24. Faith
The moment Hudson shut the door, leaving me alone, I noticed his absence immediately. The entire apartment just felt…empty. It was as if he had consumed every bit of space around him, and when he left that area, the vacant hole that remained gaped into fathomless proportions.
I wanted him to come back.
Jerking in surprise when warm fur brushed against my ankle, I glanced down at Salem. It was almost as if she’d rubbed against me when she’d walked past because she was trying to comfort me.
Grateful for her attention and the distraction it caused, plus the reminder that I wasn’t alone anymore, I stroked her back with my toes. Hudson had made sure I always had company now.
Damn. Tears glittered in my eyes.
He probably had no idea the gift he’d actually given me when he’d dumped the damn furball on me, but I loved her.
When my phone gave another notification chime, I realized I needed to get my ass into gear.
“Shit!”
At this rate, I wasn’t going to be fifteen minutes early to class as I usually was. I wasn’t going to have time to lay out everything in its proper order and clear my head before the test. My schedule was going to be all out of whack and?—
Nope. I couldn’t even consider all the horrible possibilities of things that might or might not happen. I was just going to have to rush through traffic and then run through campus, and I’d still make it in time for my usual preparations.
“You got this,” I commanded—I mean, encouraged—myself as I snagged my book bag from its hook on the wall and hurried out the door that led into the shop.
I could hear Mirlande’s rich, carrying voice as I hustled down the steps. She was at the check-out counter, placing stones, or roots, or dusts, or something in a gift bag for a customer as I passed.
When she glanced up, I blew her a silent kiss in greeting.
And she called, “Bonjou, chéri. I have some orange cake in the back for you. You make sure you get it now, you hear.”
“I will later,” I answered. “I swear.”
As I hurried past her, however, the front door opened, and three familiar faces entered. I jarred to a halt, gaping at Hudson’s friends: Keene, Alec, and Oaklynn.
Certain they were here to fetch him home as well, I mentally worded my answer, already prepared to point to the back of the store in the direction of the alley, where I was sure he was still leaving with Thane.
But then Oaklynn sent Keene a very narrow-eyed, displeased glance as she said, “What’re we doing here again?”
Which meant they weren’t on a hunt for Hudson, after all, and probably had no idea that he’d even been here.
And therefore, it felt very weird for me to run into them now.
So I did an about-face before they could see me just as Keene paused at the love potion display, and Alec wandered toward the hanging row of rabbit’s feet.
“I told you, we’re just going to ask the owner some questions,” I heard Keene answer as I hurried past the check-out counter and into the back.
Mirlande glanced up at me in surprise. So I sent her a saccharine smile and pointed. “On the other hand, I’ll take the cake with me now.”
She sent me a suspicious squint, but her customer inquired about something on the display next to the cash register, so she was distracted enough to let me pass without giving me the second degree.
As soon as I reached the candle section, however, I ducked behind the staircase instead of continuing on toward the break room.
Beyond curious to know what Hudson’s friends were doing here, I paused in my hiding place and peeked back around the side of the staircase.
I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but Oaklynn seemed irritated. Alec looked like a kid in a candy store, poking through all the shelves and picking up about everything he saw to check it out. And Keene appeared to be a man on a mission.
As soon as he spotted one of the store’s business cards, he plucked it up, then jerked a chalice from Alec’s hand and returned it to the shelf.
“Come on,” he ordered, hooking his arm through Oaklynn’s to drag her back toward the counter where Mirlande was.
When they paused to wait behind the current customer, Oaklynn glanced around in wonder, her expression changing when she spotted the rocking chair positioned in front of the bottom of the stairs.
Unhooking her arm from Keene’s as if in a trance, she wandered over to the chair.
“What’re you making there?” she asked in a kind but cautious voice, as if she might be attempting to charm a cornered animal that could either bite or lick her hand. “It looks like?—”
She cut herself off with a gasp when Keene grabbed her arm and yanked her away.
“Who the fuck are you talking to?” he hissed in alarm.
Blinking at him as if he’d lost his mind, Oaklynn pointed at the chair. “I’m…” But then her eyes widened, and she winced in apology at Keene. “No one’s there, is there?”
“Uh, no…” he answered as if that should be obvious.
“God, you are so embarrassing,” Alec added. “We can’t take you anywhere, can we?”
For a moment, Oaklynn looked crushed. “I,” she started, already lifting a hand to her chest to keep herself from crying. But then Alec’s face broke into a crazy grin, and he snickered before bumping his arm into hers to let her know he was only joking.
Mouth falling open, she smacked his shoulder. “Oh my God, you’re so mean.”
Still chuckling, he lifted a hand to solemnly swear, “Hey, I only tease ’cause I love you.”
She sniffed and rolled her eyes, but from the shadows behind the stairs, I couldn’t seem to breathe right.
