“I guess.” I rub my face with my hands and push my hair back. “It sure didn’t happen with me. I was certainly startled, but after that—well, how do you deny what’s right in front of your face?”

  She pokes me in the shoulder. “That’s because you, my dear, have an open mind and are willing to allow for there to be more to the world than what most people accept.”

  “I guess that’s my superpower.”

  Jilly laughs. “No, I think your superpower is talking to ghosts.”

  “I’d rather be able to fly.”

  “Wouldn’t we all.”

  “So do you have any tips on how to summon a ghost?” I ask.

  “I don’t think you necessarily have to summon them. Just find a quiet place and indicate that you’d like to have a conversation.”

  “Indicate how?”

  She shrugs. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s just a matter of saying their name and inviting them to join you.”

  Jilly tries to get us to stay for dinner, but I beg off. I need another shower after grubbing about in the Crescent Beach world, and Gabi and I need to prepare for tomorrow. The whole way back to the house Gabi chatters about all the things she’s learned from Saskia. I don’t really understand it—there’s too much jargon. All I know for sure is that Gabi can’t seem to access the internet the same way Saskia does, even though Saskia says she should be able to do it.

  “I’ll just have to keep coming at it from different angles, I guess,” she finally says.

  “Yep. Giving up is for losers,” I say.

  “Exactly.”

  She helps me make dinner, including a mess of chicken, rice and vegetables to see Sonora through the next few days. I think Tam’s home but I haven’t seen him. I figure if he’s hungry he’ll come down for dinner, but I have the sense that he’s sleeping off this past weekend. Whether Lydia is sleeping it off with him, I have no idea.

  After dinner I go outside with Sonora and sit on the remains of the old wooden swing set in our backyard. It doesn’t work anymore, but Tam and I put supports under the seats so we can still come and hang out here when it’s a nice night. This evening certainly qualifies. There’s a three-quarter moon peeking over the roof of the house next door and the stars are beginning to appear as the light drains from the sky. I can hear traffic but it seems a million miles away. Mostly I hear crickets and June bugs.

  Sonora sits with me for a few moments before she gets bored and goes off to explore the garden.

  Okay, I think. As Gabi would say, dive right in.

  I clear my throat.

  “So Ethan,” I say. “Can we talk?”

  I feel stupid as the words come out my mouth.

  “About what?”

  “Gah!”

  I almost jump out of my skin because he’s sitting directly across from me on the swing’s other seat.

  “God. Can’t you give a girl a little notice like a normal person would instead of appearing out of nowhere and giving me a scare?”

  “I’m not normal,” he says. “I’m dead, remember? And you called me.”

  He looks so real. I’m half convinced he’s not so much a ghost as that he has Joe’s ability to step in and out of the otherworld. But I keep my hands to myself and resist leaning forward to poke him. Sonora trots over and regards him with suspicion until I tell her it’s okay. I turn back to Ethan.

  “Are you following me around?” I ask. “Because if you are, ew.”

  “I don’t know where I was. I just heard my name and found myself here with you. What do you want?”

  “Who killed you?”

  He sighs. “You know, it’s not surprising the show got cancelled after three seasons, because you seem to have totally lost any deductive ability.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I didn’t even know I was dead until the last time we talked.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “So how could I know who killed me?”

  “But you seemed to blame Charlie Midnight, once you did find out.”

  “I can’t think of anybody else who’d want me dead.”

  “What about the guy who sold you the manuscript?”

  “Why would he want me dead?”

  “I don’t know. Why did you want me to find him?”

  “I needed provenance for the manuscript, preferably notarized.”

  “So you could resell it?”

  He nods.

  “You didn’t ask for that when you bought it?” I ask.

  “I honestly didn’t think of it.”

  “What did you pay for it?”

  “Ten thousand dollars.”

  A low whistle escapes my lips.

  “I know,” he says. “I’m an idiot. But I got caught up in the whole idea of a new Nora book and kind of lost my head.”

