Her Last Whisper (25 page)

That did it: he had her. She was still mad at him, but she couldn’t resist asking, “A way out?”

“I want my life back. I want you. I want—a lot of things. I thought, if I could get a new body …” His voice trailed off. “It was a way out.”

A whole host of emotions hit her. They were varied and tangled, but they swept the hard knot of her anger away. She sat up in bed.

“Michael.” She hesitated, then added gently, “I don’t think there is a way out of being dead.”

“If there was, everybody’d be doing it, right?” The wry humor in his voice wrung her heart. “I got it. I’m a fucking ghost. I don’t have to like it, but there it is.”

Sugarcoating the hard truth would do him no good.

“Pretty much,” she said.

“Yeah.” It was acceptance. “Go on to sleep, babe. I’ll still be sitting here dead when you wake up.”

That made her smile. The fact that he could make her smile when he was in such obvious pain brought a lump to her throat. He didn’t say anything else, and she didn’t, either: really, what was there to say? After a moment she lay back down and curled onto her side, but this time she was facing him. At some point her eyes must have closed because finally, against all odds, she slept.

In the morning, Michael was flickering. Solid one moment, see-through the next. Having lived with ghosts in her life for what felt like millennia now, and with this ghost in particular for a little more than six weeks, Charlie knew the signs: flickering meant trouble. Flickering meant a spirit was on its way out.

Her heart was in her throat from the moment she woke up, glanced at him stretched out on the bed beside her, and saw what was happening to him.

“Holy crap!” were the first words out of her mouth as she sat bolt upright in bed and stared at him by the dim gray light filtering in around the curtains. To which he replied with a quick quirk of his lips, “I’m pretty sure holy’s got nothing to do with it.” At the same time, his eyes were sliding over her (the covers having dropped to puddle around her waist) and he added, “Looking good, babe.”

She almost screeched it. “You’re
flickering
.”

“I caught that.”

Bottom line was, he hadn’t even tried to do anything about it. Hadn’t tried to wake her up so that
she
could try to do something about it. He’d just watched himself flicker and waited to see what would happen.

Que sera sera
was what his new attitude seemed to be: what will be, will be.

Which she found almost as alarming as the flickering.

“What are you, a ghost with a death wish now?” she fumed at him as she hurriedly dressed. Then she rushed him down to Tam like a mother whisking an injured child to the emergency room.

“There are no more spells to fix you to earth,” Tam told Michael sternly. This morning she wore a figure-hugging hot pink silk jumpsuit with a gold scorpion pendant nestled where it would call the most attention to her ample cleavage. Her outfit should have clashed with her red hair and bright lipstick but somehow didn’t: she looked as fresh and vivid as Charlie didn’t feel wearing a white blouse and black slacks with only small silver hoop earrings and Michael’s heavy silver watch by way of accessories. By that time, Tam and Charlie—with Michael prowling restlessly around the sleek modern table—were finishing up a quick breakfast in the sumptuous, surprisingly-crowded-given-the-early-hour buffet. Charlie had mainlined coffee, and nibbled on a piece of toast, which was a total waste considering the vast quantity of food on offer for a single price. Her appetite clearly unimpaired by this latest crisis, Tam was polishing off the last of a heaping plate of waffles, eggs, and bacon. Looking at Michael, she added, “Last night, when you left me, you were restored. Then you possessed a body!” She shook her head and looked at Charlie, who’d spent breakfast filling her in, with a small number of judicious edits, on everything that had transpired after they’d left her the previous night. “Once a spell is used on an individual, it won’t work again on that same individual. It loses its potency.”

“So what do we do?” Charlie put down her coffee cup. She needed the caffeine, but the sudden lump in her throat made swallowing difficult.

“There’s that
we
again.” Tam frowned at her as she ate the last of her waffle. “The first thing you do is put
that
out of your head. You and he—no. Not
we
.”

“Tam—” Charlie looked at her friend impatiently.

“Fine. You want to know what to do?” Tam sipped at her juice. “You hope he’s strong enough to recover. It’s possible that the
grounding spell I used on him last night will have enough lingering aftereffects to keep him here. Possible, but not certain.”

Michael’s response was flat. “In other words, I either make it or I don’t.”

