I swallowed hard. ‘Okay,’ I said, fighting to maintain that hard-won calm. ‘Okay. Right. Bob. Marcus. Dad.’ My laugh brokehalfway through and turned into something a shade away from hysteria. ‘Bob? Really? You let us call you Bob?’
The fruit bowl shifted. An orange rolled forward and stopped, the stem facing me like it was presenting itself.
I blinked at it.
‘Is that a yes?’ I asked. ‘Orange for yes, banana for no?’
The orange rolled back.
Bloody hell. I was communicating with my dead dad via one of my five-a-day. This was up there among my top insane moments in life to date.
My legs felt weak and I tried to steady them. Steadyme.
I pulled out my PNB and my pen and set them down on the dining room table. ‘Can you write?’ I asked.
The pen rose and clicked on, but it kept falling as he tried again and again to write. It was like his grip on the pen was too weak.
Loki blew a raspberry.
I sighed. ‘That’s a no then.’
Robbie pulled out his phone and called someone. ‘Get me a Ouija board,’ he ordered. A beat later he said, ‘I don’t give a shit. Make it, buy it, steal it. Get one here, stat.’ He hung up.
I frowned at him. ‘Did you have to add “steal it” as an option?’
‘Yourdad is here. Can we focus on that?’
He was right. Dad was here. That was far more important than Ouija theft right now.
My dad was dead. I’d seen his body. Seen it unmoving and unbreathing on the morgue table mere hours after his death. It was high on the list of the most traumatic moments in my life, including the kidnapping and torture.
Yet … his soul was here. Ghosts were supposed to be an impossibility in the Other realm, but here we were, with a ghost juggling fruit in my lounge.
The cogs in my brain started to turn. The visit with Vance Broadlake was fresh in my mind, and he’d spoken of severed souls. Broadlake had said he’d had the same conversation with my dad, and here was my father … a severed soul.
I didn’t believe in coincidence.
‘You came up against Jingo,’ I said to my dad. A statement more than a question, but all the same, after a beat the orange rolledyes.
Fucking Jude Jingo. That fucking prick!
‘Rude Jingo!’Loki squawked.
I took some calming breaths. Now was not the time to fall apart. ‘Like Broadlake, you severed your soul to escape him.’
The orange rolledagain, and my stomach was churning so much I worried I might be sick.
‘Did Jingo possess you?’
The banana rose. No.
‘Then you must have severed your soul just as he was about to subsume you rather than after,’ I mused more to myself than to him. ‘With no soul present, he couldn’t take over your body. Doppelgangers connect to the soul, not the body. Right?’
The orange rolled. Yes.
‘Something went wrong,’ I extrapolated, ‘and you couldn’t get back into your body.’
The orange rolled again.
