Rock N Soul (6 page)

“Something bad like what? An explosion? Tearing open the fabric of space and time?”

“No, more like . . .” He paused and tilted his head. “More like I won’t like where I go if I leave now.”

“Oh.” There was a little bit of awkward silence while every hellfire and brimstone sermon I’d ever heard ran through my head. None of that seemed helpful, though, so I just sat there and let my head fall back to stare at the ceiling.

After a few seconds, he cleared his throat. “So . . . if it’s not the ring . . . why you? Why you and not that girl?”

“I have no idea, man. None.” I considered making up a story about séances or another arcane ritual, but I’m not really that good a bullshitter. “Maybe because I was the first one to touch the ring? Or because I was the one to find your body so there’s some sort of connection to your soul?”

“I wonder if it really is just you,” he said, sounding a little lost in thought. “Maybe I could show myself to other people if I tried harder.”

I shrugged. “You can try. But I’ve got to finish my shift. Richard will fire my ass for sure if I don’t. And even if he doesn’t, Malika will probably have me committed for my own safety unless I get out there and start acting normal again.”

He gave me an extremely dubious look. “You’re going to go back to work after all this?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Bills don’t pay themselves, man. And also, you owe me a tip.”

“I owe you a tip? For what?”

“For bringing you room service and stiffing me on the gratuity,” I clarified.

“. . . when did I stiff you on a gratuity? I’d never met you before tonight.” He blinked at me, his forehead wrinkled up. It was almost endearing, his confused face. Made him seem more like a real human being instead of an untouchable rock star.

“About two months ago,” I said. “You ordered a steak, medium rare with a bleu-cheese crust, and a side of grapes.
Grapes
. And not just any grapes, but red seedless grapes. We had to run out and find some grocery store that was open in the middle of the night and sold red seedless grapes because we didn’t have any in stock. It was so weird, dude. I didn’t know heroin gave people weird pregnancy cravings, but whatever.”

He stared at me, and I decided that it must not be possible to hear the gears turning in someone’s mind because if it
was
, I’d be hearing them now. But I saw the exact moment when he figured out what I meant.

“I didn’t stiff you,” he said, his voice rising in volume with each word. “I was
dead
.”

“Yeah, well, tell that to my cable bill.” I raised an eyebrow. “That was a hundred-dollar steak, man. Twenty percent of a hundred dollars is
twenty bucks
that I was counting on taking home.”

“You’re so bad off that twenty bucks is the difference between paying your bills and not paying them?”

“Zoe Saldana, man,” I said.

“What? Oh.” He looked a little sheepish, to his credit. “Skewed sample again, I guess.”

“Yeah. Welcome to the world of the working class.” I pushed myself up and off the bed. “Speaking of the working class, I have to get back to it.”

He looked around. “What am I supposed to do?”

“I don’t know.” I smoothed out the wrinkles in my bellboy jacket. “Didn’t you say you wanted to go haunt some people? Maybe you could do that. That would be fun for you.”

“I guess I could,” he said. “All right, then. I suppose this is good-bye.”

“Yeah.” I picked up the ring and put it in my pocket. “I’ll mail this to your manager and he can get it to whoever.”

“Probably my sister,” Chris said. “Thanks again.”

“Yeah, no problem.” I gave him a weird little salute and headed out of the room and down the hallway. Before I got to the elevator, though, I heard Chris speak from right behind me.

“So . . . this is kind of unsettling.”

I stopped and turned around to glare at him. “Why are you following me? Don’t you have people to haunt?”

“Yeah, about that . . .” He shifted. “I’m not sure I can be away from you.”

I raised both eyebrows this time. “What do you mean?”

“You got about twenty feet down the hall and then I had to follow you.”

“Well, that’s sweet and all, but I don’t think I’m your type,” I snapped. “Go away. Go find your sister or Nathan Vale or some groupie with a nice rack. I’ve got work to do.”