“Exactly.” Tam nodded, giving him an assessing look. “This has been going on for about six hours?”

“Give or take,” Michael agreed.

“Probably you would already be gone if that’s what was going to happen,” Tam told him grudgingly, and Charlie got the impression that she wouldn’t have been entirely sorry if Michael had been sucked away into Spookville during the night. Despite Tam’s tone, Charlie instantly felt better: Tam was rarely wrong about anything to do with the spirit world. “Although I can’t guarantee it. What I can guarantee is that if you’d done something so stupid without having recently been fixed to this plane by my grounding spell, you would have no hope. You would have been hurtled into The Dark Place the instant you left the mortal body you stole.”

“Borrowed,” Michael corrected, and Tam made a derisive face.

“He can’t just possess a body and expect to live a normal, human life in that body,” Charlie said, just to clarify things for Michael—and herself. “Right?”

“Spirits do possess bodies occasionally,” Tam replied. “They sometimes even manage to stay in them for considerable periods of time, by which I mean a few days, a few weeks. Usually the body must be empty, which means the spirit must enter at precisely the moment of the previous soul’s exit and the body’s death, for that to be possible.”

“So all I have to do is find a guy who’s just died and I’m golden?” Michael looked at Tam with sudden interest.

“Hardly,” Tam said. “It’s way more complicated than that. Even the mechanics of it are complicated: the body has to be capable of living, for one thing, which if the person just
died
, the body probably isn’t. A limited number of the possessed walk among us, indistinguishable from the living, at any given time. They’re known as revenants. But that’s very rare, and is never permanent. Revenants are considered monsters, and the price they eventually pay for their
temerity in trying to cheat death is high.” She gave Michael a warning look. “Remember that: there is always a price.”

Charlie put the question to Tam that she knew was tearing at Michael. “Is there any way you can think of for him to get any semblance of a human life back?”

“No,” Tam said. “There isn’t. I thought I made that clear last night. He can stay as he is—a spirit walking the earth plane—for as long as he’s able to hang on here, possibly for as long as eternity, although given his proclivity for getting himself into trouble I doubt that’ll happen. Or he can go ahead and give in to the inevitable and move on to whatever awaits him in the Beyond.”

Michael grimaced. “Now, there’s a real win-win situation if I ever heard one.”

“He was being terminated.” Charlie had given up on even trying to drink her coffee. “I don’t think moving on to the Beyond is an option for him.”

Tam shrugged. “The
executeurs
can’t be everywhere. If he manages to escape their notice, he might continue to exist in the Beyond for a considerable time. Who knows? I can’t say for sure. No one can.”

“Great,” Michael muttered.

“Spirit, listen to me,” Tam ordered, and he stopped pacing to look at her, curling his fingers around the top rung on the back of one of the two extra chairs at the table and looking so alive that if Charlie hadn’t known for sure that he was dead she wouldn’t have believed it. Until he flickered again, that is: in and out, quick as a blink, like a failing lightbulb. “Understand that there are consequences to everything you do. You’re like a cat with nine lives. I don’t know how many you’ve used up already. I don’t know how many you have left. But I do know this: on the day that you run out of them, there is nothing that I or anyone else can do to save you. You’ll go into the Beyond, and you’ll face whatever awaits you there. So if you want to stay earthbound, you need to be careful. For starters, no more possessing bodies.”

“Got that?” Charlie chimed in, just to be clear. His eyes, very blue and not nearly as troubled as they should have been under the
circumstances, met hers, and Charlie frowned at him while Tam added direly, “Unless you
want
to find yourself back in the Dark Place.”

Charlie was getting ready to pile on more warnings, but the ringing of her cell phone interrupted.

It was lying on the table beside her plate because she’d been waiting for this call. As part of her summation of last night’s happenings, she’d told Tam about Giselle Kaminsky and asked if she would help. Tam had agreed—reluctantly, because she had long made it a rule to focus her abilities only on the light. Shuddering away from Charlie’s choice of profession, she had once explained it to her this way: touching on something as dark as murder felt like it left the psychic equivalent of a bloodstain on her soul.

Once Tam had agreed, Charlie had texted Tony, asking him to run it by Lena. This should be his reply.

