Remembrance (The Mediator #7) (12 page)

And she continued to cling to my neck like a thousand-pound weight. How was that possible, when she was only the size of a doll, and a ghost besides? For someone whose name meant “light,” she was anything but.

Once, in my quest to find the most effective cardio I could do in the shortest amount of time, I’d read that treading water vertically while bearing a heavy weight was the way to go. It’s an integral part of U.S. Navy SEAL training: they tread water while holding a dive pack above their heads.

That had sounded way too brutal to me, but now I realized it was exactly what I should have been doing all along. Who knew U.S. Navy SEALs and school counseling interns had so much in common?

The next thing I knew, the kid had me strung up in midair like a salmon on a fishing line. I dangled there by my neck, still struggling to unloose her fingers, gasping for air, wondering in the distant part of my brain that could still register thought what I would look like to any of my fellow tenants who might happen to glance down at the pool from their balconies. They wouldn’t be able to see the NCDP that was holding me by the neck above the water level. Would they think I was performing some kind of odd water ballet? Suze Simon, amateur mermaid. Perhaps they’d applaud, and compliment me later . . . if I lived until later.

Then she plunged me back into the deep end, and I wondered how I could have been so smug—and stupid—to think that she hadn’t followed me home.

She’d not only followed me home, she’d watched me get out of my car, wave good night to my neighbors, then go inside to check my messages.

Sure, my apartment was ghost proof.

But it had never occurred to me to sprinkle a protective layer of salt around the pool. It wasn’t even one of those environmentally safe saltwater pools that Andy goes around recommending on At Home with Andy. It was filled with human-harmful—and extremely foul-tasting—chlorine and other chemicals that were currently burning my throat.

“Lucia,” I croaked when I’d finally managed to sip enough air to allow speech. “I don’t think you understand. I’m on your side.”

“No,
you
don’t understand,” she hissed in my ear, her long fingernails scraping at the skin of my cheek in an almost loverlike caress. This wasn’t at all creepy. “Becca’s mine.
My
friend. No one will ever hurt her again.”

Okay, okay,
I wanted to say.
I got it already.

But I couldn’t say anything more, because it hurt too much. My lungs were too full of water and my hair was plastered over my face (why hadn’t I listened to Christophe about that swim cap?) and she still had hold of my throat. She’d pulled me well away from the sides of the pool, so I couldn’t grab anything—except handfuls of water—to hit her with or find anything to push against. Where were my boots when I needed them? Oh, right, with Maximillian28.

There was only one thing I could think of to do, and that was to grab
her
. I needed to get her to loosen the iron grip that was cutting off my oxygen and causing the lights around the pool to slowly dim.

But my arms were feeling strangely heavy. Lifting them felt like lifting the two-hundred-pound weights Brad kept in his garage and was always challenging everyone to try to bench. I’d sapped too much vital energy fighting to stay afloat to be able to land a good punch, even if I’d felt okay punching a dead kid in the face, and I was really starting to, considering this particular dead kid was being such a pain in my ass.

But I could still grab. I thrust my arms up over my head until my fingers closed around something wet and stringy. At first, in my state of near unconsciousness, I thought it was seaweed. But why would there be seaweed in my apartment complex’s swimming pool?

Then I realized I’d managed to grab twin chunks of her blond curls.

Hair pulling is dirty business—it’s what toddlers and drunk girls on reality shows always resort to. But this was different. It was her or me, and it sure as hell wasn’t going to be me. I had a wedding scheduled to Dr. Hector “Jesse” de Silva for next year in the basilica at the Carmel Mission. I had no intention of missing it if I could possibly help it.

I pulled with all my might, and to my utter relief, the clawlike fingers disappeared from my throat. Lucia’s tiny, tenaciously strong body flipped over my head and shoulders and went splashing down into the water in front of me.

She landed on her back, so I could see her face. Her expression was priceless, one of utter surprise, like,
How did I get
here?

I would have laughed if I hadn’t been so busy trying not to die.

