The Unburied Ghost

1. Reva

CHAPTER ONE

REVA

Cal’s blood is warm under my hands.

That’s the first thing my brain fixes on.

It acknowledges and dismisses the gunshot, still echoing in the back of my skull.

It moves past the screams coming from inside the house, the music cutting off somewhere beyond the terrace doors, one elegant string note plucking discordantly in the middle of it all.

The blood is warm.

Too warm.

And too much.

My palms press hard below his ribs, where dark red keeps pushing between my fingers no matter how much pressure I use.

The green satin of my dress is bunched beneath my knees, soaked at the hem, stuck to the stone where blood and spilled champagne and spilled dirt from the planter have turned the terrace into something ugly.

“Cal.” My voice comes out small. Wrong. Nothing like the voice I use in the back of an ambulance when someone else’s father is bleeding out in front of me.

I clear my throat and try again. “Stay with me. You hear me? You stay with me.”

His eyes flutter.

I lean closer, one hand slipping before I shove it back into place and press harder. “No. No, don’t do that. Look at me.”

His mouth moves. Blood shines at the corner. My throat closes so hard I almost choke on it.

“You are not allowed to die,” I whisper. “Do you understand? I love you, and you are not allowed to do this to me.”

His lashes lift just enough for me to see him.

No. I can’t think like that. I can’t make him small and precious and half-gone already. I can’t let my mind turn him into memory while his blood is still pumping under my hands.

“You told me to run,” I say, because anger is easier than this terror spreading through me, and I need something with teeth. “That was stupid. I’m not running. You know I don’t run, Cal, not unless zombies are chasing me.”

Nash is beside me, one knee on the stone, his hand firm at Cal’s shoulder.

He is talking, but I only catch pieces of it.

Pressure. Ambulance. Southwest gate. Two shooters down.

Secure the side drive. His voice is calm in a way that feels obscene, but his eyes are not calm. Nothing about his face is calm.

Deacon stands a few feet away, gun in hand, body angled toward the open terrace doors. He has blood on his sleeve. Some of it might be Cal’s. Some of it might belong to the man I shot. I don’t know. I don’t care.

“Where is Delia?” I demand.

My hands never leave Cal’s wound, but the question rips out of me sharp enough that Nash looks up.

Deacon’s jaw tightens. “Inside.”

“Where is she inside? Go get her—”

“She was taken through the east corridor,” he says. “Two men took her, one wounded. I saw them pull her past the chapel arch before I got clear.”

For half a second, the world tilts. Delia’s face flashes behind my eyes. Her hand shoving me. Her voice, choked and furious. Stay down. The guard’s arm around her throat. Her feet dragging against the stone.

She tried to save me. Cal took the bullet. Both thoughts hit the same place, and something inside me nearly buckles.

“Go get her,” I say.

Nash’s hand tightens on Cal’s shoulder. “Reva.”

“Go get her.”

A muscle jumps in his cheek. “If I leave this terrace, police walk into a dead man, a shot security guard, your fingerprints on Cal’s weapon, and your dress covered in blood.”

“I don’t care.”

“I do.” His voice drops, hard enough to cut through the panic clawing up my spine. “I care because if they put you in cuffs, I can’t protect you, I can’t protect Cal, and I can’t find your sister. Let me do my job.”

I hate him for making sense while Cal is bleeding beneath my hands. I hate everyone for making sense.

A siren rises somewhere beyond the garden wall.

My head snaps up.

The sound should help. I know that. I have spent too much of my adult life sitting behind the engine of that sound, feeling it in my bones like relief. Tonight it scrapes straight through my ribs.

“They’re coming,” I tell Cal. “You hear that? They’re coming. You’re going to surgery, and you’re going to be mean to nurses, and I’m going to yell at you for bleeding on my dress.”

His fingers twitch against the stone.

I want to grab them. I want to squeeze his hand and anchor him to me with bones and skin and every terrified thing I have left. I can’t. If I move even one hand, the pressure changes. The blood wins more ground.

So I press harder and talk faster.

“You remember when I got the flu in ninth grade and puked in your truck? You didn’t even get mad. You just opened every window and said I owed you a detailing when I stopped dying. Which was rude, by the way. You were very rude to your sick child.”

His lips shift. Maybe a smile. Maybe pain.

I take it like a gift.

Boots pound across the terrace. Voices layer over each other. A paramedic drops beside me with a trauma bag, and my body reacts before my mind catches up.

“Gunshot wound to the left upper abdomen, maybe flank. Significant blood loss. He was conscious, then intermittent. Airway intact. Breathing shallow. Pulse fast and thready.”

