Her Last Whisper (2 page)

“No,” Spivey responded with a sunny smile, and as Charlie recorded his answer, he looked pointedly at the Hershey bar. “Can I have my candy?”

“Told ya.” Michael’s tone was smug as Charlie broke off another section of candy bar and slid it over. The tips of Spivey’s fingers just brushed hers. They felt soft and damp. The contact made her stomach tighten, and she quickly pulled her hand back. Michael continued, “And just so you can quit racking your brain, I scored ESFP. And that was without being bribed by chocolate.”

The curious thing was, ESFP—extraversion, sensing, feeling, perception—was the exact opposite of INTJ. Absolutely
not
the mark of a serial killer. As far from it as a subject could possibly get, in fact. Charlie’s lips twisted. No way had that been an accident. Michael had, no doubt, manipulated the test. As she reached that conclusion, she shot him a condemning look. He grinned, a slow and devilishly charming grin that admitted everything.

And just as easy as that he had her going all marshmallowy inside.

Damn it
. She refocused on her test subject with grim determination.

“Please don’t do this to me.”
The disembodied whisper came out of nowhere, snapping her right back into the Amityville Horror that her life was devolving into like a quick plunge into ice water. The terror in the voice sent chills down Charlie’s spine. Her instant, instinctive reaction was to glance at Michael, furtively searching his face to see if he’d heard it, too. If the woman she was hearing was
present in spirit, even if the timing and circumstances of her death put her beyond the parameters of Charlie’s ability to see her, Michael should be able to see her, because as a spirit himself he could see other spirits in his vicinity, just like she was able to see any living, breathing human who might, for example, walk into the room.

But Michael clearly wasn’t seeing whoever was connected to the voice. He wasn’t hearing her, either.

Okay, deep breath
. This was different. This was outside Charlie’s experience. This was a whole new facet of the freak show that was her existence. It had been happening to her only since she had died and been brought back.

Either she was cracking up, or—or what? She wasn’t sure. Random floaty voices existed in the universe, which she was just now able to access. For the last three weeks, since she had woken up in a hospital bed to learn that she had nearly drowned, she had been hearing the voices at odd moments. The truth was that she didn’t know anything about them. Who was speaking. Who they were talking to. If they actually even existed outside of her head. What it meant.

All she knew was that the experience of hearing them was unnerving. And she needed—badly needed—for them to stop.

If they didn’t, she was afraid she might start to fall apart.

“More,” Spivey demanded, licking his lips. His lashless brown eyes fixed on Charlie’s slender fingers as they absently smoothed the foil covering the remaining chocolate.

Charlie shook her head, tucking the candy bar back into her pocket, out of sight. Keeping it visible, she had discovered, was too great a distraction for Spivey. “After you answer the next question,” she told him firmly.

“No,”
the unseen woman moaned. Gritting her teeth, Charlie did her best to tune out the voice while glancing blindly down at the papers on the table in front of her. Clairaudience—that’s what her sudden ability to hear these disembodied voices was called. Unless they really were all in her head, in which case
crazy
described it better.

“Babe, you just turned a whole nother shade of pale.” Michael
frowned at her. As she glanced at him, she had to consciously stop herself from taking her lower lip between her teeth, an obvious sign of distress that he would jump on like a duck on a June bug.

Time for Charlie to face the truth: her way-too-close brush with death had done a number on her. In its aftermath, she felt vulnerable in a way that she hadn’t in years. It had brought back a host of terrifying memories. It had upset her carefully constructed psychological equilibrium. It had sensitized her in ways that she feared she was only just beginning to discover. It had made her want to curl up in a ball in the middle of her hospital bed and pull the covers over her head and stay there forever, as if that would somehow keep her safe from the evil that she knew—
knew
—existed in the world.

Instead she had coped in the only way she knew: by getting up and getting on with it, and going back to work.

But the voices were unsettling. The voices she didn’t need.

