“I think he is possessed by a jinn,” Misam insisted.
“Maybe he’s a necromancer. Or a warlock. He’s stealing our souls so he can use them to power his evil magic.” Sophia shot a sulky glare in Noah’s direction.
Dillon had to bite the inside of his cheeks to keep from laughing.
“Noah is not possessed. And he doesn’t have evil magic.” Joe folded his arms across his chest, his hands curling into fists. He didn’t sit but stood, wide-legged, at the end of the table. At his insistence, the ghosts were gathering at a booth at the far end of the bistro from Noah and Grace, far enough away from Noah that he wouldn’t hear them.
Dillon thought Joe’s efforts were pointless. The faders were congregating at the booth, too, but slowly. Many of them were still drifting around. Noah might not be listening to their conversation, but if he could hear ghosts, he’d be hearing other ghostly voices, too: the woman calling for Carly, the guy worried about driving too fast, the kid with the peanut allergy, all the random phrases the wisps whispered and cried and sang.
“There’s no such thing as jinn. Or magic,” Joe continued, voice firm.
“I bet you didn’t use to believe in ghosts, either,” Sophia said bitterly. “Back when you were alive.”
Joe opened his mouth as if to retort, then closed it again.
“It doesn’t matter why Noah’s caught us,” Dillon said, sliding into the booth next to Sophia as Misam clambered up and over his mom, perching on the back of the bench, his feet on the seat. “We need to decide what to do. If Noah leaves Tassamara tomorrow and Rose hasn’t found us yet, she won’t be able to show us a door and we’ll never escape.”
“How come he didn’t capture her, too?” Sophia demanded. “Why didn’t she get pulled along with the rest of us?”
Dillon lifted a shoulder. “I told you she was special. She went through a doorway and came back. It made her… different.” Rose wouldn’t like it if he told the others what Akira thought about what had happened to her, but even she couldn’t deny that coming back had given her unexpected abilities.
“A doorway like the one you want us to go through,” Nadira said with a frown. “I am still not sure about this plan.”
“Let’s worry about that later, when we find one,” Dillon said. He’d been trying to reassure Nadira for weeks, ever since he first met the other ghosts. Eventually they’d have to convince her, he knew, but he’d cross that bridge when he came to it. “Right now we have to decide what to do about Noah. If he can hear us, shouldn’t we tell him who we are? What we are?”
“No,” Joe and Nadira said in unison.
“We cannot know how he will react,” Nadira said.
“Badly,” said Joe. “That’s how he’ll react. Badly. We don’t tell him.”
“I think we should kill him,” Sophia said unexpectedly.
“Sophia!” Nadira protested, eyes widening with shock.
“Oh dear, oh dear.” Mona raised a hand, sketching the sign of the cross on her chest hurriedly.
“You heard him,” Sophia defended herself. “He wouldn’t care. He thinks it’d be easier to be dead.” She snorted. “Boy, I bet he’d be surprised.”
“We are not killing Noah.” Joe’s tone was even, but Dillon could hear the annoyance under his words.
“We could, I bet.” Sophia pursed her lips thoughtfully. “Maybe we could electrocute him. Like in the shower or something. Do that energy surge thing to the water. Maybe he’d fry.”
“Sophia!” Nadira snapped. She reached up to put her hands over Misam’s ears. “Don’t talk like that.”
“Stop, Mama.” Misam pushed her hands away. Earnestly, he said, “I do not think we should kill Noah, Sophia. We might get sent to hell.”
“We’re in hell,” Sophia muttered, but she slumped down against the bench and fell silent.
One of the wisps floated across the table. Dillon could hear it complaining. “You promised. You promised we’d go.”
“You know, even if Noah was possessed by a jinn, that’s probably not the problem,” Dillon said.
“Why do you think not?” Nadira sounded surprised.
“The jinn would have had to take him over in Iraq, right? We don’t have jinn here.” Dillon didn’t think he believed in jinn. But Nadira and Misam did and he didn’t think Joe should rule out the possibility with such vehemence. Necromancers, on the other hand… well, he was pretty sure Sophia hadn’t been serious. He nodded toward the wisp. “You said this didn’t start until you came back to the States.”
“That’s right,” Joe said. He relaxed his hostile stance. “He had us, but this stuff—” He waved his hand around at the shades and floating balls of light. “—this stuff didn’t start happening until we came home.”
“We’d met other ghosts, but Mona was the first to join us,” Nadira added.
The cleaning woman was standing on an empty chair, dusting a hanging light fixture, but she glanced in their direction at the sound of her name.
“What was different about her?” Dillon asked. They’d talked about the other ghosts before, but they’d never gone into detail about how they’d wound up together.
Nadira snorted and Joe laughed.
“That place!” Nadira drew her scarf across her face, then dropped it as she added, “Any decent woman would have wished to leave.”
