Chapter 21

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

HIRO

Only two more days until the weekend, which Barry is working for me. It’ll be nice to have a weekend off where we have no plans. Since Barry is taking over until closing today, I pass off the reins to him and head for home.

It’s a pretty uneventful drive as I show my grandpa the area and point out things of interest… there’s not much. Once we reach home, he wanders off to scrutinize the yard and the outside of the house.

I push the front door open and kick my shoes off. Bandit comes running to see me, so I stoop down to pet him for a bit.

“Was Maddox depriving you of love, you poor thing?” I ask as I scratch under his chin. He’s purring up a storm as he rubs against my leg. “Speaking of Maddox, where is he?” I wander farther into the house where I find him passing through the kitchen. “Who is this sexy stranger in my house?” I tease.

Someone clears their throat behind me, and I awkwardly turn to realize that my grandpa had joined me at some point. I guess I’m not used to my ghosts silently hanging around and assumed he was still outside.

“The way you whipped around tells me you were talking about someone else,” Maddox says.

I grin. “Definitely not talking about my grandfather.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” Maddox says.

“Was the rest of your day good at work?”

“Yeah, nothing exciting. Pretty routine things.”

“Same here. I have to confess that sometimes I get a little bored at the bookstore. I’m used to helping you and then I’m like oh… what’s this box? Maybe something from a creepy person? Oh… no, just more books.”

“How could that possibly disappoint you?” Maddox asks.

I grin at him. “I’m teasing. Just teasing.”

“You better be,” he says a moment before my phone beeps, and I see that it’s from Nakamura.

Nakamura: These ghosts you claim to see…

Me: Yeah?

Nakamura: Can you see them through things? Like through a screen? Or a picture?

Me: Not usually. But weirdly, I could see a blur of them in a picture of Hikaru before he was attacked. I think it’s the first time I’ve looked at a photograph and was easily able to tell that there were ghosts in it. It doesn’t show them exactly, but the photo was very blurred in areas to the point where I couldn’t even see Hikaru.

Nakamura: You don’t say.

Me: Why?

Nakamura: Just thought that maybe you were missing me and wanted to see a picture of my charming face.

Maddox: You realize I’m in this chat too, right?

Nakamura: The more the merrier.

Me: Did something happen?

Nakamura: Define “something.”

Maddox: Clearly something happened.

Nakamura: No, no. Everything’s fine. Let’s just say that if I hadn’t tripped over this pesky pigeon today, I have the weird feeling someone would have driven over my body. But I’m sure it was just an accident.

Me: Care to elaborate?

Nakamura: A pesky pigeon dashed in front of me to get something on the sidewalk. I tripped over it and stumbled off into the grass as a black car with no license plate jumped the sidewalk where I’d been seconds prior. Then without a moment’s hesitation, they drove off.

Me: I’m confused. It almost sounds like there’s a part of you that’s pretending like it wasn’t on purpose.

Nakamura: Maybe the man simply hated pigeons. Our pigeon friend sadly did not make it. RIP pigeon friend.

Maddox: Whoever is after you is either really bad at their job or you’re really lucky.

Nakamura: I like to assume I’m blessed with more than just a handsome face.

Me: Are you somewhere safe now?

Nakamura: Is a pet store surrounded by tiny puppies and kittens a safe place? If someone comes in to murder me, I’ll cover myself in the puppies and kittens. I have to assume no monster would murder a kitten and a puppy… although they did kill that pigeon… maybe I need to rethink this.

Maddox: Maybe you need to get the police on the scene.

Nakamura: Come on now, you can’t expect too much out of me.

Maddox: Did you call them?

Nakamura: I did. I did. I’m just like… you know when someone tells you something that’s so ludicrous that you really don’t believe them, but you don’t want to be super rude, so you kind of pretend to believe them. And then something happens that makes you feel like maybe you were the wrong one all along?

Me: Weirdly, Maddox went through that exact same thing. Funny, huh? Funny how people refuse to believe me until they’re given no other choice?

Nakamura: Super funny. It would be funnier if you didn’t predict someone was trying to kill me. So how exactly do I go about fixing this?

