#GRUDGEGIRL

Chapter 11

Jia woke up to find her head propped up on a pair of pillows. The remains of their late day meal swished through her stomach, and she noticed a bucket on the floor next to her bed which Jia was pretty confident she'd be using before she'd manage to get back onto her feet. Her head ached so much it brought tears to her eyes, and there was a stab of burning pain at the base of her skull. She remembered seeing the four ghosts. She remembered raging at them to the point where she was ready to end her life. She gazed around the stamp sized bedroom in a near panic – where was her gun? Where was Izzy?"

"Hello? Izzy ... I'm okay now, I think."

The old biker walked the length of the trailer and stood in the small doorway. He looked down at Jia with genuine concern on his face. "You are most definitely not okay. I had to knock you out because you stuck the barrel of a gun under your chin and your finger was on the trigger. You were yelling and barking away like a crazy woman, and I did what I had to do to stop you from blowing the top of your fucking head off."

Jia clenched her jaw tightly. She had lost control, and that never happened before. But then again, she hadn't seen shades with this kind of frequency before so she pushed her anger at herself aside and considered the man standing in front of her. She had told Izzy that she saw the dead and he hadn't judged her. He'd revealed that he once saw a ghost himself, so it was clear that he believed her. But had he seen what she'd seen on the road into Capri Lodge?

"There were four of them," she said, avoiding his gaze. She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and pushed back another wave of nausea. "One old spirit – it had to be over a hundred years old. And the other three ... one of them looked pretty fresh. It's not supposed to happen like this. It has always been one shade at a time."

Izzy padded to the kitchen and came back moments later with a tumbler full of whiskey. He handed it to Jia, and she gulped it back without even grimacing. He lit a cigarette and handed it to her. "Neither of us knows why this shit is happening to you. We're both staggering through some strange, dark territory but I do know one thing."

"What's that?"

"If you killed all those men, I believe your reasons were sound," he said flatly. "I know that wouldn't save your ass from the needle if you were in a country that had the death penalty so be thankful for a few small blessings. But killing even one person — shit, that just messes with you on a whole lot of different levels. I can't even imagine how you carry the deaths of six dudes, even if they had it coming."

Jia stood up and immediately regretted it. The room began to spin, and she leaned against the wall of the trailer with one hand to steady herself. "It's hard to explain, Izzy. You wouldn't understand."

"Never said I did, but I'm trying to."

She still looked a little disoriented, so Izzy took the cigarette out of her hand in case she passed out again and then placed a meaty hand on her shoulder. Jia noticed the faded letters tattooed on each finger spelled a woman's name; E-L-L-Y.

"Who's Elly?" she said, dropping back onto her mattress.

"Someone who mattered to me when I didn't matter that much to myself," he answered quietly, handing Jia her cigarette again. "She's gone now. Long gone. Listen, Jia ... I don't know shit about ghosts or the why's of everything you're dealing with."

She took a deep drag on her cigarette and then dropped the smoldering butt into her now empty tumbler. She glanced up at Izzy knowing full well that he was struggling with the sheer enormity of what she had done and she wanted more than anything to somehow find a way for the biker to see the world through her own eyes.

It wasn't that she enjoyed killing; if anything, she put her life on the line every time she stalked a murderer. She could just as easily wind up as dead as any of the six ghosts that forced her into acting on their behalf. And where was the fairness in all this? Why did the shades even come to her in the first place? What made her so special that she had to become a human proxy for the dead who can no longer act on their own?