Wraith (2 page)

I raised my eyes hesitantly. He was watching my
mother, his expression curious. She, of course, couldn’t see him.

"Do you need to go back to the house
first?" she asked. "Or can we go from here? The car’s in the beach
lot."

I glanced down at my perfectly decent cami and
shorts—I never wore a swimsuit if I could help it—and told her I was ready.

"Are you okay?" she asked suddenly,
studying me. "You look a little… frazzled."

"I’m fine," I answered too quickly, unable
to meet her gaze. I was a rotten liar. Always had been. It didn’t usually cause
me a problem, because I didn’t usually lie. Only about the shadows… and that
was necessary for her own good. "I’m just out of sorts. I think I must
have fallen asleep or something."

"You were sitting up when I got here," she
said skeptically, shoving a lock of identically curly, dark brown hair from her
own eyes. We looked a lot alike, my mother and I, except that—aside from being
nearly forty years older—she always kept her hair short and the waistband of
her jeans high. The last part, I was working on. What was harder to deal with
was the fact that she was so blasted perceptive.

I cast another surreptitious glance at the surfer.
He smiled back at me. My heart pounded.

"Can we stop at that roadside market up by
Turtle Bay, too?" I babbled, employing the tried-and-true tactic of
diversion. My mother was a highly intelligent woman, but she was easily
distracted, particularly when food was involved. "I want to get some fresh
mango. And pineapple too. I bet it’s cheaper there."

With my best effort at casualness, I turned away
from the beach—and the  shadow—and headed toward the parking lot. I tried not
to look back. What had I been thinking, talking to one of them like that?
Ignoring the shadows was ingrained behavior; it was something I
had
to
do. Ever since that horrible time in my childhood, the darkest in my parents’
lives, when they honestly believed what multiple psychiatrists told them—that
their otherwise happy, healthy little girl was desperately, hopelessly,
mentally ill. I was the one who had saved them from that horror. It was easy
enough, once I realized that all I had to do was lie.

But I couldn’t help looking back.

He wasn’t smiling anymore. He was standing on the
beach right where I had left him, gazing after my mother and me with an
expression I can only describe as melancholy. Yes, melancholy. Like something
out of poem. In an instant, the sadness in his eyes seemed to leap the distance
between us and stab at my gut like a knife.

My mother wasn’t paying attention. She walked on
ahead, stretched out her arm and pushed the remote button on her car keys. I
knew I should keep on walking myself, but that wasn’t possible. Dead or not,
real or not, I couldn’t just walk off and leave him there, forever, looking
like that.

On my next step I twisted around a little. Then I
stretched back an arm and waved goodbye.

I unloaded the groceries into the fridge, keeping
one eye on the small sliver of beach I could just see out the picture windows
in the great room of our condo. I tried to pretend I didn’t know what I was
looking for, but I was no better at lying to myself than anyone else. The
surfer shadow was all I could think about.

It had to stop.

I could
not
let myself go back there, to that
horrible place where a terrified five-year-old had been forced to decide
whether the rest of the world was crazy—or she was. Against all odds, I had
found a way out of that hell, and I was
not
going back. Not for
anything. I had succeeded in ignoring the shadows for over a decade now, and I
was doing just fine with that plan, thank you very much.

I finished putting away the groceries, grabbed a
plastic baggie full of fresh, chilled mango, and headed out onto the deck. My
mother had set off to collect my dad from the base and wouldn’t be back for a
couple hours. Hickham Air Force Base was at Pearl Harbor—a long haul from the
North Shore, perhaps, to a local. But to a family from Wyoming, it was a donut
run. Already I was struck by the small scale of everything in Oahu. From our
rental on Sunset Beach, we could reach all the North Shore had to offer in a
matter of minutes. I only wished I had access to a bike, as we had only the one
borrowed car among the three of us.

