Page 14 of Keeping Sarah

“Someoneelse, Omen,” I corrected her. “She is a person.”

“Forgive me, but I don’t know if that’s true anymore.” She sat back, crossing her arms. “The thing about possession, if it goes on for too long, it can work like an addiction or an infestation.”

The thought made my muscles tense, but I needed her to clarify her meaning. “In what way?”

“A thousand different ways. When you make room in your mind for a whole other person with a history and memories, it is strenuous. It’s killed people to be possessed, just by virtue of trying to make that room for them,” she explained. “For the people who get possessed and survive the initial possession, the ghost who possessed them can become a part of them, if the possession lasts for too long. Depending on the ghost possessing them…” She shook her head and stared into the night in front of my ship. “They can make things verypleasantfor their host.”

“Pleasant in what way?” I asked, not caring for the sound of that.

Omen glanced back at me. “Skilled ghosts, the ones who know what they’re doing, they can trigger chemicals in the host’s brain, provoking an addiction to the possession. Or they can even trigger sneezes, seizures, orgasms—"

“Orgasms?” I echoed.

She exhaled a frustrated breath. “How did I know you were going to latch onto that part of the conversation?”

I shrugged. “When you were alive, you once said I was a vile life support system for the best dick you ever had, so—"

She laughed. “I’d forgotten all about that.”

“It was hard for me to forget.” I gave her a mischievous grin. “I’m the best dick you ever had.”

“I also called you vile.”

“I tend to look on the bright side of things when I can.”

“One of your better qualities.”

I thought about what she had just told me about the possible addiction, which I found unnerving. I didn’t like the question I was about to ask, but I needed to know what we might be dealing with. “Do you really think that Sarah is going to end up hooked on Rex?”

Omen fidgeted in her seat. “I would like to say no. But I truly don’t know. This concerns me for two main reasons: one—I like Sarah and she possessed Rex to save all of us, so the thought is terrible, but also, two—if she were to become addicted to him and not want to separate, and her powers keep growing the way they have been—"

Oh, fuck.“Then Rex could become the most powerful tyrant we’ve ever seen,” I whispered. The words echoed in my heart and scared the shit out of me. “Deacon and I could lose the woman we love to the man we hate. Rex could destroy Halla…oh gods.”

“Which is why I’ve been a bit testy.”

I increased the ship’s speed by triple, testing the belief that a faster trip through atmo could cause harm to a planet. It had always been just a theory, as far as I knew, but Omen shouted, “Slow it down, Jac.”

“What? Why?”

She pointed to a rear monitor. Treetops behind us were on fire from the discharge of fuel shooting out of my ship’s turbine.

“Shit! What do we—"

“I’ll get Abyss on it, don’t bother to stop.”

She left for wherever the conduits were. I slowed down to avoid expanding the forest fire I’d ignited. A moment later, I watched on the rear monitor as rain came out of nowhere and doused the flames.

Omen rejoined me once it was over. “Fast is good. Fast enough to light the trees—"

“Not good,” I said sheepishly. “I know.”

Hours into the journey, I saw smoke rising ahead. “Okay, that fire is not mine.”

I slowed on our approach to the smoke. Something metal shone at the treetops when I flashed our lamps at it. Dark blue metal. My stomach flipped with terror.

“Fuck, hang on,” I snarled, and drove us straight toward the nearest opening in the trees, some thirty meters away. Nearly a crash landing. I was out of my ship and running before I had a chance to tell anyone what was happening. Thankfully, they all knew enough to follow me.

I roared in the dark, “Sarah!”

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