Page 24

Dakota

I woke up alone. Again.

My husband’s side of the bed was cold and untouched . Again.

Blake wasn’t giving me any reason for him to leave so often. I had been patient after the most recent Kali debacle, but now it was just getting ridiculous, and I’d had enough. I knew everyone said that the first year of marriage was tough, but this wasn’t tough; it was practically non-existent. Lately, I felt like he was only keeping me around for the sake of having a wife more often than not, and that was not okay with me.

I was sitting on the edge of the cot, shoulders slumped and a stress headache pounding through my skull, when the cot suddenly jolted like someone had bumped into it. Except, there was no one there…

I jumped to my feet and scanned the area, searching for an animal that had somehow snuck inside the tent, but, again, there was nothing there. Our reason for following Chance down south for an impromptu camping trip flashed through my mind, and I wondered if I was somehow meeting the ghost they were hunting.

‘Hello?’ I called out, but my voice was quiet, stuck behind my suddenly constricted throat. When I received no answer, not a single sign that I wasn’t alone, chills spread throughout my body as fear tried to take hold. Where was Chance when I needed him?

‘Shit… Hello?’ I tried again, panic starting to set in.

‘Okay,’ I muttered under my breath in a feeble attempt to soothe myself. ‘It’s okay, Dakota. It’s just a spirit. Chance and his team deal with them on a daily basis, and they’re doing just fine. There’s nothing to be afraid of.’

When nothing else moved, not even a chill in the air, I relaxed a little. Perhaps they were merely wandering through and accidentally bumped into the cot. Did ghosts stub their toes, too?

I physically shook those thoughts from my mind, actively ignoring the sensation of eyes watching me from the shadows, and decided now was as good a time as any to get ready for the day. It was already late, sometime in the afternoon, but I had lain awake in bed while I waited for Blake, hoping and praying that he would return. But he never did.

I paused on my way to my suitcase to check my phone for the umpteenth time. Nothing. No missed calls. Not a single text. Radio fucking silence.

Anger bubbled to the surface, pushing away the sadness and loneliness I’d been feeling for a while now. I was used to him disappearing whenever he went on his fishing trips, but even then, he somehow managed to make time for a phone call here and there. I always woke to a good morning text and went to sleep with him wishing me a good night.

Something was wrong. My gut was screaming at me.My first thought was born from my insecurities within past relationships. The thought of him cheating on me made me physically sick, my stomach twisting painfully in protest, but he had given me no indication that he was unhappy with me. As far as I knew, we had our problems just like anyone else, but we were happy. We’d just gotten married.

Then, I wondered if he’d been called into work for an emergency and had simply forgotten to let me know, but that wasn’t like him. He always managed to get a message to me to let me know what was going on, so it just didn’t make any sense that I wouldn’t have heard from him by now. This was the third night in a row that he hadn’t come to bed, but at least the first two times he had shown up in the morning. But there were only so many times he could claim he needed to ‘clear his head.’

My anger dissipated when the fear settled in, the only other possibility one I didn’t want to consider. What if he wasn’t here because something had happened to him? What if he was hurt… or worse?

No. I couldn’t think like that. He would let me know where he was and that he was safe eventually. He wouldn’t leave me in the lurch like this without a good reason. He just wasn’t that kind of man, and it was one of the reasons I’d fallen in love with him in the first place. He was steady. He was sturdy. He was present.

And until recently, I’d believed wholeheartedly that he loved me. I just needed to get the fuck over myself, because he deserved better than that from me.

I also deserved better from him. If he was fine and was just milling about, minding his own business, ignoring his wife, then he had better hold onto his testicles before I ground them into dust.

I bent down to hide the phone and its lack of communication inside my handbag, but when I stood up, I froze. The small, circular makeup mirror I had placed on the fold-up table to the side showed I wasn’t alone. I wasn’t alone at all.

I swivelled around, my hair flying out as adrenaline coursed through me and made my movements far faster than usual, but there was no one behind me. Shaking, I darted a glance back to the mirror and, sure enough, a white-haired woman who looked remarkably similar to the woman I had seen in photos stood by the cot.

‘K-Kali?’ I stammered, a hurricane of emotions roaring inside of me as I stared at her face. She flickered in and out of focus, like my brain was refusing to acknowledge what I was seeing as real and was trying to erase the evidence of her presence. But I couldn’t. She was here.

I watched in morbid horror as she dipped her head, acknowledging my question, but my nerves couldn’t handle any more. I stumbled away from the mirror, threw on whatever clothes I grabbed first, and rushed from the tent.

I needed to find Chance, and I needed to find him now .

Florence stormed past at that moment, almost running into me as she teetered precariously in her ridiculous heels that were by far the most stupid thing I had seen her wear. They were muddied and were in the process of getting increasingly dirtier as they sank further into the ground.

‘Watch where you’re going,’ she snapped at me in her annoyingly high-pitched, nasally voice. She’d complained about a deviated septum too many times to count, but there wasn’t much septum left to deviate, so I knew it was just her voice.

Before she could storm off in a snit, I grabbed her wrist to keep her from leaving. ‘Hey, wait. Do you know where Chance is? Or maybe Ashe or Mikey?’

She sniffed haughtily like the question offended her and tore her wrist from my grasp. ‘He’s at the house on the other side of the trees.’

I took off at a run and yelled a thank you over my shoulder. I was too far away to hear what she grumbled, but she seemed put out by my actions. Nothing new, but also not my concern.