“You okay?” Michael’s eyes were intent on her face. He suddenly seemed to take up way too much space in the tiny room. Even though, of course, since he had no physical substance and was, in fact, a phantom that only she could see and hear, he took up no actual space at all. “Finish up with this scumbag, and let’s head home.”

Home
. Meaning her house in the nearby town of Big Stone Gap. Hearing Michael call it that felt funny, but … good. Since college she’d lived alone and liked it. Now she lived with him. A ghost.
Her
ghost. Her home was
their
home. Six weeks into their association, she was still processing the ramifications of that. Still processing the ramifications of
him
.

Still working hard not to fall in love with a damned—and she was very much afraid that that was the literal truth—ghost.

This was her second day back at Wallens Ridge, and she was tired—way too tired for three p.m. on a Tuesday, when before she had routinely worked until 5:30 five days a week and then had more than enough energy left at the end of the day to go for a long run up the wooded mountain trail behind her house. She’d completed reams of other tasks before getting started with this interview, of course, but still the level of exhaustion she was experiencing was abnormal, and she recognized that. The idea of going home early was enormously appealing. But the work she was doing was important. The
stakes were high. If she could figure out a way to identify serial killers in the earliest stages of their development, before they started to kill, countless lives would be saved, as would immeasurable amounts of human suffering.

The suffering she herself had endured being a case in point.

With a quick, barely there shake of her head for Michael, she refocused on the questions in front of her.

“Please answer yes or no.” Charlie looked at the chubby-cheeked, harmless-looking man who was watching her expectantly. She felt her stomach tighten. “You prefer meeting in small groups rather than interacting with lots of people.”

“No,” Spivey answered, so promptly that Charlie wasn’t entirely sure whether he was answering the question or just responding at random, as he sometimes did.

“Again, answer yes or no: You prefer interacting with lots of people?” She reworded the question in an attempt to verify his answer.

“I want candy,” he said.

“You can have candy after you answer,” she told him, and repeated the question.

“No,” he said.

She looked at him for a second—he was leaning slightly forward, staring in the general direction of her pocket where the candy bar waited, although she knew he couldn’t see it from where he sat. In her judgment, his attention had wandered, rendering his response unreliable. With an inward sigh, she tapped the end of her pen against the questionnaire without recording a response, recognizing that she had gotten as much out of Spivey as she was going to for the day. It was time to end the interview.

“Thank you, Mr. Spivey. We’re finished here,” she said.

“I want candy,” he said again, frowning at her. His round face turned petulant, like that of a giant baby who was about to cry. His eyes batted. He licked his already damp lips.

“All right.” Repressing a shiver of revulsion, she retrieved the candy bar from her pocket while Michael straightened away from the wall and muttered, “Hallelujah.”

“You’ve done very well today,” she told Spivey as she broke off
a piece and pushed it across the table toward him. “We’ll meet again next—”

“Please,”
the woman’s voice inside her head screamed, the cry so shrill and full of pain that Charlie lost focus.

She only realized what she had done—that her hand had moved too far across the table, putting it within Spivey’s reach—when Spivey grabbed her wrist and yanked her violently toward him.

Her heart leaped. As her stomach slammed into the edge of the table, she tried to stop her forward momentum without success.

“Got you,” Spivey crowed with satisfaction a split second before his teeth crunched down on her fingers and Charlie screamed.

“Goddamn it,”
Michael roared, and dove for Spivey. Charlie felt the brush of a large, solid body hurtling past her, heard the smack of flesh hitting flesh, heard Spivey cry out as his head snapped back. He dropped her hand and she threw herself out of his reach just as Johnson burst through the door.

“Charlie.” Michael’s voice was no more than a breath of sound as she cradled her wounded hand and fought to regain her composure. Her stomach dropped clear to her toes as she realized that he was nowhere to be seen.

Michael
.

Inside her head, Charlie screamed his name. Over and over. Desperately. Out loud, she urgently whispered it under the cover of the commotion as Spivey was dragged, shouting and fighting, from the room.

