Chapter 37

At twice the temperature of a normal crematory, the incinerator had done its job well—but there was still a handful of ash left over. Laura didn’t want so much as a speck left behind in her building, so the four of us trooped out to the overpass and tipped the bag into the train yard below.

As what was left of Jennifer Chance drifted away on the wind, I realized I’d just covertly disposed of a body. Me, a former homicide investigator. I wasn’t sure how to feel. Hypocritical? Complicit? Guilty? Weirdly enough, no.

Mainly, I was relieved. And I strongly suspected Jacob was, too.

Once we were back in the car, he said, “I was thinking we might stop and see Dr. Jibben on the way home. Let him know how things turned out.”

We’d heard it had taken an entire team nearly five hours to pick out all the glass, but that wasn’t what kept Jibben in the hospital. A torn ligament in his leg had required surgical intervention, and they’d been monitoring him heavily in case he threw a blood clot.

Normally, I don’t go out of my way to make buddy-buddy with anyone from work. But we’d been through a hell of a lot with Jibben, so it only seemed right to pop in and do a bit of awkward smalltalk.

As we made our way up to the hospital, Jacob said, “I’ve also been thinking that it might be time for me to break the cone of silence.”

Cautiously, I said, “Which one?”

“Mine. What I can do. What I am.”

I thought he’d been awfully even-keel these past few days. Turned out he’d just been gearing up to capsize everything we’ve been working so hard to keep afloat. “Jacob—”

“You heard Dr. K. Research is turning the corner on telekinesis—thanks to something we did. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

Frankly, no. Just relief that another medium was better at flowing light than I was, so I wouldn’t be conscripted into a bunch of experiments. But Jacob had never developed the healthy sense of self-preservation that I’d had to cultivate over the years.

He said, “What if there’s a reason we’re not meant to be parents? Maybe we were meant to leave a different legacy? Maybe we were meant for something more.”

Sometimes, the best way to disagree with Jacob is to keep your mouth shut. That way, he doesn’t have anything to argue with. But as we headed up to Jibben’s room, I really had to bite my tongue. We passed a few more hospital visitors in the hall. One was carrying a potted plant, another was lugging around a big stuffed get-well-soon bear. I wondered if we should’ve stopped to pick something up for Jibben. But given his OCD tendencies, I suspected that the best gift we could give him would be not showing up with a goofy ceramic angel in our hands.

Although maybe he’d like a book of crossword puzzles. Something that would both help pass the time and make him feel smart. He did have a thing for puzzles and games. I supposed I could run down to the gift shop and grab one—

“I’m just gonna go, uh…. Jacob?”

While I’d lagged behind a couple of steps, Jacob had gone stock still in Jibben’s doorway. As he frowned and double-checked his phone, I caught up with him and peeked in.

The bed was empty. Not I’m-in-the-can empty. Empty-empty. Bed stripped. Personal effects gone.

“It’s the right room number. Maybe they moved him to a different ward,” Jacob said—a bit too quickly, so obviously his first thought was the same as mine. That Jibben was dead. “Or maybe he was released.”

Dr. K would’ve said something if he’d been released, so I highly doubted it.

We spotted a nurse in cheerful purple scrubs walking by and flagged her down. “We’re here to see Dr. Jibben,” Jacob said.

The nurse looked confused. “I don’t think there’s a Dr. Jibben on this shift. Unless he’s new—”

“Howard,” I supplied. “Howard Jibben. He’s a patient.”

Jacob said, “The patient who’s in this room…or at least, he was.”

The nurse glanced in. “There’s no one in this room.”

Jacob gave her the slow-blink he reserves for folks who seem deliberately obtuse. “Could you look him up and see where he is?”

When she hesitated, he flipped open his wallet and flashed his federal ID, and suddenly she became a lot more willing to help us. “Let me check.” She keyed open the tablet she’d been carrying and scrolled around. “Nope, there’s no one in this room. How do you spell the name?”

While Jacob put the thumbscrews to the nurse, I opened up my crown chakra and headed into the vacant room, scanning for an outline, a shadow, anything that shouldn’t be there.

No ghost.

“Jibben?” I said softly. “You here?”

I paused beside the bed, tilted my head, and listened.

Nothing.

