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Calisto

When I opened my eyes, Baxter was already there, his presence allaying any fears I’d had about needing to search for him again. “In retrospect,” I said as I climbed to my feet, “I wish I’d spent more time here over the years instead of fighting it. I’d know more about this place and what I’m capable of.”

“What do you want to know?”

I turned in a slow circle, the fog even thicker than it had been on my previous visit. “Are there demons here?”

“Yes.”

“And you never thought to mention that?”

Baxter shrugged. “They tend to keep to themselves. You learn how to avoid them.”

“Good to know.”

“What’s the plan?” Baxter asked.

“We find the girl. I shove her soul into O’Reilly’s latest murder victim. And then while mother and daughter are busy with their tearful reunion, Asher and I get Ben the hell out of there, and everyone’s happy.”

“And you really think she’ll just let you walk away?”

Something cold and wet took up residence in my gut. “That’s the deal. Besides, the time to raise objections is long past. I can’t exactly go back and say I’ve changed my mind. That poor girl, whoever she is, will still be dead, and Ben’s life will still be on the line. Not to mention mine and Asher’s. He shouldn’t even be here, but he came because—”

“Because he loves you,” Baxter finished for me with a distinct lack of snark. “And he’d rather die than live without you.”

Something solid and ball-like settled in my throat, and it took a few swallows to dislodge it. “No one is dying! Now, are you going to help me find this girl? Or do I have to do it all on my own?”

“I’ll help,” Baxter said. He turned and set off in a specific direction, waiting for me to catch up before he increased his pace. “Every time I’ve seen her, she’s been in this area.”

“How can you tell?” When Baxter cast me a quizzical look, I explained. “Everything looks the same. Especially with this damn fog. I can barely see my own feet, never mind a meter in front of me.”

“There is no fog.”

I laughed until I realized he was serious. “You can’t see fog?”

“You’ve put the fog there. You’ve created your own idea of what this place should look like. Either that, or it’s another obstacle to stop yourself from discovering what you’re capable of.”

“What do you mean?”

He cast me a sideways look. “You’re special, Calisto. Do you really think it begins and ends with you being able to travel back and forth? You’ve been here three times, and no one has stopped you. You speak to spirits when you bring bodies back to life? Have they communicated with you here?”

“No.”

“What do you think that means?”

“I have no idea, but I assume you’re going to tell me.”

Baxter rolled his eyes. “Well, the obvious assumption is that they have no problem with you being here.”

My head was pounding from all the information. “Why have you never said any of this before?”

Baxter sighed. “Because you didn’t want to hear it. You wanted to live in a permanent state of denial, wrapped up in your own guilt because one thing went wrong. Poor little Calisto.”

“That’s harsh.”

“It’s true. Have you gotten rid of the fog?”

“No, because I don’t know how.”

He came to a stop and turned to face me. “It’s not here. You just need to believe that.”

“Like believing in Tinker bell,” I said.

“Great! Now you think you’re Peter Pan.”

I closed my eyes, trying not to think about there being two versions of me now, both with their eyes closed. What if I splintered off into a third version and ended up somewhere else? “No fog,” I said and did my best to believe it. And when I opened my eyes, it wasn’t there. “It’s gone.”

“Good. Now, how about you find this girl instead of expecting me to do all the work?”

It was strange without the fog, visibility much improved, and the sky—was it sky?—much lighter. The random objects were back, different ones to last time. A vase of flowers. A scooter. A small fridge. “At the risk of sounding like we’re in a pantomime, she’s behind us,” I said, without having any idea how I could know that.

Sure enough, when we both spun round, a girl stood there. She didn’t look how I’d expected Janessa O’Reilly to look, her hair a mousy-brown color rather than auburn. Maybe the choice of body was supposed to be an upgrade. Perhaps Janessa had always wanted a different hair color, and O’Reilly, in her self-appointed role of doing whatever the fuck she wanted, had decided to give it to her along with a second stab at life.

The longer I stared at the girl, the less of O’Reilly I could see in her. Yet, she seemed familiar, the two things not aligning.

“Hi,” she said, her hands clasped in front of her. “I’ve been wanting to speak to you for a long time.”

“So I heard. I guess determination runs in the family, as does the inability to take no for an answer.” The girl frowned, something about it niggling at me. I shoved it away. “Look,” I said, keen to get this over with. “Your mother has moved heaven and earth to get you back.”

“It’s not her,” Baxter said.

I was so intent on my spiel that his words barely registered except as background noise. “So I’m going to send you back before she puts a bullet through either my good friend, who happens to be a police detective, or my boyfriend’s brain. I like both of them far more with their skulls intact.”

