“Yes, well, that makes two of us.” Harper dragged a hand through her hair, considering. “I don’t want to keep pushing you to think about something you might not want to remember, but it’s important you tell me what you did last night ... or even this morning.”
Leslie’s forehead wrinkled in concentration. “I don’t know. None of this makes any sense.” She glanced around, sincere bafflement twisting her features. “Is this a dream? It feels like a dream.”
“This is ... not a dream. Well, it kind of is. It’s not the sort of dream you’re talking about, though. In fact ... .” Harper trailed off, a hint of movement catching her attention out of the corner of her eye. When she looked in the direction where she’d seen the shadow, though, there was nothing there. “Did you see that?”
“I can’t really see anything.” Leslie’s attention was fixed on the moon. “It’s weird, but I feel as if I’ve been somehow detached from my life. Maybe I’m drunk.”
“You’re not drunk.” Harper edged closer to the spot in the woods where she’d seen the shadow. She didn’t feel anything malevolent emanating from the location, but she also couldn’t shake the feeling she was being watched. “Hello? Is somebody out there?”
“I’m right here,” Leslie called out in the dreamy tone Harper recognized as disassociation. Leslie wasn’t ready to be helped … at least not yet. It would happen eventually, though. She was much more interested in the second entity.
“If you need help, I’m here,” Harper offered softly, tilting her head in an effort to pick up noise of any sort. “Just tell me who you are.”
There was no response, not that she necessarily expected one. Instead, the wind merely picked up, and Leslie continued to float in the middle of the clearing as she stared at the moon.
“This isn’t right,” the ghost said finally. “This is wrong.”
Harper nodded in agreement. “It’s totally wrong. We’ll figure it out, though. Go back to trying to remember where you were before you popped up here. It’s important.”
“Okay. I’ll try.”
9
Nine
Harper had to drag herself to consciousness the next morning. It was like slogging through quicksand, and she almost gave up and let weariness drag her back under, but then she remembered what the day would likely hold, and with resignation, her eyes popped open.
Next to her, his arm around her back cradling her into his side, Jared stirred. “Good morning.”
She made the usual joke because it seemed warranted. “There’s nothing good about a morning.”
He chuckled and pressed a kiss to her forehead before stretching. “Did you sleep?”
She nodded, the “dream” from the previous evening coming back with a vengeance. “I did, although ... I had a weird dream. I’m not sure it was even a dream.”
He arched an eyebrow. “Do I want to know?”
“Probably not, but I’m going to tell you anyway.” She launched into the tale. It didn’t take long. She explained about sitting around with Leslie for an extended period of time trying to get the ghost to remember. “Eventually she just disappeared.”
Jared rubbed his jaw, considering. He wanted to know everything he could about Harper’s abilities, but he also feared saying the wrong thing. The last thing he wanted was to inadvertently insult her. “It could’ve just been a regular dream, right?”
“It could have. I mean ... I’m not an expert. I know they’re my dreams, but it’s not as if they came with an instruction manual.”
He waited a beat, but she didn’t expand. “You don’t think that, though, do you?”
She shook her head. “I think it was real. I don’t know if my abilities are expanding or what, but it feels real. Maybe I was always capable of doing this.”
“I think you’re capable of doing whatever you set your mind to.” His fingers were gentle as they brushed the hair away from her forehead. “How do you want to handle this?”
It was an interesting question. She didn’t have an answer. “I need to think on it. I’m not sure. I hope that’s okay.”
He chuckled, the sound low and throaty. “It’s okay. You can’t force yourself to know what to do in a case like this.” Even though he knew exactly how the next suggestion would go over, he barreled forward anyway. “We can go home. We don’t have to stay here.”
“No.” She immediately started shaking her head. “You know as well as I do that we’ll both be haunted by this if we do nothing. Besides, there was something else in the dream that threw me off.”
“Leslie didn’t try to get freaky, did she?” He was going for levity, but it fell flat.
“No. She was more confused than anything else. The thing is—” She broke off and chewed on her bottom lip.
“Don’t leave me hanging,” he prodded. “You’ve come this far. Tell me the rest of it.”
In halting terms, she did just that. “There was a moment when I was talking to her where I felt like someone else was watching us, someone hiding in the woods.”
That piqued his interest. “Do you think it was the killer?”
“No. I didn’t feel danger or anything. It was more like someone was curious ... and afraid.”
“How would someone else get in your dream? That seems impossible to me.”
“Ivy can share dreams with Jack,” she countered, referring to her friend from Northern Lower Michigan, a woman she’d met months before. “She can see and talk to ghosts and she and Jack dream walk. They share it together.”
Jared had listened to Ivy explain the phenomenon to Harper on more than one occasion. He had no reason to doubt the pink-haired witch, but it seemed fantastical on the face of things. He also wasn’t certain he understood the explanation Ivy laid out when it came to sharing dreams. “Is it possible you’ve somehow joined with someone else?” The question made him distinctly uncomfortable, but he asked it anyway.
As
