Michael made a rough sound under his breath. He was no longer behind Charlie. Instead, he had moved to her left and slightly in front of her, not blocking her view of the girl but clearly positioning himself to step in between them if the need should arise. Noticing that with impatience, Charlie made a mental note to give him, the first chance she got, a quick overview of the rules covering ghosts on the ground.
“Hell, somebody’s beat her to death,” Michael said. His face had tightened. His position allowed him to view the girl from a different angle, and it was apparent that what he was seeing was bad. Even as Charlie instinctively craned her neck to look, Michael shook his head at her. “You don’t want to see this.”
Charlie shot him a look. This whole
Protective-R-Us
thing he had going on was actually kind of cute, but it was also annoying and, given who and what he was, ridiculous.
“Believe me, I’ve seen worse.” Her response was tart. Charlie then got an eyeful of what he was trying to keep her from seeing and immediately wished she hadn’t.
The back of the girl’s head was bashed in. Crushed like an egg. Dark clots of blood matted her hair to the wound. More blood made the strands around the wound clump together. Shattered remnants of her skull were embedded in gelatinous brain matter. Part of the brain itself hung out of the hole, looking like a slimy lump of congealed oatmeal, dripping blood mixed with a milky liquid Charlie could only surmise was brain fluid.
It was, in a word, gruesome.
Charlie’s stomach, which had been fighting the good fight against nausea so that she had been registering only mild gastric distress, started to churn.
“Told you not to look,” Michael said, and Charlie guessed that she must have blanched.
“Hello?” The girl looked up suddenly, hopefully, her eyes going straight to Michael. Blinking, she peered at him as if trying to get him into focus. The light hit the tears rolling down her face so that they made glistening tracks along her cheeks. She was a pretty girl, twenty-ish, small and slender, with big dark eyes currently welling with tears and delicate features framed by masses of wet black curls. As she blinked at Michael, her breath caught on a shuddering sob. From her expression it was clear that, if she hadn’t been able to see him before, she could see him now. Her voice took on an urgent note. “Who are you? Do you know what’s happened?”
She scrambled to her feet as she spoke: she was maybe five-foot-two. More tears spilled from her eyes. Taking first one and then another hesitant step toward Michael, as if she wasn’t quite sure she was actually seeing him, she then whispered, “Oh, thank goodness!” and broke into a run. An instant later she threw herself against him, wrapping her arms around his waist as she started to cry again in earnest. Michael looked down at her with as much alarm as if he had just been grabbed by a ghost—and he wasn’t one himself.
Well, the ins and outs of finding himself among the dead were new to him. He was still adjusting.
“Yo,” he said, his eyes sliding Charlie’s way. Sobbing loudly, the girl buried her face in the front of his white T-shirt and clung. His hard, handsome face turned grim as he looked down at her shattered head. Seeing how small the girl looked in comparison to him—the top of her head didn’t even begin to reach his broad shoulders, and a whole lot of wide chest was visible on either side of her—Charlie registered again in passing how tall and muscular he truly was. Add his surfer God good looks to the mix and, in life, he must have had women hanging off him like Christmas tree ornaments. Except as part of appraising his qualities as a predator, it wasn’t something she’d really thought about before, but … now she did. She also registered something else: a tiny niggle of—what? Awareness, that was it. Seeing Michael with a woman was new, and what she was feeling was simply herself becoming aware of the newness of it.
It was different, that was all. And that’s why she was feeling the niggle.
“So do something already,” he said, glancing at Charlie again.
“Don’t talk to me. She doesn’t know I’m here,” Charlie instructed. “I want you to talk to
her.
Tell her you’re here to help.”
Lips tightening, he transferred his attention back to the weeping girl and gave her a couple of clumsy-looking pats on the back.
“Don’t worry, I’m here to help,” he said.
