Eyes to the Soul (19 page)

“There will be no surgery at this time, likely not at any time. I’m here to see what that blockage is and why it’s there.”

“Can you do anything about it?” Celina asked.

“Absolutely. Remember last time, when I did a sweep up toward your eyes?”

“That was you?” Celina gasped, remembering the horrible pain…and then the threats. She didn’t know what to think. Except… she didn’t want the asshole back. At all. But she definitely didn’t want him to feel like she was trying to get rid of him.

“And that brings us to ghosts.”

Celina, her mind locked onto the ghost that had been terrorizing her since forever, almost missed Dr. Maddy’s comment. Then when it registered she had to wonder if the woman hadn’t read her mind. Did she know about her haunting? Could anyone see that? Was that predator one of the people she had in her space or one she held close to her heart – her mind immediately dismissed that – or was he connected to her eyes? She’d been arguing with him for so long about seeing, but she’d never imagined he could have a physical impact on her ability to see. Not really. She’d been denying him, but as she hadn’t been actually able to see she couldn’t do what he wanted anyway.

Still, she didn’t know what he could do with what little she had.

And he didn’t believe her.

Or he wouldn’t believe her.

Then again, she was trying to give a ghost a reasoning brain, and they didn’t have that as she’d long since found out. They had a narrow focus that narrowed further the longer they walked this plane. He was locked on her sight, or lack of it, and couldn’t leave the subject. It was driving her crazy.

“Celina?”

She started. “Sorry, I was just…”

“Thinking about the crazy idea of energy and ghosts. I thought if you saw ghosts you would have a more open opinion to the concept of energy being in different forms in a way that so many people couldn’t understand.”

“I do. And I don’t.”

The chair squeaked across from her. She winced. “I do see ghosts. Or I used to. Now I think I just imagine them. Because I can’t see anything anymore.”

She sighed. “At least not like I used to.”

*

Stefan knew he
shouldn’t be listening in. But his senses were super jacked where Celina was concerned and Dr. Maddy had opened the door between them, letting him hear the conversation. He was happy that Celina had admitted to seeing ghosts, but the latter part of her comment worried him. He’d seen too many psychics unable to understand or to handle what was happening in their world. Too often they went quietly insane. Or if they sought out help and got the wrong kind, they spent the remainder of their lives in a drugged stupor. That Celina was afraid she was imagining ghosts was the same thing, just in her own quietly tortured way.

He felt for her. For all that he’d checked up on her, he’d been unable to reach out and help her. Something he’d always regretted. He’d been in the camp of “leave alone what wasn’t his to touch,” and he’d followed it religiously. But he might have been able to make her last year so much easier.

Still, she’d always resisted letting him get any closer, even after all this time. It was all he could do to stand back and let it all be. It was her body and her physical space. That meant it was her call.

But he could help her.

If she let him.

If Dr. Maddy let him.

*

“So, Eric, I
hear you are having some problems.”

Eric looked up at the doctor and his minicomputer. He’d like a little computer to play on but he didn’t like the doctor. Any of them. No one understood. No one cared. They all thought he was making the monster up. He wasn’t.

“Your mother says you aren’t sleeping well. Now that’s too bad,” the doctor said in a too-happy voice. “You need rest to heal.”

Eric stared at him, waiting for the usual heart-listening, back-listening, head-patting, writing on the tablet, and leaving. It happened every day around the same time.

And every day Eric didn’t say anything. The monster had told him what would happen if he did.

The monster would do something horrible to Mom.

*

Maddy shifted position.
She was in the corner of her office with Celina sitting in the chair as she had been before. They’d gotten to the point of Celina allowing her to take a look inside. She needed to make this fast for everyone’s sake, especially Stefan, who paced outside.

Maddy closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and jumped free of her body. The process worked so easily now that it was almost a mind switch and she was out. She moved toward the quiet woman and, using the anchors she’d placed inside before on her previous trip, found herself back inside the base of Celina’s skull. She hadn’t blended with the energy this time. Instead, she opted to get a better view of the blockage.

She needed to see what was behind this problem.

With that in mind she slipped closer slowly, trying not to enter Celina’s mind but stay separate psychologically and move between the organic structures to see the physicality of the blockage. Moments later she realized that there was none.

There was no physical impediment surrounding her eyes. If there was a blockage it was on either a mental, emotional, or energetic level.

Or most likely – all three.

*

“How are you?”
Jacob asked Lissa, his see-through visitor. He was so damn grateful to have anyone to talk to he was afraid he’d say the wrong thing and she’d disappear. “I don’t understand how you know me.”

“Oh, I don’t know you. Hadn’t met you before you went into a coma,” she said with a bright, translucent smile. A smile he could see right through.

He hated to ask personal information, but he really needed to know how to get out of this situation and hopefully back into his body where he might be able to wake up.

“Are you in a coma too?”

She laughed, a bright tinkle of sound that floated throughout the small room. “No, I’m not in a coma. I’m dead.”

He swallowed hard and stared at her. “How can you talk to me if you’re dead? I’m still alive.” He motioned to his body, lying beside them. “I’m trying to figure out how to get back inside my body.”

“You still have that option, but I don’t. I died a long time ago. I kept trying to contact my sister after I’d died, but it took a while to sort things out. I refused to leave until I could though.”

“As you are still here I presume you never managed to contact her.”

“Oh, sure I have. It’s great fun to be able to catch up with her. I love her very much.”

He frowned. “So why stay now, then? Surely you’re supposed to move on.”

Her face twisted. “Maybe, and maybe not. I found that I have something to offer people while I’m here, so I do my best to learn and grow. I don’t know what comes after this stage, and I’m not sure I want to know,” she said with honesty. “I like my life here and I am learning to do more and more things. It can be lonely at times, which is why it’s fun to meet people like you.”

“Like me?”

“Sure – people caught in between. I’ve met a few ghosts too,” she said in a commonplace tone of voice, “but they are often more zombie than alive.”

He didn’t want to ask too closely what she meant by that zombie comment, and his mind kept returning to her caught in-between comment. “Is that what I am? Caught between life and death?”

She studied him. “You tell me. This is your experience. You created this. Are you alive?” Lissa motioned to the form on the bed. “If you call that alive,” she continued, then swung her arm toward him. “Or are you dead?”

Jacob winced. “I want to be alive.”

“Then what’s stopping you?”

He stared at the strange girl and her easy grasp of a situation that would drive him insane. She was so accepting. So complacent. “I don’t know how to get back into my body.”

“Pssshhh. Sure you do. It’s easy. Just go lie down. Your body and soul know what to do naturally. The problem here is that something is stopping you from going back. That’s the issue you have to solve before you can return.”

There seemed to be an inkling of truth to her words, but he had no idea what problem he would possibly need to solve.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said with a smile. “You’ll figure it out.” She started to fade in front of his eyes. “Or not.”

“Wait…”

And she was gone.

Damn it. He stared at his body and tried to figure out why he wouldn’t want to go back to his old life.

C
elina shifted uncomfortably
in her chair. She understood in theory what the doctor had said she was going to do, but it still sounded like a sci-fi movie. Her mind couldn’t let go of the concept of a blockage. If there was such a thing, then was it possible she’d get her eyesight back?

Her stomach wiggled. It’s what she’d desperately wanted, but wanting didn’t mean anything.

As she pondered whether she could be so lucky, a knife slashed out across her brain. She cried out. And the pain stopped. She gasped for breath, waiting for a return of the attack. When nothing happened she relaxed and waited for the doctor to continue. She didn’t feel anything. She frowned, wondering if she should turn around or wait. Dr. Maddy had said not to move.