Hush

Thirteen

Jesse crossed the room in about two steps and embraced me tightly. I felt deja vu tug at the back of my mind, but it took me a few moments to realize what memory triggered it. This, Jesse holding me because he was scared he might've lost me, reminded me of when he'd caught me in David's old room seeking sanctuary from a potential attack from Maria.

I couldn't help but melt into him. I felt tired, to say the least. Every bit of adrenaline that had been coursing through my body to help me fend off Alexa had dissipated, and all I could remember was the fact that I'd woken up before dawn, and some of my body parts were bleeding.

Jesse realized this a few moments later when he pulled away.

"You're hurt," he said softly, surveying the damage that Alexa had done. "Wait here."

I didn't know what else to do besides wait. The idea of moving, getting dressed for working or eating breakfast or anything else, did not sound appealing. Jesse returned a few seconds later from the bathroom, first aid kit in hand.

I winced as he cleaned the small cut on the bridge of my nose with peroxide and then Neosporin. He thumbed through the kit briefly before he selected the smallest strip sized Band Aid possible and pressed it to my nose.

"I'm going to look stupid," I lamented.

"You'll look worse if it gets infected," Jesse said briefly before he began to tend to my shoulder. He lifted the t-shirt I'd been wearing over my head swiftly, and I shivered as goosebumps began to form on my skin.

I traded shivering for wincing again as Jesse began to clean the cut on my shoulder. He handed me my shirt after he'd applied another Band Aid to it.

"She got my back, too," I said, and instead of putting my shirt back on, I twisted around so that he could see the slender cut that ran between my shoulder blades.

I couldn't see Jesse's face, but I heard him swear. His words were in Spanish at least, which meant things weren't quite as dire as him swearing in English.

"What? Am I going to be disfigured or something?" I asked. I tried to whip around to face him, but Jesse had a steadying hand on my shoulder.

"It's not that. You'll be fine," he said after a few moments.

The sensation of the peroxide going along the cut on my back produced a hissing sound from me. Jesse's hands continued steadily until I heard the sound of scissors snipping briefly before there were bandages, several of them, laid out across the skin of my back.

I put my shirt back on and turned around to face him afterwards.

Jesse's eyes fluttered between mine and my abdomen. "I'll kill her," he said flatly.

I sighed. "She's already dead. I stabbed her twice, and she did all of this after that happened."

"I'll find a way," he vowed.

"I don't even think she can be exorcised," I said. "Jesse, I don't think she's your everyday ghost. I think she's a shifter."

"A shifter?"

I nodded and said, "A mediator with the ability to time travel and perform exorcisms with just a bit of visualizing. Like me."

Jesse ran a hand through his hair and swore in Spanish.

"That complicates things," he admitted.

He wasn't wrong. Being a shifter explained how Alexa had gotten out of Shadowland so fast after Jesse had exorcised her. It probably also explained what had happened to the ghost of Francesca Powell. Grabbing hold of someone and thinking of fog and doors was much easier than gathering up chicken blood or holy water.

There was a long moment of silence where neither of us wanted to admit the frightening truth that had settled between us.

We didn't know what to do.

Finally, Jesse said, "You should get dressed."

"Why?" I asked. "I'm not exactly at my best right now. I'll have to check with Felipa first, but I don't think I have any appointments until at least eleven. I'm going to try and get some sleep until then."

"You can rest in your office. I'm fairly sure that," and here he broke off to call Alexa a word in Spanish that I hadn't learned yet but sounded incredibly juicy, "will come back to finish her work as soon as she's able to.

"She could pop up at the clinic," I said.

"I'll be at the clinic," Jesse said. "And she won't ever want to see me again."

A few hours later, I wasn't sure if it was the threat of Jesse or Alexa's need to recuperate that was keeping her away from our workplace. With my head on my desk and a small puddle of drool forming beneath me, I wasn't sure about much of anything other than how good sleeping in with warm rays of sun shining on my back through the window felt.

I jumped awake with a start when I heard a loud knock on my office door. I quickly wiped the incriminating drool off my face as I crossed the room to open the door.

"Brett," I said in surprise.

Dr. Brett Whitehall, who looked like a highly intelligent surfer in his lab coat, gave me a terse smile.

"There's a patient of mine who it turns out is a patient of yours," Brett said. "Daniel Powell. He came in this morning with some suspicious injuries, and he won't say how he got them. He won't say anything, for that matter. He's come in the same way before, and at this point, I'm concerned that there may be some sort of abuse in his household. Could you corroborate anything like that?"

"Abuse in his household," I said slowly. "There aren't any indications of anything like that in my sessions with him. Is he still here by any chance? I could talk to him again."

It was Tuesday, and I didn't have another appointment scheduled with Daniel until tomorrow afternoon. But I was starting to have a bad feeling about why he was showing up again with suspicious injuries.

"He is," Brett confirmed. "I'll send him here."

Daniel arrived and was seated in my office in no more than three minutes. He looked at me so blankly I felt like he was looking through me.

"What happened, Daniel?" I asked. "I mean, what really happened?"

Daniel looked away at that point. He even shifted around slightly so that he could see out of the large window next to my desk.

"You know you can talk to me. I heard you do it yesterday," I insisted, a little more impatient than I should have. My counselor voice was slipping into my mediator voice.

