A Gift of Ghosts (Tassamara) (24 page)

Dillon’s blue eyes were wide. The intensity in her voice was
getting to him, she saw. He wasn’t scared, but he wasn’t quite as eager as he
had been just a few minutes ago.

“Just wait a couple of minutes and then give it another try.”
She looked from Dillon to Zane and back again, and swallowed. Zane wasn’t going
to like this, but she had to warn Dillon. “If you start feeling pulled from
farther away—like if you’re in the car, and it starts to feel like you’re being
tugged?—you need to get away. If that happens, go as far away from the house as
you can.”

“That would mean she’s getting stronger?” Dillon asked. Akira
let her gaze flicker to Zane. He was frowning.

“Yes, exactly.”

“Why would she get stronger?” Dillon asked, sounding uneasy
but fascinated.

She smiled tightly. “The obvious reason.”

If the ghost managed to kill Akira, there’d be a lot more
spirit energy in the vortex. Its reach would easily extend to the car, but if
they parked too far away, Dillon would be stretching to get to the house.

Without waiting for him to figure it out, she hurried on. “Just
remember what I said: wait and then approach slowly. If you feel pulled, run
the other way. Okay?” As he nodded, she opened her car door and stepped out.

She took a deep breath as Zane joined her, then started
walking, careful steps bringing her closer and closer to the house.

“What’s the obvious reason?” he asked, voice grim.

Oh, dear. If he was bothered by that, he really wasn’t going
to like the rest of what she had to say.

“It’s not important,” she said. “There’s something else you
need to know. I didn’t want to talk about it around Dillon.” She glanced back
at the car. Dillon’s worried face was visible through the window.

Her mouth was dry and her legs had a quiver running down the
back of them that meant her body was saying, run, run, run, but she’d made her
decision.

And this was it, she realized. This was the conversation that
always ended things.

She looked at Zane. His frown was almost a scowl, his eyes
gone their grayest in the light. “Ghosts that have lost control pull in energy
from the environment. Is there a room or a place in your house that’s colder
than it should be?”

Zane nodded. “Dillon’s room. No one uses it, but it stays
colder than the rest of the house.”

“So we’ll go there.” Akira stepped up onto the porch. She was
trying to think of some way to phrase this part of the story, some way to tell
him the truth that would make it palatable for him. But there wasn’t one, and
she knew it, so before he could follow her up the porch, she turned. Their eyes
were on the same level as she started talking.

“She’ll try to take me over. Possess me,” she said baldly. “That’s
what they do. I’ll be trying to absorb her energy and fight her off at the same
time. I’m pretty good at it, I’ve done it before.” She glanced over her
shoulder at the door. The energy almost made it look as if parts of the house
were shifting and melting in her vision, but she knew that was just because of
how she saw it. The house itself would be solid.

“Possess you?”

Was it disbelief in his voice? Akira wasn’t sure but she
pressed her lips together for a moment and then continued steadily, trying not
to remember the sympathy in the voice of the boyfriend in college who had told
her she needed psychiatric help.

“The thing is, she’s really strong. It’s going to feel to me
like I’m being electrocuted. I can take it for a few minutes, but unless I can
bleed off a lot of her power, enough to bring her back to rationality, it
probably won’t be in time.”

“In time for what?” His voice held a snap.

“In time for—” Akira paused. “Look, spirit power is like
electricity. It’ll cause random electrical activity in my brain. That’s going
to cause seizures. I can’t tell you what they’ll look like. If they’re mild, you
might not even notice, but they might be more serious.”

“Meaning what?”

“Ah, well, um, convulsions, basically. You know, the
full-bore, falling down, jerking and twitching, unconsciousness thing.” She
tried to smile again but he didn’t smile back.

“Here’s what matters,” she continued quickly. “Ghosts get
stronger from blood, so it’s really important that I don’t bleed. If I start
losing blood for any reason, I’ll get weaker, and she’ll get stronger. That
would be bad.” Zane was starting to shake his head no, even as she kept going, “But
ghosts hate pain. Once they’re dead, they don’t have any physical sensation and
they forget what it’s like. If you—if I get hurt, she’s likely to let go of me,
at least for a bit.”

Zane’s head motion stilled, and he reached for her, putting a
hand on either shoulder. Akira could feel the warmth through the light cotton
of her shirt and she tried to let it soothe her, but the tension in her muscles
didn’t ease.

“I don’t know what you’re saying, but I don’t like it,” he
said.

“Since my dad died, I’ve only done this once. That time, I—”
She was opening and closing her hand, she realized, almost convulsively, and
with a deliberate effort, she stilled herself. “I took a hammer and I broke my
hand.”

His fingers closed around her shoulders, squeezing hard. It
wasn’t painful, just tight. “It’s tough to judge how hard to hit,” she said. “My
dad . . . my dad. . .” How could she explain this? But she didn’t have to.

“You had convulsions, and your father, instead of taking you
to a hospital, beat you until he broke your bones?” Zane interrupted, and this
time the emotions in his voice were unmistakable. Shock. Horror. Revulsion.

“I’ve been possessed by ghosts and my father saved my life by
hurting me, yes.” Akira wanted to cry, but she tried to keep her voice even. “And
broke a few bones along the way, that too,” she added, the admission almost
reluctant.

“Akira, that’s insane!”

“I know what it sounds like.” Akira almost laughed, although
not with humor. “If I’m not schizophrenic, I’ve got post-traumatic stress.
Abused child hallucinates as a defense mechanism, rationalizes the abuse to avoid
perceiving herself as a victim, her father as a villain. There’s no such thing
as ghosts and I ought to be locked up for my own safety.”

Zane let his hands fall off her shoulders. “Let’s not do
this,” he suggested.

