Chapter 6 #2
Of course, the ghost answered immediately. Where else would I be?
“He has,” I told her.
She nodded again. “I wondered why it felt like he wasn’t really gone,” she whispered. “Because—because it wasn’t like that with Daddy. When he died it felt—it felt like he was gone.” She looked at me. “Where is he?” she asked.
I knew it was rude to point, but I had no idea how else to answer her, so I pointed beside me to where Robby was crouching.
She looked at him, or, rather, looked at the space where he was, since she couldn’t see him. “You still should have told me, Robby,” she whispered. “But I know why you didn’t. And I love you. We love you.”
I love her, too, he said. Tell her I love her so much.
“He says to tell you that he loves you so much,” I said quickly, before she said more.
She smiled, a sad expression, and nodded. “I know you do, Robby. I know that’s why you did it now.” She rubbed at the fresh tears falling from her eyes. “Thank you,” she whispered. “Baby brother.”
I’ll always be with you, Betts, he said.
I told her this.
She shook her head. “No, Robby,” she said softly. “Don’t stay with me. I love you, but you deserve to be able to move on. To find Daddy. To tell him we still love him. You can do that. You can go be with him.” She turned to look at me. “He can, right?”
I didn’t know, not really, but Ward seemed to think that people could find their loved ones beyond the veil. “If that’s what they both want,” I answered her.
“Go find Daddy, Robby,” she continued. “Tell him we’ll see him when our time comes. Mom will. And I’ll come find you, too.”
The ghost was crying, again, too. Tell her to take her time, he told me. Take a long, long time. Have babies. Teach them how to throw boccie balls and make blueberry pancakes and homemade banana pudding. And I’ll come back and visit, sometimes. I can do that, right? His eyes were pleading.
If you want, I answered. I knew ghosts could come and go, if they wanted to.
Tell her that, he pleaded.
I told her.
I was exhausted by the time Bethany and Robby left.
Robby had gone first, fading away as he allowed himself to cross over, but not before wrapping me in a hug that felt cold and clammy and made me have to suppress a shudder.
Bethany hugged me, too, before she left, pressing a check into my hands that was more than we would have charged her to see Ward.
She’d insisted I keep it all, even though I told her it was too much.
I stood there, staring at the door, realizing that my hands were shaking and there was a line of cold sweat down my spine only after the door had been closed for a good thirty seconds.
I turned around, then let out a tiny squeak when I realized Mason was standing in the mouth of the hallway.
“Well done, Rayn,” he said softly. “Very well done.”
I blinked, startled and confused. “What?”
Mason stepped away from the wall, walking over and guiding me gently to sit on the couch where Bethany had recently been sitting, the upholstery a little warm still from her body.
“You handled that very well,” Mason said, taking the check away from me.
“That was a lot of work, and it’s not easy to manage other people’s grief like that.
” He grimaced. “I know what it takes out of me, and I don’t have to talk to dead people. ” Then he stood. “Stay here.”
I stayed, the exhaustion brought on by so much magic use making my limbs feel heavy.
Even though I could see ghosts more or less naturally—without having to put effort into it—sustaining the energy to hear them and speak to them required magic.
Not as much as pushing for a psychic reading of something.
Definitely not as much as trying to use my death magic or summon a ghost. But it still took magic, which meant that a long conversation like the one I’d just had with Robby Tripp had taken more out of me than I’d expected.
Mason returned after a few minutes, a mug of hot chocolate in one big hand. “Are you okay to hold it?” he asked me. “Or should I find your gloves?”
“It’s fine,” I replied, reaching out. “Thank you.” I took the mug—my mug—from him, careful not to burn my fingertips on the now-hot ceramic.
I was much, much better at controlling my psychic senses than I’d been even a four months ago, although it was more difficult the more tired or emotional I was feeling, and at that precise moment, I was feeling a bit overwhelmed by both.
I sipped cautiously at the hot chocolate, not wanting to scald my tongue.
“What happened?” he asked, quietly, after I’d taken my third sip.
“Her brother had been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer,” I replied, the words surprisingly difficult to say. “And he took his own life rather than put his family through watching him decline.”
Mason let out a soft grunt. “That must have been difficult.”
“He was still very upset. But their father had died from cancer, and it had been very hard on all of them, so he didn’t want to put his sister and mother though it again,” I explained.
