Hush

Twelve

Content Warning: Violence

"I'm coming with you," I said.

"There is absolutely no way you're coming with me," Jesse said, and he closed the last button on his blue oxford shirt.

"I've got to go into work at some point. I might as well just go with you-save money, save the planet, and save you in case things get dicey."

Jesse gave me a wry smile. "I don't need you to save me, querida. And besides, I'm not going to exorcise the ghost at the clinic."

I narrowed my eyes in confusion. "Why not?"

"Property damage," Jesse replied.

"Well, where the hell are you going to exorcise her? At the Mission? They can only replace that statue of Junipero Serra so many times, you know. We really shouldn't make getting it knocked over by angry spirits a family tradition."

"I'm only going by the Mission to get the supplies for the exorcism. And then I'm going to perform it on the beach."

"There might be people out there, watching the sunrise or something."

"Not Carmel Beach. I'm thinking about the beach where those vengeful students died."

It took me a moment to remember the RLS Angels, but when I did, I said, "Jesse, there are snakes down there."

Jesse laughed. "There are no snakes down there, Susannah. That was just your imagination."

"I know what I felt," I mumbled.

Jesse put his hands on my shoulders and looked straight into my eyes as he spoke next. "I'll see you at work. I'll be on time. You'll be on time. And everything will be taken care of, querida," Jesse said. And then he kissed me.

When Jesse said things like that, he sounded so confident I couldn't help but believe him. Everything would be taken care of. Everything would be OK.

I shouldn't have believed him. I might've been prepared for what was going to happen if I hadn't believe him. But I did believe him at the time, so I climbed back into bed.

I couldn't sleep even though I was tired and there was still moonlight streaming in through the bay window. How could I sleep when Jesse was out there performing an exorcism on Alexa by himself? She was strong, but even more importantly, she was talented. Even when she was pissed at me, not a single one of those knives strayed so much as half an inch off of her intended mark in the wall.

Alexa had been a ghost for over a year now, but even then her powers were prodigious. Most younger ghosts relied on powerful emotions, typically anger, for their strength. Maybe Alexa was some new ager like Elena Cho. Although the people who got called new age were probably not the same people getting called murderers and jewelry store thieves.

I tried not to worry, but the fact that I did could hardly be blamed. I should have followed him. At this point, I could probably still head him off before he made it to the beach. The idea of going down there in the dark by myself was harrowing, but it was better than something happening to Jesse. No matter what Jesse might have thought, he could need saving sometimes. He was mortal again now-and had been for around a decade.

My phone buzzed, and I saw I had a message from Jesse.

It did not say what I wished it would've said, something along the lines of "mission accomplished" or whatever the equivalent of that was in Spanish. Instead, his message read:

No. Me. Siga.

Right as I was typing "siga" into my Spanish translation app, another message came through:

"Don't follow me."

Jesse knew me better than I would have liked him to sometimes. If he was texting, something that he never did when he was driving, then he had either made it to the Mission or he was at the beach already.

The sunrise began to come in pink through the window and slowly bathed the room in warm, gentle light. If it was dawn, then matins would have already been underway. Jesse had probably gotten what he needed for the exorcism already and was at the beach. I'd be too late to tail him.

I tried to take my mind off of the exorcism that would soon be in progress by helping CeeCee decipher the text messages that Adam had sent her yesterday. There wasn't that much to be deciphered if you asked me though. Adam seemed to be asking her on a date under the assumption that she would accept his invitation.

I was halfway through texting her to inform her of this when my phone buzzed.

El exorcismo fue un éxito.

It took me a couple of seconds to decode Jesse's Spanish. And then I still had to look up "un éxito" to confirm what it meant. I smiled when I figured out that, apparently, the exorcism was a success.

My response was excelente, followed by a mess of exclamation marks that probably weren't necessary.

I switched screens, sent off the message to CeeCee, and then noted that there was still nearly an hour to go before seven. I could definitely take a quick nap and still be more or less on time for work.

