#GRUDGEGIRL

Chapter 2

Jia had been riding for less than twenty five minutes when her head started pounding. First a distant rumble that morphed into a series of hard thuds; as if someone was bashing away at the inside of her temples with a sledgehammer. She eased off the highway and onto a short paved road leading to a Shell – Wendy's rest stop. One of the dozens dotting the roadside of highway 401 from Sarnia in the west to Cornwall near the Quebec border in the east.

She pulled the big Suzuki next to a trashcan in an empty corner of the parking lot and shut down the engine. A roil of nausea thundered through her stomach, and Jia tore off her helmet just in time to vomit into the bin. The sour stench of rotting garbage burned through her nostrils and she puked one more time. She dropped her helmet onto the pavement as her stomach pitched with a series of dry heaves when a familiar female voice echoed through her head.

"You bring shame upon your family," the woman's voice hissed like a rattlesnake about to sink its fangs into its prey. "You will never rest because I know what you have done. I should have seen the darkness in you from your first day and your first breath."

"Fuck. Off. Mother." Jia growled as she lifted her head from the garbage can. A thin slither of drool dangled from her bottom lip as she dug her fingers into the rusty metal barrel.

"Your language." The voice seethed with anger. "You would curse your own mother?"

"Did curse ... not would!" Jia spun around to lash out at the voice that was always a constant reminder of how far she had fallen.

There was just no way the voice could be real, she thought. It was an inner dialogue, that's all. The dead couldn't infect someone's mind. They couldn't own someone's body and soul, could they?

Her parents had been dead for nearly as long as Jia had been on the road.

Another wave of nausea pounded through her bowels and Jia gazed through a film of tears at a teenage girl dressed in a poodle skirt standing next to the Suzuki. She wore a sweater draped around her powder pink blouse. Jia shuddered when she saw the bloodstains.

She almost threw up again when she saw the girl's sliced up face; as if the killer had used a box cutter and had been in a rush to get the job done.

"Shit," Jia said angrily as the specter reached out and gestured to follow. "I'm not ready yet ... it's too soon."

The spirit continued to motion for Jia to follow but she wasn't going to budge, even though she knew that she would pay a high price for her refusal. Instead, she climbed back aboard her motorcycle and slipped her helmet back on. She gazed again at the ghost to see that it had started to flicker like a candle flame next to a drafty window. It was an old ghost and the old ones either flickered or faded before they disappeared and went to wherever the hell old ghosts go. Jia knew all spirits were often little more than faint echoes of spectral energy. But some ghosts were more active, like the ones she'd called haunts. Spirits maintaining a link to this plane of existence, usually those taken before their time, and almost always as the result of an accident like a car crash. Why fate or some cosmic judge and jury selected Jia to bear witness to the pleas for justice from murdered women was a mystery. And it was always women or girls, never men.

In four short years, the dead had reached out to a new emissary for those restless spirits whose lives were snuffed out . She'd been seeing the dead since she turned three. That's when Jia's mother knew there was something different about her only child and when she first sensed the shadow clinging to Jia like a thick cloud of smog over a major city.