CHAPTER ONE #2
I ping-ponged my attention between them. “What? Is it the bond? Did that bring you back?”
Ben scratched his head before nodding. “Yeah, I might’ve been, yes.”
Gabriel dismissed the notion entirely. “No, that can’t be right. You were only gone maybe a half hour, max. You left after Willa pulled herself out of the nightmare.”
I blushed at the idea that they watched me in my sleep. It was intimate on so many levels. We were basically cohabiting, apart from the sex, and I’d only been kissed once—well, one kiss that turned into another that melted my socks off, courtesy of, er, Ben.
“I know,” Ben agreed, oblivious to my thoughts. Mind-reading wasn’t up for debate, to my immense relief. “Time is still a difficult concept for me when I’m distracted, but I showed up when my sister was pouring a bowl of cereal and felt the tug before she’d finished eating it.”
“Hold on, wait a second.” I held my hand up, pressing pause on their discussion. “I’m lost. So you guys feel compelled to return here after being away too long?”
“Not to return here—return to you.” The warmth in Ben’s directness and weighted gaze coaxed a corresponding heat to my cheeks. “And yes.”
Focus, Willa.
“But… you two never mentioned this. Has it always been like that?” It was one thing to hear Gabriel had been around for years, but realizing how present he’d been tipped my brain into a highlight reel of my most cringe-worthy moments. I’d been eleven! Who wouldn’t wince at their preteen selves?
“No, Willa! Dios mío!” Gabriel reassured. “It’s not always been like this. I was mistaken before. It must be because of the bond.”
Somewhat mollified, I nodded. We’d only been bonded since just before Halloween. That scenario was much preferred because, as far as I knew, they couldn’t hide from me anymore. If they were around, I sensed them, unlike before when I couldn’t perceive those no longer on the living plane.
“So moving about freely wasn’t a problem before,” I surmised.
Gabriel paused, considering his answer. “Technically, that’s right, but within reason. For example, if I wanted to visit the pyramids at Giza as a ghost, I could, but it would’ve been hard to find.”
“Oh, so if you didn’t know something before you died, you don’t automatically get that knowledge?”
“Exactly. Transitioning to the non-living plane isn’t an information dump. Ghosts don’t become some omnipresent, all-knowing being with the answers to the universe at their proverbial fingertips. In a lot of ways, we’re still mortal.”
“Okay,” I drew the word out, trying to decode his point when it wasn’t clicking.
Gabriel held his hands up, as if to slow my thoughts before I became too invested in them. “Let me rephrase. We’re mortal, but only in the that we have limitations. Let’s loop back to the pyramids reference.”
“Sure.”
“Intellectually, I know they are in Egypt. But without access to GPS, it’d be eons before I stumbled across them.”
“Right. That makes sense. I don’t know if you’ve heard this, but the ocean’s kind of a big place.”
Ben snorted behind a hand he’d propped on his crossed arm, solely to cover his mouth. He might’ve been attempting to hide his amusement, but he failed miserably.
Gabriel responded to my quip with the dry look it deserved.
“Not only that, but after a while, the living world starts to fade and lose meaning. We don’t…
worldly temptations mean little to us. Biology is driven by survival.
We need to eat. We need to sleep. We need to pass on our genes.
Those are the basic driving forces behind every vice.
So, clothes, cars, a nice house, prestige, all of that becomes trivial in the grand scheme of things. ”
In a lot of ways, that made sense. “Okay, yeah.” Here I was thinking they were cute, yet sex failed to ping their radar. That sounded wrong. “So you said the world fades, is that literal or figurative?”
“Both,” they answered in stereo, glancing at each other.
At some unspoken agreement, Ben took the floor.
“The brief time I was dead and not tied to you, the real world paled and lost detail. You can’t feel the rain or the snow, the sun, the grass…
you can’t smell the air—after a while, you realize you don’t need the air.
It’s… a disconnect that happens, like a sunken ship slowly overtaken by barnacles until every last piece is reclaimed by the sea. ”
I shivered at the idea losing Ben forever. “So… there’s no heaven or hell, just nothing?”
Ben glanced at Gabriel, conceding to the more experienced ghost.
The older ghost shrugged. “We don’t know what there is.
Most people that die don’t linger like we have.
My uncle was killed right along beside me, and I’ve never seen him when checking on my family.
It’s like he passed on instantly. Shouldn’t he have wanted to see his wife, or his five boys, even briefly to make sure there were coping without him? ”
“Well, he had a big family—maybe he was content with his lot in life, even though he died violently,” I offered, somewhat at a loss, too.
Gabriel canted his head. “So, because I didn’t have any brothers or sisters, and only my mom, and I certainly didn’t have time to have kids of my own, my spirit is restless?”
“Certainly?” Ben asked. “I mean, eighteen isn’t unheard of.”