My eyes fell closed of their own accord. After all, there was nothing to worry about anymore-at least not so far as Alexa herself went. Patrick would be a different situation. We'd have to figure out a way to make sure the police could pin the crimes on him, and that wasn't going to be easy. But the most important thing, for now at least, was that Alexa had been handled.

Or at least, I thought she had been.

My eyes opened suddenly as a chilly sensation rolled down my back. It was how I usually felt when I was in the presence of a member of the undead.

"Good morning, Susannah," Alexa cooed at me from the foot of the bed.

I was dumbstruck. "How," I said. "Jesse just-."

"Jesse just tried to," she corrected. "He was very determined, what with all of the Latin and the holy water, but he didn't know how difficult I am to get rid of."

I swung my legs out over the side of the bed in an attempt to gain some distance from her, but I stumbled to the floor as something hit me hard. I looked up to see Alexa still sitting calmly as one of the pillows from the bed hovered next to her.

"Believe me when I say I didn't really want to have to do this. Things like this only happen to people who get in my way."

"Things like murder?" I asked as I started to draw myself up from the floor.

The pillow came down on me near immediately with a force that pillows should not have been allowed to exert.

"You're not wrong though," Alexa said with a tranquility that contrasted the fury she'd put into the pillow. "Murder, in your case, and walking in to find your lover tragically murdered, in your husband's case, should send a pretty clear message to him."

Alexa's plan was completely bullshit. If she murdered me, Jesse was going to come after her with a vengeance, not back off. I didn't tell her that though. What if she got it in her head to murder him, too? He'd be caught off guard since he thought he'd exorcised her.

Alexa's plan was also complete bullshit because I wasn't going to let someone who thought pillows made an acceptable weapon murder me. It just didn't work like that.

I surged upwards, more quickly than she'd been expecting, and grabbed the pillow that was situated beside her with one hand. I could see the surprise in her eyes as I landed a punch right in her face with the other. And then I straddled her, pressing the pillow to her face and holding down until she lost consciousness.

Or at least, that was the plan.

Because a few seconds later, I realized that I wasn't straddling anything but the bed anymore. Alexa had dematerialized from right beneath me.

She must have realized that I was not going to lie down and accept death and made a hasty retreat. There was no sign of her in the room, and no sign that she'd ever been present except for the pillow's change in position and the way the sheets and comforter dragged on the floor slightly from where I'd tried to hastily get out of bed.

I closed my eyes as a headache began to set in. My mind was racing, and I felt sick-both with nausea and with worry. Because there was something else bothering me besides the fact that I'd just had a run in with an angry ghost.

Aside from the fact that angry spirits should not have been able to have access to the house, what with all the precautions Jesse and I had taken, Alexa had gotten out of shadowland much too quickly. How could Patrick have come to her rescue in such a short period of time? The way mediator-ghost connections worked, when the mediator and the ghost were in love, at least, was that the ghost had a heightened sense of awareness in regards to the mediator. The connection did not work the other way around. For example, back when Jesse had been exorcised, it took Jack calling me to let me know he'd done it himself before I knew what had happened to Jesse.

Jesse.

I should definitely call him to let him know that Alexa wasn't locked up in that foggy purgatory anymore. She might've left me to my own devices only to pursue him.

I opened my eyes and began to reach for my phone when the door to the room burst open.

For a second, I thought it was Jesse. He must've sensed that I was in danger and come running, as he typically did whenever his Susannah Senses were tingling.

But I was wrong.

There was no one at the door. There was no way it could've slammed open so dramatically of its own accord though, so I tensed. Alexa was back, if she'd ever left, and we were about to start round two.

I stood and began to edge my way towards the closet, where I kept my mediating gear. What Alexa could use this time was a nice dose of brass knuckles into her skull. That might persuade her to take a break.

I didn't make it more than three steps towards the closet before the doorway wasn't empty anymore. A collection of knives from the kitchen glimmered slightly from the gray morning light caught in the doorframe to the bedroom. This army of knives was more motivation to make sure I was armed too, but I didn't make it any closer to the closet.