The trek to Rhodes’ house was longer than I thought, and I was glad I’d slipped on my sneakers even if they were flopping around on my feet, the laces tucked in rather than tied. The ground was uneven, so I put my weight on my toes rather than my heels as I ran, trying to avoid the divots in the grass so I wouldn’t roll an ankle. When I reached the gravel driveway, it wasn’t much better. The rocks spread out beneath my feet almost like I was slipping, but I slowed down now that the house was in view. When I reached the door, I was panting. Sweat plastered my clothes to my skin and my hair to my neck, and I wished I’d had the forethought to tie it back, but there wasn’t any time. Without the mirror, I had no idea if Kali had followed me or not, but I needed to let them know that she wasn’t alive.

Fuck… Kali truly was dead. And she was haunting me.

I began to sweat again when no one answered after I’d knocked multiple times, my anxiety ratcheting up to new heights with each second that ticked by without at least another living person present. I tried not to freak out when my last attempt also went unanswered, but it was too late for that. I had seen a ghost. And not just any ghost, but the spirit of my husband’s missing wife.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

But then I heard it. Male voices. Behind the house.

Chance .

‘Chance!’ I shouted, still breathless enough that I wasn’t sure I was loud enough for him to hear.

‘Hey, guys, did you hear that?’ I heard his friend Mikey ask.

‘Hear what?’ Rhodes asked.

‘I thought I heard Dakota for a second there. Sorry.’

‘You did!’ I shouted again, stumbling around the side of the house to see the three men in the process of setting up some devices whose purpose completely eluded me. His name tumbled out of my mouth again on a terrified whimper.

Shocked to see me, and in such a state, he almost dropped the device he was holding, but scrambled to catch it at the last second before handing it off to Mikey. ‘Dakota? Are you all right? What’s wrong?’

My mouth opened, but the words got stuck in my throat. How was I supposed to tell him Kali was dead?

He was in front of me now, hands on my shoulders to steady me as he bent down to keep our eyes connected.

‘Dakota, what’s wrong? What happened?’

I couldn’t hold it in anymore when I saw the genuine concern in his eyes. Chance was such a good man, one of the best, and we had only just pushed past the barrier that had prevented us from forming any sort of relationship. What I was about to tell him could derail that before we ever got the chance to build a familial relationship, but he deserved to know, dammit.

The words came tumbling out before I could stop them, uncensored and panicked. ‘She was in my tent. I saw her… She bumped into the cot, but there was no one there, and then she was in the mirror. Kali was there, Chance, but she was a ghost.’

His reaction wasn’t what I expected at all. In fact, it was such a drastic difference from what I had expected that I stumbled away from him in confusion. He gazed down at me with knowing eyes, soft eyes. Eyes that spoke of a lifetime of hurt and loss, yet there was a peace in them that terrified me more than anything I had seen today.

‘Chance, what…?’

‘I know she’s dead, Dakota. I mean, it wasn’t hard to figure that out. She’s been missing for seven years. But we already figured out that her spirit is lingering.’ He glanced behind him at where Mikey was instructing Rhodes on how to set up a particular device, his demeanour entirely too calm for the situation at hand.

‘I don’t understand,’ I admitted.

‘We believe she was murdered somewhere nearby, and her spirit is stuck in the area. We’re setting up our gear to try to communicate with her.’

‘But if Rhodes can see her, then why do you need your gear?’ I asked, latching onto that rather than the fact that he was unfazed by Kali’s ghostly status.

‘Rhodes has seen her, sure, but this isn’t an exact science. There’s no guarantee he’ll be able to see her again, or when.’

I frowned, deflating. This morning had been a rollercoaster ride of emotional whiplash, and I didn’t think I had the mental capacity to handle much more. ‘Oh.’

‘Did you really see her?’ he asked, something like hope flickering behind his eyes.

‘I think so. I recognised her, and I asked her if she was Kali. She nodded.’

‘What did she look like? Did she seem okay?’

‘I-I,’ I stammered, unsure what answer to give. She was a ghost. How was she okay?

‘Shit, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be bombarding you with questions. Are you okay, Dakota? You look pretty freaked out.’

‘I’m being haunted by my husband’s ex-wife,’ I said in a small voice. ‘I’m not sure how that’s okay.’

‘Kali wouldn’t hurt you. Ghosts can’t physically interact with the living, so she couldn’t even if she wanted to. Which she wouldn’t,’ he hurried to add when my face drained of blood.

But his words weren’t comforting. ‘She moved my bed.’

He blinked at me, slowly processing what I’d said. ‘Sorry. What?’

‘I was sitting on the edge of my cot, and it was like something bumped into it. It moved, Chance. She moved the bed.’

‘But… that’s not possible,’ he argued. ‘Are you sure you didn’t just move it by accident?’

I felt like I was going to be sick, and my head swam nauseatingly, making it worse. ‘I didn’t move it, Chance. I was literally just sitting there. I was still. I didn’t even twitch.’

His eyes were wide, his shock and disbelief evident. I could tell he believed me, but he was also struggling with the new information that directly opposed the knowledge he already had. The knowledge he had worked for years to curate and compile into evidence to prove the existence of the paranormal.

‘Holy shit.’

‘I know,’ I agreed wholeheartedly. ‘I came running to find you as soon as it happened.’

A sharp, high-pitched, mechanical whine pierced through the air and was quickly followed by shouts of alarm and excitement from Mikey and Rhodes.

‘Come quick!’ Rhodes yelled, bouncing up and down like an excitable puppy. ‘We’ve got a hit!’