They were just so accepting of her abilities. It was?—
Wait a fucking second! Oaklynn was the friend Hudson had been talking about last night? She was the one he’d given a nosebleed? The roommate who saw ghosts?
Holy shit.
I probably should’ve guessed that already, but still… My breathing went from stuttering and barely coming at all to suddenly working too fast.
Oaklynn was a sensitive. It was…
Honestly, it was spectacular.
She seemed so normal. So well-adjusted. So loved and accepted by her people.
And I had so many questions.
As the customer with Mirlande started away, she turned her attention to Oaklynn with a soft, encouraging smile. Then she motioned to the rocking chair. “I see you’ve met my pitit fi, there, have you, chéri?”
Hudson’s three friends immediately straightened their acts, and Oaklynn looked distinctly cornered. “Uh…”
She was clearly drowning, not sure what to say, so Keene swept forward.
“Howdy, ma’am,” he greeted with a charming, Texas grin as he tipped an imaginary cowboy hat at her. Then he held up her business card in front of his face and squinted at it. “Are you…Mer…landy?”
Mirlande arched very unimpressed eyebrows. “It’s pronounced meer-lawned.”
“Hey, sorry about that,” he said, sweeping right past his faux pas to get to the meat of their visit. “But we were wonderin’, are you truly legit or full of total bullshit?”
“Keene!” Oaklynn gasped and smacked the side of his arm. “You can’t just ask people that.”
He blinked at her as if silently wondering, why not. Then he turned back to Mirlande. “Look, no offense,” he started, lifting two apologetic hands. “But we have some real odd questions here, and we need some real honest answers. I’d try to schmooze them out of you if we had the time, but we don’t, so…sorry. Do you actually know anything about supernatural shit or not?”
While Oaklynn was left speechless, Alec groaned and covered his face with one hand.
Mirlande, however, finally stopped scowling. Amusement flickered over her face as she lifted her eyebrows. “Despite the lack of couth, I must say, I’m liking the candor.”
Keene nodded encouragingly and stepped forward. “Hell yes, you do. So once again, are you legit or not?”
With a great sigh, as if seeking patience, Mirlande sent Keene one last censorious frown before transferring her gaze to the rocking chair. “The girl sitting there,” she said, “is wearing a white dress and crocheting a blanket.”
All three—Keene, Alec, and Oaklynn—turned slowly to peer at the chair. When it started to slowly rock, Alec jumped and crowded into Keene, gurgling out a squeak of fear.
“Dude!” Keene nudged his friend right back out of his personal space and lifted his arms in question.
Alec could only shrug. “It moved.”
“Well, yeah,” Keene argued. “There’s a freaking ghost sitting in it.” Then, with a disgusted sigh, he rolled his eyes and spun to Oaklynn with lifted eyebrows. “Well?” he demanded. “Is the old woman right or not?”
Mirlande sniffed and straightened her back self-righteously over the term old, but Oaklynn backed her up by nodding. “I mean, I don’t know if I’d call her a girl. She seems to be our age, but yeah… White dress. Crocheting. That’s right. She’s different, though.” Glancing at Mirlande, she squinted slightly. “She seems so oblivious to everyone here. Can she…hear us?”
“My pitit fi can hear as well as anyone, chéri. She just don’t address the living unless it’s her will.”
“Yeah, great,” Keene broke in, coming between the two women. “So our girl’s nose keeps bleeding.” He hitched his thumb toward Oaklynn. “Can you do something about that?”
“A bloody nose, hmm?” Mirlande waved Oaklynn forward, and when Oaklynn uneasily shuffled closer, Mirlande reached across the counter to touch her cheek. Then she smoothed her fingers along it before capturing Oaklynn’s chin and nudging her face up as if to peer into her nostrils.
“Well, dry weather will cause a bloody nose,” she started, as if she were some kind of doctor.
But then Alec leaned past Oaklynn and blurted, “Can ghosts cause them?”
Mirlande’s eyebrows lifted. “Ghosts?” Returning her gaze to Oaklynn, she dropped the girl’s chin and furrowed her brows. “What else have you been experiencing, child?”
“Dreams,” Oaklynn answered with an uneasy wince. “I shared dreams for two nights in a row with one of my roommates who lost his best friend when they were both ten. The dreams are about the boy’s death. And now I can’t seem to go near my roommate without getting a nosebleed.”
“Oh non,” Mirlande croaked in dread and slowly backed away from Oaklynn.
Knowing they were referring to Hudson, I inched closer to the back of the stairwell to hear better, completely invested in this conversation now.
Behind the counter, Mirlande gathered both hands near her heart. “Been summoning a spirit from someone’s body, have you, then?”
“Uh, what?” Oaklynn asked before glancing toward Alec and Keene for clarification.
“Summoning…what now?” Keene demanded, tipping his ear toward Mirlande. “Are you saying she’s sucking our buddy’s spirit right out of him?”
