Ghost Is the New Normal (Spirit Knights Book 4) Read online

  Ghost Is the New Normal

  Spirit Knights book 4

  by Lee French

  Acknowledgments

  This book is dedicated to my father, who passed away while I was writing it. He was a knight among men, and now flies airplanes in his own demesne.

  Thank you to Connie, for helping me through the peculiar, specific challenges of this book. Additional thanks to Erik for his unexpected inspiration and generous assistance. A number of other people provided support, in ways large and small, and you are all appreciated.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Epilogue

  Chapter 1

  Claire

  White.

  White. White.

  White. White. White.

  The blankness stirred and formed a vague shape. Definition came when it came. Time had no meaning here, and the blank consciousness at the center had no understanding of anything. Outside the empty blob of being, another shape coalesced, this one with swift purpose. And colors.

  “Oh, Claire.” A being with dark hair and skin, wearing white clothing, sighed and seemed sad. “I’m so sorry. I can’t seem to stop failing you.”

  “Claire?” The name sounded right and fitting for the cloud. As it thought about the label, it noticed its shape shifting to mimic the dark one. Fingers formed first, still made of white mist, but a shape nonetheless.

  “You don’t remember anything yet.” The dark one shook his head and sighed again. “It’ll come. I’m Rondy. You’re Claire. Take your time. Ask me anything you want.” This being, who seemed to care about Claire, stood and waited with his hands in his pockets.

  Claire touched its own arm as it formed. White mist formed flesh. Fabric covered it. Everything felt cool and soft, but its cloud offered resistance. “What am I?”

  “A Phasm.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Rondy looked away. “It means you were a girl and Knight, but now you’re dead. You’re a ghost, Claire, the ghost of a sixteen-year-old girl who had a difficult life and unpleasant death.”

  Rondy used too many words Claire didn’t understand. Their meanings teased on the edge of the cloud, inviting investigation. Reaching out, it brushed against a flash of dark colors and flinched.

  ~*~

  Rain tapped on an umbrella someone else held. Claire wore a navy dress, dark green shirt, and faded red leggings from the donation box. She still had her own sneakers and her heart-shaped locket with its strange swirl pattern. The social worker had asked her to leave her stuffed unicorn in the car.

  Everything else she cared about had burned in the fire last week.

  The smell of wet dirt and grass filled her senses. Three coffins waited for the priest to stop droning about things Claire didn’t want to hear before they’d lower into the fresh graves beside her ancestors who’d lived in the area. Death dates on the other tombstones went back to the 1860s.

  She didn’t cry, not even at the sight of the small, fire-engine-red box with her little brother’s charred remains inside. Some awful person had painted a train on the side in bright colors, as if everyone needed to be reminded about Tyler’s age. He never even liked trains. He wanted to be a ninja. But nobody asked Claire. Because she was only ten. She didn’t have enough maturity to make any decisions at a time like this—so her social worker claimed.

  Glancing back, she saw a handful of women from her mother’s book group and another small crowd from church. All watched her from under umbrellas, their faces drawn in sadness. Claire resented them for feeling something for her family. They belonged to her. No one else had the right. How dare they come here and pretend to a claim on grief that Claire rightfully owned?

  To one side, she noticed a group of unfamiliar men. They all had broad shoulders like Dad, and she guessed they formed his game group. Her father never brought them home, but he liked to tell stories of the monsters they battled and the king they served as knights. She’d asked to come fight monsters with him more than once. He’d promised to take her when she got older. No chance of that anymore.

  The priest stopped talking, and the social worker pushed Claire forward. She faced her father’s coffin with no idea what to do. Too empty for tears anymore, she stared at the wooden box and waited for him to throw off the lid, jump out, and hug her. It never happened. The social worker nudged her until she reached the thick chunk of granite waiting to be placed over his head.

  She crouched and ran her fingers over the wet surface, tracing his name etched into the stone—Mark Terdan. Behind her, the grass rustled under the assault of shoes and boots. People murmured at the coffins and retreated. They kept coming. Someone patted her on the head. Claire ignored them.

