Page 112 of Chasing Your Ghost

It was most likely due to the close proximity of his body, but Riley didn’t think she needed to point that out.

“That’s a good sign, right?” she asked. “It means Ella was right about this house.”

“Yeah, I’d say she got the right place,” he agreed, his shoulders rolling back in discomfort.

Riley wanted to tell the others to hurry up, to quit walking through the well-maintained backyard like they were on an early-evening stroll and not on the cusp of returning Asher to his body. It was more like speed walking, but the impatience banging against her skull and coursing through her body made it feel like they were dawdling over the lawn.

“Riley,” Asher said. He stopped walking, pulling her to a stop with him. He lifted a hand to his chest and grimaced.

“What’s wrong?”

“It hurts,” he managed to say before his fingers slipped through hers like water. His wide green eyes, beseeching and scared, met her gaze.

“Asher,” she yelled, uselessly reaching out to him. Her hands passed right through his arms, and she bit back the shout that desperately wanted to escape her when he disappeared.

“What’s happening?” Noah asked.

Riley swallowed and turned to face Asher’s friends. “He’s gone,” she got out through her tight and aching throat, somehow managing to get the two words out without her voice cracking.

“But he’s just back in his body, right?” Chris asked. “So let’s go find him.”

“Right,” Riley replied, but the empty space beside her felt like a missing limb. They’d been so close. Asher disappearing again then, and so soon after his last disappearance, felt wrong. “Let’s go.”

“See,” Ella said once they’d raced down the outside steps that led down to the basement. She’d taken her sunglasses off, and Riley wondered if she’d been wearing them to ease the symptoms of a migraine or if she’d only wanted to hide her puffy eyes. She pointed to the wooden door that was all that stood between them and Asher’s body.

Riley saw what she’d meant. It looked old, aged by time, and by what looked like water damage. Most of the white paint had peeled off it, leaving a sad excuse of a door that Noah kicked at without instruction. He aimed his foot below the rusted doorknob, and after several kicks that felt far too loud to Riley’s ears, the door gave in, swinging in with enough force that it banged against the inside wall.

“Impressive,” Chris said with an approving whistle, but Ella didn’t stick around to hear it.

She was already rushing into the basement, her phone held in front of her, its flashlight lighting her way. Noah cursed and ran in after her, and Riley and Chris were right on his heels.

Riley took only three steps through the door before coming to a stop. However innocent the outside of the house looked, it had been hiding something truly sinister.

She gulped, her gaze fixed on Asher’s prone body, the only thing in the cold and dark room besides candles, a bowl with rust-colored stains, and a discarded length of rope. Or at least they were the only things that could be seen in the dim lighting, the far walls of the basement nothing but pits of black even with the door open.

“Oh my god.”

A circle of lit candles surrounded him. There were five of them spaced evenly at the points of a pentagram that had been painted onto the concrete floor with something dark that Riley was hoping wasn’t blood. A symbol that reminded Riley of runes was similarly painted outside the circle-enclosed pentagram above Asher’s head, but it was the deep cuts on his arms and legs and his slashed and blood-stained shirt that stole her attention.

Some of the cuts had scabbed over, the blood drying on his skin and sealing the wound, but others hadn’t managed to heal. There was so much blood that Riley could smell it in the air, the sharp scent of iron hitting her nose and making her stomach turn. She wasn’t sure how he was alive, and she found herself staring at his chest, waiting for it to rise and fall with an inhale and exhale. She watched for the movement that would signal she hadn’t been gravely mistaken.

Only…it didn’t come. Riley stared and stared, but there was no rise and fall. No signs of life. She stumbled into the circle, falling to her knees beside him and touching her fingers to his neck. She felt nothing, so she moved her fingers an inch to the left and then to the right. And then back again.

She blinked back the moisture in her eyes, shook her head in denial, and tried again. There was nothing. No flutter beneath her fingers. No whisper of movement. Nothing.

“We have to call an ambulance,” she said, the words sounding strangely far away.

The paramedics could help him, she tried to convince herself. They could save him. Because she couldn’t have been wrong. Asher couldn’t be dead.

Except that he was.

Riley’s vision blurred, the scene in front of her swimming in the sheen of her tears. But Asher remained still. The kind of still that only the dead were capable of. The kind of still that made her want to scream into her palm until she lost her voice. The kind of still that made her want to plead with God.

So, she did.

I’ll do anything. Anything! If you just make him breathe.

Ella stepped over the candles and kneeled next to his body, shaking his shoulder so roughly that Riley wanted to scream at her to be careful. “Asher?” she asked, her voice breaking in a way that made Riley’s tears flow faster.

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