***
“I can’t really push you, sweetie.”
“Wanna go high,” demanded the little boy, his lower lip pouting.
Akira sighed and looked back at the house. She hoped no one was looking. Grabbing the metal chains that held the swing, she pulled it back, up and up, as high as she could reach, and then let it go. He chortled with delight as the swing fell and rose, fell and rose again.
“Again, again,” he begged, and Akira obeyed, a reluctant smile curving her lips.
“Is this where you died, honey?” she asked, trying to make the question casual. She didn’t want to upset him again. The storm of ghost tears that she’d precipitated the first time she’d asked still stained his face.
“Mama said no,” he answered sadly. “No swing, too little.” At the highest height of the swing, with a squeal of glee, he pushed himself off, and fell, tumbling through the air. Akira couldn’t resist the gasp of horror and the instinctive grab, but it was hopeless. Even if he’d been flesh-and-blood, she couldn’t have caught him. For a moment, a bare second, he was a crumpled shadow on the ground, and then he bounced back up again.
This was where he’d died, she realized. And it wasn’t a murder-suicide but an accident-suicide.
“Can you help him?”
At the sound of the voice behind her, Akira whirled. It was the ghost from the house, edges still quivering and flashing. She took two steps backward.
“No, please,” said the ghost, reaching out a hand to her, but not moving forward. “I know you can see him. See us. I don’t mean to scare you. But please help him.”
Akira swallowed. “Help him how?” she asked, trying to keep her voice steady.
“I can’t get close to him,” the ghost told her. “Something starts to happen when I do. I think it hurts him?”
Akira nodded. This she knew. “Your energy is too strong. You suck in power from your surroundings and when you get near another ghost, you—well, rip him apart, basically.” She took another step backward, not feeling inclined to mention what he could do to her.
“But why?” he asked, voice despairing, energy level flickering a little higher. “I didn’t start this way.”
Oh, dear. Should she try to run? “Despair, grief, anger,” she answered. “The more upset you get, the more energy you pull in. At a certain point, it works like an overdose of neurotransmitters might in a living human.”
“Which means what?”
Akira took a deep breath. Should she be telling him this? Was she going to make it worse? But something about his looks—the lanky build, the shaggy hair, the deep brown eyes, the wire-rimmed glasses, the pale skin—said intellectual to her. “There’s a theory that psychosis is caused by excess dopamine. The energy does something like that.”
“I’m going to lose my mind?” He sounded horrified.
“If you don’t calm down, um, yes.”
“How can I calm down?” His energy jumped a little higher, the pink deepening. “I’m a ghost!”
Akira’s heart was starting to pound in her ears. She took another step away, glancing behind her to check for obstacles. “If you don’t, you’ll destroy your son,” she pointed out, hoping that she was right about the accident. If he had murdered his son once, a second time might not seem like an obstacle.
“Dada?” The little ghost boy wandered forward, and his father hastily shifted away. The boy plopped down on the ground, and started to weep. Akira crouched next to him, wanting to console him, not sure how.
“Calm, calm,” the father repeated. Akira could see him taking deep breaths and for a moment, she wondered what breathing felt like when you were a ghost. But his red edges pulled back a little, the aura around him diminishing. “Can you help him?”
What was he asking her to do? Akira wondered. Set up a ghost orphanage? She imagined, briefly, bringing the swing set back to Florida and putting it up in her back yard. The little ghost boy could join the bigger boys. Maybe they’d have fun together. But then she tried to envision explaining to the tearful woman inside why she wanted the swing set and shook her head. That was never going to work. “What do you want me to do?” she asked.
“I never expected this to happen,” the father said. “I thought dead was dead. The heart stops beating, the brain shuts off, life is over.”
Akira eyed him warily. He didn’t seem upset about the discovery, not really. Not like the religious ghost she’d met once who was very, very angry about not being in heaven. Akira stretched her hand, opening and closing the fingers. Sometimes those bones still ached.
“But this can’t happen to everyone. I’ve looked for others. I went to the cemetery, the hospital.”
“Hospitals usually have a few spirits hanging around.” Akira was trying to be cautious, watching the light around the ghost for any hint that he was losing control. But he seemed to be calming and he was being careful, too, staying several feet away from her and the little boy.
“Yes,” he agreed. “But one disappeared while I was talking to him. And another asked me if I saw a door, and then faded away. So there has to be somewhere else, not just here. And some way to get there.”
Akira frowned. A door? She’d interacted with a lot of ghosts and they did disappear. When she was young, she thought they went somewhere, but her father had scoffed at that. They were just energy, he insisted, energy changing forms. “How did you talk to them?” she asked. The flaring around his edges would be dangerous for any other ghosts in his vicinity: how had he gotten close enough?
“This didn’t start until I found Daniel and realized what I’d done,” the ghost answered her, a look of pain crossing his face as he looked down at the boy, still sitting on the ground. Akira nodded. That was why she avoided certain subjects with ghosts. Even seemingly calm spirits could get dangerous if they got too upset.
“And I’ve been trying so hard to get someone inside to listen to me, but they just won’t.”
Akira stood. The boy was no longer weeping, just playing with the grass, trying to make blades move to no avail. “They can’t see you or hear you.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “Why can you?”
Akira lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “Just lucky, I guess.” She tried to keep the words light.
“Not so lucky if you’re scared of me,” the ghost answered. “I won’t hurt you. Not on purpose, anyway.”
Hmm, Akira thought. He was perceptive for a ghost. Or maybe a hint of her true feelings had slipped out. But she could see that his edges had started to solidify. He was calming down.
“I thought maybe we were trapped here until there was a service. You know, a funeral. But they’ll never find our bodies.”
Akira knew that wasn’t right. She was quite sure that Dillon had had a proper funeral, as had plenty of the ghosts she’d known in the past. A funeral wasn’t a magic ticket to another world. But she glanced at the house, thinking of the woman inside. She didn’t want to lie to this ghost, but maybe she didn’t need to tell him the whole truth, either.
“Do you want me to tell them where your bodies are?” she asked, trying to keep her voice neutral.