Dead Endings: Chapter 6

Gabriella, propped up by pillows, eyed her cast with dismay.

“How long did you say this would be for…?”

The plump young doctor grinned at her over his clipboard. “About two months, give or take.”

“What if I drink a ton of milk?”

He considered her suggestion. “You might shave a month off. Maybe even two if you really buckle down and drink a gallon of whole milk a day.”

She gaped. “Seriously?!”

He leaned in close, his doughy face suddenly solemn. “Nope.”

Gabriella sighed and fell back against the pillows.

“Coach is gonna kill me.”

“If he does, then at least you won’t have to worry about the wrist anymore,” the doctor said cheerfully. With a wave, he left the room.

Everett watched him go with a smile on his lips.

“Well, better than amputation, right?”

“Might as well have been,” she grumbled. “I’m out of the exhibition.”

“Aw…” Everett frowned sympathetically and handed her a cup of water. She pressed it gratefully to her hot forehead and sighed.

“Anyway,” she said, “how’s the other patient?”

They both looked over at the far corner of the room. There, tucked away behind a tray table stacked with instruments and boxes of rubber gloves, sat Cailen. Her small size made it hard to pinpoint her, unless Gabriella knew where to look. Her continued fugue state contributed to this difficulty.

She neither spoke nor made any movement except for the steady rise and fall of her chest and the occasional blink. Her bandaged hand lay in her lap, and the other loosely held a cup of water. She hadn’t made an effort to drink since Everett had placed it in her hand and carefully wrapped her inert fingers around it. She hadn’t dropped it, at least.

Gabriella studied the smaller woman with her other sight. A muted, smoke-colored light outlined Cailen’s body. Gabriella recognized it as an indicator of distress, after years of interpreting moods and conditions through peoples’ auras.

And Cailen’s aura was weak. This was a bad sign on someone like Cailen, who seemed to only run with her brights on. The aura’s slight expansion encouraged her, at least, and she noticed that it had started to lighten in color; a slow, but sure, indication of recovery.

Everett rocked back and forth on his heels beside her bed. He seemed to practically vibrate under the weight of all the questions he wanted to ask her, but she guessed he was too polite to barrage her with them under the current circumstances. She sighed. She wanted to oblige him, but he would have to wait.

The nurse who had touched up Gabriella’s arm had seen Cailen’s bloody washcloth and, with the kind of pity usually reserved for the young and uninsured, she had further cleaned and bandaged it. The kindly nurse seemed to accept Gabriella’s explanation of Cailen’s silence (an apparently debilitating fear of hospitals), but the woman’s shrewd eyes spoke of further investigation if they didn’t get Cailen out of the hospital. Their cover story of a wild moving party was already pretty dubious, so it seemed best to hasten their departure.

“Can you take her back to the apartment?” Gabriella asked. “It looks like she’s coming out of it, but we have to get her home and they won’t release me until my temp gets back under control.”

The doctor thought her high fever was a sympathetic response to her broken wrist, but Gabriella knew that overusing her abilities caused her temperature to run hot. Sadly, she didn’t think that would convince them to discharge her any faster.

Everett didn’t seem pleased to leave without hearing any details, but she promised to explain everything once he’d safely ensconced Cailen back at their place. She didn’t tell Everett that she really needed time to sort out those details in her own mind first. For being the supposed expert on all things dead, the events at Markle’s apartment surprised and disturbed her.

Crestfallen but dutiful, Everett guided Cailen up and out the door like an attendant at a nursing home herding an ancient grandma. He held her hand and encouraged her as he closed the door behind them.

Gabriella couldn’t help but smile as she sank back into the pillows. Thank God for Everett. She wasn’t sure she could have managed the aftermath of the apartment without his help. She wasn’t even sure that Alex wouldn’t call the cops after the mess they’d left. Dear Lord…

She raised a shaking hand to her head. Everett’s departure allowed her to relax her grip on her feelings a bit. The knot of tension in her stomach uncoiled slightly.

