“Am I a ghost?”
“No.”
“Are you?”
“No. Do you need a coat? It’s cold out here.”
“I have my blanket. Or … yours, I suppose. That’s your bedroom, isn’t it?” When he didn’t answer, she shrugged. “It smells like you. Cigarette smoke and shaving cream.”
It was a nice scent, actually. The only thing she’d liked about the room.
Sissy pushed her hair over her shoulder, feeling it shift across the baggy button-down shirt he’d given her. “Is she the devil?”
When he didn’t answer, she glanced over. His eyes had a killing light in them as he stared out at her sunrise. “Is she?”
“Yeah.”
“So that makes you … an angel?”
“Don’t know about that sometimes. But it’s part of the job description.”
“You don’t have wings.” When he just shrugged, she felt her eyes well up with tears. “If you’re an angel, you can’t lie, right?”
“Not to you, at least.”
“So if this is real, and not an illusion … I want to see my family. Can you take me to them?”
Without hesitation, he looked at her and nodded. Almost as if that had been part of the plan—get her out, take her home.
He reached over and brushed a tear from her cheek. “Whenever you want, we go. Besides, I promised your mother I would bring you back to her.”
“You’ve seen her?” she whispered.
“I went to her, yeah.”
“Is she … all right?” Dumb question. None of them were okay. “I mean … so I can live with them? I can go back and—”
“That I don’t know.”
Bullshit, she thought. She could tell by the set of those massive shoulders, and the fact that he wasn’t meeting her in the eye anymore—there was no going home in the conventional sense.
Sissy resumed watching the sunrise, her brief flare of optimism snuffing out. “I feel like I’m losing my mind.”
“Been there. Done that. This is … hard.”
The idea that there was somebody who understood a fraction of what she was dealing with helped. But … “Are you sure the devil can’t come after me and take me back.”
“Over my dead body.” His eyes shot to hers. “You got that?”
God, she hoped he was as tough as he looked, because that demon from Hell was a nightmare. “If you’re an angel, doesn’t that mean you’ve already died?”
“You don’t need to worry about that. Just remember—she’s not going to get you.”
Sissy frowned and rubbed her forehead, wishing, not for the first time, that she hadn’t ended up where she was, sitting on this porch, halfway between the living and the dead, with an enemy she didn’t understand and a savior who clearly wasn’t happy about his job.
“I can’t remember what happened,” she muttered. “I don’t remember how I got stuck in the down below. Do you know?”
When he remained quiet, she turned to face him. “Please.”
Before he could answer, a ten-year-old Honda drove up to the front of the house. From out of the open window, a bagged newspaper went flying—but the aim was off. Instead of landing anywhere near Sissy, it went right into the bushes by the side of the house.
The car screeched to a halt, and as the driver’s-side door got shoved wide, the man beside her stiffened and shifted subtly, one of his hands going to the small of his back.
There was a weapon there, she thought.
Except as a sixteen-year-old got out of the car and trudged up the front lawn, Jim relaxed—
“Chillie!” Sissy jumped up. “Oh, my God, Chillie!”
Chillie, a.k.a. Charles Brownary, didn’t look over. Or stop in shock. Or … show any response at all. Her best friend’s little brother just kept going over to the scrubby bushes, cursing under his breath, shrugging into his Red Wings hoodie like he was beyond done with winter.
“Chillie,” she said dully, as he picked up the CCJ and turned to the porch.
The second attempt worked like a charm. The paper flew right past Sissy, nearly clipping her in the arm.
“Chillie…?”
As he turned away and headed back to the car, everything hit her hard: the terror from down below, the confusion and fear up here, the pain of losing her family, the horrible amnesia…
Sissy opened her mouth and screamed as loud as she could—and she kept screaming, the sound exploding in her head, rising to a concert level, flushing the birds from the trees at both ends of the house.
Chillie’s feet slowed, then stopped. With a twist of his upper body, he looked behind him—but his eyes were focused on the house, roaming around the windows as if he were expecting to find someone staring out of them. Shuddering like the place had Norman Bates’d him, he scurried for his car and hit the gas as if chased.
A strong hand grabbed her arm, and that was her only clue that she was listing forward. As her legs buckled out from underneath her, the last thing she remembered was the way Chillie had looked, silhouetted against the gathering light, his short hair pushed back by the cold wind as he had stared right through her.
And then she lost consciousness.
Chapter Ten
G.B. rolled over in bed and patted around the cardboard box he used as a table for his phone. He found the TV remote, the base of his garage sale lamp, that dust-covered Nietzsche book—
Bingo.
Fumbling to light the cell up, he groaned when he saw the time. Eleven o’clock. Considering he went to bed at five a.m., this might as well be the middle of the night—not that he could see daylight. Thanks to his blackout drapes and the fact that he’d put a washcloth over the front of his cable box, there was no illumination around him at all.
It was like he was floating in air, and he loved the weightless feeling as he reclined against his pillows and stared up at a ceiling he couldn’t see.
His erection was of the pleasant variety, nothing that demanded attention—more like a suggestion in the event his right palm was bored. He was a little hungover—not bad, though. After he’d left the café, he’d met up with a couple of buddies and they’d ended the night talking about songwriting in the back of a friend’s dive of a sports bar.
G.B. glanced at his phone’s digital readout again.
That children’s book illustrator had to be up by now. She’d gone home early so she could work in the morning.