Me: I’m not sure yet. Let’s try the picture thing. I mean, if it worked with Hikaru, I can’t help but think it might work with you. So go ahead and send me a picture of you. Make sure it’s not too zoomed in. I want to be able to see the space around you.

Nakamura: Got it. Got it.

A minute or so later, a photo gets sent to the two of us of Nakamura, who really is in a pet shop. In the photograph, he’s posing with a purebred fluffball of a kitten that he’s holding above his head like it’s Simba from The Lion King .

“Didn’t this guy just nearly get run over and he’s already back to being ridiculous?” Maddox says. “What can you see?”

I zoom in on the photograph and shift it from side to side. Nakamura doesn’t look as blurred as Hikaru did, but the edges of the photograph are definitely distorted.

“The edges look fine to you?” I ask.

“One hundred percent.”

“He’s clearly still being haunted, then. What a mess.”

Me: There’s definitely some still surrounding you, but they’re not as bad as they were around Hikaru. I have to wonder if they were worse before you dodged getting hit… You’re not out of the woods yet. You probably won’t be until you catch this person or stop them.

Maddox: For both Hikaru and Charlotte’s husband, the people who attacked them were people they knew. It wasn’t a random attack. There were emotions pushing them into it. Can you think of anything?

Nakamura: Not really. I have a decent relationship with people in my family. Not close, but I sure hope none of them are planning to off me. I did go on a business trip and forgot to get my sister her favorite candies, so that might do it.

Me: Stay focused.

Nakamura: I am! She loves those candies! I don’t have a whole lot of use dead. No big emotion-filled breakups. Hell, the last guy broke up with me. It has to be someone through work. Someone I arrested or something. I’ll dig through it some more, but it’s not looking promising.

Me: Please be careful. Do you have others helping you with this?

Nakamura: I’ve mentioned it, but it was hard to look into something when I hadn’t technically been harassed yet. Now that someone has tried running me over with a car, it’ll be a bit easier to make my point.

Me: I thought you promised not to go anywhere alone?

Nakamura: Yeah… I remember saying something like that. My backup is here. I’ll let you know if anything else happens.

Me: Please be careful.

I sigh as I look at Maddox. “Why’s he being so reckless?”

“He’s cocky.”

“He sure is. But doesn’t he realize that’s how he’s going to wind up dead?”

“Hopefully he’s taking things seriously now. I have to answer a couple of emails and then I’ll get going on the steaks,” Maddox says as he nods toward the back.

“No rush. Nicolás was hoping I had some pictures for Patricia’s birthday present, so as soon as I’m done with that, I’ll get started.”

“Wait for me to get started with dinner.”

“Okay,” I say as I go over to the bedroom and open the closet. I have a box in there packed full of photographs that I begin to dig through. A lot of them were from Patricia that I really didn’t know what else to do with since I had so many. I kept out my favorites, but there were still boxes full of them. I think she just really wanted to make us feel like we were part of the family. And she wanted to make sure if the other two ended up back with their parents, they would always have a piece of this family to remember us by.

Thankfully, that never had to happen, and she was able to adopt all three of us.

Patricia really did so much for us. It had to have been hard to draw three kids into her life who were all in their teens with their fair share of troubles, emotions, and shit. But she dealt with absolutely everything we threw at her. While I was probably the easiest to deal with, I still gave her my share of shit to deal with.

And she dealt with it all.

“Who’s that?” Grandpa asks as he peers over my shoulder.

“Oh, this is Patricia here.” I point to her. “She’s the lady who adopted me. She took me in when I was thirteen.”

“Your parents died when you were ten?”

“Yeah.”

“Where did you go for those three years?”

“Foster homes. I… uh… got shuffled a little because I was notorious for running off. I wasn’t actually running away… I just… often got distracted by ghosts. And it was like…” I think about it for a moment as I try to figure out the best way to explain it. “So many of these ghosts were a bigger part of my life than the living people who were in it. So I would do more for them. But Patricia’s amazing. She’s super sweet.”

“I’m sorry that happened,” he says.

“It’s fine. I really love Patricia. I owe her so much.”

“You don’t owe family.”

“Maybe… but she did so much for us. I’ll take you to meet her. This is Sean. He was killed years ago… but he was super nice. And then this is my brother Nicolás.”

