AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He reached for the door, unsure he’d even be able to open it when the feeling of panic stopped. Just cut off as if it was never there. Except now, there was an empty void in its place. It was so much worse to feel nothing at all.
Panic all his own grew, and he wrenched the door open. He tiptoed into the nearly empty warehouse, the lights were off but the moonlight cut through the dusty windows enough to illuminate the floor. There, toward the back exit, was a man not much larger than Mel. The man was bent over a still form in a dark dress. A very familiar clutch resting just to the side of an open but motionless hand. The door closed behind Mel and the man’s face turned to the noise.
Curtis Dubree stared right through him.
Mel could remember no time in his existence, before or after death, when he felt such intense fear and anger all at once. His teeth ground together. He felt a pull of intense energy around him, every single light in the warehouse began to glow. Curtis watched as the lights grew brighter and brighter around him. With every step Mel took toward Curtis, the lights above Mel burst. The air grew heavy, but Mel didn’t notice the change until Curtis looked at him.
“Who are—?”
Curtis actually saw him.
He didn’t remember reaching Curtis. Nevertheless, Curtis’s shirt was gripped between Mel’s hands, lifting Curtis until his toes barely grazed the floor.
“You dare touch her?” Mel growled, his voice amplified by the heavy charge in the air.
“What the fuck are you?!” Curtis tried to pry Mel’s hand from his shirt, his hands battering on the cold form holding him off the ground. The scared man looked down, seeing his captor’s blood-soaked shirt, his eyes growing wide as Curtis watched blood ooze from the wound in his gut. Curtis’s eyes traveled back to Mel’s pale face, now focused only on him.
Mel pulled Curtis closer to his face. “What did you do?”
“What h-he told me to,” Curtis answered in a whimper trying to claw at Mel’s hands to let him go. Mel’s grip was like a statue, hard and unrelenting.
“What did you do?!” Mel yelled, his voice straining. The last of the lights blew overhead, showering them both in sparks.
The warehouse was deathly quiet, enough that Mel could hear a soft shift of movement behind him. He turned to the sound, thinking another attacker was with them, but found something that made him feel like he died all over again.
Anastacia stood next to her prone figure on the ground. She looked down at herself and then up at him.
“Mel?”
Thethickenergyinthe warehouse stilled and everything stopped. Anastacia stood in her beautiful dress, her hair messy around her face with a dull pain blooming around her neck. Her mind froze in confusion and shock, unable to put all the pieces of the moment together. She blinked once, twice. A blank slate until she focused on Mel.
Mel opened his hands, dropping Curtis to the ground. The man crawled back until he hit a wall, pressing up against it. Anastacia could hear Curtis stumbling in the dark toward the exit, but she didn’t care. All of Mel’s attention was on her.
Anastacia lifted her hands out in front of her, seeing the transparency of the form instead of the solid skin she had seen all of her life. She wrenched her gaze from her hands to the area around her, finding her physical body lying on the dirty floor of the warehouse. Her eyes were closed as if sleeping. She took a deep breath as if she could breathe it back into her body. When it didn’t work, she turned back to Mel, her breath now shuddering as she released it.
“Am I dead?”
The question was simple. Cut and dry. She’d seen enough dead people by now to know, hadn’t she?
“No. No, you’re not,” Mel answered too quickly. In an effort to convince himself, no doubt.
Her heart sank further with every second. “I—I’m…”
“You can’t be dead.” Mel’s voice held no room for argument, so stern she had no other choice but to listen. “I promised you I wouldn’t let anything happen to you. I said I would protect you. And on the one night I wasn’t there— Knight was there. Wassupposedto be there. Where the fuck was your White Knight when you needed him?”
His eyes darted over to her body and focused, searching for something.
“Mel, he strangled me. I blacked out. Why did he…?” she asked, her hands still up and in front of her.
“Hey, hey, hey.” He rushed forward without thinking, grabbing her wrists to pull her to him. They both stopped and gawked at where his hands connected with her wrists. He could touch her, feel her. And she could feel him. Her hands turned and gripped his arms to stabilize herself.
“Why did he kill me?”
“Look at me,” Mel demanded as her head drooped further, her eyes afraid to meet his. He pulled her arms and pushed the backs of her hands flat against his chest, holding them there with one hand. With his other hand, he gently tilted her face to bring her eyes back to him. “You’re not dying tonight. Don’t you dare lose hope now. You aren’t like me. Look.”
Even though Mel was a spirit, he was completely solid to her. As real as any living human, just like all the other spirits she saw. Her hands were transparent. She was standing precariously with one foot in life and another dancing closer to death. Seeing their hands together, her breathing calmed as she hummed in thought. Turning her hands under his, their fingers laced together. Her right hand ran over his chest up to his shoulder. Her fingers brushed the hair at the nape of his neck, running over the divot where the fatal shot entered the base of his skull. Her fingertips moved on their own, jumping over the bullet wound each time they passed by again. She felt him and nothing felt as real as he did.
He watched her closely as she took her time.