“Good job,” Charlie encouraged him, and in return received a look that she roughly interpreted as meaning something on the order of
eat dirt
. The niggle that was her awareness of him with a woman in his arms subsided—he couldn’t have looked more uncomfortable if a python were twining itself around him—and Charlie was glad to dismiss it as the nothing it had been. She would have found his obvious unease with his situation almost amusing if the girl’s distress hadn’t been so heartrending. “You’re doing great.”
“Please.” The girl’s voice trembled as she looked up at him. “I don’t know where I am. I—I think I’m lost. Can you help me?”
It was obvious to Charlie that, as was the case with many new spirits, she had no idea she was dead. She also was no longer able to experience the world of the living. The girl could only see Michael. The people around her—Charlie, law enforcement, rescue workers, everyone on the scene—were invisible to her, as were the details of her surroundings. Why? Because she was dead and they were not: each existed in a different plane. Here in this moment, in this place, for this dead girl, only Michael existed.
“Don’t come right out and tell her she’s dead,” Charlie said quickly to Michael as he looked like he was getting ready to do just that. She had a lively fear that he was about to be as forthright with this girl as he had been with the one in her house. “Ask her her name.”
Michael sent Charlie another of those narrow-eyed
this sucks
flickers before looking down at the girl again.
“Everything’s okay,” he told her, rather gingerly putting an arm around her shoulders as, with both arms still wrapped around his waist, she looked beseechingly up into his face. Charlie had to admit that she was impressed by how reassuring he was actually being. “My name’s Michael. What’s your name?”
“L-Laura. Laura Peters.” The girl looked wildly all around. “Where are we? What’s happened?”
“Ask her what she remembers,” Charlie instructed, and Michael did.
“Oh. Oh, oh.” Laura’s expression changed dramatically. Pushing away from him, looking all around, she suddenly started gasping. “I’m drowning. The water—the water’s pouring in. I can’t—they said kick your feet, and move your arms like this.” She mimed trying to breaststroke. “They’re trying to help me. But I’m sinking—” She started to cough violently. “I can’t swim! I can’t swim!”
“You don’t have to be afraid. You’re safe now,” Michael told her. Shaking her head, Laura looked up at him with blind terror, then sank down on her haunches and covered her face with her hands as she burst into tears again. With a glinting look at Charlie, Michael crouched beside her.
“Ask her who tried to help her swim,” Charlie directed.
“Laura. Can you tell me who tried to help you swim?” In contrast to his face, which could have been carved from stone, Michael’s voice was soft and steady.
Her hands dropped away from her face. Her expression was agitated as she looked at him. “The other girls. They can swim. They tried to help me, but I can’t. I can’t swim! My head keeps going under and—” She broke off, gasping and gagging as if she were choking. “There’s a man. I’m afraid of him. He’s drowning us. He wants us to—he wants us to— The water’s pouring in. Oh, no! Oh! Oh!”
“You’re all right,” Michael told her swiftly, and when she dropped her head and burst into tears again his arm went around her once more.
“Ask her about the man. Can she describe him?”
Encountering his gaze, Charlie was surprised at the anger in his eyes.
“Did you see the man, Laura? What did he look like?” Michael’s tone as he shifted his attention back to the girl was, in contrast, very gentle.
Laura shivered violently. “Death. He looks like death. All in black—his face, it’s white. Horrible white. Oh, no,
please.
He’s going to kill me—
why?
I was in the bar and then …” Closing her eyes, she gave a piteous-sounding whimper.
“What bar?” Charlie prompted. Michael, face taut, repeated the question.
Laura’s eyes were still closed. “Omar’s. I didn’t win. I—I left, and then—there was a van.” She moaned, and Michael’s arm tightened around her.
Charlie knew the signs. The spirit was growing increasingly distressed. They needed to get as much information out of her as they could as quickly as they could. Charlie prompted Michael: “What did the van look like? Color, make, model?”
