I liked her.
* * *
I carried the heavy polygraph machine up the two flights of stairs to my apartment, vowing to get an elevator installed the first chance I got. How expensive could they be? My phone rang the minute I sat it on my kitchen table. The convent where Quentin lived on the weekends appeared on the caller ID. Sister Mary Elizabeth, a very interesting woman who could hear the conversations of angels, was on the other end. I could tell something was wrong the moment she spoke.
“Charley?” she said, her voice quivering.
“Hey, Sis, what’s up?”
“It’s Quentin. The School for the Deaf called. He left campus this morning and has been gone all day. He’s never done this. Have you seen him?”
Alarmed, I asked, “Have you tried his phone?”
“Yes. I’ve texted him several times and tried to do a video chat with him. Nothing. He’s not picking up.”
The alarm level rose. That was so unlike Quentin. He was the sweetest kid on the planet. Well, most of the time. He was a beautiful blond-haired, blue-eyed sixteen-year-old whom I’d met when his physical body was possessed by a demon. The demon was ripped to shreds by my handy-dandy Rottweiler guardian, and Quentin had been a friend ever since. He had no family and lived at the convent with the sisters when he wasn’t at school. I wasn’t sure how the Catholic church felt about that—but so far, so good. At least he hadn’t been kicked out yet, but if Quentin started misbehaving in any way, I couldn’t imagine the church would let him stay there much longer.
“Okay, let me see what I can do.”
The moment I hung up, Cookie rushed upstairs and barreled into her apartment. I walked across the hall and watched her as she searched it.
“What are you looking for?”
“Amber,” she said, diving for her phone. “I went to pick her up from school and she wasn’t there. The office said she was marked absent all day. Why didn’t they call me?” She was panicking, but I was amassing an all-consuming kind of dread.
Surely they wouldn’t have.
Before I could tell Cookie about Quentin, my phone rang again. “It’s Amber,” I said to her, then put an index finger over my mouth to shush her before answering. I had a feeling I knew what was going on. And I had a feeling I knew why Amber was calling me instead of her mother.
“Hey, kiddo, how was school?” I said, unable to resist.
“Aunt Charley?” she said, her voice quivering more than Sister Mary Elizabeth’s, and that dread I’d felt rose like a tidal wave inside me.
“Pumpkin, what’s wrong?”
“We’re at the top of the tramway. Something happened. I need you to come get us.”
“Are you hurt?”
“No, we’re … okay. It’s just, Quentin is kind of freaking out. He won’t talk to anyone but you. He’s really scared. We were supposed to be back before school let out, but we got up here and he just lost it. I’m so worried about him.”
Relief washed over me so completely, my knees almost buckled. “Stay on the line. I’m leaving now.”
“Please don’t tell my mom.”
Damn it. I knew she’d called me for a reason. “I won’t. Stay right where you are.”
Cookie pawed at me, frantic for information on her daughter. I covered the phone while retrieving my bag and keys. “They’re okay,” I said to her quietly. “They decided to skip school and take the tram to Sandia Peak. But something happened with Quentin.”
“Oh, my goodness, what? Is he hurt?”
“No. She said he’s scared. Either he has a fear of heights he didn’t know about or something else happened. Something supernatural.”
She grabbed her bag. “I’m going with you.”
“No, she didn’t want me to tell you, and you have to pretend I didn’t.”
“What? Charley, this is no time to be the beloved aunt. She skipped school. Anything could have happened. She is going to be grounded for the rest of her natural-born life if I let her live that long.”
“I just promised her I wouldn’t tell you. Besides, you have a date to get ready for.”
“A date?” she screeched. “You’ve got to be kidding. I can’t go on a date.”
“I went to a lot of trouble to set this up. You can’t leave me hanging, Cook. And this is just as much for Amber. You need to act like you know nothing about this.”
“Why? So you can be the hero? I am perfectly happy with being the bad guy in this, Charley. She will be punished for skipping school and pulling something so dangerous.”
“I know,” I said, putting a hand on her arm. “And she’ll do the right thing. You watch. But let her be the one to tell you, Cook. If she knows I told you, she’ll never trust me again.”
“I can’t be worried about your relationship with her—”
“She tells me everything, Cook,” I said, trying to get my meaning across. “She asked me the other day about contraception.”
