Ghostly: A Paranormal Romantic Comedy (Perks of Being Paranormal Book 1)

Chapter 22

“You didn’t. Oh, you didn’t.” Ida paced the living room, the hem of her dress waving erratically. “And she’s gone already? You let her go?”

“Relax,” Gabriel said. It was enough that he was nervous; he didn’t need Ida to accidentally hurt herself mere hours before the ritual.

“Say, couldn’t Ida use her ghostly powers to help us?” Perry looked the least nervous by far, stretching out on the sofa.

“It doesn’t work like that,” Gabriel said. “And no one is doing anything in regards to Natalie Waller. We have more important business.”

“But she’s going to ruin your career!” Ida stopped and hugged her middle. “You have to go after her. You have to stop her, prevent her from writing that article—right now!”

Gabriel did feel sick at the thought of the soon-to-be-born article, and a part of him wished he could run after the damn reporter and fix what could still be fixed. By now, she’d surely called her boss, if not somebody else, too, just to brag. Gabriel Vane is so self-important he needs to be the star, even if therole is in a scandal. His head pounded. Of all the stupid things he could’ve done, why had he let her provoke him?

“Gabriel, please.” Ida came closer. “You have to leave as soon as possible. You should be there when the news hit, so you can explain yourself.”

How was he supposed to explain his statements? Boo-hoo, bad reporter wasthreatening my friends? His bosses were going to love that.

All moot, anyway. “I’m not leaving. The ritual is tonight!”

“And Perry and I can do it. We have all we need.”

“Yeah, we’ll figure it out.” Perry turned to Gabriel. “You said you weren’t needed for the ritual, anyway.”

Oh, thanks.Just what he needed on top of everything else: a teenager sassing him.

“I’m not leaving.” Gabriel fixed Ida with a determined stare. “Perry can’t see you. If other forms of communication fail, everything could go wrong. If something happens during the ritual, you need me there—it can’t be repeated or restarted. I’m not leaving.”

Ida’s lips trembled. “Y-you stupid, overconfident, self-sabotaging… buffoon!” And she flicked out.

“Oh, no,” Perry said in a pretend crying voice. “Mom and Dad, please don’t fight!”

“Shut up,” Gabriel retorted (he supposed he used all the good stuff on Natalie) and went to his room.

Hours passed slowly, minutes slower. Gabriel and Perry dined on TV dinners and put on a feel-good movie so Ida could haunt the TV. Gabriel paced the hallway upstairs, downstairs, and went around the house six times, making an excuse about wanting to check everything was set. Perry kept rereading the Resurrection Contract and its instructions. Ida froze a windowpane and tried drawing a puppy on it.

After Gabriel helped Perry prepare the spot for the ritual, the nerves got the better of him (for the eleventh time today) and he retreated into the kitchen, where he attempted to draw together a decent email for Ernest and Clifford, explaining what catastrophe might hit them soon.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ll fix the circle. There you go, ghostie. All good?” Perry’s voice drifted from outside.

Through the window, Gabriel caught him walking around in the dark, waving with his phone. Ida appeared out of it, inspected the ground, and popped back in.

Perry laughed. “It does look like a creepy eye, doesn’t it?”

Gabriel rubbed his forehead and refocused his attention on the screen. His pathetic words from the email he was drafting blinked out at him.

I’m very sorry for any issues this might cause not only to you, but yourconnections…

I can like Ida, but I’ll never build the same connection to her you have.

I assume we will not have to wait much longer for the news to spread…

She’s already dead. How much longer are you gonna wait to tell her how youfeel?

The point is, everything happening is my fault.

Point is, you’re freaking in love with her.

Gabriel pounded his head on the keyboard.

Don’t overthink it now.Perry was blood, Perry liked Ida, Perry would save her. Gabriel was just a soon-to-be-ex lawyer who measured affection in cups of coffee. He glanced at the antique wall clock. Twelve minutes to go.

Perry has this.

Gabriel repeated the thought, but the more he did so, the more it became like one of those words you only realize are strange once you taste them on your tongue.

Off record: what if Perry was right?

