Haunted Redemption by Rebecca Royce
“I know. I’ve wanted to say something in the past. You seemed really invested in keeping things to yourself, and I am not one to push on this matter. Grayson is clear. He doesn’t need energy work. I’m not sure what’s going on.”
I touched her arm. “If it had simply been a matter of his encountering dark energy that caused him to be clogged up, I would have cleared that out myself. My children have never needed clearing simply by living with me. The dark stays away from them. Even more so now that my parents are around. Dex is having visions, but we’re working it out. If I’d thought Grayson’s issues were anything other than human related, I’d have handled it long ago.”
She nodded. “Have you … that is to say … I’m seeing a lot more problems. Kids who had nothing supernatural in their life seem to be carrying heaviness around. My mother used to call it a Cascade.”
I jolted at the word. I didn’t know why hearing it made dread form in my stomach. Okay, I’d seen a Cascade myself and cleared a demon all within the same week when most practitioners were lucky if they saw two solo ghosts a week. I’d only been on the job for days and already Austin felt like it stood on one of Buffy’s Hellmouths.
“I’m only recently back in the game. If there’s something going on, I really don’t know about it yet.”
She bit her lower lip. “Well, we’ll have to keep each other in the loop. I’m going to keep working on Grayson. Divorce is so hard on anyone.”
The mention of the dissolution of my marriage brought the current situation front and center. “Look, if Levi knew what you could do, I don’t know what he’ll say. I’m not lying to him anymore.” Except about how Malcolm made me want to become a sex goddess or a nymphomaniac. “But he’s not like us.”
“You know that Gray is, don’t you? All of your children. Very powerful little forces.”
She couldn’t have harmed me more if she hit me over the head with a pole. “No. I didn’t. Feeling other people’s abilities is not one of mine. Not unless we’re both using at the same time. Even then I don’t know that I could feel a seer. When Dex experiences his visions, I don’t feel anything. You say Gray and Molly have the gift? Do you know in what way?”
Dr. Bloom sighed loudly. “If only I did. I’m sorry. I won’t know before they know, and I imagine you’ll see it first.”
Wow, this was going to be a really fun dinner conversation with Levi. I had a feeling dinner was going to require a lot of wine.
****
Levi looked really handsome in his slacks and his collared shirt. We almost never went downtown to eat—or at least we hadn’t when we’d been together—so when he’d pulled off Highway 183 to 35 and headed south, I was shocked. I’d always loved tapas, and he didn’t disappoint when we arrived at a small, cozy restaurant that served the shared small plates for us to dine on.
Somewhere in the back of the restaurant a woman cackled, and a low sounding string instrument I couldn’t identify—I really knew nothing about music—strummed away, played by a man in a dark suit I’d seen heading to the bathroom on his break.
Levi had been very quiet since I’d let him know about the kids in the car. He wasn’t surprised, just disappointed.
I sipped my wine. Perhaps I had enough liquid courage to press forward. Or maybe I’d just had enough brooding for one lifetime.
“You want to try to get back together. You’ve been saying as much for a week.”
His blue eyes met mine. “Thinking it even longer.”
The wine we were drinking was a beautiful, dark purple color. Like music, I knew nothing about what made one bottle better than another. I preferred red to white, and I seemed to prefer the Pinot Noirs to the Cabernet Sauvignons. There were other kinds; however I was happy to sip whatever Levi ordered. We were compatable that way.
“Because you hate the dating pool out there?”
He sighed loudly. “Because you’re my wife.”
“Ex.” I wasn’t doing this verbal dance with him tonight. “If you really want to try to be together again, then we need less fighting, less sadness, less you brooding over every small thing. I need to know you’ve actually forgiven me, and I have to work on getting to where I am one hundred percent not angry at you. Also, a little romance wouldn’t hurt. Rolling around on the floor together doesn’t count.”
His eyes widened slightly. “Romance, huh?”