The sound of "Someone Saved My Life Tonight" distracted me momentarily, and Alexa was behind me in an instant. One of her hands wrapped itself very tightly around my throat.

Let me say this, ghost strength is a confusing thing. I didn't know if Alexa knew the first thing about fighting. She'd been a photographer from a wealthy family when she was alive, so I would hazard a guess that she didn't. But ghosts have an entire reservoir of strength to tap into when they're in the zone. And it doesn't take particularly good technique to choke someone so much as it takes some arm muscle and willpower.

Alexa wasn't using all of her willpower to strangle me though. The knives in the doorway under her control glimmered more as they began to quickly move towards me.

I was a little embarrassed at what I had to do next. Because I've been in the mediator game for a long time, and I really would have liked to say my technique had improved over the years. But I bit into Alexa's arm with all the force and finesse they'd taught us to use in elementary school if someone should try and kidnap you.

Alexa's arm loosened, though she didn't remove her grasp on me entirely. I jabbed my elbow into her stomach-hard, and she doubled over. The knives in the doorway drooped and then fell entirely as she spluttered behind me.

"Do you have any idea how stupid you are?" I asked as I crossed the length of the room quickly. I knelt and picked up all four of the knives Alexa had been controlling. "Let's say your plan worked and you killed me. Did you ever think that through? Do you really think I'd just drop off the map and let you go on a robbery-murder spree with your fiance?"

Alexa was still doubled over, and I took the liberty of making sure she stayed that way for a while. I took one of the knives I was holding and rammed it straight through the back of her neck. Alexa was still for several moments until she reached around, with shaky hands, to remove the knife from her neck.

I didn't stop her from doing it. After all, she needed to hear what I had to say.

"If you kill me Alexa, or if you kill Jesse for that matter, we will come back as ghosts. And we will completely wreck your shit. If you think I'm getting in the way now, then you don't even want to start to imagine what I'd be capable of doing to you if death wasn't on the table for me anymore."

With the first knife out of her neck, I took the pleasure of ramming a new one in there. I removed it myself this time though, and I plucked the first knife from Alexa's hands as well. Hopefully, she had heard my message loud and clear. She was not going to win today. Or any day, for that matter.

Alexa dematerialized, and I dropped the knives and scooped up my phone from the bed as "Someone Saved My Life Tonight" started to play again.

"It's under control," I said quickly, before Jesse could ask how I was.

"What happened? I'm on my way home now, but I could feel that you were in danger."

"Alexa is apparently spectral herpes."

Jesse didn't say anything, and for a second I was worried Alexa was with him.

"Jesse?" I asked.

"'Spectral herpes?'" he said finally, and the confusion in his voice was evident.

I sat down on the bed, cross legged, and said, "You're a doctor, Jesse. C'mon. What's herpes?"

"A virus that forms blisters. Are you saying she's a blister? I'm not understanding your metaphor, querida."

"I'm saying she's a loathsome and recurring problem. She just showed up here," I said.

"Oh," Jesse said, realization dawning on him. "That makes sense then. Except, it doesn't make any sense whatsoever because I just exorcised her. How could she have been there with you?"

"I don't know," I said. "Maybe…"

And the realization of what Alexa must have been hit me suddenly.

"Oh God," I said. "She's-."

"Back," Alexa hissed as she materialized suddenly.

One of the knives on the floor that I'd just dropped went whizzing past my shoulder. Unlike the knives she'd pinned around Jesse the other day, this knife actually hit me. It took off the fabric from my t-shirt and scraped along my skin briefly until my shoulder was wet with blood.

"She's what?" Jesse asked, and when I didn't answer, I could hear his tone start to grow worried. "Susannah, is she there now? Susannah?"

I wanted to answer him, but I couldn't. In my preoccupation with not being stabbed, I'd dropped the phone. Even though it wasn't on speaker, I could still hear the plethora of Spanish swear words Jesse was saying from the phone's position on the floor.

