Ghost Perfume | ✔

Chapter 6: Haunt Me (Part 1)

I rose up slowly from the sleep of the dead. My body ached, a low muted ache that pulsed everywhere, even in the thin-skinned tips of my fingers and the bottoms of my feet.

But I'd been in a lot more pain - something had been seriously wrong in my chest ... and now it was healed. Had healed on its own.

Even half-asleep, I felt deeply relieved. It was like realizing that a nightmare was just a nightmare. My spool of thread had regenerated on its own. Good. Good. Thank god ...

I was warm and loose-limbed under a blanket that felt like a cloud.

The memory of last night filtered gradually into my thoughts.

I shot up, my heart hammering. I surveyed the room and probed my senses for the nearby presence of the dead. But I couldn't detect Jackal, or any ghost.

A ghost had tried to take over my body. It was like a bad horror movie had overtaken my real life.

And there'd been a physical effect. Blood had poured out of my pores as I'd expelled him.

And there'd been witnesses, of a sort.

My new friends.

Alexander had destroyed the front door.

Lukas had brushed my hair, after I washed the blood out.

Michael's gloved fingers had trailed fire on my ribs ...

I checked my arms and under my pajamas. My skin was mottled with what looked like bruises two or three weeks old. Almost gone!

I collapsed back against the pillow. What did they think of me now? How did last night explain itself to Lukas and Alexander? Had they told their brothers? Were they still my friends? I was beginning to accumulate a towering debt with the Alistairs. Did they care for me more now that I showed I needed more care? Or was I too weird, too high-maintenance?

Was friends even the right word?

I was closer to a charity case to the good doctor, the good neighbor, the good boss. Wasn't I?

Wasn't I Tommy's little sister to Gabriel?

My mind, brutal, showed me that occupied look in Michael's eyes as he turned away from me, the first time I'd glimpsed him in the pub; thoughts I couldn't guess had swum into his aristocratic gaze and I'd felt a little like a peasant looking at royalty - a figure very far from me, whose concerns were too great in scope for me to understand.

I thought helplessly of Alexander's drawled It's not your scene down there, drunk girl. I'd felt it - from what a distance he looked down on me.

Gabriel's amusement when he snorted and said You'll have to catch us out. Of course he was amused. They read me much better than I read them. They'd been humoring me with that card game. I wondered what I'd been like, under impaired self-awareness, that I would die from embarrassment to see from their eyes. Red-faced? Slurring? Slow to understand?

Lukas eyeing me in the pub with an arch of the brow, saying focus on the here and now till you get back home. He wasn't my friend. He saw me as someone who needed watching over. Babysitting.

My wet eyes sought the great portal, my gold and cruel friend.

It shimmered at me, a mesmerizing gleam in the trace of its circular edges. It very faintly pulsed.

I faintly heard the music it only sang to me.

I lay my head on my knees, smiling bittersweetly at it.

The point, I thought, the point was that I wasn't a little girl or a drunk fool or a sick child, I was nothing like the impression I may have made on my amused, aristocratic friends ... so I could correct their impression.