21

The lights flickered as Louis slumped by the outlet, drawing too much power from the fuses as he lowered his head. “We were too late. . . .”

The smell of breath mints traced the air as Tim rocked back and forth by Mrs. Cavendish, his hands still in front of his face as he stared at them. A shroud of silence pressed the oxygen from the room, weighing over me, and my arm was throbbing harder, like steps in a funeral procession for Mrs. Cavendish.

I didn’t ask Louis what’d gone on in here, or if her wrangler had escorted her to the glare yet. I only rose up from the floor and inched into Mrs. Cavendish’s family room, decorated all over with framed landscapes of the sunny sea. Next to her, a coffee table was overturned, spilling travel magazines and potpourri over the carpet.

My essence quaked, sputtering in disappointment and failure. Tim had fulfilled all the promises of his bloody dreams. Worse yet, that dark spirit, my killer, had helped him, just as if he’d wanted to make Tim into an apprentice. Back in the other house, he’d said, “I couldn’t resist quietly meddling. I suggested a diversion that might keep him away from Nichelle for a time, so you can thank me later for that.”

Was this the result of his interference? But he’d also made another comment.

“I told him something rather helpful, too. . . .”

What had he meant by that? Because murder didn’t fit the definition of helpful.

When Tim smiled, laughing softly to himself, I wondered if he’d gotten high from killing Mrs. Cavendish. Just to be sure, I reached out, touched him, using my empathy even if it was the last thing I felt for him.

Hands around her neck, squeezing and squeezing, her eyes glassy, full of terror, confused and begging. Choking, gasping . . .

Mom’s face?

Nichelle’s?

A rush of adrenaline pumping the heart. Alive, so alive!

Pulling away from her, having the power of death over life. Fun. That was such fun . . . !

I shoved out of Tim, retreating to the kitchen, weaker now, my arm like a flashing beacon. He shivered like he was in the middle of an ice storm, but he still had that smile on his face as he kept rocking over her.

I wanted to maim him. No, better yet, I wanted to ignore the consequences fake Dean had said there would be for killing him and just do it.

But all my choices didn’t matter worth a shit when Mrs. Cavendish made a final, tiny throttled sound—she hadn’t been dead?—and a misty stream of gray rose out of her eyes. . . .

I could only stare as she officially gave up the ghost.

She floated over her body, a pearly gray middle-aged woman in a white mesh bathing suit cover-up, looking at her new hands, just as Tim had looked at his—almost like she didn’t recognize that they were a part of her. She ran her fingers over her arm, then traced her palms down her torso, and I didn’t know if it was because she was realizing she was dead or if she was getting used to the fact that she’d be in this outfit for the rest of her ghost existence. Her long brunette hair was in disarray, probably from her battle with Tim, and when she saw him kneeling in front of her deceased body—the one she’d taken such pains to maintain in her cougar years—she fisted her hands, then let out a blood-stopping scream.

Too bad Tim couldn’t hear it. Too bad I couldn’t even go over to comfort her because, at that moment, a familiar, beautiful gray shape fogged out of the ceiling, like it’d traveled right through it, and wafted like a veiled bride toward Mrs. Cavendish.

When she saw the wrangler, her scream cut off. Then she stumbled backward through the air.

“No,” she said. “No, no, no . . .”

I had to help her. “This is your reaper. It only wants to escort you to the real afterlife.”

Mrs. Cavendish finally noticed I was there. She screamed again, this time at the sight of me, then Louis. Then, clumsily, she flew toward the rear of her house where the door was open, her scream drifting back to us, fading a little more with every passing second.

All that was left was Tim, the wrangler, Louis, and me.

The reaper didn’t seem to mind Mrs. Cavendish’s rejection. Instead, it gravitated to Tim, its veils flowing as it reached out and used its twiggy fingers to rake down his face, almost like a cruel, curious stroke.

