“How’d you get there? I mean, nobody exorcised you, right?”

Paul was grinning now. I saw, to my dismay, that I’d asked him exactly the question he’d most wanted to hear.

“No, nobody exorcised me,” he said. “And you didn’t need anybody to exorcise you, either.”

This came close to flooring me. I froze in my tracks. “Are you trying to tell me that I can just go strolling around up there whenever I want?” I asked him, truly stunned.

“There’s a lot,” Paul said, still grinning lazily, “that you can do that you haven’t figured out yet, Suze. Things you’ve never dreamed of. Things I can show you.”

The silky tone of his voice didn’t fool me. Paul was a charmer, it was true, but he was also deadly.

“Yeah,” I said, praying that he couldn’t see how fast my heart was beating through all that pink silk. “I’m sure.”

“I’m serious, Suze,” Paul said. “Father Dominic is a great guy. I’m not denying it. But he’s just a mediator. You’re a little something more.”

“I see.” I hitched my shoulders and started walking again. We had reached the crest of the hill finally, and I entered some shade afforded by the giant pine trees on either side of the road. My relief at finally being out of the heat was palpable. I only wished I could rid myself of Paul as easily. “So all my life, people have been telling me I’m one thing, and all of a sudden you come along, and you say I’m something else, and I’m just supposed to believe you?”

“Yes,” Paul said.

“Because you’re such a trustworthy person,” I quipped, sounding a lot more self-assured than I actually felt.

“Because I’m all you’ve got,” he corrected me.

“Well, that’s not a real whole lot, is it?” I glared at him. “Or do I need to point out that the last time I saw you, you left me stranded in hell?”

“It wasn’t hell,” Paul said, with another one of his trademark eyerolls. “And you’d have found your way out eventually.”

“What about Jesse?” I demanded. My heart was beating more loudly than ever, because this, of course, was what really mattered—not what he’d done, or tried to do to me—but what he’d done to Jesse…what I was terrified he’d try to do again.

“I said I was sorry about that.” Paul sounded irritated. “Besides, it all turned out okay in the end, didn’t it? It’s like I told you, Suze. You’re much more powerful than you know. You just need someone to show you your true potential. You need a mentor—a real one, not a sixty-yearold priest who thinks Father Junipero Whoever is the be-all and end-all of the universe.”

“Right,” I said. “And I suppose you think you’re just the guy to play Mr. Miyagi to my Karate Kid.”

“Something like that.”

We were rounding the corner to 99 Pine Crest Drive, perched on a hill overlooking Carmel Valley. My room, at the front of the house, had an ocean view. At night, fog blew in from the sea, and you could almost see it falling in misty tendrils over the sills if I left my windows open. It was a nice house, one of the oldest in Carmel, a former boardinghouse, circa 1850. It didn’t even have a reputation for being haunted.

“What do you say, Suze?” Paul had one arm flung casually across the back of the empty passenger seat beside him. “Dinner tonight? My treat? I’ll tell you things about yourself—about what you are—that no one else on this planet knows.”

“Thanks,” I said, stepping off the road and into my pine-needle-strewn yard, feeling insanely relieved. Well, and why not? I had survived an encounter with Paul Slater without being hurled into another plane of existence. That was quite an accomplishment. “But no thanks. See you in school tomorrow.”

Then I waded through the heavy carpet of pine needles to my driveway, while behind me, I heard Paul calling, “Suze! Suze, wait!”

Only I didn’t wait. I went straight up the driveway to the front porch, climbed the steps, then opened the front door and went inside.

I did not look back. I did not look back even once.

“I’m home,” I called, in case there was anybody downstairs who particularly cared. There was. I found myself being interrogated by my stepfather, who was cooking dinner and seemed anxious to know all about “my day.” After telling him, then seizing sustenance from the kitchen in the form of an apple and a diet soda, I climbed the steps to the second floor, and flung open the door to my room.

There was a ghost sitting there on the windowsill. He looked up when I walked in.

“Hello,” Jesse said.

chapter

four

I didn’t tell Jesse about Paul.

I probably should have. There were a lot of things I probably should have told Jesse, but hadn’t exactly gotten around to yet.

Except I knew what would happen if I did: Jesse would want to rush into some big confrontation with the guy, and all that would result in was somebody getting exorcised again…that somebody being Jesse. And I really didn’t think I could take it. Not that. Not again.

So I kept Paul’s sudden matriculation at the Mission Academy to myself. I mean, things were weird between Jesse and me, it was true. But that didn’t mean I was at all anxious to lose him.

“So how was school?” Jesse wanted to know.

“Fine,” I said. I was afraid to say anything more. For one thing, I was worried I might start blabbing about Paul. And for another, well, I’d found that the less said between Jesse and me, overall, the better. Otherwise, I had a tendency to prattle nervously. While I’d found that generally, prattling kept Jesse from dematerializing—as he tended to do more often now, with a hasty apology, whenever any awkward silences ensued between us—it did not seem to engender a similar desire to gab from him. Jesse had been almost unbearably quiet since…

Well, since the day we’d kissed.

I don’t know what it is about guys that makes them French you one day, then act like you don’t exist the next. But that was the treatment I had been getting from Jesse lately. I mean, not three weeks ago he had pulled me into his arms and laid a kiss on me that I had felt all the way down to the base of my spine. I had melted in his embrace, thinking that at last, at long last, I could reveal to him my true feelings, the secret love I had borne him since the minute—well, almost, anyway—I had first walked into my new bedroom and found it already occupied. Never mind that that occupant had breathed his last over a century and a half ago.