Chapter 8
EIGHT
I had the cover of night to thank for helping me accept Rae’s offer. She didn’t take up much space, sitting in a chair shoved against my closed closet door.
“Will the light from my phone be too distracting?” she asked.
“No, that’s fine.”
The light wouldn’t bother me. Distraction came with her scent, the warm notes of brown sugar and vanilla.
Rae’s slow, steady breath filled the quiet.
Her presence was the ambiance of dreams. I should have clung to it; let it lull me into a sense of security.
Instead, I stayed alert, imagining what she looked like as I wrapped her ankle in the stable.
Despite being covered in mud and frustration when we made our way around the grounds, Rae glowed.
I’d forgotten how thrilling it was to be the recipient of flirtation.
Forgotten how buzzing nerves and warmth in my stomach combined in a beautiful overwhelm.
“Sorry,” I whispered when she readjusted, the chair creaking underneath the shift. “I’m usually faster than this.”
“Take as long as you need,” she murmured.
My heart drummed, enthralled at how sensuality soaked clean through her comment. I cleared my throat and shifted under my sheets.
“Should I tell you a bedtime story? Sing you a lullaby, maybe?”
There was a smile in her voice. The offer was a joke, but I hummed in approval anyway.
Rae placed her phone face down on her thigh. I tried my best to make out her outline in the dark. There was a bit of light filtering in from between the curtains. But it just barely kissed the edge of my bed, not reaching far enough to offer visual aid.
“A story would be nice,” I said.
“I should probably avoid the spooky ones,” she teased. “Right?”
“I’d appreciate that.” I tugged the blankets around my neck, relaxing now that her deep voice took up so much space.
“You’ll have to give me a second to think,” Rae whispered. “All my good ones are spooky.”
“Tell me how you started your merry gang of ghost hunters.”
She laughed. “Merry? I don’t think anyone but Jonah fits that bill.”
“Just Jonah? What disqualifies you?”
“Merry’s a bit too sweet.”
“Rae, I hate to break it to you, but you’re a glorified toothache. Besides the moment you kicked me out of your book signing, you’ve been nothing but sweet.”
“Kicked you out is a strong phrase.”
“It’s as strong as you are sweet,” I agreed.
“I gently nudged you aside.”
“You had not one but two security guards escorting me to the side.”
“Oh, come on. Jonah and Nico are hardly security guards.”
“They’re as good as any I’ve ever seen.”
She laughed and relented. “Fine. Um…I wanted to start a team after a job that would be my last with my sisters. We were in a small town on the coast. The mayor hired us to get rid of vengeful spirits in their diner. Dawn, Eve, Opal, and I didn’t always agree on methods and approaches.
When we were younger, that didn’t get in the way much.
I yielded most times. But as we got older, arguments became more intense. I yielded less.”
“Naturally.” I thought of the first time I dug my heels in after my parents insisted on moving again.
They’d been as shocked by my protests as I’d been.
Until I turned seventeen, I’d been agreeable.
But the years had worn through my patience, leaving me threadbare with no supplies to patch up.
When we had our first fight, my parents were stunned by my anger.
I had been, too. I hadn’t realized I’d spent my childhood bottling everything up.
I was tired of being dragged around like some pet.
Tired of my lack of agency. That resentment burst out in one go, shoving an eternal wedge in our relationship.
Some of the last words I’d ever said to them were sharp and splintered.
Cuts of regret I kept hidden until this very day.
“The last day we spent in town, a storm was about to roll in. They put me on runner duty, like always—”
“What’s runner duty?” My eyes closed as I tried to imagine a younger, less experienced Rae. But I couldn’t picture a different version of the woman before me.
“It’s a nicer way to say bait.” The amusement in her tone transformed the story from a crappy memory of non-agency to entertainment. I wished I could do that with my memories of being with my parents. I wished I could look at the colors of the past and not just the darkness.
“That had to suck,” I said.
“I didn’t mind it. I kind of enjoyed pretending to be a damsel in distress.”
“So, you played damsel and your sisters were the ones to unmask the ghosts? The Daphne to their Velma?”
“Ghosts can’t be unmasked.”
“In Scooby-Doo, they can.”
“Scooby-Doo lives in a less complex world,” she countered with a laugh. “Where the paranormal is rarely real.”
“Opposed to where we live, a more complex world, in which it is real.”
