Chapter Twenty-Eight

" What ?"

I had my answer to my question about Avi floating, because with that shout, he levitated almost to the ceiling. The papers behind him started to rustle before they lifted into the air and began to circle the room.

"Avi. Please. We're disturbing the crime scene."

"I didn't kill Corchran. I would never kill Corchran. Corchran was Oren . Harcourt was going to propose to him if I— If they— Gah!" He clutched his hair with both hands and the paper picked up speed. "Why would you think I would kill him?"

I scrambled to my feet, which put my head about level with his loafers. "If you come back down, we can talk about it, okay?"

He glared down at me, eyes practically glowing, and for a moment, all I could think was, oh, shit . True, Avi had never flung anything but paper around, but I'd read Cards as Weapons . Paper could be lethal , and death by a thousand paper cuts was not the way I wanted to go.

I throttled back on my flight reflex, though, because despite Carson's claims of unspecified childhood emotional abuse, I didn't think Avi was homicidal. I kept my voice level. Calm but firm. Ish.

"How about you let everything settle and we can figure things out, all right? You don't want to trash Oren's stuff, do you?"

Avi froze for an instant and then glanced behind him. He let go of his hair, but his fingers still curled into fists, his chest heaving, so I wasn't sure if he was winding up for an explosion or backing away from the edge. After another few seconds, he returned to the floor, although it was more of a flop than a float. The paper followed suit. But while it stopped, Avi kept going until he was crumpled in a heap next to the window seat.

When I sat down beside him, he raised his head and gazed at me, and I was rocked back from the total devastation in his expression.

"Avi…"

"I would never kill Corchran. You have to believe me."

"I believe that's what you believe, at least now. But Borderline has been out for three years."

His brows drew together, and the grief was replaced by something I couldn't quite identify. " Borderline ? What are you talking about?"

" Borderline was the last Ziv Harcourt book."

"No. It wasn't."

"Yeah. It was." I took a fortifying breath. "Fans had been waiting for it for six years, so we all jumped on it as soon as it hit the shelves."

"And I'm telling you no. The last Harcourt and Corchran book was All In ."

It was my turn to frown. " All In ? That's not—"

"The identity theft case? Harcourt's sister being gaslighted by her loser husband? Harcourt and Corchran going undercover at the spa?"

"Uh…"

"The mud bath scene? Oh, come on , you must remember the mud bath scene. Unless…" He scrubbed his hands over his face. Was it weird that I was getting used to being able to see the room through him? "Oh god. You're not a Jake Fields reader. Sorry. I—"

"No! I'm totally a Jake Fields fan. But none of those things happened in Borderline ."

" There. Was. No. Borderline," Avi shouted, and the edges of a good half of the papers started to flutter. "The last completed book was All In , but I hadn't turned it in to my agent yet because I wanted Oren to read it first, even before Patrice, and he hadn't had a chance because of the Toronto project and moving and he probably lost the manuscript while he was packing anyway because he never said a single thing about it in any of our calls. The only thing that was borderline was the stupid WIP that refused to cooperate. I actually changed the working title to Borderline Garbage , because that's what it was."

My ears rang as though someone had conked me with the Lang, because holy shit , was that was this was about? I lifted a finger. "One moment, okay? Just, um, hold that thought."

I scrambled to my feet and crossed to the desk. The top few pages of Patrice's neat pile of the deconstructed Borderline were askew from Avi's latest paper maelstrom, but it was mostly intact. I grabbed the stack and plopped back down, facing Avi.

"Take a look at this."

He reared back, revulsion flickering across his face. "What is that?"

"This is the only thing you've truly destroyed since I arrived."

"I'm sorry. I don't know why I did that. I've never destroyed a book before in my life. I don't remember doing it now ."

"Maybe it was instinct." I lifted the title page and showed it to him. " Borderline . By Jake Fields."

"No." He tried to snatch it from me, and while he didn't manage to grasp it, it did flutter in my hand. "No no no no no."

Oren's papers started to make a break for it again. "Avi, I know you're not happy about this, but do you think you could maybe target the paper levitation a bit?"

"What?" He tried to grab the page again.

I set the whole stack on the floor, oriented toward him. "If you can flip over one at a time, you can read the book even if you can't hold it in your hands."

He pressed his lips together, throat working, but he nodded and focused on the pages in front of him. At first, he was only able to scatter them like they'd been hit by a wind gust, but after a few minutes of strain that brought out ghostly perspiration on his forehead, he gained enough control to be able to manipulate one page at a time.

As soon as he read the opening paragraph of the first chapter, his breath hitched. "This is…" Another few pages fluttered away. Then a few more. Then he lifted his chin and met my eyes. "These are the chapters I was working on before I— Word for word, Maz. Word for fucking word ."

"You only got to about chapter four, right?"

"Halfway through five, actually."

"Check out six." Or maybe not. Six opened with the news of Corchran's death. "Ten. Check out chapter ten."

He nodded and bent over the book again, his forehead knotted as he concentrated on paper domination.

"So, Avi."

"Hmmm?"

"Who knew you were Jake Fields?"

"A lot of people," he said distractedly, as he flipped another page. "I mean, it wasn't universal, but everyone in Ghost. My agent. My publisher. My writing group. The— Oh my god. This is worse than that drivel you were reading the other day." He jabbed a finger at the book, skewering it with enough phantasmagorical force that the edges jumped. "I did not write this."