“I’m glad you had them. You know, if circumstances were different…”

“You don’t have to defend them. It is what it is.”

“I know they were both going through shit… but they should have done everything for you. I know they both regret it now. Your aunt wasn’t in a good place… she was struggling with her own life, still attached to a husband who was very traditional. I remember floating around their house when Rina suggested adopting you, and he told her he’d never take care of a kid that wasn’t his. He wasn’t abusive in the sense that he’d hit her or yell at her, but he really thought her place was at home taking care of housework. And that’s fine, if that’s what she wanted, but I think she went so long doing nothing that she… didn’t know how to do anything on her own. She had no job, she didn’t know how to care for herself, let alone another kid. She really truly had hope you’d be adopted right away. Or maybe that’s what she told herself.”

“I’m… glad she got out of that.”

“Took her long enough. I’m just glad Yumi didn’t let that friend of hers convince her into anything. I would just follow her around and scream at her, even though I knew she couldn’t hear me. She was just too… sweet to see the red flags. But Hikaru is a good man. Hopefully she sees that and keeps him close. You found a good man too.”

“I did, didn’t I?” I ask as I think about how truly lucky I am to have found Maddox. Not only did I find him, but I get to spend the rest of my life with him. “I’m very lucky. I’m honestly truly happy I ended up with Patricia. I love her and Nicolás and the rest of my new family very much.”

“Good.”

There’s pecking on the window and I look out at Spite who is perched on the windowsill, pecking away. He looks borderline irritated that I’m not already on my feet to let him in.

“Does that thing not realize it can fly through the window?” Grandpa asks as he scrutinizes the bird.

“Sure doesn’t,” I say as I push the window open. It’s the only window in the room that doesn’t have a screen after Spite stood outside the window at three in the morning throwing a fit that I wasn’t opening the screen for him. I eventually dropped the screen to let him in as Maddox tried to reason with me that a ghost doesn’t need the screen to be removed. That was all fine for him because he could sleep through the ruckus.

Spite doesn’t fly to my shoulder, instead he starts raising a fuss as he rushes through the door.

“What’s wrong?” I ask as I hurry after him.

He’s cawing, but it’s not a happy noise. He’s distressed about something, and I quickly follow him as worry hits me that something could be wrong with Maddox.

“Maddox?” I ask as I hurry down the hallway. “Maddox!”

“What?” he asks. “Something wrong?”

He steps out of the spare bedroom, and I immediately stop as I stare at all the ghosts crowding around him. They’re packed around him, grabbing him, pawing at him like they need to desperately hold on to him.

Maddox must see the panic on my face because he goes, “Hiro, what’s wrong?”

“What the fuck did you do?” I ask.

He’s confused and I don’t blame him. “What?”

“What did you just do?” I demand, terror filling me. “The ghosts… they’re all over you. Maddox, what did you do?” What the fuck is happening?

“What did I do? I… don’t think I did anything. Hiro… hey… it’s okay.”

“You were fine when you came home. Something changed. What changed? What were you doing? Was it something for work?” I can tell I’m just rambling, but the fear is driving me over the edge.

“Hiro, calm down,” Maddox says, but I can barely see him through the number of ghosts packed around us. Their dull eyes are fixated on Maddox, attention completely absorbed by him. I wish they could speak to me. I wish they could help me. I wish I could understand why they are so overcome by anxiety that they can’t even talk.

Panic tightens around me, wrapping around my stomach and squeezing. It’s up in my lungs, making me feel like I can’t breathe. All I can do is think about him lying out in that fucking field after he’d gotten shot. After he’d collapsed as death took him. The way his ghost looked right at me. The way I couldn’t go to him because I wasn’t strong enough to rush to his side to comfort him. Instead, I just stared at him, knowing he was dead… he was dead and there was nothing I could do.

“Hiro, stop, breathe. It’s okay,” Maddox soothes, dashing over to me as I sink down to my knees. He barely manages to catch me before I hit, but even with my arm in his hand, he can’t get me to my feet.

“Hiro, it’s okay, it’s okay,” he says as he tries to pull me up, but I can’t get up. The world is crashing around me. I can’t tell if it’s spinning or what’s happening.