  “Where would you even get that kind of money?”

  “Buying and selling Nora memorabilia is surprisingly lucrative.”

  I had no idea. I mean, I knew the show still had a fairly avid fan base, and the money Greta could get me for appearances seemed stupidly high, but I never really thought about it the way Ethan did.

  “Okay,” I say. “Back to Charlie Midnight. Why would you think he’s responsible? And why do you think he might go after Edward? And before you ask, I’ve arranged for protection for him.”

  Ethan’s face lights up. “You did?” He seems both surprised and genuinely grateful.

  “I did. Now tell me about Charlie Midnight.”

  “I’ve had horrible dreams about him,” Ethan says. “Ever since I left Crescent Beach and came here. You know he feeds on a person’s life essence, right?”

  I nod. “It’s in the book, but it’s not clear how he does it.”

  “I don’t know either. But I did find out before I left that he’s particularly fixated on Nora and the people closest to her. In the dreams…sometimes I dreamt he was standing right at the foot of my bed. I couldn’t see how he was doing it, but I knew he was pulling my life force out of me and I was too scared to do anything except lie there and wait for him to finish. In the morning I’d wake up and feel all tainted, plus stupid and sluggish for hours.”

  “So you think it was more than a dream.”

  “I didn’t know what to think.”

  Something else has been niggling at me ever since Gabi told me she’d followed him here from the Crescent Beach world.

  “How did you find your way here?” I ask him. “How did you even know there was a here?”

  “Gavin told Nora about it. Well, not this world in particular, but that there are other worlds. He believed that Charlie Midnight came from this one and I guess in a way he was right.”

  “And Gavin is?”

  “A very weird guy. He called himself an adventurer, but he was actually a cryptid hunter.”

  “Sorry—a what hunter?”

  “Cryptids—a creature whose existence has been suggested by, you know, folklore or urban myth, but isn’t documented by the scientific community.”

  “That’s a Crescent Beach thing?”

  He shakes his head. “It’s a thing, period.”

  “Give me an example.”

  He shrugs. “The Loch Ness Monster. Bigfoot. The Jersey Devil. Werewolves and vampires.”

  “Wait a second. Gavin—he’s the vampire hunter from the book, who tells Nora about the prophecy.”

  Ethan nods. “He said there are veils that hide the worlds from each other, but they’re very thin and permeable in some places, particularly any kind of border.”

  At my blank look, he goes on. “Supposedly, magic works strongest where there’s a natural threshold, or border. It can be at dusk—the border between day and night—or a riverbank, a seashore, the place where a meadow turns into forest. They’re harder to find in the city, but he had some ideas. When I finally decided I needed to get away, I started looking in the places he mentioned and other places that I thought were likely candidates.”

  “And you found one.”

  “It took me a couple of weeks, but yeah,” he says. “Just before I left, I broke into a jewellery store and grabbed a bunch of stuff. I got out before the cops showed up. I’m not even sure they came. By that point the bloods were starting to go after people and they had their hands full. I crossed over, then used the jewellery to buy myself a new life.”

  He sighs. “I guess I should be grateful. I got two years before my killer found me. Back there, I’d probably have been dead within two weeks.”

  With Gabi, I get confused about the memories that are real for her but I only remember from the show. The trouble is, the longer I spend in her company, the harder it is for me to tell the difference. But I don’t have that connection with Ethan. Except for how he cares for Edward, he’s a self-serving, pervy jerk. He just abandoned everybody in the Crescent Beach world and didn’t look back. And his Nora-porn debased everything the character stood for. I don’t owe him a thing.

  I’m about to call Sonora and go inside when I remember how he and I first met, and I realize I can give him this much before I wash my hands of him.

  “I tracked down who sold you the manuscript,” I tell him.

  “Seriously?”

  I nod. “It was Emma Rohlin’s son-in-law.”