For a moment we simply floated in the deep end of the pool, me busy choking up pool water, the dead girl appearing stunned by her defeat, even though it was only temporary. A spirit with that much power would quickly regather her energy—while I had none left. I had vastly underestimated the depths of her rage and determination to keep anyone from interfering with Becca. I had no idea what was going on with her and her human host, but whatever it was, Lucia wasn’t going to let anyone part them.

Still, in those few seconds, her long blond hair circling us like a golden halo (oh, the irony), I couldn’t help being struck by how incredibly sweet and vulnerable she looked. She was still clutching the stuffed horse she’d been carrying earlier that day, still dressed in her riding jodhpurs and boots, looking every bit like a pony-loving cherub who’d happened to trip and fall into the pool.

Then tried to drown me.

That was it. I was out of there.

I turned and began swimming away from her with everything I had left of my strength. If I could only reach the gleaming chrome ladder I saw a few strokes ahead of me, then pull myself up, I knew I’d be all right.

Of course I was only fooling myself. But I had to believe in
something
.

I kicked hard for the ladder, beginning to think I was going to make it—though my heart was pounding as if it were about to burst—when an icy cold, sharp-clawed hand clamped down around my ankle and attempted to yank me back into the crystal depths.

No.

Then at almost the exact same moment, a similarly steel-gripped, but also similarly familiar
warm
hand wrapped around my wrist and began pulling me toward the side of the pool. What was happening? Was someone trying to rescue me?

Oh, dear God, no. Not one of my do-gooding fellow tenants from the Carmel Valley Mountain View Apartment Complex, thinking I’d gotten a muscle cramp. Lucia would pull him into the water, too, and then the pool guy would find
both
of us facedown at the deep end tomorrow morning.

Could this day get any worse? I couldn’t save myself and a civilian, too. I didn’t have the strength left.

“Stop,” I begged, pulling on my wrist, preferring to be drowned by Lucia than allow her to take out an innocent bystander as well. “I’m fine. Please go away.”

But the grip on my wrist only tightened. I floundered as I tried to stay above the surface, pulled in two different directions by two entirely different but equally determined—and seemingly preternaturally strong—forces.

“You’re not fine,
querida
,” I heard a deep voice rasp.

My heart began to pound in a different way than before.
Jesse.

I saw him kneeling by the side of the pool, his hands grasped tightly around my wrist. His expression was hard to read since his back was to the bright security lights, but I was sure he must be furious. The shirt and tie he was required to wear to work were both soaked.

“And sorry to disappoint you,” he said, “but I’ll never go away.”

diez

I began to think I might actually have a chance of getting out of this thing alive.

The same thought seemed to occur to Lucia, since the cold, tentacle-like fingers wrapped around my ankle loosened. I heard her let out a last, furious hiss, and then, with a final burst of bubbles, as if the entire pool had suddenly turned into a churning cauldron of witch’s brew, she was gone.

Then the crystal blue pool water turned as still as it had been before I’d slid into it. Except for the lapping of the water filter, the sound of the crickets, and my own heavy breathing, it was completely silent in the Carmel Valley Mountain View Apartment Complex pool.

Until Ryan, my neighbor in unit 2-B, called from his balcony, “Hey! You guys okay down there?”

Jesse was still holding me by the wrist, keeping me suspended half in, half out of the water.

“She’s fine,” he shouted up to Ryan. “Just a cramp.”

“Tell her that’s why she’s supposed to wait half an hour after eating before going for a swim,” Ryan said in a teasing voice before turning back to the television show he was watching inside.

Jesse didn’t wait another moment before pulling me out of the water, soaking his shirt and tie even further, then carrying me to the closest chaise longue.

“Susannah, it’s all right,” he said, his expression an adorable mix of anger and anxiety. “She’s gone.”

“I know she’s gone,” I said. My teeth had involuntarily begun to chatter. “Stop being so dramatic. You’re getting your work clothes all wet.”

“Damn my clothes,” he said. It was unusual for him to swear, at least in English. I’m the gutter mouth in our relationship.

He’d grabbed my towel from where I’d lain it on top of my clothes, and was bundling me in it. The chaise longue groaned a bit under our combined weight. The building management hadn’t exactly forked out the big bucks for their poolside decor.

“You’re shaking,” he said. “Did she hurt you?”

