean I had to be one forever.

“Jensen…”

I had to get on with this. “It’s also a good idea for me to be in that house with Wendy and the other innocents, just in case that dark spirit decides to come around again before the cleaner arrives. I can protect them from what we brought over.”

She couldn’t argue with that part.

“Do you have salt in this car?” I asked.

She seemed to sense that I was going to do what I was going to do, no matter what. “I always carry some in my purse.”

“Good. Why don’t you sprinkle it around in your car to keep that dark spirit out of here in case it was writing that ‘You will pay’ note to you?”

“You’re right. Okay.”

I already knew that her house was protected. And that she knew how to at least temporarily shoo a spirit away. I felt good about the odds of her security. Honestly, she was the last person I was worried about with this dark spirit. My fears ran more to the Edgetts, the innocent ones in particular.

Amanda Lee was already in motion, opening the car door, her purse in hand. She dug into it for the salt and circled it at every opening of the car while I waited.

“You won’t be able to ride in here anytime soon,” she said.

“I’m more of a VW Bug sort of girl anyway.”

We looked at each other, and she still seemed ashamed. Maybe that was a good thing. Maybe she could start the rest of her life tonight.

As for me? I was continuing what I’d started.

“Drive safe,” I said, rising in the air.

“I still wish you wouldn’t go back.”

“No chance.” Not only was I without fear, but I was humming with anticipation.

She got back into the Mercedes, and from behind her closed window, she pressed her fingers to the glass in good-bye. I lifted my hand, imitating the shape of her hand on the window.

Then, with one last swipe to her eyes, she started the engine, pulling onto the quiet road while I flew up to the power lines. Just for a short time.

As soon as I could—maybe even too soon—I jammed out of there, up the road again, to the mansion. The first thing I noticed was that every light was shining through the windows, and someone had already boarded up the broken sitting room pane.

Was Constanza savvy enough to have blocked off the chimney, too, just until the house could be cleaned?

I traveled to the roof, braced myself on top of the chimney, then rolled down into it, expecting to be barricaded at any instant. When I wasn’t, I got a little jittery, like I’d had another can of predeath Mello Yello.

If I could get back in the house, then the dark spirit could be anywhere, too. But had it just used Amanda Lee’s portal to arrive in this dimension and it was gone now?

I found everyone in the kitchen, their backs to the cabinets as they sat on the marble-tiled floor. Farah and Noah were huddled side by side while Wendy and Constanza stayed near each other. Gavin, the lone wolf, was the only one left standing, his arms crossed over his thick chest as he leaned against a counter and looked out the window toward the pool.

My first instinct was to go to him, see if I could lure him away from the others so I could continue my haunting, but then I saw the salt on the floor. It was in a circle around them, on the tile, on the counter.

Of course, I thought. Even a rich household wouldn’t have an unlimited supply of salt, and they’d made do with what they had on hand until the cleaner arrived. She had obviously advised the Edgetts about what to do to safeguard themselves, just in case.

I also noticed that everyone but Gavin was holding either a cross or a crucifix, which was a fine idea, seeing as they might affect a dark spirit. But not me.

Still, I kept a good distance away so I wouldn’t alert them with my temperature.

“Do you see anything out there?” Farah asked Gavin. She was looking at her older brother like he was a commando who was there to guard them all. A protector. But he also seemed just as sleep-deprived as he had before, even worse now, actually, with red smudges under his eyes and a five o’clock shadow making him even rougher.

“I told you,” he said. “There’s nothing to worry about. You saw the spirit fly out the window as clearly as I did.”

“I didn’t like what it forced that psychic to write,” she whispered. “‘You will pay.’ What did that even mean?”

“It’s gone, and hopefully we’ll never know.”

As he spoke, Wendy was watching everyone’s faces, like she had no idea who these people were. And she probably didn’t. She was still the half-scared, half-spellbound teenage girl she’d been when the spirit had made its appearance, and she peered to the side of her, like she’d sensed that something had changed in the room.

Something like me.

I backed up a little while Gavin glanced at the watch on his wrist, then impatiently ran his fingers through his hair, cursing under his breath.

“This is ridiculous, Constanza. The spirit left. We don’t need to be surrounded by salt when there’s nothing to be afraid of anymore.”

