Page 67 of The Turning of the Tables

No.

Just terror.

Is Noah there?

He’s at work right now.

But he said he’d stay if I started feeling sick.

Good.

Do you want me to call?

You don’t have to.

Do you want me to?

Yes.

My phone started to buzz,and I had to swallow back a surprising ball of emotion at the fact that Elliot Crane was calling me. That he’d asked if I wanted him to call me, and then he had, simply because I asked him to. It wasn’t in keeping with Rule Two, and even though most of that was on me, he had been the one to ask first. So maybe I wasn’t the only one invested in whatever kind of friendship this was.

I slid the green button across the screen. “Hey.” I was pleased that my voice neither shook nor broke when I said it.

“Do you want to talk about it?” he asked, and his rough voice was soft and gentle, and I was very glad that he couldn’t see me because I had to scrub away a tear that escaped my suddenly-full eyes.

“No,” I answered, and this time my voice did quaver. “But I don’t think I can help it.”

I wasn’t supposed to go into the details—to tell anyone the sort of information that was highly specific to the crime scene and that only the people who had been at the scene would know. The things that you didn’t tell the media because the only person other than those of us who worked the scene who knew them was the killer.

All of them poured out of me. The three older cases. The fact that I’d connected them through viral DNA. And then this case. I didn’t know the victim’s name—I didn’t even know if anyone knew. I didn’t know if the DNA of the strain we’d all been exposed to was the same as the others, although I would have bet a significant amount of money that it was.

And then I told him about this scene. About the explosion and the blood I’d inadvertently sucked into my lungs. My two broken ribs, four cracked ribs, and bruised torso. The contusion to my shoulder. The concussion.

Everything. Things I hadn’t even told Noah. I felt guilty about that—the fact that I was sharing things with Elliot that I hadn’t shared with my brother. Noah was my twin. We weren’t supposed to have secrets. But Noah wasn’t a cop, and he wasn’t good at keeping things to himself. He’d tell Lulu, and Lulu wasterribleat secrets.

Elliot wasn’t going to tell anyone, at least not inRichmond. Well, okay, he might tell Hart, but Hart was a Fed, and I trusted Hart to not do or say anything that would be a problem. Hart might even know some of the details, since I knew he and Maza were pretty close. Hell, he might know more than I did, if Maza hadn’t been knocked unconscious like I had.

That, and if Noah knew too many details, he’d worry. I didn’t think Elliot was the worrying type. Besides, Rule Two meant Elliot wouldn’t worry anyway.

Except that he asked if you wanted him to call you.So maybe he did worry a little. Yet that made me feel better, not worse, the way it did when Noah worried. I wasn’t sure what that meant, or what I wanted it to mean.

When I finished, Elliot was quiet. For a long time, yet somehow I didn’t worry that he’d put me on mute and was ignoring me or that he wasn’t paying attention. So I waited.

“What scares you the most?” he asked me, his voice still soft, despite its roughness.

I swallowed. Talk about getting right to the core of it. “I don’t want to die,” I whispered. “I know too much about dying.” The minute it came out of my mouth, I winced. Not what you say to someone whose father had just been murdered.

“Do you believe in an afterlife?” he asked me, then.

“I—work with Ward Campion,” I replied. “I have to.”

“Ghosts can exist without there being an actual afterlife,” Elliot replied.

“How do you figure?” I asked him.

“We don’t know where ghosts go, once they move on,” he pointed out.

“Except that Ward can drag them back from there, whereverthereis,” I said.