Chapter 9
If there was a burglar lurking around, Miles lost the element of surprise the moment he stepped on the creaking stairs.
“Is anyone up here?” he called, scanning the open games room at the top, with a giant TV, controllers spread across the coffee table, and a mini-fridge sitting beside the overstuffed couch. “Do you want to talk?”
The lights overhead flickered. Miles’s skin prickled as the temperature took a nosedive.
He followed the chill to the bedroom at the end of the hall. It had to be one of the owners’ kids’, the walls painted a dusty green where they weren’t covered in video game and superhero posters, a narrow bed pushed into the corner and toys littering the floor.
In the middle of the room, a ghost appeared.
Miles had been right—it was a kid, a young boy dressed in a pair of blue dinosaur pajamas. His hair was messy like he’d recently rolled out of bed, cheeks round and ears sticking out. The edges of him were faded, blurring into the wall behind him. Judging by his clothes, he hadn’t been dead long.
“Hey.” Miles kept his voice low, not wanting to scare the kid off. He already looked pretty spooked, arms wrapped tightly around a ratty, stuffed brown dog. “Hey there. What’s your name?”
“Jake.” His voice was the tail-end of an echo, fading as soon as it started.
“Nice to meet you, Jake. I’m Miles.”
“How can you talk to me?” he demanded suspiciously. “No one ever hears me.”
“I’ve got a special gift. I’m psychic. Do you know what that means?” Miles felt intimidating looming over the poor kid, so he sat down casually, crossing his legs.
Jake shook his head and crept a step closer.
“It means I can talk to ghosts.” Lots of ghost kids didn’t understand the implications of that. “Do you get what that means?”
“I know I’m dead, if that’s what you’re getting at,” the kid replied sullenly. “I’m not stupid.”
“Sorry.” Chagrined, Miles asked, “Do your parents still live here?” He doubted it—if you were worried you had a ghost, a deceased kid was a pretty big thing to forget to mention.
“No. They left me here.” Overhead, the bulbs dimmed to almost nothing. The yellow striped curtains fluttered. “They forgot about me. I don’t think they love me anymore because I died.”
Miles took it back. He’d face a murderous poltergeist any day. This kid being stuck here proved that the universe was capable of incomprehensible cruelty.
“No, Jake, they just… they didn’t know you were still here, or they never would’ve left you. I bet they moved because they love you too much. Being here and missing you so badly probably made them sad.”
Jake nodded, but his chin was wobbling. He looked so small in the darkness of the room. “I don’t want to be here anymore. I miss my mom and dad and Boots.”
“Who’s Boots?”
“My dog. He’s brown with floppy ears and he snores when he sleeps.”
“He sounds awesome. It must be hard, being here without him.” This was usually the point in the night where he could call it quits and let his dad know the haunting was legit.
But it seemed wrong to leave Jake like this.
“You know, you’re not going to be stuck here forever.
You can… move on. To somewhere you might see your parents and Boots again. ”
“Like their new house?”
Miles wanted so desperately to lie, but Jake deserved better than that.
“No, not their new house. I honestly don’t know where you’d go.
A nice place, I hope, safe and warm. That’s better than being trapped here, right?
” He motioned to the room that had to be a nightmare—full of toys Jake couldn’t play with, a bed he couldn’t lie down on, a window he couldn’t open.
He wished he could provide something more comforting, but Miles didn’t know what he believed was waiting for the dead. It was easier not to think about it. He was in a business he would never fully understand, dancing around an answer he wouldn’t get until the day he himself died.
“I guess,” Jake agreed dubiously. “But I’ve tried to leave before, and it doesn’t work.”
“You just need a little help.”
Before he could continue, the stairs squeaked. Gabriel’s voice floated up. “Miles? Were you attacked by a burglar? Do I need to perform a daring rescue?”
Very funny.
“I’m fine,” Miles called back. “I found our ghost. Come say hi.”
“Do I have to?” But footsteps climbed towards the second floor.
“Who’s that?” Jake asked, clutching his stuffed dog and flickering in and out of sight.
“It’s okay. This is my friend, Gabriel. He can see you too.”
Gabriel stepped into the room, his eyes finding Miles, then Jake. The corners of his mouth turned down. “You were right about the childish energy.”
“Eventually, you’ll stop doubting my skills.” He noticed Gabriel’s empty hands. “Where’s the grimoire?”
“Back in its box. It didn’t like being ignored.” He sat down beside Miles, copying his crossed legs. “Now that you know he’s here, what’s next?”
