Intersections Read online

  And here we were, standing out in the open. Exposed. Stuck between a post-orgasmic gay man and my possessed ex-husband. Fucking great.

  It wasn’t hard to imagine Mr. Shady spotting us through the trees. Our ghostly auras must’ve stood out like beacons in the thicketed darkness. My ghostly flesh tingled. The wee phantom hairs on the back of neck stood straight up. I bore my eyes into the phone and gritted my teeth. We tried again.

  The phone rose but only barely. Shannon whimpered. Her body trembled, either from the effort or sheer terror.

  “We got this,” I told her, though I didn’t know it to be true.

  We tried again, lifting it maybe an inch before it fell back down with a muffled thump. Thankfully the lovers didn’t hear but we couldn’t risk that again.

  What happened next came from pure desperation. Or maybe it was the sight and sound of the two men toiling with each other in the dark. I ground my pelvis against Shannon’s ass, rubbing in a concentrated circle. Her tremors ceased. She pressed her butt back against me. I cupped her hip with my free hand. She grabbed my palm. Waves of tension poured over us. Our merged auras throbbed with silver light. Silver, not gold. She slid my hand across her flat belly, over the bulge of her twisted guts. Now lower.

  Before, when I’d touched or been touched by other ghosts, there had been tingles. Now, those tingles blossomed into something all-consuming. Strengthened by our desire, power swelled inside us. Through us. Around us. That silver light pulsed.

  All the while, we lifted the phone.

  My fingers drifted lower. The phone rose higher.

  Lower and higher. Lower and higher.

  Until the phone hovered at eye level with the cracked window.

  Until my fingertips slid under her waistband through trimmed hair.

  We pulled the phone out just as I nudged my middle finger over her clit. I’d never touched another woman like this before. Her labia felt different from my own, fuller and more complicated somehow. I wanted to do more—to slide my fingers inside her and taste her phantom nectar—but we hadn’t the time. She moaned and grunted with frustration. I ground against her, my own pussy throbbing. We almost dropped the phone. It wobbled from our grasp but we caught it before it hit the gravel.

  “Quick,” I said.

  Crouching low, we hustled the phone away. With every step, our dominion over the rectangle of plastic diminished. The device fell lower and lower so that in the final steps it skimmed over the gravel. At the end, it slid upon the dirt at the lot’s edge. Panting pointlessly, we hit the home button. Lock screen.

  We tried their home address. No.

  We tried Tara’s birthday. No.

  “Try her birth year,” I said.

  The cacophony of screaming grew still louder. My hand rested on top of Shannon’s, index finger pressing into her fingernail. Our merged auras still glowed with that silver light, but it was fading. We had to hurry. I followed her lead, our fingers dancing a slow waltz across the screen. The year worked. The home screen blinked on.

  “Yes!” Shannon said. She navigated to Mr. Noble’s contacts, but Tara wasn’t listed.

  “Screw it,” I said. “Just enter her number.”

  “I don’t know her fucking number. Who the hell memorizes phone numbers?”

  “I hate your generation.”

  “Wait. He calls her Hooter.”

  “He calls her Hooter?”

  “He says her big eyes make her look like an owl.”

  “Ah.”

  Sure enough, she found Hooter in the list of contacts and started a new text message. I imagined it must’ve been agonizing for her, texting in slow motion like this. She was probably one of those annoying kids I saw at the coffee shop, thumbs blurring over their phones while smirking.

  She typed:

  * * *

  Tara its me shannon i have posses zest your dads phone. Help me. Summon a

  * * *

  She paused.

  “Posses zest?” I said.

  “Fucking autocorrect. How do you spell Ouija?”

  The coldness inside me intensified. Our hands trembled. I told her how to spell Ouija and she continued typing:

  * * *

  Ouija then drive to airport. Hurry. Ple

  * * *

  That was as far as she got, because a tangled pile of shadows emerged on the other side of the lot. The mangled mess of glistening dark spirits writhed and screeched. Broken bones protruded from dangling limbs that hung disjointedly from the gruesome bundle of darkness. The tortured spirits were stacked as high as ten deep at their peak. Atop this horrid pyramid, Mr. Shady stared down at us and smiled.

  19

  We sent the unfinished text message, scrabbled to our feet, and ran. At first, we tried using the long gravel road, but Mr. Shady had the advantage on the open ground. Our hands clutched each other, but the combined will of his minions easily surpassed our own. He gained ground on us, and a sickening chill wiggled inside me. I knew what we had to do, but it was going to hurt so damn bad.

  With a grunt that sounded far fiercer than I felt, I yanked Shannon off the road and into the woods. Sticks stabbed into our feet and branches slashed at our ribs. Bushes lashed our thighs. We ran almost blindly, and our only compass was the dreadful cold nipping at our backs. Behind us, Mr. Shady’s slaves shrieked and moaned. I dared not look back.

  The woods stretched on forever.

  Near the top of a muddy slope, a stray branch skewered my face, jabbing right beneath my eye. I screamed and collapsed.

  I’d never known exhaustion like this, not even after a half marathon. We were done for. Mr. Shady and his demented crew closed in. I was ready to give up, but then a loud horn blared nearby. By the trailing pitch, I could tell that the noise came from a speeding vehicle. A highway. So close.

  Shannon smacked my face—the unskewered side. “We can do this, bitch. Come on.”

  I stared into her eyes and nodded. We scrabbled back to our feet and pressed onward, though Mr. Shady was only a stone’s throw away. Atop the rise, white headlights and red taillights slashed through the night. I was pretty sure the divided highway was Interstate 70, which would take us right past the airport.

  Renewed with hope, we sprinted down the hillside. Twigs and brush slashed through us, and we tumbled into a ditch as a bloody mess of torn flesh and cracked bones. Still clasping hands, we crawled onto the shoulder of the highway. Traffic hurled past, the wind from the semis knocking us over.

  Behind us, something roared.

  Mr. Shady and his minions barreled out of the woods. The conglomeration’s souls shrieked, begged, and cursed with tinny voices. Mr. Shady towered over us. Sour cold radiated from his slaves, numbing my back and freezing my phantom blood. Dark grey swarmed over my vision.

  We scrabbled to our feet and into traffic. It was our only chance. We ran with the traffic, chancing looks backward to change lanes and avoid being run down by oncoming semis and vehicles. Mr. Shady soared over the interstate on the backs of his nasty crew. He closed the gap between us though our legs pumped at a blur.

  Shannon kept looking back and changing lanes.

  “Trust me,” she said.

  Mr. Shady drew so close and the chill emitting from his followers grew so strong that I could barely feel sensation in my numb legs. I looked back. He loomed overhead. We cut into the right-hand lane. Mr. Shady followed, and a set of headlights tore through him. Shannon pulled me down just in time. A gigantic tanker truck smashed through the slave ship—an explosion of light and shadow that sent pieces of souls spraying through the air and over the road. The truck roared overhead. After it passed, Mr. Shady flailed through the air and tumbled over the blacktop—a long dark comet with a black blood-splattered tail.

  For a moment, everything dead remained still. Bits of souls—once again glowing dimly—lay in pieces. Hands. Arms. Torsos. Heads. Then the screaming began—the horrid symphony of more than a hundred spirits suffering in stone cold agony.