Constanza shook her head. “Mr. Gavin, please. Make me happy by staying here. There is nothing more important for you to be doing.”

He smiled wryly. “How about sleeping? I could use some of that. I’m dying for my bed.”

“Just sleep on the floor here,” Wendy said.

“Wen.” His voice softened. “That mattress is a Vividus, and it’s all I want right now.”

When he started to step out of the salt circle, his family yelled at him.

Farah’s voice was the loudest out of everyone’s as she stood, darting toward him, catching his shirttail and pulling him back into the circle. “You’re the one who brought that séance to us. You owe us some peace of mind, so stay here.”

He slowly glanced down at her hand, which had landed on his waist. Farah backed off, head down.

I saw that, nearby, a black-beaded rosary with a crucifix attached was curled on the counter by a fruit basket. Gavin took hold of it and held it up.

“How’s this?” he asked. “I’ll take it with me, and nothing will be able to get to me. Then Constanza’s friend will come, and she’ll help us all.” He said that last part facetiously.

“She will help, Mr. Gavin,” Constanza said.

He lowered his head, then looked back up, an eyebrow raised. “You admitted that she only dabbles in the paranormal. She’s supposedly cleaned one haunted house before, and she’s more of an enthusiast than anything.”

“She will help.”

How perfect was this? I’d already seen how arrogance had been Amanda Lee’s downfall tonight, and Gavin was falling into the same trap by being an unbeliever. Right into my invisible hands.

“Mr. Gavin,” Constanza said, “your best protection is in the circle. Eileen said so.”

Eileen, the name of the inexperienced cleaner?

“If that thing comes back to get me,” he said, “I’ll haul myself back here in a hurry. I swear on my mattress.”

As he stepped out of the circle, everyone else got to their feet, even Noah.

Gavin smiled, and since he didn’t do smiles all that much, it caught me.

“I’m not scared,” he said, walking away from his family.

His words echoed in me.

As his family nervously watched him leave, I followed him down the brightly lit hall, to the foyer, up the stairs, to his room. He headed straight for his bed, the “Vividus,” he’d called it. It did look thick and comfy and puffy, and as he collapsed back onto it, spilling the crucifix by his side to the stark white bedspread, I almost wanted to crash with him.

I wouldn’t be able to feel any mattress, though. It was just memories of a good night’s sleep that seemed so appealing.

Outside the window, the sound of waves rushed up the shore and back out. Gavin sighed with exhaustion, then closed his eyes, rubbing his temples. He was so damned sure that Amanda Lee had expelled his tormentor from the mansion that he relaxed quickly enough, his breathing evening out, the rough lines on his face smoothing out. I didn’t know if he was fully asleep yet, but he was definitely mine for the empathetic taking.

I deftly swooped in, touching his cheek, hoping against hope that, this time, empathy would work on him. But as usual, I couldn’t get in to his thoughts, so I pressed harder against his cheek, thinking that a hallucination would relax him fully while he still wasn’t expecting a ghost.

All of this had taken only a flashing second, and he didn’t have any time for fear or thought.

He didn’t have time to react quickly enough for anything, and I was in before he could stop the hallucination… .

We are in water, the ocean, floating and feeling the sun on our face.

Warm, bobbing up and down on slight waves.

Silence, except for the dull roar of the sea in our ears…

And then something happened that I totally didn’t expect.

I somehow tumbled into his mind.

He hadn’t just relaxed—he’d fallen asleep from the hallucination and his complete exhaustion. I knew it because that eerie slow-motion passage of time surrounded me as I opened my eyes and saw a red sky above me, clouds dripping from it like the bloody tears I’d once seen on Gavin’s plastic-masked face in his first dream.

As I rolled from my back to tread water, I saw that I was actually in a pool. The lagoon pool, outside the mansion.

I wasn’t moving in the double-slow-motion time that had distinguished Gavin’s original fire-sky and wall-of-water dream from the relatively more realistic second dream half that had taken place in the study. Even so, I still moved at a drag as I swam to the side of the pool, clutching the edge.

A sound from my left won my attention, and I swiveled my gaze over to see the pool guy who’d been peeping at Wendy the other morning hiding in the bushes. Blond, good-looking… he should’ve been a welcome sight to any girl, but he had a grimace on his face that was so heart-shocking to the dream body I now had that I had to press a hand over my thudding chest.

