Emma Holly (33 page)

fine as French rose glowed on the slope of her breasts. Her nipples shook with tiny aftershocks of excitement. In spite of his recent satisfaction, his body began to reverse course. In that moment, he knew true regret.

He couldn't take her again. One more coupling like that just might brand her on his heart. His hopes for the future did not include pining after what wasn't his.

With an effort, he pulled his attention back to his brain. "I should go. I have some correspondence I need to see to."

He gathered his clothes as quickly as he could, pausing only to put on his pants. Considering his omission of undergarments, not to mention his agitated state, he was lucky he didn't do himself harm.

Charity watched in silence, her gaze like weighted fire.

"B.G." Her voice stopped him at the door. "Are you really that uncomfortable without your rules?"

This was the same accusation Eric had made. From her, at this particular time, the arrow struck a trifle too close to home.

"I'm fine," he said, his hand resting on the lintel for support. "I have some work to do."

She let him leave without further challenge. For that, he was appallingly relieved.

Charity
tried not to feel rejected, but B.G. might as well have poked his finger into the bubble of her happiness. With each step she took toward her room, her spirits sank.

She'd thought… she'd hoped she'd be able to keep B.G. and Eric for a while. Not forever, but a while.

Now—just like those times when her mother's man-chasing ways had made her the new kid in school—she'd have to fight to be liked again. She'd have to start all over from scratch.

She didn't understand how what they'd shared could make B.G. want to run. To her, their lovemaking had been amazing, a truly special touching of souls… unless her soul was too shallow to be worth touching.

She'd been kidding herself, apparently, about being new and improved.

"Stupid," she said, pushing her door shut behind her. The hinges were designed not to slam, or she would have reveled in the noise. Everything she'd feared was true. She was an overemotional, shallow, stupid floozie just like her mom.

"Stop it," she ordered, swiping at the tears that had sprung to the corners of her eyes. She was blowing this all out of proportion. She was letting B.G.'s reaction make her unhappy when he could have had a thousand reasons for what he did. For all she knew, her guess about the rules being his safety blanket was on the mark.

Maybe B.G. wanted to get away from her because he liked what they shared too much. The man might be a genius, but she'd long since learned anyone with a Y chromosome could act dumb occasionally.

She flung herself onto the bed and wrapped the comforter around her, still feeling crummy but more in control. Determined to pull herself together, she forced her breathing to calm.

She was what she was. If God or the universe or whatever ran this world couldn't manage to love her, with or without improvement, they weren't worth worrying about.

Ri-ight
, said a sneering inner voice.
You don't care if you're loved
.

"Crap," she said and threw a pillow against the wall.

The outburst didn't make her feel better, but she tried to pretend it did. She'd had a boyfriend once, a hippie throwback who'd taught her to meditate. The habit hadn't taken, but she still half-remembered how. She breathed in, then out, holding the air and slowly releasing it. The room was shadowed, the sun setting on the other side of the house. The courtyard garden looked weedy and sinister. In spite of being prone to the creeps, she was damned if she was going to get up and turn on the light. If she
wasn't
a quantum being, if her thoughts had no reality-altering power, her fear of ghosts couldn't attract them to her.

This conclusion didn't prevent her neck from tightening at the sound of footsteps dragging down the hall.

A full-body tingle swept her skin. Those weren't Eric's footsteps, or B.G.'s; they scuffed along the slate too much for that.

She became aware that the room was icy. Silence had spread through the house around the shuffling sound, descending without warning like a cotton fog. No clocks ticked. No voices spoke. Nothing moved but the approach of the strange footsteps.

Charity breathed faster, her head gone oddly light. The sensation was so trancelike that when she noticed she could see her breath turn to white clouds, she couldn't get her mind to process why that was wrong. The door began glowing around its edges an instant before it was shoved.

That's when she discovered she was paralyzed.

A figure moved through the light, familiar but shadowy.

"Stupid," it said with a sneer of supreme disgust. Then tried to slam the bedroom door.

Oh, my God
, Charity thought as the figure covered its face.

It looked just like her. It stood there, trembling: a picture of Misery struggling not to cry.

"Stop it," it said, and wiped the tears away. It looked so angry Charity was proud.

Be angry
, she thought.
Stupid Y chromosome
.

But the figure wasn't mad at B.G. It was heartbroken, staring forlornly into space like it didn't care if the world ended.

Poor thing
, Charity thought.
She needs to snap out of that
.

Then her double flung herself onto the bed and into the very space Charity occupied. Every hair she had stood on end. The other wrapped the comforter around herself, just as Charity had done before. The

other blew out her tension. The other forced her breathing to calm.

I am what I am
, Charity heard her think—and all the rest that followed. Though she'd conceived those words herself, they seemed alien.

She was outside her thoughts. Or maybe she was bigger than what her brain could contain. Maybe the ideas that flitted through her conscious mind were only the tip of the iceberg of who she was. It was the kind of revelation you had when you were stoned, but stoned wasn't how she felt. This was a different level of altered state, one in which she was absolutely alert. Her atoms seemed spread to the distant corners of the cosmos, intertwined with everything. If she was quiet, she could feel each line of energy being tugged by the lines it crossed, a huge radiating net of awareness. She was conscious of being terrified, but the emotion seemed not just removed but irrelevant.

I am a quantum being
, she thought as her double threw the pillow against the wall.

The spell, or whatever it was, broke the instant the pillow hit.

The double disappeared. Charity was alone.

"Holy cow," she gasped, covered in a clammy sweat. She had to brace her hands on the mattress to keep upright. Then she heard it: the slow, scuffing drag of feet coming down the hall. Her feet.

