18
I took the quickest way out of the mansion to catch Amanda Lee—the broken window.
I didn’t even think about what might happen if that dark spirit was waiting outside. Didn’t even stop to remember how my new friends had told me that meeting bad ghosts was rare and, good God, what was this one doing here?
I exited just in time to see Amanda Lee’s car tear out of the driveway and onto the road. I had to haul ass, but as she squealed around a corner, I hitched onto her roof and hooked my essence into the thin crack that she’d left in her window.
Then I leaned against the glass, shaping part of myself into a fist and banging.
“Amanda Lee!”
When she heard me, she jumped in her seat and swerved the steering wheel, almost veering into the next lane, where a car was coming.
For an endless split second, it felt like this was a replay of that car accident hallucination I’d given her the other night, with the headlights coming straight at us… .
Amanda Lee hit the brakes, skidding to a beach-view turnoff near a guardrail, dust rising as she cut the engine and fell against the steering wheel.
Still against the window, I watched her weeping, her proud figure collapsed into an emotional mess. But I was weak enough to lose my posture, too. That dark spirit had scared me, and I was just now feeling it.
Sinking over the edge of the window, then down the inside of it, I hunkered into the backseat, letting Amanda Lee cry great wrenching sobs.
She spoke around them. “I have no idea what I let loose tonight… Goddamn it, how could I have been so arrogant?”
Because you always believe that your way is the best way, I thought. And it backfired.
I didn’t think I needed to tell her that, though.
She shook her head, swallowing, coming up to wipe a hand over her face and push off those glasses. “What did I do, Jensen? Oh God, Liz would hate me. I wouldn’t ever have summoned something that dark, even by mistake, when she was alive. I wouldn’t have gone to these lengths, but it’s just that…” She glanced in the rearview mirror as I rested in back. Her eyes were red. “Sometimes I’m the one who feels dead and emotionless without her here. I don’t even recognize myself anymore.”
She trailed a hand down her face so hard that she left long, faint red marks from her fingernails, like she was punishing herself. But she seemed to realize that she was crumbling, and she drew in a quivering breath, taking really good stock of me behind her in that mirror.
“But just look at you,” she said. “You’ve lost all the color you had. Goddamn me, I’m so, so sorry.”
“I’m fine.” I’d been through worse.
“You’re barely fine. That… thing attacked you. It came out of nowhere.”
I didn’t tell her that I planned to make matters better by rising to the power lines in a minute, just for a mini-fill-up. And I wouldn’t stay too long here in the car with her because the cleaner was coming to the mansion, and I had one last chance at Gavin, because I was sure this ghost chaser would spirit-proof his office and car and wherever else he was going to be, too.
When Amanda Lee had calmed down, I injected some levelness back into our conversation. “Can you tell me what that dark thing was?”
“I don’t know. Maybe an entity that was attached to the property, a relative who’s still clinging to the family… I was going to ask if you saw more of it than I did. Did it look like it might be your fake Dean?”
“No.” Then again, how could I be sure? I had no idea what that “keeper, not a reaper” looked like under its facade.
She began shaking her head again and wouldn’t stop. “I opened a portal. When Wendy mentioned it to me before the séance, I was so sure I could keep everything under control, but something was waiting to come through. It happened so fast, and if that something hadn’t been hanging around…” A sob shuddered through her. “Do you think it was Liz, and she became so angry in the afterlife that she’s a dark sprit now?”
Oh my God. “No, Amanda Lee. It couldn’t have been Elizabeth. She loved you and would never do that to you and…” Should I tell her? Could I trust fake Dean’s information enough?
Like that mattered anymore.
“I know that Elizabeth moved on after she died,” I said. “Don’t ask me how. You just need to believe what I’m telling you.”
She turned to me with her tearstained face, hope filling her eyes. “Do you think it’s true?”
Without hesitation, I nodded. “With my entire heart.”
Who was lying now?
The news seemed to strengthen her. Maybe, later, she would come to doubt me, but sometimes we believe what we need to in order to go on.
As the occasional car drove by on the road behind us, I expected the hard-core general to take Amanda Lee over again. But her voice was still unconfident, shaky.
“That dark spirit truly wanted to announce itself tonight.”
“It did the job. But what interests me is that message it left. ‘You will pay.’ Who was it talking about?”
Amanda Lee sent a slow glance to me. “Any one of us in that room. Me. You.”
Gavin? I thought.
But if the dark spirit wasn’t Elizabeth, why would it be after him?
A terrible notion nudged me. “What if Wendy was right on? What if her mom came back and…”
“What?”
“I don’t know. That family is so damned cold and messed up that there could be a million scenarios.” A million family secrets that we hadn’t uncovered yet.
“The spirit flew out of the house, though, didn’t it?” Amanda Lee asked, still fixated on the dangerous part. “It did leave.”
“Yeah. I think you expelled it. And the Edgetts seem to believe that I was that spirit and the house is now free of a haunting. But their live-in maid talked to them after you left and she’s calling a cleaner to make sure the mansion is extra safe.”
Amanda Lee nodded, giving me another mortified glance in the mirror. “I’m glad the cleaner is coming. I shouldn’t have done what I did to Wendy, and not only will a cleaning keep her safe, but it’ll put an end to any poltergeist speculation.” She sighed. “It was one thing for me to talk about collateral damage during a haunting, but actually seeing what happened tonight when that spirit crashed the séance… it’s not just talk anymore. It’s real.”
“No shit. By the way, I was trying to stop you from framing Wendy.”
“I noticed, and I almost didn’t carry through. Then…”
I took an educated guess. “Then you thought of our mission.”
She nodded, the tears teeming in her eyes again.
“Amanda Lee,” I said. “I want to stay here with you, but the cleaner’s going to be there soon, and that limits my time with Gavin. I can still—”
“You’re not going back there.”
Um… what?
She was shaking her head again, this time harder. “That dark spirit changes everything. It could harm you in so many ways.”
“But what about bringing closure to Elizabeth?”
She wiped her nose. All the makeup was getting smudged—lipstick, mascara, extra foundation and contouring. “Liz wouldn’t want you to go back there. There’s something evil in or near that house now, and there’s got to be a better way to see that Gavin gets his just deserts one day.”
She was being emotional, not thinking things through. So was I the one who needed to solve this mystery now? Somehow it had taken the place of my own murder, showing me that, someday, I could get closure for myself, too. It gave me hope.
“I’m not scared to go back,” I said, meaning it. I’d died a victim, but that didn’t mean I had to be one forever.