What the fuck was he doing here?

It seemed to take hours for me to get out of the pool—time enough for him to step back into the foliage and disappear.

Blood raced through me because I was filled with dread—and that was saying something, seeing as I had already gone through a whacked-out dream with Gavin along with visions of my own murder. I was used to weird, but being in the pool under a bloodred sky was more unsettling than usual for some reason.

When I glanced at the mansion, a wall had rolled open to reveal the study with the heaven-high shelves of books.

Water dripped from me, plopping onto the concrete in slightly suspended time as I looked down at my body.

At the white swimsuit I was wearing.

I couldn’t stop myself from grabbing the towel on a nearby chair and covering myself up. Couldn’t stop the realization that I was playing the part of dream Elizabeth tonight.

With the towel around me, I told myself that this was just a dream, and I found myself walking toward the opening in the study. The room was empty, except for all the books strewn around.

When the fourth wall slammed shut behind me, I slow-whipped around, dropping the towel at the same time. Belatedly, I grabbed at it, but it disappeared in my hand, just as quickly as the pool guy had faded into the bushes outside.

Now I was dressed in my unfortunate Jensen clothes again: blue jeans and sneakers. No towel. No more white bathing suit. No more me-being-Elizabeth.

When I looked up, Gavin was sitting in that leather chair he’d occupied in the original dream. But there wasn’t any blood trailing from his fingers and over the leather this time. He was sedately reading one of the books, the tome open in his lap. He looked up at me as if he’d been expecting me.

“You,” he said simply, and he was watching me like…

Whoa. Like he was seeing that half-angelic spirit in Wendy’s photograph, with light-colored hair spread out in the air. Beautiful, ethereal, spellbinding.

And he looked completely bewitched by me.

My dream heart pumped excitement through my body as he closed the book, speaking again.

“Were you there tonight?” His words were slightly dream-slurred. And he didn’t need to explain that he was talking about the séance.

“Yes, I was,” I said.

“That psychic let something in that should’ve stayed out… .”

“I don’t know what it was.”

“Why don’t you?”

I only shook my head. I should be the one asking him a million “why”s.

No… Elizabeth should be the one.

I walked closer to him, and his pale eyes lit up, like he appreciated that I wanted to be near.

He couldn’t take his gaze off me. He was even smiling, warmer in this dream than he’d ever been in life.

I was going to take full advantage of his fascination, even if my dream libido was beating, telling me to go in another direction altogether. A taboo one.

“What happened that night?” I asked, talking about Elizabeth’s murder. “You have to tell me.”

“That night?”

He seemed confused and—

Without warning, the room went dark, the lights turning off. I hit the floor just as a slant of illumination angled out of a corner of the room. But as the light got brighter, I saw that this wasn’t a room anymore.

I was in the desert, but not like one I’d ever seen. The red sky had followed me here, and the cactus plants had stiletto knives instead of needles sticking out of them. Blood dripped from the blades as well as the sky. The sand looked like crushed skulls beneath my tennis shoes, and when a tumbleweed undulated by, it was composed of hissing asps.

My perception had slowed a hundred times to a barely moving flow, and I realized that this dream of Gavin’s was the opposite of his original one—the faintly less surreal portion coming first and the weird-as-shit part coming second.

A hand grabbed my arm. Awareness tingled in me, claiming every cell.

But it was only Gavin standing next to me, touching me. A normal guy against the fucked-uppery of this land. A cipher who might never be solved.

He let his fingers trail down my arm, his gaze following his gentle touch. He looked like he wanted to confirm I was real. But there was an edge in his irises, too—black splinters cutting through the blue.

He was attracted and repulsed by what I was—his compelling, torturing devil. A floating ghost who looked like an angel of death in Levi’s jeans.

I closed my eyes, trying not to let him affect me.

In the near distance, a humming sound claimed the atmosphere, and I opened my eyes to see that a Victorian air machine was slicing through the red sky. It was the same machine as in the original dream, with the little girl pilot and her dark hair flowing from her helmet.

But wait. There were two machines this time.

I was so busy slow-watching the skies that I was barely aware that Gavin had started pulling me back from something, forcing me to get behind him with such suspended speed that it took me forever to process what was going on.