“No. She’s just a kid.”

“A kid?” He laughed, but there was no humor in the sound. “A kid who nearly killed you. We’re going to find out who she is and then we’re going to—” Now he was swearing, fluidly, in Spanish.

“Jesse, stop it. What’s the matter with you? Your specialty’s pediatrics. You’re supposed to suffer the little children.”

“Not this one. This one has no chance of getting into the kingdom of heaven. She’s getting exorcised by me straight back to hell, where she came from.”

“She isn’t from hell. She’s frightened, and in pain.”

“I think you’re getting her confused with yourself,
querida
.”

“No, I’m not. CeeCee’s aunt Pru said so. She tried to warn me about it tonight outside the café, but I didn’t pay attention.”

Jesse uttered a few highly descriptive oaths about Aunt Pru. Even though he spoke in Spanish, I caught the gist.

“She was only trying to help,” I said, in Pru’s defense. “And you know she’s right. Why are you doing that?” He was rubbing my skin through the terry cloth of the towel.

“You’re in shock,” he said. “You’re cold, and you’re wet, and you’re shaking. I’m attempting to restore warmth and circulation to your extremities. Don’t argue with me, I’m a doctor.”

“I’m not in shock,” I said. “I’m all right. I swallowed a lot of water, but I’m still in one piece. At least this one didn’t ruin my boots.”

“Your what?”

“My . . . never mind. What are you doing now?”

“Helping you to avoid going hypothermic by sharing my body heat.” He’d pulled me onto his lap. “Do you disapprove?”

“Oh, no, I approve.” I slipped my arms around his neck, burying my face in his shoulder, enjoying the warmth of his strong body and the faintly antiseptic smell that seemed permanently to cling to him, thanks to the many times a day he had to wash his hands. I suppose I didn’t smell much better after the chlorine waterboarding I’d received at Lucia’s hands. “How did you know that I was in trouble?”

“I always know.” He tightened his arms around me, his lips intriguingly close to my right earlobe. “I
felt
her, all the way back at the hospital. Or I felt something, anyway. And then when I tried calling, and you wouldn’t pick up your phone—”

“I went for a swim. My phone’s back in the apartment.”

“I knew there was trouble when I asked if you wanted to play doctor later,” he said, “and you never replied.”

“That’s not true.” I turned my head so that his lips, instead of being close to my ear, were next to my mouth. “I said
mucho gusto
.”

“I never got that text. How can your Spanish still be so terrible after studying all these years?”

His hands slipped beneath the towel to singe my bare flesh. I sucked in my breath. “Is that something you do to all your patients you treat for shock?”

“No.” He pulled me closer to him. “Only you. You get special treatment.”

His lips came down over mine.

I could feel our hearts thumping hard, separated only by the thin damp microfiber of my swimsuit and the white dress shirt he’d worn to work. He pressed my body back against the chaise longue, his tongue hot inside my mouth, his hand just as hot against my bare skin, while yet another kind of heat radiated from the front of his straight-fits.

Those straight-fits. They were always causing me problems. When it wasn’t my gaze I had trouble keeping off them, it was my hands. Like now, for instance, especially since I could feel what was pushing so urgently through the front of them, practically branding the rivets of his fly into my thigh.

But I knew if I reached down and undid those buttons, then wrapped my fingers around all that masculine glory, the only thing I’d receive for my troubles was a groan, then a polite request that I stop what I was doing. I knew because it had happened a million times before. Jesse’s commitment to staying on the righteous path was admirable, but it was also frustrating.

So I knew he wasn’t going to strip off my bathing suit and do me on the chaise longue in the middle of the pool area at my apartment building. For one thing, that would be gross. Anyone, including Ryan from upstairs, could wander out onto their balcony and see us. And for another, that wasn’t how either of us had envisioned making love for the first time.

Though I had to admit that at that moment, I didn’t particularly care. I wished we were anywhere than the stupid pool deck. My bedroom upstairs, for instance, or his bedroom back over at Jake’s. Except that even in those places he always managed to keep from ripping my clothes off, whereas I seemed to have a real problem not pawing at his. Maybe the curse was wrong, and
I
was the one with the demon inside me—