The Ghost Files 2 (The Ghost Files - Book 2) (21 page)

“New Orleans?”
he asks, confused.
“No, we was up in Virginia when we got caught.”

“Then how did you get here?”
I ask, just as confused.
“We’re in New Orleans right now.”

He frowns, thinking.
“When I died, I saw this bright light. It felt good, peaceful like, and I remember walking towards it and then…then I was here in this house and Jonas was telling me I had to do penance for what I did in life. I did some bad things, ma’am. I deserve penance, but not this. He hurts us all the time and we’ve tried to stop him, but we can’t. It ain’t right, all us suffering like this.”

“I didn’t do anything wrong,”
a woman spoke up.
“I was in a car crash in Arizona and ended up here.”

She is standing across from us, wearing jeans and a Poison tee shirt. Her blonde hair is all frizzed and puffed up like they wore back in the nineties. Her face is bleeding from a cut above her eye and several others covering the entire surface of her face. That’s not what killed her, though. It has to be the long shard of glass firmly lodged into her throat. My guess is she went through the windshield.

“What did Jonas tell you?”
I ask curiously.

“Only that I was now a part of his family. I tried to leave, but there’s a barrier up around the house. It won’t let us out.”

That I didn’t know. I focus my thoughts and try to push outside the property. I can get through easily enough. Why can’t they?

I can hear them then, all of them, wailing in the background. They’re suffering so much and the reaper in me needs to help them, but how? I can’t shake the knowledge I know how to help them and it frustrates me that I can’t figure it out.

What I can do is open a doorway to the Between, the place between the living and the dead. A reaper usually ferries the soul through the Between as they pass from this plane to the next. There are very bad things in the Between that would gobble up a poor lost soul. If I open that up, I’d be condemning them to a worse fate than here.

“My friends and I are trying to destroy Jonas,”
I tell them
, “but we don’t know where he hides. If we can find him, we can kill him.”

“You can’t kill him,”
another voice pops up.
“He’s too strong. If you try, you’ll get killed same as us and then no one can help us.”

That voice belongs to a little boy of about ten or so. His skin is a dark ebony color and he’s sitting next to Doc, swinging his legs back and forth. His face is haunted and his eyes are bruised. There’s no obvious death wound on him, though, so I’m not sure how he died.

“How did you get here, sweetheart?”
I ask him softly.

“I died here.”
He shrugs.
“We didn’t have enough food and I had to give mine up for the little kids. I went to sleep one night and woke up here in the big house.”

My heart goes out to him and I want to make everything all better. He’s just a little boy and I can see the suffering in his eyes. Jonas has been keeping them afraid, feeding off their fear for God knows how long. It isn’t right, not at all.

“Emma Rose, have you learned nothing?”

My head snaps around to see the painter lounging in the corner. His black eyes are shining with something like frustrated anger. How is he here? I thought he was just in my dreams.

“Dreams are easier to reach you in, but when you open yourself up like this, you let us all in, even Jonas. Don’t you feel it? He’s starting to drain you again.”

I close my eyes again and search for something off. I hadn’t felt anything, but then again, I’d been too busy listening to the ghosts. Ah, he’s right. I can even see it. My energy is being siphoned, pulled out from me and down the hall.

Wait, if I follow it, I can find him.

“Yes, you can find him, but unless you deplete his power base, you can do nothing to stop him,”
the painter tells me.

“Why do you care?”
I ask him. It’s odd that he’s trying to help me. Then again, I don’t think he’s ever really tried to hurt me, either. Sure, he’s scared me before, but he’s never tried to kill me.

His smile sends shivers up my spine. It promises so much and nothing good.
“I have a vested interest in you, Emma Rose, and I mean to see you safe until I collect you.”

The threat is obvious and sets my own hackles rising.
“Look here, buster…”

“Shush, child,”
he says, his own irritation as obvious as my own.
“I’m trying to help you.”

I shut my mouth.

“Good. To deplete his power base, you have to cross the souls over.”

