Enthralled: Paranormal Diversions (16 page)

Had I seen Tori’s ghost? I knew if I asked Derek, he’d give me a bunch of other possibilities. We were supernaturals; there were always other possibilities. But I was a necromancer. When I saw and heard someone that no one else did, it was never anything
but
a ghost.

And there was no question of
who
I’d seen. She’d looked straight at me in that shaft. Looked at me and pretended she needed help, so I’d fall into some kind of hole. I wanted to say that meant it obviously wasn’t Tori, but who was I kidding? If she somehow died in that house and blamed me for chasing her into it, might she try to hurt me back? Absolutely.

We reached the house, and I ran to the open window. Derek caught my hands and pointed at the jagged bits of glass along the sill. There was dried blood on one.

“I-is that—?”

“It’s old.” He said it quickly, but not convincingly.

He led me to the back door. There, hidden by the shadows of a sagging porch roof, he snapped the lock. When I tried to push past, he grabbed my shoulder and started stepping in front of me. Then he stopped and moved aside.

“I’ll be careful,” I whispered.

He may have let me go first—a huge act of trust for Derek— but that only meant he settled for walking so close I could feel his breath on my hair.

I picked my way through the kitchen. There was debris everywhere, everything from broken dishes to ripped-off cupboard doors. There were empty boxes too, cereal and cookies that mice and rats had devoured, leaving their droppings dotting the floor.

“About what I said earlier,” Derek began as I headed for the hall door. “About Tori. It did sound cold. I didn’t mean it like that.”

“I know.”

“I don’t want anything bad to happen to her. I just wish she’d treat you better. Sometimes she does, and other times, I want to shake her and tell her to smarten up. I don’t like seeing her mouthing off to you when you’ve been nothing but nice to her.”

I walked down the hall.

Derek exhaled behind me. “Okay, yeah, Simon would say that’s kind of ironic, me not liking someone else snapping at you.”

“I didn’t say a word.” I let him squirm for a second, before glancing back. “It’s different. I know that. And I know you’re trying to tone it down. Occasionally even succeeding.”

I moved into the living room. “I should have told Tori about your dad. It would have been easier if it came from me. I knew that. I just . . . I chickened out. We’re getting along so much better, and I didn’t want to screw that up.”

I stopped in front of the window. “Can you get her trail from here?”

“Yeah.” He knelt, then glanced up at me. “Whatever happened, it’s not your—”

“Let’s just find her, okay?”

We could deal with my guilt later. I’d certainly had enough practice dealing with it, after killing Dr. Davidoff.

I didn’t say that, but he knew I was thinking it, and the look on his face—that mix of pain and anger and helplessness— reminded me why I was crazy about him. He wasn’t always the nicest guy. He wasn’t always the most romantic boyfriend. He wasn’t about to write me poetry or bring me flowers anytime soon. But that look said more about his feelings for me than all the poems and flowers in the world.

I crouched and kissed him, whispering, “I’ll be okay. But thanks.”

He mumbled something, gruff and unintelligible. I started to stand. He squeezed my knee, then bent to pick up Tori’s trail.

She’d come in that window, as I thought. There wasn’t any blood on the floor, though, so no sign she’d hurt herself badly crawling through. Derek followed her scent into the front room. As soon as I walked through the doorway, I saw the hole. Not a big one. Barely two feet wide, the rotted floor freshly cracked, bits of sawdust still scattered around. Fresh blood glistened on a jagged piece of broken wood.

I raced to it. Derek grabbed the back of my shirt when I leaned over the hole. Below, I saw a pale figure, arms and legs askew. Tori.

I ripped from Derek’s grasp and ran toward the kitchen, where I’d seen a basement door.

He caught me before I reached the doorway. Didn’t stop me. Just grabbed a handful of my shirt again, slowing me down.

“Be careful,” he said. “The floor’s rotted. The stairs—”

“—will be rotted too. I know.”

Taking my time going down those basement stairs was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I kept leaning and bending and straining, trying to see Tori. Finally, Derek scooped me up and lowered me over the side, then let me jump to the floor.

“Go,” he said. “Just be—”

“Careful. I know.”

I ran across the room, my gaze on the floor so that I wouldn’t trip over anything. There wasn’t much down here—vandals had stuck to the upper floors. I was almost to the section under the hole when someone stepped in front of me.

