Chapter 29
When a person is contaminated with ectoplasm, they need to be isolated. Best practice is forty-eight hours of isolation, but I’ve found this nearly impossible to enforce.
—Methods of Modern Ghost Hunting: A Tactical Guide to Containing and Vanquishing the Dead by Donald Dellman
The house is eerily silent. I creep down the stairs so Nico won’t hear me deliberately disobeying him, then pull my boots onto my feet before stepping outside.
What am I doing?
Images of Griffin flash through my mind. When he was pinned to that ceiling, how he positioned himself between me and danger—there’s so much pressure in my chest it feels like my ribs are going to crack, and the only way to relieve it is to find him.
I turn in a slow circle, scanning the yard. My gaze lands on the hulking shadow at the far edge of the property. Of course.
Overgrown grass brushes my ankles. My bones feel heavier than usual, as if I’m sneaking somewhere I shouldn’t and my body is trying to stop me, and maybe I am, but knowing that doesn’t stop my legs from moving.
The barn door is slightly ajar, and a sliver of light spills onto the grass. I push it open enough to slip inside.
Griffin is on the opposite end of the gym with his back to me, hammering a punching bag like he’s trying to kill it.
He’s shirtless, his back a map of tensed muscles and old scars.
The beginnings of red bruises bloom across his shoulders and wrap around his ribcage, damage from today that feels like a personal failure on my part.
I pull the door shut behind me, and it closes with a boom that echoes through the cavernous space.
Griffin whirls around, his eyes wild and angry.
He does not look happy to see me.
“Why are you here?” His voice comes out rough.
“I came looking for you.”
As I say it, I realize how stupid I sound.
Why am I playing nursemaid to someone who’s made it clear he wants space?
I’m not his keeper. I’m not even really his friend yet.
Griffin’s going through something I can’t begin to understand, and here I am, making it about me and my desire to fix something I have no business fixing.
“I just—” I dig my fingers into my breastbone.
I can’t say that I thought seeing me would make him feel better.
Not when he really wants Bonnie to be the one to find him and promise him that she’s okay.
“I needed to see you were breathing. I needed to know you were okay because back there you weren’t moving and I thought you were—” My voice cracks.
Suddenly, Griffin doesn’t look angry anymore. “You got contaminated, too?”
“Not as much as you, but—” I swallow against the tightness in my throat. “Yeah. I did.”
“Jesus Christ.” He claps a hand onto his head, walking across the gym all the way over to me. His chest heaves, sweat mingling with the ectoplasm seeping from his pores. “Eden, you shouldn’t be out here.”
“Neither should you. You’re hurt—”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re bleeding all over the floor and leaking ghost goo,” I say, cringing at how shaky my voice comes out sounding. “That’s not fine.”
His mouth quirks. Then his eyes narrow, really looking at me. “Wait. How bad are you feeling this?”
Bad. My skin is too tight, and there’s fire in my veins, and I might vibrate apart if I stand still for one more second.
But saying that feels embarrassing, so all I come up with is, “I’m managing.”
His eyes flare like he can see right through me. He curses and backs away.
“Go back to the house,” he says.
He throws another punch at the bag, then another, each one harder than the last. The bruises across his back make him look dangerous, like a wild animal that’s been caged too long.
Heat floods through me so suddenly, I sway. It starts low in my belly and spreads outward until every nerve ending is awake and screaming for something I can barely name.
Oh.
Oh no.
I bite the inside of my cheek until I taste copper, using the sharp pain to snap myself out of whatever is happening.
The ectoplasm must be amplifying the longing, turning a passing thought into this overwhelming need that makes my hands shake.
Coming out here was absolutely, spectacularly stupid, and I need to leave before I make it worse.
I turn toward the door, but his voice stops me before I can take a step.
“Wait.”
I glance back to see Griffin holding the punching bag still, his forehead pressed against the leather.
“Sorry,” he says, panting. “I’m just bad company right now.”
“Should you even be doing this?” I ask, gesturing at the punching bag. “Kickboxing when you just had a ghost inside your chest?”
“Sweating can accelerate the purging process.” He punches again. “Besides, this is the only thing keeping me from barging back in there and breaking Nico’s fucking face.”