But when a hideous, huge black spider appeared in front of us, I screamed.

Its face… crushed, just like the dragon’s had been in Gavin’s original dream.

I watched helplessly as the spider dangled and those air machines flew over us, dipping low, the first little girl pilot in her goggles, leather uniform, and flying long dark hair. She was waving at Gavin. The second machine began a drawn-out dive, too.

But that’s when the spider turned toward the girls, opened its mouth, then shot out a bony, skeletal web that flew with rickety grace at the first air machine, caging it. Yanking it down and crashing it into the shattered skull-sand.

As the dust flew around the wreckage, that first little girl cried out, her scream one long echo. The other, airborne pilot didn’t seem to notice the danger, and she kept diving in her air machine, the same long dark hair streaming out of her leather helmet behind her.

The spider scuttled toward the trapped pilot as she wailed.

“No… ! No, please, no… !”

Gavin tried to take a step toward her, but his boots were mired in the crushed skulls. I tried to move, too, but fear had me in its hold.

Then, suddenly, another cry filled the air. Inhuman. Crowlike.

At next glance, I saw that the huge bird that had been shadowing the first little girl’s machine in the original dream had materialized and it was diving down, aiming for the hanging spider. And when it impaled the creature, black blood flew everywhere—over the cacti and the sand.

When the liquid hit Gavin, speckling his white shirt, it was like the blood freed him, and he began to run toward the first girl, even though his boots were getting sucked into the broken skulls.

With every step, he sank deeper… deeper… . But he wasn’t giving up, and with a ragged cry, he stretched his arms toward the massive bird and the spider, who was getting impaled over and over again.

When Gavin raised his fist and punched through what was left of the spider, drawing out a dark blob of a heart, he held it up, staring at it. Then falling into a spent heap to the ground.

As the other girl’s machine kept diving toward us, the first pilot crawled out from the wreckage and then between the bones of her cage to Gavin, ignoring the bird and the spider like they were invisible. When she got out, she threw herself over Gavin’s back, clinging to him as he lay belly down, motionless on the ground.

In the sky above, the second machine pulled up from its long dive, then flew past us, continuing its journey like nothing had happened below. The little girl’s hair kept flowing, just like a dark river, and I saw her waving back at us until she faded away.

The bird began to bury the spider beneath the skulls while the rescued first little girl kissed Gavin.

“My hero,” she said worshipfully, clinging to him.

Then it was as if all of it—the girl, the bird, the cacti, and the skull-sand—had never existed. Just Gavin in a red, empty space. Just me, still on the ground, unable to move.

And then footsteps that thudded like a reanimated corpse’s.

It took a few dream seconds, but I looked over my shoulder to see who’d arrived. Elizabeth?

She was naked except for the bloody white scarf tied over her eyes, blinding her. Worst of all, her limbs were attached by large, thready stitches, like someone had tried to put her back together after her killer had dismembered her.

She didn’t say a word to us, only shaking her head in sad pity.

From somewhere, the sound of a muffled bell shook me, and when I looked at Gavin, he wasn’t next to me anymore. I should’ve known that was the end of the dream, even before my body got yanked once, twice, and then I flew backward, out of the red land, through the darkness, back to Gavin’s bedroom.

Expelled, I skittered over the carpet, leeched of energy.

Before looking anywhere else, I spied a wall socket, and I began moving toward it so I could stick myself into it for a rush of energy. The hallucination, the dream, the residual effects from the dark spirit had done their work on me, even with my power-line fill-up.

Behind me, Gavin’s voice came, wide awake. No fear. No energy I could take from him to make me feel better.

“You came back,” he said, almost regretfully. “You really should’ve stayed away from this place.”

I could barely look at him, but when I did, I saw a man sitting up on his bed, forearms braced on his thighs, his hair bed-ruffled. He had a longing on his face I didn’t understand.

Until I realized that he would do anything to protect his family—even get rid of the angel-ghost he’d touched in his dream.

The doorbell rang, and I realized that was what I’d heard in his subconscious. And before the cleaner could enter the mansion, I left the bedroom as fast as I could, trying to get downstairs to the chimney and to safety.

But I wasn’t nearly fast enough.