Donn's Legacy, page 19
“I astral projected the other night.”
As quickly as I could, I described my experience. I expected Kit’s jaw to drop or for her to leap up excitedly and announce she was coming back to work with the Soul Searchers so she could be part of filming the research into this groundbreaking discovery. But she just narrowed her eyes and smiled indulgently.
“That’s… not possible.”
“What?” My shoulders sagged. “Of course it is. Horace did it multiple times.”
“Yeah, but he’s on his own level,” she argued. “Amari’s been trying to find anybody who can prove they can really astral project, and nobody’s willing to do it on camera. A lot of people claim they could if they wanted, but you know what that means.”
“I’m not making this up. I did it, Kit.”
She pinched her mouth with one hand. “Sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. I’m just saying—maybe you think you did it, but it was just a dream. You have crazier, more vivid dreams than anybody I’ve ever met.”
I felt the irritation settling onto my face and dragging my features toward the ground. As surprised as I had been by Graham’s skepticism, hers was even more unexpected. She traded her life in Donn’s Hill to go chasing the paranormal all over the globe, but she couldn’t believe I was capable of doing something extraordinary?
Kit stuck out one leg and nudged my knee with the toe of her Vans. I shifted my weight onto my other hip, moving myself out of her reach, and turned my face to the side.
“Look, I’m sorry,” she said. “This new show… we sort of take Dad’s ‘supernatural second’ method to the max. It’s more like ‘supernatural never.’”
I said nothing.
“I believe you.” She kicked my knee lightly, and I grudgingly looked at her face. Her brown eyes were round and sincere. “I do.”
“Promise?”
She grinned. “Do me a favor. Pull a Horace. Show up in my hotel room with creepy red eyes and prove it to me. It’ll be worth having to pay Penelope for new bedsheets.”
The tension between us broke, and we got down to the business of making up for lost time. As we waited for the apartment door to be opened by a ghostly hand, she caught me up on life in LA, and I told her everything that had happened to me in New Mexico.
“You seriously brought another one of those jewelry boxes home?” The expression on her face was part shock, part morbid interest. “After what happened last time?”
“This one feels different,” I protested. “I didn’t pass out when I picked it up, and I haven’t been getting those weird headaches. And you should see the way Striker acts around it. She’s not afraid of it at all.”
“That’s so weird.” Kit chewed one black-painted thumbnail. “Or maybe not. I mean, Amari is dead certain the other box held some kind of angry spirit. Striker probably felt that.”
It made sense to me. Of course Striker would be more friendly to a box haunted by someone like Camila.
I glanced at my watch. Kit and I had been at the bar for hours, and it was now long past the time the miner’s ghost should have come to his room, stepped out, and returned. But the door hadn’t opened since we’d come in here.
“Hey, will you humor me for a minute?” I asked. “Can we do a quick little séance?”
“As if I would say no.” Kit scooted forward until her knees touched mine.
We grasped hands, and I followed my normal breathing ritual until I was in a relaxed, receptive state. It wasn’t hard to get there; the weeks apart from Kit had left a mark, and hearing her laugh and trading jokes with her was like a healing salve that soothed my soul. I found it easier than usual to calm my mind and reach out with my other senses.
Still… I felt nothing.
We sat in silence for over half an hour as I pushed my psychic energy as far as it could go, grasping in the darkness for any trace of the young miner who haunted this place. I pictured him in my mind as I’d seen him before: gaunt, sluggish, sick.
Nothing.
“Damn it,” I muttered.
Kit’s eyes fluttered open. “No dice, huh?”
“Nope.” Disgusted, I heaved myself off the floor and kicked the edge of the cupboard. I felt like all the energy I had summoned within myself to try to make contact with the spirit was now trapped inside me like an overinflated balloon, and I prowled back and forth across the room in a vain effort to work it off. “This is ridiculous. We were here, and there was a ghost. Now I’m back, and there’s nothing. How is that even possible?”
Kit got to her feet more slowly than I had. A troubled look grew on her face, and she cradled her chin in one hand. “That is pretty weird. And this isn’t even the first time this has happened, right?”
I stopped pacing. “What do you mean?”
“This is just like the Franklin cabin. One day it’s haunted by a violent poltergeist, and the next…” She snapped her fingers. “Poof. He’s gone.”
My eyes went wide. She was right. This was exactly like what had happened back then. Sometime between our investigation and tonight, someone had come along and banished the spirit.
No. Not someone.
Horace.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
After dropping Kit off at the Oracle Inn, I raced home to Primrose House. I was desperate to be asleep in my own bed, where I had the best chance of astral projecting. As amazing as it had been to spend the evening in Kit’s company, I couldn’t wait to see Camila.
I needed to be sure she hadn’t disappeared too.
To my relief, she was already waiting for me in the backyard when I finally fell asleep. The world was gray scale again, but with a thought, I forced the color to come flooding back into my surroundings.
“You’re here,” I breathed.
Camila raised an eyebrow. I could practically hear her thoughts: Where else would I be?
“Don’t worry about it. It’s a long story anyway. I’m just glad to see you.”