He lands another punch that makes the whole bag swing. Nico did nothing to deserve being punched. He saved our lives, and was really gentle with Griffin—although I can’t judge, because I also punched Nico after he did absolutely nothing wrong.
Watching Griffin makes the barn suddenly feel small, even though we’re standing at least twenty feet away from each other.
Each punch sends a ripple of movement across his shoulders and down his spine, and I catch myself staring at the way his body moves with this wild power that makes my mouth go dry.
This is the ectoplasm. Just the ectoplasm making everything feel more intense than it should.
I focus on breathing. Both of our breathing sounds impossibly loud in here. But underneath it all, I hear something that sounds a lot like… scratching.
I tilt my head, trying to pinpoint where it’s coming from. It’s the same scratchy whispering I heard at the crime scene, and then coming from the glob of ectoplasm in Ed’s kitchen. Now it’s coming from Griffin.
I turn my attention to my own body, and shudder. I can feel the ectoplasm inside me. Shifting and writhing like something alive.
Paying too much attention to it makes me feel like I have a tapeworm or another insidious bug in my body, so I try to ignore it. The sound gets quieter. If I can ignore it when I’m not actively looking for it, maybe I can keep this under control.
I walk over to Griffin until I’m standing right in front of him because talking across this distance feels ridiculous. Also, because the ectoplasm makes me want to be closer, but I try not to think about that. “Did the shot mess up your leg?”
Griffin tugs up his pant leg, revealing his prosthetic. There are a few dents in the metal where the salt hit, but otherwise it looks fine.
“I can fix it, and I’ve got another one anyway,” Griffin says. “Made them both myself. Configured exactly how I need them.”
My mouth falls open just a tiny bit. “You made your own prosthetic?”
“Turns out when you lose your leg, you get really motivated to figure out how to walk again.” He drops the pant leg. His knuckles are split open, blood mixing with the ectoplasm and dripping down his fingers. “Uncle Sam’s version was shit, so I built something better.”
“That’s badass,” I say.
“Yeah, well.” He shrugs. “Had to be good for something after I died.”
The lightness in his tone doesn’t match the words. “Is that how it happened?” I ask. “How you started seeing ghosts?”
He nods. “I was part of a unit clearing explosives from a school. Standard sweep—we’d done hundreds of them.
But the device was more sophisticated than intel suggested.
I cut the wrong wire, and it triggered a chain reaction through the building’s foundation.
” His hands flex on the punching bag. “I got lucky. Lost the leg, and my heart stopped for a minute, but they got me back. The other three guys on my team weren’t as lucky.
I started seeing them about a week after I got out of the field hospital.
Cabrero stood at the foot of my bed in his dress blues, staring like he wanted to end me.
The docs thought I had PTSD, but they couldn’t explain why I knew things that nobody had told me, like how Cabrero’s wife was pregnant. ”
I can’t even imagine. Seeing ghosts is bad enough, but seeing the people whose deaths you blame yourself for, following you around with accusation in their eyes?
If that lady in the library had been some warped version of Rosie trying to stick her fingers through my face?
I don’t think I could have handled it. I barely handle the dreams.
“Army discharged me,” he continues, still not looking at me.
“Combination of this”—he slaps his leg—“and psychological grounds. Said I was too fucked up for service but not fucked up enough for a padded room. Went home, moved in with my mom, and spent most of my time drinking and trying to convince myself I could still lead a normal life.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t look so serious.” Griffin’s mouth quirks up at the corner. “I’m clearly thriving now.”
I laugh, even though nothing about this is funny. “You’re bleeding all over the place.”
“Bleeding all over the place is my baseline state,” he says. “If you couldn’t tell from the day we met.”
There’s something about the way he can crack jokes even when he’s clearly hurting that reminds me of myself. Deflecting with humor to keep the darkness from swallowing me whole.
“So,” Griffin says, dropping his eyes. “How much of that did you hear? My conversation with Nico, I mean.”
I shrug, aiming for casual. “Just the yelling.”
“Liar,” he says. “Those walls are thin. I hear you singing to Bob every night.”
Well, that’s mortifying.
“I heard enough,” I say.
“So you heard about Bonnie.”
I nod. I probably shouldn’t ask him anything about her, but I also know how much I hate it when people tiptoe around my family. Like talking about them will somehow make it worse, when really, remembering who they were can make them feel closer to me.