“Not his own spirit,” Mirlande corrected. “I’m referring to the spirit of someone in there who no longer has his own body to dwell in.”
Dumbfounded silence followed that. Alec, Keene, and Oaklynn blinked at Mirlande as if she’d just started talking in her native Haitian Creole.
Then Keene gave a negative swish of his hands. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Are you saying Brett’s ghost is…inside Ivey?”
“But that can’t be right,” Oaklynn said with a confused shake of her head before Mirlande could even answer. “I mean… If there was a ghost in Hudson, why can’t I see it?”
Mirlande tilted her head thoughtfully. “Ghost possession can be quite undetectable, even by a medium, until they are near the surface.”
“Possession?” Alec yelped in alarm. “Hudson’s fucking possessed?”
Keene glanced at him in dismay. “Dude. What the hell did you think she meant when she said there was a damn ghost inside him?”
“I don’t know!” Alec snapped back. “My brain hadn’t made that connection yet.” Clutching his head, he glanced at the shop owner. “But oh my God. How the hell did Brett get inside Hudson after more than ten years of being dead?”
“Ten years?” Mirlande winced. “Oh, that’s not good. That’s not good at all.”
“What’s not good?” Keene, Alec, and Oaklynn asked in unison as they crowded together and clutched each other’s forearms.
From my hiding spot, I pressed a fist to my mouth, bracing for the bad news as well.
“The ghost would’ve gone into your living friend upon his death.” With a bitter snort and roll of her eyes, she mumbled, “Damn dead children. Such nasty, unnatural creatures, if you be asking me. And unpredictable to boot. So many times, they see the light, and instead of going toward it, they just try to hide, and unfortunately, it’s sometimes in the first warm living body they find.”
Alec shuddered and made a small moaning sound as if he felt something slithering over him.
Keene merely shook his head and breathed, “Holy…shit.”
“But having a second soul inside you puts a strain on your own soul,” Mirlande went on. “Your living friend must have one of the purest, most inexhaustible spirits to host another in him for a full decade without yet dying from it.”
Keene shuddered through a shaky breath before bobbing his head with emotion. “He does.”
“He has the best soul,” Alec swore adamantly with a solemn bob of the head.
In my hiding spot, my fingers fisted around the cloth of my shirt directly over my chest, and I finally started to see why Hudson had been so adamant about defending his friends. They really did care about him.
“Regardless,” Mirlande told them with a sad shake of the head. “This dead boy is dragging your roommate down. The ghost must be removed before it kills its host.”
“Okay, now we’re talking my language,” Keene cheered as he smacked his hand down on the checkout countertop. “I one hundred percent agree with you, Meer-lawned! So how do we get rid of the little fucker?”
Mirlande turned to inspect the wall of shelves behind her before she pulled down a small keychain that had an amulet dangling from it. When she turned back, she extended it to Keene.
“What’s this?” he asked, taking hold of it to lift it up and look into the small teardrop-shaped glass bauble. “Will this fix him?”
“No,” Mirlande answered. “But it’ll tell you for certain if your friend is possessed. White smoke mists inside it whenever a ghost is near.”
“Well, let’s test it,” Keene said, tromping over to the rocking chair and lifting the keychain above it. I bit my lip, wishing I could see the results from my angle, but Alec’s murmur of awe told me smoke had appeared in the glass amulet.
“Alright, then. We’ll take it,” Keene decided, pocketing the keychain.
Mirlande scowled. “That’ll be twenty-nine, ninety-five, please.”
With a sigh, Keene pulled out his wallet and approached the counter. As the shopkeeper completed the purchase, he asked, “So how do we get the ghost out once we’re sure it’s in there?”
Mirlande said nothing, merely gave Keene the receipt and shifted her gaze to Oaklynn.
When she looked at Damien’s girlfriend long enough, Oaklynn backed into Alec and glanced at him for help. “She’s looking at me. Why is she looking at me?”
“Nosebleeds and dream sharing,” Mirlande murmured almost to herself. “The type of sensitive you are…” She nodded as if coming to some kind of conclusion she’d been working through in her own head. “You’re like a magnet to ghosts. They are drawn to you. They find your aura pleasing.” Bobbing her head with more certainty, she added, “And when they’re hiding inside another’s body, they’re usually pulled to the surface toward you, sometimes against their will, which puts an extra strain on your sixth sense and causes physical responses, like nosebleeds.”
Oaklynn managed to shut her mouth for a few seconds before she could say, “I—So you’re saying my nosebleeds are caused by me sucking Brett out of Hudson?”
“Oui,” Mirlande nodded gravely to confirm it. “But the closer you suck him to the surface, the more power this ghost can gain. For at the surface is where they can take…control of their hosts.”
