ELEVEN
Chiara
Jack’s eyes rolled back in his skull and he went limp, hanging in air like a marionette supported by some giant hand. A trickle of blood traced the back of his hand which had faded into near invisibility, just like his mouth and finger had done earlier.
“Jack!” I yelled again, snapping my fingers in front of his face.
Nothing.
That new fluttery feeling clutched my chest, pressing on my lungs and making it hard to breathe. It hurt to see him like this. Unresponsive. The ghost version of unconsciousness.
I was definitely on the verge of a full-on freak out.
He was okay. Jack was a ghost. Nothing could hurt him. Right?
But the skittering jumpiness of my heart wouldn’t let up.
The memory of his touch lingered, the back of my hand burning from his finger. Stupid, overachieving man to pack so much feeling into a paltry square inch of skin.
As for our experiment . . .
Why hadn’t it worked? What would make him stay in our reality?
The chocolate had been a long shot. The scene replayed in my mind. Jack concentrating, staring at my lips. His own flickering as he pushed them into physicality.
And abruptly, they had appeared. Fully formed lips, red and slightly chapped. I had instantly popped the chocolate in his mouth.
The needle had been much of the same. Jack’s hand suddenly becoming completely here, tanned skin, tendons flexing. Despite my bravado, I had felt bad stabbing the needle into him. His anguished cry had only made it worse. I was a terrible person.
And now . . . this.
Jack had collapsed. If he were fully corporeal, I would have dialed 911 by now.
“Jack! Snap out of it!”
So help me, if he hurt himself, I’d never let him hear the end of it. I hated that my heart beat frantically, clogging my breathing and making my knees bounce.
Didn’t Jack know that he was the Elmer Fudd to my Bugs Bunny? Tom to my Jerry?
Whoa.
That new scary feeling in my chest fluffed out, shaking its feathers.
Jack was the Tom to my Jerry. The Coyote to my Roadrunner. Or was I the Coyote?
Regardless, I finally acknowledged that new scary sensation for what it was.
Feelings.
I had feelings for Jack. Feeling-feelings.
I didn’t hate Jack. I didn’t even dislike him. I most certainly wasn’t neutral.
I liked Jack.
Not a full-blown crush or anything. But . . .
He was a good friend. Someone whose opinion mattered. Who else would bat a rhetorical ball back and forth with me if something happened to him? Who else so readily tolerated my inability to filter my words?
I sat on the couch, worrying my bottom lip as I stared at his unconscious ghostliness, wondering how to deal with feelings for a ghost.
What was it about him that drew me in?
This thought, naturally, turned into curiosity. Or at least that’s how I labeled it. Some small part of me—my conscience, I suppose—pointed out that my behavior had more in common with obsession than curiosity, but thankfully I was a pro at ignoring my conscience.
I never got a chance to simply study Jack unnoticed. He was always awake and, of course, would never let me stare at him without making some obnoxious comment.
But for now, I drank my fill. My eyes traced his full lips, the curve of muscle in his shoulders, the dip of his waistcoat just below his ribs.
All the online fervor was right.
Jack was absurdly handsome. His chestnut hair had a gentle wave to it, and I imagined the scruff on his chin would rasp my palm if I could touch it. He was on the tall side but not oppressively so. My little five-foot-one self would fit perfectly under his arm.
I walked closer, leaning into him, my nose nearly touching his. In repose, his face was relaxed, allowing me to contemplate the laugh lines next to his eyes and the tiny wrinkles of skin beside his ear. He had a small scar to the left of one eye. His eyebrows were in desperate need of manscaping.
And his lips . . .
I lifted a finger to them, running my finger tip back and forth over his full bottom lip. I didn’t feel a thing, of course. Not even a trace of temperature difference. Nothing.
And yet, even the nothing of him caused my poor finger to tingle. Dumb man.
Of course, Jack decided at that moment to rally. His eyes popped open and his body revved to life.
Our gazes met. He had no choice really, as my eyeballs were only about six inches from his.
His head reflexively jerked back, expression instantly sardonic. Like everything else, it looked good on him.
“Contemplating true love’s first kiss, are you?” His tone half ironic humor, half surprise.
I willed myself not to blush. I was only marginally successful. “It might be hard to find a sacrificial maiden.”
“That blush on your cheeks tells me you don’t think it would be a sacrifice.”
Some polite responses would have been:
I think you’re mistaken about my blush.
Please stop teasing me, Jack.
