Page 28

Ben sighed, drifting closer to Willa’s sleeping form. She looked like an angel with her hair spread across her pillow, even with the injuries marring her face and the sterile, uninviting setting of the hospital room.

In fact, those things failed to register to him, as if they’d been muted somehow.

To say he was still adjusting to his new existence would be a massive understatement. The physical world wasn’t so far removed from his thoughts that he couldn’t recall the juicy, sweet release of a perfectly fresh, crisp piece of fruit, or the way the wind sounded passing through his neighbor’s symphony of windchimes.

Or the soft, addicting taste of Willa’s lips pressed to his as she responded with eager curiosity.

God, he’d nearly died not knowing that feeling, and he loved her all the more for insisting that day he visited her—his last full day alive.

And yeah, he could say he loved her.

When he was… living, he might have had reservations about saying the words. His home life wasn’t one built on rainbows and sunshine, so he’d withheld his feelings from her, and now it was too little, too late.

He couldn’t even get her to hear him—not after that first time.

“Oh, I wondered if you’d be here or checking on your sister,” a voice intoned.

“Gabe,” he greeted, still a little weirded out by the guy, his fellow ghost in arms. He got cagey anytime Ben tried to press him for answers. One thing he knew for sure was that Gabe had been dead a lot longer than he had.

How long that was, Ben didn’t know. Gabe knew. He was keeping some deep secrets, but Ben had yet to discover why or what was so valuable about them.

What could they do? They were dead. What all-important agenda could a ghost have?

The guy tended to pop away anytime Ben tried to corner him for answers, though, and honestly, he was still trying to wrap his mind around everything, so yeah, Gabe could keep his secrets.

Well, most of them.

“Should have checked here first,” Gabe grumbled.

A thread of guilt wrenched Ben’s soul. Yeah, he should check in on his sister more than he had been, but despite living with a somewhat neglectful and verbally abusive father, she wasn’t in mortal danger. Chief Pierce loved his children, even if that love was toxic.

“Hey, I’m not judging. I’m just saying,” Gabe continued, drifting closer. “Your battery still drained?”

“Yeah.” Ben reached out, only to have his hand pass right through Willa’s form. “She hasn’t heard me. I can’t even reach her right now when she’s asleep.”

“Well, you had a lot of new ghost energy that night. That happens when you’re fresh off a violent death. That negative energy sometimes gets channeled into the victim—”

Ben tried not to wince at the idea. He was a murder victim. Something must have shown on his expression, though, because Gabe shrugged.

“Sorry. Sometimes I forget how sensitive you living people can be… or, well, ex-living people. Anyway, you had a lot of power to burn, and you channeled it all into saving her. It’ll take some time to recover.”

“How much time?” Ben asked, frustration welling up.

“It’s hard to say.”

Ben wanted to throw something.

“But if you keep pushing yourself like that, you won’t ever be able to recharge.”

Ben paused, confused and pissed off by Gabe’s glib comment. Could the guy take anything seriously? The momentary lapse in his anger made him realize Willa’s vitals’ monitors had been glitching as nurses rushed into the room, only to be confused by the now level readings.

“Did I do that?” he whispered, watching as they checked and rechecked that the sensors were hooked up correctly.

“Why are you whispering?” Gabe mocked in a hushed voice before he returned to a normal volume. “They can’t hear you, and yeah, that was all you. You’ve got to keep it cool.”

“How can I? My own dad hit my girlfriend so hard, he would have snapped her neck if you hadn’t interfered.”

Gabe dimmed for a second, as if he was about to teleport again but changed his mind. “You saw that, did you?”

“Saw you jump inside and save her while I stood by watching like an idiot as it happened?” Boy, did that fact cut his soul like a windstorm of razor blades. “Yeah. Hard to miss.”

“Hey, don’t be so tough on yourself. If it weren’t for you and your connection to Wil— your girlfriend, she would have died earlier.”

Willa shifted in her sleep, rolling onto her side. It was a welcome change from the lifeless form she’d been while stuck in a coma under heavy sedation. Ben watched her, unable to help himself as he probed at the boundaries of her mind, just a gentle push to see if anything had changed.

It hadn’t.

Wherever she was now, he couldn’t access it. That, or he was too weak to do so. He’d thought it was because of the coma, but now that she’d woken up, it had to be something else.

