Jon hesitated. “The morgue.”
She started to laugh, and it cycled up and up until the giggles spilled out of her like bubbles. “You’re kidding me.”
“No.” He smiled. “Usually people don’t find that funny. Gross, maybe. A little scary. Never funny.”
Mel shook her head. “No. It’s just that…never mind.”
It would’ve been too perfect, right? This guy shows up and sets off some sort of screwball ghostly chain reaction in her apartment because he’s what Tesla suggested, some kind of medium. Or, Mel thought assessingly as she glanced at the bulge in his flannel sleeping pants, an extralarge. And as it turned out, the dude worked in the morgue. Too perfect.
Which meant she’d sound like a gigantic douche-canoe if she asked him if he had any, like, psychic powers or whatever.
“What?” Jon asked.
“Nothing. Really.” She gave him her best “nothing to see here, move it along” kind of smile. “Here, take the cupcakes as a welcome to The Valencia present, okay? And let’s just start off on a different foot, how about that?”
Jon took the cupcakes and gave her a small, tight smile. “Sure. Okay.”
She held out her hand. “I’m Melissa Benjamin. But you can call me Mel.”
“Jonathan Adams. Call me Jon.” He shook her hand, deftly balancing the box on his other palm in a show of dexterity that should not have been as sexy as it was.
Great. Now she was imagining him like some sort of circus act, all bendy and supple and talented with his fingers. What the hell? She admonished herself. Horny was one thing, but this was just totally out of control.
“Welcome to The Valencia,” she managed to say. “This place is the bee’s knees and the cat’s pajamas, don’t you know.”
Jon blinked.
Mel pressed her lips together before she could say anything else. His apartment was stifling. Heat rose in her cheeks, the column of her throat. It centered in her belly and between her legs, making them weak as she backed up another step toward the front door. She put out her hand behind her and found the cool metal of the knob. It centered her, helped her focus. She drew in a breath and let it out. Found her voice.
He was just a guy, after all. Supercute, yes, but while she might be suffering the effects of an overlong dry spell in the sex department, she hadn’t yet reached desperation level. Mel would never, she vowed, reach that level. And Jon, despite those eyes and that mouth, those shoulders, that ass… God, she thought. That ass. What a masterpiece.
The handle turned under her palm as she gave herself a mental shake. Jon was not giving off even the slightest hint of interest. No matter how attractive he was, no matter how long it had been since Mel’d done any mattress Olympics , she was never ever going to throw herself at a guy who clearly wasn’t into her. Besides, Tesla’s advice was spot-on. Don’t muddy the waters, Mel reminded herself.
“It’s a…great…building,” Jon told her. “I’m sure I’ll really…love…living here.”
That she could respond to, because she’d lived here for four years and loved it. Some of the heat faded as she smiled. More when she turned the knob the rest of the way and opened the door. By the time she got through the doorway, she was no longer quite so consumed with the desire to jump his bones.
“It’s a great place,” she assured him. Something stopped her as she turned toward the stairs though. She paused to peek back through the door. “Except watch out. Some people think it might be haunted.”
Jon didn’t raise a brow. Didn’t crack a smile. “Some people are right.”
* * *
Sensing the dead was never as it was in the movies. Jon never saw a glowing white light or a floating figure. He never saw anything at all.
He felt everything, instead.
Tonight it was the searing pain of a ruptured gut from the guy who’d been riding recklessly on his motorcycle playing dodgem cars with a tractor-trailer. A dozen broken bones. Cracked skull. He’d died at the scene, and his spirit still clung to the corpse that now rested on one of the metal gurneys in the hospital morgue. There’d be no autopsy—the injuries were obvious enough that a description of “multiple traumas” would be enough. All Jon had to do was finish logging in the body and make sure all the personal belongings were put into the property safe.
If only he could get past the pain to do it.
This guy had died the way he’d ridden his bike—fast and hard. His relentless squawk of outrage at being cut off cut in and out of Jon’s brain, overlaid by the incessant “oh no, oh no, oh no” that had probably been the rider’s last coherent thought. Even the sight of himself, broken and bloodied on the gurney, face a ruined mess, didn’t clue him in that there was no way he was fitting back inside that body.
