and I want to tell her about the demons and the magic. She gets freaked out when I tell her about a ghost, though, and I know how crazy it will all sound.
“Turn left at the stoplight,” I tell Ethan and look back at my phone. Might as well invite Laney over, bust out the junk food, and spit out the truth, right?
Me: When do you get off?
She doesn’t respond right away since she’s working, and I drop my phone in my purse.
“Can we listen to music?” I blurt, afraid the silence is going to get awkward.
“Sure, what do you like?”
“Either classic rock or Britney Spears,” I say, scrunching up my face. “It’s an odd combination, I know.”
“You really like classic rock?”
“Yeah, is that surprising?”
He nods. “You don’t look like someone who would.”
“You should stop stereotyping me, Ethan. You said I don’t look like someone who’d have demonic bounty hunters after me and look how that turned out.”
“Touché.” He laughs and opens a playlist, turning on Kickstart My Heart by Mötley Crüe. I watch our surroundings pass us by as drive, feeling increasingly paranoid. I thought everything hit me before, but the fact that I could have died—that Hunter could have been ripped apart—weighs on me and I get all jittery.
“Anora,” Ethan says slowly and reaches over, hand landing on mine, which is resting on my thigh. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” I say right away and force a smile. It’s such a natural thing to do, to cover up how freaked out I am. But then I realize I don’t have to lie around Ethan. “Actually no. I keep replaying it in my mind, and I feel really fucking stupid for going out on my own like that.”
“Why did you go out on your own?”
“Partly curiosity,” I admit. “And keep going, then turn right into the little plaza up there.”
“What was the other part?”
“I had a feeling those things were looking for me. A herd of cattle was attacked, and I assumed it was them, which makes me sound even more dumb for going after them. I guess…I guess if it wanted me, I wanted it to go after me and not hurt anyone else in a sense, though I didn’t really know what it was yet. Does that even make sense?”
“I think so. Look, it doesn’t matter. We all do stupid things, and we’re all guilty of not thinking things through. Besides, it’s not like you knew demons were in the woods. You didn’t die, and you killed two demons in the process.”
“Are the Pricolici demons?”
“Not in the technical sense, but anything evil can be lumped into the demonic category.”
“This is a lot to keep track of.”
“You’ll get it,” he assures me and pulls into the parking lot. We get seated right away since it’s that off time between lunch and dinner. I order a glass of sparkling water along with my cheese ravioli.
“What’s it like to be a medium?” Ethan asks, grabbing a breadstick from the basket on the table.
“Well, the pay sucks.”
He chuckles. “You worked as a medium?”
“For Madame Violet,” I say in the fake accent she used to use. “She thought I was a fake like her, and when I actually contacted the dead, people kind of freaked out.” I run my finger down my water glass, wiping a line in the condensation. “Mostly…mostly it’s isolating.”
I look up, meeting Ethan’s eyes for a moment. “It’s like there’s a war raging constantly in my head between our world and their world. I have to use so much energy to keep the mental door leading into their world shut. I pick up on spirits’ emotions and they become my own. I remember one time on a school field trip, the bus passed this site where a girl got murdered. Of course, no one else knew that, but I was overcome with these powerful emotions of just absolute terror. I had a panic attack, and we had to stop the bus.” I take another drink. “It made being a kid rather difficult since I was always so different but couldn’t explain why.”
“I know that feeling. Not fitting in but not being able to tell anyone why, especially when you know your secret makes you so much more badass than everyone else.”
“I don’t know how badass having a conversation with a ghost only you can see makes you. I’ll give you a spoiler: it just makes you look crazy.”