Red Heather Read online

  “Same,” she agreed, and we went to scout out our flavors. “You work tomorrow, right? Finally?”

  “Yep,” I said. “I have a meeting with Catherine in the morning, and she told me to expect some work afterward. I also apparently get my maintenance guy tomorrow.”

  “Careful,” Estelle advised as she lobbed a carton of strawberry into her cart. “With your recent animal magnetism, you might end up married before the week’s out—and then how am I supposed to take you partying?”

  • • •

  When was hauling my grocery bags into a seemingly vacant house, I initially figured Jonah was off sulking somewhere after our minuscule spat.

  Instead, I came to find that he was lounging on the couch while I threw out my back trying to limit the number of trips back to the Jeep. I glowered at him a little when I—short of breath—peeked into the living room. “You’re only corporeal when it’s convenient, aren't you?”

  He glanced at me condescendingly. “I’ll plead the Fifth.”

  “Typical,” I huffed, turning back to the kitchen.

  “It’s not like I eat any of it.”

  I glared over my shoulder at the empty doorway. “Well, you drink a surprising amount of coffee for someone deceased!”

  “I feel like you’re haunting me—you know how fucked that is?”

  That drew me up short, and I was somewhat surprised to realize he was actually mad. “What crawled in your corpsey ass?” I murmured, crouching to dig into a bag. By the time I rose with an armful of cold groceries, he’d migrated from the couch to the edge of the counter, his bony fingers clenched against the stone. I looked up at him and into his glaring eyes. “What?”

  “Do you realize that provoking me isn’t going to do you any favors?”

  “Are you threatening me? Is that what this is?” I asked incredulously.

  He hopped down from the counter, and we would’ve been nose-to-nose if he hadn’t been a head taller than me. “It’s whatever it needs to be for you to understand.”

  “What the actual hell did I do to make you so mad?” I demanded.

  “White sage stubs in the yard?” Jonah demanded. “Salt lines across the doorways? What’d you do, consult the first page of search results for some expert advice?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?!”

  “As if any of that would even work, but I thought we were actually getting somewhere!” He was seething and I had no comprehension of why, much less how to defuse the tension.

  “So did I until you started acting like an ass again!”

  “Oh, cut the shit, Miri—you’ve wanted me out of here since Day One.”

  “Because you shouldn't be here in the first place!”

  “Says who? You? Please.” His lips drew back from his teeth in an ugly scowl. “Like anyone else who’s crossed paths with me in this world, you know nothing of what lies beyond your field of vision. You understand nothing.”

  I grimaced at that. “That’s not my fault. I don't know what you’re talking about, regardless. I don’t know why there’s white sage growing in the yard or why there’s salt in a doorway. Maybe I spilled some. The point is that I don't know.” I shook my head. “Whatever that all meant, if this was your way of figuring out why I don't trust you, take a look at yourself. Doesn't take much thought.”

  I took a step past him to start loading frozen dinners and ice cream into the freezer, intending to leave him to seethe by himself. Unfortunately, that wasn’t what happened.

  My skull cracked against the cupboard and the frozen groceries fell from my arms and careened across the floor with dull, consecutive thumps. Stars blazed in my eyes and their bright, unnatural aesthetic hurt my brain.

  Jonah had pinned me with a hand around my throat. It had all happened before I’d even noticed him take his hand off the counter. Like anyone, I’d heard scary stories of ghosts having cold, dead hands, translucent and skeletal. His hands were skeletal, but held neither chill nor heat and were more than solid enough to hurt me if he wanted to.

  Did he want to?

  His eyes looked darker than usual—only a few pigments of blue separated them from the glossy black of a shark’s. We were both silent as we stared each other down. I gripped the counter behind me while my blood pumped hot through my neck under his hand. My mouth had gone dry and I could taste my breath, foreign and empty, against my tongue.

  And I waited.

