Perception (Apparition Investigations #1)

Case #2: Hell's Gate: Part 18

Mrs. Gomez followed us out to the car, thanking us over and over again. She kept taking Rose's hands. Kept pulling her into a sobbing, relieved hug.

Inside, Camilla was putting Esperanza to bed. Or cleaning her up. Or changing her clothes. I don't know—we'd just dropped her off. We weren't interested in long goodbyes or heartfelt thanks. We'd dropped off the girl and had told Mrs. Gomez to pay whenever she could, and then we'd booked it out of there.

Or rather, we'd tried to. Mrs. Gomez had followed us through the house and outside to the car. Grateful tears streamed down her face. Her entire posture relaxed in relief. She'd looked ten years younger as she hugged Rose for the last time before we finally managed to jump into the car and drive away.

Rose took it like a champ, but I could tell she wasn't sharing in the enthusiasm.

And judging from our silent car-ride back to her apartment, I wasn't too enthused either.

I pulled into the parking spot beside her car. Then I put it into park as she reached for the door handle.

She grasped it but didn't pull it open. Her eyes stared through the window, to her parked car. And for a long moment, she didn't move.

"It looks the same," she finally said on a sigh.

"What does?"

"My car."

I followed her gaze through the window, to the white Kia box with its tiger stripes and the superman sticker on the back window. I could even see through the car's window, to the necklaces she kept draped over the rearview mirror, from all the way back to high school. To the picture of a child she donated money to through one of her gazillion nonprofits, still taped onto her dashboard as it had been for years.

"Yeah," I said. "It does."

She took in a deep breath. "I feel different."

"Good or bad?"

She thought about it for a moment, her fingers tightening on the door's handle. "I don't know." She turned to me suddenly, whipping around in her seat so that she faced me. "Did we cross a line?"

I could see my indecision on her face. Glad to know she shared my thoughts on Noah's actions at the graveyard. We'd saved Esperanza—and that had been what Rose wanted more than anything to bolster her business—but had we killed a ghost to do it?

Before I could answer, her words ran away with her. "I mean, we rescued the living girl, which is what we needed to do. That was the job we were hired for. And I'm glad she's back home, safe. But the screaming, Stel. I can't get the screaming out of my head. And I'm not even sure if I should feel bad about it or not, because the ghost possessing her wasn't even alive was it? But then it just kept screaming like..." she finally lapsed into silence, her eyes watching me expectantly.

"What does your gut say?"

She took in a deep breath. "That we went too far."

I nodded. "Yeah, I think we did."

We had crossed a line. Both of us.

Just not the same line.

Rose had allowed Noah to violently do away with the ghost possessing Esperanza. It had needed to be exorcised from her, there was no doubt about that, but the method had been wrong.

If it had been a monster, that was one thing. But this had been a ghost. A lost, confused ghost just trying to find its home.

Neither one of us had stopped Noah.

But, more than that, I had messed up with Camilla. I had ordered her, stripping her of her free will and denying her the chance to cope with what was happening in her natural way because I hadn't liked the screaming.

That was it. There wasn't a deeper intent behind my actions.

She'd been screaming. I hadn't liked it. And I'd ordered her to stop.

I leaned my head back against the seat and closed my eyes. "I ordered Camilla to be quiet at the graveyard."

I couldn't see Rose, but I could hear her hedging voice. "Well, that's not too bad."

I snorted. Ever the loyal friend, she was defending my inexcusable actions.

"I ordered her, Rose. Noah was right. I'm too lax in how I use my powers. I don't have rules, guidelines that I follow. I need them."

"Yeah, I think we all need to sit down and establish some rules about how we proceed."

I opened my eyes at that. "We're going to keep going then?"

She gave me a determined nod. "Absolutely. We did it poorly, but we helped someone, Stella. I think we can do real good here. But it has to be for the right reasons. Not because I have something to prove, or because you like having your powers, but because we want to help people."

"And Noah?"

She sighed, turned in her seat and reached for the handle. "I'll talk to him."

I remembered the hard look in his eye. The way he'd walked off without a word. And I had the feeling that something had clicked for him too. Just not in the direction that Rose and I had. "Good luck with that."

She gave me an uncertainchuckle. "Yeah, I may need it."