The Haunted Heart: Winter by Josh Lanyon Page B

and began pressing
buttons. “You can’t stay, Flynn. It’s not safe for you.”
    “That’s so sweet,” I said shortly. “But I’m
sta —” I broke off as Kirk held his phone up to show me a grainy
video on the small screen. I leaned forward for a better look,
trying to hear the blurred video.
    I felt an unnerving shift, as though the air
pressure had changed, as though a trap door had opened. The bottom
had just dropped out of the only reality I knew. The lighting was
terrible, but even so, I could see the video was of me. I was
sitting on Kirk’s sofa and I was speaking quietly, venomously.
Quietly, venomously in French.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

     
    “T hat was you last
night,” Kirk said. In case I missed the point.
    It took me a second or two, but I got out,
“It turns out I don’t like having my sleep disturbed either.”
Neither of us laughed.
    I couldn’t tear my gaze away from the mini
video. Off screen, another voice, Kirk’s, was calmly questioning
the onscreen me. “What is it you want? Why are you here? Can you
speak English?”
    The onscreen me seemed to wind down,
speaking more slowly, sleepily. My scalp crawled, listening.
    Real life Kirk said gruffly, “Do you see
now?”
    “I see I missed an easy A when I didn’t take
French as a high school elective.” I answered automatically, my
brain going a million miles a minute while I tried to make sense of
what I was watching on the small screen.
    Possession? Was that what this was? I was
possessed by a ghost? A French lady ghost at that? Was she
somewhere inside me at that very instant? Or was she just renting
space in the evenings? It was unbelievable. I was the most ordinary
person I knew. But fuzzy though it was, that small image was
unmistakably me.
    “I know you don’t want to hear it, but I
guess because of your loss, you’re more receptive to whatever this
is. A spirit, a ghost, an entity…you are vulnerable to it.”
    I appreciated that he was trying to be more
tactful than the first time he’d suggested I was the catalyst, but
I had to point out, “How do we know? Nobody’s watching you sleep.
Maybe the same thing is happening to you when you’re counting
Zzzzs.”
    Clearly the idea had never occurred to Kirk.
The scowl returned full force. “That’s not very likely.” He turned
off his phone, which was a relief.
    “I’d have said the same thing, but you’re
holding the proof in your hand. Speaking of which, if that video
ever makes it onto YouTube, I guarantee to personally haunt you to
the end of your days.”
    “You need to take this seriously, Flynn. I
don’t scare easy, but you scared the shit out of me last
night.”
    I could believe that. I felt pretty shaken
too. I was very grateful he hadn’t called my parents or 911 when
I’d conked out. Either time. “Okay. So you think the solution is I
run home to Virginia and you deal with the mirror? How do you plan
on doing that?”
    “I haven’t worked out the details. I was
thinking maybe of putting it in cold storage on the other side of
the state for the next fifty years.”
    “I thought we were being serious.”
    “Seems practical to me. We’ve speculated
that this spook has a limited range. So we isolate her — it — from
humans.”
    “Fine. If that’s the solution, I’ll take
care of it myself and then I can get back to work cataloging Uncle
Winston’s collection.”
    “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
    “And that would be because why?”
    “Because we don’t know what else is up
there. Or down there. Because we don’t know for sure that our lady
in black is restricted to the mirror’s location. Because the risk
to you does not justify the gamble.”
    “What do you care about the risk to me?” I
scoffed. “A hard ass ex-Ranger like you? No way. You just want your
isolation chamber back.”
    “That’s true. I can’t get anything done with
you around. You’re one distraction after another. Interruption, I
mean. But also —” He stopped