I smiled. “Imagine that. I mean, I know we were married for a long time. Maybe we lost it. But once upon a time, I swear we used to know how to do romance. Like”—I set down my cup—“I could tell you that you look so incredibly handsome tonight you make my heart skip. You get better looking every year. When you smile, and part of your lips raise slightly to the left, it makes me want to just put kisses all over your face.”
Color painted his cheeks. He looked down at the table before he outright grinned at me. I remembered this Levi. I’d dated him a hundred years ago—or at least it felt like it had been that long ago.
“You’re always the smartest person in any room but so kind you never make anyone feel like they’re less than you. I loved basking in the glow of your sheer goodness. You have this dirty sense of humor no one sees unless they really know you, and—”
He squeezed my fingers. “Stop. You know I don’t like to be the center of attention.”
“You’ve always been the center of my world. You and the kids.”
Levi brought my hand to his mouth and kissed my palm lightly. “If I start talking about all the reasons I love you, you’re going to say that I just did it because you did.”
I rubbed my foot up his leg just as the waiter arrived with our food. I expected him to grin, but instead he gently nudged my foot away. “We’re in public.”
I stared down at the cheese plate we were going to share now. “We’re alone in the corner. If we’re careful, we can be a little naughty and no one is going to notice.”
“Come on. This isn’t us.” He cut one of the pieces of cheese in half and placed half of it on plate and the other on his. “Save it for home. We’ll play later.”
I tried not to be disappointed by his response. None of this was unusual for Levi. He didn’t love to be overly affectionate in public. A light kiss on the lips and nothing more, not even on New Year’s Eve. Alone he could be very affectionate, but his own parents hadn’t been particularly public in their love and neither was he. It had never bothered me before. He held my hand, told me he loved me. Why did I want to throw a fit that he wouldn’t get a little bit frisky with me in the quiet corner of the restaurant?
Why had I thought he might?
“I’ve disappointed you.” He rubbed his eyes. “You’ve changed, you know. Beyond the acknowledgement of your powers, you’re changed. You’re all lit up inside and glowing on the outside. Every day you alter a little bit. I love you, and I want to go on this journey with you. I’m afraid you’re leaving me behind.”
I took his fingers in mine, careful not to knock over anything on the table. “I’d make all the same choices if I could, except I’d come clean to you before we got married. But I need this now. I don’t know why it happened. I still can’t for the life of me figure out why that ghost did what it did that day in the PTA meeting, but here I am. This is part of my life, and maybe I’m lucky the ghost presented the day it did. What if Dex got his first vision and I still wasn’t back in touch with my own powers?”
“I wish you could see yourself right now. You’re so animated. I don’t remember the last time you were so alive. You were never unhappy, but I could see you weren’t always happy. That’s gone now.”
His words silenced me. He thought I hadn’t been happy? “I was always delightfully content. You gave me exactly the life I wanted.”
Levi shook his head. “You weren’t. You wanted to be. I could see that most of the time you were pretty good to go. But not all the time. I used to wonder what would set you off. Now I know. You were only living a half-life. Can you live a full one with me in it? I’m sti
He was really trying so hard. I could see it in his eyes; I could see the way his eyes pleaded with me to say okay. He needed me to say yes. We could do it together. He’d made a huge mistake, and he wanted to come home. I loved him. I simply had to agree.
Movement caught my eye a second before a dash of cold travelled up my spine. Pain assaulted every nerve ending in my body. Pain drove into me and I cried out, gripping the table in front of me. Oh no, what was happening? My head buzzed.
“Are you okay?” Levi jumped from his side of the table and rushed over to me.
Breathing hurt. “I don’t know what’s happening.”
“Sir, everything okay?” The waiter was by us, and I smiled, which might have come across as deranged.
