“Not to everyone. But she killed me,” Akira reported matter-of-factly. “Killed me and possessed my body. It’s what vortex ghosts—the ghosts that have lost control—try to do. And they destroy other ghosts.” She sighed and started chewing on her lower lip, still watching the restaurant.
“You seem pretty alive?” Sylvie’s tone made the tentative words a question.
Akira waved a hand dismissively without looking. “Defibrillator. Resuscitation. No permanent damage. That time, anyway.”
“So do you think Chesney’s one of these vortex ghosts? Could he have destroyed Dillon?” Sylvie’s horror was like vomit rising in her throat. She would rather have gone to jail for the rest of her life, for eternity, than learn that Chesney had taken his vengeance out on Dillon.
Lucas put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her close to him, but Akira shook her head.
“I’m not sure.” Akira uncrossed her arms and put her hand on her stomach. “There’s a lot of energy there. I can feel it from here. And Rose is gone, too.”
“Rose?”
“The other ghost that lives in Akira’s house,” Lucas told Sylvie quietly.
“I can’t tell what’s happened. And I can’t . . .” Akira let the words trail off as she stroked her hand up and down, across her shirt.
Sylvie recognized the gesture, putting it together with a memory of Lucas babbling in the coffee shop. “You’re pregnant.”
Akira nodded. Zane put his hand on the nape of her neck, his love obvious in the touch, and she leaned into him.
“And you can’t get close enough to help Dillon because the ghost, whoever it is, might kill you,” Sylvie said flatly.
Akira nodded.
Sylvie took a long deep breath. For an instant, she desperately wanted to go for a run. Not to run away, but to hit the rhythm where she could block out the world and let her brain go numb. It had been a very long day. And then she firmly suppressed the desire and pulled herself back to the moment at hand.
“What can we do?” she asked.
The men looked at one another. Akira’s arms went back up, crossing herself like a hug, and Zane shifted so that he stood behind her, his head resting on her hair, his arms around her protectively.
“I used to think the ghosts were literally a vortex, like a whirlpool pulling other ghosts in, but I’m not sure about that anymore,” Akira said.
“What do you think it is now?” Sylvie asked.
“A portal to another universe,” Zane answered for Akira, his voice touched with enthusiasm. They all looked at him, Akira turning her head up so that she could see his face without moving. He shrugged and his arms tightened around Akira. “Admit it, it’d be cool.”
“Not another universe,” Akira corrected him. “Another dimension.” She looked over at Sylvie, almost as if Sylvie had voiced her skeptical response. “Do you know anything about quantum physics?”
Sylvie’s eyebrows rose, but she didn’t smile. “No.”
“Human beings are limited by our ability to perceive the world only through our senses. Physicists have known for decades that ordinary matter,” Akira stamped a foot on the ground, as if to indicate its solidity, “makes up less than five percent of our universe’s mass. We can see from the ways the stars and galaxies move that there has to be a lot of mass out there that we aren’t able to perceive.”
“Okay.” Sylvie nodded. What did that have to do with ghosts?
“Particle physicists call the missing matter ‘dark matter’ and are searching for a subatomic particle to explain it. Proponents of string theory, specifically M-theory, postulate instead that there are dimensions that we can’t see or experience. The dimensions would exist only at the quantum level, but they might contain energy that could affect the dimensions that we do see.” Akira paused, eyebrows raised as if to question whether Sylvie wanted her to continue.
“Okay,” Sylvie agreed. “So . . . the energy inside those dimensions moves the stars?”
“Exactly.” Akira sounded pleased.
Sylvie didn’t want to diminish her enthusiasm by asking what quantum physics had to do with Dillon, but she was lost. She glanced at Zane.
“Ghosts are energy,” he said. “Energy that most human beings don’t have any way of seeing.”
Sylvie frowned and looked back at Akira. “Are you saying that ghosts are dark matter, then?”
“No, no.” Akira spread her fingers wide as if to say stop, and then closed them. “Well . . . .” She tilted her head to one side as if to consider the idea and then glanced back at the restaurant window. She shrugged, her dark eyes thoughtful, and leaned back into Zane. “I’ll have to think about that one.”