  They took too long to leave. She wanted to go home. The feet behind her stopped. She sagged with relief at no longer being on display.

  “This is what can happen, boy,” a man said in a gruff voice.

  Claire stiffened again. She focused on her father’s headstone but couldn’t block out their voices.

  “Yes, sir,” a younger man said. “What about the girl?”

  “The foster care system will take care of her,” another man said. “She’s not our responsibility.”

  “Poor kid,” a fourth man said. “My wife and I could take her in. Toppenish is a lot safer than Portland.”

  The third man sighed. “None of us has legal standing to take up her guardianship. Let the system do its job. You can apply to be foster parents and request her by name.”

  “The cross-state paperwork alone will probably take years,” the fourth man said. He also sighed. “Make sure you set something up for your kids, Justin. Before they’re born, even.”

  They walked away. Claire sat on the stone, not caring about getting her clothes soaked. She watched the four men fade into the distance, swallowed by the rain. Clunking and humming startled her. Mechanized rollers lowered the coffins into their holes.

  “We should go, Claire,” the social worker said. “Would you like some ice cream?”

  Of all the things she wanted, dessert rated so far down on the list she had no answer. As dead inside as her family, she followed the woman back to the car for a lack of anything better to do.

  ~*~

  The tears wouldn’t stop. Two weeks after the funeral, Claire couldn’t remember what happiness felt like. She huddled in a dark corner of the bedroom she shared with seven other kids, her face buried in the matted white fur of her stuffed unicorn. The day her social worker brought her to this group home, one boy tried to take the stuffed animal away. After she hit him, the foster mother told her to spend her free time away from that boy.

  “Hi.” A different boy, this one with red hair and black glasses, knelt beside her and offered her a box of tissues.

  She hadn’t noticed him entering the room. Whe
n she looked up, he smiled. It hurt to see someone who didn’t feel so much pain.

  “I’m Drew. My parents died nineteen months ago. Car accident. It never stops hurting, but you can learn to ignore it so you can do stuff.” He sat beside her, still holding the box.

  Claire took a tissue and wiped her nose. “They’re coming back, I know it.”

  “Yeah.” Drew put an arm around her shoulders and tugged her close.

  “It wasn’t them in the fire.” No one had hugged her since the funeral. She wanted to climb inside his shirt, even his skin, to get as close to another person as possible. “Or the coffins.”

  “I know.”

  Everyone else refused to agree with her. The social worker said she needed to accept their deaths. The police officers looked down at her with pity. The foster parents told her to go cry someplace out of sight. The kids all called her a stupid liar.

  “Why are they waiting so long?”

  “Because the fire turned them into fairies. You can’t see fairies when you’re awake, only in your dreams.”

  She furrowed her brow at him, not sure if he meant to make fun of her or not. “I haven’t seen them in my dreams.”

  Drew shrugged. “Other stuff gets in the way. When you’re ready, you will. If you listen really hard, you’ll hear them whispering, but you gotta be really quiet.”

  Claire sniffled and wiped her nose again. If he lied to her, she liked his lies. She leaned against Drew and heard his heartbeat through his chest. “I hate this place.”

  “Me too. But it’s a little better now you’re here.”

  The tears stopped. Claire wiped her nose again. “Okay. But if you’re only doing this to take my unicorn, I’m gonna punch you like I punched Brad.”

  “I’m not going to take your unicorn.”

  “Then we can be friends.”

  ~*~

  The broad-shouldered, muscle-bound man with short, dark hair swung his axe at a chunk of log resting on an old stump. Its blade hit off-center but still split the log in two pieces. He set the larger piece on end and offered Claire the axe.

  “You won’t get it to break the first time. Probably not the second, third, or tenth time either. But it’s good for building up muscle. And when you do get it cut, the result is firewood, so you never feel like you just spent an hour doing nothing.”

  Claire took the axe in both hands. She’d never held a weapon before. Her fists, knees, and combat boots had always been enough until she met Justin a week ago and fell into the deep end of the ghost hunting pool. “I feel like maybe you’re leaving off some part of the directions. Like, an important part.”

