a waxen complexion.
“You should eat,” Angel said.
“I was….” Tucker gestured. “Damien was in the graveyard.”
“I remember now.” Damien was the ghost who’d come the closest to taking Tucker over. Even if the pile of boxes hadn’t screamed his name and Tucker hadn’t dropped it occasionally, Angel would have remembered Tucker’s anguish at seeing a noxious green spirit body of the man he’d once loved above all others. “Are you okay?”
“I… I resisted the pull twice. Once when I tried to have a girlfriend, and once with….” He pushed his plate away as if he suddenly couldn’t stand the thought of food. “But a few times, I couldn’t find the pop—the person I was supposed to be with that night. I felt the release in my chest, and I just knew I was too late or in the wrong place or… or something had happened.”
“That wasn’t your fault.” Angel’s chest tightened, and a shiver raced up his spine. He no longer questioned whether his body was real—too many visceral reactions related to Tucker Henderson assaulted him almost every minute.
“I’m not saying it was,” Tucker muttered, looking down at his pad again. “It’s just—I started to keep a record book. When it happened, I searched through the newspapers and clipped out, you know, bad weird things. Because a banker shooting a guy in the middle of a cookie shop before offing himself isn’t an everyday thing. I figured those other misses would have a… a thing. Something would show up.”
Angel swallowed against the fear that Tucker wasn’t made for this life—not like Ruth had been. Tucker was the sweet boy Ruth had told him about. He was vulnerable. He needed Angel’s help, Angel’s protection, more than Ruth ever had.
“Why would you do that to yourself?” Angel asked, his voice rough. He sat across from Tucker, realizing that the red-padded kitchen chair had been pulled out for him already, as if Tucker was hoping he’d sit there and was trying to make him comfortable.
Angel’s hands shook. He was tired of asking himself how that could be.
Tucker looked up at him, surprised and, Angel was relieved to see, sane. “Just to keep it from happening again, Angel. I wanted to see how I’d missed them—how we hadn’t connected.”
“So you could stop it from happening again?” This, at least, was proactive. Angel could understand this.
“Yes.” Tucker flipped through the scrapbook again. He pulled in a deep breath through his nose and made a notation in his notebook.
“What are you writing?”
Tucker gave a half laugh. “I’m sorry. I’m not communicating well. That day at the graveyard I recognized two of the names.”
“Damien’s.” Angel remembered Damien’s ghost, the twisted features of what had once been a laughing—and kind—young man.
“Yes. And the name of my ex-girlfriend’s father.”
“Who?”
“The first and only relationship I tried to have, Angel. I resisted the pull, and she had to leave town because her father died of a heart attack and she needed to be with her family. It was… too convenient. I knew that it was blowback of some sort, I guess. It was why….” He swallowed and shrugged, studying the scrapbook in front of him with intent. “And his headstone was out there. I was looking to see if any of my other misses were.”
Angel grunted, trying to put this information together. “Were they?”
“Yeah. See?”
Tucker shoved the scrapbook at Angel and flipped the pages. “George Alvarez—that was my girlfriend’s father. Gary Kunis—I missed him because I had pneumonia. I was in the hospital, and they’d doped me, right? And I kept begging them to let me go, I guess. They thought I was delusional.” He rubbed his wrists, and Angel bit his lip.
“They restrained you?”
Tucker shrugged like it hadn’t hurt.
Angel wrapped his hands around Tucker’s wrists, their flesh colliding, because Tucker’s heart was bleeding again, and it obviously had hurt. No shrugging and denial could change that. “They restrained you,” he repeated bleakly.
Tucker shook his head and wiped his eyes, but he only pulled one hand from Angel’s grasp.
“I was trying to get up in a rainstorm,” he said, and Angel pictured him, ill, desperate, fighting restraints to go out in the rain to answer the pull. He opened his mouth to cry. Howl. But Tucker shook his head and kept going. “Then there was this one.”
Angel looked at the scrapbook, at an article about a young woman who had stepped onto the light-rail tracks at K Street; then he looked at the notebook. “Courtney Julian?”
“I went out that night—I swear I