I let out a yelp and stopped short. There stood an old woman with long, matted white hair. She was dressed in a frilly nightgown better suited to a five-year-old.

“What are you doing here?” she said, advancing on me, forefinger extended, yellowing nail headed for my eye. “Get out of my house.”

I stumbled back—right into Derek.

“It’s a ghost, Chloe.” He recognized my reaction, even if I no longer shrieked every time I saw one. “That means you can go”—he put his hands around my waist, lifted me, and walked forward—“right through it.”

The old woman let out a screech and a string of curses.

“This is my house,” she screeched. “Rebecca Walker. My name is on the deed. I still own it.”

I ignored her and raced over to where Tori lay sprawled on the floor.

“Serves her right!” Rebecca shrieked. “Kids, breaking into my house, stealing my things. Almost as bad as those developers. The floorboards didn’t rot so fast on their own, you know. Those people wanted to cause an accident. Force my poor Timmy to sell.”

I dropped beside Tori and touched the side of her neck. I thought I could feel a pulse, but my fingers were trembling so much I wasn’t sure. I glanced at Derek. He was already kneeling on her other side and checking for a heartbeat.

“Oh, she’s fine,” Rebecca said. “Well, as long as she didn’t snap her neck. But if she did, it would serve her right, breaking into other people’s property. Probably meeting some boy here. That’s what they all do. Boys and girls. In my house. Upstairs, in my—”

“Would you shut up?” I said, so loud I startled Derek. I turned to him. “Is she—?”

“I said she’s alive,” the old woman said. “I’d know, wouldn’t I? I’d have seen her ghost, and the only one I’ve seen is that woman who followed you here.”

I turned sharply. “Woman?”

“Oh,
now
you want to listen to me, do you? Is this how you treat ghosts, girl? Ignore them until it suits your fancy? Well, let me tell you, I don’t—”

She kept ranting. I turned back to Derek, who was on his phone, calling his dad. I shook Tori’s shoulder. Her eyelids fluttered and she groaned.

“She’s going to be okay,” Derek said. “Your aunt’s coming.” Aunt Lauren was a doctor. “Did you say something about a woman?”

“She says one followed me here. Another ghost.”

I turned back to Rebecca Walker. A month ago, I’d have been tripping over myself to apologize for ignoring her. I credit Derek for that too—teaching me I don’t need to be so polite all the time. I still believe in being nice, but with ghosts, if they’re nasty to me, I have to give them attitude right back, or they’ll take advantage.

“Do you want us to call the police too?” I asked. “Report this accident? Or would you rather we kept it quiet so your son doesn’t get in trouble?”

She stopped ranting.

“We’ll make you a deal,” I said. “We won’t tell anyone what happened here. In fact, we’ll alert your son to what the developers did. In return, you’ll tell me everything you know about this woman.”

Now she started squawking that she didn’t know much, that it was just some lady who must have been following me because of my necromancer’s glow. She’d come in here, seen Tori fall, and taken off.

“I can’t tell you more than I saw, girl, so you’d better not hold out on me.”

There was genuine panic in her voice. That’s another thing Derek made me realize—I often feel that I’m at the mercy of ghosts, but it’s the other way around. They’re stuck, and I’m their only chance for contact with the living world.

“We had a deal,” I said. “I’ll do my part, if you tell me what this ghost looked like.”

Rebecca jabbed a finger in Tori’s direction. “Like her. Same height. Same hair. Skinny. Blue eyes, though. And older. Maybe forty. Dressed all fancy, too, like she thought she was something special.”

“Diane Enright,” I whispered. “She’s describing Tori’s mom.”

He swore under his breath. “She used a glamour spell.”

“A what?”

“Glamour spell. It makes a witch look like someone else. It only works if you’re
expecting
to see the other person.”

“Like when that other person disappears from sight, then returns. Or seems to.”

I marched from the room. Derek came after me.

“Stay with Tori,” I said. “Please. I don’t want her to wake up and hear this.”

He hesitated, but agreed, and watched me head up the stairs. I went out the back door. As I gazed around the empty yard, I swallowed. I might have marched up those stairs, but my knees were trembling. This was Diane Enright. Tori’s mother. The woman I’d raised to kill Dr. Davidoff. To murder Dr. Davidoff.

