It made me want to tackle him, and not in the football way. Well, I mean, I guess the method was the same, but not the purpose.
A smile flickered at the corners of his mouth. “You’re staring,” he said.
Damn it.My face went hot again, and I turned away to limp toward Malachi’s storefront. The blushing was another side effect of this stupid body. When I’d been a spirit, I’d still felt things, of course, but it was weaker, mere shades of this intensity.
“So, what’s the plan?” I asked over my shoulder, doing my best to pretend the last three minutes hadn’t happened. “Same as last time?”
With the other faux ghost-talkers, Will had gone in asking to communicate with his recently deceased cousin, Maria…who, of course, didn’t actually exist and never had. Yet they’d never failed to come up with detailed descriptions of her, obviously based on Will’s appearance, and always told him how happy she was now. Not a single one of them had ever bothered to explain that some spirits—most, actually—are unreachable. Only the ones who have unresolved issues and tend to stick around after death—in Middleground, as Will called it—could communicate.
And the money they charged for all this nonsense? Ridiculous. We’d already spent almost everything Will had earned in his brief career as a busboy. There were serious dollars to be made in this area, especially as the real deal. Not that Will would ever even consider that.
Will easily caught up to me on the sidewalk leading to Malachi’s storefront, and stepped ahead to grab the door. “Yeah, I think the Maria story works—”
He stopped suddenly enough that I smacked into his back, my nose colliding sharply with his shoulder blade. Short! I was short now, damn it!
Eyes watering, I stumbled back. “Walk much?” I demanded, rubbing my stinging nose.
He didn’t respond, just stood there, head cocked to one side, staring into Malachi the Magnificent’s windows.
A chill skittered over my skin. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“There are ghosts here,” he said quietly over his shoulder. “More than usual.”
Ghosts are everywhere, as I’d learned after my own death and return as a spirit. Even at the other fake ghost-talkers’ locations, there’d sometimes been a few tagging along after the other clients, people they were attached to, or one or two who’d read the “psychic” sign out front and hoped it was for real.
“Really?” Holding on to Will’s arm for balance, I leaned around him for a look. Not that I’d be able to seeanything. Even though I could apparently hear spirits—a side effect of being a spirit stuffed back into a body, or maybe because I’d been trapped in Lily’s body during a near-death experience, we weren’t sure—seeing them was not my forte.
I squinted and all I saw were a few blurry, smudgy spots that had no discernible source. My ghost vision coming in? Or poor window cleaning on Malachi’s part?
“Are you sure?” I asked Will.
“A guy in a Lincoln-type top hat is talking to a woman in a nightgown and…” He leaned closer to get a better look in the window. “There’s some girl dressed for spring break at the beach, and a dude in the far corner is holding what appears to be a severed arm. His own.”
I jerked back. “Ew. So Malachi is actually legit?” You’d think he’d have moved on up to the less skanky side of town, if so.
“Unless this is a costume party gone horribly wrong…maybe.” Will turned to face me, tension now visibly thrumming through him. “Subtle has to be the key word here. We can’t go in there and let on that we can see them.”
I shrugged. No problem for me.
“Or hear them,” he added.
I made an exasperated noise. “Fine, okay, whatever.”
“Hey, I’m serious.” He reached down and tipped my chin up with his fingertip until I was forced to meet his gaze. “You aren’t my spirit guide anymore. We have no protection, no way to make them back off.”
Ah, yes, another lovely side effect of this in-body disaster. Whatever bond we’d shared as spirit guide and ghost-talker was now gone. Or, at least, the most obvious sign of it. I didn’t show up daily wherever he was at 7:03 a.m., the time of my death. Good thing, because that might have been kind of tough to explain to the Turners.
At one time, I’d also been able to freeze pushy ghosts in place by simply restating my claim on Will. These days, not so much. Actually, for all we knew, it might still work. But it seemed unlikely, given everything else, and it was too dangerous to try. It would mean revealing who I was inside this body and that I could hear the spirits. Then Will wouldn’t be the only one being overwhelmed by last requests.
“I don’t want you to get hurt,” he added, his gaze softening as he took in the scar on my face…Lily’s face.
Lily.I jerked away from him. Will wasn’t immune to the effects of this bizarre situation, either. Even though he knew better, sometimes he looked at me and saw her. I know he did. And he’d never been as concerned about my welfare until it became tied to hers, it seemed.
It wasn’t fair.
“ Iwill be fine,” I said curtly, doing my best to squelch the wounded feeling rising up in me. “Can we just do this already?”
He opened his mouth as if to say something, then closed it, clearly thinking better of whatever it was. Smart. “Yeah. Okay,” he said. “I’ll go first. Stay right behind me.”
I nodded, not about to argue that part of it. Among the other things we’d never tested was whether I’d bump into ghosts, as Will did, or pass through them, as other non–ghost-talkers would. I hadn’t found myself colliding with invisible people yet, but that was no sure indicator, as I knew from experience that ghosts avoided walking through the living whenever possible.
He turned and opened the door, and I stayed on the heels of his worn Chucks as he walked in.
Malachi the Magnificent’s waiting room looked surprisingly similar to that of a doctor’s or dentist’s, only darker, dustier, and reeking of way more incense. There were a bunch of chairs lining the outer edges of the room and in rows toward the middle. A door in the far wall led, presumably, to the back rooms, where the “magic” would happen.
A book lay open on a desk next to that door, with a photocopied sign asking us to SIGN IN, PLEASE!
Will wrote fake names—Milli Martin and Steve Vanilli—in the book without batting an eye. (Yeah, he thinks he’s funny.)
But then he turned to face the waiting room again and hesitated. I followed his gaze, and for once, I understood. The blurry spots I’d seen before were not smudges on the glass. They were in here and moving. At least four of them, maybe more. The trick was how to avoid them without look inglike we were avoiding them.
I stood on my tiptoes, putting most of my weight on my good leg. “The chairs in the back left corner, maybe?” I whispered to Will. There weren’t as many blurry spots in that direction, though we’d have to pass several to get there. The noise seemed fainter in that direction, too. I couldn’t hear anything specific, just a low murmur of voices, but too many for the half dozen or so living people there, most of whom were sitting silently anyway.
Will looked sharply over his shoulder at me. “You can see—”
I shook my head. “Kinda, sorta. It’s…I’ll explain later.”
He nodded and started toward the chairs I’d indicated, and I was right behind him…until someone caught my eye. A livingsomeone.
I stopped dead, certain that I could not be seeing who I thought, especially not here.