EPILOGUE
B
eing in this room didn’t trip Willa up half as much as Gabriel assumed it would.
On the other hand, why would it?
That girl was adamantium. He’d watched her for so long, seeing her grow into a wonderful woman for almost a decade.
Whatever game the FBI agent was playing at, asking Willa to come make a formal statement in the same interrogation room she would have died in if Gabriel hadn’t phased inside her to absorb some of the blow, Willa wasn’t biting.
In fact, only judging by Willa’s expression, Gabriel would have assumed he had more of a reaction to the reminders this room brought to the surface.
He could still recall watching her, slight and broken, bullied by a roomful of officers.
Ben, a day-old ghost at the time dealing with an entire spectrum of other matters, had frozen at the sight of his dad breaching the room and threatening Willa.
He probably wouldn’t have been able to do anything anyway.
He’d used all his remaining life force from being newly dead to spring Willa from that psych ward.
So Gabriel stepped in, jumping into Willa at the last second. If not, she’d have died. She still did, several times, according to Ben. Gabriel hadn’t been at the hospital until later. He’d needed to restore himself after exerting so much energy to save her.
The FBI agent drew Gabriel’s attention back to the present. Well, technically, the FBI agent said something that colored Willa’s emotions enough that he felt it through the bond. Gabriel checked. She still didn’t show any expression. He could not have been more proud of her.
He wondered if she could feel his emotions too. There was a lot he didn’t know about what they’d done.
The one thing he was sure about was that he finally, truly felt the tether connecting them together.
After so long, it was hard to believe. It’d been all he could do to get her and Manny to know each other better—slamming lockers, fritzing her computer so she’d have detention with his cousin, and dozens of other instances over the years.
After countless failed attempts, the planets had aligned on their own, bringing Willa and Manny together without Gabriel’s interference.
Some things in life felt like fate.
Her easy friendship with his cousin was one of them, even if Gabriel had been disappointed to realize she didn’t connect Manny to the same scrawny kid she selected at random to dance with at middle school.
Manny definitely remembered. Maybe he would tell her one day.
Another instant flashed of a faceless, timeless robed figure sticking a gnarled finger into the threads of the world and plucking the loom with a quick tug that rippled in all directions.
Gabriel knew his cousin. Manny was playing it cool for now, but he was smitten with Willa.
“Okay,” the agent declared, glancing down at the paper form with a serious expression. “Let’s start again, from the top.”
Willa sighed, sinking into the seat a fraction before seeming to remember her intention to project an unfazed facade, then her spine snapped straight. “Do we have to?”
Gabriel didn’t blame her for her impatience.
Out of curiosity, he’d materialized behind the agent’s shoulder to read what he’d been writing, but little of it made sense.
His shorthand contained a series of numbers interspersed with capital letters, reminders to check for specific references on a case, and names of people Gabriel didn’t think were on the man’s team.
Gabriel could be wrong on the last one. Honestly, the living held little interest unless they were relatives, or like with Willa, he was drawn to their presence.
Something about her ability made her seem more real than everyone else on the living plane, which was why he’d started sticking close to her during the times he’d be checking on Manny.
After Gabriel and his uncle, Manny’s father, died, his cousin grieved a little quieter every day. When he’d reached the point where he began smiling again, Gabriel couldn’t help but be fascinated by the girl two desks behind him who glowed with vivid color and warmth.
He checked on Manny less often, and instead, began studying her—Willa Walker. When he witnessed her first “episode,” he realized she had some affinity for the dead, even if she didn’t know it yet, and he’d been with her ever since, trying to get her attention.
A flash of light brought Ben, who materialized behind Willa’s chair.
“You’re alive,” Gabriel murmured, feeling a wash of cool relief flow through him.
Ben came out of the gate running. “Boredom, I can deal with boredom. Sure, I thought it would be the figurative death of me, but second death? Can we die again?”
What was he on about?
“I don’t know,” Gabriel replied, confused by Ben’s train of thought but bracing himself for the inevitable fallout when Ben noticed the change in Willa—or where they were.
If Gabriel had a problem with the setting, Ben definitely would. Depending on how much energy he’d recovered during his absence, heads would roll—or, well, objects might fly, the ghost equivalent of a tantrum.
Gabriel readied himself to intervene when shit hit the fan.