But, no.
I went with, “Stop being dumb.”
Yep. That was my lame response. Verbal filters. Why couldn’t I have some?
Though I said the words more as a reflex than anything, I supposed. More akin to calling a friend a dork in a good-natured way.
“That’s your best comeback?” His expression amused.
Shaking my head, I took a step back and crossed my arms. “I just watched you pass out again and then had to sit here wondering if you were ever going to wake up. I was worried and concerned about you. So, yeah, that is my best comeback at the moment.”
Jack’s nostrils flared, eyes blazing blue. “I-I . . . uh—”
“The only words out of your mouth right now should be ‘I’m sorry.’” Mentally, I winced at the tone of my words.
Way to go, Chiara. Make him apologize for your ogling of his man-lisioucness.
Silence.
“I am truly sorry.” Jack bowed. A full-on proper lordly bow with a sweep of his arm and everything.
And not a hint of irony.
We faced off with each other. The air heavy with things unsaid, but our eyes couldn’t keep silent.
Me. You look like you have something to say.
Him. Ladies before gentleman.
Me. I don’t want to talk about it.
Him. Me either.
“How’s about we agree to not test this again?”
He nodded. “Agreed. That was a mite terrifying.”
And that was all we said.
Two days later, we still hadn’t talked about That Which Could Not Be Discussed.
Namely, his weird almost-collapse. And my continued night terrors over my father’s suicide.
It was a tentative stalemate.
Opening up to Jack about my father had been . . . difficult, to put it mildly. I felt even more raw and exposed and was not eager to relive the experience anytime soon.
But the whole exchange had thawed something between us. Or, if I were being completely honest, it thawed something in me. Our exchanges were still snarky but they had lost that biting edge, moving more toward teasing humor than anything else.
It was a good change, though it did serve to confuse my poor emotions even more.
The automation team completed their job and packed up. A command center now sat in the former distillery off the kitchen, gleaming with computer monitors and cameras. The idea was to provide Jack with a state-of-the-art surveillance system, as well as a way to control it all through voice activation. The monitors could be switched from room to room, position to position, leaving hardly a square inch of the estate unmonitored.
“This is quite remarkable,” he commented for the twentieth time, upper-crust accent crisp. “I shall enjoy this room, I think.”
Men and their toys. Some things were universal.
I brushed off my hands. “Well, I’ll leave you to your devices then.”
“Hah. You and your horrid puns.”
Maybe. But it didn’t stop him from smiling. For the record, Jack had a terrific smile.
True to his word, Jack spent the next day and a half glued to his electronics, shifting his cameras at regular intervals and yelling when he saw something exciting. Like, ya know, a rabbit hopping across the driveway.
The man knew how to par-tay.
As for me and my potential future as a Cosa Nostra crime statistic, Inspector Paola assured me that the police were making progress.
“We are expecting arrest warrants any day now,” she said in one of her almost daily calls.
I wasn’t sure if she called me out of courtesy or to fish for information about Jack. Paola seemed to have developed something of a crush on my ghostly roommate.
Regardless, the whole situation with the Tempeste family felt like old news. We had explained the random lightning bolt messages and realized that my own subconscious was more likely to take me out than a Tempeste bullet.
But still. I valued my beating heart and had a strong interest in keeping it that way, so I laid low.
Besides, Jack was good company. I wasn’t ready to admit this to him—his ego hardly needed another boost—but he was funny and clever and I found myself looking forward to our days together. He and I passed the time with our mutual combing of the D’Angelo digital archives, searching for anything that might help us understand the scars or weird Chucky-slime.
It was very slow going. For better or worse, the entire D’Angelo archive was organized by year and person. So you could read the writings and notes about Lorenzo D’Angelo, Sofia’s brother and the D’Angelo heir that Jack had known in 1818. Or you could read about Alessio D’Angelo from the late sixteenth century, dubbed il Magnifico due to his patronage of the arts and elegant manners.
But if you wanted to find information about a specific topic—for example, what had been said about future wars over the years—then you had to read each page carefully.
After over four hundred years of detailed record keeping, there were tens of thousands of documents.
So . . . yeah. Trying to find a reference to anything related to rips in the fabric of reality was literally like searching for a needle in a haystack.
Making things slower, I insisted that we take the time to keyword each document as we went. Anyone who looked through the documents was asked to enter searchable terms summarizing what the document said, making information easier to find in the future. We were already in there, reading the things. Might as well archive them more thoroughly while we were at it.