"You made a good point earlier," Alexa said, and the knives that I'd dropped to the floor earlier were inches away from me now and steadily gaining more ground. "I shouldn't kill you."

I didn't speak. I barely even breathed. The knives were so close to me, and every last one of them was under Alexa's control. With the knife that nicked my shoulder unaccounted for, there was still one knife in front of my chest, another in front of my face, and one had circled around me to aim at my back.

Alexa spoke again in a very casual, almost friendly voice, and said, "I'm just going to maim you. I'll leave you alive enough to not become a ghost, but not alive enough to pose a threat to me. Plus, your husband's still on the line, so he'll get to hear the whole thing as a warning."

Without a single one of the knives receding, Alexa stooped, picked up my phone, and pressed the speaker button. "That sounds like a fair deal, right?" she said.

"You're sick," I said quietly.

"I was sick," Alexa corrected. "I consider myself cancer-free now."

The knife in front of my face began to inch closer and closer, and I squirmed. She was trying to gouge out one of my eyes. There was no way I was going to get out of this without getting a little banged up, as the blood on my shoulder already indicated, so I might as well have gone down fighting. There was no sense in just sitting here and letting her stab me at her own discretion, of course.

I jerked myself upwards suddenly, and I felt one of the knives make light contact with the bridge of my nose. I moved it to grab it by the blade, barehanded, and I gripped it tightly. Alexa was still controlling it, even as my palms felt warmer and wetter with my own blood. And I only had one knife in hand; there were still three more of them. I didn't have enough hands to be able to stave them all off.

I felt the knife at my back press into me insistently, and my skin felt cool once it had created a rip in my t-shirt, and I could feel the metal directly against me. I moved sideways only to have that knife rip a longer hole into my shirt that eventually cut into my skin.

There was something about the thinness of the cut that, unlike my bleeding hands or shoulder, made me cry out in pain.

And then I heard Jesse's voice again.

"Alexa," he said darkly, and then he called her a name in English that quite possibly would've earned him the biggest single contribution the swear jar had ever seen, "If you hurt her, Hell would pale in comparison to what I'll do to you."

Alexa laughed cruelly and was about to say something to me when, suddenly, one of the knives that was pointed at me was pointed at her.

She looked down in confusion, as did I. My hand wasn't on the handle, and the only person in the room with telekinesis was her. But before either of us knew it, all of the knives, except for the one I was gripping blade first, were turned on Alexa.

And then all of the knives were plunging into her body.

Both the knives and my phone clattered to the floor a few moments later as she dematerialized. I grabbed them quickly, even though my palms ached. Each of the four knives was covered in blood, but, as time passed, the blood on one of the knives began to fade into nothingness.

I held on to all of the knives tightly, by the handles instead of by the blades this time. I had no way of knowing if she was gone or not. I reached down again, still holding all of the knives, to pick up my phone.

"I'm OK," I said.

I could hear both the relief and worry in his voice as he responded, but I wasn't listening to anything he said.

"Suze?" a voice in the direction of the window seat said.

I turned to the source of the voice as I gripped the knives more tightly. I nearly dropped them when I saw who it was.

"We'll talk when you get home, Jesse," I said tonelessly, and I cut him off abruptly as I looked at my latest spectral visitor.

"Elena," I said quickly. "Did you use those knives on that ghost that was just here?"

Elena nodded and said, "I was coming by to ask if you'd had any luck with telling the police about my body yet, and I noticed you were in trouble. Are you OK?"

"I'm fine now," I said. "Thanks, by the way. I didn't know how I was going to get out of that one. And I was planning on calling today. Sorry, I've been pretty busy."

"It's alright. I see why you've been so busy lately. Are most of the people you work with as difficult as her?"

"Not typically," I said.

Elena looked like she was about to say something else, but she dematerialized as someone else appeared in the doorway. This time, it wasn't Alexa.

Jesse was home.