“He kissed my aunt. I can’t believe he kissed my aunt,” Dillon said. He was trailing along behind Noah with the other ghosts as Noah strode through the forest, at a pace not quite a jog, but fast enough that the ghosts were falling farther and farther behind him.
“It was a lovely kiss, too.” Rose clutched a hand to her heart. “So romantic. And then the way he stood in front of her with the bear.” She gave a shiver of delight. “It was almost as good as when Spider-Man rescued Mary Jane from those bad guys in the rain.”
“But he kissed her! My aunt.”
“I am fairly sure that technically she kissed him. It was quite forward of her.” Despite her words, Nadira didn’t sound disapproving. A small smile played around her lips.
“That bear! It was so cool!” Misam gave a skip and a hop, trying to keep up with the others’ longer strides.
“Kissing my aunt is not cool,” Dillon muttered. He kicked at a pine cone on the ground, his foot passing through it. Grace had had boyfriends before, of course. There’d been that dweeb she’d gone out with for a while in high school and then a revolving cast of professor-types who’d come to visit her on summer vacations. They hadn’t all been horrible but none of them were nearly good enough for her.
And neither was Noah. He glared at Noah’s back.
“Don’t be silly, Dillon.” Rose clasped her hands together. “Just think how convenient it would be. They can fall in love and get married and buy a house and live down the street from Akira and Zane. And we can all stay in Tassamara together. Maybe they’ll come to movie nights at your other aunt’s house. And eat at Maggie’s, of course. It’ll be just like always, only with lots of company.” On her last words, she flung her arms wide and then spun in a circle, bright with happiness.
“He is not gonna marry my aunt,” Dillon said.
“Think what beautiful babies they’d have,” Rose said encouragingly. “His eyes, her hair. Or maybe her eyes, his eyelashes. Can you imagine? On a little baby girl? Oh, she’d be adorable.” She tucked her hand into his arm and leaned into him.
Dillon rolled his eyes, but his expression softened. Grace would make a really great mom. She deserved pretty babies, if she wanted them.
“He heard us,” Joe said abruptly. “Did you notice?”
“What?” Surprised, Dillon turned toward Joe.
“He heard us,” Joe repeated. He let his steps slow, falling farther behind Noah. “Twice. Did you see it?”
Dillon thought back.
“You always think that,” Nadira scoffed.
“He’s right, though,” Sophia said unexpectedly. “Joe’s right. Misam and me, we saw her when we were hunting for squirrels. We were coming back with her. He wasn’t looking toward us until Dillon said she was mad and then he did. I saw him.”
Nadira snorted. “Nonsense. So he looked around, so what? Perhaps he heard Dillon’s aunt approaching.”
“But that’s what happened with the bear, too.” Joe stopped walking. “I don’t know who saw it first. Mona, maybe? She was screaming.”
Mona drew herself up. “It startled me,” she said with dignity, in one of her rare moments of non-cleaning-related speech.
“It’s not right,” muttered the angry man. “It’s not right.”
“Well, maybe you saw it first,” Joe said to him. “It doesn’t matter who did, because it wasn’t Noah. He didn’t see it at all. He was busy kissing your aunt, Dillon.” The balls of light and shades were drifting around them as Noah continued moving away and Joe shifted to avoid one, waving at it irritably. “But when he stopped kissing her, he looked over his shoulder. He must have heard us. Why else would he have looked behind him instead of at her?”
“Perhaps he heard the bear,” Nadira suggested.
“Did you?” Joe asked her. All of the ghosts had stopped walking and were gathering around him, including Chaupi and the angry man. The remnants started to collect around them, too.
“I…” She paused, considering. “Not until it growled. It was surprisingly quiet for such a large beast.” She gave a shudder. “That growl, though. It made my blood run cold.”
“Do you have blood, Mama?” Misam asked her. He looked down at himself. “Do I have blood?”
Nadira patted his cheek. “It’s just an expression, dear one.”
“I don’t think I have blood anymore,” he said decidedly. “I would know.”
“Of course you don’t have blood.” Sophia hugged herself. “If you had blood, you could die and we can’t die. We’re stuck.”
Joe ignored the byplay between the younger ghosts, looking troubled. “I don’t think he heard the bear. I think he heard us.”
“Does it matter?” Nadira asked.
“Yes, of course it does,” Joe said with surprising vehemence.
“But you always said he could hear us.”
“I know, but… Can’t you imagine what that would be like for him? If he knows we’re here? To feel like there are invisible eyes on him constantly? That he’s never alone? It’s creepy as hell.” Joe leaned in Noah’s direction, tense lines appearing in his brow and around his mouth, as if he were fighting something unseen.
“Oh, come on,” Dillon said. “We’re not so bad.”
Misam began rubbing his stomach and Nadira shifted uncomfortably.
“We need to keep moving.” Nadira nodded toward Noah’s disappearing back. “This shall soon become uncomfortable.”
“Oh?” Rose glanced at Dillon.
He shrugged. He didn’t feel it, but the pull wasn’t as strong for him as it was for the others.
“We have to talk about this, though,” Joe said. “And not where Noah can hear us.”
“Why not?” Dillon asked.
If Noah could hear them, really hear them, not just vaguely sense them, they needed to talk to him. They could explain who they were, how they’d wound up with him, how he could help them. If Noah could hear them, maybe he could take them to a place where they could find a ghost with a doorway — a hospital, say, or a retirement community. A place where people died because death was inevitable, not because they’d been stupid or unlucky. Rose could point out the doorway, the ghosts could go through… Dillon gave a bounce, almost like one of Misam’s.
Joe started sliding forward, his feet not lifting off the ground. “Walk, but slowly,” he said, beginning to move his feet.
