My boyfriend who might cease to exist in a few days.

I needed to let off steam. I needed to clear my head. I needed to shake off the feeling that I’d been touched by something slimy.

Suppertime is the best time to hit my building’s pool. Everyone else is using the gym or heating up their microwave dinners, huddled around their Ikea dining tables, watching Jeopardy or the nightly news or Netflix.

I’m not an exercise freak, but I have to stay in shape, not only so I can fit into my clothes, but so I can kick the butts of all the dead people (and sextortionists) in my life who keep pestering me.

I left my apartment, went down the stairs to the pool area, kicked off my flip-flops, and peeled off my T-shirt and yoga pants, leaving them on a chaise longue with my towel. Then I slid into the brightly lit, heated water, dunking my head under (even though my hairdresser, Christophe, begs me to wear a swim cap. He says I’m ruining the highlights for which I pay him a small fortune).

But swim caps are ugly, and squeeze my head so I can’t think. I do my best thinking when I’m doing my laps.

Under the water, I couldn’t hear the sound of the light traffic over the G16, or the crickets chirping in the decorative plantings the apartment management company had put all around the pool. I couldn’t hear the tinkling of silverware in unit 2-B (they keep their balcony door open at dinnertime, just like I do).

Soon all I could hear was the sound of water splashing and my own breathing as I began to swim.

After my laps were finished, I decided I’d dry off and drive to the hardware store—there was a Home Depot open until ten in Monterey—and buy every bag of rock salt they had in stock (they’d probably think I was a lunatic. It snowed so rarely in Carmel it was considered an apocalyptic event).

Then I’d sow every inch of 99 Pine Crest Road with it, and the soil around it, too. I’d even salt the yards of the neighboring houses.

I had no proof this would work, but what other choice did I have? My apartment was salted to keep troublesome spirits out. Wouldn’t salting the ground of a place where dark acts had been committed keep that evil in?

That probably wouldn’t stop a demon for long, but if I also got Father D over there to perform another one of his house blessings—and maybe, while he was at it, bless Jesse, too—it could help.

Not that I believed for one minute that Jesse was going to sit still for a blessing—at least not without an explanation. He went to mass every Sunday, and on holy days of obligation, as well. If there was a demon living inside him, it was going to take one hell of a blessing to drive it out. I was probably going to have to come up with an imam, a rabbi, and a Wiccan high priestess in addition to Father Dom to get rid of this curse.

If only I’d kicked Paul in the throat instead of the groin on graduation night. If I’d broken his hyoid bone and killed him, I probably would have gotten off on self-defense. If I offed him now that he was so well known—thanks to Los Angeles magazine and his own parents suing him—the case might garner a lot of publicity, and if convicted, I’d probably get some jail time . . . though still way less than Jesse, seeing as how I’m white, and a woman.

But any jail time is too much for a girl who can only sleep with three down-filled pillows on 100 percent cotton sheets.

Oh, what was I saying? I could never kill another human being . . . at least not one that I knew.

Or could I? In order to protect everything—and everyone—that I loved?

When did everything become so complicated? If it wasn’t some jerk from your past showing up to blackmail you into having sex with him, it was a baby homicidal spirit wrecking your office. Non-compliant persons, both living and deceased, seemed always to be popping up from out of nowhere, ruining my life. Was I never going to be able to kick back and enjoy myself for a change?

It’s unconscionable—to use one of Sister Ernestine’s favorite terms—that I was thinking this exact thought when an NCDP appeared in the water beside me.

But I was so absorbed in my dark thoughts about Paul, listening to my own breathing and heartbeat, watching the shadow my own body made on the floor of the pool as I did my laps, that I didn’t notice, despite Pru’s warning not an hour earlier.

I didn’t notice until its clawlike hands were wrapped around my neck, and it was shoving me under the bright blue water.

And suddenly, I was the one about to die.

nueve

I flailed in the water, swallowing deep gulps of it, while clutching at the sharp little fingers digging into my throat.

“Don’t you hurt Becca,” an all-too-familiar voice hissed into my ear when I managed to surface for one all-too-brief gasp of glorious air. “Don’t you come near her again!”

There was nothing I could say in response. Even if there had been, I couldn’t speak. Her grip on my throat was so tight I couldn’t utter a sound, nor could I dig my fingers beneath hers to loosen her grip. Besides, she’d plunged us both to the bottom of the pool, her body—which should have been weightless—suddenly heavy as a refrigerator.

And I was the stray dog someone had decided to cruelly chain to that refrigerator for kicks before shoving both into the bottom of the lake.

All I could do was fight my way back to the surface against the weight inexorably bearing me down. But when I finally did reach the glorious air, instead of taking it in, I could only cough out the burning chlorinated water I’d swallowed.

And she continued to cling to my neck like a thousand-pound weight. How was that possible, when she was only the size of a doll, and a ghost besides? For someone whose name meant “light,” she was anything but.

Once, in my quest to find the most effective cardio I could do in the shortest amount of time, I’d read that treading water vertically while bearing a heavy weight was the way to go. It’s an integral part of U.S. Navy SEAL training: they tread water while holding a dive pack above their heads.

That had sounded way too brutal to me, but now I realized it was exactly what I should have been doing all along. Who knew U.S. Navy SEALs and school counseling interns had so much in common?

The next thing I knew, the kid had me strung up in midair like a salmon on a fishing line. I dangled there by my neck, still struggling to unloose her fingers, gasping for air, wondering in the distant part of my brain that could still register thought what I would look like to any of my fellow tenants who might happen to glance down at the pool from their balconies. They wouldn’t be able to see the NCDP that was holding me by the neck above the water level. Would they think I was performing some kind of odd water ballet? Suze Simon, amateur mermaid. Perhaps they’d applaud, and compliment me later . . . if I lived until later.