  “Her son-in-law? Why would he do that?”

  “We haven’t figured out that part yet. Could be anything—greed, a gambling problem, might’ve owed the wrong people some money. Or maybe he just doesn’t like his mother-in-law. You were right and wrong about the authorship of the newer books, by the way.”

  “How so?”

  “Rohlin didn’t write them—or at least she didn’t write them on her own. They were collaborations with her daughter Shannon.”

  He shakes his head. “I didn’t see that coming.”

  “Neither did I.”

  I stand up. As soon as I do, Sonora comes over from where she’s been mooching around the shed at the back of the yard.

  “I’ll be seeing ya,” I say.

  “Wait. What am I supposed to do now?”

  I honestly don’t know what to say, so I settle with, “Whatever dead people do, I guess,” and head for the house. I wait until I reach the door to look back. The swing is empty.

  Gabi’s sitting in the dining room with a newspaper spread out in front of her open at the comics page. She looks up when Sonora and I come in.

  “Jilly just called with a message from Joe,” Gabi says. “He wants us to meet at the greenhouse first thing in the morning.”

  “So we’re really doing this,” I say. “You had some serious regrets when we got there yesterday.”

  She gives me a rueful shrug. “I know. The shock of it really hit me. But I’ve been looking for Nora for two years and I’m not going to stop now. She’d never leave me hanging, either. I know what I’m getting into and, yeah, I’m going, though if you want to change your—”

  I hold a hand up. “We’ve already had that conversation.”

  “Got it.”

  “Should we go see if there’s anything useful in the stuff upstairs?” I ask.

  “Sure.”

  Gabi helps me pull a couple of boxes out from the back of my closet. Inside are prop souvenirs from various movies and the Nora Constantine show. Most of them are fakes, but there’s a pair of genuine Japanese swords—a katana and the shorter wakizashi—that we might be able to use since we’ve both practiced with bokken back in our martial arts days. I also find a long hunting knife that the props guy on Dying in the Dark gave me when the shoot was done. I guess he thought it was romantic. At the bottom of one of the boxes I find my old butterfly knife and I set it aside as well.

  While we sort through the boxes, I replay my conversation with Ethan.

  “I never knew Gavin was on the level,” Gabi says. “I always thought he was kind of sketchy.”

  “Was he still around before you left? Because maybe we could enlist his help.”

  Gabi shakes her head. “Charlie Midnight had him beheaded in front of the town hall.”

  I feel the blood drain from my face. “Seriously?”

  “Yeah, I heard it wasn’t pretty. He killed the chief of police and Mayor Sanders at the same time.”

  I clashed with Chief Irvine on more than one occasion, and I never trusted Sanders, but I wouldn’t have wished a death like that on anyone. Then I catch myself. That was on the show. Who knows what they were like in that other Crescent Beach.

  “Do you think there’s anyone left to save?” I find myself saying.

  “You mean besides that foul-tempered man we met at the pier? God, I hope so.”

  We’re both thinking of Nora. The Gabi from the show was never very social, so this Gabi probably didn’t leave anybody else that she really cared about.

  “I guess we’ll find out tomorrow,” she says.

  We’ve just brought the swords and knives down to the dining room when the front door bangs open.

  “Honey, I’m home!” Tam yells.

  The silly fool.

  I hear his backpack drop onto the floor. His guitar case he’ll have set down much more carefully. Sonora bounces out to greet him and he fusses over her before stepping into the dining room. He gives Gabi a puzzled look.

  “Hey, Allison,” he says. “What are you doing in town? I thought Joon told me you were working on a pilot for Syfy out in Vancouver. And what’s with the half-Gabi look?”

  “What’s a half-Gabi look?” I have to ask.

  He looks at me like I’m off my rocker. “Come on. Gabi’s always in black with, like, a million studs and face piercings.”

  He turns to Gabi and rolls his eyes. “How soon she forgets.”

  “This isn’t Allison,” I tell him.

