Dark Demon Rising: Whisperings Paranormal Mystery book seven (2 page)

I
curled my hands to fists. “I didn’t die here or anywhere, Mel. I am
not
dead.”

“Then
whose body is on life support?” She gestured at the bed.

“It
sure as hell ain’t me!”

“It
is. Look at her.”

“Aha!”
I wagged a finger at her. “If she’s me and she’s alive, I can’t be dead.” I
frowned as what I’d said sank in. “Now wait a minute. I mean. . . .” My voice failed
as I realized I didn’t know what I meant.

“Yes,
the body is alive but it can’t function on its own. The organs won’t work
without artificial stimuli. So for all intents and purposes, it’s a lump of
dead flesh,” Jack said unforgivingly. “When the body’s dead, the occupant
leaves it. If a person is no longer in a dead body, what are they? Anyone?”

Mel
performed a hop and waved her hand in the air. “Me!”

Jack
clasped his hands behind his back and nodded at Mel. “Yes Miss Trent?”

“They’re
a shade!”

“Well
done!”

My
voice came with a heavy dose of sarcasm. “Okay, Professor Jack, if a body’s dead,
why keep it on life support?”

“Because
life support systems can be used to maintain a body declared dead until
critical organs can be recovered in the operating room.”

“Maybe
so, Jack, but they don’t keep it in a fancy hospital room and allow it visitors.”
I’d had enough of Jack in medical information mode. “Hell, I’m getting out of
here.”

I
strode to the door, put my palms flat on it and pushed. Honestly, I thought
this time it would open. My head injury muddled my coordination when I tried to
open the door before. The cop outside didn’t hear me through a thick door made
to mute noise. I could explain away everything.

It
didn’t budge. I groaned, turned my back to the unresisting thing and faced my
roommates.

“Um,
Tiff,” Jack said. “You’re not actually leaning on a door. What you feel is your
boundary.”

“Touch
anything else and you go right through it,” Mel added.

“Now
you’re being ridiculous,” I sputtered as my brain contrarily reminded me of
landing in the armoire, which was right behind where Royal sat.

Did
I fall through him?

Mel
gave me a sad, pitying look. “You’ll see.”

They
went to stand either side of the bed.

“Look,”
I wearily said from across the room. “You made an assumption based on my . . .
accident, and our being in the same room as a patient on life support. My
memory is a little fuzzy but obviously I was hurt and—”

“If
she isn’t you, she’s your twin,” Jack announced.

“You
are blind as well as. . . .” I lost my voice again as I joined them and my gaze
fell on a delicate necklace on the bedside table. A silver crucifix inside an
endless knot and an engagement ring hung on a silver chain. The diamond in the
ring sparkled in the room’s artificial light.

My
hand went to my neck where a tiny crucifix and a ring dangled on a silver chain
between the points of my collar.

The
necklace Royal gave me, and my engagement ring.
¹
Worried I’d damage
it, maybe knock the stone from the setting, I wore the ring there when on an
assignment. The jewelry on the nightstand looked identical.

The door opened and Royal came in, distracting
me from the enigma of the necklace and ring at the patient’s bedside. He looked
terrible, not only his tortured eyes, he sagged as if he had aged thirty years.
He lowered his big body to the chair and ground his eyes with his knuckles.

I stood at his side as close as I could get as
he took the patient’s hand in both of his. “Royal? Royal, honey? Look at me.”

He picked up the crucifix and wound the chain
through his fingers.

“He can’t hear you, Tiff,” Jack said. “Give it up.
You’re only torturing yourself.”

A moment passed before I realized the overall
wrongness. No demon heat emanated from Royal, no tantalizing sandalwood and
amber scent. I drew in a deep breath through my nose and smelled nothing, not even
the usual antiseptic smell found in hospitals.

Nausea
churned in my stomach, rose in my chest and turned to bile at the back of my
throat.

“Royal!” I heard the panic in my voice. “Please!”
And I laid my hand on his shoulder.

My hand went through him.

I snatched my hand away and transferred it to
my mouth. Backing away, I began to moan. I couldn’t stop the sounds coming from
me and didn’t want to.

When I managed to quiet myself, I looked at the
woman, her pale face, tip-tilted nose, the silvery brows and the lashes brushing
the tops of her cheekbones, and imagined silver-white hair framing her face.

An icy chill worse than anything I’d known gushed
through me. My body
lay in a hospital bed. I had no reflection, I
couldn’t touch Royal or anything else. I had a hole in my head.

I have seen too many shades who bear death
wounds.

Oh my freaking god!
Another moan escaped me as the reality of what
I saw, the whole picture, slammed into me.
I’m usually not this
slow but this blew my mind to new heights, so totally incomprehensible it took
me till now to put the pieces together.

