Ghost Silk (Ghost Perfume, Book 2) | ✔

14 - Jump through hoops - Part 1

Rose (continued)

I begged Alexander to stop the car, because the ocean was right there.

We took a few steps off the quiet road onto the beach. The earth was mostly rock, not as sandy as I thought beaches were supposed to be. It descended sharply to the shifting water's edge.

The air smelled like salt and fish.

I admired the endless, shifting blue ripples of the water. Its waves were smooth, but here and there the sun hit the water at just the right angle to shoot off in sparkles. Strange to imagine that under this sparkling, ever-moving surface, crabs and other things scuttled on the ocean floor, and deeper out, fish swam in a dark freezing world. I wanted to put my feet in and see if the water was really as cold as people said it was, even though the sun shined on its surface.

The dead flew down to the ocean, while the Alistairs came to stand on either side of me. The wind blew their hair into disarray and woke up the blood under their skin.

They stood patiently without asking why we'd stopped.

Lukas looked unimpressed. His gaze lingered on a couple cans of soda, glinting sadly on the sandy rocks.

"Who litters a beach?" he snapped, unusually upset. "People are disgusting. This should be illegal."

"It is illegal, Lukas," Michael said. He picked up a can and tossed it at a tilting pair of trash cans some meters back. It landed perfectly inside the one marked for recycling.

"Then it's badly enforced, isn't it?" Lukas threw the other can.

"I've never been to the beach before," I said.

"We could go to a better one someday," Lukas said, dusting sand off his hands.

Michael's eyes traced the horizon. The tension that lived in his temples eased away. Alexander balanced on a rock, his hands in his pockets.

Gabriel wasn't even looking at the water. He was looking at me.

"You have the prettiest hair," he said.

My hair was curling from the wind and getting in my eyes. Those strands that I could see were lit to a reddish shine by the sun.

"You have the prettiest eyes," I said honestly, and immediately regretted it when the world's four prettiest pairs of eyes focused on me. There was surprise in Michael's, offense in Lukas's, and derision in Alexander's.

But Gabriel's lovely sloping eyes crinkled at their edges as he smiled at me, and I could only blush at him like an idiot.

Alexander threw his arm around my shoulders and turned us back to the car. "Don't we have something important to do? Soon we'll have wasted half the day."

"Yes. Let's move." Jackal's gaze bounced between me and Gabriel.

Alexander held the front passenger's side door open for me and practically shoved me in. Lukas said sharply "Rosie sits in the back again, I'm not squeezing in there with two of you," but Michael settled the argument by closing the passenger side door on me and coming around to the driver's seat. The other Alistairs fit themselves into the back, Gabriel laughing under his breath.

Jackal hovered practically in my lap, Jane took Gabriel's lap, Ellie sat on Lukas, and Astor and Ilium floated near the roof.

It was alright for the Alistairs, they couldn't see ghosts. I scowled at Jackal. His nose was a hair from mine. "Can you get off me? You were on the roof before, you can go back there."