He gasped in agony, because the wrangler had combed over the same red streaks that he’d put there himself when he had scratched his face after my dark killer had shown up at his house. Now he scrambled away from Mrs. Cavendish’s body, coming to a stand, holding a palm over a cheek. With his other hand, he rubbed an arm. Then he started pacing back and forth while never dragging his gaze away from his victim.

Had Tim just woken up from his killing glee? Did he realize now that he was in trouble?

The wrangler paused above, then circled around him, sending a veiled glance to me and Louis. Deep in my essence, I knew what it was thinking.

He’ll get his. Don’t worry.

A sense of peace should’ve come over me, but it didn’t. Hatred was hanging through me like parasitic moss, and the wrangler must’ve known that, because it slowly shook its head, discouraging me from doing anything to him on my own, then drifted back to the ceiling in reverse, absorbed into the plaster, leaving a faint shadow of its outline before it disappeared altogether.

The only sounds I could hear were Tim’s heavy breathing while he paced, plus the thud of his sneakered footsteps. As my own beating essence—the wound on my arm—ran a race with his rhythms, a random thought came to me. He must’ve grabbed the shoes outside, before he’d tried to start his bike. Right before he’d come inside to murder Mrs. Cavendish. He wasn’t crazed.

My hatred of him swelled.

“Jensen,” Louis said in that thin, wounded tone. “Don’t do it. Don’t put a mark of darkness on yourself by going after that monster.”

I stayed silent.

“The wrangler even warned you,” Louis said. “I saw it with my own two eyes. The universe must have a plan for Tim. Let it happen.”

He came off like fake Dean when he’d warned me about acting like a god. But I had the power of a god over a dung beetle like Tim, didn’t I? And he was right here, pacing, nervously brushing a hand over his hair as he panicked and probably thought about how to dispose of the body.

“What else did you see with your own two eyes?” I asked Louis. “How did this happen?”

Grayness cut with faint color washed through him, thanks to the power outlet, but the fight with the dark spirit had still sapped him. I didn’t even have to ask if that thing had taken a chunk out of Louis and put it into itself during their fight because the answer was clear.

“I’ll tell you after you plug in,” Louis said. “You’re not looking well.”

I glanced at Tim wearing a hole in the carpet, and I knew that I’d need all the energy I could get to deal with him. So I slid to an outlet above the kitchen’s Formica counter, near a big blender. Space-age machines were all over the place, but Mrs. Cavendish wouldn’t be using them anymore. There was also a ceramic bowl filled with keys nearby, a patchwork purse, and two clean glasses on the counter.

I started to electrify myself, ready to spring at Tim at a moment’s notice.

Louis seemed satisfied with me now, although he kept monitoring Tim, too. “Mrs. Cavendish . . .” He trailed off and soberly corrected himself. “Margaret. She told Tim to call her Margaret when she saw him trying to start his motorcycle and went over to ask if she could help. He’d called her Mrs. Cavendish, and she’d told him that only her middle school students had called her that before she’d stopped teaching and went into online education consulting for herself.” He paused. “When she found out Tim didn’t have Triple-A for towing his bike to a garage, she offered to use her card to get someone out here. He thanked her, and she said that’s what good neighbors do, then asked him in for lemonade while she made the call.”

“Was she . . . ?”

“Inviting him in for another reason? I don’t think so, but I think Tim did. He popped one of those breath mints he’s always carrying into his mouth while she got ready to pour lemonade.” Louis lethargically indicated the glasses on the counter. “I was strong enough to follow them inside at that point. Tim was already worked up from the dark spirit, and he started getting insistent about borrowing Margaret’s car instead of having his bike towed.”

“So he could go and find Nichelle, just like he’d threatened to.”

“Yes.”

Had Tim snapped then? Had he given in to my dark killer’s suggestion to kill his neighbor?

I asked, “Did she refuse to give him her car?”

“Yes. She was nice about it, and Tim began sweet-talking her, but in an aggressive way. She got nervous and asked him to leave the house.”