Sylvie waited, but apparently Akira was planning to think about it right now. Her thoughts were a jumble, none of the words adding up to anything that made sense to Sylvie, while the silence lengthened and dragged on. Finally Sylvie broke into Akira’s thoughts impatiently, “Okay, but what do we do?”
Akira shook her head slightly. Sylvie could feel her unhappy worry but she didn’t say anything.
“There must be something,” Sylvie prompted.
At the restaurant door, a man who had to be the fire marshal emerged with Max Latimer. They were talking and the man shrugged. Max shook his hand, clearly thanking him. Inside the restaurant, the lights came back on.
And then suddenly Akira’s mood changed. Sylvie glanced at Lucas to see if he felt it, too, as joy swept through Akira.
“What just happened?” Lucas demanded.
Akira ignored him. “Rose, Rose!” she called out, her smile unforced and grateful. She pushed herself onto her toes and waved at the door. “Rose!”
“At least one ghost made it out,” muttered Zane.
“What happened? How did you break free?” Akira was talking to empty space in front of her as if someone were there. “Did you—but—all right, that doesn’t make any sense.” Akira frowned. “Rose, I’ve seen this before. The vortex should have—what do you mean you’re not really a ghost anymore? That’s . . . oh. Well . . . .” Akira glanced at Sylvie and shrugged. “Sure, that should be all right.”
“What’s happening?” Sylvie’s frustration built. She’d been focused on Akira but even with Lucas present, she couldn’t understand what the other woman was thinking.
“Rose wants you and Lucas to go into the restaurant. She says that Chesney is gone, but that Dillon is stuck and she thinks that if he sees you, he might be able to figure out how to get unstuck.”
Unstuck? Sylvie was so ready for a nice straightforward white light to show up.
“Is it dangerous?” Lucas asked.
“Who cares?” Sylvie responded, grabbing his hand and starting to pull him toward the restaurant door. Other people were going inside and it didn’t matter to her if it were dangerous. She wanted to know what was happening to their son.
“Not to you,” Akira called after them. “You’ll be fine.”
Chapter Seventeen
The lights were moving around.
When the white light moved away from him, Dillon yelped in protest. He liked that light. He wanted it to stay near. But it was moving toward the iridescent blue that had to be Akira, and he knew that he couldn’t go near her.
He stopped himself from moving after the white light with an effort and tried to think.
The lights were people. He couldn’t talk to them and he couldn’t hear them, but he could see them. He wondered what his light looked like to them, but then he realized that none of them would be able to see him. He’d never been able to see these glowing images when he was alive.
Maybe Mrs. Swanson, the old woman who claimed to see auras, would know what he was looking at. But he couldn’t talk to her to find out what she knew.
He looked around him again. The void was endless. It went on forever. He understood why his gran had despaired because the thought of staying here filled him with horror. But he had an advantage that she hadn’t had; he knew what had happened and he knew that it was possible to escape.
But not by taking over Akira’s body and killing her in the process. He wouldn’t do that, not even if it was the only way out.
Energy.
That had to be the solution.
He’d fallen into this void by overloading on energy. What would happen if he tried to get rid of the energy?
Lights were coming closer, shifting and bobbing around him. Two seemed to pause next to him, one a warm fiery red, the other a golden red. He felt as if he should recognize them, but the colors didn’t mean anything to him.
The white light moved back toward him, too, and Dillon relaxed. The white light soothed and encouraged, its warmth comforting. As long as it was close, he thought he could search for a solution without fear. He wondered who it could be.
The little voice in the back of his head gave a disgruntled harrumph.
Dillon’s eyes narrowed. His subconscious was annoyed at him? That seemed . . . odd. Okay, so maybe his mind had plenty of reason to be disgusted with his emotional actions, but that voice had felt like a response to not knowing who the white light was. Was he being stupid?
He waited, but his subconscious was silent.
Dillon shook his head, dismissing the idea, and stared at the red auras. Who were they? He should be able to figure it out, he thought.
Listen
.
That was the voice again.
Concentrate.
A slow smile turned up the corners of Dillon’s lips. He closed his eyes, the better to focus on his ears, and with all his heart, all his soul, listened as hard as he could and concentrated even harder.
