A Gift of Ghosts (Tassamara) (18 page)

“Hmm, that’s interesting,” Zane answered. “Not a—?”

“Don’t even go there,” Akira interrupted him, as he pulled up
in front of the house. “It was not a white light. Or at least Rob didn’t see a
white light. And Daniel . . .” She tried to remember his exact words but
failed, and, mystified, added, “I don’t know what he saw. He said something
like, ‘come this way,’ and then they disappeared together.”

“So you’re thinking?”

Akira shook her head again. “Let me get Dillon,” she said. “Would
you mind driving?” She wanted to keep adding observations to her spreadsheet.

Ten minutes later, they were on the road again, and Akira and
Dillon were having a friendly argument accompanied by Zane’s interested
silence.

“But maybe if you helped me resolve my lingering issues . . .”

“Psychobabble,” Akira interrupted Dillon. “I’ve tried that, really
I have. And it doesn’t work. Unless ghosts are completely oblivious to their
real issues and the ones I’ve tried to help were sending me off on wild goose
chases.”

“Okay, I’m not asking for a white light, but a door would be
awesome.” Dillon was leaning forward from his usual spot in the middle of the
backseat, cheeks flushed with ghostly excitement.

“Dude, you’ve talked to your relatives. What exactly do you
think you could say that would make a difference?” Akira wished she hadn’t
given Dillon this glimpse of hope.

“Maybe I need to talk to my Dad?” Dillon offered. “Or, you
know, let my Dad talk to me? He’s probably pretty pissed off.”

Akira sighed. “There was this one ghost. When I was in
college?” she told him. “I returned her library books. I transcribed a paper
for a class on English romantic poets for her. Seriously, I did everything she
could think of that she hadn’t finished. It wasn’t fun. And nothing worked. It
didn’t make a difference. She was still haunting the café down the street from
the library when I graduated.”

Dillon flopped back with a sigh.

“No ghostly roads, huh?” Zane asked, turning onto a narrow
road.

“A road?” Akira asked, looking at him. Where had he come up
with that idea? Daniel hadn’t said anything about a road, but then he’d been
very vague.

“Native American tradition,” Zane replied. “Ghosts stick
around for a year, then take the ghost road in the sky. Maybe Dillon needs to
look up at night?”

“Ha,” Dillon replied from the backseat. “He forgets how much
time I’ve spent in a parking lot. Not much to look at except the sky. No, I’d
know if there was a road. It’s okay, Akira. My life—well, or whatever you want
to call it—is good these days. I don’t need a door or a road.”

Akira looked over her shoulder, and smiled to acknowledge
what he’d said, then glanced at Zane as he pulled the car to a halt. “No roads
in the sky either.”

Zane grinned at her. “I’ll keep reading.”

“You do that.” Akira unbuckled her seat belt and turned,
reaching for the door, a smile tugging at her lips. Maybe in a different mood,
at a different time, she would have been worried that he was researching
ghosts, anxious about what he might be thinking, but right now, today? Today,
it felt sweet.

And then she stopped, hand on the door, smile gone as if it had
never been.

The house.

Oh, shit.

The house.

She’d been half expecting it to be ostentatious, but it wasn’t:
a big white farmhouse, it was two stories with shutters on the windows and a
wide porch extending half the length and then bending around the side, and
lovely landscaping, with plenty of the bright flowers that made Florida so
colorful.

It should have been beautiful.

And it would have been, if it hadn’t been so very, very
haunted.

The house in North Carolina had shimmered with energy; this
house roiled with it, a crackling, snapping power as if it was trapped amidst a
storm cloud that only she could see.

Fear surged within her. She felt her heart racing, her throat
closing, a fuzzy feeling in her legs that let her know her knees wouldn’t hold
her . . . and then it doubled, trebled.

“Dillon,” she gasped, but the name was nothing but a puff of
air he could never have heard, even if he wasn’t already out of the car,
strolling toward the porch, unconcerned about the deadly vortex that would rip
him apart when he got too close.