“No, no, it’s not okay. It’s not fucking okay. I can’t lose you.”

“You’re not going to lose me. Just like with Hikaru and Nakamura, we’ve proven this doesn’t mean anything. We’ve had people target us before. It just means someone’s fixating on me.”

“Fixated on you to kill you!” I yell. How can he not understand this?

“We don’t know that, okay?” Maddox wraps his arms around me, squeezing me tightly. I can’t even seem to figure out how to use my limbs, so he pulls me onto his lap and cradles me against him. And maybe I’d have found comfort in it if it weren’t for the ghosts bumping into me. They’re surrounding me because they’re surrounding Maddox… because they know that someone is coming for his head.

“Hiro, it’s okay,” Maddox says as his strong arms wrap around me.

“I can’t lose you.”

“You’re not going to lose me. We’ll figure out what’s going on.” He kisses the top of my head since I have my face tucked against his neck.

“Okay… okay….”

“I mean… there is a possibility it’s related to something I’ve just done, so we can look into that. I just finished dealing with some work shit. So let’s go see what I was doing, okay?”

I nod, happy to be doing something , and let him pull me up to my feet. I feel nauseous as we walk. I’m not sure how the fuck I’m supposed to deal with any of this. I want to help others. I want to find peace for those whose lives were cut short far too soon. But why does it always come back to us getting involved in this shit, back to Maddox getting hurt or his life being in danger? I know he doesn’t have a safe job, and I understand that, but why is it this bad?

Maddox sits down in the chair at the computer and pulls me onto his lap. It can’t be easy for him to see the computer from around me, but I’m glad he pulls me down because I’m not sure how much longer my legs could hold me up.

“Okay, so let’s see. I sent an email to Detective Avery about some documentation that was missing. It’s nothing recent, though. A case that’s been circling around in court for months. It keeps getting pushed back, but I wasn’t involved in the woman’s arrest and haven’t really even interacted with her.”

I watch as he flips through emails explaining what each one pertained to. The longer he goes through them, the more I realize that whatever happened probably had nothing to do with what he was doing. Were the ghosts here in response to someone deciding at that moment that Maddox was their target? Did someone decide between the time I got home and the time I saw him again that he was going to die?

Why can’t it be something simple? Why…

Maddox smooths my hair back and kisses the side of my head. “It’s going to be okay. It’s fantastic that you can see this, Hiro. Otherwise, we’d have no idea someone is targeting me. We’ll take more precautions. We’ll be very careful. We’ll remove ourselves from situations where we could get hurt.”

Right… he’s right… but then why doesn’t it make me feel any better?

“Okay,” I say quietly.

I don’t know what else to say or do. “You didn’t do anything else back here?”

“Nope… I went through my personal email too, but there was nothing of interest. Just junk that I deleted,” he says as he navigates over to it and scrolls through his personal email before clicking on the trash. It’s all promotional junk. “Unless the pizza place is out to get me because I deleted their promotion for Hawaiian pizza.”

“What’s that?” I ask as I point to an email that stands out.

“Oh, it’s a local center that I somehow started getting emails from a while back. Looks like some community support group. I think I got signed up back when I was doing something… what was that? I think it was some volunteering stuff that Deputy Chief Parker made me do. She said that it would help me have a better image with the community. You know… even though she hates people more than me, she wanted to make me become a better people person. Or maybe just a better person in general.”

I reach over and take the mouse before clicking on it. The second it’s open, I’m suddenly torn back. It happens so fast that I don’t even have time to block the ghosts that slam into me. Some of them grab on, tearing the chair back. Maddox loses his balance, not expecting the assault, and we’re both knocked down on the ground as the chair we’re in hits the floor.

“What the fuck is going on in here?” Reggie asks, sounding a bit panicked.

“We leave you alone for one hour! What the hell happened?” Natalie cries as she begins grabbing ghosts and literally tossing them. They immediately return, not at all put off by her.

“I think we figured out which email,” I say as I warily look at the computer, even though the email is definitely not going to jump out and do something.

“What’s happening ? Why can’t you guys do normal things like decorate cookies or something?” Reggie asks.