He’d spent weeks with Ida; Gabriel had spent months. And those months had been the wildest, craziest, but also some of the most fun in his life. So he’d had some trouble reining in his physical attraction to Ida; but underneath it was something stronger, more solid, more powerful, longer lasting. And it hadn’t been created after—it was born long before Ida had put on her perfume. Built, piece by piece, by every smile she’d given him, every antic he’d caught her doing, every secret they’d shared.

She imprinted herself in his soul without a single physical touch.

Ten minutes.

Family isn’t about blood.

“Oh, fuck it.” Gabriel slammed the laptop closed and hurried outside. He squinted in the dark, eyes still adjusting from the light in the kitchen.

A solid shape, sitting down, must’ve been Perry. Another shape, shimmering slightly in the dark, sat close to him.

No, no, no. Don’t tell me they’d startedalready.

“Stop!”

As he ran to them, Perry and Ida looked up.

“Don’t do it,” Gabriel said. “I mean…” he swiveled his gaze to Ida. “Don’t do it with him.”

Ida blinked. “I don’t understand.”

“Let me be the bonding person.”

“Duuude!” Perry’s smile spread wide.

“Uh, could you give us a moment?” Gabriel said.

“Sure, my man. You two talk.” Perry stood, comically winking at Gabriel. “Just don’t forget! Nine minutes!” He scurried to the side.

Gabriel kneeled inside the circle, the pure white petals of the lily almost glowing in the dark. The temperature was perfect for the early spring—the soothing warmth Ida described of the night she’d died—and even the sky cooperated, sprinkling silver-lined clouds here and there. Subdued, chirping noises came from the forest.

Gabriel cleared his throat. “Ida.”

He didn’t know what he expected—not quite that she’d run into his arms, but something ghost-appropriately similar—but it wasn’t Ida pursing her lips.

“Listen, I don’t know what kind of a joke this is, and I’d advise you to stop because we don’t have much time left—”

“It’s not a joke. I want to be the one to help you. To bind you back to this world. And I can, because I… I…”

Ida tilted her head. “Gabriel?”

“I care a lot about you.” Oh, god. Wasn’t that what people usually said when they wanted to get out of a relationship?

Ida covered her mouth.

Dammit, he did use all the best stuff on Natalie. “I… I…”

“It’s okay.” Ida reached a hand toward him, as if to calm him down, and her eyes glistened slightly. “Actions. Words.”

“So you…”

“I care a lot about you, too.” Her mouth drew up, and up, until she burst into a laugh, dragging him with her.

“I thought after the perfume incident, it had been too much. That I’d gone too far, and you didn’t like, didn’t want—”

“Didn’t like? I thought you didn’t like me. I mean, other than… you know.”

“I don’t know what she’s saying, but you’re being very vague!” Perry shouted from the darkness.

“Perry, I said ‘privacy’,” Gabriel shouted back.

“Theoretically, you didn’t! You only said ‘a moment’!” And, after a second of silence, “Okay. Understood. Going further away. Seven minutes!”

“So, where were we?” Gabriel looked back to Ida.

“The, ahem, perfume incident.”

“I’m sorry I overwhelmed you,” he said. “The perfume did something, but it was never just the perfume. It was you. All of you.”

Ida bit her lip. “Really?”

“I think it may have started with the chicken.”

Ida burst into laughter. “Lemon chicken and orange blossoms. Taken into account.”

“They do smell great.” He winked. “When you’re back solid and human again… do you think we could…”

“Continue where we left off?”

“I was thinking more along the lines of starting it again. Many times.”

Ida blinked. “Just to clarify, are we talking about the food or the perfume?”

He let the silence—and a flirtatious smile—speak. Words weren’t his forte currently.

“Oh.” Ida’s eyes grew wider.

“I wish I could see you blush.”

“Six minutes!” Perry yelled.

“In six minutes, you might,” Ida said, her tone indicating she’d be blushing hard at this moment.

“In six minutes, I will. Just the face won’t be enough, though. I need to see you flushed all over.”

“But if I’m dress—oh. Oh.” She giggled.

Gabriel let another few moments pass. “You know what I’d do first, though?”