Michael didn’t answer.

There was nothing from him: no sign, no sound.

Spookville: had he been hurtled into it again? That was the fear that made her go cold all over.

But even if Michael had been yanked away to that horrible netherworld, at this moment, in this place, surrounded by people as she was, there was simply nothing Charlie could do.

The first finger of her right hand was bloody and torn. It burned and throbbed and ached. She was so on edge with mounting anxiety that she barely noticed the pain as she was helped to the infirmary. Nearly every bed in the main ward was filled, and she could feel the eyes of the inmates and guards and orderlies (all of whom were male) following her as she was handed over to Dr. Creason. By the time he had finished treating her, the injury was the least of Charlie’s
concerns. She was beside herself with anxiety. Her heart hammered. She felt like she was about to jump out of her skin.

And not, as Creason clearly assumed, because she’d just been brutally attacked by a serial killer. She didn’t like to think what it said about the screwed-up nature of her existence, but the sad truth was that being attacked by random serial killers was starting to seem like just one more day in her extremely sucky life. At this point, Spivey was of no more importance to her than a mosquito that had bitten her, even if she could still hear him screaming not so far away. Having been strapped down to a stretcher and rushed into a special locked ward just yards from where Charlie now sat on a molded plastic chair in one of the small examination rooms off the main part of the infirmary, Spivey was howling like a werewolf. Clearly the drugs pumping into his veins to sedate him were slow to take effect.

At any other time, Charlie would have found the sounds he made chilling.

Right now, though, she was beyond being chilled by anything the corporeal world could throw at her. She had bigger problems.
Cosmically
bigger problems.

Michael
.

She was a quivering bundle of nerves because a good twenty minutes had passed without so much as a glimmer from him. No sound, nothing. She knew there was no way he would have left her like that of his own accord. Through the open door of the treatment room she was in, she watched two inmates in blue trustee jumpsuits mopping the slick gray floor of the admitting area. The trustees were inmates nearing the end of their sentences who had earned the provisional trust of the guards, and thus were given more freedom within the prison, as well as more responsible jobs that required minimal supervision. She watched them mop, listened to Spivey’s screaming that all but drowned out other, more ordinary sounds, such as a distant TV and the whir of hospital machinery, and felt the sting of her damaged finger, all without being more than peripherally aware of any of it.

The thought that Michael had been sucked up into the horror
that was Spookville, never to return, was becoming all-consuming. If she wasn’t careful—if, God forbid, it proved to be true—it would tear her apart inside.

What can I do?
The panicked thought fluttered like a trapped bird inside her head. Answer: no clue.

“Your pulse rate is still elevated. Are you sure you’re all right?” Creason asked, frowning at her. A small, neat man of forty-six, the prison doctor had thinning brown hair and sharp features. The last time she had seen him, he had been rushing—too late—to join her in trying to save Michael’s life. The plastic name tag attached to Creason’s white lab coat reminded her that his first name was Phil, and she made a mental note because she had forgotten it. Charlie had her own lab coat off and the short sleeve of her blue shirt pushed up to her shoulder. Having cleaned and bandaged the wound, Creason had just finished giving her an injection of antibiotics. Smoothing her sleeve down over the newly applied Band-Aid that adorned the injection site on her upper arm, Charlie saw that Creason was regarding her with concern. No surprise there: a human bite was ten times more dangerous than a dog bite, and this one went clear to the bone.

She hadn’t even noticed that he was checking her pulse until his fingers left her wrist.

“I’m fine.” She took a deep breath. Physically, it was true. Psychologically, she was as fragile as blown glass. If Michael couldn’t get back …

There are things you can do
, she told herself fiercely. Even if at the moment she didn’t know exactly what. Michael had forbidden her to try to follow him into Spookville again. And the sad truth was, the prospect of once more entering that plane of horrors was terrifying. Plus, getting there was difficult, and tricky, and there was no guarantee the method she had used the last time would work. Or that she could find him even if it did—