“Which one of you is being targeted?” Keaton questions.

“Maddox is being targeted,” I say.

“Since when?” Keaton asks as Maddox gets to his feet and pulls me up to mine.

“Since about five minutes ago,” I answer. As soon as Maddox tries to get close to the computer, the ghosts begin panicking. Where before they were just there , now they grab on to him, ripping him back from it, and since I’m so close to them, they have quite a bit of strength. Maddox stumbles back, he’s pushed with so much force.

“Goddammit. Nothing like being beaten around by something you can’t see. It’s… like I can feel them. I can feel their hands, the way they touch me and grab me… but I can’t see them,” he says a moment before the monitor falls over and crashes to the ground.

“I’m sorry. I should have been stopping them,” I say as I make myself focus and force them to become incorporeal.

“It’s not your fault,” Maddox assures me as he lifts the screen. When he plugs it back in, there’s a spot in the corner that’s a bit fuzzy now from where it’d hit, but it still works for the most part.

As he returns to the email, the ghosts try reaching for him again, but this time, they can’t make contact.

“What’s it say? With the ghosts, I can’t see shit,” I say.

“Let’s see. ‘You are an integral part of our community. So many of us move about our daily lives caring for others that it’s hard to tell when we need to take time to care for ourselves. If you’re dealing with domestic abuse, addictions, stress from life changes, or anything else, we want you to join our community. Your mental health should never be neglected. We’d love to welcome you to our forum for a chance to speak out and speak up. Grow to love yourself and understand more about yourself. Past traumas do not have to define your life.’ What’s so exciting about this?”

“Join the forum,” I suggest.

He clicks it as I push the ghosts away so I can better look at the screen. There’s an introductory article that Maddox pulls up, and it talks more about how important it is to love yourself and to not let things define who you are and who you’ll grow to be. There’s also a strict set of rules threatening an immediate ban if anyone isn’t following the rules.

Maddox clicks one and it’s a woman speaking about domestic abuse she’d gone through. Everyone who’s replied seems quite nice and sympathetic, many sharing similar experiences, others sharing helpful resources.

“Is this something that’s easily accessible from a browser?” Keaton asks. “I want to make sure it’s not a fake site that you’ve been directed to.”

I let Maddox know what Keaton said, so he types in some keywords like “forum, self-help, abuse.” It takes a few more tries, but it does eventually pop up when he adds more specific words to it. “Seems pretty easy to find. I bet just about anyone looking for specific help could likely find it. And the forum doesn’t seem to be related to this community support center that the email came from.”

“Does the center just use it as a self-help forum?” I ask as I click another post which is speaking about losing a loved one. I do notice there are a handful of moderators who supply resources and a ton of support. “Maybe some of the moderators are part of the community center?”

“Possibly.”

“It looks normal,” I say.

Maddox nods but looks as perplexed by it as I feel. “It does… and I honestly believe that it might be. But there’s something with this. The ghosts are pissed about this site.”

I look over at them as they try so hard to grab on to Maddox and pull him away from the computer, but they can’t touch him. “They are.”

Maddox scrolls through multiple posts before leaning back in his chair. “I guess let’s write something. You’re better at this stuff than me. Write something.”

“Okay,” I say as I sit on his lap and pull the keyboard over to me. Once I’ve signed in, I open a new entry and think about it for a moment before realizing that the best thing to write about would be something truthful, so I write about losing my parents and the abandonment I felt when I was pushed into foster care. “Since this is under my email, I think you should write one under your email. I know emails are hidden, but an admin would be able to see them. We’ll see if either gets any hits or attention.”

“Okay,” Maddox agrees as I finish up and log out before signing him up as well. “Write something for me.”

“Why don’t you write it?” I ask, kind of hoping he’d write about his parents.

“Fine.” He leans forward and types up some random story about being in a relationship with a lot of red flags. He actually does a good job of making it seem like he doesn’t recognize the red flags, much like someone in denial would write.

“There,” he says. “Now let’s go eat some steak. While we do that, I’ll send the email off to work and see how we can trace it.”

“Okay,” I respond, wishing the ghosts had moved on, but if anything, they seem more agitated, as do my fears.