“You don’t know,” Ben echoed. “You’re the expert. Man, you’re supposed to know this stuff.”
“I’ve been dead longer than you, but that hardly makes me an expert. How could I possibly know the answer to that question? The only way would be if I watched some other random ghost die.”
“Fair enough. Still, boredom can be dealt with. Watching Willa live her life, unable to interact with her? It’s a searing lance to the chest, but far from the worst thing to endure as ghosts.
Side note, how have you not gone insane?
You’ve been trying to help your family almost since the day you died.
I watched Willa suffer through one instance of mortal peril, and I nearly ceased to exist entirely. ”
He was referring to how he’d attacked the shadow creature that nearly killed her.
“You get used to it.” Kind of. “And it sounds like you should be the expert on the second death. You were gone for ages,” Gabriel commented.
Ben explained the void of nothing he’d been in while recovering his essence. A measure of guilt lifted off Gabriel’s chest when Ben finished outlining his experience.
Gabriel needed Willa to see, but pulling her into his headspace had exposed her somehow. Each time he tried, those terrifying beasts would hunt her down like prey. Ben’s connection with her was the only thing that saved her, so really, it was Gabriel’s fault Ben needed to intervene.
Gabriel reassured himself that it’d been necessary and that Ben was back now.
He asked, “Have you returned to full strength?”
Ben still hadn’t perceived much about the real world yet, and Gabriel would take all the seconds obliviousness could buy. Maybe they’d be out of the police station and on the road before Ben noticed anything amiss.
“It felt like I had to regrow my soul. Without this connection to Willa, I might not have been able to. It’s as if she’s my tether to who I was.”
Yeah, Gabriel could see that and had experienced it firsthand. She’d been his link to humanity, even more so than his own family in a lot of ways. Outside of that, matters lost potency.
Perfect case in point, not recalling the names of Veritas’s team. They’d called each other by surnames for hours after Gabriel slipped from Willa, returning the reins to her.
“I’m glad you’re okay. Welcome back to the land of the unliving.”
“Hilarious. What’d I miss?” Ben asked, looking around at where they were.
And there it was.
Gabriel didn’t answer at first, watching Willa squirm in the metal chair while the FBI agent sat across from her, taking more random notes and not jotting down a single word she recounted for what was supposed to be a sworn statement.
Gabriel glanced over Veritas’s shoulder again, growing alarmed due to the last thing the man wrote and underlined three times: still evading.
Willa’s soft cry made everyone in the room train their eyes on her. She stared at the table, not daring to look up. When did she start looking so broken?
Gabriel tilted his head, confused. She’d been holding her own. Had the agent said something Gabriel missed with the distraction of Ben’s arrival?
The agent must have, even if he put on a show of being just as startled as the invisible half of the room.
“Willa’s crying,” Ben intoned, his voice dangerous. “Why is she crying?”
Gabriel wanted to know the answer too, shifting to get a better vantage point of the agent.
“Wait,” Ben continued, frowning at something. “Willa… She feels different, like…” He closed the distance, crouching near the floor as he stared up at her. Ben reached out and laid his hand upon her forearm, gasping, then his head whipped in Gabriel’s direction with heat. “What did you do?”
Too bad.
Gabriel had hoped for a bit more time to wrap up here, even if the agent seemed inclined to drag it out. “I did what I had to do. Willa was in danger—”
“Danger?” Ben flipped from hostile to confused before reverting to aggressive as he glanced over Willa. “She’s shaking.”
“She wasn’t before, and she’s been here a while. I don’t know why she’s acting this way now.”
Ben circled her, leaning close to examine her left side. “Are those cuts?” His voice rose, as did Willa’s violent trembling.
“Are you okay?” the agent asked. “Do you need medical attention?”
“No,” Willa declined. “I’m fine.”
“Really? Because you look like you just saw a ghost,” Veritas added with a healthy dose of skepticism.
Willa gave a weak chuckle. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you if I did.”
She offered no information beyond that, despite the pressure of the agent’s weighty stare. Even Gabriel could feel it, as if the man could measure a person’s worth with a look.
“You don’t seem fine. Are you nervous? Sad?”
Willa licked her lips. “I don’t want to be here anymore.”
Gabriel grew annoyed because he could feel how much the admission cost her. Ben appeared to be in the same boat.