Page 43 of Seducing Jenny
She wrung her hands nervously in her lap. “Is that a problem for you?”
He gave his head a quick shake as if to snap himself out of his shock. “She…go on.”
She paused a moment, then continued. “When we were kids, Sarah kept getting in trouble for her ghosts, and eventually, she ended up committed for a year in her teens because a ghost made it look like she tried to kill herself.” She visibly shuddered. “I refused to speak of the ghosts after that.”
“And yet you speak of them now,” Mal said gruffly.
She nodded. “Sarah was taken from Earth by Jacaranda Cozz and his crew. Deacon Ladrang needed a conduit, found out about her, and I guess they hit it off. The three of them—”
“Are united,” he said, clearly aware of who they all were. “Continue.”
Her eyes widened in surprise. “You know about that?”
His jaw flexed. “Yes.”
Her chin jutted out a bit. “I’m not the only one with secrets then, am I?”
“Certainly not.” He leaned back in his seat, his demeanor cool. “Tell me more.”
“Fine,” she said, almost defensively. “Sarah ran into a big problem here on Halla. Well, a lot of them. Apparently, she’s a special kind of conduit called a contra. Do you know—”
He nodded once, his eyes giving nothing of his true emotions away. “I am familiar.”
“Right, so being a contra gives her certain abilities the rest of us don’t have. One ghost in particular, Rex Terian, was causing her and other conduits a lot of problems.”
Mal’s entire body tensed. His eyes became icy, and a muscle feathered in his jaw as it clenched.
Jade paused, before she asked, “You know him?”
“Go on,” he bit out, ignoring her question, and I wondered what he was hiding.
She absently touched her tail, something I noticed she did when she was anxious. “Anyway, this Rex guy was fighting Sarah, Jac, Deacon, Deacon’s family and friends, and the conduits. He wanted them all dead. So, she did the only thing she could think of. Since ghosts can possess people on Halla, she…reversed it. As a contra, she was able to forcehimintoherbody. It worked. It stopped the battle.”
Unmistakable pride threaded her voice, and I could tell how much she admired her sister in that moment. But the brightness in her eyes dimmed just as quickly.
“But once Rex was inside her, they started to lose themselves in each other. That happens with possession sometimes, and it got bad. So Deacon and his crew came to Earth to get me and Elizabeth, to bring us here. When Sarah saw us—us being her family—she was able to remember who she was. It helped her break free of Rex and sever the connection.”
“And then he was murdered in cold blood,” Mal muttered.
I cut in to try and smooth things over. “He…I mean, I guess, technically, at the moment—”
Mal’s steely eyes cut me off. “If you have to addtechnicallyto something, Tiger, then it’s not that technical. He was murdered. In his Ladrian body, and in his ghost body.”
I held my ground. “The person who killed his ghost, she had her reasons.”
He narrowed his gaze at me, and I did not like being on the receiving end of his anger. “What reason is there to kill someone in cold blood?”
“Rex had slaughtered her family in front of her when she was a child,” I said, my voice hard. “So I would say that’s a damned good reason.”
He looked taken aback. “What are you talking about?”
“End of the war,” I said, repeating the story I knew from Deacon. “Her family lived on an island Justice wanted to gift to his generals for doing a good job during the war. They were just poor farmers, and Rex slaughtered them all like livestock in front of this poor girl, so if you think that’s not reason enough to—”
Mal held up a hand to stop me. “Understood.” His expression faltered. “I knew Rex had done some questionable things that I was unaware of. But I didn’t know it was anything quite that repugnant.”
Jade straightened in her seat. “That is the kind of person my sister was brave enough to face in the most intimate of ways possible. That’s the kind of person our mother raised us to be. She raised us on her own. My father…”
Her voice trailed off, but my heart raced at what she’d been about to reveal. I hadn’t realized she meant it when she said she wanted to tell Mal everything.