Oh, no. That had probably been the start of the nightmare for her, because Tim’s dreams and fantasies had been much different from this reality. In his mind, she would’ve given him anything, a car, her body . . .

In the family room, Tim stopped pacing, like his panic had finally subsided. He flexed his fingers, another hazy smile tipping the corners of his mouth as his gaze caressed Mrs. Cavendish’s body.

Was he remembering what it’d been like to kill her?

I hunched on the counter, wanting so bad to pry a picture off the wall and send it across the room, decapitating him.

Louis went on. “I hadn’t juiced up enough over at the other house, so the trip over here made me tired. I wanted to go into Tim’s head to see if a hallucination might calm him, but I needed energy. I couldn’t even throw a lamp at him, not after that dark spirit took a piece of me.”

I closed my eyes, not just in pain for Louis, but because I didn’t want to talk about my killer. It was too soon.

Deal with this first, I thought. Then . . .

Then I didn’t know what.

Louis looked as sick as I felt. “Tim was barely containing his rage by then, and Mrs. Cavendish started running toward the back door to leave. He went after her, grabbing her arm, telling her that he was going to use her car. That she couldn’t deny him that.”

“His board, his rules,” I said, tracking Tim while he got to his knees in front of the body.

Louis continued. “Tim had that look in his eyes. Coveting. Anger. Aggression. A hint of those fantasies we saw in his dreams.”

I knew what was coming next and steadied myself for it.

“He took Margaret by the hair,” Louis said, “then dragged her into the main room.” His voice broke. “He started pulling down her cover-up, groping her, telling her to shut up because he’d seen how she flaunted herself in her backyard, knowing that he was watching. But Margaret was a fighter. She kneed him so hard in the groin that it stopped him, but not long enough, because he put his hands around her neck and squeezed.” Louis rested his head in his hand. “There still wasn’t a thing I could do but plug in and try to knock something off the couch nearby to distract him, and I did manage that.”

I saw a yellow throw pillow on the floor, next to her body.

“He didn’t notice,” Louis said. “She choked for minutes on end and then . . . It got so, so quiet. And you know what he said to her afterward?”

“Do I have to know?” I whispered as I watched Tim staring at Mrs. Cavendish.

Louis said it, anyway. “‘I thought you liked me.’ That’s what was running through his head after he killed her. Not I’m sorry or What have I done?”

I’d never imagined Tim would be like some of the fiends I’d read about. A male chauvinist rapist? Was that what an expert might call him? He couldn’t fathom how a woman might ever want to deny him. He would even try to explain the attack away by saying something like Tim had said.

“He didn’t expect her to fight back,” I said. “When she did, he just wanted her to cut it out. He panicked, and that’s why she’s dead. But, even if this was a mistake, he realized afterward that he’s got a taste for this.”

Maybe even because my dark killer had implanted that in his psyche, encouraging what was already there, finally sending him over the line?

Tim was reaching out a hand to Mrs. Cavendish’s hair now, and when he began fluffing the strands over her shoulder in a style that Nichelle or his mom might’ve worn, that was the last straw.

“Don’t touch her,” I said.

Summoning energy, I rolled it into a bolt and hurled it toward one of the sea pictures, batting it off the wall, sending the frame toward Tim and smashing him in the face.

He fell backward, his hand over his nose. When he took his hand away, it was covered in blood, and he could make only a yawping sound while getting to his feet. He was so off balance that he leaned over Mrs. Cavendish’s face in the process, dripping blood onto her, adding insult to injury.

But he’d added even more than that. Trace evidence.

I got ready to fling another projectile at him because the more blood he left here, the better.

“Jensen,” Louis said.

“It would only be right,” I said, my voice trembling. “Didn’t you see him? He was going to pose her body, making it into Nichelle’s or that picture I saw of his mother with her side braid. If we went into him right this second, we’d see a lot of sick new fantasies he’s conjuring up.”

But I didn’t want to see anything more about Tim Knudson. I wanted him erased.

Just as I was choosing which picture would look good up his ass, there was a rattle at the front door.