Jon breathed in the scent of chemicals and blood and death. They didn’t bother him anymore. He breathed out, counting one, two, three. Trying to get a handle on this battered spirit who just wanted to see his girlfriend one more time. She was pregnant.
This guy would never see his child born, but that seemed an unnecessarily cruel thing to point out. Jon concentrated on visualizing a bridge, instead. Damned if he knew if that’s what it looked like. A tunnel of light, a bridge, for some it was a meadow full of flowers. Jon had no clue what the dead saw when they passed from this plane to the next. He could only try to find something, anything, that would get them to go.
He gripped the metal of the gurney and closed his eyes. Shoulders hunched. The pain was very bad, the worst it had been in a long time. But it wasn’t his pain, and he did the best he could to absorb it and let it go so the man on the table could do so as well . Everything centered inside him, a myriad tiny threads of sensation and emotion. Jon gathered them and concentrated. Then…he pushed.
A clenching fist letting go, the first heartbeat after resuscitation, the breath you take when you break the surface of the water you thought would drown you. That’s how it felt. A pulse.
With a hitch, like a bubble bursting, the spirit went.
Jon let out a shuddering breath and felt the world spin for a moment as he righted himself. He was here, his feet on the ground, hands on the gurney, eyes closed. He opened them. He was alone, thankfully. There’d been more than a few times when he’d come back to himself to find he had a witness. He blamed a weak stomach, an excuse most people accepted without question. It had become sort of a joke among the staff, and that was okay even though he was sure a few of the techs and even the docs laughed at, not with him.
Now though, he was alone. The spirit had gone, and none of the other bodies in the morgue had anything clinging to them but the odor of chemicals. Jon washed his hands at the sink and finished up taking care of the body, then sat at the desk to go over some of the paperwork while he nibbled on a sandwich.
He couldn’t shake the feeling of the motorcyclist’s last few minutes, not even after an hour and three mugs of shitty coffee. It reminded him too much of the first time this had happened to him. Something in the sound of the biker’s internal monologue, his desire to see his girlfriend and baby. Maybe even the severity of his injuries. All of it wove itself into Jon’s memories until he was shaking a little too much for even his chicken-scratch writing to withstand. He put the pen down and washed his hands again, breathing in, breathing out. Trying to forget and knowing he couldn’t. He could never forget.
He hadn’t always been able to sense the dead, or had this ability…no, this responsibility, this curse, to send them on. He hadn’t inherited it or found it along the way, or cultivated it. He hadn’t bought or stolen it.
It had been forced inside him against his will, and the memory of it, forced on him again by tonight’s stiff, filled him with ineffable fury.
* * *
Jon’s on his way home after a long day in which nothing much was accomplished, but he doesn’t feel bad about that. Sometimes you have to take your time to get your reward. The hours he spent carefully removing the nails from the crown molding in the latest
renovation, pulling it down and refinishing every beautiful, detailed carving…it would take him weeks at this pace. Every second worth it.
He’s not paying much attention to the street, the buzz of motorcycles passing him. He’s walking and enjoying the nice air. The job’s been close enough to home that he can walk every day, and the weather’s been so gorgeous he’s taken advantage of it. He swings the bag in his hand as he walks. He stopped off and bought Naomi not only flowers, but chocolates too.
Why?
Why not?
Another motorcycle hums past him. There’s a girl on the back. No helmet. Her hair flies out like a banner, a shade of red that can’t be natural but catches his attention. She’s not very smart, he has time to think before the bike whips around the corner. What if there’s an accident…
In the next minute, the shriek of tires and clash of metal stops Jon cold. His heart pounds. His stomach drops. There’s another grinding crash and then the bleat of a car horn.
He runs.
He’s still holding the flowers and the bag of candy in one hand when he reaches the corner and sees the carnage in front of him. A pickup truck and a tiny foreign car have collided at the intersection. In the middle is one of the motorcycles. The other is on its side a little farther down.
