Free Apparition (The Hungry Ghosts) by Trish J. MacGregor Page A

keep me in the loop about the symbols. And I’ll let you know what I find out from the council.”
    Hugs all around, then Tess walked outside with Charlie and Kali. They stood for a moment in the magnificent backyard that overlooked Esperanza, lit up now like some magical city in a fairy tale. “You need to find out what the deal is with Ricardo’s tribe. And can you meet us tomorrow morning out at the café? Diego is going to get us into the area that disappeared.”
    “I’ll be there,” Charlie said.
    Tess hugged him for the third time that night. “Love you, Dad,” she whispered.
    “Do you realize that’s the first time you’ve called me Dad in, oh, more than four years?” He leaned back from her. “Why’s that?”
    “I guess I’ve forgiven you.”
    “For what?”
    “Dying.”
    “Love you, Slim,” he said, his voice soft and choked, then he shed his virtual form and he and Kali moved rapidly back across the city.
    2.
    Once Charlie reached old town Esperanza, he faded into view as Manuel Ortega again. Kali was still with him. “Okay, I get it. You’re really a messenger between the living and the dead, right? Well, I don’t have any message yet. But stick around, Kali. Come to the meeting with me.”
    As she touched down on his shoulder, Charlie turned into an alley, passed a bodega, a takeout place, a hole-in-the-wall used bookstore. Then he ducked into La Última, a café created from collective chaser thought. It boasted the best coffee in Ecuador, the fastest Internet connection in South America, and had a spread of delectable goodies in the display case.
    Charlie headed toward the counter, Kali riding on his shoulder, and ordered a cortadito —espresso with milk; a slice of spinach quiche; and a cheese pastry topped with coconut. He had to admit that one of the most pleasant aspects of the afterlife was that you could eat what you wanted. No worry about cholesterol, fats, high blood pressure, diabetes, or any of the rest of it.
    He made his way to the reserved table next to the window, Kali now pecking at the pastry. A parrot with a sweet tooth. “Hey, I can get you one of your own, you know.”
    She made that sound again, like a laugh. Charlie broke off a piece of the pastry and handed it to her. She wrapped the claws of her right foot around it and nibbled away.
    Outside the window, it was twilight. Long, thin shadows fell across the alley and sidewalk and everything had a beautiful patina to it. But the twilight, like everything else around him, was an illusion. He knew it had been around three A.M. mortal time when he’d left Wayra’s place. It was often twilight when the council met.
    As usual, he was early. When he was alive, he used to be early in court, too. Some habits stayed with you life to life. He slipped out his iPad, checked his e-mail to see if any of the chasers had dropped him a note about being late. The iPad, like everything else in his world, was a mental construct, one more illusion, and hadn’t really come into being for him until shortly before Steve Jobs’s death, when Maddie had convinced him to conjure one of them.
    After Jobs’s death, Maddie wanted to know if Jobs was among the chasers and Charlie had actually checked. This was the genius, after all, whose last mortal words were, “Oh wow, oh wow.” He reported back that, yes, Jobs was a chaser, working in a province in China and improving the lot of the workers who assembled the Apple products. Charlie suspected that Jobs might be reborn among those very workers at some point quite soon and no telling what might develop from that.
    Victor had sent him an e-mail twelve minutes ago. On the way.
    Sounded good, Charlie thought. But Victor moved according to his own time, at his own pace, and on the way could mean that he would might show up four hours, days, or months from now. Charlie wasn’t supposed to give a shit about time in his chaser form. It was an artificial construct, after all, something the living