“I don’t know how to do that.”

“Yes, you do,”
he counters.
“You’ve done it before without even thinking about it. Think back to that day in the group home, the day all those ghosts were able to leave. You thought it was because the woman died, but as you know now, she was very much alive. It was all you, Emma. You opened that portal for them.”

“Why do you keep calling me Emma?”

“Because it’s your name, of course.”

“You know who I am?”

Instead of answering, he continues as if I hadn’t just asked the question.
“You can open the door to the Between easily enough, but the portal to cross over is entirely different. That portal opens up and allows other reapers to help the souls to the next plane.”

“How do I do it?”

He sighs.
“I’m not a reaper and so I can’t tell you. The answer is inside of you. Just think back to that day, think about what you did, what you were feeling. Let it flow from there.”

That day is NOT something I like to think about, but if it will help these people, I’ll try.

One of the many therapists I have been to over the years taught me a technique to remember things I don’t want to. You take a physical reminder of a memory and use it to recall things you don’t want to. I pretty much blocked out everything about that day, but I need those memories now.

I look down at my hands. They are scarred and slightly misshapen. A sledge hammer destroyed them. Mrs. Olson had done it while I’d been strapped down to a chair, unable to help myself. I open and close my fists, feeling the pain it still causes me and I remember running, my ankle twisted and my knee out of socket. The fear eats at me, makes me start to shake with the reminder of how helpless I felt.

I remember Mrs. Olson falling over the railing and I remember sinking down, thinking I was dying. I remember all those ghosts who had helped me despite their fear, but mostly I remember Eric. He’d sat with me, held my hand, and told me it was going to be okay, that he was there with me. I’d felt safe and loved and so peaceful. It had been okay. We would cross over together.

There’s a gasp and the voices start to crowd in on me again, all of them excited and afraid.

I open my eyes and I see it. One of the walls has turned into a tunnel of soft, glowing light. I did it. Ohmygosh, I did it.

“It’s okay,” I tell them. “That’s where you’re supposed to be. You need to cross over. Go into the light. Someone is waiting for you there.”

“
I see my brother!
” the moonshiner says, excitement in his voice. “
He says he’s been waiting for me for a long time.
”

“Then go,” I tell him with a smile. Once he crosses into the light, the others begin to follow. They are like a stampede set loose. I can feel them flow from this world to the next. Hundreds of them.

“They’re coming, Emma Rose,”
the painter whispers in my ear.
“His guard is on the way. Tell them to be ready to defend you. You have to finish this or you can’t defeat Jonas.”

“Eli!”

“Yeah?”

His voice sounds a bit hushed. I glance at him. He and his dad are both staring at the portal with awe. They can see it?

“You see that?”

He nods. “It’s beautiful. You did it?”

“Yeah,” I tell him, “but we got problems. Jonas is sending his nasties in to stop me from helping the ghosts cross over. If we don’t drain his power, we can’t defeat him. You have to keep them away from me until I finish this.”

He turns those beautiful aqua eyes to me and there’s something dark and forbidden in them. His face is hard and determined. He’s so beautiful in this moment, it hurts my eyes to look at him.

“They won’t touch you.”

He and his dad stand, swords drawn, as the doors to the library are blown open.

God help us now.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Ax-man from the hallway lumbers towards me, swinging his bloody weapon. The grin on his face makes me flinch on the inside. I can just see his ax sinking into me, blood flying everywhere. My heartbeat speeds up and it’s all I can do to breathe. I know this ghost can cause me physical harm and that he wants to hurt me. The need to hurt, to maim pours off him in waves. I step back, terrified. The portal on the wall falters, starts to fade.

“
No, Emma, don’t think about him, just focus on the portal, think of what made it open to begin with,
” the painter whispers to me.

Easier said than done. He’s not the one with a maniac barreling down on him.

Eli steps in front of me and distracts the ghost, giving me a chance to calm down and breathe. I close my eyes, blocking out the ghosts streaming through the door. I need to trust that Eli and his dad will take care of the farmer and the others.