People are screaming. The fucking car horn won’t shut off. The stink of gasoline and exhaust and burned rubber make him cough and choke, and he’s running before he knows it. The flowers, the candy, they’re gone. Lost.
That red, red banner of hair is spread out along the pavement. Spreading farther. All that blood.
Jon’s taken a few first aid classes, but he’s not qualified for anything like this. All he can do is drop to his knees next to the girl with the red hair. Her eyes are open. Her mouth is moving. The rest of her face is gone. Most of her body, too. He takes the broken crab of her hand, the fingers sticking out at all angles. She doesn’t flinch, though he’s sure it has to hurt.
Maybe she can’t feel anything anymore. That would be a blessing. He wants to believe it, but he sees the agony in her eyes…bright blue eyes the color of a summer sky, but one is gone dark with blood.
How can she not be dead yet? The ambulances have arrived, lights whirling, sirens screaming. A fire truck. Jon waits for someone to come and help her, or someone to tell him to get out of the way. Nobody does. He kneels on the hard pavement with glass cutting into his knees, and he holds this girl’s hand. He waits for her to die.
He sees when she does. The faint flicker of life in her remaining good eye goes out, and he twitches. A hand on his shoulder steadies him.
“She’s stuck.” The man staring at him has a full black beard, dark eyes, bushy brows. He looks like a hobo, but his teeth are straight and perfect-white when he grins. “You’re gonna have to help her out, boy.”
Jon has no idea what this man means. Behind him another ambulance arrives. A tow truck. Police cars. Traffic is stopped in both directions, and there are dozens of looky-loos gathering.
The bearded man’s fingers dig into Jon’s shirt. Then…his skin. Oh, God, oh, no, the nails are sharp and cutting and deep. They pierce his skin. The man is cutting into him with his nails, making Jon bleed. Jon jerks away but can’t quite get free. The man bends low and lower, face in Jon’s. Grinning. Grinning.
And then Jon’s head is full of pain so bad it doubles him over. He chokes on it. He can’t breathe. He can’t see. Everything’s a haze. A murmuring voice he doesn’t recognize begins to chant, something about a doll. A dog. Something about a dress. Images flash through his mind as his eyes roll back. He feels foam at the corners of his mouth.
He hasn’t yet let go of the girl’s hand; like grabbing an electric fence, there’s a current in her that won’t let him go. The voice in his head moans, mournful. She looks terrible, she thinks. How can they all look at her when she is now so ugly?
“So ugly.” A strand of drool drips from Jon’s lip.
“You can hear her, huh? That’s right. Feel it, too. I know it, boy. I know how it is. Let me tell you, it’s gonna be a long, hard road, but someone has to do it.”
“Do what?” Jon finds his tongue. “What the hell are you talking about?”
The man’s eyes flash. He leans closer. He smells of cigarettes, liquor, the funk of unwashed socks. “Psychopomp.”
And then he lets Jon go. Backs away, both hands in the air and an “aw shucks” grin on his face. He blends into the crowd before Jon can even get to his feet.
The girl in his head—not just in his head, but all over him. Inside him. She weeps and fights and struggles, and without thinking, desperate to get her out, get her OUT, Jon pushes with some unused muscle deep inside his mind. It unfurls like a tentacle, thick and pulsing but strong, fuck, it’s strong.
Pulse.
She goes.
Limp, Jon lets go of her hand. She’s dead, there’s no question about it. The pain is gone. Her voice, too. He gets to his feet and wants to scrub off her blood from his hands but there’s no place to get clean except if he wipes it on his clothes. Hands out, he takes two unsteady steps.
There’s another body. This one is under a sheet, abandoned for the moment by the paramedics who’d been unable to save…him. It’s the man who was driving the cycle. His muttering moan engulfs Jon first. Then the pain and confusion. He’s no better prepared for it this time than he was the first, but at least the instinct to push and pulse is there.