But Jibben was a TK. And if he died and left something behind, it might not be visual or auditory. It might be tactile. I go through life so much in my own head, I really don’t stop to think about how the rest of me actually feels. Closing my eyes, I tuned into the sensation of my own skin. The air on my face. The slight pinch of one shoe. The little throb where I’d been slacking on my yoga. And—

“Holy—”

I jerked my hand back where something distinctly fuzzy had brushed up against it, only to discover a young kid in a hospital gown holding the stuffed animal I’d just seen trooping down the hall.

“I got a bear,” she said matter-of-factly.

“That, you do.” Now if my heart could just stop pounding in my throat. “So, why’re you here?”

“My dad is giving me a new kidney.”

Mediums are piss-poor candidates for transplants. My expression must’ve said as much.

“Most people got two,” the kid informed me. “But you only need one.”

“I’ve never really thought about it.”

Pleased to have told me something useful, she looked over her giant bear at the empty bed. “What happened to the man?”

Good question. “What do you think happened to him?”

“Don’t you know? Some guys dressed like you took him away.”

A sick feeling settled in the pit of my gut. “He must’ve been feeling better, so they came to take him home.” If, by home, you meant some dank cell in Washington DC where scientists from National could wire him up with electrodes and pump him full of drugs.

Maybe I was imagining things…and maybe Laura really had just sent over someone from HQ to give him a ride. But when I found Jacob had gotten nowhere over at the nurse’s station—when they claimed that no one named Jibben had ever been their patient—I knew the scenario I’d envisioned wasn’t farfetched at all.

Jacob said nothing as we climbed back into the car, though the grim set of his mouth spoke volumes. Instead of heading home, he swung by Montrose Beach, where there was plenty of sunbathing, jogging, and rollerblading action, but only a few intrepid swimmers braving the early-summer cold of Lake Michigan. We found a bench by a rocky stretch to sit and watch the waves lap the shore. Eventually, beneath the camouflaging sound of the surf, Jacob said, “I can’t believe I was willing to offer myself up like a sacrificial lamb.”

I pried his hand off his knee and threaded my fingers through his, toying with the hard edge of his wedding band. “I would’ve stopped you. And, look, you came to your senses without any help from me.”

Jacob leaned into my arm. “I just thought we were finally beyond all the secrecy. Think about how much psych research has changed since the Argus Institute’s time. Just a few decades later, all the supposed pseudoscience became legitimate research. But telekinesis was still the big holdout. I just thought that if I helped normalize TK, then maybe we could finally stop looking over our shoulders. Maybe we could finally be happy.”

“We are happy.” And I knew Jacob. Now that he finally saw himself as a legitimate psych, no way would he ever go back to being “normal.”

I spotted a flat stone nearby. With a quick squeeze, I let go of Jacob’s hand and stood, picked up the stone, found a good lull in the waves, and slung the stone at just the right angle. It skipped four times before the lake claimed it. Not bad, but maybe I could do better. I picked up another stone…skip, skip, plop.

Soon enough, Jacob came over to try and outdo me—just like I’d hoped he would. If there’s anything more certain than death and taxes, it’s Jacob’s need to compete. As he sent a stone dancing across the water’s surface, he said, “It’s all in the wrist.”

The clicker in my pocket said otherwise, ticking as the stone hopscotched away. And though the etheric push probably hadn’t given Jacob any extra skips, it confirmed what I already knew.

Jacob might be a fantastic liar. But his control on his talent needed work.

It was tempting to hold on to the Telekometer, since it would come in handy if Jacob’s old self-doubts ever started to resurface. It had taken some real sleight of hand on my part to replace Hinman’s device with the compass from my exorcism kit. I’d known the lab would match every last shard of glass to the manifest, so I couldn’t just pocket the thing and hope to get away with it.

But nobody monkeyed around in my kit but me, and once I replaced my original compass, no one would be the wiser.

Jacob skipped another stone, and I pulled the device out and watched the needle click. If I could spot a TK with it, so could the goons from National. It just wasn’t worth the risk.

Besides, I could tell when Jacob was trying to move things by the look on his face.

I wound up and pitched…and the gizmo skipped even farther than Jacob’s last stone, before it was sunk by a wave.

Jacob squinted. “Was that…?”

“Never mind. We didn’t need it.”

After all, we had each other.

And that was how I intended it to stay.