Joe’s grin was wide as he explained, “The guys from AlecCorp took Noah out when he first started with them. To a strip club. Nadira was madder ‘n a wet hen.”
He added appreciatively, “I’d never heard some of those words before.”
“Pfft.” Nadira’s eyes crinkled in amusement. “It was disgusting.”
“I liked it,” Misam said with a cheeky smile. “I liked the ladies’ sparkly clothes.”
“It wasn’t a dive, but it was no Vegas joint,” Joe said. “We think Mona might have been there since before it became a club.”
“Oh, dear. Oh, dear.” Mona stepped off the chair. “That floor. It will never come clean. My husband will be here soon. It has to be spotless. I have to try harder.” She dropped onto her knees, a bristle brush in her hand instead of the feather duster she’d been holding, and began scrubbing. “Carbolic soap, that’s what I need.”
“Poor Mona was trying to clean the floors.” Nadira shook her head.
“Mama made all the lights pop,” Misam said. “Pop, pop, pop. All of them! It was very dark.”
Nadira patted Misam’s leg. “I’m sorry, love. I know you didn’t like it.”
“They had to shut down and when we left, Mona came with us,” Joe said. “She was the first.”
“Had she been trapped there?” Dillon asked. Mona’s long skirt and blouse were drab and shapeless. They could have been from any part of the early twentieth century, but he thought her hairstyle, rolled back and off her face, might have been from around the second World War.
“Yes, she’d been there many years,” Nadira said. “Decades spent cleaning a den of iniquity, poor girl.” Nadira leaned across the table and added in a whisper, “She says she doesn’t remember her death but I think her husband might have killed her there. Sometimes the things she says…”
“She’s still worrying about him.” Sophia took in a deep, shuddering breath. “Even dying didn’t let her escape. It’s so sad.”
“Cut it out, Sophia.” Dillon poked her. “Mona’s fine.”
Sophia’s lower lip quivered, but she didn’t say anything more.
“So if she’d been trapped, how did she leave with you?” Dillon asked the others.
“Nadira helped her. I think Mona wanted to come with us.” Joe looked back at Nadira. “Right?”
She nodded. “I pulled her out of there.” Her voice held a hint of triumphant pleasure. “She didn’t want to be in that sinful place any more than I did, so I took her by the hand and didn’t let go when Noah finally left.”
“Chaupi was next.” Joe gestured toward the older man. Chaupi had gone into the kitchen and was investigating the pots on the stove and peering over Maggie’s shoulder as she flipped a burger on the grill. “We found him in the kitchen of a take-out Chinese place.”
“Why did he come with you?” Dillon asked.
The other ghosts exchanged glances. Joe was the first to shrug. “He just did.”
“Do you remember how upset Mona was, Mama?” Misam kicked his feet against the back of the bench.
“When you took her away from the strip club?” Dillon asked in surprise.
“No, no, she was happy to leave there,” Nadira replied. “It was with Chaupi, at the Chinese place. The kitchen had bugs. Big ugly brown things, scurrying on the walls.”
“Roaches,” Joe interjected. “Way gross. A couple bugs ain’t gonna hurt anybody, but that place had a problem.”
“Interesting,” Dillon said. Had Chaupi hated the place where he was trapped? Maybe the ghosts wanting to leave had something to do with why they’d been attracted to the others.
Of course, that hadn’t worked for Dillon. He’d still been stuck with his car after meeting Rose and Henry. He’d wanted to escape, but until his grandma’s spirit had ripped him free, he’d only managed to extend his reach a few hundred feet.
“I don’t know when the first glow ball showed up,” Joe continued. “I don’t think I even noticed them at first. They’re like the bugs, one or two’s no big deal, but once you start to get a lot of them, they’re a pain.”
“And then the singing lady,” Misam said.
As if prompted, she wandered by the table where they sat. As always, her eyes were unfocused or perhaps focused on something none of them could see, as she crooned her low, melancholy melody. “All through the night.”
“We picked her up at this training Noah went to in Virginia. She was wandering around the grounds,” Joe said.
“Virginia was nice. That place was fun,” Misam said.
Nadira opened her hands. “Fun, I don’t know, but pleasant enough.”
“Pleasant enough.” Sophia snorted. She folded her arms across her chest, wrapping her hands around to her shoulders as if she were hugging herself.
“You weren’t with us yet, Sophia. It was back in autumn, when the leaves were just changing color,” Misam told her.
“Autumn.” Sophia sounded wistful. “I was in school. I hated school. I wish…” She let the words trail off.
“You were still alive in autumn?” Dillon asked. “This past autumn?”