“He can hear you.” Miles gave Jake an exaggerated eye roll. “We were talking about how to help him move on.”
“I don’t want to scare the people who live here anymore,” Jake added with a guilty look. “I don’t mean to. Sometimes I get upset when they can’t see me, and things happen. But not on purpose.”
“We know,” Miles reassured him gently.
Gabriel was watching Jake with a puzzled expression, like a riddle he couldn’t solve.
Ghost kids were pretty rare, and never failed to fill Miles with a sense of wrongness.
Naively, he wanted to believe children were too young to know true trauma or hatred or spite, but here was proof otherwise.
It was the worst example of how rotten and unfair the world could be.
“Do you want me to try and find your parents?” Miles offered Jake. “I could tell them you’ve moved on—”
“No,” he insisted.
That made Miles pause. Such a quick reaction would normally make him wonder about the circumstances of Jake’s death, but he missed his parents, and spoke about them with love.
“Are you sure? They’ll want to know if—”
“I said no!”
A wave of energy surged from Jake. The bedroom shook, plaster dust raining down as the walls rattled and toys fell from the shelves.
Miles tried to get to his feet, but the floor bucked beneath him, sending him tumbling into Gabriel.
They landed in a heap of flailing limbs as the bedroom door slammed closed.
Overhead, the low hum of the lights became a high-pitched whine.
Miles swore, pulling Gabriel’s face into his shoulder and ducking his own head a split second before all the lightbulbs exploded. Shards of glass rained down on them as the bedroom plunged into darkness.
Silence settled over the room, still and heavy. Miles waited a moment, ears ringing and mouth full of an acrid, burnt toast taste. Gabriel was a tense line against him, his hair tickling the bare skin of Miles’s throat. Nothing else moved.
“You okay?” he murmured, pulling back enough to check Gabriel’s face. This close, Miles could only take him in in slivers, fragments of beauty. The arc of his lashes. The dip in the bow of his upper lip. The jump of his pulse beneath the thin skin where his jaw met his throat.
“Fine.” Gabriel reached up and brushed glass out of Miles’s hair, fingertips slipping down to his face. His touch was an electric shock. Miles went still as he lingered, thumb brushing so lightly it was almost imperceptible.
Unable to resist, Miles leaned into his hand with a relieved exhale. Gabriel’s expression shuttered, slamming a wall between them, and he jerked away.
“I’m sorry,” Jake said, making Miles jump. His knees were tucked, stuffed dog cradled close as he watched them remorsefully. “I didn’t mean to.”
“It’s okay, that was my fault.” Miles climbed to his feet, glass crunching beneath his shoes, and offered Gabriel a tentative hand. It went ignored, Gabriel looking everywhere but at him. “I won’t find your parents if you don’t want me to.”
There was a lamp on the desk; he turned and hit the button, dim yellow filling the bedroom and revealing how Jake’s chin wobbled. “When they talk about me, all they do is fight and cry. I want them to forget about me so they can be happy again.”
Miles’s heart plummeted so fast, it made him sick. He swayed for a moment, dizzy from the uncertainty of what he could say to make it better.
Gabriel stepped forward and sank to a crouch in front of Jake. “They’re never going to forget you,” he said. “Even if they could, it wouldn’t make them happy. That’s not how missing someone works.”
Jake ducked his head. “That’s not fair,” he mumbled into his stuffed dog’s fur.
“It’s not. Death is rarely fair for the ones who get left behind.”
An unexpected lump formed in Miles’s throat. “Your parents love you. But you’re gone, and that means part of them will always be sad. They’re always going to miss you and wish you were still here. But it might make it easier for them, make it hurt a little less, if I can tell them you’re at peace.”
If any part of them had suspected their son was still here, they’d always wonder. Always worry. Never find closure.
“Not knowing is the worst,” he told Jake. “Wondering and worrying when they’re gone, not knowing where they are or if they’re okay, it’s… it eats you up.” He could feel the heat of Gabriel’s stare on the side of his face. “Let me tell them they don’t have to worry anymore.”
Jake hesitated, then nodded. “Okay. And Boots too. He was really sad when I died. I don’t think he has anyone to play ball with anymore.”
“I’ll make sure Boots knows too.”
Miles’s parents would be able to find them—even if the current owners of the house didn’t know anything about the previous ones, you could find out anything online. And his mom was persistent.
Gabriel straightened, turning to face Miles. There was a crease pinched between his eyebrows. “Can I talk to you in the hall?”
Miles gave Jake a reassuring smile. “We’ll be right back.”