The knob, twisting.

Tim took off toward the kitchen, going for the ceramic bowl on the counter, grabbing Mrs. Cavendish’s purse, and fleeing for the back door. At the same time, the front door opened and Amanda Lee walked through, trailed by Twyla, who floated just above her.

“Randy said you two would be in here. . . .” Amanda Lee froze at the sight of Mrs. Cavendish.

Out front, a car started. Tim must’ve run around to the driveway to take Mrs. Cavendish’s vehicle.

“Go!” I said to Twyla, who was at full energy. “He’s getting away!”

She didn’t hesitate, darting back outside as the squeal of tires hit pavement.

I unplugged from the outlet, even though my arm was still giving me fits, beating, beating. Louis could stay here and tell Amanda Lee everything, but I wanted to go with Twyla to catch Tim.

I still wanted to give him more than a bloody nose.

Zooming out the door, I sputtered on the street, seeing that Twyla and Tim were already gone. I thought of bringing up a travel tunnel for speed, but that wasn’t smart since I didn’t know the destination . . . unless he was going to Heidi’s house.

But he couldn’t be that dumb. He might’ve even been making a run for the Mexican border, and we had to get the cops over here quick so they could start pursuing him. Dammit, the minute that Louis or I saw what was going on, we should’ve manipulated a phone to report a killing, but we’d been trying to sort out the murder.

I went back inside, admitting I wasn’t going to be fast enough for a car until I charged up more. Besides, I could be useful here . . .“The only witness to Mrs. Cavendish’s death was a ghost,” I said. “We need to tie suspicion to Tim before he makes it into Mexico. He had a nosebleed over the body, but it’ll take too long—”

“To have his blood analyzed so he can be identified and charged by the authorities,” finished Amanda Lee. “I can lie and tell the police that I saw Tim leaving the premises. It’s close to the truth.”

I had a better idea, and it was totally gross, but it was for justice’s sake.

“Amanda Lee,” I said, “just call 9-1-1.”

Then I went about my business. I sailed to Mrs. Cavendish, settling next to her and bowing my head, apologizing to the universe. Then I fortified myself, pressing my hand on her face.

Once, I’d possessed a willing person. Gavin. He’d invited me in, and since there was no one at home to keep me out of Mrs. Cavendish’s body, I filled her up with my essence and—

Oh, God, it was stiff and colder than hell inside her body, like I was wearing a wet suit that’d been soaked in icy water. I couldn’t even move her head to look around.

I was a rubber mummy.

I heard Amanda Lee gasp, long and harsh. Louis called my name again, but he would understand what I was doing soon enough.

It took everything I had to manipulate Mrs. Cavendish’s hand, raising her fingers enough to dip them in the blood Tim had dripped onto her face. I reached over to the marble surface of the table that had probably been knocked over during her struggle with him. Then I forced that hand to write:

T-I-M K-N-

It was too difficult to get any farther than that, and I let Mrs. Cavendish’s hand trail down in a streak of blood to the carpet. Then I erupted out of her with a jarring thunk, shuddering in the aftermath.

“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Cavendish,” I said, heading for the outlet again. The red pounding on my arm had spread farther, making me slightly numb.

Amanda Lee was off the phone, and now she yelled at me, the mellowness from today’s hallucination utterly kaput. “You didn’t have to go that far, Jensen! I could have grabbed her hand and written his name on that table!”

“And I probably could’ve manipulated her hand to do the same thing,” I said. “This way it looks like she did it. On CSI, they totally would be able to tell if someone moved her body, and we don’t want to screw with the chain of evidence or whatever.”

Louis was merely shaking his head as he kept powering up. “Yes, this way, the detectives will only wonder why she was moving after she died.”

Was CSI that good?

“But first,” I said, “they’ll be wondering why she wrote Tim’s name, and they’ll get busy investigating him.”

Louis clenched his jaw.