“Yes.” Sophia pulled her knees up, huddling into a ball. “I didn’t know…”
Dillon had suspected that Sophia hadn’t been dead for long. He hadn’t wanted to ask — death felt like a sensitive subject and he didn’t much want to talk about the stupid way he’d died — but from things she’d said before, he thought she might have killed herself. Still, traipsing around with Noah was a lot more interesting than being stuck in one place for years.
He patted her shoulder, feeling awkward. “It could be a lot worse.”
She looked at him, with her too big eyes and her hair that looked like she’d chopped it off herself, and said, “It could be a lot better, too.”
“Were you expecting heaven?” He’d never thought much about his own death, but becoming a ghost had been a pretty unpleasant surprise.
She snorted. “I was expecting nothing.” Her eyes started to well up. “I thought it would be all over. Like being asleep, only not having to ever wake up again.”
“You wanted that?”
“Yes,” she said vehemently, tears disappearing. “Yes, I wanted that.”
On the other side of the restaurant, Rose popped through the door. She glanced around, spotted the other ghosts, and headed in their direction.
“Hey, look,” Dillon said, relieved by the interruption. “Rose is here.”
“That’s what supposed to happen,” Sophia said, ignoring the interruption. “That’s what my mom said when my grandpa died. She said he’d be at peace, no more suffering, and we should be glad for him. I wasn’t glad.”
“Here you are,” Rose said cheerfully as she joined them, squeezing in next to Dillon.
“I’m glad you found us,” Dillon replied. “Noah’s talking about dragging us back to DC. Or somewhere else. Turns out he’s got a brother in New York City. We could wind up there.”
“New York City?” Rose’s eyes widened. “I wonder if there’d be snow. I’ve never seen it in real life.”
“This is not life,” Sophia said bitterly. “You wouldn’t be able to touch it. You wouldn’t be able to feel it. It would just be white stuff on the ground.”
“We saw snow in Baghdad once,” Misam said. “It was very exciting.”
“What did it feel like?” Rose asked.
“We were already dead.” Misam scrunched up his nose. “I did not feel it. But it was very beautiful.”
“It hurts,” Sophia said. She was staring into space again. “Snow hurts. It burns like fire against your skin.”
“That doesn’t sound very pleasant,” Rose said doubtfully. “It looks so pretty in the pictures.”
“It snowed the day I died. For a little while, anyway. And then it turned into rain. It was the day after Thanksgiving. My mom wanted to know what I wanted for Christmas. I told her I wanted to die. She got so angry at me.” Sophia laughed, a harsh, scraping sound. “She grounded me. Grounded! Can you believe it?”
Dillon blinked. Something was going wrong with his vision. It was turning fuzzy. Blurry, almost. He blinked again, looking around the restaurant. The walls and surfaces looked oddly reflective, as if the light was changing, as if his sight was shifting.
“I snuck out,” Sophia continued. “It wasn’t like they’d notice. I walked to the park. It was such a long walk. I don’t think I ever walked that far before. My feet hurt but I didn’t care because I’d stolen all my grandpa’s leftover pills. It didn’t matter to him. They didn’t do him any good. He died anyway. That’s when it started to rain.”
“Rose,” Dillon said, his voice hushed. “Do you see that? Is that what it looked like to you when I… before, I mean? When Chesney was here?” He’d been so angry. Furious, frustrated, devastated by the collapse of all his plans, and it had all happened so quickly.
“Oh, dear.” Rose put her fingers over her mouth.
Nadira was staring at the light fixture above their table. “What is it?” she asked, curling a hand around Misam’s leg.
“What’s happening?” Misam reached out and touched the wall next to him, stroking it as if he expected to feel texture under his fingertips. “Why does everything look so soft?”
“Rain!” Sophia burst out. Her voice began rising and she scrambled to her feet, standing up on the bench next to Rose. She kicked out, her foot flying through the table’s surface. “It was rain, like the universe was crying with me. But the universe doesn’t care. It’s all just a horrible joke.”
One of the floating balls of light drifted toward their table. A transparent wisp followed. And then another.
“Akira’s trying to find a way to measure spirit energy,” Rose said. It sounded like a non sequitur but her eyes met Dillon’s.
He knew she was thinking the same thing as him. “I don’t think we need a ruler to decide that maybe this is too much.”
Too much spirit energy created a vortex, a portal to another dimension that dragged in passing spirits. He’d been to that other dimension once. He never wanted to go back.
But he knew how to get out.
The others would be trapped.
“What do you mean?” Joe asked. He was staring around the room, too. “Why does everything look so weird?”
“I’ve seen this before,” Nadira said. “At that place where we found Mona. Before all the lights went out. Remember?”
Joe chuckled uneasily. “I was watching the dancers. I didn’t notice.”
“I came and sat in your lap,” Misam said. His actions followed his words as he slid off his perch on the back of the bench and onto his mother’s lap. Her eyes were wide, but her arms closed around him. “After the lights went out. What is it, Mama?”