I nodded my head. “Everything is fine.” I needed Levi to sit down and for the waiter to walk away. I had to breathe. Whatever was happening, it wasn’t physical. The best they could do was to leave me alone for just a second so I could come away from whatever had hit me. There weren’t any ghosts in the room. I’d scanned before we came in. Someone in the room could be carrying a demon, although I didn’t feel it anywhere. A smart demon would stay hidden until I left. I couldn’t do anything about it if I didn’t know it was there.
So what the hell had hit me so hard?
Levi took his seat, and I took my napkin to wipe the sweat off my forehead. I caught the movement again, this time from two tables away from us. It had been empty. Except now it wasn’t.
I stared at the figure in front of me. Seated like a person eating dinner was a creature with no face. A giant shadow of nothingness. And yet somehow I knew it stared right at me.
Levi whispered loud enough for me to hear it. “What is going on?”
“There is a shadow over there, the shape of a man with no face, staring at me. Being near it is hurting me.”
The only man I’d ever loved stared at me as though I had two heads. “What?”
“Listen, I know it sounds nuts to you. If you could see what I can see …” I stopped talking. The shadow moved and was coming toward me until it stood over the table. I stared up at it like I might were the waiter asking if I wanted more wine.
“Hurts doesn’t it?” The voice was deep but entirely human in how it sounded. Unlike a demon, I wouldn’t know its otherness from sound alone. “Being near me. Today is just the beginning. You’re going to hurt. Over and over again. The bringer of light will not win. We are ready and we have waited. You and everyone you love.”
The shadow raised its dark arm and placed it on Levi. He jolted like he’d been struck, and his face whitened two shades.
He grabbed his throat as though he were being strangled.
“No.” I spoke aloud before I raised my hand toward the shadow. With every ounce of energy I had, I pushed my powers at the shadow. It took me seconds to realize it wasn’t working. All the shadow did was touch Levi, and it was killing him. I wasn’t powerful enough. My power moved right through the thing and didn’t stop. It was as though I had no abilities at all.
This thing was going to kill Levi, and I couldn’t do a thing.
I cried out and jumped toward the shadow like I could physically move it off of Levi, and nothing happened except I fell on the floor and everyone in the restaurant stared at me. Let them look. I had to do something.
The shadow laughed, a long, hard, cold sound before he dropped his hand off of Levi. He fell to his knees from the chair, gasping in air. My whole body had gone numb. I was exhausted; there was no power left inside of me while I stared at a thing I’d never seen before, never imagined could exist, and it stared at me.
“See you, Kendall. We’ve waited a long time.”
The next minutes were a blur to me. I crawled to Levi. He breathed, and I needed to feel the air coming in and out of his lungs. His heart beat. For then, it was enough.
“Kendall.” Levi gasped my name. I don’t know what he would have said. The paramedics arrived and loaded him into an ambulance. He was alive. I had to keep reminding myself.
****
The hospital was quiet as I sat by Levi’s bedside. They’d given him something to sleep after taking no less than ten vials of blood from him. The doctors had no explanation for his episode in the restaurant. Levi’s blood pressure was scary high. He’d never had a bad physical in his life, and he worked out every day. If he ever blipped over 120/70, I’d never seen it. They’d admitted him for the night. Maybe it was an allergic reaction to something he ate. I had a pretty good idea of what the results of the blood work would show. If the shadow man was anything like a demon or ghost encounter, then Levi was just going to look like he was a little bit anemic. Unexplained anemia.
I had no idea how much he understood of what had happened. He’d been really out of it before he’d gotten upset, yelling at the top of his lungs for help. That’s when they’d sedated him. I didn’t have the slightest idea how he’d be when he woke up.
My mother appeared before me as though she materialized there, but I was pretty sure I’d been so out of it I’d simply not seen or heard her arrive.
“How is he?” She whispered. I’d texted them that we’d had a paranormal event at dinner and that Levi was in the hospital. Dex hadn’t had a vision; they’d had no idea anything had happened. What good was it to have two seers in my life if no one could at least warn me when something horrific was about to happen?