Nadira gave a grunt of discomfort and began moving, too, nudging Misam along in front of her.
“I hate this,” Sophia said bitterly. “Hate it, hate it, hate it.” She stomped off after Noah, her steps silent but her body language eloquent. Mona began hurrying through the brush, passing through bushes and tangled undergrowth in a straight line toward Noah. Chaupi and the angry man followed suit.
“What are you worrying about now?” Nadira asked Joe as the wisps and remnants began drifting after Noah, too.
“If he knows we’re here, if he knows we’re us…” Joe’s lips pressed together. “I don’t know how he’d react.”
Nadira’s lip curled. “Perhaps we should be afraid of what he might do, should he come to believe in our presence.”
“What do you mean?” Joe asked.
She shrugged and didn’t answer, but her glance at the top of Misam’s head was worried.
“Maybe he would think we are jinns. Instead of an exorcist to fix the jinn inside him, the one that traps us, the exorcist would get rid of us.” Misam looked up at his mother’s face. “What do you think would happen, Mama, if an exorcist tried to cast us out?”
“You are too clever by half, my boy.” Nadira paused, just long enough to scoop him up.
He wrapped his legs around her waist and leaned into her, his head peering out over her shoulder. “I do not think I would like to be exorcised,” he said, his expression thoughtful.
“Exorcism doesn’t work,” Dillon said with conviction, but he couldn’t help frowning. Misam’s words hit a little too close to his own experience with another dimension.
“How do you know?” Nadira asked.
“Akira said. Her parents tried it with her when she was little.”
“Perhaps they didn’t find a good exorcist. Perhaps it worked on the spirits around her but not on the jinn inside her. Perhaps…” Nadira tightened her grasp on Misam, but she didn’t finish her thought, adding brusquely. “We must hurry. If Noah starts his truck…”
Dillon grimaced. He remembered what it had been like when Akira had driven his car away without him. The pain had been agonizing. He didn’t know whether it would be the same for him with Noah: it was possible that the distance would simply break a tie that had never seemed too powerful. The ghosts with stronger ties to Noah would suffer, though.
“Do you want me to take Misam?” Joe asked her. “You want a piggyback, kiddo?”
“It’s all right. I have him.” Nadira broke into a trot, jiggling Misam and singing him a song in lilting Arabic.
“Noah wouldn’t exorcise us,” Dillon said as he and Joe and Rose fell behind the others. “Would he?”
“No, of course not,” Joe replied. “At least I don’t think he would.”
“What do you think he’d do?” Rose asked.
“I don’t know. But he’d try to help us, I’m sure of that,” Joe said.
“We’re not so easy to help,” Dillon stuffed his hands in his pockets, hunching his shoulders.
In their first conversation after he’d learned that Dillon was a ghost, his dad had asked, his voice rough with emotion, “How can I help you? What do you need?”
Dillon hadn’t had an answer for him. He didn’t know what he needed, why he was still hanging around.
Akira, though, had been brisk, telling his father about her past experiences, all her failed attempts to find the mysterious white light of lore. She’d finished with, “Ghosts simply are. They’re not a problem that needs fixing. They’re people, usually ones who died untimely deaths, still working out their time here. That’s all.”
But Dillon had known from the expression on his dad’s face that he found her answer profoundly unsatisfying. He felt that way about it himself. Yeah, maybe he’d died too young, but why did that leave him trapped?
“Noah wouldn’t do anything that would hurt us,” Joe said, but his voice was grim. Dillon wondered if he was trying to convince himself, but Joe continued, “But if he can hear us…” He shook his head and then took an angry, wild swing at a tree trunk ahead of him, his fist sliding right through it and then his body following suit. He wasn’t making any attempt to go around the plants, just shoving through them as if they didn’t exist.
“If he can hear us?” Rose prompted.
“It explains so much,” Joe burst out. He glanced at Dillon. “I know I said he could hear us, but that was mostly just to annoy Nadira.”
Rose’s eyes went wide. “To annoy her? On purpose?”
Dillon had spent enough time with the other ghosts that he wasn’t surprised. “She probably claimed he couldn’t hear you just to annoy you,” he said dryly.
“You know how it is.” Joe’s dimples flashed. “Being dead is boring. Arguing with Nadira makes life — uh, afterlife — a lot more interesting.”
Dillon rolled his eyes, but Rose laughed.
But Joe’s face sobered. “But if he can hear us, then—” He waved an arm wide to indicate the wisps scattered ahead of them in the forest. “No wonder his life sucks. He should be in school, getting a degree. But how would he study if we’re always talking around him? He should have a girlfriend. But if he can hear the kid asking questions every time things start heating up, of course his hook-ups are never going to turn into anything real. He should have a life, damn it. He’s still alive. But he doesn’t and it’s because of us. It’s because he knows we’re here, even if he’s never admitted it.”
Dillon skirted a tree as Joe marched through it. Maybe Joe was right. But if so, they needed to talk to Noah. They needed to explain. “We should tell him we’re here. Who we are.”
“No.” The easygoing joker in Joe had disappeared, leaving a hard-eyed soldier adamant in his place. “Not you, but Nadira, Misam, and me? He’d blame himself. We need to be quiet around him. Dead quiet. And somehow we’ve got to get the rest of these ghosts away from him. We need to find one of those doors you talked about and soon.”
Dillon exchanged glances with Rose. She frowned and opened her mouth, as if to say something, but at that moment, Noah must have started his truck. Joe gave a startled yell and disappeared in a whoosh of wind as the gentle pull that Dillon had previously felt tugging at his core turned into a yank that had him tumbling into the air.
The last thing he saw as he was drawn away was Rose cupping both hands around her mouth and calling out, “I’ll catch up with you!”