No time to argue. Now I had to charge up even more since going into Mrs. Cavendish had wasted me. While I did that, Amanda Lee called Ruben, even though chances were incredibly slim that Tim would find Nichelle at her house since she and Amanda Lee had no obvious connection. Then she went outside to wait for a patrol car. After I heard sirens, I couldn’t wait around anymore.

“Louis, I’m strong again. I’m going to try and catch up to Tim and Twyla. She might need help.”

“She can handle him, Jensen. Just rest some more.”

I looked at Mrs. Cavendish. I hadn’t done enough.

Streaming out the door, I headed for the freeway, hoping I could find Tim traveling southbound, driving toward the border with Twyla in pursuit. I even remembered the blue car parked in Mrs. Cavendish’s driveway, so I could identify it.

But things weren’t that easy. Ghosts—especially wounded ones—aren’t as fast as cars, and as hard as I tried, I couldn’t find the one I was looking for. My arm kept slowing me down most of all.

My frustration came to a head: Tim, the dark spirit, the injustice of how this universe worked.

I started to run out of steam, skidding over to the side of the freeway, close to Mission Bay, where the water spread like a gray tarp under the overcast sky.

Why couldn’t ghosts have unlimited energy? How unfair was that? I screamed at the injustice, just as Mrs. Cavendish had screamed when her ghost had seen her dead body. I almost started to cry, but I was too full of rage.

This had to be someone’s fault. I mean, who put monsters on earth to kill innocent women in the first place? Who just sat back in whatever cosmic throne they’d made for themselves and watched it all happen?

I knew of one entity that saw all the pain go by and had the power to do more about it than he was doing, and I couldn’t hold back from screaming at him, too.

“Dean, you son of a bitch, don’t just sit there watching this happen! Do something! Stop that bastard!”

And while he was at it, why couldn’t he deal with my own dark killer, wherever he was?

All I got in return was silence, except for the metallic roar of the cars on the freeway, the squawk of seagulls as they winged over me.

I shoved a middle finger at the sky, to wherever the star place was. “Is this fun for you, to see humans and ghosts and all us lesser beings thrown into chaos? Do you eat our pain, just like my killer wants to eat mine?” Then I went for a shot below the belt. “Do you want me to belong to him instead of you? Because that’s what he wants. . . .”

A whooshing vortex enveloped me as I spun skyward, pulled to a familiar plane.

The star place.

I had a body up here, so I panted and took in all the air I needed as I stayed on all fours, braced on that invisible floor that held me up from the purple, star-dotted sky around me. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a few glowing bodies suspended in the near distance—male and female, comatose and sublimely tranquil. Then I saw the standing white lotus pool sending up a pale glow.

A glare spot? A temptation to go into the light.

“Be my guest,” fake Dean’s voice said on my left. “I won’t stop you from going with your wrangler and taking that next step.”

As I moved, I winced. My arm keened like someone had taken a chomp out of it. And someone had.

I held my hand over the injury. “I didn’t come up here for that. You heard what I was saying down below.”

“Yeah, you’re pretty angry. At me, of all people.”

I almost told him he wasn’t a person. “You could’ve stopped Tim.”

Fake Dean had his thumbs in his belt loops, so casual, so careless. But then I saw the hurt in his eyes just before he closed his lids, opening them again and showing me the same cool cat as before.

He grinned. “There can’t be darkness without light, and vice versa, Jenny. I can’t stop darkness from operating.”

“You’re colder than I thought.”

He didn’t answer. Had I hit a bull’s-eye in him?

“Somewhere on the earthly plane,” I said, shakily rising to my knees, “there’s a killer on the loose. He wants to find his ex-girlfriend and hurt her. Hell, he wanted to hurt her earlier in the day, but someone took her place in a massive way. We can’t let him get away with that.”

“But he might get away. That’s the way of the world. It’s been like that since its inception, since the gods used humans in their games with each other, since man coveted another man’s piece of hunted meat. Someday, when everyone goes too far in their appetite for destruction, it’ll all end, but they have a ways to travel, Jenny.”