“You catch on fast,” Rae teased.
“What happened on runner duty?”
She took a breath. “What didn’t happen? They completely ignored the alternative approach I wanted to take, sending me to incite an old-fashioned game of cat and mouse. I tripped in the sand—because who the hell runs well on the beach?”
“I do.”
She scoffed in disbelief. “Why?”
“I used to train in it,” I said. “I wanted to join the cross-country team in high school.”
“Why in the world would you volunteer for that torture?”
“To impress a girl,” I said simply.
“Ah.” Her voice softened. “Fair enough. I suppose I’ve done worse to impress girls.”
The plural rang in my mind. I wondered how many relationships she’d had.
It couldn’t have been a ton because she’d been on the road like me.
Except Rae’s transient experience had been the opposite of mine.
Where it’d sharpened her into something strong and confident, it dulled me into a point that could barely pierce through soft earth.
“So, are your non-cross-country ankles the reason you got caught in quicksand earlier?” I asked.
“You’re almost as funny as you are beautiful, Octavia Daniel.”
“I looked up sinkholes, by the way.”
She hummed an unspoken, of course, you did. “And what did you learn?”
“The rain from the storm probably triggered it,” I said. “It was most likely a solution sinkhole formed by surface corrosion.”
Rae remained quiet for a few breaths before saying, “I wonder, would you have to have a chat with a demon itself to convince you of the paranormal?”
“Are those real, too?”
“I’ve been lucky enough to never encounter one, but sources have told me stories.”
“That’s the biggest difference between you and me,” I said around a yawn. Sleep crawled up my body, making it nearly impossible to keep my eyes open.
“What’s that?” Rae asked.
“You take people for their word.”
“If proven reliable, why not?”
“No one’s reliable,” I murmured, the words fading into something softer, transitioning over to the realm of dreams. “Not completely.”
“That’s a tough way to look at things.” She matched my volume. “Makes life harder, not being able to use others’ experiences to inform your decisions. You’re basically starting from scratch at the beginning of each day.”
“Difficult but necessary.”
“You’re in for a rude awakening.” Her melancholic honesty made me wince.
“Let’s hope not,” I whispered. “Now, finish your story. Why did falling in the sand make you want to leave the family business?”
“When I fell, I nearly drowned in a few inches of water. We thought the ghost was category four, but it was a five, which meant its intentions were always to kill as soon as it harvested enough energy to do so.”
I frowned. “How did you get free?”
“Opal came to the rescue,” Rae said. “She remembered an accident one of the townspeople had, which we initially figured was unrelated. Most ghosts are nonviolent. They just need help crossing over. Unfinished business and whatnot. But this one had more than just unfinished business. It derived pleasure from hurting people as a human, so that desire followed it into the afterlife.”
“I’m sorry that happened to you, Rae.”
I wished I could see her. And wished she could see me to understand how much I meant it. I didn’t know what actually happened at the beach, but I did know the last hitch in her voice revealed fear. She sounded like I had whenever I spoke about losing the ranch.
“It’s fine,” she promised. “I’ve been in worse spots. Would you believe it?”
When I didn’t answer, she added, “Right. You wouldn’t.”
We shared a laugh. For a minute, none of the other stuff mattered.
She wasn’t some paranormal investigator brandishing a belt of ghost-hunting supplies, and I wasn’t some horse-loving loner who’d spent the last of her cash on a pipe dream.
For a minute, Rae and I were just two women who dreamed and wanted desperately for those dreams to become our reality.
“Being nearly drowned after not being listened to is one hell of a final straw,” I said.
“Nothing like a near-death experience that’ll make one rethink their career goals.”
“Ah, yes…I’m curious, when did a bobblehead line appear on the goal list?”
Rae laughed. “Those came after the mints. Gotta have mints when you’re staking out for ghosts, keeps you alert.”
“Right, the mints…how could I forget…the mints,” I said before giving up my standoff with sleep.
I’ve experienced two kinds of darkness while dreaming. The warm, limitless kind that gave way to possibility. And the heavy kind, burying me so far underground that I had no choice but to breathe in dirt.
The darkness tonight filled my lungs with dirt. I dug until my nails bled and continued to do so because what else was there? I couldn’t give up, could I?’
You could, the voice was familiar. Mine, but weirdly modulated and miles away. Or maybe decades. An older version of me who had seen more and learned her lessons tenfold.