The paramedic looks at me for the first time. Mid-thirties, longish dark hair pulled tight, eyes quick. “You EMS?”

“I was EMT in Chicago.” My mouth keeps working while my hands keep pressure. “Entry wound here. I didn’t roll him. I didn’t check for exit. He coughed blood once. He’s been responsive to voice, but he keeps trying to close his eyes.”

“Good. Keep pressure until I tell you.”

“I know.”

She doesn’t react to my tone. Smart woman. She opens gauze, talks to her partner, and slides into the rhythm that should be mine. Gloves. Shears. Vitals. O2. Monitor. A second medic moves in with a stretcher and a backboard, and suddenly there are too many hands near him.

Too many hands that are not mine.

“Don’t lift him like that,” I snap.

The male paramedic glances at me. “Ma’am, we’ve got him.”

“You need to check—”

“We’ve got him.”

“He took the shot close range. He may have internal—”

“Ma’am.”

“I am not a ma’am.”

The female paramedic looks up, patient in the thin, dangerous way people get when they are doing a job and someone with a personal stake is making it harder. “Then tell me your name.”

“Reva Hart.”

“Reva, I need you to let us package him.”

“No.”

Her gaze sharpens. “You did good. Now move.”

My chest turns hollow and hot. “I am not moving.”

Cal makes a sound. Barely anything. A breath scraped through blood.

Every bit of training I have ever had fractures against the sight of him.

I know the right answer. I know I’m in the way.

I know family members hovering over a patient make the scene harder, messier, slower.

I have been the person silently begging someone to back up so I could save the body under my hands.

Knowing all of that doesn’t help.

This is Cal.

This is the man who taught me how to drive with one hand on the wheel and one hand ready to smack mine away from the radio.

The man who sat through school plays he had no interest in and clapped too loud anyway.

The man who let me scream into couch cushions after nightmares and never once asked me to make my grief easier, prettier for him.

This is my father in every way that matters, and they want me to take my hands off him.

“No,” I say again.

Nash’s hand closes around my upper arm.

I jerk away so hard my shoulder burns. “Don’t.”

He releases me immediately. “Little wolf.”

“Do not.”

His face changes at whatever he hears in my voice.

He shifts back, but he does not leave. Around us, the terrace has become a scene he is trying to own.

Men move at the edges. Security. Medics.

A woman in a torn silver mask is crying near the doors until Shiloh appears and guides her away with one hand at her elbow and murder in his eyes.

Shiloh’s here.

His tux jacket is gone, his shirt untucked, curls damp with sweat.

He sees me, and all the practiced ease drains out of his face.

For one second he looks younger. Terrified.

Then his gaze drops to Cal, to my bloody hands, to the gun on the stone, and he pulls himself back together hard enough that I can almost hear it.

Ever is behind him, moving like a man trying not to run because running would mean he’s lost control.

His eyes sweep the terrace, fast and merciless.

Dead guard. Cal. Nash. Me. Deacon. The medic bag.

The broken planter. The open doors. The cameras I know he’s already thinking about.

The device in my hair. The bracelet on my wrist.

His gaze catches mine. I want to tell him I’m fine, but I can’t make the lie fit in my mouth.

“The signal was cut near the chapel,” Ever says to Nash, voice clipped. He keeps his eyes moving. “I had partial audio from Reva until the interference hit. Two men took Delia east. Service stairs or back hall.”

“Find the camera gaps,” Nash says. “Now.”

“I’m on it.”

Shiloh steps closer, careful, like I am a bomb he knows he needs to tiptoe around. “Sweetheart.”

“Don’t sweetheart me.” My voice breaks on the last word, which ruins the whole thing.

His throat moves. “Okay.”

The paramedics shift Cal. I lunge with the pressure, refusing to lose contact. “Watch his side. Watch his side. He’s still bleeding.”

“We see it,” the female medic says. “Reva, I need your hands off.”

“No. No, I can’t.”

The male paramedic reaches for my wrist.

I bare my teeth at him. It’s ugly. Embarrassing. Animal. I would feel shame if there were room for anything except blood and sirens and Cal’s eyes slipping closed again.

Hands catch my shoulders from behind.

I twist hard, ready to scratch, ready to bite, ready to break fingers. Whoever has me shifts with the movement, close enough that my back hits a chest and the smell of gunpowder and old leather cuts through the copper in the air.

Deacon.

“Let go of me.”

His mouth is near my ear. “They need space.”

“I can help.”

“You already did.”

The words hit some soft, stupid part of me, and I hate him for finding it.