Given our rate of progress, I estimated we’d be through our document research about . . . never.
That said, there was something soothing about sitting next to Jack, day after day. Shoulder-to-shoulder. Reading documents. Asking questions. Every four or five minutes, hearing Jack give a voice command or dictate a summary.
I found it comforting. Us . . . like this . . . it was kinda nice.
Not that I would ever tell Jack that. He would tease me about it endlessly, and my feelings toward him were still new and tender and easily bruised.
“Look at this,” he said late one evening, pointing to his screen.
I leaned over, noting what he was working on.
“Whoa. Why are you even looking at ol’ Cesare il Pompaso’s stuff?”
“I thought it interesting that he had the same name as your father. Was your father named after him?”
I shrugged. “I certainly hope not. That man was a lunatic—Cesare il Pompaso, not my father.”
Jack simply raised an eyebrow at me, gaze pointed.
“Funny.” I clacked my tongue. “Yes, I know all D’Angelos are insane, but Cesare ‘il Pompaso’ D’Angelo has the distinction of being the only D’Angelo heir to go insane before he actually went insane, if you get my meaning.”
Jack cocked his head at me, leaning back in his chair. “Why call him Caesar the Pompous if he was insane? Why not Cesare il Pazzo, Cesare the Crazy?”
“Apparently, he was an utterly narcissistic douchebag. An arrogant windbag of a man. He was one of the Enlightenment D’Angelos—”
“Yes, the record says he was born in 1684.”
“Exactly. Cesare had a serious case of keeping up with the Joneses. This was the era of Versailles and absolute monarchies. Cesare saw himself as the supreme ruler—the Caesar, if you will—of his little earldom. He ran the family businesses into the ground and spent enormous sums of money on absurd things. He picked fights with other families and single-handedly destroyed most of the wealth the D’Angelos had built over the previous centuries.”
“Sounds like a typical aristocrat.”
“Hah! You would know.”
“Funny. Very funny.” Jack grinned along with me, his tone teasing.
“Thank you. Where was I?”
“Cesare.”
“Yes. Basically, Cesare the Pompous was the dictionary definition of a megalomaniac. He considered himself to be the next Nostradamus. He hired a scribe to follow him around and record everything he said. So not only was he a pompous windbag, he was a verbose, pompous windbag. I think my grandfather calculated that ten percent of the entire D’Angelo archive is comprised of Cesare il Pompaso expounding on his greatness—”
“I think you’re holding back. Tell me how you really feel.”
I pointed a finger at him. “You’re smirking now, but after the hundredth page of ‘I have the best visions’ and ‘No one in the history of the world has seen all the awesome things I’ve seen’ . . . trust me, you’re going to want to scream. EVERYONE ignores his writings because he’s so pretentious, it’s painful to read, and there’s nothing there but the arrogant ravings of a diseased mind.”
I may have been panting and slightly shouty at the end. But, honestly. Cesare il Pompaso would drive a Quaker to drink.
I was also thoroughly enjoying myself. Given his lopsided smile, I think Jack was too.
He nodded slowly, mouth skewing more to one side. “Soooo, you’re suggesting I should simply ignore this bit here where he says, ‘I know all the secrets. The universe tells them to me and me alone. I know about the gaps and the ragged tears in the fabric of our world. Read on and you will find the answers—’”
“What?!” I lurched out of my chair and staggered behind Jack, intending to read over his shoulder but ending up in his shoulder instead.
Fortunately, Jack didn’t seem to care. It was a milestone in our relationship, I think. We had reached the point of being able to simultaneously occupy the same space in reality without it being too weird. Like sharing spoons or couch cuddling in an extremely metaphysical sorta way.
Or something like that.
Jack ignored my serious violation of his personal space and instead pointed to the screen.
Yep.
That was what Cesare had written. The page ended on the word answers.
“What does the next page say?” I reached through Jack and clicked his laptop touchpad.
Confession: I kinda liked sharing personal space with Jack. It was campy and fun without having the awkward side-affect of physical sensation. If I sat with him like this more often, would he think me odd—
I frowned as the next page loaded.
It was black. Pitch-dark.
“Bad scan?” I muttered, clicking onto the next page.
Black again. And the next. And the next.
The fifth page had sprawling handwritten text again. But Cesare was now talking about, ‘The evil empire of hate that has formed against us and spreads untrue falsehoods.’
I clicked back. Four black pages.