“It’s Tony,” Charlie announced as she verified that with a glance at the incoming number, then picked up the phone and said hello. Their conversation was brief. As noisy as the dining room was, she didn’t think there was any way Tony’s side of the call could have been overheard by the other two, so when she disconnected she looked at Tam and repeated the gist of it. “He said Kaminsky—Lena—would welcome your help. She has Giselle’s things up in her room.” Tam had told her that it would make it easier if she had something that belonged to Giselle to concentrate on. “Tony’s there with her now, if we want to go on up.”

Tam nodded, and Charlie signaled for the check. The waiter, a good-looking, thirtyish guy whose name tag read,
Hi, my name is Bob
, came over with it, asking, “Can I get you ladies anything else?”

While Charlie was shaking her head no, Tam, who was infinitely more with it than Charlie this morning, grabbed the check and signed the room charge. With a reproving look for Tam, Charlie counted out the cash needed to cover the bill and tucked it into her friend’s purse, then looked up to find that the waiter’s gaze had parked itself admiringly on Tam’s cleavage.

“Nice necklace. Are you a Scorpio?” Bob asked as Charlie plopped her purse on the table with a
thump
and he tore his eyes away to discover both Charlie and Tam frowning at him. Michael
was looking at him, too, with the kind of level look men give each other, but of course he couldn’t see that. Charlie had to give Bob credit: the bit about the necklace was a pretty good save.

Tam didn’t seem at all perturbed. Rising, she met his eyes. “No, but you are,” she told him. “You’re also single, from—either Kansas or Kentucky, a state that starts with a
K
, I’m leaning toward Kansas—and you own a big blue motorcycle, which is waiting for you in the parking lot right now. With an expired tag.”

Bob’s mouth fell open. Taking a stumbling step back, he blinked at her, suddenly google-eyed. “How—how did you know that?”

Tam smiled seraphically at him. “I’m psychic. I know everything about you,” she cooed, and swept from the restaurant with Charlie and Michael trailing in her wake. Charlie could feel the waiter’s shocked gaze on them all the way out the door.

“Bet that’s the last time he lets his eyes wander for a while,” Michael murmured to Charlie with a chuckle.

“I told you she was good.”

“Spirit, give us a minute,” Tam imperiously told Michael as she paused in the opulent hallway to let Charlie catch up.

“Yes, ma’am.” There might have been a touch of irony in his voice, but he obediently dropped back, following at enough of a distance to allow them to talk privately as they headed past the in-house theater and gift shops then threaded their way through the busy lobby toward the elevators.

“I can see what you see in him,” Tam said, low-voiced. “He’s absolutely gorgeous. When my spell restored him and he was all of a sudden standing there naked in my bathtub—well, I have to admit my eyes popped. He’s built. And hung. A total stud-muffin if I ever saw one.”

Charlie tried not to sound defensive. “That is
not
what I see in him.”

Tam gave her a skeptical look. “Cherie, I’m not blind. I see the way you look at him. I’ve seen the way you two are together.
Muy caliente
.”

Okay, maybe she did sound defensive. She couldn’t help it. “So I like him. So sue me.”

“Like?” Tam practically snickered. “That’s a new word for it.
I’d ask if you’ve managed to have sex with him yet, but the answer’s obvious. Was it before he died or have you been practicing up on your astral projection?”

“I’m not that good at astral projection, believe me,” Charlie said defensively. Her sex life—especially her sex life with Michael—wasn’t up for discussion. Not even with Tam.

“You’ve got to practice to get good. Like with Kegel exercises. Anytime you get a few minutes, close your eyes, clear your mind, and focus on forcing your vibrations higher. Right now, as close as you apparently still are to the Beyond, you should have an easier time pushing through. Do it while you still can, and have sex with him until your tongue is hanging and get him out of your system. Then you can let him go
poof
with no regrets.”

“I’m not going to practice up on astral projection just so I can have sex with him,” Charlie said firmly.

“Your call.” Tam shrugged. “Probably for the best. But if he has a hot ghost friend—one who’s not a serial killer—send him my way. For a guy who looks like that,
I’ll
astral project out the yahoo.”