Ghosts of July (Shamans of the Divide, Book 1)

Chapter One

It took a second glance for me to realize she was dead.

Not the tired sort of dead, the way we describe the drivers who'd run 16 straight hours without stopping—no, she was the actual dead sort of dead.

The stringy hair and slow roll of her head from side to side should have tipped me off, but I was three hours into a five-hour shift and, besides, I wasn't expecting a ghost. 

Above the clink and scrape of silverware on dinner plates, she looked straight at me with vacant black eyes. When a tiny rivulet of blood dripped out of her nose and from the corners of her mouth, a swell of panic rose from the bottom of my stomach straight to the top of my throat and I couldn't do much but stare with an open mouth for a few torturous seconds. She didn't move either and made no sound.

 A third quick look around the diner and I understood that I was the only one who could see her and that's when I began to hyperventilate.

The breaths came quickly—too quickly—and the chirping noise I made earned me a few wary glances from a couple of exhausted drivers and some snide remarks from the table in Sherilee's section.

"What the hell is that wheezing thing she's doing?" Said the girl with long tawny hair with perfectly cut fringe bangs that hung in her eyes. Her name was Annabelle—I recognized her from Calculus, my first class at Winston Senior High when I transferred last semester. Anabelle hadn't bothered to be friendly then either, even as she copied off me on every test.

"Isn't that girl named April or something?" Annabelle continued and the girl across from her turned around to look. It was Hannah Lewis, all-state volleyball captain and first-class mean girl. "I think she sat by us in Government."

 It was then that the boy with longer black hair turned around to look at me. I remember thinking he had the soulful eyes of a puppy dog, cheesy, I know, seconds before I faded into a faint and hit the floor.

I don't think I was out long, just long enough to completely land on the diner's checkered floor and knock over a tub of dishes I'd tried to grab on to.

"Oh...fiddle!"

I heard Lem waddling over from the cash register and cringed at the old man's inability to say an actual curse word. At 64-years-old and just as round as he was tall, he wasn't exactly my knight in shining armor. He reached for my hand and fussed me up onto my feet.

"What happened?" He asked, dusting off my back unnecessarily. I shooed his hand away.

"That girl," I muttered, pointing toward the center of the diner. "She was just there—white dress, dark hair. Where'd she go?"

My eyes darted up and down the diner and I even searched the blind corners to the kitchen through the convex mirrors up on the ceiling.

"No, honey," Lem was shaking his head. "Nobody came in but the ones already sitting."

He meant Hannah and her friends. They were still laughing to each other as I stood there a few painful seconds longer with my mouth opening and closing like some pathetic fish-girl gasping for air.

They all laughed except for the dark-haired boy named Renn. I recognized him now from school and he was staring at me as though he were looking for something. Maybe he was trying to place me from school. Maybe he was considering calling the mental health hospital over in Evanston to come collect me. He never let me know.

When they were long gone, I finished my to-do list until my shift ended at 9:30     . p.m.

Nana was sitting at the linoleum counter top near the coffee station, doing the day's books. She greeted me without looking up when I sat next to her.