“I meant on you,” Mason said gently. “Although I imagine it was also horrible for both him and his family.”
I blinked. “I mean. It wasn’t…” I paused, thinking about how to word my emotions.
Often, if I didn’t think before I spoke, I would say something that people took entirely the wrong way.
I knew Mason was patient, but I still tried not to upset him if I could help it.
He’d always been both kind and tolerant of my failures.
“I didn’t enjoy telling the sister that’s what happened,” I said, finally.
“It was sad, but it was better that she knew than that she continued to blame herself for his suicide.”
Mason nodded. “That’s almost certainly true,” he agreed. “But that still doesn’t make what you just did easy.”
I frowned a little. I wouldn’t have called it easy, exactly, but it also hadn’t felt particularly difficult. “I just did what was needed,” I said, finally.
Mason smiled a little. “You and Ward,” he said, then patted my shoulder before standing and walking back toward his office.
I felt my frown deepen, since I wasn’t sure what he meant by that. We could both speak to ghosts, so I suppose the comparison made sense, but otherwise Ward and I really weren’t all that much alike. We had different magic, different abilities, different personalities…
I sighed, then took another sip of the hot chocolate, figuring that this was just going to be one of those things that I simply didn’t understand but would have to accept.
There were a lot of those.
After a few more sips, I was feeling less shaky, so I got up and took my hot chocolate back to my desk to return to working on the spreadsheets.
Which lasted all of five minutes before someone else came through the door, jangling the bells.
I looked up, but my hand paused before pulling up my gaiter.
“Hey, kid,” Hart said.
Behind him, Raj smiled, the expression warm, although fleeting, as he pushed it off his face quickly.
That probably meant they were here for the FBI.
“Hello, Hart,” I replied. “Raj.” I tried to keep my tone even, but I doubted I’d succeeded. Hart’s eye roll confirmed that I had not.
Raj lifted up a satchel. “Anybody using the conference room?”
I shook my head. “Let me tell Mason,” I said, standing and walking towards the back.
“I heard,” Mason said, having come out of his office. He was studying me. “You okay to do this?”
I nodded.
“Why wouldn’t you be?” Raj asked, immediately.
“I’m fine,” I replied, smothering the annoyance at both of them. I understood that it was because they were concerned for my well-being, but I wanted to be seen as someone who could manage my own abilities, not as someone out of control or prone to failure or weakness.
I supposed I would have to actually demonstrate my stamina and skill for that to happen. Which was what I was trying to do, except that Mason’s question had now shaken my confidence and caused Raj and Hart to doubt me.
I half-expected Mason to ask if I was sure, but he didn’t.
He simply nodded. “Let me know if you need me for anything,” he said, looking at each of us, as though either Raj or Hart might need him to do something.
I suppose he was trying to make it seem as though he hadn’t aimed the comment specifically at me, but I could practically feel the intensity of Raj’s gaze boring into my back, worried about what I was about to do.
I hit the switch to start recording the proceedings as I walked into the conference room, and we settled around the table, its polished surface gleaming, the thin lines of dark and light wood knotted into a harmonious pattern.
I ran my fingers over it, letting just a brush of feeling slip through my skin.
Pride. Strength. Power. Sympathy and protection.
I’d come to love this table for more than its beauty.
It was beautiful—Elliot Crane was a master artist, but he was also a good man.
He was proud of his work, and he loved doing it, and both of those things were imbued into the wood of the table.
And Ward and Beck and Mason worked with it, giving it their power and causing it to echo their passion for their work, the sympathy they felt for those who had lost loved ones, the drive that pushed them to seek justice.
Despite the grief that often accompanied the people in this room, those were the emotions that had seeped into the wood over the past six or so months.
When I worked in this room, the table helped to ground me, anchoring me to this place, to these people, and to myself, no matter how horrible the things I saw were.
“Rayn—” I could hear the concern in Raj’s voice.
“I’m fine,” I repeated, more strongly, this time, shooting him a look that I hoped he understood meant that I didn’t want to talk about it—and that I really was fine to do this.
Raj opened his mouth to say something else, but Hart spoke, instead.
“We have the case materials from the RPD,” he said. “We need you to touch the evidence from both scenes again.”