  “Yeah, right.” He sits down and picks up the sheathed katana. “This is cool.”

  I sit down as well and take the katana from him. “Let me catch you up on what my life’s been like since I last saw you on Sunday.”

  He takes it well. Better than maybe I would have if our roles were reversed. He does interrupt with a lot of “no ways” and “shut ups” as he tries to digest everything he’s being told.

  “No, no,” he says when he hears what we’re planning to do. “You’re not the freaking Marines, Joon. This is not your fight.”

  “But it is mine,” Gabi says.

  He leans across the table to get a closer look at her.

  “Seriously?” he says. “You’re not Allison?”

  I see Gabi bristle. “Do you have a problem with that?”

  He sits back in his chair. “I have a million problems with it, starting with: what the fuck? How is something like this even possible?”

  “Come on, Tam,” I say. “We talked about some of this stuff before and you seemed to accept it.”

  “That was different.”

  “How was it different?”

  “Now we’re talking about other worlds and my sister’s suddenly developed an action hero complex. If these monsters are real, you could end up dead.”

  I sigh and reach in both directions to squeeze each of them on the shoulder. This conversation could go around in circles, and Gabi and I need our rest.

  “Let’s sleep on it and talk again in the morning,” I say.

  9

  Wednesday

  We get up early and are out of the house before Tam wakes, which saves us having to have the conversation with him before we leave.

  By the time we arrive at the greenhouse studio, Joe’s waiting in the backyard with a couple of other men. They’re cut from the same cloth as Joe, handsome and rangy, with a slightly feral light in their eyes. He introduces them as Whiskey Jack and Nanabozho.

  “Call me Bo,” Nanabozho says.

  They’re dressed in jeans and cowboy boots. Joe and Jack are wearing T-shirts, Bo’s in a flannel shirt. On the picnic table is a heap of body armour, a pair of police helmets, two riot shields and some serious weaponry. Automatic weapons. Shotguns. Handguns.

  We’re not going to need the swords and knives I brought.

  “Where did you get all this stuff?” I ask.

  “From the Spook Squad’s weapons locker.”

  “What? They just lent it to you?”

  Joe shakes his head. “No, we took it.”

  “Jesus, Joe.”

  “Don’t worry about it. We’ll either bring it all back before they ever know, or it won’t make a difference to us.”

  He points two fingers at Gabi and me, then nods at the body armour. “Now suit up.”

  There are only two sets of body armour.

  “What about you guys?” Gabi asks.

  Joe shrugs. “Don’t worry about us—we’ll be fine.”

  I played a member of a SWAT team in Blue Line of Valor, so I know how the gear works. I help Gabi with hers then suit up myself.

  Jilly stands by the door to the greenhouse, plainly unhappy with the turn her little adventure with me has taken. I walk over to her when I’ve finished buckling and strapping myself in.

  “Stop worrying,” I tell her. “We’re not going to take any unnecessary chances.”

  “Besides going over there in the first place,” she says, echoing Joe’s concern the last time Gabi and I insisted we accompany him.

  I’m not going to argue with her.

  “So you’ll take care of Sonora if—”

  “Don’t you even put that out into the universe!” she says. Then she gives me a hug made awkward by the bulk of the vest I’m wearing.

  “Wisakedjak and Nanabozho,” Gabi says by the table. “Those are names from Native American mythology.”

  Whiskey Jack gives her a grin. “Are they now?” He looks at Joe. “What are the odds on that?”

  “Who’s keeping an eye on Edward?” I ask.

  “Some corbae who owe me a favour,” Joe says.

  He gives Gabi and me belts with a holstered Glock, taser and baton attached, waits while we buckle them on, then hands us each a machine gun on a strap. Gabi and I look at each other. If this business weren’t so serious, the way we look would be hilarious, all bulked up and bristling with weapons. Instead, it’s instantly sobering and I feel my chest go tight.

 

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