The girl blinked. “My mother would never shoot anyone. I doubt anyone could even get her to pick up a gun.”

I snort-laughed. “Yeah, right? Okay, if we’re being pedantic, she wouldn’t shoot anyone herself, but she has plenty of people in her employ willing to do it for her.”

“At the hairdresser’s?”

“What?”

“It’s. Not. Her,” Baxter said again, the words getting through to me this time. Probably because I was already reaching the same conclusion on my own. “We assumed it was, because that’s what we wanted to believe, but we should have known things are rarely that straightforward.”

There was a moment of frozen silence while I grappled with this recent development. “Who are you?”

The girl tried for a smile, but it didn’t quite come off. “Whitney,” she said. “Whitney Caldwell. You work with my brother Griffin.”

The familiarity all made sense then, especially why the frown had struck such a chord, because how many times had I seen Griffin frown over the past few years? Particularly during those dark times where there’d been no Ben in his life, and he’d drank himself into a stupor as often as he could. And standing in front of me was Griffin’s entire reason for ending that relationship the way he had, the guilt of him being with Ben instead of being there for his sister in her time of need too much for him to handle. We might not have known that at the time, but he’d admitted it later once Ben and he had sorted things out amid the chaos of the Satanic Romeo case.

“I need you to pass a message on for me,” she said. “Would you do that? That’s what I’ve been waiting here for. I couldn’t move on until I’d done that. I wanted to talk to you the last time you were here, but I got scared.”

Baxter winced. “I’m sorry. I should have asked who you were, and then I would have been able to make this idiot listen.”

Normally I would have balked at being called an idiot, but it wasn’t the time. “Of course I can pass a message on to Griffin.” At least, I hoped I could. It gave me yet another reason to ensure I survived the day.

Whitney’s smile landed this time, and her shoulders relaxed. “Thank you. I know he’s found it tough since I… Well, since I killed myself. There’s no pretty way of saying it.”

“He has,” I said, “but he’s doing better now.” Or at least he was before Ben’s kidnap .

“Tell him…” She let out a shaky breath. “I’m sorry. This is hard.”

“Calisto!” The urgency in Baxter’s voice reminded me there were other people relying on me today besides Griffin’s sister. Namely Ben and Asher. Time might go slower here, but it didn’t stop altogether.

I turned my head to glare at him. “One minute. We can wait that long.” To Whitney, I said, “Take your time to think about what you want to say.”

She shook her head. “That’s the stupid thing. I’ve done nothing but think about it, but when you know it’s the last communication you’ll ever have with someone, it’s hard, you know…”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “It is.”

She nodded and took a moment to gather herself. “Tell him that even though we argued sometimes, that he was the best big brother I could ever have hoped for, and that what I did had absolutely nothing to do with him, that I probably would have done it sooner if it wasn’t for his unfailing support. I think part of me waited until I knew he was happy and had someone to lean on. I knew Ben worshipped the ground he walked on. And I didn’t know that in his grief, he’d push Ben away. How could I have done?” A single tear streaked its way down her face.

She dashed it away with an air of frustration. “Tell him that there was nothing he could have done to stop it, that if I hadn’t been successful that night, I would have tried again until I was. It wasn’t an impulse decision. It was always going to happen. A case of when rather than if.”

She took another shaky breath. “Griffin. My parents. I loved them all, but I just didn’t want to be there anymore. And the only thing I’ve regretted about it was how hard it was for the people I left behind.”

“You’ve seen it?” I asked, still as ignorant about how this world worked as I’d ever been.

“Snatches,” she said.

“How?”

“I don’t know,” she said, already backing off a few steps like her time was up. “I just do. I think someone shows it to me, so I’ll know when the time is right to move on. You’ll tell him, won’t you? And you’ll tell him I love him and that I hung around just so I could have that last conversation with him. I know he blames himself that we couldn’t have it.”

“I’ll tell him.”

“Thank you.”

And then she was gone.

When I turned back to Baxter, he wore a concerned expression. “I could hardly tell her to come back later when we weren’t so busy,” I said in my defense. “You know how cut up Griffin has been about his sister’s suicide. It was the reason he hit the bottle so hard.”

“I’m not worried about that,” Baxter said, his expression turning graver. “I’m worried about us both operating under the mistaken assumption that was Janessa O’Reilly, and it not being her. Because… what if she’s not here?”

My gut experienced something akin to the drop on a rollercoaster. “She’s here. She has to be. It might just take us longer to find her.”