Gabriel dimmed. “Turned fourteen and got a job.”
Ben winced. “Ouch. That’s rough. And who would hire a fourteen-year-old?”
“Lots of people if they’re paying cash.” Gabriel shrugged. “It was an honest living, and it helped Mom out.”
He’d been a hard-worker, and how had life repaid him?
“So, are we talking about the heavy topics now?” I questioned in the quiet that followed.
“Sorry, Willa. We haven’t been intentionally trying to keep you in the dark or anything.” Ben rubbed his neck, glancing at Gabriel before answering me. “After everything that happened, with the bonds, my dad getting arrested—”
“With reason,” Gabriel added. “He tried to—”
Ben held up his hands to remind him of his innocence. “I know. Believe me, man, I know. And good riddance to him. I’m just saying, there’s been a lot you were adjusting to, Willa, and we didn’t want to be responsible for adding more to your plate.”
I collapsed backward into the cushion, my strings cut. “You sound like my parents.”
Ben clutched his chest. “Ouch, my heart. You shot the arrow right through.”
“You’ll live,” I retorted without thinking, then winced. “Ben—”
“Willa. You have nothing to apologize for. It’s not your fault that the mayor cut my brake lines.” He paused. “And if you say it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t started dating you, then you would be mistaken.”
“But—”
“No buts.”
“Except—”
He laughed. “No excepts either.”
“He’s right, Willa,” Gabriel added. “You can’t blame yourself for the actions of others. It’s as simple as that.”
“Sure, however—”
“Did you blame Ben when his dad totaled your Jeep and tried to kill you and Manny?”
My teeth clicked shut on the next arguing point I’d queued up. They hadn’t convinced me, but I knew when to concede a battle. In my limited experience, that was when they teamed up in agreement about something.
Ben eased into the silence that followed. “So, that was why we haven’t discussed anything since Halloween.”
I forgot everything had happened shortly before Halloween. Nick, my brother, teased me relentlessly about not needing a mask. He hadn’t been wrong, either. I’d have been right at home as an extra in a zombie movie.
Ben’s dad’s truck rammed my driver’s side door hard enough to turn the glass window into a couple dozen razor-sharp projectiles that abraded half of my face.
The other cuts came from racing through the woods on foot, trying to escape the madman.
Gabriel’s “little cousin” had been right by my side.
Our desperate speed left lashes from thin branches and thorn bushes we waded through in the dark.
Once Dad caught wind of Nick’s teasing, he’d been quick to nip it in the bud, uncharacteristically yelling and throwing things. Neither of us could fault his foul temper. The FBI agent in charge had spilled a chunk of the secrets I’d been gatekeeping from my parents—none of them good.
To say he’d been under a lot of stress would be a gross understatement.
I cleared my throat. “Well, we’re waving at St. Patty’s Day in the rearview mirror. Maybe we should start addressing the elephants we’ve avoided?”
They exchanged a look.
“Can you two read each other’s thoughts?” I blurted out, unable to help myself.
The question startled them. “No, of course not.”
My eyebrows rose at their matching answers. “Can you read mine?”
“No!” Again, they replied in concert with one another.
“Uh huh. Are you sure you can’t read each other’s—”
“Willa, Willa,” Ben interrupted. “No one can read anyone’s thoughts.”
I frowned. “Wait, that can’t be true. When your dad was trying to kill us, I heard Gabriel talking in my head. The same way with when you helped me escape from the loony bin—”
“Don’t call it that,” Ben corrected. “You’re not some crazy person.”
“Of course, because sane people talk to themselves and see dead people.”
Ben gave me a disappointed stare at my sarcasm. He could be such an earnest boy scout.
Gabriel saved me from squirming beneath Ben’s look. “No, we were speaking telepathically those times. That’s different.”
“Oh, it is?”
“Yes. It’s… there’s a consensual component. If you think something to one of us with intent, we hear it. And it would probably work the same way for you.”
I frowned, thinking, Really?
Ben laughed. “Yes, really.” At my eyes lighting up, he tacked on, “No, I didn’t hear your thoughts. They were all over your face. Your eyebrows pinch in the middle when you’re concentrating, and your tongue peeks out.”
My tongue fled inside my mouth, as if shrinking from some invisible searchlight. Then his words sank in, and just like that, he popped my balloon of excitement.
Gabriel shook his head. “Don’t be sad. I heard it, so it worked. You must’ve been thinking of me when you said it.”
Did his voice sound the slightest bit smug?
It must’ve because Ben frowned at him.
“Oh. Neat,” I said, trying to move on from the subject. “Could I do it to both of you simultaneously?”
Gabriel and Ben both whipped back in my direction, actually paling, which was no simple feat for a ghost that didn’t have a body, let alone blood-filled veins. “What?”