A Gift of Ghosts

CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Ghosts disappeared.

  They’d be there one day, and then the next, they weren’t. Nothing about that surprised Akira.

  But they didn’t disappear because they went somewhere.

  Where was there to go? They disappeared because they were energy, and the energy changed forms or dissipated, right?

  Right?

  Akira sighed. She was staring out the window of the plane, waiting for everyone else to take their seats, and trying to think through what had happened today. Oh, not the drama of it all. Not the emotions, the people, the dynamics, the complicated stuff. She just wanted to understand the science.

  Damn it, ghosts were energy. They didn’t go places. Of course, theoretically, other dimensions could exist. The cosmological multiverse theories postulated a potentially vast number of universes. In fact, there was a cosmologist—at MIT, maybe?—who was working on a taxonomy of universes beyond the observable one that people experienced every day. She wondered what he would have to say if she could tell him what she saw.

  “You okay?” Zane was buckling himself into the seat next to her, pulling the long shoulder strap across his body and snapping it into the clasp, but his worried eyes were locked on her face.

  She ignored his question. “I’ve wasted a decade of my life,” she said, as the realization hit her.

  He didn’t smile, just tilted his head as if encouraging her to go on.

  “Energy research. I should have been studying quantum physics all this time.” She shook her head. She’d gone into physics to try to understand the way the universe worked, and she’d focused on energy because her father had always insisted that the ghosts she saw were just energy.

  She frowned. Well, not always. In her earliest memories, it had been different. But from the time they’d settled in Santa Marita, he’d told her that what she saw was a form of energy.

  Zane picked up her hand and she let him take it, watching as he laced their fingers together, still thinking about her father, until, dropping his voice, Zane asked her, “Do quantum physicists study resonant frequencies?”

  She couldn’t not smile at him. “Not really, no.”

  “Not wasted then,” he murmured, leaning forward to take her lips. She opened to him, feeling his tongue trace its way into her mouth and a surge of desire sparking in her stomach and spreading warmth through her veins. God, it felt like days since he had touched her, but it was just hours since they’d woken up together. What a weird day it had been.

  She pulled away, but let her hand slide up to cup his cheek. “Do you do that often?” She was thinking of the woman they’d left behind, currently lost in a fog of grief. The strength of Diane’s anger had made Akira think that she was tough enough to be okay someday, but someday wasn’t going to be soon. They’d left while the news media filled the street, FBI agents the house, but tomorrow, or maybe the next day, Diane would wake up to emptiness. Akira remembered what that felt like. And the loss of a child must be even worse: she hoped Diane had someone who could be there for her.

  “Kiss you? Not often enough.”

  This time, her smile wasn’t even reluctant. “No. I mean look for missing people.”

  Zane grimaced. “I prefer insurance cases.”

  “To finding kids?”

  “Or not finding them.”

  “A good shrink could help you with that problem,” Lucas drawled, snapping himself into the seat across from Akira.

  Reluctantly, she pulled her gaze off Zane and looked at his older brother. She didn’t like him. She might not be being fair, she acknowledged to herself: her perceptions were undoubtedly colored by the gauntlet of reporters she and Zane had had to push their way through to get into the house, and the fear she still had that her image was going to wind up on some evening news show as a helpful psychic. Diane had promised not to tell anyone what had happened, but who knew how trustworthy the distraught and bereaved mother was?

  “I didn’t know you were with him,” Lucas said gently.

  That didn’t make it better. He was still taking advantage of his brother. Why should Zane have to follow Lucas’s every whim?

  “Dragging Diane out to the airport seemed cruel, especially when Zane didn’t think he could help. Why give her false hope? Plus, every reporter and cameraman in North Carolina would have been right behind her.”

  Yeah, and then there was the mind-reading thing. It just seemed so rude.

  “Well, then, don’t think so loudly.” A smile was playing around Lucas’s lips. Akira glared at him.

  “He doesn’t usually do that,” Zane interjected, squeezing the hand he was still holding. “Ignore him.”

  “Except for the part about the shrink,” Lucas corrected him. “Your inability to find dead bodies is just a mental block. If you can find a diamond, you can find a dead body.”

  Akira frowned.

  “Well, I can’t,” Zane said flatly.

  But it didn’t make sense that he couldn’t. “If you can find a mineral that’s measurably indistinguishable from another lump of the same mineral, then finding a specific mass of DNA, living or dead, shouldn’t be hard,” Akira said.

  “It doesn’t work that way.” Zane shook his head. “If it was that simple, I wouldn’t be able to find anything. Everything would all blend together.”

  “Not finding dead bodies is a defense mechanism.” Lucas leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes, as if to say that the old argument was at an end, as the plane’s engines roared to life.

  A defense mechanism? Akira tried to imagine what Zane’s life would be like if he could find dead bodies. How many people went missing every day? How many of them wound up dead? How many hours would he spend just like this, sitting in a plane, waiting to fly to or from a scene like the one they’d just left?

  It wasn’t that she was unsympathetic to Diane, but it seemed to her that Zane’s gift was more like hers than she’d realized: once it was revealed, his life would no longer belong to him. It would be an endless stream of desperate people, tragic situations, grief and pain.

  “Or a coping strategy,” Akira suggested. Her words were almost drowned out by the noise of the engines as they accelerated down the runway, but Lucas opened his eyes and looked at her. She met his gaze evenly. Maybe she’d reserve judgment on Zane’s brother. He was Dillon’s father, after all.

  Zane squeezed her hand again and she looked back at him, at his wry smile, the affection in his eyes. She should tell him about ghosts. She needed to tell him about ghosts, about their violent energy, about what they could do, both to her and to other ghosts. But if she did . . .

  Maybe she should think about what she’d learned today a little more first. It didn’t change the risk: angry ghosts weren’t like people, it wasn’t possible to have conversations with them. They were much too dangerous for that. But if ghosts actually went somewhere when they disappeared? She needed to consider what that meant, see how it might change her ideas about past events.

  “Think we can make tomorrow a do-over on today?” Zane asked her, voice low, just for her ears. She raised her brows in question. “Start the day the same way, but stay in bed a whole lot longer? Then maybe brunch at Maggie’s? She makes incredible waffles. And then I’ll take you to the springs. We can kayak, maybe see an alligator? Go for a swim if you like really cold water?”

  Okay, yeah, she was definitely not telling him about the ghosts. Possession, convulsions, broken bones, possible death—they were so decidedly unromantic. She’d have to tell him eventually, but the fun would be over then, and she really wanted just a little while to enjoy this—to enjoy him—first.

  She smiled. “Sounds perfect.”