Page 53 of Ghost Girl

Oh, shit… Was she about to make the same mistake I did?

I saw myself in her, the start of the questioning of Blake’s actions. The wondering where he was, who he was with, and if I was just being paranoid or going crazy. I rushed forward with the intent to comfort her before I realised I couldn’t. There was no comfort she could take from me. Quite the opposite, really. If I were even able to make my presence known, all it would do was scare her or make her uncomfortable. Likely both. I pulled up short before I could reach her, chiding myself for my rash actions and thanking my lucky stars that she couldn’t see the blunder.

Unfortunately, in my sudden urge to comfort this woman I had never met, but had unwittingly taken my place in this dangerous game of life and death, I had accidentally made myself a little bit more tangible and knocked into the cot in my haste. The sudden jostling startled her, and she bolted to her feet, scanning the room with wide, frightened eyes.

‘Hello?’ she called out softly, backing away from the cot. ‘Shit…Hello?’ she tried again, and I realised she must have believed in ghosts if she was this terrified. I hadn’t meant to make my presence known. I’d seriously fucked up here, hadn’t I? The last thing I wanted to do was scare her.

And then a thought struck, one that would have knocked the breath from my lungs if I had any. Maybe this wasn’t such a bad thing? If she was ignorant of Blake’s… hobbies, then maybe I could save her? If I could just get a message to her, tell her to run and never look back, maybe I could spare her the pain, the fear, the sheer, unadulterated misery that would come with her discovering her husband was a serial killer.

Was it worth it? It had to be. Ihadto try, because if she was innocent in all of this, and I highly suspected she was, then she didn’t deserve to go through that level of suffering.

I mentally thanked Bianca again, because she had given me the power to help this woman, and I was now pretty damned sure that she needed it.

Chapter 23

Dakota

Iwoke up alone. Again.

My husband’s side of the bed was cold and untouched. Again.

Blake wasn’t giving me any reason for him to leave so often. I had been patient after the most recent Kali debacle, but now it was just getting ridiculous, and I’d had enough. I knew everyone said that the first year of marriage was tough, but this wasn’t tough; it was practically non-existent. Lately, I felt like he was only keeping me around for the sake of having a wife more often than not, and that was not okay with me.

I was sitting on the edge of the cot, shoulders slumped and a stress headache pounding through my skull, when the cot suddenly jolted like someone had bumped into it. Except, there was no one there…

I jumped to my feet and scanned the area, searching for an animal that had somehow snuck inside the tent, but, again, there was nothing there. Our reason for following Chance down south for an impromptu camping trip flashed through my mind, and I wondered if I was somehow meeting the ghost they were hunting.

‘Hello?’ I called out, but my voice was quiet, stuck behind my suddenly constricted throat. When I received no answer, not a single sign that I wasn’t alone, chills spread throughout my body as fear tried to take hold. Where was Chance when I needed him?

‘Shit…Hello?’I tried again, panic starting to set in.

‘Okay,’ I muttered under my breath in a feeble attempt to soothe myself. ‘It’s okay, Dakota. It’s just a spirit. Chance and his team deal with them on a daily basis, and they’re doing just fine. There’s nothing to be afraid of.’

When nothing else moved, not even a chill in the air, I relaxed a little. Perhaps they were merely wandering through and accidentally bumped into the cot. Did ghosts stub their toes, too?

I physically shook those thoughts from my mind, actively ignoring the sensation of eyes watching me from the shadows, and decided now was as good a time as any to get ready for the day. It was already late, sometime in the afternoon, but I had lain awake in bed while I waited for Blake, hoping and praying that he would return. But he never did.

I paused on my way to my suitcase to check my phone for the umpteenth time. Nothing. No missed calls. Not a single text. Radio fucking silence.

Anger bubbled to the surface, pushing away the sadness and loneliness I’d been feeling for a while now. I was used to him disappearing whenever he went on his fishing trips, but even then, he somehow managed to make time for a phone call here and there. I always woke to a good morning text and went to sleep with him wishing me a good night.

Something was wrong. My gut was screaming at me.My first thought was born from my insecurities within past relationships. The thought of him cheating on me made me physically sick, my stomach twisting painfully in protest, but hehad given me no indication that he was unhappy with me. As far as I knew, we had our problems just like anyone else, but we were happy. We’d just gotten married.

Then, I wondered if he’d been called into work for an emergency and had simply forgotten to let me know, but that wasn’t like him. He always managed to get a message to me to let me know what was going on, so it just didn’t make any sense that I wouldn’t have heard from him by now. This was the third night in a row that he hadn’t come to bed, but at least the first two times he had shown up in the morning. But there were only so many times he could claim he needed to ‘clear his head.’

My anger dissipated when the fear settled in, the only other possibility one I didn’t want to consider. What if he wasn’t here because something had happened to him? What if he was hurt… or worse?

No. I couldn’t think like that. He would let me know where he was and that he was safe eventually. He wouldn’t leave me in the lurch like this without a good reason. He just wasn’t that kind of man, and it was one of the reasons I’d fallen in love with him in the first place. He was steady. He was sturdy. He was present.

And until recently, I’d believed wholeheartedly that he loved me. I just needed to get the fuck over myself, because he deserved better than that from me.

I also deserved better from him. If he was fine and was just milling about, minding his own business, ignoring his wife, then he had better hold onto his testicles before I ground them into dust.

I bent down to hide the phone and its lack of communication inside my handbag, but when I stood up, I froze. The small, circular makeup mirror I had placed on the fold-up table to the side showed I wasn’t alone. I wasn’t alone at all.

I swivelled around, my hair flying out as adrenaline coursed through me and made my movements far faster than usual, butthere was no one behind me. Shaking, I darted a glance back to the mirror and, sure enough, a white-haired woman who looked remarkably similar to the woman I had seen in photos stood by the cot.

‘K-Kali?’ I stammered, a hurricane of emotions roaring inside of me as I stared at her face. She flickered in and out of focus, like my brain was refusing to acknowledge what I was seeing as real and was trying to erase the evidence of her presence. But I couldn’t. She was here.

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