Watching Griffin makes the barn suddenly feel small, even though we’re standing at least twenty feet away from each other. Each punch sends a ripple of movement across his shoulders and down his spine, and I catch myself staring at the way his body moves with this wild power that makes my mouth go dry.
This is the ectoplasm. Just the ectoplasm making everything feel more intense than it should.
I focus on breathing. Both of our breathing sounds impossibly loud in here. But underneath it all, I hear something that sounds a lot like… scratching.
I tilt my head, trying to pinpoint where it’s coming from. It’s the same scratchy whispering I heard at the crime scene, and then coming from the glob of ectoplasm in Ed’s kitchen. Now it’s coming from Griffin.
I turn my attention to my own body, and shudder. I canfeelthe ectoplasm inside me. Shifting and writhing like something alive.
Paying too much attention to it makes me feel like I have a tapeworm or another insidious bug in my body, so I try to ignore it. The sound gets quieter. If I can ignore it when I’m not actively looking for it, maybe I can keep this under control.
I walk over to Griffin until I’m standing right in front of him because talking across this distance feels ridiculous. Also, because the ectoplasm makes me want to be closer, but I try not to think about that. “Did the shot mess up your leg?”
Griffin tugs up his pant leg, revealing his prosthetic. There are a few dents in the metal where the salt hit, but otherwise it looks fine.
“I can fix it, and I’ve got another one anyway,” Griffin says. “Made them both myself. Configured exactly how I need them.”
My mouth falls open just a tiny bit. “You made your own prosthetic?”
“Turns out when you lose your leg, you get really motivated to figure out how to walk again.” He drops the pant leg. His knuckles are split open, blood mixing with the ectoplasm and dripping down his fingers. “Uncle Sam’s version was shit, so I built something better.”
“That’s badass,” I say.
“Yeah, well.” He shrugs. “Had to be good for something after I died.”
The lightness in his tone doesn’t match the words. “Is that how it happened?” I ask. “How you started seeing ghosts?”
He nods. “I was part of a unit clearing explosives from a school. Standard sweep—we’d done hundreds of them. But the device was more sophisticated than intel suggested. I cut the wrong wire, and it triggered a chain reaction through the building’s foundation.” His hands flex on the punching bag. “I got lucky. Lost the leg, and my heart stopped for a minute, but they got me back. The other three guys on my team weren’t as lucky. I started seeing them about a week after I got out of the field hospital. Cabrero stood at the foot of my bed in his dress blues, staring like he wanted to end me. The docs thought I had PTSD, but they couldn’t explain why I knew things that nobody had told me, like how Cabrero’s wife was pregnant.”
I can’t even imagine. Seeing ghosts is bad enough, but seeing the people whose deaths you blame yourself for, following you around with accusation in their eyes? If that lady in the library had been some warped version of Rosie trying to stick her fingers through my face? I don’t think I could have handled it. I barely handle the dreams.
“Army discharged me,” he continues, still not looking at me. “Combination of this”—he slaps his leg—“and psychological grounds. Said I was too fucked up for service but not fucked up enough for a padded room. Went home, moved in with my mom, and spent most of my time drinking and trying to convince myself I could still lead a normal life.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t look so serious.” Griffin’s mouth quirks up at the corner. “I’m clearly thriving now.”
I laugh, even though nothing about this is funny. “You’re bleeding all over the place.”
“Bleeding all over the place is my baseline state,” he says. “If you couldn’t tell from the day we met.”
There’s something about the way he can crack jokes even when he’s clearly hurting that reminds me of myself. Deflecting with humor to keep the darkness from swallowing me whole.
“So,” Griffin says, dropping his eyes. “How much of that did you hear? My conversation with Nico, I mean.”
I shrug, aiming for casual. “Just the yelling.”
“Liar,” he says. “Those walls are thin. I hear you singing to Bob every night.”
Well, that’s mortifying.
“I heard enough,” I say.
“So you heard about Bonnie.”
I nod. I probably shouldn’t ask him anything about her, but I also know how much I hate it when people tiptoe around my family. Like talking about them will somehow make it worse,when really, remembering who they were can make them feel closer to me.
“What was she like?” I ask.