After an absorption rate of approximately twenty-four bytes per second, taking into account the limited RAM we were working with, Cookie screamed at me. “She’s twelve!”
I winced and pressed the phone against me harder, hoping Amber hadn’t heard. It did sound bad when I said it aloud. “I was going to tell you, I swear.” Then I beamed at her. “She told me she wants to wait until she’s married to have sex.”
Cookie calmed instantly.
“But she doesn’t know when she will want to have kids, so she was asking me the best methods.”
“And you fell for that?”
“I have a lie detector built into my genetic code, remember? She hasn’t done anything. I promise. And in case you’re wondering, Quentin is a virgin, too.”
“I so don’t want to know how you know that.”
“I scrolled through her texts one night when she was over,” I explained regardless. “I had to make sure there was nothing going on. I’m the one who brought him into your lives. It would kill me if something happened to Amber that you’d resent me for.”
“Charley, Amber is her own girl. I would never blame you—”
I heard Amber talking into the phone and held up a finger to put Cookie on pause. “I’m here. I’m headed that way now.”
When I pressed the phone to my shirt again, Cookie just said, “Go.”
I tore out of the apartment and ran to Misery. The tram was only about fifteen minutes away from me, then another twenty-minute ride to the top. I prayed Quentin would hold on.
* * *
It didn’t take me long to figure out what the problem was, why Quentin wouldn’t take the tram back down the mountain. There simply weren’t many things creepier than a dead girl in rags staring you down. She must have picked up on the fact that Quentin could see her like she did with me. She stood in front of me, her long dark hair in matted strings over her face, hiding most of it. But her eyes shone through the strands. Especially when she got close, as in an inch from my nose, and glared, her eyes completely void of life. It didn’t matter which direction I turned, she was there, nose to nose, staring me down like a gangsta. She’d probably crawled out of a TV screen at some point in her life. Or death. Either way.
But I had to give it to Quentin. He was right not to want to come back down. She was creepy as heck. I didn’t want to take the ride back down either.
I’d taken out my phone and tried to talk to her, but she just stared. Not really seeing. I couldn’t even look out over the gorgeous landscape. If I turned to look out a glass panel, she’d appear in front of me, hovering outside the rail car, creeping me out even more.
“Look,” I said to her, gripping my phone harder, “cut this crap out and cross through me.” Everyone quieted and shuffled their feet. I couldn’t blame them. My one-sided conversations with the departed often sounded weird even on the phone. But I couldn’t help that now. “You are scaring people. Are you doing it on purpose?”
Nothing.
We were nearing the top of the tram, and I didn’t know if I could get Quentin down the mountain if she was still hanging around. Maybe I could make him close his eyes. But it would be better if she’d just cross.
I lowered my head and gathered my energy. I’d never tried something like this, but maybe I could make her cross whether she wanted to or not. I waited until the energy inside me calmed, then sent it out, softly, coaxingly, to lure her in. It seemed to be working. She moved closer to me. And ran smack into my face.
Wonderful. Now I was standing in a car full of people with a dead girl stuck to my face. This was so wrong.
As Angel was about to tell me. “That looks so wrong,
pendeja
. It’s creeping me out.”
I spoke through clenched teeth. She clung like a magnet. I couldn’t shake her off without looking like a complete spaz. Not that something like that ever stopped me, but still.
“Join the club. How do I get her off?”
He laughed, enjoying my agony. Her right eye was practically touching my left one. Our eyelashes met when I blinked. When I moved, she moved. When I stepped back, she floated forward. It had been a long time since I’d been this creeped out.
“You look like Siamese twins.”
“Conjoined twins,” I corrected him, “and for the love of pancake syrup, get her off me.”
“I ain’t touching that. She’s like that girl from the movie.”
“
The Ring
?” I asked, surprised that he’d seen it. He died long before it was made.
“No, the movie where that girl who gets possessed turns her head all the way around.”
“Oh,
The Exorcist
.”
“That movie was messed up.”
“Yeah, I can see the resemblance. Now, get her off me!”
He doubled over as the car came to a stop. The passengers couldn’t seem to get off the car fast enough. No idea why. The attendant stood there, waiting for me to disembark.
