Page 10 of Ghosted AF
In the few days I had spent with him, I’d come to realize that Rylee had a habit of talking himself into circles. If I took the timeto untangle what he said, however, there was usually a fair bit of logic hiding under the mess.
“All we know is that he left in the middle of a job without his tools,” I reminded him. “There is no evidence to suggest that something fatal happened to him.”
No evidence…like a dead body.
“Except his ghost.”
I gritted my teeth, but I couldn’t hold back my growl. “There is no ghost.”
The words still hung between us when a loud crash sounded from the back of the unit. In response, Rylee yelped and launched across the sofa, plastering himself against my side as he clung to my arm.
“You were saying?” he asked, his voice wavering.
My arm burned where his hands clung to me, my skin stinging with the spark of electricity. This close, his earthy scent saturated the air, filling my lungs with every breath, and making my mouth water. Even tainted with the stench of anxiety, it was no less potent because of it.
“It’s not a ghost,” I reiterated through gritted teeth as I gently pried him off my arm. “Stay here. I’ll go check it out.”
“What if you get possessed?”
He sounded so damn earnest I didn’t have the heart to laugh, but I damn sure had the urge. The guy had a lot of ideas about how he thought the supernatural world worked, none of them remotely accurate.
We’d talk about it later.
Pushing up from the sofa, I paused to look at him. He might be wrong about a lot of things, but that didn’t lessen the fear.
With a barely audible sigh, I crouched in front of him and took his hands, surprised by how cold they felt. “Nothing is going to happen. I’m just going to check out what caused that crash, andI’ll be right back.” Chuckling, I cupped his jaw and brushed my thumb across his cheek. “Unpossessed.”
He leaned into the touch, his eyelids fluttering closed briefly before he opened them wide to meet my gaze again. “Promise?”
Caught in those endless pools of cerulean, I had the insane urge to lean in, to close the small distance between us and brush our lips together. Instead, I did something I hadn’t done in almost two hundred years.
I surrendered and looked away.
“Promise,” I said, my voice strained, thick with an emotion I didn’t understand. “Wait here.”
Shoving to my feet, I stared down at him for another moment before forcing myself to walk away. Still, I paused at the edge of the kitchen and glanced over my shoulder, fighting the urge to return and comfort him again.
I turned away and stepped into the darkened hallway.
The crash had come from Rylee’s room, and it had echoed with enough volume to suggest something substantial had fallen. Not furniture being toppled over, but maybe a shelf giving out, or an overstuffed box in the closet surrendering to gravity.
Nearing the open bedroom door, I tensed when I felt a presence behind me, the scent of lavender and sage drifting on the air. “What are you doing?”
Rylee hovered at the threshold, just beyond the line where the light met the shadows. Wide-eyed but with a stubborn set to his jaw, he clutched the handle of a frying pan in both hands, holding it up near his shoulder like a baseball bat.
“You’re not supposed to split up,” he whispered. “Everyone knows that’s how people die in horror movies.”
His reference to the genre actually explained a lot.
“Then it’s a good thing this isn’t a movie,” I countered as I moved cautiously toward the bedroom door.
A sliver of moonlight spilled out into the hallway through the crack, the glow dancing off the dust particles that hung in the air. Each step sent a chorus of floorboards creaking beneath my feet, the sound barely audible over the rattling and rustling coming from inside the room.
“Be careful,” Rylee hissed.
I choked back a sigh and reached out to push the door open wider. “Nothing is going to—”
I jerked my hand back, narrowly avoiding a broken finger when the door snapped closed in my face. Frowning, growing more pissed off by the second, I grabbed the scarred knob.
