A Gift of Ghosts (Tassamara) (17 page)

She frowned. Well, not always. In her earliest
memories, it had been different. But from the time they’d settled in Santa
Marita, he’d told her that what she saw was a form of energy.

Zane picked up her hand and she let him take it,
watching as he laced their fingers together, still thinking about her father,
until, dropping his voice, Zane asked her, “Do quantum physicists study
resonant frequencies?”

She couldn’t not smile at him. “Not really, no.”

“Not wasted then,” he murmured, leaning forward
to take her lips. She opened to him, feeling his tongue trace its way into her
mouth and a surge of desire sparking in her stomach and spreading warmth
through her veins. God, it felt like days since he had touched her, but it was
just hours since they’d woken up together. What a weird day it had been.

She pulled away, but let her hand slide up to cup
his cheek. “Do you do that often?” She was thinking of the woman they’d left
behind, currently lost in a fog of grief. The strength of Diane’s anger had
made Akira think that she was tough enough to be okay someday, but someday wasn’t
going to be soon. They’d left while the news media filled the street, FBI
agents the house, but tomorrow, or maybe the next day, Diane would wake up to
emptiness. Akira remembered what that felt like. And the loss of a child must
be even worse: she hoped Diane had someone who could be there for her.

“Kiss you? Not often enough.”

This time, her smile wasn’t even reluctant. “No.
I mean look for missing people.”

Zane grimaced. “I prefer insurance cases.”

“To finding kids?”

“Or not finding them.”

“A good shrink could help you with that problem,”
Lucas drawled, snapping himself into the seat across from Akira.

Reluctantly, she pulled her gaze off Zane and
looked at his older brother. She didn’t like him. She might not be being fair,
she acknowledged to herself: her perceptions were undoubtedly colored by the
gauntlet of reporters she and Zane had had to push their way through to get into
the house, and the fear she still had that her image was going to wind up on
some evening news show as a helpful psychic. Diane had promised not to tell
anyone what had happened, but who knew how trustworthy the distraught and
bereaved mother was?

“I didn’t know you were with him,” Lucas said
gently.

That didn’t make it better. He was still taking
advantage of his brother. Why should Zane have to follow Lucas’s every whim?

“Dragging Diane out to the airport seemed cruel,
especially when Zane didn’t think he could help. Why give her false hope? Plus,
every reporter and cameraman in North Carolina would have been right behind
her.”

Yeah, and then there was the mind-reading thing.
It just seemed so rude.

“Well, then, don’t think so loudly.” A smile was
playing around Lucas’s lips. Akira glared at him.

“He doesn’t usually do that,” Zane interjected,
squeezing the hand he was still holding. “Ignore him.”

“Except for the part about the shrink,” Lucas
corrected him. “Your inability to find dead bodies is just a mental block. If
you can find a diamond, you can find a dead body.”

Akira frowned.

“Well, I can’t,” Zane said flatly.

But it didn’t make sense that he couldn’t. “If
you can find a mineral that’s measurably indistinguishable from another lump of
the same mineral, then finding a specific mass of DNA, living or dead, shouldn’t
be hard,” Akira said.

“It doesn’t work that way.” Zane shook his head. “If
it was that simple, I wouldn’t be able to find anything. Everything would all
blend together.”

“Not finding dead bodies is a defense mechanism.”
Lucas leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes, as if to say that the old
argument was at an end, as the plane’s engines roared to life.

A defense mechanism? Akira tried to imagine what Zane’s
life would be like if he could find dead bodies. How many people went missing
every day? How many of them wound up dead? How many hours would he spend just
like this, sitting in a plane, waiting to fly to or from a scene like the one
they’d just left?

It wasn’t that she was unsympathetic to Diane,
but it seemed to her that Zane’s gift was more like hers than she’d realized:
once it was revealed, his life would no longer belong to him. It would be an
endless stream of desperate people, tragic situations, grief and pain.

“Or a coping strategy,” Akira suggested. Her
words were almost drowned out by the noise of the engines as they accelerated
down the runway, but Lucas opened his eyes and looked at her. She met his gaze
evenly. Maybe she’d reserve judgment on Zane’s brother. He was Dillon’s father,
after all.

Zane squeezed her hand again and she looked back
at him, at his wry smile, the affection in his eyes. She should tell him about
ghosts. She needed to tell him about ghosts, about their violent energy, about
what they could do, both to her and to other ghosts. But if she did . . .

Maybe she should think about what she’d learned
today a little more first. It didn’t change the risk: angry ghosts weren’t like
people, it wasn’t possible to have conversations with them. They were much too
dangerous for that. But if ghosts actually went somewhere when they
disappeared? She needed to consider what that meant, see how it might change
her ideas about past events.

“Think we can make tomorrow a do-over on today?” Zane
asked her, voice low, just for her ears. She raised her brows in question. “Start
the day the same way, but stay in bed a whole lot longer? Then maybe brunch at
Maggie’s? She makes incredible waffles. And then I’ll take you to the springs.
We can kayak, maybe see an alligator? Go for a swim if you like really cold
water?”

Okay, yeah, she was definitely not telling him
about the ghosts. Possession, convulsions, broken bones, possible death—they
were so decidedly unromantic. She’d have to tell him eventually, but the fun
would be over then, and she really wanted just a little while to enjoy this—to
enjoy him—first.

She smiled. “Sounds perfect.”

***

“Earth to Akira.”

“Hmm?” Akira responded absently, not looking up from her
phone. She was trying to organize her past experiences with ghosts into
categories, but it was proving much more challenging than she’d expected.

She’d always thought that ghosts came in types. There were
the faders, the confused, the free, the tied, and then the red-edged.