“No, I mean . . . I really had to follow you. As in, when you walked away, I
had
to follow you. It wasn’t optional.” I scoffed, and he continued, “I’ll show you. Walk away.”

“That’s what I’m trying to do,” I said. I turned my back and walked another fifty feet or so toward the elevator again. When I looked over my shoulder, Chris was about twenty feet behind me.

“I didn’t move on purpose. You dragged me with you.”

“I dragged you with me,” I repeated. “What the fuck does
that
mean?”

He glared. “Walk backwards and watch me.”

I rolled my eyes but did as I was told. For every step I took, Chris stumbled forward a little, reluctantly, as if someone was pushing him along. He could have been faking it, I guess, but it was pretty convincing.

“Huh,” I said, super eloquently.

“Yeah,” he said. “So there’s that.”

“So not only am I the only one who can see you, and not only do you not disappear when I take off your ring . . . but I’m stuck with, like, a restraining order. Except instead of you needing to be
more
than twenty feet from me at all times, you have to follow me everywhere.”

“Yeah, that seems about right.” He motioned at my pocket. “Or it’s the ring I have to follow.”

“Guess we should test that, huh?” I turned away from him and pulled it out of my pocket. “Here goes.” I squatted and rolled the ring along the floor away from him, then twisted around to look at him. He was standing in the same place.

I stood and took a big step backward, and Chris stumbled forward again. “Guess that answers that,” I said.

He scowled and walked toward me so that we were at a normal speaking distance again. “No offense, man, but this sort of blows.”

I laughed. “You have no idea.”

“Well . . .” He ran his hands through his hair again, and I watched it slowly fade back into its unmussed state, like he was resetting to always look the same. “What are we going to do?”

“I’m going to finish my shift, and you’re going to stay back and be quiet. And then when I get off work, we’re going to figure out what to do.” I walked over to where the ring had stopped rolling, then picked it up and put it on.

“So I just . . . follow you around and watch you do your job?”

“Pretty much, yeah. Maybe it will be educational for you. To see how the common masses live when you’re not Inciting them.”

“I guess I could do that,” he said. “After all . . .” He paused dramatically. “It won’t kill me.”

I groaned. “Okay, you’re going to have to stop with the ghost jokes.”

“That’s the only one I’ve told,” he argued, looking ridiculously put out by the whole thing. “Come on, man, I just found out I’m dead. Worms are currently eating my liver. The least you can do is give me a couple of free passes on ghost humor.”

He had a point. I sniffed so he knew how generous I was being, then shrugged one shoulder. “Fine. You can have a
couple
of ghost jokes.”

“Really?” He gave me a lopsided smile that would have sent Carmen into spasms of pleasure. “Thanks, man. That means a lot.”

“Don’t think you can just smile at me and get anything you want, though,” I warned, even going so far as to waggle my finger at him. “That only works on girls.”

He opened his mouth to say something, then closed it. I gave him a moment to decide whether or not he was going to try again with the speaking thing, but he didn’t, so the seconds stretched on until they got sort of weird.

“Anyway,” I said to break the awkward silence. “I have to get downstairs. Just be quiet and, I don’t know, try and figure out if you can float.”

“All right,” he agreed. “Lead on.”

When I made it back up to the front counter and found Richard, his eyes immediately fixed on me with an unnerving intensity. I raised my eyebrows at him like I didn’t know what he meant by that, but he didn’t seem fooled by it. He motioned me into his office and closed the door behind us.

“Sorry,” I said, trying to placate him before the yelling started. “I just had a little bit of a flashback and it freaked me out. Malika finished up Mr. Kingston’s room.”

“She said you were curled up in the fetal position screaming your head off,” Richard said. “We got complaints from other guests too. About the screaming.”

Chris walked over and sat on Richard’s desk. I watched him for a second before I realized that it probably wasn’t a good idea to watch ghosts walk around the room when people could track my eye movement. I wrenched my eyes back up to meet Richard’s. “Yeah. Like I said, I’m sorry. It was just . . . weird.”

