Randy kind of jumped and then arched over the bar, landing in the seat next to me, my essence going staticky and sensing his cool temperature as I shifted.
“So why’d ya follow me in here tonight?” he asked with a tilted grin. “Bored?”
“I… Not really. I wanted to meet someone who was like me.”
“Right. Besides, you’re too new to be bored yet. But I’m gonna tell ya—watch out for boredom, toots… .”
“Jensen. You can call me Jensen or Jen.”
“I like that. Jen. I know ’nother ghost from the nineteen ’eighties.” He waggled an unsteady finger. “You’re not like her. She’s got hair thass all these colors, and she wears petticoats as skirts, too. They didn’t even do that in the dance halls.”
Sounded like a total Valley Girl to me.
Randy touched his wrist. “She’s got black bandy things on her arms, too. They’re ’cause of Madonna.”
He seemed very proud to name-drop someone from the ’eighties.
“Very good, Randy.” But I wasn’t happy that I had been wearing those same bracelets before I died. I’d lost them at the forest party, so they weren’t a permanent part of my ghost wardrobe. I’d had a total love-hate thing with Madonna: liking that she sassed all the boys while not liking her mainstreamness. I was more an Oingo Boingo SoCal girl.
“Anyway, I was talking about boredom, wasn’t I?” Randy scratched his head under his hat, scrunching his eyebrows together. “Thass right. Ya need to know that boredom is bad for us, Jen. Very bad. Ya said you were caught in a time loop?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, that can happen again. Don’t think it won’t. When one of us doesn’t recharge, we lose power, and we go into that time-loop imprint. The pros call it a ‘noninteractive’ spirit.”
“Pros? Like…”
“Psychics. Mediums. Hunters. What have ya.”
Again with Amanda Lee. I couldn’t seem to get away from the thought of her.
“What do they call ghosts like us?” I asked.
“Interactives. Intelligent spirits. We still have our personalities and we can think, unlike the nons. But there’re a boatload more, like anonymous spirits, who’re confused and afraid and won’t come out to play like we do, poor fatheads.”
I wished I could take notes from Randy Randall. This was the best.
“What else?” I asked.
“It’ll take more than a night for ya to know everything. Besides, I gotta go off the island and look for my letter soon.”
“Maybe I can help you.”
He smiled with those crooked teeth, and his voice went all crackly again when he said, “Thass a girl.”
In life, I’d managed to have a lot of friends, especially in high school, where people elected me to stuff like the student council and even made me Homecoming Queen, not that you’d know it by looking at me now.
Damn, I wished ghosts could do wardrobe changes.
Just as I was thinking that it might be pretty easy to make ghost friends, too, Randy shifted gears.
“Ya know how ghosts appear in different places? It’s not just because they have a purpose in being there—sometimes they need a change of loo-cation, and they get happy by changing up their routines. We get a real charge outta reactions from people when we scare ’em, too. Thass because it’s fun.”
I gave him a curious glance.
“Don’t worry. I just boo the jerks, no one nice.” He looked me up and down. “I’d say ya got some kind of charge tonight yourself.”
“I was out on some power lines before.”
“Nah… not from that. An inner charge. Like ya feel more alive for some reason. Ya got some color to your gray.”
Hadn’t Amanda Lee noticed my slight color, too, after I’d come back from the star place?
Now was my chance to ask about fake Dean, but Randy was looking yearningly behind the bar at the whiskey, which had slowed to infrequent drips. This sailor was an exercise in futility, I feared, but I liked him.
“You said there’s a boatload of ghost types,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Like… ?” I urged.
Randy glanced away from the booze, his gaze focusing on me again. “Like malevolent spirits. Never pal around with one of those, Jen.” He hiccuped.
Was he talking about the type of ghosts Amanda Lee had mentioned? “What do you mean… malevolent?”
“Negative ghosts, ones that’re attracted to despair and bad feelings. Sometimes ya can’t even tell ’em apart from any other ghosts. But only sometimes.” He hiccuped again. “And don’t confuse them with demons.”
Shit. Demons actually existed?
Could Gavin summon one of those to go after me? Not cool at all.
Randy leaned closer. He wasn’t producing a smell right now; otherwise I’m sure I would’ve been knocked over by alcohol fumes.
“Ghosts aren’t demons, in case you’re wondering,” he said. “They’re spiritual entities that’ve always existed.”
“Can they hurt us?”
“Demons? Gosh, yeah. Avoid ’em.”
Instead of avoiding, I just might be putting myself into the path of bad by engaging in Gavin’s haunting. But what were the odds of him reaching out to a demon for help against us? Amanda Lee was only being ultracareful when she’d mentioned the slight possibility of spiritual enemies.
Paranoia, the destroyer…
I wasn’t scared. I just wanted to be prepared. “Can ghosts hurt other ghosts?”
“Sure, jus’ like humans can hurt other humans, but it’s not something we usually do. Why? You thinkin’ of takin’ me on?”
He held up his fists and shadow-boxed at me, then laughed. His sudden movements made him lose his balance and spill off his stool, but he regained his floating, pushing his hat higher on his head.
I couldn’t help laughing, too. He was something.
“About them demons, though?” he said, coming back to the stool. “They don’t go after ghosts so much. Jus’ humans, and anyone who asks to tangle with one deserves what they get. They possess people when they can.”
I narrowed my gaze. “Can ghosts possess, too?”
“Only with the willing. I’ve never done it. If you’re not experienced”—he mangled that word, too—“it’s supposed to suck so much energy out of ya afterward that you’ll probably turn into an imprint.”
He started hovering out of his seat, toward the booze, like he couldn’t fight it anymore. But I stopped his progress with my next question.
“Have you ever met an angel of death?”
His energy fritzed as he hung in midair, then turned to me, wary.
“We all meet ’em at some point,” he said, “but they’re not angels. We call ’em wranglers, and their job’s to—”
“Bring us to the light?”
He nodded, and I almost thought he’d gone sober.
“I didn’t meet my wrangler for the first time till…” He shrugged. “Gosh, not till they started buildin’ the Coronado Bay Bridge. The nineteen sixties?”
I didn’t know much about the history of that. “So he’s visited you more than once?”
“Sure. They check in every once in a while, jus’ to see if you’re ready. But I wouldn’t call wranglers ‘he.’ They’re sort of like… its. Ya can’t tell what they are because they got veils and they’re all covered up.” He got closer to me. His skin had gotten a little grayer. “Did one already visit ya?”
My stomach area had gone truly hollow. “I’m thinking this wasn’t so much of a wrangler.”
I described fake Dean, the lotus pool, the star place.
By the time I was done, Randy’s mouth was hanging open. Then he said, “That wasn’t a wrangler, Jen. I don’t know what the hay that was.”
Maybe I did need a drink—or the closest I could get to one.
I floated off my stool, joining Randy as he went behind the bar again. I bent to catch a drip of whiskey in my mouth, feeling a sizzle in me.