Once upon a time, my house had been a ghost-free zone. I had done my best to hide my identity as a ghost-talker, and the few ghosts who’d figured it out had never managed to follow me home.
Ghosts are not omniscient. They don’t know anything more than they did when they were alive, other than what they learn by watching, listening, and, well, walking through walls. So my exact address had remained a mystery to them, thankfully.
The trouble was, as soon as my reputation started to spread—thanks in part to Alona’s initial desire to make sure everyone knew she was myguide and therefore better/more important than the rest of them—more spirits started recognizing me on sight. And constantly staying on guard and making sure I wasn’t followed became more difficult. When Alona had been my guide, she’d kept everyone in line, literally. But now? Not so much.
Unfortunately, the dead look pretty much like the living, unless their clothes are obviously outdated or you catch them passing through a solid object, which they can’t do when they’re around me anyway. So, checking to make sure the strange guy behind you on the sidewalk is, in fact, breathing and not a ghost trying to stalk you is a little tricky.
As it turns out, ghosts don’t usually mind being asked about their status in the living world—it’s attention, and for most of them, they’ve been running short of that for years—but the living tend to kind of…freak out.
I’d done the best I could to be careful when coming to and going from my house, but it only took one or two of them to track me down and then spread the word. Consequently, my bedroom at times now had more ghosts in it than a hospital, cemetery, and funeral home combined. Fun.
As soon as I hit the hallway, someone noticed me, and the whispers that I’d been able to ignore in the kitchen started to rise in volume until they hit what could only be described as a clamor. Five or so ghosts were crowded into the hall in a half-assed kind of line that started at my bedroom doorway and crossed in front of the bathroom.
Doing my best to project a calm that was in complete contrast to the sweaty nervousness I was feeling, I ignored the voices and the hands reaching out to grasp me.
“Will, please—”
“I need you to tell them—”
“—you help us?”
“—stop him from selling the house?”
No one tried to pin me down—that was good—and I managed to slip through into my bedroom. I shut the door, catching someone’s fingers between it and the frame. An indignant and surprised yelp followed.
Yeah, some of them were still trying to adjust to the idea of having physicality around me. That was actually a good thing. It meant they weren’t as likely to try physical coercion or violence to get what they wanted…yet.
In my room, the ghost situation was worse—probably ten of them—but at least I recognized most of them as people from the list Alona had begun assembling for me a few months ago. They knew I’d been working on helping them. They’d seen Grandpa B., one of their former fellow haunters, go into the light, and I’d told them about how Liesel and Eric had finally found their peace last month. So they wouldn’t get too pushy…most likely.
“Any luck?” a ghost in a poodle skirt asked hopefully, her ponytail swinging as she got off the foot of the bed to greet me. A bunch of faces turned toward me expectantly, including that of a vaguely familiar-looking woman wearing a tight blue business suit, her dark red hair in a fancy twist. She actually pushed her way forward from the back to hear my response.
They all thought I was looking for Alona. It was, again, a story I’d been forced to come up with on the fly to explain her absence and my diminished ability to help them. There were too many of them, and without Alona, I couldn’t get as much done. Not to mention the time suck that researching anything and everything to try to separate Alona from Lily had turned out to be.
Leaning back against the door, I shook my head. An audible groan went up from them at once, as if they’d rehearsed it. And I suppose, in a way, they had. They were showing up here two or three times a week now, with the same question, and I was always forced to give the same answer.
Telling them the truth would have been a mess. If other ghosts knew what Alona had been able to do—taking on a body, possessing it, for lack of a better term—there might be a run of them trying to do the same on anyone they found who seemed to be in an unconscious or comatose state. And that was the last thing we needed. Most of them probably wouldn’t succeed…or not for very long, at least. It took a great deal of power, apparently, to do what Alona was doing. A red-level spirit or above, according to the classification system the Order used. Still, we weren’t entirely sure of the effects these attempts might have on the living, nor did we want a rash of five-minute-long possessions, which would, frankly, be creepy as hell.
So as far as anyone in the spirit world was concerned, Alona had taken off for locations unknown after we’d had a fight. That last part, at least, didn’t require much of an imagination stretch.
The poodle-skirt girl shook her head, ponytail bobbing with the movement. “You should have apologized right away,” she said disapprovingly.
“How do you know I was the one in the wrong?” I asked, offended in spite of the fact that we were talking about an argument that had never happened.
“Please.” She rolled her eyes and flounced over to perch at the foot of my bed again.
“I keep telling you, she’s gone.” Evan, the creepy janitor dude from my former high school, spoke up, smashing his mop down impatiently into the bucket/wringer that was always with him. “Disappeared, poof, vamoosed. She doesn’t respond when you summon her. She’s not here at her time of death.” He shook his head. “The bond is broken. She ain’t coming back.”
Which was all true, but not the direction I wanted this conversation to go. I held my hands up and tried soothing. “We don’t know what—”
“No, I think we do.” He jabbed a finger in my direction. “And you need to start focusing on what’s important, not chasing after your piece of ghosty tail.” He smirked.
A barely muffled round of snickering emerged from the crowd, and I felt my face get hot. Evidently, Alona and I had not been as discreet as I’d thought. Technically, there wasn’t anything wrong with our relationship. Except, I suppose, the part where I was alive and she was…not. Still, it wasn’t like that. We’d known each other when she was alive, and we were the same age…Oh, forget it.
I tried to rally and regain control over the room, despite all the smirking faces. “And I take it you want me to start by helping you?” I asked Evan.
“I’ve been waiting.” He leaned his mop against the wall and stepped forward, hands out in an “I’m here” gesture and a grin stretching across his acne-scarred face.
Except he’d been sent to the back of the line by Alona, I knew, which meant that most, if not all, of these people should have been ahead of him. To my surprise, though, none of them protested his advancement, which could only mean they’d given up on the order Alona had established and were desperate enough to see someone, anyone, helped to give them hope that they would one day be in his position.
Not good.
It was also a problem because it was Evan.
“Well, come on, then.” He stepped around several of the others and patted my desk chair eagerly. “Turn on your machine and let’s get cracking.” He looked from my computer to me expectantly, and the ghosts shuffled and shifted around in my room, moving closer like they wanted to be sure not to miss any of the show.
I sighed. “Evan, you killed people.”
“It was an accident!” he protested.
“I know,” I said wearily. Sort of. To hear Evan’s side of it, he’d only intended to scare the kids he’d caught tagging and egging the school in the middle of the night. Actually, he hadn’t even caught them. He’d heard gossip about the intended midnight prank during the day and planned to stake out the school until they showed. It had, apparently, become a point of pride for the Groundsboro students in the early nineties to torture him by making messes they knew he’d have to clean up. And he’d become equally determined to catch them in the act and turn them over to the cops. Unfortunately—or not, as it turned out—they’d moved up their plans, and by the time he arrived, they were already done and trying to make a not-so-clean getaway. Per Evan’s description, it looked like a chicken factory and a paint factory had exploded simultaneously—minus the feathers…and the fact that there is no such thing as a chicken factory. But whatever. This was Evan’s story.