Approaching the room again.

"Fuck," she said, then muttered a hasty prayer. The vapor of her breath came out winter-white.

This time, before the door could open, she mustered her will and screamed.

B.G.
was at the turning of the passage to his private wing when he heard Charity's cry. A thousand possible causes whirled through his mind as he raced to her room.

Despite his haste, Eric was there before him, on the bed hugging her tight. Charity was crying and clinging back. The pang B.G. experienced was ironic. He'd been thinking about jealousy, and here it was.

He simply hadn't expected it to be his.

"What is it?" he asked, taking a seat on the edge of the futon. "Why did you scream?"

It took a few tries to sort out her tale of ghostly doubles and events going round in loops. She seemed embarrassed by her hysteria but unable to rein it in. When she explained that a long-ago boyfriend of her mother had instilled this panic by trying to convince her his house had ghosts, B.G.'s temper snapped.

"That's outrageous!" he exclaimed. "Bad plumbing is my guess. For goodness sake, the vast majority of supposed spectral phenomena turn out to be nothing more than clanking pipes."

"B.G.," Eric said cautioningly.

"But it's a travesty. Terrorizing a twelve-year-old. How could her mother condone it?"

"I don't know," Eric said, evidently trying to send a message with his eyes. "The point is, you certainly wouldn't want to suggest to Charity that
you
believe in ghosts."

"Oh," he said, suddenly wishing he'd caught on right away. For that matter, he wished Charity had divulged this story earlier. He would have done a number of things differently. Hoping to undo the damage, he called on his most confident professorial demeanor. "I have absolutely no hard scientific evidence to support the existence of conscious ghosts."

For some reason, this declaration inspired a laugh. "Thank you," Charity said, "but that still doesn't explain what I saw. It was like that movie
Groundhog Day
. I thought it was going to play over and over to infinity."

At her resurgent sniffle, Eric patted her back while B.G. tried not to feel useless. It didn't help that this was his fault. It broke his heart to see those tears staining her cheeks.

"It might not have been a true time loop," he said, offering her a fresh tissue.

This was not the right thing to say.

"What the hell else would you call it?" She snatched the tissue, blew her nose, then looked abashed.

"Sorry. I'm not mad at you."

That was debatable, but B.G. chose to act as if he believed her. "Strong electromagnetic fields have been shown to affect the temporal lobe of the brain, which can, in turn, produce hallucinations. What you saw could have been a waking dream."

In his desire to be helpful, he had spoken incautiously. When Eric turned to stare at him, B.G. feared his old friend was assembling the pieces of a picture he'd hoped to keep indistinct.

"Strong electromagnetic fields?" Eric repeated. "Correct me if I'm wrong, but you're not talking about the kind of EM field you find around a hair dryer."

"No," B.G. admitted.

"Hell, B.G., what have you been playing with?"

B.G.'s shoulders tensed defensively. "I shut the project down when your sister told us about the trouble.

The fields should have dissipated by now."

Eric's face was grim. "Exactly what did you shut down?"

B.G. hesitated, then decided he couldn't make the situation worse—and Charity probably had a right to know. "I'll show you," he said. "Both of you. But you must swear never to go there alone."

Charity spoke through the crumpled tissue she'd pressed to her nose. "If whatever it is caused whatever that was, you have my solemn oath. I'd just as soon not revisit
The Twilight Zone
."

B.G. appreciated her stab at humor. He hoped she could hold on to it through the rest.

She
could walk, but barely. Though the threat she'd faced wasn't physical, her knees were still quivering.

Too much adrenaline, she supposed. As she stepped away from the bed, her legs almost gave out.

Eric's hand flashed to her elbow. "We should do this later. You're in no state for sightseeing."

Part of her wanted to give in, but she knew if she let herself, she'd never overcome her fear. "I want to go," she said. "I need to see whatever made this happen."

"You need new clothes," B.G. put in. "Those are soaked."

Clarity glanced down at them in surprise. She'd assumed she was clammy from sweating, but no sweat could get clothes this evenly wet.

"It was cold," she said slowly. "Right before it happened, the room went cold as ice."

B.G. nodded. "Probably a change of vibration due to the energy field. That can lead to heat transfer and condensation." He fingered the strap of her form-fitting ribbed tank top. Material that had once been light green was now dark. "Maybe what happened here wasn't in your mind."

"You know," Charity said, "you could at least pretend to be a little more sympathetic and a little less scientifically intrigued."

She'd meant to tease, but hurt slipped into his eyes before he could hide it. "My apologies," he said, looking away. "Sometimes I forget other people aren't experiments."

Charity clucked her tongue. "I know better than to believe that. I also know you can't help being interested." She rubbed his sleeve when she wasn't sure her reassurance got through. "I'm putting on a robe. I'll be right out."

Not knowing where they were going, she grabbed a pair of jeans as well. When she emerged from the bathroom, the men were standing awkwardly side by side—her guys, as she'd begun to refer to them in her mind. She doubted they'd said a word while she was gone.

"Shoes," B.G. advised, and she laced on a pair of Nikes.

If
just do it
ever needed to be her motto, now was the time.

Walking through the house was different with B.G. Once they passed into the below-ground section, the lights no longer turned on for him. Eric and Charity were following a few steps behind him, and a small but definite lag marked the time it took for them to trigger the sensors.

"Something wrong with your wiring?" Eric asked, noting the delay.

Too preoccupied to answer, B.G. shook his head. He looked as worried as Charity had ever seen him.