She grinned and held up her hand for a high five. As before, our hands didn’t make a sound when they slapped together, but her palm was surprisingly solid when I touched it.
“Oh,” I said. “I’m not in my body, right? Of course we can touch. I’m basically just like you.”
She rolled her eyes and gave a chuckle I couldn’t hear, as though I’d said something ridiculous. Then, eyes locked on mine, she slowly became more transparent. Graham’s garage became visible through her body.
A moment later, she was gone.
“Holy crap,” I said, hoping she could still hear me. “Did you just disappear on purpose?”
I blinked, and she appeared in front of me again, just an inch from my face. I shrieked and leapt backward. Camila doubled over in silent laughter, her shoulders shaking with mirth.
“Very funny,” I said dryly.
If Kit scared me like that, it would have kicked off a prank war that lasted for days. But Camila had the unfair advantage of being a ghost. Scaring her felt impossible.
Unless…
“How did you do that?” I asked. “Did you just think it, and it happened?”
She shrugged and nodded.
If she could do it, I felt sure I could too. After all, we had just proven that our bodies, if you could call them that in the astral realm, were the same.
I stared at her as I tried to focus on disappearing from view. I imagined fading away into the surrounding scenery like a wraith, leaving behind no trace of myself. I felt my features scrunching together as I poured all my effort into doing what Camila had done, and I was sure the stress vein I inherited from my mother was popping out of my forehead.
As Camila watched me, her expression slowly turned from mild amusement to genuine surprise. Her eyes bugged out, seeming to lose track of me in the darkness.
“Mac?” she mouthed.
“Did it work?” I asked. “Can you still hear me?”
She didn’t respond. My chest swelled. Kit might have just spent a week doing paranormal espionage in Paris, but she couldn’t do this.
I looked down at my hands to see if I could still see myself. I didn’t notice any difference; my arms were pale but solid as ever.
It was payback time.
When I looked at Camila to plot my approach, she was staring straight at me. An enormous grin stretched across her face, and when I locked eyes with her, she dissolved back into silent laughter.
I hadn’t disappeared at all.
“Oh, that’s low,” I said as my shoulders deflated. “Was that part of your plan all along?”
She was too busy cracking herself up to answer. I fought the smile trying to creep onto my face, determined that when she finally managed to collect herself, she would see how unfunny I found her little trick.
I lost. It was impossible to stay angry in the face of this much joy. I wondered when she had cooked up this scheme and how long she had been waiting to try it out on me. I got the feeling she didn’t get to socialize much in the afterlife. Donn’s Hill might have been the most haunted town in America, but Primrose House didn’t exactly have a history of paranormal activity. The only exceptions I knew of were Camila herself and a ghost named Tom Bishop—but he had been haunting me, not the house.
Tom had hung around until his killer was brought to justice. I wondered what unfinished business was tethering Camila to this world.
When she eventually calmed down, I asked, “Hey, when you, um… Well, after that night in the desert, did you stay here on purpose?”
Her eyes narrowed, and she frowned.
“What I mean is: why haven’t you moved on?” When she didn’t answer, I said, “Oh, right. Can you move on?”
She shook her head, then wrapped the fingers of her left hand around her right wrist. She pulled away from me, but her wrist stayed in the same place.
“You’re stuck.”
Another nod.
“Can you leave the yard? You can go in the house, right?”
She pointed to the house and nodded, then pointed to the street and shrugged.
“Let’s test it out,” I suggested.
With Camila following me, I marched out toward the edge of the property line. I couldn’t wait to get to the inn so I could fulfill my promise to Kit and prove I was capable of doing this. But the closer I got to the road, the slower my legs moved. It felt like trying to walk through waist-deep mud. I pushed myself forward, but something tugged at the back of my belly button. There was too much resistance around me. Straining against it was physically painful, like there was a hook inside me holding me back.
I couldn’t get to the street.
“Is that what happens when you try to get out there?”
Camila tried to get past me, and it was strange to see the limitation kick in from the outside. She, too, struggled against an invisible barrier, and if her hair had been blowing behind her, I would have thought she was fighting against a strong wind. After a few seconds of walking slowly in place, she turned toward me and heaved one of her silent, exaggerated sighs.
Experimentally, I probed the boundaries of the yard. I could walk out into the street in front of the house but couldn’t get all the way to the sidewalk beyond. At the sides of the yard, I could get farther to the east than to the west before the invisible tether in my stomach pulled me back. I stood on the front lawn, hands on my hips, and glared at the house.
“It’s like there’s an anchor in there keeping me down,” I complained, rubbing my stomach with one hand.
I wondered if the ache in my belly would still be there when I woke up. When I was in elementary school, the other kids used to say that if you died in a dream, you would never wake up again, which was a delightful thought to have pop into your head as a six-year-old at bedtime. But I wondered now if there was any truth to it. If something happened to me on the astral plane, would it affect my body in the real world?
My body.
That was it. The thing anchoring me to Primrose House—the thing trapping me in the yard—was my body. That blogger was right; astral projection required a separation between the spiritual self and the physical form.