I settled into a patio chair, popped a juicy slice
of mango into my mouth, and prided myself on the fact that I had just gone a
whole sixty seconds without thinking about the shadow. There
was
hope.
Never mind that I had been sure, on three occasions, that I had seen him
skulking around the Foodland. But that was ridiculous. The shadows never
changed location; they were always rooted to particular spots, even if the location
was no longer as they might have remembered. I once saw a farmer plowing away a
good ten feet up in the air over the parking lot of a shopping plaza that had
been dug out of a hillside. The shadows didn’t give a hoot what was going on in
the present.

And I didn’t give a hoot about them.

My cell phone buzzed in my pocket, and I dug it out
with a grin. I hadn’t been at all sure I could get coverage on a rock in the
middle of the Pacific Ocean, but technology is a wonderful thing. It was a
text, from Kylee.

Howz the beach? Met any hot guys yet? TEXT ME! Luv
u!

My cheeks grew hot; I was thinking about
him
again. Gritting my teeth with annoyance, I texted back quickly.

No hot guys yet, but the waves are awesome! Miss
u!!!

I sent off the reply with a flourish. I was
not
lying. Whatever I had seen on the beach, it was
not
a guy.

"I take offense at that, you know."

I sprang up so quickly my thighs banged under the
iron patio table and lifted it off its feet. The voice had come from directly
behind me, but I didn’t need to whirl around to know that it was his.

"Are you saying I’m not hot?" he asked
innocently, flashing another grin. "Or that I’m not a guy? I could take
offense at either."

I forced my breathing to slow. I reached around
behind me, grabbed another patio chair, and lowered myself into it before my
knees could buckle.

"You
can’t be here
," I said weakly.
"It’s not possible. You’re supposed to stay at the beach."

"Really?" he answered, sitting down in the
chair I had just left. Strangely, it looked as though he was fitting into its
contours, even though his body had no weight to support. Could he
think
himself into a particular appearance?

"Perhaps you’d better teach me the rules,
then," he continued. "Because I’ve been all up and down the North Shore.
Never been inside Foodland before, though."

"That
was
you!" I said accusingly.

He smirked.

My heart raced. I felt slightly nauseous.

"Listen," I began, my voice unsteady. I
had no idea what I was about to say. I only knew that a gazillion red lights
were flashing in my brain, warning me, begging me, reminding me how huge a
threat he posed.

I took a breath and started talking, my voice a mere
squeak. "I don’t know why I can see you, but I do know that I
shouldn’t
see you. I can’t deal with a talking shadow that follows me around. It's too…
weird. And believe me, I know weird. So please, no offense or anything, but
will you do me a huge favor and just
go away
?"

He leaned towards me. In the slanting sunlight of
late afternoon, his green eyes had a cast like a cool lagoon. His lashes were
long and perfectly curled—way too pretty to belong to a guy. His blond curls
looked dry now, and he had somehow changed into a new pair of board shirts and
a tight swim shirt that molded perfectly over the muscles of his torso.

"You have mango in your teeth," he
responded.

I turned my head away with a groan. Was he
trying
to torture me?

"Look—" he began, his tone placating.
"Do you realize I don’t even know your name? Why don’t we start this over
again?" He reached out a hand towards me as if to shake, but realized the
error and jerked it back. "Hi there. My name is Zane. And yours?"

I turned to face him again, fairly certain I’d taken
care of the mango. Either way, I could hardly feel more mortified than I
already did. The alarm bells in my head still sounded, but their dire warnings
refused to gel with what either my eyes were seeing or my ears were hearing.
How could any…
being
that was so friendly and so beautiful be
dangerous?  "Kali," I answered flatly, spelling it out for him. I
always did that, otherwise people spelled it "Collie," and I
preferred not to be confused with a dog.

He smiled.

My heart skipped uncomfortably. I really wished he
would stop that.

"That’s a beautiful name. It sounds…
Hawaiian."

There was a hesitancy in his voice, and the unspoken
question touched me. He was trying to be sensitive, of all things. Because
aside from having a dark complexion, I didn’t look in the least bit Polynesian.
My gray-blue eyes were far too light, my hair too curly, my nose too long.
"It is," I admitted. "Kali is just a nickname. I was named
‘Kalia’ after my grandmother. I’m one-quarter Hawaiian, though you’d never know
it from the hair and the giant schnoz. For those, I can thank the Greeks on my
mother’s side."