I
wanted to pull my hair out but doubted I could. I wanted to scream, but no one would
hear me. What I always dreaded had come to pass. I died, violently, cursed to
remain here until my killer died.

A
sob rose up my throat. Numb with misery I stood rooted to the spot, thinking of
the shades I’d met one after the other and my sympathy for their plight. I was
one of them, doomed to watch the world turning without me, never again a
participant, only an observer.

Stop
it! Pull yourself together.

But
why should I not give in to grief for everything I lost? For a future with the
man I loved. My life was over, too soon, with so many things left undone.

Because
it won’t get you anywhere, stupid.

Something
tickled the back of my mind and I felt it should be thumping at the front,
telling me,
you’re missing the obvious, Tiff.

My lips parted and my shoulders relaxed as the
answer came to me.
Jack’s wrong.
I would not be on life support were I
brain dead. Royal would not do that to me. If a person’s brain still functions,
they are alive, even though they survive with the help of machines.
Something
of me was still in there.

But part of me was out here, separated from my
flesh and bones. If not the shade of a dead person, what was I?

Stressing over the question would get me
nowhere. I had to let it go.

Easier said than done.

You
have the characteristics of a shade but you’re
not
one.

But
if it looks like a shade, acts like a shade and falls clean through its
boyfriend. . . ?

I
tried to assess my feelings. Scared? Yes. Angry? Hell yes. Angry, frustrated,
with misery creeping on my heels.

I couldn’t bear it.
Hyperventilating,
I stumbled away. I couldn’t breathe. Where is a brown paper bag when you need
one?

I
stopped short, dragged in a breath but tasted nothing and no sensation of air
passing down my throat to my lungs, yet I felt them swell. I peered at my
chest. It didn’t move.

I
slapped my hands to my chest. “I can’t breathe. Can’t breathe! Help me!”

Jack
sucked the inside of his cheek and dipped his chin. Mel slowly shook her head.

Jack
lifted his head to eye me with mock compassion. “Tiff, oh Tiff, what are we
going to do with you? The dead don’t breathe.”

“But
I did before!”

“No,
you
assumed
you breathed. Now you understand you can’t, you’re
panicking.”

“Maybe
it’s a phantom sensation,” said Mel. “A person who loses a limb often thinks
they still feel it. Try not to think about it.”

I
inhaled again. Nothing passed through my air passage yet my lungs filled. I had
a thought: “You need air to talk.”

“Yes,”
Mel hissed, “if you’re
alive!
”

I
almost laughed then. All the times my roommates challenged my patience, now I tested
theirs.

A tap on the door and another nurse walked in
balancing a small laptop on one palm. I did a fast backward shuffle to get out
of her way.

“Don’t mind me, I’ll be done in a minute,” she
merrily told Royal as she set the laptop on the bedside table and adjusted the
IV drip. I didn’t think he heard her.

Royal. In my confusion and misery I’d forgotten
Royal sat at the bedside, sunk in his own misery.

“Can
I get you a cup of coffee? A soda?” she asked as I imagined her salivating over
him.

Damn
woman. What a nerve, looking at Royal as if at a juicy steak while he sat next
to his nearly dead girlfriend.

He
blinked as if waking. “Thank you. If I want anything, I can get it.”

“Yes,
it’s good to stretch your legs.” Her gaze went to his thighs. “But if you need me,
use the buzzer and I’ll be right in.”

Yeah,
I bet.

She lingered another minute, though, before
leaving.

“Well, my love,” Royal began with a weak smile,
his voice rough and so low I leaned in to hear. “You have stumped them. They
will run more tests but do not believe they will tell them anything more than
they already know, which is next to nothing. They can find no reason you cannot
function without these machines.” He closed his eyes. “Although it has only
been three days, they say if your condition does not improve I should consider—”

The nurse came back in. “Knock-knock!” She went
to the bedside and got her laptop. “Silly me, leaving this here. Sorry to
disturb you again.”

She waited, smiling down at Royal but he didn’t
acknowledge her. Her smile turned sour. She jogged one shoulder and strode from
the room.

The doctors said Royal should consider what? Pulling
the plug? We made wills naming each other beneficiaries and agents for our
Living Wills. Royal was my health care proxy. I shot upright. “Over my dead
body!”

I expected my roommates to laugh but they
waited silently. Mel’s lower lip trembled.

“Royal,
no! Maybe I can. . . .” What, get back inside my head, my body? A sense of
horror shivered through my nonexistent self. If Royal let them disconnect me
from life support, what happened to me when my body died? Although a boundary
confined me and I couldn’t touch anything solid, I wasn’t a shade like Jack and
Mel; I didn’t linger because I died violently. Perhaps my living body tethered
me and I’d be whisked off to the great beyond when it died.

