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“Will you stay with me for a few minutes?” I asked, pushing a chair toward her, even though she had no corporeal form. Still, the presence of her spirit was more than I could’ve hoped for at this point.
I wasn’t sure if ghosts slept, but mine didn’t. Jaysa had been sitting in the chair in my bedroom for hours. Seeing her pensive like this wasn’t helping me sleep. She kept staring at me and yet didn’t speak.
I sat up in bed. “Whatever it is, just say it.” It couldn’t be worse than wondering why she kept staring at me like this.
She took a few minutes, looking down at her hands, before she finally began talking.
“Widow Herbert and I had a chat today, and she thinks you should be told of some things.”
The fact that my dead spirit friend had obviously lectured my other ghost companion didn’t bode well at all. I wanted to groan but was afraid it would stop her from talking. Clearly this was something I needed to know.
“Normally power transfers happen right before the moment of death,” Jaysa said, sounding younger and more unsure of herself than ever. “I knew how to do that, how it was supposed to work, but I went about things in an unconventional way. Plus, I failed to consider that you weren’t a shifter. The transfer wasn’t as fast as it should’ve been. It should’ve happened in a couple of seconds, quick and easy, like handing off a calling card. But that’s not how this happened. I initiated the transfer, but as I was preparing to pass on, nothing about it felt smooth and easy. It felt like an industrial shop vac sucking me dry, and it wouldn’t let go, even as I was moving on.” She looked up at me for a split second, and then at the floor, as if dreading to maintain eye contact.
“What exactly does that mean?”That I was whispering was a testament to the amount of dread building at the possibility of anyone else hearing this. As what she said settled in, I wanted to scream until the guys were at my stoop, wondering what was wrong.
“I don’t know. I think you might’ve pulled in some other—matter.” She was fidgeting. Not only was my ghost an insomniac, but now she couldn’t sit still in the chair she wasn’t really sitting on.
“What the…”Stay calm.If I lost it, she was going to bolt, and it wasn’t like I could follow her.
Calm, calm, calm.
Yeah, I could repeat that a hundred times in my head and it wouldn’t matter. The only thing that was keeping me from lunging across the room and choking her was that she didn’t really have a body. I couldn’t kill her because she was already dead, so I might as well get some answers.
“Jaysa, what exactly are you trying to say to me? Whatever it is, it’s okay.” I spoke to her like she was Charlie, hoping she’d buy the act that I didn’t want to murder her.
She shrugged. “This is a little embarrassing, so I guess I hesitated to tell you, but I wasn’t always the best person. There might’ve been a moment of touch-and-go there before I crossed over where things could’ve swung either way.”
Did she think that hadn’t been obvious? That we’d all thought she was some paragon of shifter society and would be sent right to whatever heaven might exist?
“Well, that’s all done with now, isn’t it? What is the issue?”
“The whole shop vac thing—I was sort of in a gray area when it was happening.”
Every time I thought I was being too harsh in my opinions of her, she proved me wrong.
“So this gray area, when I was sucking in energy like a—a shop vac? Was it light gray, medium gray? Or are we talking closer to really damned dark gray?”
“I don’t know if I’d sayreallydark. But perhaps darker than medium dark?”
Was she saying…? No. I had to be mistaking this somehow. Had to be.
“Did you crank me full of hell magic? Tell me you didn’t. Please, say I’m misunderstanding.” I got out of bed, closing in on her, determined to hold her deathly ghost form here until I got answers.
“I don’t know.” She flung her hands up. “You’re the one that sucked it all up, too. I told you, it’s not my fault it didn’t work out. I was trying to do somethinggood, for the record.” She started pacing the small room.
“Oh, yeah, unleashing the powers of hell through me was a fantastic plan. How good of you.”
“I told you, it wasn’t aplan. If your stupid body could’ve taken on my magic like a normal shifter, then this wouldn’t have happened. It’s your fault too.”
“No, it’s not. I didn’t do this to me,” I said, my voice rising. “How did you even manage to keep yourself out of hell, anyway? What bowling ball did you find in the last second to tip the scales?”
“I’d rather not say. It’s personal.”
“I rather you did, since you’re the one that got me in this mess.”
“Well, trust me, I’m paying you back.”
“What does that mean?”
