Ghost of a Chance Book 1 in Above the Grave Trilogy (26 page)

“It’s gone!” Drew whispered.

 

“What’s gone?” Liza and Mary Ann asked at the same
time.

“The necklace that Brendan gave me.” She pointed at
her body. “It isn’t there I must have dropped it somewhere.
Or, maybe that stupid bitch took it off of me when she got
inside the house. Damn it!”

“Drew, I don’t remember you having it on when I took
you to the house. Besides, you are dead at the moment what do
you need it for? You know what they say… “You can’t take it
with you.””

“I’m not dead!” Drew yelled. “Besides, my body has
that stupid ring of Lezetta’s on! She must have traded it and
hid it somewhere.” She was looking frantically around the
ground for her necklace. Mary Ann and Liza stared at each
other now, the idea seeming to click for both of them at the
same time.

“Drew!” They screamed in unison.

“What? I have to find that necklace! Brendan gave it
to me!” Drew wanted to cry but of course the tears wouldn’t
come. “Please help me find it!”

“Drew, honey, I think Lezetta might be wearing it.”
Liza said excitedly.

Brendan, for the first time in one hundred and fifty
years actually wished that he was a ghost. There was no way
that he could take on Danny. Danny tired of Brendan’s
ducking and running after only a couple of shots and found a
way to make himself invisible then visible again just before he
pounded on him.

It didn’t take long for Brendan to be knocked down as
he had no way of defending himself. Danny turned around and
headed for the women who were now struggling to open the
tomb where Lezetta’s decomposing neck lay wrapped in a
beautiful Celtic necklace that Brendan had gifted to Drew.

“Does someone want to tell me how my necklace
would have gotten inside of this grave?” Drew demanded of
Mary Ann and Liza.

“I think that Lezetta traded jewelry with you in order to
trade spirits with you.
How the hell do we get this thing
open?” Liza cried out.

“Watch out Drew!” Mary Ann screamed. Danny was
headed straight for her.

“Oh, ye are a pretty little thing.” He snarled. “I can’t
wait to get my hands on you when my Lezetta and I both
become of flesh again.
Ye are a little too innocent for my
liking though I am afraid.
I will be takin care of that part
though soon enough.”

Drew swore she saw drool slithering out of his mouth.
She shuddered as she imagined it to be a very cold and slimy
thing. She didn’t know how it was possible that they could be
twins. Other than their looks they were nothing alike. Brendan
was charming and soft hearted underneath his attempt to be
stubborn
at
times
while Danny
was
just
pure evil.
The
darkness bled from his pours.

Once Brendan was able to find himself again, he took
off across the cemetery towards Danny and the girls. He knew
there was no way to stop him though he had to at least try to
slow him down.

“Why don’t you pick on someone your own size,
brother?” Brendan yelled as he ran towards him.

Danny stopped just as he had Drew by the throat.
Drew didn’t know how it was possible but she could smell his
rotten breath as it lingered much too closely to her face. Danny
turned around to watch his brother in amusement.

“And what is it that ye think ye can do, lad?” Danny
chimed.
He tossed Drew aside and made his way back to
Brendan in three long very dedicated strides. “You are doing
nothing but being a pain in me arse!”

The next thing Brendan knew he was being flown
across the grave yard toward the girls, hitting his head hard on
Lezetta’s tombstone. They all heard a crack… then a sizzle…
and Brendan was gone.

“Oh, God!” Liza cried. “Where did he go?”

“Ha, who says ye can’t die twice, aye?” Danny was
wearing his evil grin from ear to ear. “And in practically the
same way no less!
Come on back Brendan and let me crack
yer egg one more time as we all know, third time is a charm!”

“Where the hell did he go?” Liza screamed again.

 

Mary Ann and Drew who were both in the spirit world
searched desperately for him to reappear, but there was no sign.