Too many questions, not nearly enough answers.

“Why do you do that?” Ben asked when he was sure Willa had settled back into a deep slumber.

“Do what?”

“Call her my girlfriend instead of Willa? You didn’t do that at first.” When Gabe didn’t reply, he continued, “It’s like you’re trying to distance yourself from her, but at the same time, you made damn sure you latched onto me when Willa allowed me past her defenses.”

“I thought you could use another pair of hands.”

Sure, there’d been a lot of ways they could have failed that night, from being unable to unlock the doors to not getting the people looking in the right direction at the right time.

Still, Gabe’s statement rang like a hollow excuse. “ Eenh . Try again. You and I didn’t have any problems communicating with each other, and you didn’t need to slip past Willa’s defenses to possess that guard at the front desk.”

Gabe sighed and drifted even closer.

Ben paused, tearing his gaze away from Willa, only to see Gabe staring down at her with almost the same level of intensity.

And that , right there, was the one secret Gabe wasn’t allowed to keep, even if he’d bought himself some leeway when he’d jumped into Willa and used some of his… his energy to absorb the blow from his dad.

The revered chief of police, he thought with disgust.

Ben had seen the flare of light at the moment of impact—otherworldly power as he was coming to recognize it.

Considering that even with the boost, Willa had still landed in a coma needing brain surgery—yeah, he had no doubt his father would have killed her with that second hit.

Even with all that, Ben couldn’t ignore Gabe’s fascination with Willa.

What was his connection to her?

Since Gabe had slipped past Willa’s mental barriers in the split second she lowered her defenses to allow Ben in, he needed answers, and despite present circumstances, he could still feel the tether to her soul. They’d forged a connection, and whenever things returned to normal, he knew he’d be able to revisit whenever he wanted—permission or not.

It was like she’d pinged him the coordinates, and now, he could stroll right on in whenever he wanted.

However, that meant Gabe could too, and Gabe seemed like a man with a mission, but what did Willa have to do with that mission?

Ben pressed. “Why did you need to connect with her?” Gabe’s form shimmered. “Don’t!” Ben added hurriedly. “Don’t disappear. Answer me! What do you want with Willa?”

Gabe solidified, looking nervous. “She’s in danger.”

“Yeah, no shit, but that isn’t why you fought your way in.”

Gabe sighed. “I think my family is in danger too.”

Ben frowned, running through the implications of that. “Your living family?”

That was the only conclusion that made sense.

“Yes.”

That narrowed down the time of death to within a century, Ben supposed. Unless Gabe had stuck around long enough to watch his grandchildren have children, and he spoke too modern for that to be true, then direct relatives still had to be alive.

“Who?”

Gabe shrugged. “It’s not important at this second. I think they are okay for now.”

“But they weren’t before?”

“No, but something’s changed.”

He was growing cagey again, and Ben was finally getting answers, so he switched back to where most of his concerns lay. “You think Willa is in greater danger?”

“I do.”

“Will helping your family put her in harm’s way?”

Gabe tilted his head. “No, I actually think helping my family might help her out too.”

Whatever Gabe was concerned about for his family had to be connected to Willa in some way. “Does she know any of your family? Or you?”

Ben had been watching closely as they talked, and the longer the conversation went on, the closer Gabe had drifted to Willa. The crux of it was, he didn’t think the guy realized it was happening. Ben almost missed it, too, since it happened so gradually.

It was as if he was magnetized to her.

“Hmm. She didn’t know me, but she might have known my cousin, Manny. He’s in your grade.”

“Manny… Manny…” Based on Gabe’s appearance, he could only mean, “Emmanuel Cortez?”

Gabe tilted his head, finally able to remove his gaze from Willa. “Does he go by Emmanuel now? He was always little Manny to me.”

So Gabe was at least a few years older.

Gabe had already returned his attention to Willa. “That was how I noticed her shortly after my passing. I was following Manny around at school one day, and I saw her glancing his way a couple of times. Manny never looked back, but he was still grieving over my death. As time moved on, she looked less and less, until she eventually quit altogether after school let out for the summer and reopened in the fall, but I couldn’t stop being drawn to her, even when Manny wasn’t around. It was like I was…”

“Pulled to her,” Ben offered pointedly.