Except in hospitals, the faders were the most common.
Sometimes she thought they were more like memories than conscious beings. Like
the boys in the backyard, who did nothing but run and play and laugh, faders
seemed to be living and reliving important moments, as if they were an
afterimage of a life, not an extension of the life itself. Akira called them
faders because they were usually translucent, but the amount of translucency
varied. She suspected that the older the ghosts, the more translucent they
were.

Then there were the confused. Most often, they seemed to be
the recently dead. Hospitals were riddled with them, and they could far too
easily start developing red edges. But they tended to disappear quickly. More
than any other type of ghost, one minute they were there, and the next, they
were gone.

“Akira,” Zane’s voice was more insistent and she shook her
head, as if coming out of a dream, and turned to him.

“Yes?”

“The plane’s landed. Lucas suggests we have dinner at the
house?”

“House?” Akira was still distracted, still lost in her
thoughts. That one time at the hospital, the time with the broken ribs. Had
that ghost said something about a door? She had, hadn’t she? What was it,
exactly? She’d been nice for a ghost, worried about Akira. She’d asked if Akira
wanted to come with her before she vanished. And she had mentioned a door.
Okay, that meant at least one checkmark in the confused column.

“The house where I live?” Zane repeated patiently. “Lucas
stays with us when he’s in town. He’d like a chance to shower and change, and
then have us meet him there. With Dillon?”

“Um, right, yes.” Akira glanced down at her phone, tapping it
to close the spreadsheet app she’d been using. Dillon. His dad. Dinner. Right.
All of that made sense. Lucas was here to talk to Dillon and she was sure that
Dillon would want to see him. She could do that.

But if ghosts could go through doors, why were the tied
spirits stuck? Like Dillon. If a door was available to him, why would he have
spent years sitting in a car hoping something interesting would happen?

“Akira.” A gentle finger was turning her chin until she was
looking directly at Zane. “You good to talk to Dillon and Lucas?”

Finally breaking out of her reverie, Akira smiled at Zane. “Yeah,
I’m fine. Dinner at your house or whatever works is great. I’m sorry I’m so
distracted. I’m still trying to figure out what happened today.”

“A ghost told you where his dead body was?” Zane offered.

“Also new,” Akira agreed as she unbuckled her seat belt and
followed Zane out of the plane’s door, hopping down to the ground. “But no. It
was the way he disappeared.”

“That was weird?” Zane asked.

Akira shrugged. “Different, anyway.”

As they got in the car, she took out her phone again. She was
careful about asking ghosts questions. Maybe too careful. Had Mr. Sato, her
neighbor, been tied or free? She’d never seen him outside his yard, but she
didn’t know whether he chose to be there or not. And after Mrs. Sato died, she’d
never been back in the house. She assumed he’d disappeared, but she didn’t
really know for sure.

So many ghosts she’d seen only briefly. And her earliest
memories were so confused. She barely remembered anything from before her
mother died, and the few years after that—well, those memories were chaotic at
best. She was trying to remember: that first time, the time with the broken
arm, what had that ghost been like? But it was too long ago, the memories just
wisps of vision and feeling. Her father had been yelling, trying to cast the
demon out of her, and her mother crying, and then there was pain. If anything,
the clearest part of that memory was the smell of the hospital, that almost
acrid antiseptic flavor that hospital air so often had.

“Christians—some of them anyway—think ghosts are actually
Satanic,” Akira mused, not looking away from her phone. She felt, more than
saw, Zane glance at her. They’d taken his car to the airport, so that Dillon
could stay home with Rose and Henry, so they were on their way to get the
Taurus before heading to his house. “I think it’s in Deuteronomy that the Bible
expressly forbids communicating with the dead. People who talk to the dead are
abominations or detestable, something like that.”

“In some Buddhist monasteries, the monks leave offerings for
ghosts before meals. Food or money or flowers,” Zane answered, stopping at the
red light in town. They’d been silent through the drive, Akira lost in her
memories, Zane not disturbing her concentration.

Akira looked up, startled by his response. “How do you know
that?”

He looked her way again, and grinned. “What, you don’t think
I’m a closet Buddhist?”

She laughed. She knew some Buddhists in California, and it
seemed unlikely. “Are you?”

“Nah,” he shook his head. “But I’ve been doing some reading.”

“About religion?” Akira asked, surprised again. That seemed
even more unlikely than Zane being a burger-eating Buddhist.

He shot her a tolerant look and said, “About ghosts. Now that
I know they’re real, it seemed like a good idea to learn a little more about
them.”

Oh, of course. “Learn anything interesting?” Akira asked,
curious. Years ago, she’d read ghost stories and traditions obsessively, trying
to find anything that would help make her make sense of her world. But she’d
given up: too many stories, too much conflicting information, and too little of
it that fit with her experiences. Maybe nuggets of wisdom were buried in the
myths, but most of them were from a time before modern science.

“Lots,” he drawled. “Anything that’s true? I’ve got no idea.”

“Probably not much,” she told him. “Although maybe I know
less than I used to think I knew.”

“How so?”

On the plane, Lucas and Zane had quickly settled in to
talking about business, which had been fine with Akira. She hadn’t really
wanted to talk to Zane about ghosts. She wanted waffles. She wanted to go
kayaking. She wanted to see her first real alligator in the wild.
She—maybe—wanted to go swimming, if the day was warm enough and the water not
too incredibly cold. What she did not want was to scare Zane off by seeming
obsessed with death, a phrase that lingered in her memory like a bitter
aftertaste from an otherwise utterly forgettable past lover.

Now she shook her head, looking down at her phone again. “The
little boy today? He took his father somewhere. The father, Rob, was saying
that he couldn’t go and then they disappeared. Together. That has to mean
something, but I have no idea what.”