Daniel remained quiet for several more moments, and I sighed. Our progress had been more hollow the I'd thought. And since I was having an impromptu meeting with Daniel and not a real session, there was hardly any time to try and coax answers out of him with artwork.

"You said nothing was going to happen to me."

Daniel's words were soft but might as well have been a knife plunging into me. I didn't know what to say to him. "Things were more complicated than I thought, and I'm sorry you got hurt. Also, you may get hurt again because I have no idea how to fix anything." That wouldn't have sounded comforting.

"I'm sorry. Handling the ghost isn't going as smoothly as it usually does. And she's been snooping," I said. I thought back to how she knew mine and Jesse's names and where we lived.

Daniel didn't say anything else, but his feelings might as well have been waving in the air like a banner. Sorry didn't fix anything.

"I'm going to take care of everything," I said.

I was surprised to hear Daniel's voice again.

"She said don't," he said. And his voice was both quiet and biting.

After Daniel left my office, I spoke to Brett again. I described him as "accident prone," a catch all term I'd used over the years to mean "prone to physical altercations with a ghost." I hated that I had to use it for Daniel though. Eight was younger than I'd been the first time I'd had a ghost get violent with me.

And eight was definitely too young for anyone to have to go through having their life being used as leverage to make someone else fall in line with a ghost's wishes. Because that was what Alexa was doing now.

She wasn't hiding away and building up strength. She'd just been changing up her strategy. Alexa knew we wouldn't dare to come after her again if Daniel's life was on the line. It was one thing to endanger ourselves, but putting children in the way of harm was out of the question. Even Jesse, who had been more pissed than I'd ever seen him, would stand down for Daniel's sake.

The uncertainty over what we should do next became an impasse. It was too dangerous to do anything, and, even if it wasn't, there was nothing I could think of that we could do.

Except, maybe there was one thing that I could do.

A light bulb flickered on in my mind as an idea that I knew was horrible, even though I wouldn't know exactly how horrible until much later, crashed into me.

I had picked up my cell phone and pressed the call button on El Diablo before I could take the time to rethink what I was about to do. My dedication to the task at hand, namely talking to Paul out of my own volition for the third time in less than ten days, dwindled with every subsequent unanswered ring. Eventually, I reached, not Paul himself, but his voicemail.

I didn't want to leave a message, but I did anyway.

"I have a favor to ask. Name your price."

The call back came within twenty minutes.

Paul didn't miss a beat.

"Sacrifice your firstborn child to me," he said.

"You sure you really want four kids?" I asked, placing a lot of emphasis on the word "four."

Paul paused and then said, in a tone more serious than I'd heard him use in years, "I don't. That's my price."

"Wait. You really want to be Rumpelstiltskin?"

"No. I meant I don't want any kids. If I do whatever it is that you're asking for then you can't hold any sort of potential paternity results over my head."

Potential results? I had the actual papers, complete with 99.9% match, squirreled away at home. I wanted him to ask for something else.

"Are you sure that's what you want?" I asked.

"No. What I want from you is a signed non disclosure agreement regarding anything related to me and any paternity matches you may find or have found. Your word's not going to cut it. I remember what happened last time we made a promise, you see."

I remembered, too. It was hard to forget the night I'd taken him along to a mediating case turned suicide, drugged him, and watched my then-fiancé slug him in the face and subsequently get hauled off to jail.

Paul continued, "If you decide to tell anyone, especially Debbie, I'll be perfectly within my rights to take you to court for everything you own. Your little clinic, your house… It might not get torn down, but believe me when I say you'll never see the inside of it again, considering the ensuing bankruptcy. But I'm sure that won't ever happen because I'm being fair. After all, this'll make us even. Neither of us will have anything to hold over the other. That sounds fair to you, right?"

The idea of giving up my one piece of leverage over Paul was daunting. The house was registered with the Carmel Historical Society, so I knew I had Jesse's soul, but when might something else come up? I hadn't been thinking that there was a dark monster lurking in Jesse or anything until Paul had put the possibility out in the open. What else might be hiding in one of Dr. Slaski's books that Paul was just waiting to tell me about later? And what would he want then?

"Deal," I said quickly, before I could change my mind. "So long as you're up for what I have in mind."

And then I explained Alexa, and how Paul, a shifter who wasn't pregnant, would be well suited to helping out. Namely how Paul would be able to follow Alexa up to Shadowland and shove her through one of those doors that no one came back from.

"Sounds easy," Paul said. "I'll be in town on business this Friday. We can meet up then at my place."

"Your place? Your hotel room?" I asked.

Paul laughed. "You want to do an exorcism in a hotel room? I mean, sure, you could. But I still own Pops' old place. I just don't stay there when I'm in Carmel because there's no wait staff and the fridge is empty. It'll be perfect for what we're going to be doing."

"Exorcising a ghost," I said in clarification. Because if this was anything like those shifter lessons Paul had forced on me back in high school, then ideas were probably swirling around in his head about what other things he planned on doing with me.

Paul paused for a second. "Depends on what else you might want to do. You're not showing or anything yet, are you?" he asked.

I resisted the urge to unleash a torrent of swear words and hang up the phone.

"Friday, you give me a time, and we'll meet at your place," I said.

"Deal."