And then the smile turned into a grin.
*****
“Dillon?” Sylvie spoke out loud to the restaurant, not caring what people might be thinking. “Are you here?”
She ignored the curious gazes directed her way. People were taking seats, obviously expecting to order food, eat dinner, move on as if nothing had happened.
“Think how much you’ll save on air-conditioning.” That was Max Latimer, calling out to someone in the kitchen.
Sylvie glanced at Lucas, asking the question without words.
“Cold spots, remember?” he told her. “Ghosts absorb atmospheric energy and make the temperature drop.”
She nodded, then closed her eyes and tried to feel if a cold breeze was coming from any specific direction. It was cold. But not so much so that she could say that one direction meant more than another. “Dillon?” she tried again.
No answer. She hadn’t expected one, not really.
She took a deep breath. Did she care about the people watching her? No, not after the day she’d had.
She took another step forward. “I told you why I left,” she said. “But I didn’t tell you this. I love you. I don’t know you. I chose not to be part of your life because I thought it was best for you. But I would do anything for you. You . . .” She swallowed hard, feeling the tears springing to her eyes again. She was too tired, too exhausted to be thinking clearly. But did she need to? Did it matter?
“You were the most beautiful baby. When I looked at you, I thought that I had never seen anything so wonderful. I’ve seen the pictures since. I know it was hormones, and me being a mom. You were a little lump of baby, just like every other baby, but to me, you were the world. I loved you with all my heart. And you still have it. I will do anything for you. Whatever you need, I will give you if it is in my power to give. And if it’s not, I’ll find a way to get it. Dillon . . .” She let her voice trail off and then strengthened, she kept going. “Find a way to tell me what you need. I will get it for you. I will make it happen. You just have to tell me how.”
She waited.
Behind her, she felt Lucas.
‘Love.’
His thought was a whisper, filled with grief.
‘He would answer if he could.’
‘He will answer,’
she told him back, her response fierce.
‘He will answer.’
And then her phone rang.
*****
Akira slid into the booth, her face alight with happiness.
Sylvie looked up from her phone. “We disagree on
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
,” she reported. “I’ll have to watch it again, but I don’t know. I thought it was pretty damn hokey.”
“So I hear,” Akira responded. “I’m supposed to tell you that it’s a statement of feminist empowerment.”
“All that fake karate? Please.” Sylvie rolled her eyes. And then she paused. “Does that mean—”
Akira nodded. “I’ve been waiting outside. The energy around the restaurant started slowly diminishing a while ago, but Zane wanted to be cautious.” Akira rolled her eyes, but Sylvie could tell from the amusement in her smile that she didn’t really mind.
Sylvie leaned back, letting her head rest against the booth. She closed her eyes.
Lucas tugged her closer, until her head was resting against his shoulder. She could feel the warmth and joy emanating from him.
“Our boy is okay?”
For some untold time, Sylvie had been talking as text messages appeared on her phone. They’d started with personal history but had quickly—very quickly—devolved into television, books, movies, politics, even a touch of religion, if Joss Whedon worship could be considered religion.
Ty, Jeremy, Rachel and her mom were sitting at an adjacent booth, Joshua having long since dropped into an exhausted sleep on Jeremy’s shoulder but Rachel still bubbling over with excitement. Max, Grace and Natalya were at a third booth, poking at their desserts and talking desultorily, with Zane just taking a seat with them. Otherwise, the restaurant was deserted, the hour long past any reasonable closing time.
“He’s fine,” Akira reported. “He’s been pumping his excess energy into texting, but he’s fully back in this dimension.”
Sylvie sighed with satisfaction and turned her face into Lucas’s shirt front. “Good,” she mumbled.
He stroked his hand down her hair and her back. She lifted her face and looked up at him.
‘Happy?’
she thought.
‘Happy,’
he confirmed. And then he bent his head and took her lips and she stopped thinking entirely.
*****
Christmas Day
Dillon didn’t care about presents any more, but watching his family exchanging gifts, teasing each other, being silly, and celebrating the holiday felt like the most fun he’d ever had.