“ Are they bad scans?” Jack asked, his voice literally in my ear.
I froze and then slowly removed my body from inside his.
Whoops. Yeah. I had gotten into him too deep too quickly. Trust me to do that. It’s how I always acted with my boyfriends—
My entire body froze at that idea. I lurched upright.
Wow. Okay. Moving on from that thought.
Liking Jack as a person did not make him my Significant Other.
Sooooo Jack . . . not a boyfriend. Perhaps a friend who happened to be a boy . . . ehr, a man. No, a ghost. A ghost friend who was a guy.
A ghost guyfriend.
Whew. That had been close. I hadn’t meant for that fluffy, new feeling to expand quite that much.
Jack as a friend . . . good. Jack as anything else . . .
I took another step back and looked at my wrist.
“Would you look at the time? I’ll call Dante tomorrow about black pages and see if he can pull them for us.”
Jack rose with me. “You’re not wearing a watch, Chiara.” He pointed at my bare wrist.
“Hah! Right! Well, then, I definitely should be going to bed. I’m obviously tired.”
I literally backed out of the room, slamming into the door jamb on the way.
Jack merely stood, eyebrows drawn down, expression a baffled mix of puzzled and vastly amused.
Thoughts of Cesare il Pompaso and his paranoid megalomania haunted my dreams.
An older man appeared dressed in an ostentatiously embroidered frock coat and satin pantaloons, looking like an aristocratic extra from a Marie Antoinette movie. He paced in an opulent room, muttering in ragged, aristocratic Italian:
I know all the secrets. The universe tells them all to me. I know all about the gaps and the ragged tears in the fabric of our world.
A scribe scritched with a quill in the corner, faithfully recording the man’s ramblings.
Eventually, the scene faded, morphed and reformed.
Another man paced back and forth . . . a younger man, though similarly dressed. The man muttered and dragged his hands through his hair with dramatic flare.
The scene pulled back, revealing a stage and then an audience . . .
And then Jack, seated in a lavishly appointed theater box. His black evening coat and knee breeches loudly announced that this was nineteenth century Jack. He was a study in aristocratic elegance, one leg crossed over the other, a quizzing glass in one hand tapping against pursed lips as he studied the stage.
The actor’s words rang clearly through the theater. “For if the sun breed maggots in a dead dog, being a good kissing carrion—Have you a daughter?”
I blinked at the strange words. My head swung back instantly to the actor who paced the stage frantically. What play had Jack so riveted?
I watched for a moment. The younger actor, fidgety and skittish. An older actor asking questions.
Ah.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
A play about a young prince, Hamlet, supposedly going insane due to the untimely death of his father and subsequent treacheries of his uncle and mother. The current scene featured Polonious, an adviser, quizzing the prince, trying to determine the depth of Hamlet’s madness.
Jack leaned forward, utterly engrossed. A lock of his auburn hair tumbled with the motion. My fingers itched to push it back, to sink all the way into the thick silkiness. Dimly, I noted others in the theater box with him. An older woman in jewel-toned silk with Jack’s same full lips and high cheekbones. A man who was a younger, less charismatic version of Jack, certainly his brother. The same Catharine from my earlier dream. An elderly couple and a blond young woman who stared at Jack rather than the stage.
The actors continued with their lines. The audience swayed and chuckled, clearly in thrall. Even a small bird got caught up in the performance. The sparrow darted around the actors, causing Polonious to flinch and bat at the bird as he said his famous line:
“Though this be madness, yet there is a method in’t.”
The bird chirped and continued to harass the actor, who swung his arms in a comic arc.
The crowd laughed. The actor growled and repeated his line.
Jack chuckled. The blond woman leaned closer to him, whispering something in his ear from behind her fan.
Jack’s humor moved from genuine to polite as he listened to her. He nodded, smiled and looked back at the stage.
He was so at ease, shoulders relaxed, body confident. Every line of him proclaiming that this was his world. This was where he belonged.
Part of me wondered why I kept having these dreams. They were so specific and so real, I was almost tempted to think that they were more than dreams. But if they were visions, how could that be? And, more importantly, to what end? How could Jack seeing a production of Hamlet be significant in any way?
That thought got lost as images swirled. Cesare in his silk coats, muttering raving mad. Jack laughing with women and men, moving through London ballrooms with elegant confidence.
I woke to the sun high in the sky and the bing-bing of my phone.
Text. Jack.
We have a problem.