“You’re not crying.”
“Exactly. I’m not crying.” She sniffled and swiped at her cheeks. “And I don’t look a total mess.”
I smiled at that. “You look a total mess.”
Her eyes snapped open. “Whaaaa? How dare you?!”
I ran my gaze up and down her body in skinny jeans and a t-shirt. Her hair was in a loose bun, tilting precariously to the right of her head. Eyes puffy and red. Skin splotchy.
She had never looked more lovely.
“You are a beautiful mess.”
That took the wind out of her. “Oh.”
“Mybeautiful mess.”
Another, “Oh.”
“I will miss you,Chiara mia.”
More lip biting. A few more swiped tears. “M-me, too.”
“Will you forgive me?”
Her brow wrinkled. “Forgive you? For what?”
“My ridiculous state of half-existence is the cause of this problem.” I swept a hand down my disheveled person, missing boots, sopping wet and all. “If I weren’t a ghost, we wouldn’t be in this position.”
“No. Don’t you dare say that!” Fire sparked in her dark eyes. “Without your half-existence, I would never have known you. You would have died two hundred years ago. So even though you’re a ghost currently, it’s better than the alternative.”
She was right. So very right. Despite all the mistakes I had made, I would not change them because that would also mean giving up the joy of loving Chiara D’Angelo.
I was crazy for her. I always would be. But I could offer her nothing real. Not now, with everything—
“Stop looking at me like that!” The fire in her eyes raged.
“Pardon?”
“You’re looking at me with those super-sad, I’m-giving-up-now eyes. Stop it. This isn’t over.” She motioned between the two of us. “You can make yourself sorta corporeal. There is hope.”
“But I can’t ask you to wait for me. There is no guarantee that I willeverbe fully in this world, not to mention the danger of the Chucky-slime.”
“We’ll keep researching. We will find answers.”
“Chiara—”
“Jaaa-aaack.”
“There’s a wonderful phrase I’ve learned since being in the twenty-first century—Catch-22. We are at an impasse,Chiara mia. Do you not see? When I push myself into corporeality, I create micro cuts in the fabric of reality. You, as an oracle, use your gifts and make those small cuts larger, turning them into scars. Scars which then open when you use your gifts of Second Sight. Gifts which, at times, have some connection to a demon vortex that tries to annihilate me. We can’t win.”
“That’s just the situation at present, Jack. It could change.”
“How? How could it change? If I continue practicing to bring myself fully in this world, I might eventually cause such enormous slashes in reality that everything crumbles. At the very least, I will likely destroy myself in the process. It’s as if the universe has a built-in self-destruct mechanism for creatures like myself. My very existence goes against the laws of reality and so reality finds a way to remove me.”
Chiara paused, tears tumbling down her cheeks again.
She said nothing.
