Free Happily Never After by Missy Fleming Page A

enough anymore.
    I wish I could help you, I thought.
    So do I.
    I jumped, which startled Jason beside me.
    “Are you okay?” he whispered
breathlessly.
    “Did you say something, before?”
    “No,” his voice was in my ear so I knew he
still stood very close. “All I’ve been able to hear is your camera
and something else. Like something’s moving around us.”
    I nodded, not really caring that he couldn’t
see me. The voice in my head hadn’t been me. It had tone and a
heavier accent than mine. The only other time I'd heard a voice was
with Marietta. Even though this one was different, the sensation of
having another voice in my head felt unnatural. Normally, I was
fine with whatever abilities I had. Feelings, hints and apparitions
were much easier to deal with than voices inside my head.
    Before I knew what I was doing, I'd cleared
my head and thought ‘hello’.
    This time nothing answered. Almost
immediately, the air changed again, back to normal. It was easier
to breathe and the static feeling disappeared.
    I let out a breath I hadn’t been aware of
holding.
    “What was that?” Jason’s voice shook a
little.
    I flicked on the flashlight and turned it
towards him. “That was a ghost, a spirit.”
    He came alive, almost bouncing in place.
“Holy crap, that was crazy. The air changed somehow and I heard
movement, like clothes rubbing when you walk. I thought a person
was standing right in front of me. I knew if I reached out, I would
have touched someone.”
    His excitement transferred onto me and I
temporarily forgot about the voice I'd heard. “I know. That’s how
it is. You’re lucky, not everyone can experience something their
first time and we encountered one of the friendly ones. There are
some nasty spirits in this building but they are a whole other
experience.”
    “Did you get anything on your camera?”
    “I’m not sure,” I answered as I began going
back through the pictures. “With the small screen on the camera,
sometimes you don’t notice anything until you can look at it on a
monitor. Wait, here.”
    I gazed at the picture in the tiny screen.
I’d caught some kind of mist, something not much lighter than the
surrounding darkness. It had been standing right in front of me,
exactly as I’d sensed. I showed it to Jason.
    “Oh man, it’s the shape of a person. It’s
hard to tell, though, it is so faint. It can’t be that easy.”
    I narrowed my eyes as I said, “It’s not that
easy. You got lucky tonight. We haven’t even been here thirty
minutes.”
    “I’d bet everything that someone was standing
right in front of us. Are you, what do they call it, one of those
sensitives?”
    That question brought up a whole mess of
personal details I really didn’t want to get into with him. I
ignored the question instead and said, “Come on, let’s find Abby
and show her this.”
     

Chapter Eleven

    The rest of the night was uneventful but
Jason still vibrated with adrenaline as we walked up Lincoln Street
in the direction of my house. Luckily, because of the heat, there
weren’t many people out or I’m sure Jason’s presence would have
caused a stampede. I followed his lead and stuck to the shadows
when we passed someone on the sidewalk.
    It wasn’t my idea for him to walk me home. I
argued and even tried to lose him on the dark streets but he was
crafty. He didn’t let me out of his sight. The guy just didn’t get
the hint.
    “I still can’t believe what happened. I mean,
I’ve always been kind of a skeptic but that was crazy.”
    “No matter how long or how many times you
experience something paranormal, it’s hard to get used to.”
    “Sounds as if you’ve experienced it a
lot.”
    I wasn’t sure what made me open up, maybe the
hope that if I told him he’d go away. “When I was little mama used
to tell me stories about Savannah and about the people who lived
here before us, even those who were still here in a sense. She said
it was a city built on the dead and