He was talking like he knew much more than he always claimed he did. He had to have the power to interfere with this one little thing. Why wasn’t he giving in to me?

Reading me, he said, “I don’t make exceptions. They tend to snowball. I’ve spent a lot of time learning risk management, believe me.”

This was going nowhere. There had to be something I could do. But how far would I go?

I thought of Tim’s bloody dreams, his fantasies that had starred all those brunettes who substituted for his mother. He’d seen his domineering mom’s face as he’d strangled Mrs. Cavendish, and I knew he would take his frustration in not being able to control her and Nichelle out on a lot more women if he wasn’t stopped.

“He’s going to get good at hunting,” I said to fake Dean. “He’s dreamed about it.” I thought of Tim’s first dream: the chase through the forest, the woman screaming for mercy. He’d wanted to hunt and kill all along, and he’d gotten the chance for the last wish today.

“You’re taking it too personally,” he said. “You’re relating Tim to your own murderer.”

“And why wouldn’t I?”

“You shouldn’t.”

Fake Dean dropped the cool act and walked over to me, getting to his knees and looking into my eyes. He gently removed my hand from over my wound and replaced it with his own.

Warmth and serene energy rushed into me, and I held back a content moan at the relief. And the desire.

I strengthened my voice. “You know that I met my killer today. Did that give you a thrill?”

“No.” He held my arm tighter. “It slayed me to watch it happening.”

I spoke before thinking. “Are you hoping my dark killer is going to push me into your arms? Was that your plan all along?”

“Jenny . . .”

“No—let me answer that. There’s no light without darkness and there was nothing you could do to interfere.”

“I wish you actually understood that. Do you think it gave me happiness to see that abomination taunt you today?”

He sounded tortured, gripping my arm harder. I almost melted into him, and I might’ve if I didn’t always suspect that he was playing one of his games to capture me.

“My killer’s also going to haunt me,” I said. “Isn’t that rich? He’s going to make sure I’m always looking over my shoulder. It is almost enough to make me want to go into the glare, but there’s that whole thing about me wanting to kick my killer’s ass before that happens.”

Dean smiled. “That’s the spirit.”

“Oh, you approve?”

“I do. That thing is off licking its wounds and building itself back up again, but I would banish him back to wherever he came from, myself, if . . .”

“You were allowed to. I know.” I reveled in his dizzying touch some more. “Can you at least tell me why he doesn’t have a wrangler who recaptures him and takes him back to wherever he came from?”

“Amanda Lee invited him back into this dimension. It’s up to her to put him back. The wrangler already did its job once, and it’s not its fault this one got away.”

“Sounds very bureaucratic, wherever it comes from.” I breathed, letting his touch pulse through me. “Today, I thought that dark spirit might be you. He used Cassie’s facade from when he reached into her yesterday.” I stopped, then said, “Did that thing get a part of me, too, back at the séance when it stabbed me?”

“No.” Dean smiled. “It was new to this plane back then, and it only learned recently that it could steal essences.”

“Can we regular ghosts do that?”

“You can’t.”

At least he could tell me that. “You like to switch your appearance, too. It sort of made sense that the dark spirit might be you, for a minute.”

“Dark spirits aren’t what you humans refer to as the devil, but they’re still deceivers.”

“You’re not?”

“Oh, I am. But I’m not altogether dark or light.”

When he took his hand away from my skin, his imprint stayed behind, like I truly belonged to him.

I looked at my wound and it was gone.

“Sometimes more light than dark,” he said, smiling again.

How I wanted to give in to that smile. . . .

But that’s not why I was here. “It seems that a creature with more light in them would want to stop a killer.”

“Jenny . . .”

“What about a trade?” What was coming out of my mouth? “What if I said I’d go along with your reindeer games if you’d just do this one thing for me?”

He tilted his head, narrowed his eyes. “Are you offering yourself to me?”

Now that the words were still ringing in the air, I couldn’t take them back. Actually, I didn’t even want to.

“Yes, I am,” I whispered.