Oh God. I couldn’t do this. Couldn’t face her. Couldn’t—

I had to.

“Mrs.—” I took a deep breath to steady my voice, then channeled Derek, putting a snap into my voice as I shouted, “Diane! I know you’re out there.”

She popped up in front of me, so fast I blanched. I crossed my arms, willed my feet to stay still, and reminded myself she was just a ghost.

“Little Chloe Saunders, looking so fierce,” she said. “I suppose that’s what happens after you kill someone?”

I tried not to flinch, but I must have, because she laughed again. “Or not so fierce after all.”

“What do you want?”

She looked down at me, and she was still smiling, but it gave me goose bumps. “I think you know.”

I just stood there, staring up at her.

“You killed Dr. Davidoff, Chloe. You used me to do it. I’m sure you’re telling yourself you didn’t, that I fired the gun and you had nothing to do with that. A terrible misunderstanding.”

No, I’d told her to do it. I knew that. I accepted responsibility.

But did I completely believe it? Or was there part of me that wanted to pretend it was a misunderstanding? It wasn’t. Seeing Diane Enright again, I knew that. I remembered everything she’d done to us. Everything Davidoff did to us. In that moment, seeing her corpse, seeing Davidoff holding the gun to Aunt Lauren’s head, and I was back in the laboratory and I felt what I had then. Clarity. Resolution.

“It wasn’t a misunderstanding,” I said. “I told you to shoot him. You were a zombie. You had to obey me.”

The look she gave me then was even more chilling, because there was no anger in it. She was studying me, appraisingly, as if murdering someone was a sign of character.

“You blame me for everything that happened, don’t you?” I said. “I freed the demi-demon, which brought down the building, which killed you. Then I forced you to kill Dr. Davidoff. You want revenge. You were following me on the other side of the veil, so I couldn’t see you. When Tori fell, you lured me away. You left your daughter to die. Then you tried to kill me.”

“Please, Chloe, I know you love movies, but drama doesn’t suit you. Victoria wasn’t in mortal danger, and neither were you. It was simply”—she pursed her lips—“a lesson. A small show of what I can do, if I wish.”

“Again, what do you want?”

“Nothing. Yet.” She stepped forward, and I resisted the urge to back up. “I merely wish you to remain open to the possibility that we can help each other. I find you interesting, Chloe. You know that.”

“No, you find me useful, especially now, when your options are so limited that you’re willing to work with the person you blame for your death.” I looked up at her. “You told me before that we could help each other. That I was stronger than your daughter.”

“You are.”

“No, I’m not. It was never about who was smarter or stronger. It was about who you could control. You couldn’t control Tori. You thought you could control me. You still think you can. That’s what this was about. To show me what you can do—leave Tori alone and hurt, lead me into another hole, where I can lie, alone and hurt too, until I’m rescued. Then I’ll do whatever you say.” I met her gaze. “Only I won’t.”

I imagined giving her a mental shove. She staggered back.

“Don’t you dare, Chloe Saunders. If you banish me—”

“You’ll come back. I’m sure you will. But you won’t trick me again, and by then, I’ll have learned a way to get rid of you for good.” I stepped forward, right under her nose. “I’m not sorry you’re dead. I’m not sorry Dr. Davidoff is dead. I just feel sorry for myself because I had to kill him. But if I didn’t, someone else would have had to, and that would only have put the guilt on them. So I’m going to stop thinking of all the other ways we could have stopped you, because there weren’t any. And when I find a way to banish you for good, I won’t worry about where you might go. I’m just going to stop you.”

I closed my eyes and gave her a huge mental slam. She let out a howl of rage, cut short as she was knocked into another dimension. When I opened my eyes, she was gone.

I let out a shuddering sigh. Then arms went around me, solid and warm, and I leaned back against Derek.

“She’s gone,” I whispered. “For a little while.”

“I know.” He kissed the top of my head.

I let myself enjoy the embrace for a moment, then remembered and pulled away. “Tori.”

“Your aunt and my dad are here. They came in the front. Tori might have a broken ankle and a concussion, but she’s okay.” He reached down, hand going under my chin. “I know how hard that was for you, confronting Tori’s mom.”

He bent, lips coming to mine and—

“Derek? Chloe?” It was Kit, opening the back door.

Derek let out a low growl.