"Giant schnoz?" he repeated wonderingly.
"You’d better watch that self-esteem. You have a beautiful nose. Among
other things."

My cheeks flared red once more. How exactly had I
gotten derailed from telling him to go away and never talk to me again?

"Zane’s a nickname, too," he continued. He
started to say something else, but stopped, the merriment in his eyes being
replaced by frustration. "It’s short for something. Zachary, I think. But
I don’t seem to know a whole lot about myself."

My brow furrowed. "What do you mean?"

He looked away from me, his eyes searching in the
direction of the ocean. Following his gaze, I became aware, suddenly, of the
sound of the waves crashing in the distance. They could be heard all the time
at the condo, but after a while, just like traffic noise, they blended into the
background of one’s brain. I preferred to keep on hearing them.

"I told you earlier," he said quietly.
"I don’t seem to know anything except the beach. It’s like I’ve been here
forever, but that can’t be right. I know I have a past, I can sense that I
still remember things—but somehow, it’s like I can’t get to those memories
anymore."

He sighed with exasperation. "I know I must be
dead. I get that. But why can’t I remember living? And why am I here?"

I swallowed. The warning lights pulsed at strobe
speed now. Already, whether he meant it to happen or not, he was drawing me
back into the very darkness I feared. And I wasn’t at all sure I could fight
him. I was the worst sucker in the world when it came to people asking for
help—Kylee and Tara teased me about it all the time. I was a hopeless bleeding
heart.

But I
couldn’t
help him, even if I wanted to.
Even if the mere thought of trying didn’t scare the crap out of me. 

"I’m sorry, but I can’t answer any of your
questions," I said gently. "I don’t know anything about it, except
what I’ve already told you. This isn’t some hobby that I enjoy. I don’t
want
to see shadows; I try not to even think about them. It’s the only thing that
keeps me sane."

He studied me for a moment, silently. Then he leaned
forward, holding my gaze. "But you can
talk
to me," he
insisted. "Don’t you understand how much that means? Do you have any idea
what it’s like to be ignored, day in and day out, by every other human being in
sight… to be
invisible
?"

The warning lights sputtered; the clanging bells
muted. My resolve was crumbling.

"There has to be some reason, Kali," he
continued, showing no mercy. "Some reason why I found you, and that you
can see me when no one else can. You have to help me."

I waited for it. I was not disappointed.

His voice dropped to a husky whisper. "
Please,
Kali."

I hung my head in my hands. I didn’t answer him
then. I was too busy composing another text to Kylee in my head. One I knew I
could never actually send.

Just agreed to help totally hot dead guy walk into
light. What’s new with you?

I picked at my fruit salad, nervously banging my
fork against the rim of my plate. My father was telling us about his day on the
base, barely able to contain his enthusiasm about the new techno-gadgets and
people he would soon be working with. Mitch Thompson was the definition of a
glass-half-full kind of guy—spending the first half of his life training to
become a fighter pilot and the second half convincing himself that it was
actually a good thing that he could no longer meet the medical requirements,
because flying was for the young and his technical skills were needed more on
the ground anyway. My mother was laughing at his description of himself
skipping around the base like a kid; we both knew that odds were, it was
literally true.

"So Kali, Babe, what were you up to
today?"

The fork dropped from my hand with a clatter. Not at
my dad’s unexpected question, but because somewhere between "Kali"
and "Babe," the nearly perfectly solid figure of Zane had inserted
itself in the empty chair across the table from my mother.

"Umm…" I responded mindlessly, my stupid
cheeks flaring red again. "Not much. I just hung out on the beach, soaked
up some sun."

"Did you meet anybody?"

Zane smirked at me, raising his eyebrows.

I forced my eyes back to my father. "No. I
didn’t see anybody my age. There were more surfers out today, though."