  It was difficult to say how many minutes passed before he dropped his hand away from me. I hadn’t noticed how hard my heart was pounding until I was no longer in foreseeable danger. Jonah looked incrementally sheepish, but not near so sheepish as I thought he should’ve. He’d made his point though—I was scared.

  Another long moment passed in silence before he spoke. “You really have no idea how the sage got there?”

  I didn't trust myself to speak, so I shook my head.

  “And the salt?”

  I repeated my movement.

  He eyed me once more before finally looking away. When he looked again, his eyes seemed back to their usual color. Where a reasonable person might have apologized, he retreated toward the living room doorway. Before he got there, he disappeared entirely.

  I stood alone in the kitchen, the ice cream tub still capsized on the floor near my feet and my head still resting lightly against the cupboard. Absently, I wondered if I still had the scab from my accident and if it had reopened.

  I wondered what my options were. At this point, within the past three or so minutes, I’d gained two facts and an assumption that I hadn’t had before.

  Jonah seemed to be reacting out of self-preservation. This was the assumption.

  The facts were that his accent wasn’t real enough to stick when he wasn’t self-aware, and the spidery gash I’d seen on his head was now gone.

  • • •

  When I went upstairs to shower and go to bed later that night, I checked the back of my head—as well as I could, anyway—in the mirror to make sure my head didn't look as bad as it hurt. From what I could tell, the cranial bash into the cabinets had only made my head feel like shit, and I hadn’t taken any additional damage.

  After Jonah the Angry Ghost had cleared his rage and then cleared out of the immediate vicinity, I’d looked up white sage and salted doorways to see if he was just having an afterlife psychotic break or if there was a reason for him to be so freaked out. As it turned out, his mood swing was semi-justified—salt and sage were apparently used for cleansing a house of spirits.

  He’d thrown out the condescending jab of “as if that would work,” so I wondered at the validity of the Internet’s claims and even his own claims since he’d had me chuck salt at the “ghost in the machine” that had fried my laptop. Regardless, I hadn’t been the one to put the thin lines of salt across the front and back doorways nor did I know how they’d gotten there, and if white sage was growing somewhere on the property, that was news to me and not my problem. His rage didn’t make sense and I had a feeling it wasn’t entirely meant to be directed at me, but it had certainly come out at me in full force. At least, I hoped that was full force.

  I exhaled the breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding and dropped my hand from my hair, sidestepping from the mirror to the shower. I reached in and jerked the handle to start the water, letting it run and warm up while I shed my clothes. There was still a scab on the back of my head under my hair, which I thought was weird. Maybe because the follicles had been yanked out, it would all take more time to heal. I touched it gingerly again before making myself leave it alone.

  I discovered exactly where I’d picked at the scab too much when I stepped under the fall of near-scalding water and what felt like a cluster of stinging pinpricks erupted on my scalp. I felt my eye twitch as I ducked away and turned down the temperature, waiting until the water reached a more agreeable state before I decided to trust it again. Then again, I couldn't exactly say that my light prodding had done that—maybe I’d just hit th
e cabinet that hard after all.

  As I lathered a dollop of shampoo between my hands and then carefully began to weave it into my hair, the soft pull of my roots and the stings it caused punctuated the severity of my internal monologue. How had it all escalated so quickly? How did everything in this damn house always escalate so quickly?

  I rinsed my hands and squeezed face scrub into my palm, the warmth of the water managing to relax me some, which was nothing short of a miracle. I didn't know how I slept at night anymore in this place, but I managed to.

  Probably because I don't really have a choice. Biologically or financially, I decided as I massaged microbeads over my cheeks. I traced the sandpapery scrub over my jawline, chewing on the inside of my lip as I lost myself in scenarios—some of which could happen and others I felt could never exist. Then again, had I dreamt up the fuckery this place had brought me, I would've thought that was impossible, too.