I rubbed at my eyes. “Like he was attacked by a shadowy figure I couldn’t expel.”
“A shadowy figure? Like a demon?”
I stood so fast the chair screeched behind me. “Not a demon, and I think you know exactly what I’m talking about. Don’t lie. I’m sick of . You came here—not the hospital specifically but to Austin—to tell me the truth. So get to it, Mom. What is that shadow-figure? What do I need to know to keep people safe?”
One lone tear travelled down her face. “I keep waiting for you to be ready. I had thought for sure that when you came back to the ways, it would mean you were ready. You’re not.”
I gripped her arms. “I’m a grown up woman. I’m never going to be any more ready for whatever than I am now. So tell me. Or go away. I can’t have any more lies in my life. Levi almost died, and I was useless.”
She nodded and sucked in her breath. “Between the ages of nine and twelve, you weren’t with us. You … vanished. You went somewhere. We never found out where. But when you came back, before you seemingly forgot everything, you kept talking about shadows.”
If the hospital exploded into a thousand pieces, I wouldn’t be more surprised.
Chapter Twelve
“Tell me again.,” I asked my mom to repeat the story. Three times so far and it still didn’t make any sense to me.
She sat next to me, both of us facing Levi, whose vitals showed better on the machine monitoring him. His blood pressure had lowered. His oxygen was good. I wasn’t in the medical profession, but that was what the nurse who had come in had told me. He was actually snoring, which the last time I’d slept with him he didn’t do.
“You and the boy we were helping vanished. We searched and searched for you. It was like you were just gone. No one could help. Three years later, you appeared at the van door. You didn’t make any sense. We tried to figure out what had happened. And then you were normal again, as though the whole thing had never happened.” She rocked a little in her chair. “Your father and I, we decided to play along. Whatever had happened, it was over. When you wanted to tell us, you would. But you never did, and over time you forgot the boy or that anything had ever happened.”
I still had no memory of any of it. Her words hadn’t suddenly triggered a memory or even a sense that I had any idea what the hell she was talking about. I tried to understand. “Must have been easier to simply pretend until you believed
“I imagine you know the feeling, considering how long you fooled everyone, including yourself, into believing you were a normal person with no special abilities.”
She made a good point although I was in no mood to hear it. I got up and walked to the side of Levi’s hospital bed. He didn’t open his eyes even when I sat down next to him. “I feel like I tricked him. I’m this freak who vanished for three years and can’t remember anything about it. I’ve done nothing but bring him pain. He has to worry about me, about his kids. I did all of it knowing there was a possibility he could never have a normal life. I didn’t tell him. I didn’t give him a choice. I was all about choice, to the point that I decided not to be who I am, and I gave him none of the same consideration. Just dropped this life on him without so much as a by-your-leave.”
“You got divorced. He’s free to date whomever he wants. But he keeps coming back. He took you on a date.”
My mother stating the obvious didn’t change things. “He loves the kids. He’s a very good dad.”
“He’s a very good man.” My mom placed a steady hand on my back. “We have to protect him.”
Yes, we did. Even if that meant I kept a wide berth away from him. If the shadow person wanted me, I wouldn’t hide. If I had to send everyone I loved far, far away from me, then I would. First, however, I needed some answers.
I wasn’t going to solve the world’s problems in the hospital. “You should go home. We’ll be here all night.”
And I had a lot of thinking to do.
****
Come on, kid, I don’t do business with children. If your mom or dad wants something, they know where I am.
“Kendall.”
I jerked awake. Levi sat up in the hospital bed, his color better than when I’d fallen asleep. He didn’t look nearly as pale, and his eyes were clear. I stretched in the chair. My neck was going to have a kink for the next week. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to fall asleep.”
“That’s okay. Did you stay all night?” Levi cleared his throat and then reached for water on the table by the bed. He took a sip. “You should have gone home.”