I wouldn’t be able to leave the yard until I broke free of that restriction.
But when I pulled away from that anchor, it hurt. Grey’s words flashed through my mind as the pain flashed through my belly. If you dive too deeply, you can get swept away.
Her warning conjured an image in my mind of my spirit disconnecting so completely from my body that I could never climb back into it again. I imagined going upstairs and seeing myself lying motionless in bed, just waiting for Graham to come find me.
Would losing me destroy him as completely as losing him would do to me?
I couldn’t risk it. I shrank back from the edge of the yard and retreated to the porch below my apartment. Camila perched on the railing. Her dark eyes overflowed with sadness as she watched me.
“What can I do?” I asked her.
She shrugged. I got the feeling she was even more confused than I was. And I didn’t blame her for looking more depressed than a cat who hadn’t been fed in four hours. She was as trapped here as I was.
“I’ll figure it out,” I promised Camila. “There’s a way around this. There has to be.”
She nodded but looked unconvinced. As she faded into the night sky behind her, I forced myself to wake up.
Morning light shone through my turret’s windows. Striker purred throatily above my head. But the cheer around me couldn’t penetrate the clouds hanging over my mind. Once again, I was sure I had astral projected. But I didn’t have any way to prove it, and neither of the two people closest to me believed I was doing anything more than dreaming. On top of that, nobody else seemed to think there was anything suspicious about Elizabeth’s death.
The only person I could talk to about any of it was a dead woman who couldn’t talk back.
I groaned and rolled over. What was the point of getting out of bed?
Striker stretched and hopped down to go investigate her food bowl. I watched her glumly, envious of the simple life of a cat, especially a cat with a good home. When she was hungry, there was food waiting for her. When she was bored, there were dozens of toys and a willing human to entertain her. There wasn’t anything to be sad or stressed about.
And then there was my life. Sure, in the grand scheme of things, I was incredibly blessed. I had a roof over my head, the perfect job, and my health. I had the love of an amazing, kind, creative man, and I had the world’s best cat.
All the same, something was missing.
I didn’t believe in curses, but I was starting to feel like I must have gotten on somebody powerful’s bad side. Every time I found someone to confide in, someone who actually understood what it was like to walk a tightrope between living in the normal world and dealing with the supernatural, life took them away from me. If they weren’t dead, they were in prison.
I wished I had gotten Grey’s phone number. I wasn’t even sure Grey was her real name. She had seemed so nervous about being in Donn’s Hill, so anxious to get out of town. If she had wanted me to be able to find her, she would have made it easy.
That was part of the problem. Like Amari had once said, most genuine psychics didn’t exactly put up billboards. As far as I knew, there wasn’t some kind of online support group I could rely on. How was I supposed to find someone to talk to about all this?
“Damn it, Gabrielle,” I told the ceiling. “I wish you were here.”
I sat up. Gabrielle couldn’t come to me; the best she could do was call. And the prison wouldn’t let me call her when I needed to talk, but they would let me visit.
I didn’t need a crystal ball to see another road trip in my future.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
As much as I wanted to jump into Baxter and go see Gabrielle the instant I got out of bed, the trip would have to wait until the next day. Fridays were Yuri’s half day at Donn’s Hill High School, and he liked to schedule short shoots for his afternoons off. I wouldn’t have time to make it back before I was due at The Enclave, so I spent the morning catching up on housework and reading the visitation guidelines for the prison that had been Gabrielle’s home for the last six months.
When it was time for me to head to work, Graham tagged along with me. He had joined us to film an episode before—one that required a total of nine participants for a séance. We weren’t doing anything so exciting today. I was still waiting for responses back from the feelers I had put out to the owners of a few reportedly haunted places, and until I was able to populate our production calendar with more interesting investigations, we were stuck continuing our assignment from Penelope: shooting more promotional featurettes about local psychics.
Stephen Hastain opened his door with a nervous wave. “Hi, guys. Eh… make yourselves at home, I suppose. I’m at your disposal.”
Graham clapped him on the back. “Don’t tell me you’re afraid of being on TV.”
“I’m not.” Stephen’s hands shook as he gestured for us to walk ahead of him into his reading room. “Just feeling a tad off today, that’s all.”
I had been in his shop before but never for a reading. The one and only time he had cast his runes for me, we sat in his kitchen upstairs. That day, he predicted I would soon take a journey, and a month later, we traveled to New Mexico. He had also told me an unseen force was pulling strings and manipulating events in my life. That reading had solidified my belief that Stephen was the real deal, and I was glad he had been included on the list of psychics to film. If he’d been overlooked, I would have lobbied to get him on there.
Today, I surveyed the decor through the eyes of a television producer. Or at least, the way I thought a producer might look at things. The walls had been painted a very pale shade of yellow and hung with large tapestries. Each of the wall hangings displayed various runic alphabets on rich backgrounds of maroon, forest green, ocean blue, and black. Stephen had taken a minimalist approach to furnishing the space, leaving most of the floor open apart from a round wooden table and a hodgepodge selection of mismatched dining chairs. In the center of the table, eight small velvet bags waited atop a black and silver cloth.