At that, Gabe blinked, as if yanked from a trance, and startled at how close he’d gotten to Willa. He cleared his throat and backed off. “Sorry, mano, it’s… I’m not sure what it is about her. She feels more… alive than everyone else. There were others who have been drawn to her over the years, but I can usually send them packing, especially the malicious ones.”

That sent a chill over him. “Malicious ones?”

“Yes, black, almost demonic presences—the old ones who have clung desperately to life for so long that they don’t even remember what it is to be human. They just want to latch onto and devour every shred of life they can.”

“And they want Willa?” Ben’s voice grew shrill again, and he had to calm himself.

It was too much. She already faced problems in the land of the living, and now they had to worry about the deceased as well?

“Yeah, probably for the same reason we’re all drawn to her. I think she has some sort of ability to see our plane of existence.”

“Ghosts,” Ben deadpanned. “You’re saying Willa can see ghosts.”

Gabe nodded. “Though I’m not sure how much. The night she let her guard down for you was the most interaction she’s had with one of us.”

“So she didn’t know about this?” It hurt to know she might have kept a secret this big from him when they were alive. It was grossly hypocritical of him to think that, though, because he wasn’t sure he would have believed her had she told him.

“Not before. Her mom had her convinced it was some weird form of diabetes.”

A spark connected. “That day at the off-road park when she had the accident…” She’d mentioned she’d blacked out because she skipped lunch in all the excitement.

Gabe winced. “Ah, yeah, food does seem to help. It’s energy, and that strengthens her ability to shield herself against the dead.”

Ben studied him as Gabe shifted, avoiding eye contact with him, but, more telling—Willa. “You caused that accident, didn’t you?”

Gabe scratched a nervous hand through the back of his hair—the most human gesture Ben had witnessed thus far. “Ah, yeah, I noticed she was glowing brighter, and I thought she might see me if I showed up. It was bad timing on my part. I should have paid attention to what she was doing.” He locked his dark gaze on Ben. “But you don’t know what it’s like to watch things happen and have no one acknowledge you… being helpless to intervene.”

The note in his statement said it’d nearly broken him, so Ben believed him.

“How long?” Ben asked point-blank.

“How long, what?”

“Don’t play with me, man. You know what I’m talking about.”

“It’s been about seven years since I died. May eighth.”

“I’m sorry for your… uh, for your loss?” Ben chuckled nervously. “Does that phrase still work for someone when they are the dead one?”

Gabe stared at him. “What do you think?”

Then Ben remembered that he was also dead. He thought about everything that’d been cut short, all the people left who depended on him and the things he wouldn’t get to do. “Right,” he conceded in a solemn tone.

“Sorry,” Gabe murmured. “I’m not trying to be an asshole here.”

Ben chuckled. “Yes, I know.” After a beat, his eyes slid back to his… Was she even his girlfriend? “So you’ve just been hanging around Willa ever since, trying to communicate with her to help your family?”

“Something like that.”

Ben bit his lip and made a split-second decision. “I’ll tell you what. If you help me save Willa, then I’ll make sure we return the favor with your family, so long as it doesn’t put her in danger.”

Gabe studied him for a moment before he nodded.

They reached for each other at the same time and shook hands, just above Willa’s form on the hospital bed. That felt right, considering she was the nexus tying them together.

“Besides,” Ben added, needing to confirm his suspicions, “I don’t think those two things are as mutually exclusive as you would like me to believe.”

There it was, a telltale flinch.

But oh, Gabe was good. He laughed it off and affected an easy manner, along with a teasing, “You’re crazy, mano. ”

If Ben wasn’t such a people person, he might have written it off. Gabe even stuck around long enough to carry on a conversation—likely so he couldn’t be accused of blipping away to avoid answering tough questions—before he finally took his leave and dipped out.

Ben lowered himself beside Willa, sort of dropping halfway through the floor. It felt weird not to sit, but normal at the same time.

“I’m going to keep you safe, Willa,” he vowed, studying her. “I promise. If it’s the last thing I do.”

In case Gabe had some ability to hide his presence even from Ben, Ben mentally added, Gabe won’t be able to keep his secrets for long.

Just you wait and see, Willa.

We’ll get to the bottom of everything, and you’re going to live a long and happy life—a dull, boring, safe one.

For both of us.

You’ll live for the both of us, Willa Walker.