“Dillon,” she tried again, louder this time, but he was too
far away, farther every second, and the door was closed. She looked at him,
looked at the house, and then she turned to Zane.

“Drive,” she ordered. “Drive!”

Zane recognized the tone.

He moved without hesitation, sliding back into
the seat that he’d been half out of, smoothly restarting the car, backing,
turning, accelerating away, all without a single pause or wasted movement.
Akira, still in the passenger seat, had her eyes closed, her clenched fists
held to her mouth.

Was she in pain? He couldn’t tell but he didn’t
ask questions.

He just drove.

Once, with Lucas, he’d heard the same order,
delivered in the same voice. It was a routine job, or as routine as any job
with Lucas ever was. They’d been in the Pacific Northwest, helping out on a DEA
case. Zane had pinpointed the location of a stash of drugs using a low-level
drug dealer as his link, and Lucas had gone in to take a look around. Returning
to the car, he’d snapped out his orders. Zane didn’t notice the blood seeping
down Lucas’s arm until they were a mile down the road and Lucas had called in
reinforcements.

Now he glanced at Akira. Her lips were moving,
but he couldn’t hear the words. “Do you need a hospital?” he asked, trying to
calculate distances and times. He could call Nat, get her to meet them at the
nearest emergency clinic.

“No,” Akira snapped. She half-turned in her seat,
craning her neck to look behind them, then turned even farther, lifting one
knee onto the seat so that she was almost fully shifted. “Oh, God, Dillon,” she
murmured. “Why did I make you practice stretching?” And then she grimaced as if
in agony, clapped her hands against her ears, and fell back into her seat.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she babbled. “I’m sorry.”

“Akira, what the hell is going on? What do you
need?” Zane asked, a little desperately. She was acting crazy, but something
was happening that he couldn’t see, he was sure of it. But not seeing left him
feeling helpless. What could he do?

She shook her head. “Are you okay?” She was
talking to the backseat.

Zane couldn’t help being a little annoyed. He
didn’t like feeling helpless, he didn’t like not knowing what was happening,
and he didn’t like that she was talking to his nephew and not to him.

“I’m sorry,” she said again, “But that house is
haunted!”

All right, maybe she had gone crazy. Her house
was haunted, her car was haunted, her whole damn life was haunted. What was her
problem with one more ghost? But chalk up another point for Max’s serendipity.
He’d been saying the house was haunted for years, since right after Dillon and
Mom died.

“You don’t understand,” Akira said.

“That makes two of us,” Zane muttered, turning
off the narrow road that led to the house, and onto the busier road that led
back to town. He wasn’t sure where he was going, but he’d head back to Akira’s
house for the moment.

He felt more than saw her glance at him, so he
looked in her direction. She was looking pale again, dark smudges under her
eyes. He felt a pang of concern. Tired was okay—they hadn’t gotten a lot of
sleep the night before—but she looked more anxious than he’d seen her in weeks.

She was so not his type, he thought. He liked
easy. Not sexually (although he didn’t object to that) but emotionally.
Uncomplicated. Cheerful. Go to a few movies, out to dinner, hang out with
friends, maybe spend some time outside at the beach or the springs. And in a
few months, when they were both a little bored, move on as friends. This
business of worrying about whether a woman was hurting was just not his style.

“Talk,” he ordered. “And put on your seat belt.”

She smiled faintly, and buckling up, said, “I
warned you. The very first time we met. I told you to stay away from the ghosts
that are all red around their edges.” That must be directed to Dillon, Zane
realized. She’d definitely never told him anything about red ghosts. Really,
they’d barely talked about ghosts at all.

“There is! Inside!” she insisted. “You’re just
lucky you didn’t get past the door.”

Zane’s phone started vibrating and he glanced at
it. Lucas, he’d guess. Wondering what had just happened. If Zane knew, he’d
answer the call, but since he didn’t, he ignored his phone, and kept listening
to Akira’s one-sided conversation.