"Well, you did write the first four and a half chapters, which is all readers would have seen in any online retailer sample. That's one of the reasons your fans were so angry, because it started out like a Jake Fields book—like a Harcourt book—and then practically did a U-turn. One of the great things about Harcourt was the community he built over the course of the series, and in one book—hell, in one chapter , and always off-page—all of them get axed one way or another because he decides they were holding him back and blocking him from seeing what was truly important. After that, stuff just happens to him. He has zero agency while he goes on this random journey of self-discovery."

Avi closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. "Please tell me there wasn't a dream sequence."

"There was a dream sequence." I scratched the back of my head. "Actually, there were eleven."

" Eleven ?"

I shrugged apologetically. "What can I say? Harcourt got super into meditation and directed dreaming."

"My editor hated dream sequences. She'd never have let this fly. How did my publisher even get this?"

"I don't think they did." I rooted around until I found the copyright page. "See? This wasn't published by the same house that handled the other Harcourt books."

Avi's eyebrows snapped down. "Not possible. My agent negotiated an eight-book deal for the Harcourt series with my publisher. A really good deal. We were all happy with it."

"And yet…" I tapped the stack of torn pages. "Here we are." My eyes widened. "Taryn said your will and Oren's were still being contested. I wonder if breach of contract over Borderline is one of the reasons."

"For the last time," Avi growled, "there is no such thing as—"

"As Borderline . Yeah, I get it. Obviously, some plagiarist SOB self-published this after your death to take advantage of your reputation and the popularity of the Harcourt series." No wonder that other than those first chapters, it was total junk.

Those first chapters .

"Avi, could anyone have found those chapters somewhere online?"

He shook his head. "I deleted them. With extreme prejudice."

"Then the only place they existed was in your trash. In your trash right before you died." I flung out a hand to point at the Lang. "When somebody hit you on the head with a freaking literary award and stole your work to pass it off as their own."

"That makes no sense. Just because an author dies, that doesn't mean the killer gets to take over their pen name. And what a stupid thing to do, anyway. It's not like readers can't tell the difference. That kind of deception isn't sustainable."

"I'm guessing the thief figured that out. That's what they're looking for. The real sixth book. If they—" The mass of papers behind Avi began to tremble, and this time they undulated like the surface of a lake at the passing of a huge fish. I gave Avi a stern glare. "Avi."

"Sorry."

"If we…" A sudden glint at the edge of the mess caught my eye. "Hold on a sec."

I pushed myself to my feet and crept closer. There, gleaming on the jewel-toned rug and half-hidden under the open flap of an envelope, was a tiny arc of gold. I picked it up and held it in my palm.

A wedding band.

My heart felt as though it were being squeezed by a vise. As Avi continued to mutter to himself behind me, I teased the envelope out from under the pile. It was blank and unsealed, so I only felt a little squicky when I peered inside. Sure enough, it held another, slightly larger gold band, along with some folded papers.

Throat tight, I dropped the ring back in the envelope and pulled out the papers. On top was an itinerary. Two round trip train tickets to Seattle. Vouchers for the ferry from Seattle to Victoria. A reservation at a B & B. A letter from a wedding officiant with a message of congratulations and a confirmation of the time of the ceremony.

The dates were for two days after Avi's death.

At that time, same-sex marriage hadn't been legal in the US, but it was in Canada. Oren had been planning to propose. Instead, he had to mourn.

No wonder he couldn't bear to come back to Ghost.

"A-Avi?"

"Hmmm? God, I can't believe how horrible this is."

"I have something to show you, but it might upset you."

"More than somebody putting my name on this absolute dreck ?"

"Yeah. Pretty sure."

"Fine." The word was laced with long-suffering. "Lay it on me."

I hunkered down and smoothed the itinerary in front of him, then extracted the wedding bands and placed them on top. "I think this was the surprise Oren had for you."

Avi covered his mouth with his hands, but it didn't muffle his sob. A transparent tear dropped toward the paper but left no trace.

"I yelled at him," he said brokenly. "I yelled at him and all the time he had this planned." He touched the smaller band, and both of us sucked in a breath when it moved. With a startled glance at me, he pinched the ring between his thumb and index finger and picked it up .

"Holy crap," I whispered.

Avi slid the ring onto the fourth finger of his left hand, where it turned as transparent as the rest of him. Suddenly he was gone—one moment sitting and the next on his feet in the middle of the room.

"Sorry. I'm sorry. But I— I need a minute."

"Sure. Take all the time you need."

After he vanished, I took a breath, rubbing my chest to ease the pinch there. Damn . What a thing to hit you on the same day you discover you were murdered and that some asshole stole your last book.

Except…

I stared down at the scatter of torn pages. That wasn't exactly true, was it? Borderline wasn't his last book. It wasn't his book at all, but there was another one. Avi had told me about it. Identity theft. Gaslighting. Undercover at the spa. A mud room scene. The last real last Jake Fields book. All In .

And the only person who'd had a copy was Oren.

The way Avi had spoken of it had sounded as though he'd sent Oren a physical copy—something that could potentially be lost during a move—rather than an electronic version.

Well, who just happened to have all of Oren's possessions, right here, right now?

"That would be me."

I jumped to my feet and raced for the pantry. If there was half a chance I could do this for Avi—find his last book, maybe turn it in to his agent for posthumous publication to salvage his reputation—then I'd do it.

Even if it meant sorting through every. Freaking. Box.