“Oh.” Oaklynn sank back a timid step. “Well, shit.”
Behind the stairs, my mouth gaped as I tried to draw in air, but none seemed to come. I couldn’t breathe.
Hudson had been worried about losing himself. And now—now it seemed as if that could actually happen.
Fuckity, fuck, fuck.
“Now hold up, there,” Keene demanded suspiciously. “Why didn’t the ghost just stay near the surface and take control when he first went into Ivey?”
Mirlande nodded as if that was a fair question. “From what I understand, they enter straight into the soul pocket, directly in the core of a body. They’re not given an option on how deep or shallow they can go, otherwise we’d see ghost possessions happening much more frequently. No, a certain type of sensitive has to come along and start drawing the ghost out through organs and bone and flesh before things start getting dangerous.”
“Eww.”
While Oaklynn grimaced, Alec groaned and threw up his hands in defeat.
“Well, that’s just great,” he lamented. “Hudson’s possessed, and Oaklynn’s making it so the damn thing can take control of him. Should we expect to see spewing green shit, spinning heads, and levitating bodies now?”
Lips twitching with amusement, Mirlande murmured, “I doubt it would get quite that dramatic, dear boy. It’s just a simple ghost we’re talking about, not an actual demon from hell.”
“Ah. Right, right.” Alec nodded as if that made sense.
But Keene waved so he could capture Mirlande’s attention for himself. “But can Oaklynn save Hudson? That’s all I want to know. Can she suck the little bastard all the way out of him?”
Mirlande arched one eyebrow as if to say maybe…maybe not. But her answer was, “I wouldn’t be trying it if I were her.”
“Wha…?” Oaklynn glanced in confusion at the two guys before returning her focus to Mirlande. “Why not?”
The shop owner merely shook her head. “Spirit drawing comes with a hefty price.”
“What kind of price?” Alec said as he grabbed Oaklynn’s arm and dragged her protectively to his side.
“It’s hard to say for certain. If you’re strong enough…” Mirlande shrugged. “You might survive. But the odds are not in your favor. I assume you’ve had headaches for a couple of weeks now.”
“Uh…” Oaklynn glanced uneasily at the boys before turning back to Mirlande. “Maybe,” she finally admitted as she bit her lip. “But I just thought it was school stress or something. Finals start today.”
“It’s not stress,” Mirlande told her apologetically. “The aching head, the bleeding nose, the dream sharing. Your body’s telling you you’re putting it under too much strain. So you need to stop. Now.”
“But how am I even doing it? I didn’t even try or know I could.”
“It’s simply your presence. That’s why we sensitives were put here to begin with—to set order right again. This is the land of the living. The dead belong elsewhere. So when one has trouble moving on, it’s up to us to help them do that. And when one invades another’s body, our sixth sense immediately goes to work, even without our knowledge, like antibodies fighting against a virus. But if the ghost inside fights back and resists the draw, it becomes a battle of wills.”
“Well, then… My will’s stronger,” Oaklynn decided. “I want to help Hudson get this ghost out of him so his soul is no longer under any strain and he doesn’t die.”
Mirlande only shrugged. “I’ve never met a sensitive who actually survived a spirit drawing against the unwilling. Just look at my pitit fi there.” She motioned to the chair. “She tried to draw a resisting spirit out of a friend, and that’s what happened to her.”
They all turned back to eye the chair warily.
“I still don’t see anything,” Alec whispered to Keene just as Oaklynn gasped suddenly, and spun forward again, clutching her head between her hands.
“Oh God. Oh God. Oh God,” she chanted in utter fright.
“What? What?” Both Alec and Keene demanded, gripping her arms.
“Her eyes…” Oaklynn wheezed as if she might hyperventilate. “She looked up at me, and her eyes were pure white. No pupils. No irises. Just white.”
Curiously, I tried to peer around the staircase to get a better look at the chair. But I couldn’t without exposing my position.
“What happened to her eyes?” Oaklynn asked Mirlande, only to spin toward Alec. “I don’t want that to happen to me. I don’t want to die and become a freaky, white-eyed ghost.”
As Alec pulled her into a sympathetic hug, Keene rounded on Mirlande.
“Hey!” he snapped. “If your purpose here as a medium is to help ghosts move on, then what in tarnation are you doing, keeping creepy, eyeless ghosts in your shop?”
Mirlande straightened self-righteously. “My pitit fi will move on when she’s ready to move on and not a second sooner.”
With that, she sent Keene a look that cowed him back a step. Clearing his throat, he answered, “Well, alright then. So what do we do to help our friend?”
Mirlande only shrugged. “A ghost possessing a body is like any other virus. You’d do well to treat it as such.”
“And what the fuck does that mean?”
“It means,” Mirlande admitted with a regretful wince. “I don’t know how to get the ghost out of him. I’m neither a medical doctor nor a paranormal one.”