It’s harder this time. The man is clinging to this plane, desperate for news of the girl. Guilt. He killed her, that’s what he thinks, and Jon doesn’t deny it. This isn’t a conversation, it’s not a dialogue. He can hear and feel everything going on in whatever’s left of this guy’s consciousness, but it’s not really a two-way thing. He pushes again. There’s terror. The man pushes back, but he’s not as strong as Jon, and finally, he goes.
He leaves Jon standing in the midst of the carnage with blood on his hands, and then the police are there, asking him if he’s a witness. The paramedics are trying to treat him until he tells them he wasn’t in the accident. They point to the shreds of his shirt and the blood on his knees, and he lets himself be taken into one of the ambulances to be patched up.
He gets home late. Naomi meets him at the door, worried. He doesn’t want to explain what happened, but she has that way of drawing everything out of him. Jon ends up telling her.
But he leaves off some details.
* * *
At home, Jon stood in front of the building, looking at the front door for too long to be normal. He couldn’t make himself go inside, and of course that was how his new, cute neighbor found him as she came out the front door dressed in a pair of clinging yoga pants and an equally tight T-shirt, her hair in a high ponytail. He caught a wink of glitter liner. It still got right to him.
“Hi, Jon.” Mel paused. “Are you okay?”
It was a small-talk question, and yet she sounded utterly sincere. He didn’t want that to get to him, but it did just like the sparkle on her lids. How long had it been since he’d had someone ask him if he was okay and made him believe she wanted to know the answer?
Frowning, he backed up a step, away from The Valencia. He hadn’t kept any lights on this morning when he left, yet the glow from inside his apartment told him someone had switched on a lamp or two. Maybe his unseen roommate didn’t like the dark.
“Sure. I’m fine,” he remembered to say. “Great night, huh?”
The weather had turned from chilly to balmy in the past few days, even now that dusk was falling. Everything smelled clean and fresh and sweet. Everything was stirring, including his libido, dammit, when she propped her foot up on the railing to tie her sneaker. Those tight pants molded to the sweetest behind he’d allowed himself to ogle in a long time…
“Take a picture,” Mel said. “It’ll last longer.”
Shit. She’d caught him. Jon stammered an apology, or tried to, but Mel held up her hands with a laugh.
“Dude, don
’t even. A look like that is worth giving up that brownie cheesecake I wanted to eat last week.” She smiled, her blue gaze skating over his face before pinning to his gaze. “I’m going for a walk along the river. Why don’t you come with me? You look like you could use one.”
The day’s efforts had drained him. He didn’t have to use the pulse every day, but today had been a particularly bad one. He didn’t want to go inside just yet, didn’t want to face the constant, simmering presence in his apartment. He didn’t want to try to figure out what was keeping the spirit there or how to make it go away.
“Sure. Okay. Sure.” He had nothing but his keys and wallet in his pocket, and he wore sneakers to work every day anyway. He wouldn’t have wanted to set off at a run, but he was dressed appropriately for a walk.
Mel talked while they walked the several blocks to the riverfront, and Jon listened. She didn’t seem to expect answers, most of the time, as she pointed out sights along the way or made commentary on the sprouting flowers in someone’s front yard or the rustle of rabbits in a bush. Mel burbled like a stream. He liked the sound of her voice.
“What’s your favorite word?” she asked, out of the blue, as they waited to cross Front Street and get to the sidewalk on the riverside.
“I…don’t know,” Jon said. “I’ve never thought about it.”
Traffic cleared, and they crossed. Mel hopped up onto the sidewalk on the other side, turning as she did to walk backward in front of him. “Mine’s serendipitous.”
He had only the vaguest idea of what that meant, and his confusion must’ve shown on his face, because Mel laughed.
“It means things that sort of fall into place, they happen by chance. Fortunate accidents are serendipity,” she explained. “I just love that idea. I love the way the word sounds but I like what it means, too. I mean, I like other words but not their meanings, like I love the word abattoir, but ew, you know. Gross. So I’d have to say serendipitous is my favorite because it’s just a really cool word and a great meaning.”
“I’ve never thought about it.” Jon followed her along the sidewalk and down the steps leading to the lower walk by the water’s edge.