Her chin went up. “Look, if you think I’m crazy, no big deal.
We walk through your house, nothing bad happens, we walk back out.” She
shrugged.

“I don’t think you’re crazy.” His defense sounded automatic,
not quite sure. He touched her cheek. “But I don’t—look, have you ever seen a
shrink?”

Her smile didn’t reach her eyes.

“Just to be sure?” he continued. “Just to . . . your father
beat you. He broke your arms, your ribs, your jaw. Because you had seizures!
Anyone would be traumatized by that. There’s nothing wrong with getting help.”

“Any decent psychiatrist would lock me up.” She said the
words softly, gently. Her tears were very close to the surface but she held
them back by force of will. She would not cry, not now.

“Let’s go back to the office. Let’s talk to Nat. She’s a
doctor. Maybe she can help.”

Akira shook her head. She glanced back at the car, at Dillon,
who had gotten out and was sitting on the roof, watching them, frowning. “I
want to help Dillon,” she said. “He needs this. And I—I love him.” She paused. Then
she shook her head and turned toward the door. “Let’s just do it. We’ll walk
through the house, you’ll show me Dillon’s room. End of story.”

***

Zane unlocked the door, torn between insisting that they go
see Nat and letting Akira have her way.

Could she have fooled him? Could she be delusional? Could the
ghosts she saw simply be hallucinations, products of a traumatized mind?

She wouldn’t have deceived him maliciously. There was no way
he would believe that. But part of his job as head of GD’s special affairs
division was to hire people with psychic abilities, the ones who worked on GD’s
special projects. He knew many people with gifts, but he’d also met some
incredibly skilled fakes.

Could Akira have an innate, even subconscious, ability to do
a cold read that had been good enough to trick him? And the rest of his family?

He led her through the foyer and straight up the stairs to
the second floor, his brain churning. He was trying, for the moment, to set
aside his horror at the idea that her father, the man who should have been
protecting her, had been beating her instead. Beating her because she had
seizures!

Back when he’d first learned about the broken bones, he’d
sort of assumed that her father had abused her. Natalya had said most of the
breaks happened long ago, and even he realized that most abused children are abused
by their parents. But every time she’d mentioned her father, it was with such
obvious affection and love that he’d stopped thinking about it. Maybe he should
have tried harder to learn about her past, but he hated it when she stiffened
up. It had been easy, too easy, to let it slide, to not ask painful questions.

Zane was fiercely glad that the man was dead. He wanted more
than anything right now to find him and hurt him like he’d hurt Akira. But he
needed to let that go, he knew. He wouldn’t know how to help Akira in the
here-and-now until he understood what was going on. Did she really have a gift
that let her see ghosts or was she insane? In the back of his mind, a thought
was pushing at him, fighting to rise to the surface, but he ignored it, trying
to focus.

She’d known Dillon’s name. But it wouldn’t have been hard to
find that out. Anyone in town might have shared information about the Latimer
family on her first visit without thinking anything of it. Rose’s name, though,
that would have been harder to learn. Zane had looked it up soon after Akira
had moved in, and a teenage girl named Rose Harris had died at that address
back in the 1950’s.

But even though the name was right, how could Akira have
learned it casually? Or by accident? It seemed almost impossible.

When he’d been reading about ghosts, there’d been an article
about people who believed they were possessed. The symptoms fit into the same
diagnostic group as people with multiple personalities. “Dissociative identity
disorder,” he said aloud.

“What about it?” Akira asked, as she caught up with him at
the top of the stairs.

He looked down at her pale face and tried not to frown. Could
she have multiple personalities? Really? She’d never behaved erratically, never
acted like a different person. But to know Rose’s name, she would almost have
to have researched it. “You could have that,” he offered. “Multiple
personalities. It was in an article I found about ghosts.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Great,” she said. “Good to know.”

He sighed and gestured toward the door of Dillon’s bedroom.

But say she had multiple personalities, his thoughts
continued. She would still have to be an incredibly gifted cold reader. She’d
known such subtleties. How could she have found out Dillon’s musical taste? She
couldn’t have, which meant that it had to be a guess, but a perfect guess. What
could have clued her in?

Akira stepped forward. He was watching her intently, still
trying to think through the implications of what she’d told him, still trying
to analyze every experience of ghosts that they’d had together over the past
several trusting months, so he saw the movement of her throat as she swallowed,
and the seemingly involuntary shudder of her shoulders as she placed her hand
on the door.

“Seizures, by the way?” she said, not looking at him. “Five
continuous minutes will damage neurons. Thirty minutes has a decent chance of
killing me.” She turned the knob, and pushed the door open, and stepped into
the room, just as his thoughts crystallized around an idea: door, ghosts, North
Carolina, bodies.

Hell.

Sure, some skillful guessing might have gotten her a lot of
information about Dillon and some research might have provided her with Rose’s
name. But she’d found two bodies in North Carolina that the local police and
the FBI had spent days searching for. That wasn’t just a lucky guess.

“Let’s not do this,” he started, following her into Dillon’s
bedroom. “At least let’s talk about it a little more.”

But it was too late.

Akira’s head arched back as if she’d just been hit in the
face, and her whole body went stiff, then she crumbled forward, falling against
the floorboard of the bed and then to the ground as if she was a marionette
whose strings had just been cut.

“Akira!” He jumped to her side, just as the thought that had
been pushing at the back of his mind jumped full-blown to the forefront: if she
wasn’t insane, she wanted him to rescue her from ghostly possession by hurting
her.

Hurting her badly enough to break her bones.

That’s what he should have been paying attention to. That’s
what he should have been worrying about. Wondering whether she was crazy was
just a way of avoiding thinking about what she wanted him to do.