“Oh, dear,” Rose muttered. “Dillon?”
“Sophia. You need to stop what you’re doing.” Dillon kept his voice calm, but his stomach churned with fear.
“Doing? I’m not doing anything.” She threw out her arms. She’d stopped crying. She looked too angry to cry. “I can’t do anything, because I’m dead. Dead and gone and nothing. I’m nothing.”
“When you get upset, you pull in energy from the air,” Dillon said. “It’s why it gets cold around us. But too much energy is dangerous.”
“Dangerous? How can anything be dangerous? We’re dead! Dead, dead, dead! And it’s horrible. It’s worse than being alive.” Sophia swung out with her arm. It passed harmlessly through the hanging lamp and into the wall. “Nothing can hurt us. We don’t exist!”
The light bulb crackled and popped, broken glass scattering across the table.
The living people noticed. Behind the counter, the waitress, Emma, put a hand on her hip. “Oh, no. Not this again.”
Dillon swallowed, looking at Rose. Was his fear making their danger greater? The last time he’d crossed to the energy plane, his anger and frustration had combined with the fury of the recently dead — and, technically, murdered — Raymond Chesney. If they all stayed very calm, could they stop Sophia from breaking the boundary between the dimensions?
“You should run, Dillon.” Rose gestured to Nadira and Misam, hand sweeping through the air as if to brush them along. “You, too. Go. Get as far away as you can.”
“What is happening?” Nadira asked. “Dangerous how?”
“We can’t get far enough away. We’re tied to Noah,” Dillon said to Rose. He could feel the energy in the air now, tingling against his skin. The room was turning foggy. In moments, he knew, it would disappear entirely, leaving them in an endless sea of darkness and churning power.
The other spirits would be there with him, but they didn’t know how to project energy. Only Misam had managed to change the channels. With no way out, they’d be lost, trapped until the sizzling currents of power ripped them apart and they dissolved into nothingness.
“Run,” Rose repeated. “I’ll try to absorb some of her energy.”
“Can you do that?”
“Akira does.”
“And it killed her!”
Rose gave a breathless chuckle. “Well, it’s decades too late to kill me. You go. Let me hold Sophia here while you get Noah to leave. Quickly now.”
“He can’t hear us.” Nadira was wide-eyed and uncertain, but her voice reflected the tension in the air and her arms had closed around Misam.
“I’ll text Grace and ask her to tell Noah to run.” Dillon scrambled out of the booth.
Sophia’s fists were clenched, her face screwed up in a grimace, fury locking her tears away. The wisps and floating balls of light were congregating around her, but she ignored them, her eyes distant, unseeing. “Nothing matters. Nothing. We’re not real. We don’t exist.”
“Come on.” Joe reached toward Nadira, not touching her but gesturing as if he wanted to put his arm around her shoulders and hurry her away.
“Hurry.” Dillon moved toward Noah. He could feel the pull getting stronger, tugging him back toward Sophia, but he resisted it, fighting his way toward the door.
Maybe vortexes were just nature at work. Like lightning in a thunderstorm. A build-up of energy and then zap, a crackling bolt of electricity, discharging power safely into the ground. Of course, safe was relative. Lightning could be deadly to those who got in its way.
Misam, Nadira and Joe were following Dillon, but some of the others were floating toward Sophia.
“Mona, Chaupi,” Dillon called urgently. “Come this way.” He tried to grab the angry man, but the other ghost wasn’t solid enough. Dillon’s hand passed right through him.
“It’s not right,” the man muttered, but his eyes were wide, his face touched with panic as he slid inexorably toward Sophia and Rose. The singing lady was almost to the booth, drifting through the chairs between her and it.
A wisp faded with a crackle and sizzle like water hitting a hot grill.
“Keep moving. Faster!” Dillon concentrated, trying to text Grace.
Rose stepped up onto the bench next to Sophia and put her hands on the younger girl’s shoulders. “You’re real, Sophia. Real as anything.”
“I can’t feel anything. Nothing hurts.”
With a gasp and one last uncertain note, the singing lady disappeared.
“That’s not true,” Rose said calmly. “Everything hurts. I know. It gets better.” She put her arms around Sophia and pulled her into a tight hug. Rose’s face contorted into a grimace and she shivered.
“I don’t understand.” Nadira clutched Misam to her, but he was peering over her shoulder, trying to see what was happening. “Explain, please. What is this?”
“Sophia’s turning into a vortex ghost and opening a portal to another plane of existence.” Dillon wanted to shove his way past Noah and out the door, but the pull was too strong. He leaned into it, like fighting against a fierce wind, but he could feel his feet slipping against the floor, drawing him back.
“She’s doing what?” Joe gave a disbelieving chuckle.
“She’s going to Hell and taking us with her. So run!”