Chris Green - Only the Good Die Young

Right away, I could feel a teeny bit of strength seep out of me because of the exertion. It wasn’t that much, but I’d have to pace myself.

I knocked only twice more, louder this time, following it with another vocal plea, a louder whisper this time.

“Gavin!”

He started awake, his eyes wide as he fixed them on the ceiling.

Now that I had his attention, a thrill shot through me, smoky giddiness, reminding me of what it’d been like to be high.

This haunting stuff was actually working!

I closed my eyes and thought of the smell of orange blossoms. Would this work, too? I’d read that ghosts could produce smells, so why couldn’t I?

But an even bigger question was: was the smell of Elizabeth’s perfume subtle?

I wouldn’t use too much of it. Just enough to make him wonder if it was really there.

He sniffed, looked around the room. I swear I could hear his heart beating.

“Elizabeth?” he asked.

At her name, I froze, motionless against the wall. If I’d had a body, I probably would’ve looked like my spine was pasted to the plaster.

I’d done it—re-created the perfume I’d read she wore. One of her anonymous friends had talked about it being something she’d missed about Elizabeth, along with her sunny smile and her laugh.

When Gavin rubbed his bare arms, I knew that my temperature was getting to him. Every muscle in his arms and back was tense as I looked down on him from the wall.

Should I say one more thing, just to make sure that telltale heart was up and running in his conscience?

Slowly, I allowed my essence to peel away from the wall, slanting down toward him until I was just above his head.

He looked up, like he really could feel me.

“Why?” I asked, ruffling his hair with the word, my voice sounding reedy, sad, and maybe a little bit like an accusation.

He bolted out of the bed, turning around, like he could find me.

Fear. I could feel it. But there was also anger there, and that was even better. It increased the energy in me, around me.

But when he couldn’t find anything to blame for the sounds and the perfume, his fear decreased, and it felt like something had pushed me lower, down and down, until I was floating just above the bed.

He’d overcome his emotions frighteningly fast.

“All right, Noah,” he said. “That’s funny. If I look around here and find those minispeakers and microphones you put in Wendy’s room last month to scare the shit out of her, I’m going to wring your neck.”

What?

No. It wasn’t supposed to go like this. He was supposed to be primed for more, not thinking that his younger brother was fooling around.

Was the rich guy going to get out of this haunting, just as he’d gotten out of paying for a bloody crime? Not even.

I was pushing the limits of subtlety when I closed my eyes again, imagining the orange blossom perfume. Noah couldn’t replicate that .

Then I whispered, “Not… Noah…”

When he laughed, a cutting “bullshit” sound, that was all I could take.

Before I could tell myself it was a bad idea, I rushed over to Gavin, stopping in front of him, shivering with a pent-up frustration that had come on me so fast that it consumed me.

Not going to get away with it. Not this time .

I made contact with his upper arm, just as I’d done with Amanda Lee, wanting so badly to connect with Gavin’s mind as I’d briefly linked with hers before she’d shut me out.

It was like I’d entered him, then bitten down on a frayed wire, and I shook with a rapid succession of thoughts that roared through his mind.

A flash of Elizabeth’s light hair.

A laugh that sounded like a song.

Elizabeth crying softly.

Elizabeth crying hysterically.

Blood on her pale skin.

A slap from her open hand, a desperate punch to the chest from her closed fist, followed by another and another—

The images cut off so sharply that it felt like my stomach had been pulled out and some of my juice drained.

Weaker now, I took a second to see Gavin backing away, his gaze on where I was, like he really could see me.

I didn’t move. I actually couldn’t do it very well because something had taken a dose of energy right out of me.

“What the hell?” he whispered, his face a mask of true terror now.

Even if I was a ghost and I didn’t need oxygen, I went through the automatic motion of holding my breath. I faintly rose upward, toward the ceiling, planting myself there.

Had I already blown it? Shit .

Gavin’s gaze stayed on where I’d just been, so obviously he couldn’t see me now. But had he before?

Had I somehow materialized for a split second and that’s why I’d lost energy so fast?

If I had, I wasn’t sure how I’d managed it, and when he went to a chair, yanked a shirt off it, put it on, and then opened his bedroom door to exit, I stayed put, fears running through me.

Did he have any idea what was going on?

Had I gotten through to him in any way?

I floated toward an electrical outlet, absorbing some of the charge. The longer I stayed put, the more I gathered my energy again and came to my senses. He couldn’t have known a ghost was visiting him. Most rational people wouldn’t believe it at first, even if the proof had been right in the same room. I would back off from him for a while, letting his conscience go to work.

Slightly renewed by the electricity, I floated into the hallway, tracking him.

I found him downstairs in the study with all the lights on, his hands clutching the ends of his leather chair’s armrests.

On his lap, a pearl-handled gun rested.

Good instincts, I thought. But guns aren’t going to get me .

Then again, I didn’t know any ghosts who could tell me any different, so maybe I’d have to take a bullet to find out.

I thought about what I’d seen in his head: Elizabeth crying, Elizabeth striking out at him. I couldn’t tell if those had been her last moments, if she’d fought back like I had during my own death, but the pain they carried had removed all sense of sympathy from me.

As I retreated from the room, I knew that I’d done my job for now, starting to set wrong to right.

It’d just be a matter of time before I could do the same thing for myself.

• • •

Feeling pretty satisfied, I whizzed back to Amanda Lee’s, thinking about whether I should try to tap on one of her windows again so I could tell her about my success.

Was it worth breaking another pane?

When I got there, I stopped by the hole-marred window first, noticing that she’d taped up the damage from the shears. I expected it’d be fixed by tomorrow, since I couldn’t imagine Amanda Lee tolerating even a day of something broken in her home.

The light wasn’t on in there anyway, so I took a whirl around her two-story home, thinking she was tucked away in bed, until I found an illuminated upper window in the back.

As usual, the curtain was drawn.

But not all the way.

I had a teensy view of a room that was so awesome that it could’ve come from the pages of I Have Splendid Taste—Check Me Out magazine. I could almost smell jasmine incense by looking at the mosquito netting that covered the exotic circle-shaped bed, the shadow from the blades of a ceiling fan slanting over the white spread.

When I saw Amanda Lee, dressed in a long white nightgown, crossing my field of vision, I peered around outside for something I could manipulate for a tap on the window.

Nothing.

But I’d done some fine knocking back at the Edgetts’, so I shaped myself into that fist again and rapped.

Knock, knock .