I never should have made the dratted Living
Will.

“How
long can I bear to see you like this?” Tears oozed from the corners of his eyes
and dribbled on his cheeks. He sniffed, and brushed them away with one hand.

My
heart broke. Royal, the strongest, most self-contained man I have ever known, fell
apart before my eyes.

I
ached to comfort him and desperation manifested as a deep, throbbing pain in my
chest. He needed me, but I could only watch him suffer.

I
looked away and a pleading note crept into my voice. “What’s happened to me?”

Mel
shrugged one shoulder. “No idea. But we don’t know everything about life and
death.”

“If
we did, we wouldn’t have been trapped in your house for decades,” Jack added.

“The
thing is, what if Royal cuts off life support?”

Jack
stroked his nose. “Nothing, I imagine. You’ll still be a shade until whoever
shot you dies.”

“For
the last time, I
can’t
be a shade. I’m an intangible something-or-other outside
my
living
body. But you could be right, I’ll likely become a shade if
Royal lets my body die. Unless I can get back in it.”

“I
should think the first thing is make Royal understand what’s happened so he
doesn’t do anything foolish.”

“And
how are we supposed to do that?”

“Don’t
ask me.” Jack made a face. “I’m not Mister Know-It-All.”

“You’re
not?” Mel sniggered. “And all these years I thought you were.”

Jack
gave her a curled lip. “We can’t do anything stuck here. If we go with him when
he leaves, maybe something will come to us.”

“I’ve
tried it, Jack,” I told him wearily. “I can’t get out.”

“As
I said before, the room must be your boundary.”

“Lovely.
You get an entire house, I get a hospital room.”

“You
know how it works. Grab him when he leaves.”

“When
we began teaching shades to move I never imagined you’d be one of them,” Mel
said.
²

I
wished I could grab Royal and hold him. “Carrie said you catch an aura, right?
Is it those colors shimmering around him?”

“You
can see it?” Excited, Jack wiggled his hips. “Remember we told you we sensed
something on people but couldn’t see it? You can, so catching on will be
easier. Go on, feel it.”

I
made a face. “I tried to touch him and fell right through him. Didn’t feel a
thing.”

“An
aura is different,” Mel said. “It’s kind of weird, a barely there
something
slightly
heavier than air.”

“Gotta
do it, Tiff,” Jack urged. “Or be tied to this room forever.”

“Or
until her murderer dies,” Mel said softly.

“He
can’t be my murderer when I’m not dead!” Not screaming the words took effort.

So
what did that make him or her, my attempted murderer? What happened when he
died? If the death of a killer releases the victim’s shade to the afterlife, it
stands to reason his life holds them here. If my attempted murderer’s life kept
me here, what. . . ? I scowled. I couldn’t figure it out,
nothing
made
sense. I didn’t understand these new rules, or lack of rules. Frustrated, I stomped
across the room.

“Shut
up, moron, don’t make it worse,” Jack hissed at Mel.

“Don’t
you moron me, Mister Ass Wipe.”

My
brows knitted. I didn’t want to touch Royal and feel nothing, as I did before,
but I had to learn how to grasp a living person so I could get out of this
hospital.

“Hush,
I have to concentrate.” I hesitantly reached for Royal. He sat with eyes
closed, elbows propped on the bedside. I drank in his familiar face: the
dark-copper lashes brushing his pale-copper skin, the hollow scooped beneath
his cheekbone, the shimmering copper and gold hair falling lose on his
shoulders.

To
everyone else he is a tall, muscular man with sun-streaked brown hair and a
copper-tone tan, but I see him shine. Sometimes, I felt as if I stood with the sun
on my face.

I
tentatively pushed my hand in his aura.

And
felt nothing.

“Guys!”

Wait
a second. I
did
feel something, a soft whisper on my skin as if smoke clung
to my hand.

“I
think I feel it.”

“Yay!”
from Mel. “Now you have to take hold of it at the very end.”

I
peered at my hand. “Why the end?”

“We
don’t know. You can go in an aura but if you want to ride with a person, you
have to catch the end.”

“It’s
not like strands of hair, this stuff fades to nothing. I can barely feel it so
how do I know where it stops?”

Jack
crouched next to me. “It isn’t easy. Pull your hand away gradually and feel
where the aura ends. As it’s kind of wispy, the transition
is
difficult
to detect. You have to keep practicing. Once you have it, it’ll be natural, you
won’t think about what you’re doing.”

“Like
eating while you’re reading or watching television,” Mel gabbled. “You don’t
watch the spoon or your mouth, you don’t think about it, but you stick the food
in the right place anyway.”