The force of Brendan’s head on the tombston
e had
pushed the solid concrete lid away from the tombstone just
enough for Liza to get her fingers between and begin to pull.
Drew saw her friend hiding behind the grave struggling and
crossed her heart and decided it was time to get the ball rolling
or she was going to be stuck in that cemetery for all of eternity.
She gave Mary Ann a nod towards Liza and then headed
towards Danny to pretend to be working on the biggest tip of
her life. God, how she hated flirting.

“Wow, you really are so much more of
a man than
Brendan could ever be.” She said, walking towards Danny and
batting her eyes. He gave her an uncertain look, but it was in
his nature to take to the compliment of being better than his
brother.

As Drew reached him she slowly reached up to his face
and held his cheek in her palm. She looked him straight in the
eyes with as much sexy as she could muster under her crawling
skin.

“Now that I have met you, I don’t know what I ever
saw in him. He is weak and you are clearly everything that I
have ever wanted in a man, and once we are both of flesh, I
can’t imagine what you could do with that beautiful mouth of
yours… all over my virgin body.”

Danny was hypnotized.
All she had to do was say
virgin and he was sold. He took one of her ghostly breasts in
his hand. What he wouldn’t give to feel her right now, to taste
every inch of her. By the Gods how long had it been since he
felt a woman’s warm flesh against his own?

Brendan woke up again in the blasted upstairs room
that he had come to hate. Only this time it was different. The
room looked so much smaller, he thought he could actually see
the other wall that he had faced so many times, but couldn’t
quite focus in on. Instead, he realized that he was staring at the
ceiling. He was lying on the floor in the exact same place that
he had taken his last breath so many years before.

He couldn’t move. Not because he was stunned, he
literally felt paralyzed from the nose down. What was wrong
with him? The back of his head was pounding and he swore
that he felt a pool of warm blood starting to form around his
head on the floor. He tried hard to sit up, but still nothing.
Soon what he was afraid of happened… the room began to fade
to black and he passed out.

“What are we to do, Miss Liza?” Mary Ann as
ked once
Liza finally held the necklace in her hand. “She has distracted
him long enough for us to retrieve the necklace, but ye can’t
carry Drew’s body out of here on your own… we must wake
her up!
Och, Lezetta will never let us switch the jewelry
knowingly and she will never leave the cemetery with you
alive!”

“I have an idea!” Liza said.

Though Drew knew she wouldn’t feel it in her spirit
state, the thought of his mouth on hers made her want to barf.
Still, she let him lean into her anyway. If anything, she may be
able to convince him into letting her have her body back; she
could then make a run for it. He leaned in and she made the
best of it by closing her eyes and pretending that he was
Brendan.
Though they
looked just
a like she
knew the
difference, she could see it in his black eyes.

She was wrong, she could feel it. It burned like all of
the fires of hell and he was sucking the little power that she had
right out of her. She had a sudden memory of her real father.
Though she hadn’t thought about him much over the years a
moment came to mind then.

She was very young and he had lit the fireplace so that
they could roast marshmallows.
She remembered the bright
blue flames that danced along with the red, orange, and yellow.
It fascinated her and she had asked her father if that part of the
fire was cold because on the faucets the cold water was blue
and the hot water was red.
He had laughed his hearty laugh,
patted her on the head, and told her that in the case of fire, it
was the hottest part of the fire.

She didn’t understand until that moment how any fire
could be hotter than another. Fire was just plain hot no matter
what color it was. The kiss that Brendan had given her had lit
her up for sure. It was like nothing she had ever felt before
then again she didn’t have much to compare it to as far as
kisses went. She had definitely felt a burn throughout her body
with his kiss and it was a good burn. It had been a burn that
she would never get enough of.

Danny’s kiss burned her too alri
ght.
It was what she
imagined her dad would have called blue fire. She imagined it
was what the poor women had felt when they were being burnt
at the stake for witch craft.
If she could have screamed, it
would have definitely woken up the dead.

