CHAPTER TWELVE
Zane recognized the tone.
He moved without hesitation, sliding back into the seat that he’d been half out of, smoothly restarting the car, backing, turning, accelerating away, all without a single pause or wasted movement. Akira, still in the passenger seat, had her eyes closed, her clenched fists held to her mouth.
Was she in pain? He couldn’t tell but he didn’t ask questions.
He just drove.
Once, with Lucas, he’d heard the same order, delivered in the same voice. It was a routine job, or as routine as any job with Lucas ever was. They’d been in the Pacific Northwest, helping out on a DEA case. Zane had pinpointed the location of a stash of drugs using a low-level drug dealer as his link, and Lucas had gone in to take a look around. Returning to the car, he’d snapped out his orders. Zane didn’t notice the blood seeping down Lucas’s arm until they were a mile down the road and Lucas had called in reinforcements.
Now he glanced at Akira. Her lips were moving, but he couldn’t hear the words. “Do you need a hospital?” he asked, trying to calculate distances and times. He could call Nat, get her to meet them at the nearest emergency clinic.
“No,” Akira snapped. She half-turned in her seat, craning her neck to look behind them, then turned even farther, lifting one knee onto the seat so that she was almost fully shifted. “Oh, God, Dillon,” she murmured. “Why did I make you practice stretching?” And then she grimaced as if in agony, clapped her hands against her ears, and fell back into her seat.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she babbled. “I’m sorry.”
“Akira, what the hell is going on? What do you need?” Zane asked, a little desperately. She was acting crazy, but something was happening that he couldn’t see, he was sure of it. But not seeing left him feeling helpless. What could he do?
She shook her head. “Are you okay?” She was talking to the backseat.
Zane couldn’t help being a little annoyed. He didn’t like feeling helpless, he didn’t like not knowing what was happening, and he didn’t like that she was talking to his nephew and not to him.
“I’m sorry,” she said again, “But that house is haunted!”
All right, maybe she had gone crazy. Her house was haunted, her car was haunted, her whole damn life was haunted. What was her problem with one more ghost? But chalk up another point for Max’s serendipity. He’d been saying the house was haunted for years, since right after Dillon and Mom died.
“You don’t understand,” Akira said.
“That makes two of us,” Zane muttered, turning off the narrow road that led to the house, and onto the busier road that led back to town. He wasn’t sure where he was going, but he’d head back to Akira’s house for the moment.
He felt more than saw her glance at him, so he looked in her direction. She was looking pale again, dark smudges under her eyes. He felt a pang of concern. Tired was okay—they hadn’t gotten a lot of sleep the night before—but she looked more anxious than he’d seen her in weeks.
She was so not his type, he thought. He liked easy. Not sexually (although he didn’t object to that) but emotionally. Uncomplicated. Cheerful. Go to a few movies, out to dinner, hang out with friends, maybe spend some time outside at the beach or the springs. And in a few months, when they were both a little bored, move on as friends. This business of worrying about whether a woman was hurting was just not his style.
“Talk,” he ordered. “And put on your seat belt.”
She smiled faintly, and buckling up, said, “I warned you. The very first time we met. I told you to stay away from the ghosts that are all red around their edges.” That must be directed to Dillon, Zane realized. She’d definitely never told him anything about red ghosts. Really, they’d barely talked about ghosts at all.
“There is! Inside!” she insisted. “You’re just lucky you didn’t get past the door.”
Zane’s phone started vibrating and he glanced at it. Lucas, he’d guess. Wondering what had just happened. If Zane knew, he’d answer the call, but since he didn’t, he ignored his phone, and kept listening to Akira’s one-sided conversation.
“Well, stopping because your dad came outside saved you then. If you’d gone inside, the energy would have ripped you apart. It’s like being caught in a whirlpool or a tornado.”
A tornado? He’d read about something like that, hadn’t he? Zane tried to remember what he’d seen about ghostly tornadoes.
“Yes, of course, I know what I’m talking about. I’ve seen it happen.” Akira’s voice was almost angry, as if Dillon was arguing with her.
Vortexes, that’s what he was remembering. Some ghost hunter site had said that it was one of the common types of ghostly experiences. But there was nothing about them being dangerous.
“Okay, fine, red like an aura, yes. No, not like an evil halo. Dillon, could you focus? This is serious.”
Zane’s lips quirked. He was almost able to imagine what Dillon was saying from Akira’s responses. His nephew had always been curious, sometimes too curious for his own good. But the inadvertent memory of Dillon’s experimentation lit a spark of sadness, and Zane sobered, as Akira continued, “Dangerous, dangerous. How many kinds of dangerous are there? It’s a ghost that will rip you to pieces if you get close.”
Okay, that didn’t sound good. But it also didn’t make any sense. “If there’s a ghost in the house, it’s my mom,” Zane interrupted. “She would never hurt Dillon.”
He glanced at Akira. She was chewing on her lower lip again, the way she did when she got nervous. “It’s not—I don’t think I’d call it your mom.”
“I’ve lived in that house most of my life. It was definitely not haunted before my mom died.”
“Maybe it started as your mom, but red ghosts, they’re not conscious. They’re not like people. They’re not aware of what they’re doing. They’re just dangerous energy.”
“But why?” Zane asked. “If it started as my mom’s spirit . . .”
“Anger, sometimes,” Akira answered him. “Angry ghosts lose control. Ghosts that want revenge go red, I think. Or, um . . .” she glanced at the backseat. “Despair, grief.”
“That medium said—huh.” Zane paused, remembering what had happened to the medium. He frowned, thinking back.
“Right. That medium.” Akira was no longer chewing on her lip. Her chin had firmed and if he had to label her expression, he would have called it a glare. “Let’s talk about her for a minute. So some medium shows up, tells you there are ghosts in your house, and then just goes away again?”
“Not exactly,” he said.
She started to nod. “I knew it. I knew it. It’s the only way a ghost gets that powerful. Damn it, you took me to a house with a killer ghost in it. You took us to a house with a killer ghost! Don’t you realize what could have happened?”
“That medium died of natural causes,” Zane answered her, hands tightening on the steering wheel. It had been strange, that was true. But still, Akira was saying that his mother—his mother, of all people—was a murderous ghost. No way. That just wasn’t possible. “They did an autopsy. It was an aneurysm.”
“Of course it was. Because medical examiners are so eager to write ‘murder by spirit energy’ on a death certificate,” Akira snapped.