Richard narrowed his eyes, but with concern instead of anger. “Because of Christopher Raiden?”

Chris glanced up at the mention of his name from his perusal of whatever paperwork Richard had spread out on his desk. I flicked my eyes over to him for the briefest instant before I remembered again that I wasn’t supposed to look at him.

“Yeah,” I said after a beat of silence. “I just hadn’t been back in that room since then.”

Richard’s frown softened a little. “I understand. If you need to go home, take the rest of the night off . . . well, I’m sure Vic would be happy to have the extra shift.”

“Nah,” I said, waving my hand dismissively. “I’m fine. I promise.”

“Listen, Tyler . . .” Richard tugged at his collar. “If you need to talk to somebody about the whole Christopher Raiden incident . . .”

“Don’t worry about it, Richard,” I said quickly. The last thing I wanted was to have to talk to my boss about my fears. About the nightmares. About anything related to my life, really.

“I didn’t mean
me
,” Richard said, his eyes widening. “I’m not exactly qualified to talk about, you know, posttraumatic stress and issues like that.”

“Oh.” I paused for a moment. “I don’t have posttraumatic stress.”

“Well . . .” Richard pulled at his collar again. “What I’m saying is that this happened to you on the job, so the hotel would be happy to pay for a few sessions for you. If you think you needed some help working through everything.”

“Um . . .” I considered the offer. On the one hand, I didn’t think I needed counseling. And telling a therapist that I was seeing ghosts would probably get me thrown in a mental institution or doped up on antipsychotic meds, and I’d seen how well that worked for my cousin Chad, who’d ended up with pancreatitis and the total inability to sit still. So no thanks on the clozapine. I’d just take my healthy pancreas and put up with my rock star ghost for a while.

Still, though, if it would be on the hotel’s dime, I might as well at least leave the option open.

And then I realized that I hadn’t actually answered Richard, so I shrugged. “Thanks. I’ll give it some thought.”

He peered at me for several seconds before speaking. “Okay. Well, let me know if you need anything.”

“I will,” I promised. “Should I go back to my post now?”

Richard nodded, and I got up and walked out of his office. Chris followed along behind me.

“You really hadn’t been back up to the room?” he asked.

“No,” I muttered. “Be quiet.”

“Why not?”

I didn’t want to explain everything to him, so I went for nonchalant. “No reason. I just hadn’t.”

“Were you, like, messed up by it?” He walked a few paces in front of me and then turned around and started walking backward so he could keep watching me.

“By finding a dead guy in his hotel room? Yeah, that was sort of a bummer.” I wrinkled my nose at the memory.

A woman who was waiting in the lobby gave me a very strange look, and I suddenly remembered how odd I must look walking along and talking to myself. I clamped my mouth shut and kept walking.

Chris wasn’t interested in being ignored, though. He kept walking backward, his gaze locked on me. “Seriously, did it mess you up?”

I did my best to stare straight through him instead of letting my eyes focus on someone nobody else could see. The semitransparency helped a little. When we got close to the door leading to the foyer of the hotel, I reached through his stomach to grab the door handle and pull the door open.

“Wow,” he said. “That was weird.” I walked past him, and he continued tagging along after me.

The foyer, where I usually stood chatting with Mark the doorman until guests arrived, was empty at the moment, so I frowned and let my eyes focus on Chris. “If you don’t want people sticking their hands through you, don’t stand in front of them,” I snapped. “And you’re really going to have to stop talking to me while I’m working. It’s hard to concentrate on just, you know, working and smiling and
not looking at you
when you’re walking in front of me and chattering away.”

He furrowed his brow. “I’m not really used to sitting back and being quiet.”

“Well, do your best. Think of it as a personal challenge.” A taxi pulled up to the curb in front of the hotel, and Mark whisked in from the lobby to get the door for them. I lowered my voice so he wouldn’t hear and muttered to Chris, “Please, just be quiet. Just while I take their shit from them, okay?”