He said, “What did the van look like, Laura? What color was it? Do you remember the make or model?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know! It was blue, I think. Or maybe gray. Old. It—it smelled bad. Like fish.”
Charlie said, “Does she remember anything else about the van? Or the driver?”
Michael asked.
“I heard—a phone call. Ben
. I can’t talk right now, Ben,
is what he said. I tried to scream but I couldn’t. That’s all I remember. Oh, won’t you please help me? Please! I just want to go home! Can’t you please take me home?” Laura started to sob again, while Michael shot Charlie a seething look and rubbed the girl’s shoulder comfortingly.
“Ask her: where is Omar’s?” Charlie said, but before he could, Laura shook free of Michael’s arm and jumped to her feet, glancing behind her in shock as she clutched the sides of her head with both hands. “No! That hurts! Oh! Jen—Raylene—something hit me in the head! Stop! It hurts! It hurts!” By the end, she had whirled around to bat at an unseen assailant even as Michael, having straightened to his full height beside her, put his hands on her shoulders to try to calm her down.
“Laura …”
“No, no, no!” She looked at him with abject fear in her eyes.
“They’re killing me.”
Her voice rose to a screech on that last. Then, abruptly, her face turned up toward the lightless night sky as if she heard or saw something there that Charlie at least could not. Laura’s eyes widened. She shook from head to toe.
“Laura. It’s okay.” Michael’s voice sounded strained.
“There’s Kylie,” Laua moaned. “And Sara. Oh, my God, where am I?”
CHAPTER NINE
In the next instant Laura dissolved into nothingness beneath Michael’s hands.
“Holy fucking hell,” Michael said.
“What?” Charlie demanded. It was obvious that Michael was seeing—had seen—something that she had not.
“Two little girls came down out of the fucking sky. Two little girls who were covered with blood.”
“Laura must have known them. Something bad must have happened to them.”
“Yeah, I gathered that.” The look he turned on Charlie was grim. “Jesus Christ, don’t you ever see any happy dead people? You know, old folks who were ready to go or somebody who was so sick death was a release? Somebody like that?”
“No.” Charlie’s response was flat. Her stomach continued to churn, but her senses were getting back to normal. The hypersensitivity was going, and that meant the spirit(s) were gone, too. Well, present company excepted. She fought to get the nausea under control.
I will not throw up.
“No wonder you’re twisted,” Michael said.
“Twisted?” Charlie began indignantly, only to jump sky-high as someone behind her asked, “What’s twisted?”
Tony.
Charlie recognized his voice even before Michael had finished with his sardonic, “Oh, yay, it’s Dudley Do-Right,” even before she had finished whirling around to confront the newcomer. The sight of Tony was instantly steadying: he looked so normal, so
real.
So totally nice and uncomplicated: a genuine good guy. Exactly what she needed in her life, in fact.
Instantly she vowed to try harder where he was concerned.
“Uh—what was done to these poor victims,” she said. Luckily, thinking fast on her feet was something she was getting really good at. “It’s twisted, is all.”
“It is that,” Tony agreed, while Michael said, “Just so you know, every time you tell a lie you stick out that pretty pink tongue of yours. Only a little bit, like you’re getting ready to wet your lips. I caught on to it while you were still doing the starched-up-shrink thing back at the Ridge. It’s sexy as all get-out, but it’s a dead tell.”
Charlie’s reaction to that was to clamp her lips together. Realizing what she had done, she barely managed to not shoot the thorn in her side a dirty look. Instead, with what she considered commendable control, she ignored him in favor of saying to Tony: “So how’s it going?”
Okay, the question was inane. It was the best she could do with Michael mock-sexily wetting his lips at her.
Tony appeared to notice nothing amiss. “We’ve got the bodies, which should give us time and cause of death. Including the knife that was left in your kitchen, we’ve got a variety of possible murder weapons. The rain’s made everything else problematic. It’s going to be hard to tell what we have that’s usable until the sun comes up and everything dries out.”