“Ma’am, do you need help?”
“Can you just give me a minute?” I asked.
“I have to load the next group of passengers.”
“Okay, you go get them, and I’ll just stand here and reflect on the beauty in front of me.”
Angel fell to the floor, laughing so hard, he had to draw his knees to his chest. Little shit.
“I’m going to beat you to death with a frying pan.”
“Oh, please,
pendeja,
you don’t own a frying pan.” He wiped his eyes and tried to sober. “That girl’s messed up in the head. Just heal her. You can make her cross.”
“I tried that. Now I have a girl stuck to my face. I can only barely see through her. How am I going to go through life with a girl stuck to my face?”
And again with the fit of laughs. The next group of passengers were boarding. I had to get off this car now. I gave it one more shot. I reached out to her, into her, let my energy meld with hers until I found her huddled in a dark corner of her mind. I wrapped my energy around her, cradled her, and coaxed her closer. That was when I felt it. The trauma of what had happened to her.
“If you’re staying, miss, you need to disembark now,” the attendant said.
“I’m staying,” I said breathlessly, the agony inside her seizing my lungs until she finally relaxed and slipped through.
She’d crossed, but when that happens, I see things. I catch glimpses of the departed’s life. What their favorite pet was or what their first snow cone tasted like. But I didn’t get that with this girl.
“Ma’am, I need to close this door. We’re on a schedule.”
I was still in the middle of her crossing. Images flashed bright hot in my mind, hateful and terrifying. The unimaginable things she suffered through had left her forever scarred, the abrasive texture of her memories undeniable proof. She’d been abused by her mother and ignored by her father, never seen, never cared for, and completely abandoned on the day he committed suicide, leaving her in the sole care of a monster. Even her brother ignored her, most likely because he was scared to incur their mother’s wrath as well. So, instead of standing up for his sister, he joined in, laughing when her mother called her stupid, turning a blind eye when her mother tripped her and she fell with a pot of boiling water. She’d burned her hands and face in the water. Those burns were still visible when she died.
These were the things I didn’t want to see. The things I couldn’t wash away, no matter how much scrubbing I did. Miranda—her name was Miranda—was the product of a failed system. While I didn’t see her death specifically, it was crystal clear she’d died at her mother’s hands in a way that was so horrific, so nonsensical, my mind rebelled, my stomach contracted, and the world pitched to the side. I stumbled when I tried to get off the car. Angel caught me and lifted me to him. No, not Angel. A man. At the moment, I didn’t care whom. I accepted the help, grabbed on to the tan jacket sleeves, and hefted myself up. I just needed to get through the worst of it. Despite everything she’d been through, the most prevalent emotion that she’d carried even into her death was a deep and abiding love for her brother. The same brother who looked the other way when her mother came at her.
I swallowed back bile as the images began to fade. Not that they would ever fade completely, but I needed to find Amber and Quentin. I would have fallen out of the car if not for the man holding me. The attendant hurried over, and I waved him away before pushing out of the man’s grasp and lunging toward the corner of the landing. I grabbed hold of the railing and proceeded to empty the paltry contents of my stomach onto the wood platform. Sinking to my knees, I almost hyperventilated as my stomach convulsed way more times than was necessary, dry heaving until it became embarrassing.
After a solid minute of that crap, I wiped my mouth on my jacket sleeve and took out my phone to dial Amber.
She picked up immediately. “Are you here yet?”
“I’m here,” I said, filling my hot lungs with the cool air of Sandia Peak. It was always several degrees cooler at the top of the mountain, and it felt good. Helped calm my stomach and clear my head until I could at least see to ascend the dozens of ramps that led to High Finance, the restaurant at the top of the peak.
“We’re sitting outside the restaurant, against the back wall. Please, hurry, Aunt Charley. Something’s wrong and I can’t understand him. He’s signing too fast for me to understand.”
“I’m almost there, sweetheart,” I said, bolting to my feet.
The man held out a hand and I looked up to thank him, only to come face-to-face with Captain Eckert. He’d followed me. Had he been in the same car? I never saw him. He was wearing a tan jacket and knit cap, clearly a master of disguise. Then again, I did have a girl stuck to my face on the ride up.