18 Thoughts (My So-Called Afterlife Book 3) (34 page)

My fists slammed against the inn’s door, and I stepped into the cold night. From the elevated porch, I searched for that punk Nate. Olga’s Dad’s truck wasn’t parked across the street anymore. Since Sam didn’t take my keys, it stood to reason I still had my car here. The car I couldn’t care less about. It’s Olga I wanted back. I looked toward the harbor. The lake’s surface looked like shards of broken mirror catching the moon’s glow. Awesome. Matched my breaking heart perfectly.

The stomping of feet from behind distracted me from my thoughts, and I turned to see Nate racing toward me. His fists were clenched, ready for battle. I put out my hands to stop him, but the combo of the wind and adjusting to being in control of my own body knocked me off-balance. His kick to the ribs is what knocked me into the railing, though.

“I don’t want to hurt you. I just want Olga.” He stood over me, his hands held in surrender.

I laughed deliriously, the crazy past ten months catching up with me. “Yeah, me and you both,
hombre
.”

He stared at me like he didn’t know what he was looking at. “Conner?”

“Yep, it’s me. Olga is gone.”

Nate held out his hand to help me up. “Did I just knock that… thing… out of you?”

Rubbing both hands over my back, I tried to ease the intense throbbing there. “Nope. Olga invited him in to herself to save my sorry butt, then he, she, whatever, took off.”

He shook his head. “And you just let them?”

I kicked the railing. “There was nothing I could do to stop it all! She took the gun I had and ordered me to wait ten minutes or she’d shoot. Whether she meant herself or me, I wasn’t sure. Doesn’t matter for Sam. He can just jump bodies, right?”

Nate glanced up and down the quiet street. “Where do you think she would go, now that Sam…? That’s his name? The demon?”

I nodded. “Yeah, and he knows it now, too. I’m not sure why he kept up the dumb act for Olga back there, claiming he didn’t know who he was.”

“But he’s possessing her?”

Leaning against the railing, I still struggled to catch my breath. “Yep.”

Nate buried his face into his hands, his next words coming out all muffled. “Where would he go?”

“No idea.” I dug around in my pockets, looking for clues. Nothing. My memories were always fuzzy when Sam was in my head. He shut me out as much as he could. “But we need to do something, and fast.”

“We should check her house first and warn her parents about what’s going on,” Nate said.

Driving was the last thing I wanted to do with a pounding headache, but we ran to my car anyway. “Don’t you have Olga’s keys? How’d she leave?”

“I had just gotten the door unlocked when I passed out. When I woke up, I was lying on the sidewalk. She must’ve moved me there before taking off.”

Too bad Sam didn’t just run him over
. I glanced at Nate as I started my car, thankful at least that he couldn’t hear my thoughts. After a minute of driving, I felt him studying me. “What?”

“Just trying to figure out why Olga keeps risking her life for you.”

The heat from the air vents tossed the pine-scented air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror, but that’s not what made me sweat. “I don’t know. She definitely shouldn’t. I’m not worth it.”

He picked up my
Christmas in the Stars
CD sitting between us on the drink console. “There’s a Star Wars Christmas album?”

I nodded. “Olga got it for me. Said she found it on Black Friday at Best Buy for $1.96.”

Nate smirked. “What a freakin’ bargain.”

Squinting hard as I approached a stop sign, I said, “Seriously. “What Can You Get a Wookiee for Christmas When he Already Owns a Comb” is classic. I don’t care if I die in December or not, I’m instructing Olga to play that at my funeral while serving Wookiee cookies.”

“I can arrange that to happen sooner than later if you’d like.”

I let loose a quick, disgusted snort. “I’d like to see you try. Oh wait, that’s right, you’ve been trying to get rid of me ever since you got to Grand Haven. But guess what, I’m not going away.”

He threw the CD back down. “Look, you’ll always have a special place in my heart as my first archrival and everything, but I think we need to put all of that behind us now and be civil. We need to work together to find Olga, and she’d want us to be friends anyway.”

My stomach squeezed in on itself. I wasn’t sure if it was his kick from earlier making me want to puke, or how he always claimed to know what Olga wanted. “I don’t know, man. Everyone has to have an enemy. Harry Potter has Voldemort, Spider Man has Green Goblin, Luke Skywalker has Darth Vader, and I have you. We bring balance to the force.”

His cell alerted him to a text message, and he pulled his phone out of his pocket.

“Olga?”

“No, just an old friend I ran into last week.”

He slid the phone back into his pants, but not before I saw a girl’s name on the screen. “Who’s Lindsey?”

Nate grunted. “That’s only something I’d tell a
friend
. Now, are you ready to talk to me like a normal human being, or are we gonna sit around discussing superheroes and villains all night while our girl is missing?”

I faux laughed. “
My
girl, and you can’t talk to a psycho like a normal human being.”

He took a deep breath. “Yeah, well, normalcy isn’t really our thing. So I doubt you’ll have trouble believing what I have to tell you.”

Pulling up to Olga’s apartment building, I killed the headlights. “What do you have to tell me?”

