Chapter Thirty-Nine
“Message - a usually short communication transmitted by words, signals, or other means from one person, station, or group to another.”
Charming
I wished the Reaper’s last words didn’t bother me. But they did.
I wasn’t used to worrying about someone. I wasn’t used to caring. But I did.
All I could think about was Frankie. What if he wasn’t just making idle threats? What if he really did go after her? What if he touched her? My God, would she feel the pain that I felt when my body was killed while I was in it? Would that searing pain seize her veins and bloom outward until it stopped the beating of her heart?
The questions were relentless. The worry was indescribable. And what made it worse was that I had no body to expel the extra energy. I couldn’t do pushups or punch a wall; I literally just had to hang there and do nothing but hope she was safe.
I wasn’t good at doing nothing. I needed a plan, a way out of here. If I had to kill that Target without a body, then I was going to figure out a way to do it.
I hadn’t lost yet. I was still in the game.
A game that now involved Frankie.
I wanted her safe more than I wanted anything, including not being Recalled. A memory flashed over me from the day Dex lost it in G.R.’s office and threw a couple well-placed punches to my face. I’d taunted him about Piper, about trying to save her, about being weak and caring about someone else over himself.
Is this how he felt that day? Desperate and willing to do anything to save the woman he loved? I couldn’t understand it then, but now… now I understood all too well. I was wrong to think of him as weak because it seemed to me that putting someone else above myself was the strongest thing I could do.
Well played, Dex. Well played.
“Dude, I saw your body. Did that hurt?” said a voice from behind me.
I turned, red scattering everywhere, and faced at a cloud that looked just like me, only this one was black. “Storm! How the hell did you get in here?”
“Dude, you don’t have a body. You can go right through the wall. You’ve seen me do it more than once. Why are you still here?”
“Are you serious?” Sure, I’d seen Storm go through walls and borrow bodies, but I thought those were abilities unique to him. It never occurred to me that I might be able to do those things too.
He snickered low and I watched as he pushed half his form through the wall and then pulled it back in.
“Why didn’t I think of that?” I muttered, feeling like a complete idiot for the little bit of panic I felt when he locked me in here and threw away the key.
“Because up until now you’ve spent maybe an hour out of your body in your entire life,” Storm suggested. “And because G.R. doesn’t want you to know that stuff. He wants you to think you’re stuck here.”
But Storm spent most of his life as a ghost and unbeknownst to G.R., he used a lot of that time to learn to do things he wasn’t supposed to be able to do.
“So I can just walk, or whatever it is souls do, right out of here?” Excited, I looked at the wall and moved toward it, thinking I would go right through like the ghosts I’d seen on TV.
I went sideways instead of forward, but I was heading toward a wall so I went with it. Only I didn’t go through. Once my form touched the wall, it puffed out like I was a chalkboard eraser being banged against the side of a building. “Uh, I’m thinking not all souls can go through walls.”
“Operating as a ghost isn’t as easy as I make it look,” Storm replied smugly.
“What?”
“You’re going to have some control issues. Operating a soul isn’t like operating a body. Your body has weight. It obeys the laws of gravity. A soul doesn’t.”
“Shit,” I muttered. Then I thought of something. “How is it you aren’t completely ghost anymore, yet you’re still able to get through a wall?”
“It ain’t easy. Sometimes I get stuck.That’sa real pain. Half in and half out of a wall? I wouldn’t recommend it.”
“Then why do you keep doing it?”
“Because it’s convenient. Because if I didn’t, you would still think you were trapped here. And because it’s cool.”