Drew knew that this was the end of whatever mission
she had been on in life and in her brief after life of what
seemed like purgatory and hell all in one. Though she had no
idea what was to become of her soul next she knew that it
wouldn’t be here. It wouldn’t be as she was now. She felt
herself fading away. She opened her eyes and saw her step
father; the look of psychotic lust tattooing her soul. He had to
hurt her one more time didn’t he?

Then the vision of her step father morphed into a new
vision, one of her mother.
It was such a sad face. One of
disgust, pity, and self-defying guilt; what her mother must have
felt all the while she was growing up. Her mother had no idea
what to do. She saw it in her eyes. She had no idea how to
handle her daughter, and she blamed herself for the pain that
she knew now mirrored in her own eyes, the pain of loving
someone so much that the best thing that you knew to do for
them was to just walk away and let them grow on their own, in
their own way.

Just when she thou
ght she couldn’t take any more and
was praying for God to take her now, the vision of her mother
turned into a man and a woman, they were as one.
She and
Brendan, their faces collided. They merged together and the
sight was so beautiful that she felt the tears fall freely down her
face. So, that was love; two lost souls colliding. And then,
love was lost for the two became one again, and she was all
alone.

Was this heaven?
She hoped not. It hurt so much. It
hurt more than the blue fire of Danny’s kiss taking her life, it
hurt more than finding that even in her after life she would
never forget the lustful looks from the devil himself, more than
understanding that her mother really did love her and she
would never be able to tell her that she loved her in return. The
pain of knowing that she would never be with Brendan, that
she would never see him again, took whatever else that she
may have been holding on to for she didn’t want to live
anymore if it couldn’t be with him.

The girls couldn’t believe wh
at they had just seen.
Drew had only kissed Danny they knew in order to keep him
occupied while they were hopefully making things right. What
Drew had done instead was saved them all on her own. The
virgin’s innocent kiss hadn’t just incinerated Danny’s
evil
spirit; it sent it straight to hell. How was that for fairy tales
coming true? If only happily ever after didn’t look to be such a
long way away.

Liza had to cover her earthly ears as the pain that she
heard from the other side was too much to bear. She saw both
Drew’s and Danny’s lives flash before her eyes in horror just
before the ground opened up and hundreds of flaming skeletal
hands reached up and grabbed him and pulled him into the
darkest, scariest world she had ever seen.

Mary Ann stood in shock of it all; both her eyes and
mouth wide open. She had been one of the evil doings of her
brother, and watching her own death from what she assumed
were his eyes, portrayed on what seemed like a gruesome
projection screen, was more than she was willing to bear. If
sitting down would help she would. If crying was something
that she was capable of she would have cried a thousand rivers.
Instead she closed her mouth and her eyes and whispered, “Let
us get on with it then.”

“We have lost Drew, Mary Ann.” Liza whispered back
in a voice that sounded so foreign that she even had to look
around to make sure there was no one else with them.

“Aye, but we can’t be given her body to Lezetta,
Love.” They both nodded in unison.

Liza took the necklace that she held in her hand and
carefully placed it over Drew’s sleeping head. Mary Ann tried
to remove the ring but she couldn’t find the energy to move a
dust particle, much less a solid ring that was wrapped tightly
around a human finger.

“What do you think wil
l happen to her when she lays
soulless, Mary Ann?” Liza felt the tears falling now. She had
never been sure about whether or not heaven and hell existed,
she had yet to see heaven but she was quite sure that what she
had witnessed just a moment before was hell and she prayed to
her
new found God that
her
dear
friend was
not
there;
anywhere but there.

“I don’t know...
I just don’t know.” Mary Ann put her
head down.
What would happen to her now?
Would she
remain in the cemetery, just her and Lezetta for all of eternity?
In her living years she had believed in God, for so many
torturous years though, He had never come for her. She was
sure that she had just witnessed hell as well and she still didn’t
understand why she was still there on Earth, trapped in the
middle.