Wildest Dreams by Norman Partridge Read Free Book Online Page A

fast enough.
    “Drop the guns,” he said. “Do it now.”
    I did. He told me to get my hands in the air, and I did that too. Then I turned around.
    I recognized the deputy. He had a trench in his heart gouged by a K-bar knife, and the front of his uniform was stained with blood, and I could see through him like a window.
    I knelt and picked up the pistols.
    The deputy’s ghost tried to shoot me. If there was something in his hand, I couldn’t see it. But his trigger finger kept moving, though nothing happened at all.
    He stared at me, shaking now, aiming a weapon that only he could see. “You’d better not move,” he said. “Y-you’d better not even twitch.”
    My words came out in a cold whisper. “There’s something I’ll tell you. You probably won’t understand. Maybe you can’t. But you’d better get used to it, all the same.”
    He squinted at me, his brows twisted in confusion.
    “You’re finished,” I said. “Back there, in the house. I stabbed you in the heart. Remember? I killed you. You’re dead.”
    He looked through his hands. “It’s not true.” He stared at the bloody hole in his transparent chest. “It can’t be true.”
    “It’s true,” I said.
    He stood there staring like he couldn’t understand at all. I left him to it. I vaulted over the porch railing into bright daylight, landing in a bed of yellow and orange marigolds.
    Fat blossoms snapped on weak necks as I kicked through the flowers.
    They didn’t stand a chance.
    The dead cop was crying now.
    No one heard him but me. But I didn’t pay attention. I’d murdered him and there was nothing else I could do. The woods were so very close.
    Giant redwoods. Alive, and dark. I could smell them, and the smell was good, and clean, and secret.
    In another moment I was out of the sun and into the shadows.
    And then I was gone.
     
    6
     
     
     
    It was midnight by the time I made it back to the bridge where I’d met the little girl’s ghost.
    I had no business going there. I should have gone straight to the banged up truck I’d bought in Baja. By now I should have been halfway to San Francisco, figuring a way to get myself a ticket on the first flight to parts unknown.
    I knew that the same way I knew I’d been set up at Circe Whistler’s mansion. But I just couldn’t leave. Not until I knew what had happened to the little girl. She was seared in my memory. There was no escaping the look of horror I’d seen in her eyes when Circe Whistler’s shade grabbed her. At that moment, fear had stilled the little girl’s tongue. But she didn’t have to speak. Her eyes said everything for her.
    “Save me, Clay,” they said. “Please, please save me.”
    I couldn’t forget that. I couldn’t forget those pleading blue eyes staring at me as the little girl vanished in a whirlwind of blood and shadow, kicking and screaming against a flayed embrace.
    I’d never seen anything like that in my life.
    Oh, I’d seen plenty of ghosts. Since I was a little boy, I’d seen them. Probably from the day I was born, when the doctor tore the caul from my face. I’d studied the spirits of the dead. Most of them were sleepwalkers, completely unaware of the living. Some were trapped so deep in pits of pain that the only thing they could do was suffer. And others were like the deputy I’d murdered at Circe’s mansion—aware of their surroundings, alert to the presence of the living, but unwilling to accept the simple fact that they were dead.
    The way I saw it, the dead weren’t much different from the living. They could hate just as deeply. I knew that, just as I knew that hate was what had driven Circe’s shade when she attacked the little girl. I’d smelled it in the air—that miasma born of murder and blood and the rot of an early grave—and both my gut and my heart recognized it for what it was.
    But why would Circe Whistler hate a little girl? And why was the child powerless in Circe’s presence? Why didn’t she try to escape?
    Why