Her thoughts trailed back to Markle’s apartment. She remembered the gun, and knew that the shot must have gone off, but she couldn’t recall consciously hearing it. Cailen had almost shot her face off. Gabriella’s hand trailed to her hair, and she grabbed a fistful. She pulled hard until the pain in her scalp quieted the hammering of her heart.

She had fucked up. Badly.

Part of her still thought she could’ve managed it, but she had seriously messed up in exposing her friend to danger. Friends. What if Everett had been injured? Or Alex? Was this the real fruit of pride that her mother had warned her about? Why had she been so stupid? She knew, knew that whatever was behind these murders was dangerous. Cailen had experienced that danger at Warner’s apartment. But they had managed it, and Gabriella had thought she was more than enough to tackle Markle and protect Cailen. She’d always been enough to protect Cailen.

She saw the spirit’s dead eyes in Cailen’s face as the fingers tightened on the trigger. The eyes were smiling.

Feeling sick, Gabriella reached for her bedside water. She sipped at it and tried to redirect her thoughts.

The blue smudge. Cinnamon. That spirit was the common denominator. It appeared at the scene of each violent death. But how did they connect? At both Warner’s and Markle’s she’d sensed that the blue smudge was a presence that appeared because of the murders, not as their direct cause. Ghosts didn’t use knives, anyway.

So…when someone was killed, the blue smudge appeared. She paused. Scratch that. When someone was hurt, lethally so, then it would appear. At Warner’s, Cailen had said that the knife came first, then, as Warner was dying, the second spirit had settled over him. They didn’t know anything about the murder at Portia Jones’ apartment, except that the footprint was there and the murder had resembled the others. Markle had clearly been alive and in considerable pain and confusion when he borrowed Cailen, and he was in the bedroom when the blue smudge appeared. But he eventually expired in the wine cellar. Whatever actually killed him had started upstairs, so again, the blue smudge appeared after injury, but before death.

There’s something to that, she thought. If the same person committed all three murders, yet lacked a personal connection to the victims–which was probably the case, since Everett and the police had found no connection between the victims–then the thing that connected them was the pattern of attack: a lethal wound, spirit possession, and finally, death.

She chewed on the edge of her paper cup as she mulled it over. The spirit possession bit shouldn’t work, though. Full on bodily appropriation was way out of the bounds for normal people–they usually couldn’t even see or sense ghosts. A very small number might glimpse or feel something wrong if a spirit was nearby, but only the rarest of people could perceive and sometimes affect the dead. “Sensitive” people like Cailen and Everett and herself.

Were the three victims sensitives? Gabriella doubted it, considering Alex hadn’t mentioned it about Christopher when specifically discussing ghosts, and that sort of thing was hard to hide from loved ones. And Gabriella was pretty well connected to the spirit-sensing community, so the idea that three separate mediums had somehow stayed under her radar… It was possible, just very unlikely. Her instincts screamed that these victims were normal people.

She remembered Warner’s words as he bled out on the kitchen floor. “I missed you.” Markle had said something similar, too.

She bolted upright. Blood pounded at her temples as her subconscious made a connection that she couldn’t quite articulate. She felt dizzy. What had Markle said exactly…?

“I miss you.”

Oh, God…

‘Miss,’ not ‘missed.’

Normal people couldn’t manage spirit possession, but what about normal people straddling that line between life and death? Cailen hadn’t started seeing ghosts until after she nearly died all those years ago. People on their deathbeds often reported otherworldly stuff. The barrier was thinner in that in-between place.

Furiously, she played back everything she knew. After both contacts, she was fairly certain the blue smudge was a man. He was a spirit with some kind of connection to the killer. A very personal and very weird connection, it seemed.

“Just kill yourself,” both spirits had said. As it tried to have Cailen replicate that final act, it said, “Just kill yourself. You should. I did.”

Gabriella pressed her palms to her eyes and said a short prayer. Lord help her, but she thought she knew what was going on.

Warner died nearly a month before Markle. If he had been the first true victim in the series, then maybe he had also been the first attempt to…facilitate communication. And if that was the case here, the other two murders did have a purpose, in spite of their seemingly random nature.

They were the continuation of a fucked-up conversation…a conversation between the murderer and a dead man.

Proceed to Chapter 6, page 3–>