I think about Eric and how safe he always made me feel. My thoughts turn to Dan against my better judgment. He and Eric are the only two people in the world who have ever made me feel safe. They are always there when I need them. Dan is my rock, my one constant. He’s why I’m still sane after everything that’s happened to me and I understand in this moment that no matter what happens in the future, he’ll always be important to me and I can’t just throw everything we have away. If that means just being friends, then that’s what I’ll be. He needs me as much as I need him.

Heat begins to burn through me, melting the ice that’s settled in my bones. Fire encompasses my body and for the first time since I was five years old, I’m warm. Really and truly
warm
. I can feel something pulsing, pulling me towards the heat. I’m terrified to open my eyes, but at the same time, I need to know what this is.

The first thing I am aware of is a hum, it’s whizzing back and forth, and as I open my eyes, a bright, blinding light assaults me. Blinking, I see Eli and his dad hacking away at the ghosts trying to make their way to me. They are awful to look at, bloody and deformed, but it’s Eli who captures my attention. The light around him is so pure a white, it glitters blue, reminding me of the blue tint surrounding a fire’s flame. It’s beautiful.

The heat I feel is radiating from Eli and into me through a string of light that connects us. I have left my psyche wide open and I can feel things I couldn’t before. There’s a connection between us that’s hard to define, has been there from the moment I met him, and has probably been there since I was born. I have always been restless, the need to constantly roam eating away at me. My mother’s penchant to move us from place to place was where I usually put the blame, but now I think it was something else.

I think the chain between us has been pulling us together since forever. I remember back when I ran away from Jersey, I convinced myself that it was because of the foster home I was in. Granted it had been a bad one, but not awful enough to warrant running away. I felt this need to leave, to run towards something. That something is standing in front of me. I know this just like I know that Dan is my anchor.

Eli is home. The realization floors me. How can this be? I don’t even know him, but he smells of home, makes me think of warm vanilla and sugar cookies, a scent I have always equated with home. I don’t know why. My mom wasn’t the milk and cookies kind of mom, but that’s what I think of when I think of home.

He turns to stare at me, his aqua eyes glowing with a dark light. He looks dangerous and deadly, but instead of making me feel cautious, I feel safe and loved. Odd. He grins that stupid cocky grin of his and I laugh. His shoves his sword behind him without looking, and the ghost attacking him goes poof into soot and ash. It’s scary to watch, but I’m calmer right now than I’ve ever been.

“You have to go, Emma Rose,”
the painter interrupts my revelations.
“His bones have been salted and burned. You crossed the last innocent soul over and he’s weak. You can kill him now.”

“How?” I ask.

“Just follow the trail and you’ll know how,”
he says.
“Go, now, before it’s too late.”

I look back to where Eli and his dad are still fighting and before I can call out to them, I’m being shoved out of the room.

“There’s no time to wait on them,”
the painter tells me as he pushes me along. He feels as real as me. His skin is flesh and bone. What in the world?

The next thing I know I’m in a hallway I’ve never seen before, but the light leading from me is going around the corner. I can’t believe I’m heading into another dangerous situation without weapons or a phone. Didn’t I promise Dan to never do that again? I can at least blame it on the ghost this time. Maybe. I’m not sure the painter is a ghost anymore.

The lighting is dim and freaks me out just a bit. It reminds me of all those haunted house movies I watched growing up. You’d think it wouldn’t bother me considering everything I’ve seen in the ghost department over the last twelve years, but it does. I feel like I’m
in
one of those cheesy B-rated horror flicks as I walk slowly down the hallway.

The doors creak open as I pass them and the cold seeps out and follows me. It’s not really the cold, but more of Jonas’s guard. If I turn around, God knows what I’ll see and I might even lose my nerve now that all the innocent ghosts are gone. What’s to stop Jonas from collecting more souls, though, if I don’t stop him? Nothing. All that stands between him and his next victim is me. I laugh, but it’s a nervous laugh. His next potential victim is me.