“What was she like?” I ask.
“Funny,” he says immediately, his mouth curving into a smile that holds so much pain it’s hard to look at. “She always knew how to get me laughing. Really laughing. No matter what life threw at us, we were always laughing.”
“Sounds like my kind of girl.”
“Yeah.” Griffin turns away from me. “She would’ve liked you.”
My throat gets tight, and I swallow hard, trying to push down the swell of emotion threatening to choke me.
“I like funny people,” I say. “It’s why I like you.”
He casts a glance over his shoulder and gestures at the ectoplasm glistening around his eyes. “I bet this is a real turn-on for you.”
“I actually prefer my men freshly showered,” I say.
“Lucky for you, I’ve got one in there.” He jerks his thumb in the direction of the house. “Big enough for two.”
My face goes hot, then my neck, then everywhere, like someone just turned my internal thermostat up fifty degrees.
My nipples are hard to the point of pain, straining against my T-shirt, and all I can picture is what they would feel like in that shower with Griffin taking my chest in his hands and giving them the pressure they’re screaming for.
Griffin is breathing harder now. I can see the tension in every line of his body.
“I told you to go back to the house,” he says.
“I don’t want to be alone right now,” I admit.
“Then go find DJ,” he says. “You don’t want me.”
“You have no idea what I want,” I say.
He barks a laugh. “I have a feeling I do.”
He turns his entire body away from me, sinking onto the weightlifting bench and bracing his forearms on his knees. The space opening up between us feels like relief and disappointment at the same time. My lungs finally remember how to fill all the way.
“I assume someone already told you how the ectoplasm works,” he says. “It amplifies every feeling. Every… urge.” He shakes his head, his eyes wide and wild. “I have no control right now.”
The drumming of my heart is so loud I can barely hear him. The barn feels like it’s shrinking, the walls pressing in until all I can see is Griffin sitting there.
I have the dull thought that this is a bad idea, but I’m too foggy and lightheaded to care. I want hands on me.
“What if I want to stay?” I hear myself say, and my voice sounds husky and sultry in a way I’ve never heard before.
Griffin gets up and stalks toward me. He’s walking so fast that I instinctively step back, my feet tangling until my back hits the wall. He braces one forearm above my head, leaning down until he becomes a question mark over me, and his breath mingles with my own.
“You followed me out here,” he says. “Why?”
“I wanted to make sure you were okay,” I say, shuddering from how close he is, still without touching me.
“Is that the only reason?”
My brain scrambles for an answer that doesn’t make me sound pathetic.
He leans closer. “I think it’s because you want me.”
I force myself to hold his gaze even though everything in me wants to look away. “You think too highly of yourself.”
“I know.” He bends down past my face, his breath ghosting across my neck and raising goosebumps that race down my spine and right between my legs. “But you won’t think so after I’m done with you.”
He pulls back so he can look me in the eye, his pupils blown so wide they consume the amber of his irises.
I press my palms flat against the wall behind me to stay upright.
He’s so close I can see the mottled bruising still around his eyes from the bar brawl…
the split in his lip that has healed to only a raised line.
I barely notice the tang of ectoplasm. It doesn’t matter anyway. I smell like that, too.
He steps into me fully, his body pressing into mine until I’m pinned against the wall with nowhere to go.
“Can you feel how badly I want you?” he whispers.
The evidence is pressed against my thigh. My hips arch forward. I’m trying to hold out, not to come on too strong, but I’m losing control.
“Then do something about it,” I say.
“I couldn’t give you anything more than this,” he says, sounding strained.
“I don’t want more,” I say. “I just want this.”
He leans down. I should tell him to stop, should do anything other than tilt my chin up and let my eyes close as his mouth gets closer.
His lips brush mine. I brace for the surge of feeling I know will course through me, only to feel—
Nothing.
I peek one eye open. Griffin’s still kissing me, and objectively, everything about this should be working, but there’s an alarm going off inside my head, complete with an obnoxious sound and flashing red evacuation lights.
I press my hands against Griffin’s chest, pushing him away. “I changed my mind.”
“Okay.” His eyes are still half-closed. “Are you okay?”
“You didn’t do anything wrong.” I duck under his arm, putting distance between us before I do something even more catastrophically stupid than I already have. “I just have to go.”
I run for the door before he can say anything else.