“I think you have much better imagination when it comes to those things, so—”

“Kiss you.”

Ida slammed her mouth shut.

“Just a simple kiss. A proper kiss.”

Ida waved a hand rapidly in front of her face. “Oh, Gabriel. In five minutes—”

“Four minutes!” Perry yelled.

“—four minutes, you’re really going to make me cry. In the best way possible.”

Gabriel reached out a hand. In four minutes, he’d finally be able to touch her. But rather than thinking about how her skin, and her lips, and her hair would feel if he entangled his fingers in it, other images took over. Ida could finally go outside the house, and they’d visit the town—the library!—together. They could cook together. She could garden again, and on a nice summer evening, they’d sit on the bench outside and watch the sun go down, and the light would reflect in her eyes and paint more freckles on her skin.

“But what about your job?” Ida asked. “Your life in the city?”

“No doubt it’s at stake,” he said. “But it doesn’t matter. Whatever happens, we’ll figure it out.”

“It’s not fair. You loved it.”

He did. But he could also live without it. Oh, he’d be heartbroken, miserable—but he’d have Ida. And time to get back on his feet. “Don’t worry about it. What’s important right now is to get you back.”

“Three minutes!”

“Wait, all of this is ready, right?” Gabriel looked around.

“All done properly and checked multiple times. Including the fine print.”

Ida smiled mischievously. “One big circle, made with petals of the lily, in which we sit. A smaller circle, here in the middle: the contract on the ground”—she pointed to the book, spread out to the page with the contract—“with the music box and the locket next to it.”

“Two minutes!”

“The instructions say I need to be in physical contact with my bond when the ritual starts,” Ida said.

Gabriel reached out his hands, palms up, above the smaller circle. Ida extended hers, until they hovered above his. Slowly, she lowered them. “I’m trying to focus some of my energy.”

Instead of the usual cold air he felt when she touched him, this was like being doused with icy water—but the shivers it sent down his spine were not due to the cold. “I can feel you.”

“One minute!”

“Almost there,” she said, her voice shaking.

His heart rate picked up, until he was sure even Perry could hear it. A silence fell upon the circle, the eye of the storm that would be Ida’s transformation.

“I think it’s happening.” Wide-eyed, Ida looked down at the contract, then at Gabriel. “I feel—I don’t know how to explain it, but like I’m being stretched, then compressed again. And vibrations.”

It wasn’t only her. The music box and the locket heated up and the warmth burst out in a wave, making Gabriel even more aware of the caress of the gentle night wind afterward.

He’d expected something sparkling, a whirlwind of light, something magical—yet, nothing visual happened inside the circle. But Gabriel still felt an energy that wasn’t there before, similar to the waves of intense emotion Ida would sometimes give out. It warmed him, then cooled him, passing from intense to light, chaotic to peaceful.

“Do you feel it?” Ida asked.

“Yes.”

“It’s like it’s inside me.” Ida ran her hand over her body, as if trying to pinpoint the origin. “Everywhere. Like the perfume, but a dozen times stronger.”

A distant alarm on Perry’s phone notified them the time was up. Ida gasped, hunched over, and stayed like this for a few seconds, not a lock of hair, a pleat of her skirt, stirring.

Gabriel grew painfully aware of every screech, hoot, and chirp from the forest, of the rustle of leaves on the nearby bush, of the blades of grass prickling his pants. “Ida?” He didn’t dare to touch her, didn’t dare move, lest he ruin the invisible conclusion of the ritual.

She straightened back up. Slowly, she reached a hand toward his. The images from before flashed through his mind—hug her, kiss her, sit with her and watch her finally live. It was so close he could taste it, feel it. Ten inches. Eight. Their fingers trembled as they drew closer. Six, five, four—and closer, and—

Ida’s hand passed straight through his.

“No.” She looked at it, passed it through the book, the music box, through her own body. She shook her head, wilder and wilder. “No, no, no.”

Gabriel only sat there, stunned, images of the future drifting to the ground. No, he only had to wait— wake up into the actual reality, where the ritual had worked.

But he didn’t. And it hadn’t worked.

Ida was still a ghost.