He was driving through a fine drizzle. The weather was otherwise warm and visibility wasn’t too bad, so he wasn’t uncomfortable. He was driving reasonably. He had his headlights on, and used his blinkers whenever he had to change lanes.
In fact, he had just put on his right signal, and looked over his shoulder to check his blind spot, when it happened.
A flash of color in front of him, almost a blur.
The blare of horns, screaming of brakes, screech of metal against metal—
Brent woke with a silent scream choking his throat. Oh, hell. It wasn’t bad enough that he was hearing thoughts and apparently dreaming ghosts—now he was sharing Cooper’s post-traumatic flashback nightmares. Spending too much time with that guy was going to end up giving Brent a severe case of anxiety.
With any luck, he could hand Cooper over to Ryan, and Ryan would have an easy answer.
In the meantime, he went downstairs and booted up the family computer, which he had built himself and which his mother had taken possession of so she could order prescriptions without looking a pharmacist in the eye. There had to be something online about this girl. Then again, the search could be a little more complicated than Cooper made it out to be.
Cooper had said Samantha sounded local, but it was more true to say that she didn’t seem to have any distinctive regional accent at all, at least in the short period when Brent had spoken to her. That meant she could be from anywhere in New England, the Midwest, or Northwest, at the least. She didn’t sound southern, and she definitely sounded born-and-raised American … but that wasn’t a lot to go on.
Searching for deaths in the area in the last few months, of course, instantly pulled up articles about Cooper’s accident.
Brent swore out loud as he read the details. He had spent most of the summer at Ryan’s or in the library, not watching television, and pointedly avoiding anyone from the regular high school in order to keep out of Delilah’s way. He vaguely recalled Elise mentioning something about an accident one day while he had been helping her stack books, but he’d had no idea the extent of the damage.
Samantha had to be related to the accident. If she had died as a direct result of the crash, even Cooper would have made that connection, but maybe she was a family member of someone involved? Hell, for all he knew she was a guilty brake mechanic, who blamed herself for the way Cooper’s car handled in the accident. The only thing he was sure of was that it would be too much of a coincidence if Cooper’s ghost wasn’t somehow connected to Cooper’s near-death experience.
Well, there was one thing more to do.
He picked up the phone, and called the le Coire estate.
“Hello?” Brent wasn’t surprised to hear a stranger’s voice. So many people went to Ryan, either to work with him or to learn from him, that Ryan rarely bothered to answer his own phone.
“Hi,” he replied. He was pretty sure he was talking to a secretary, but for all he knew he could be talking to some kind of super-mystic. “This is Brent Maresh.”
“I remember you,” the voice on the other end said. “Everything all right?”
“For me, yes,” Brent answered. “But I have a friend who has been having some weird things happen to him, which I think Ryan might be able to help with. Or at least might be interested in. Could I talk to him, and see if he would mind if we came by?”
“I think he’s working with someone right now, but I can pass on a message. When were you thinking of coming over?”
“Tomorrow morning, if that’s all right.”
“Mmm. Probably. What’s the guy’s name?”
“Cooper Blake,” Brent replied, though he doubted that detail would matter to Ryan. He wasn’t the type to bias his judgment of someone’s power by doing much background research.
“I’ll let le Coire know.”
The line went dead before Brent could say good-bye.
What next?
He could call some friends and make plans, but he didn’t feel the urge. He didn’t have a lot of close friends these days; he had pushed most of them away in his search for some peace and silence before his hospitalization, and hadn’t dared make many new ones since. If he hadn’t met Delilah in such intriguing circumstances, he probably wouldn’t have even let her into his life.
He grabbed his keys, and had just reached his car when the dream from earlier came washing back. He stayed there, one hand on the driver’s-side door handle, until the memories had peaked and fallen, and then he forced himself to get into the car. He refused to be stuck with Cooper’s issues.
It took more willpower than it should have to turn the car on, and take it out of the driveway, but by the time he reached the town center it was like his body had remembered that the accident hadn’t actually happened to him. The fear and phantasmal pain faded.
To test his recovery, he merged onto the highway, and was gratified to learn that his body didn’t panic. He still drove carefully—Cooper’s memories remained, and would probably be vivid for a while—but he had successfully sloughed off the imprint of terror that he had picked up from Cooper.
11
Cooper just barely made it through the school day. He found his way home and ate dinner, then faced his room again.
He hadn’t seen Samantha in almost twenty-four hours. In the entire time he had known her, she had never been gone so long.
Might she be gone, for real? If this was over, he didn’t need Brent’s help … but then what? Should he try to go back to his friends and pretend she had never existed?
He wasn’t sure he could handle never knowing who she had been. Didn’t he owe it to her to learn that? People shouldn’t just be able to disappear without anyone noticing.
He tried to fall sleep, but anxiety kept him up. He stared at the shadows in the corners as they crept up, and wondered if they had at last … No, he couldn’t think that way. She couldn’t be gone.
He wasn’t ready for her to be gone, damn it. It was selfish of him, but maybe he was a selfish guy. If there was a possibility she had moved on to where she needed to be, he knew he should be happy for her, but instead he felt empty. She couldn’t just be there one day and gone the next.
He leaned back on the bed and shut his eyes, less because he had any hope of sleep and more because he was so tired he couldn’t keep them open. It was almost one in the morning.
“Cooper!”
He sat up so fast he nearly fell out of bed, just as Samantha tried to fling herself into his arms. It should have been comical the way she bounced off him—but it wasn’t. She looked pale and worn and scared. Her entire form seemed gray and insubstantial. He would have held on to her if he could have, but he knew that trying to would only make her disappear.
“I got lost!” she cried. “I was walking in Brent’s dreams, and then he woke up suddenly and I fell … somewhere … and I got lost! Those things were there, and they could see me, and they wanted to hurt me … and why can’t I cry? Cooper!”
“Samantha …” He didn’t know what to say. She was huddled on the floor and he couldn’t even help her up.
He sat next to her, a little distance away so he didn’t bump into her and displace her. It was awkward, but it was the best he could do.
“I talked to Brent,” he said.