“Well, stopping because your dad came outside
saved you then. If you’d gone inside, the energy would have ripped you apart.
It’s like being caught in a whirlpool or a tornado.”

A tornado? He’d read about something like that,
hadn’t he? Zane tried to remember what he’d seen about ghostly tornadoes.

“Yes, of course, I know what I’m talking about. I’ve
seen it happen.” Akira’s voice was almost angry, as if Dillon was arguing with
her.

Vortexes, that’s what he was remembering. Some ghost
hunter site had said that it was one of the common types of ghostly experiences.
But there was nothing about them being dangerous.

“Okay, fine, red like an aura, yes. No, not like
an evil halo. Dillon, could you focus? This is serious.”

Zane’s lips quirked. He was almost able to
imagine what Dillon was saying from Akira’s responses. His nephew had always
been curious, sometimes too curious for his own good. But the inadvertent
memory of Dillon’s experimentation lit a spark of sadness, and Zane sobered, as
Akira continued, “Dangerous, dangerous. How many kinds of dangerous are there?
It’s a ghost that will rip you to pieces if you get close.”

Okay, that didn’t sound good. But it also didn’t
make any sense. “If there’s a ghost in the house, it’s my mom,” Zane
interrupted. “She would never hurt Dillon.”

He glanced at Akira. She was chewing on her lower
lip again, the way she did when she got nervous. “It’s not—I don’t think I’d
call it your mom.”

“I’ve lived in that house most of my life. It was
definitely not haunted before my mom died.”

“Maybe it started as your mom, but red ghosts,
they’re not conscious. They’re not like people. They’re not aware of what they’re
doing. They’re just dangerous energy.”

“But why?” Zane asked. “If it started as my mom’s
spirit . . .”

“Anger, sometimes,” Akira answered him. “Angry
ghosts lose control. Ghosts that want revenge go red, I think. Or, um . . .”
she glanced at the backseat. “Despair, grief.”

“That medium said—huh.” Zane paused, remembering
what had happened to the medium. He frowned, thinking back.

“Right. That medium.” Akira was no longer chewing
on her lip. Her chin had firmed and if he had to label her expression, he would
have called it a glare. “Let’s talk about her for a minute. So some medium
shows up, tells you there are ghosts in your house, and then just goes away
again?”

“Not exactly,” he said.

She started to nod. “I knew it. I knew it. It’s
the only way a ghost gets that powerful. Damn it, you took me to a house with a
killer ghost in it. You took
us
to a house with a killer ghost! Don’t
you realize what could have happened?”

“That medium died of natural causes,” Zane
answered her, hands tightening on the steering wheel. It had been strange, that
was true. But still, Akira was saying that his mother—his mother, of all
people—was a murderous ghost. No way. That just wasn’t possible. “They did an
autopsy. It was an aneurysm.”

“Of course it was. Because medical examiners are
so eager to write ‘murder by spirit energy’ on a death certificate,” Akira
snapped.

***

“I’ll call you.”

Damn it, Akira thought as she watched Zane’s car pull away.
She hated that phrase. Not just the words, but everything they encompassed.
Both the sub-textual, “Yeah, you’re a little too weird for me,” and the
implied, “And don’t call me.”

Not to mention the passive-aggressive dishonesty of the lie.
He wouldn’t call. She’d see him at work next week, and they’d both pretend that
Friday night had never happened.

With a sigh, she picked up a box that was resting by the
front door, then turned and sat down on the porch steps. The early evening was
still warm, the air soft and fragrant. The orange blossoms that Meredith had
promised had flowered weeks ago, but a vine twining its way around the porch
had developed little white flowers. Akira was almost sure it was a weed, but
the smell reminded her of jasmine and she liked it.

She was hungry. It had been a long day. She ought to go
inside and make herself some dinner. But the thought of a solitary meal,
probably pulled out of the freezer, nuked for five minutes in the microwave,
and then eaten in front of her computer just wasn’t appealing.