  I leaned into the spray and began working the peachy smelling product off my skin only to lean in too far and cause warm water riddled with diluted shampoo to trickle over my forehead. I screwed my eyes shut, but it was too late—what tiny prickles of pain had crept from my head were forgotten as my eyes started burning.

  I groaned and tipped my head back, forcing my eyes open just enough to hopefully wash out the suds while getting the rest of it out of my hair. I'd barely been on the job for two seconds before the water shut off.

  “You've got to be kidding me,” I murmured, standing like an idiot in the stall. Eyes still shut and aggravated by chemicals, I twisted the handle for the water to see if I'd bumped it without realizing. Nothing happened. “Well… Fuck,” I mumbled, instinctively rubbing the backs of my hands against my eyes and then blindly fumbling with the hose leading up to the shower-head. It didn't feel like there was a blockage… Just like it had stopped.

  I went to try the handle one more time and froze before my fingertips touched anything—my anxiety was starting to ramp up and making me feel like I wasn’t alone. The paranoid thought came without evidence, fueled only by the distinct sensation that came with being watched, which was scientifically proven to be one of the fakest sensations we experience on a day-to-day basis.

  “Um… Jonah?” I inquired anyway, reaching up again to rub my eyes. A shiver rippled up my spine, but it was difficult to say whether it was nerves or my shower-warmed body adjusting to the lack of hot water. When there was no answer, I frowned, unsure of how to deal with this when I could barely even see.

  At that moment, what felt like a slow sigh of hot air fanned across my face.

  A scream wrenched up my throat and I choked on it. My breath felt too big in my throat, and I couldn't breathe around it. I was starting to have a panic attack. Acting on instinct and assumption, I threw a hard right hook in the direction of what I swore had just breathed on me. My knuckles crunched against ceramic, and the noise reverberated through the stall and the glass door beside me.

  I winced and cradled my hand against my chest, leaving it there while I swiped my fingertips against some water on my thigh, flushing out my eyes with what little moisture I could gather. It was enough to allow me to open them at least and I whirled around to take in nothing but an empty shower stall. I was still shaking, but the wave of panic was beginning to ebb—at least I told myself it was. My brain was already starting to rationalize the situation, and I fought against it. Maybe it was a gust of heat from the showerhead.

  Maybe it wasn’t.

  “Jonah, if you're messing with me, it’s not—”

  The shower door exploded with noise, violently rocking in its frame as if it had just been punched, and that was when I finally screamed—and then nearly fell over when Jonah burst out of the shower wall.

  “What the hell is—oh, for fuck’s sake,” he swore when he saw where he'd ended up and that I was naked.

  “Was that you?” I half-cried.

  “Was what me?” he countered, and we both freaked when the water blasted back to life. It was freezing.

  “You d-didn’t hear that?!” I demanded through chattering teeth as I evaded the water and shut it off.

  “What, you beating up the shower?”

  “And why would that make sense to you?”

  “It didn’t, but it was either that or you were dropping things, and the sounds were in the walls,” he mumbled, throwing my towel at me as I got out of the stall. I bundled up and gave myself a minute before responding. Then I realized I needed two or three minutes just to reorder my thoughts.

  Jonah frowned down at me and herded me out of the bathroom to my bed, guiding me to sit on the edge with one solid hand resting on my shoulder. While I collected myself, he went and got my hairbrush and put it next to me before he sat on the floor facing me, his legs crisscrossed underneath him.

  I decided not to wonder how he seemed to know my post-shower routine. That wasn't an issue at this point. “There was someone in there,” I finally said.

  He arched a brow at me. “‘Someone’?”

  “Yeah,” I murmured, pulling the towel more tightly around myself.

  “A human ‘someone’?” Jonah wondered, his tone implying that he already knew the answer.

  “It couldn’t have been,” I said. “There’s no way. A normal person couldn’t have come and gone that fast.”

  “But there was still someone in there,” he repeated my words condescendingly.