Nate’s hands shook in his lap, putting me on edge. “You might want to keep the car on for the heat. This may take a while.”

Everything in me, my body parts and my insides, felt cold as I listened to Nate telling me about him and Olga breaking into Sean’s cabin and finding some mysterious files. I rubbed my hands along my arms and swallowed hard. “I don’t understand. If the three of us died, how are we here now? Did we come back to life after spending time in another dimension without remembering it? Do our parents know we died on the table?”

Nate stretched the cuff of his black leather jacket over his palm, like he was desperate for warmth too. “I don’t think I have enough information to answer any of those questions. It was really confusing to us, too, and Dr. Judy didn’t offer any answers when we visited her the next day. She told us to let it go. The thing is, it would make sense that maybe you and I died after our accidents without remembering. I’ve heard of weird stuff like that happening before. But what about Olga? She never swallowed a whole bottle of pills a week after your accident. And it seems like our parents would’ve mentioned something about us dying on the table, unless the doctors didn’t tell them. I don’t know. Nothing makes sense.”

“Let’s go see if Olga’s inside. We can brainstorm this later.”

Nate nodded, and I slid the key out of the ignition. Over the past eighteen years, my worship of everything Star Wars had been the only religion I’d known. But as I walked up to Olga’s door, I found myself praying hard.

“We are responsible for what we do,
no matter how we feel.”
—Nate’s Thoughts

Olga

y skin tingled as I sat on my bed, shaking uncontrollably. Strangely, I could still feel my body. I just wasn’t in charge of it anymore. I had no idea how or when I’d gotten home. This was what Conner had explained to me. Patches of time go missing without any hope of getting them back. All I knew was Sam’s presence vibrated and hummed underneath my skin. I walked to the bathroom, splashed my face with cold water, then studied my reflection in the mirror.

Sucking in a deep breath, I said, “Olga?”

The flash of darkness around my corneas told me my own personal demon was talking to me. I’d known weird this past year, but this moment took the cake.

“Consider yourself lucky,” my reflection told me. “Unlike Conner, I’m going to communicate with you so we remain on the same page. We are going to lay low for a while. Your parents and friends won’t notice anything is off. I’ll make them think you were strong enough to kick me out, and I went away for good. I can access your mind to keep up your grades for school. Is that all right with you?” I heard the sound of my giggle, but nothing in my spirit wanted to laugh. “Oh, that’s right. You don’t have a choice.”

An icy chill raced down my spine, and a memory flashed in my mind, a memory of me from another perspective.

Sandals clack across the tile, and I look up to see a young girl approaching the bed, black-framed glasses covering beautiful blue eyes. Her long, red curls are frizzy, and she’s a petite little thing, a couple inches over five feet maybe. She wears slim white pants that end at her ankles and an unzipped gray hoodie over a T-shirt featuring a Shakespeare quote. Despite her fidgeting hands, she looks excited. I recognize her picture from the file. Conner instantly responds to her, jumping around inside like a dog greeting a human at the door.

“Took you long enough.” I make my tone flirty, seductive.

“I know! I’m so sorry! Phone was off.” She rushes to his bedside and gently wraps her arms around his neck.

She smells fresh, and on the spot, I want to lick her milky-white skin, but I resist the urge for now. “You can squeeze me harder, Olga. I’m not going to break.”

She laughs, giving him a little squeeze, then carefully sits next to him on the bed. A few faint freckles decorate her skin underneath her eyes and across the bridge of her nose.

I can feel how desperately Conner wants to touch her, so I let his hand come up and cup her face. A palpable zing—unexpected and almost like lightning bolts of energy—causes me to suck in a breath of surprise. I have to have her. I shove his hands in her hair and pull her toward me with a fierce longing. She goes limp as his lips attack her, perhaps too shocked to respond. I decide to wake her up, too. When I shove his tongue in her mouth, she pushes her arms against his chest and shoves him backward.

The rush of adrenaline deflates, but I keep my gaze on her. “What’s wrong? I thought this is what you wanted.”

“I do. But, Conner, you just woke up, and I don’t know. It just isn’t how I imagined my first kiss.”

I chuckle internally. “Your first kiss? Well, that explains why you were so bad at it.”

Her cheeks flush red as I laugh aloud. Her chest rises and falls with rapid breaths, her taut nipples teasing me through her shirt. Possessing her would definitely be my body of choice, so much innocence to ruin. But first I’ll have to find a way to get her to invite me in. I bet Conner could help with that part.

Seeing the memory from Sam’s point of view was unbearable. A flood of rage rushed through the parts of me I could still call my own.

“Do you see now, love? This has been my plan all along. You’re the one I wanted. And now that I have you, I’m never letting go.”

A knock sounded on the bathroom door. “Olga? Nate and… Conner… are here to see you.”

The spirit smiled at me with an ugliness no mirror could truly capture. I realized then what a conundrum I’d gotten myself into. The spirit within me didn’t possess one trace of humanity but was also an intelligent being, probably smarter than me, and a thousand times more powerful.