Page 34 of The Imaginary Friend's Obsession

Dorian, one shaking hand still raised to defend himself, blinks out. Then he appears again, on his feet in front of the viewing window. Two of his arms wrap around his torso as he looks around, shaking his head. His chest rises and falls in a deep breath, and he reaches up, touching his mask as if reassuring himself it’s still there. Then he looks at me and inclines his body in a graceful bow of thanks before disappearing again.

My legs go weak with relief. I sink to my knees on the tile.

“You…stopped it.” Ezra stares down at me. “But… I’ve never…”

While he struggles for words, I pull my knees to my chest, struggling to calm my breathing. “He’s done this before?”

“Yes. Most ghosts do at their time of death,” Ezra says, still staring into the now-empty cell. “The first time you mentioned the scratching in your childhood, I thought that was why.”

I swallow back revulsion as the realization hits me.The scratching. That’s what was happening under my bed every night when I was a kid. He was reliving a horrible, painful death. “He didn’t do it every night,” I say. “Well, he did at the beginning, but then it stopped, until now…”

Ezra frowns. He turns away from the cell and looks at me. “Repetitive behavior is standard for ghosts. They’re echoes of the past; they fall into old patterns. They don’t…changelike this.” His brow furrows in thought. “But many things about Dorian aren’t quite how a ghost behaves.”

“I’ve been telling you,” I whisper, “he’sdifferent.”

“But he behaved like a textbook poltergeist at the beginning,” Ezra says, still staring at me, likeI’mthe puzzle here instead of Dorian. “And then….” Understanding breaks across his face. “Something changed him.”

“What?” I ask, though I have an idea of what he’s about to say.

“You.”

Chapter Sixteen

Ezra says he needs time to think, and I need time to rest. My head is still spinning from everything that’s happened tonight, so I head home with his promise to alert me to any changes in Dorian’s behavior and reconvene on Monday with a plan to move forward.

After being near Dorian once—feeling him, touching him, being held by him—I am empty without him. For the rest of the weekend Iachefor him, alone in my house. Sometimes I crawl into bed and close my eyes and try to imagine him here, his body curled around mine. It soothes me in a way I haven’t felt in a very long time.

Dorian.My Dorian.How could I have forgotten him? Now he plagues my thoughts like a craving. Like an obsession. He is mine and I am his, two halves of one heart, and it is painful to have been so close only to be ripped away from one another again.

It doesn’t matter how he’s changed, or what he’s done. There is nothing he could do that I wouldn’t be capable of forgiving. I am incomplete without him. I need him back, and I am willing to do whatever it takes to ensure it happens.

As I drift off to sleep, I feel a weight at my back. Fingers combing through my hair. Breath on my neck. It’s almost like he’s really here.

* * *

Making it through Sunday, knowing Dorian is in the cell waiting for me, is agonizing. I pace around the house, keeping myself busy with dusting and spot cleaning. It does little to calm the emotions that stir beneath my skin like an angry sea.

But my feelings aren’t the only thing that have become volatile. I’m not sure if it was my contact with Dorian that awoke something in me, or if my emotions are doing it, but my once-subdued powers are roiling just beneath the surface now. When I reach for the duster, it leaps into my hand. When I try to make tea, the mug cracks in my hands, pieces of porcelain floating around me before tumbling to the floor.

Flashes of memory haunt me along with the surges of power. I see Dorian everywhere in fleeting recollections. Memories of him sitting on the counter beside me while I cook dinner, chasing me through the hallways in play, sleeping next to me in bed.

But that one important night is still a giant hole in my memory.

As I climb into bed, I squeeze my eyes shut and try to remember. I search my mind for any scraps about that night. My mother and father killed in front of me…how does one forget something like that? I had to have seen something, felt something, heard something.

When I strain, I can hear a whisper of something, just out of reach—

Step. Scraaape.

I blink, and suddenly, sunlight is streaming through the window.

“What?” I whisper. I raise a hand to rub my face and stop at the sight of dried blood coating my fingers. When I look down at myself, my once-white nightgown is a mess of rusty gore. I lurch out of bed and rush to the bathroom.

I pause at the sight of myself in the mirror: ghastly pale, with blood crusted over my nose and lips. As nauseating as it is, it floods me with relief.

A nosebleed. Just another nosebleed.

Still, I tremble through my shower, unable to banish the cold from my bones.

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