  I gave him a look that lacked the level of venom I wanted—in large part because I was scared. “Can you just take my word for something for once? Please? I know what I…”

  “What you…?” he pressed. To his credit, I could see that he was at least trying to take me seriously now. “Saw?” he guessed when I didn’t finish.

  “No,” I murmured.

  His brow pinched at the middle. “…Heard?”

  I nodded. “And felt.”

  “Felt?”

  “I think someone breathed on my face after the water shut itself off.” Jonah slipped back into his look of reserved disbelief. “No, Jonah, I know what it sounds like, but it happened, okay? And then the punch was me—”

  “You tried to hit them?” he asked, mildly amused now.

  “Of course I tried to hit them!” I replied, stretching my hand and wincing. “Anyway, that punch to the wall was me, but then the shower door—it sounded like someone slammed their hand against it. Like really hard.”

  “But you never saw them?” Jonah clarified.

  “I had shampoo in my eyes when the water turned off and only got it out after I hit the wall,” I explained. “I could see when the shower door was hit, but I didn’t see anyone do it.”

  He spent a few minutes without saying anything, just mulling over what I’d said. Then he finally lapsed back into that face people always make when they're prepared to tell you that you’re being crazy, but they still feel bad about it. “Miri—”

  “Don’t you dare tell me I’m wrong, I know what—”

  “Miri, just listen to me,” Jonah insisted. “I would know if there were someone—even something—here. More than that, I’d tell you. Okay?”

  Not okay. “How would you know?”

  That wasn't something he wanted to discuss—he withdrew and the motion was incremental, but it showed in his eyes. “I just would. I’m asking you to trust me.”

  “Why can't you tell me?” I pressed. “You’re asking me to trust you, and you’re giving me very few reasons to. Especially after—”

  “I know,” he murmured. “I was out of line, and I’m sorry. Truly. I just thought… Well, it doesn’t matter. There’s no justification for it.” We eyed each other before he added, “I know I haven’t been the most trustworthy. This is different. There’s no one here except us.”

  He glanced me over one more time before shaking his head, standing up, and leaving the room. “Get some sleep.”

  Jonah shut the door and I was left staring after him, which I did for a long time rather than settle in to “get some sl
eep.” How the hell was I supposed to sleep after all that? How could he expect me to?

  I eventually curled up on my side, still in my towel. However, I stayed awake until dawn. My thoughts made sure of that. Mentally, I kept coming back to what he’d said, the statement meant as reassurance. “This is different. There’s no one here except us.”

  “No one here except us.”

  Then...is it you?

  Chapter 16

  “Hey. Miri. Wake up.”

  I groaned even before I understood who was talking to me—I was only just realizing I’d been asleep at all. When I raised my head and ran my fingertips over a perfect impression of a pen stamped on my cheek, I also made the mistake of looking over just as Estelle pelted me with a wadded sticky note.

  She smirked when it hit me in the nose. “That was supposed to be for your head.”

  “Well, you missed,” I grumbled, rubbing my eyes and pulling my hands away streaked black. “Goddammit.”

  Estelle looked at me sympathetically. “You look like a sad raccoon.”

  “It’s always when I have eyeliner on that I decide it’s a good plan to rub my eyes,” I mumbled. “Typical.”

  “Falling asleep at work,” she mused, shaking her head. “What a disappointment you’ve turned out to be.”

  “That blouse is a disappointment.”

  She pouted her lip slightly. “Excuse you. I just bought this.”

  “I know,” I yawned. “It’s cute.”

  “Thanks,” she said, cracking her knuckles. “Why are you so tired?”

  I hesitated and waited until Steven walked outside with Carla for a smoke break before saying, “I think there’s something wrong with my house.”

  “That’s the fucking understatement of the century,” Estelle pointed out dryly. “What makes you say that this time? Your resident ghost giving you issues?”

  Good question. “I’m not sure. I’m starting to wonder if he is.”

  She grimaced. "I thought he was more like the stereotypical brooding ghost man in all those penny romance novels."