  Justin smirked. “There’s no trick, just hard work. Lift the axe, slam it down, repeat as needed. You might miss, and that’s okay. You’ll hit it with the flat of the blade a lot at first. Just don’t chop your own leg off.”

  “Oh, sure. Yeah. Great tip. Is the next one to avoid throwing the axe?”

  His smirk grew into a broad grin. “See? You’ve got the idea already.”

  As annoying as she found his directions, Claire noticed herself smiling genuinely. Justin had signed the papers to adopt her, something she’d given up hope of ever happening. Teenagers didn’t get adopted. Especially not sixteen-year-olds.

  She adjusted her grip on the axe then lifted it over her head, like she’d seen Justin do before, and tried to imagine the impact between its metal head and the standing log. Don’t let it slip out of her hands, don’t chop off body parts, and don’t worry. Because one of those things didn’t directly contradict the other two. Sure.

  Certain this wouldn’t end well, she heaved the axe, expecting it to hit the old stump. The metal clanged against the log, wobbled, and slid down the side. The log fell, Claire whacked her knee into the stump, and the axe hit the ground. Still unsteadied by the unexpected result, she fell face-first over the stump.

  Justin remained several feet away, leaning against the firewood shelter. His mouth twitched with nearly-suppressed amusement. “Nice trip?”

  “Yeah, great,” Claire snapped. “I suppose you knew that would happen?”

  “I suspected. Do you know what went wrong?”

  “I listened to you?”

  He chuckled. “That’s pretty close to what I told Grandpa Jack after my first swing. I slipped on the mud and hit my back.”

  She pushed herself off the stump and sat on it to inspect her knee. The blue and black striped sock covering had no damage, but when she pushed it down, she found a mild, stinging scrape. The palm of her hand smarted too, though it looked fine. “Does this mean I get to stop for now?”

  Justin snorted. “No. Spirit Knights don’t give up just because something is hard or sucks. We do the right thing because it’s the right thing, not because it’s the easy thing. If this job was easy, it wouldn’t need to be done.”

  ~*~

  “I remember.” Claire the Phasm recalled how the rest of the afternoon had gone. On her tenth try, she’d hit the log with the blade hard enough to get it stuck. Justin had praised her and finished the job for her. Two weeks later, she hit the logs every other try, and a few days before… before her memories stopped, she split two whole logs by herself, taking roughly twenty times longer than Justin did.

  Colors flickered over her shape. Her skin became olive-tinted flesh, her hair darkened to black, and her clothes bloomed in a riot of colors. The white around her took the form of Justin’s clearing. Trees, both deciduous and evergreen, lined one edge. The lean-to full of firewood formed another. One path led to the farmhouse where Grandma and Grandpa lived. Drew lived there too. The other path ended at the front door of Justin’s cottage, where she lived with him, his wife, and their two little girls. Flanking the path near the door, a vegetable bed had already been cleared after the first frost of autumn.

  Yellow, orange, and brown leaves littered the muddy ground. Moss-covered stones lined the well-used paths. On a chilly breeze that kicked up a handful of tiny, dry leaves, Claire smelled pine, earth, and wood smoke from the farmhouse chimney. She shivered and a coat covered her body as if someone painted it on her.

  She turned around in place and smiled. Despite spending less than two months here, this place had become home. When she stopped, she sat on the stump and snuggled in her coat.

  Rondy stepped into sight with a sad smile. “This isn’t real.”

  “It is too.” Claire ignored him in favor of picking at the battered bark of the old stump. Bits of brown wood lodged under her chewed fingernails.

  He nodded like he understood. “It would be nice if the air warmed up, wouldn’t it?”

  “Sure. I mean, this coat is great and all, but…” She trailed off as the air she breathed no longer held a chill. “That’s…”

  “What happens when you want something in your own demesne.”

  Claire shied away from the rest of the memories flooding in. But they pressed on her like a load of bricks. Thanksgiving happened. She got her sprite and Justin got corrupted. She fixed everything and saved the world by damning it. Or something like that.

  “I died?”

  Rondy nodded with a sigh. “Yes. Caius killed you. I’m tied to you, so I know nothing after that.”

  Claire patted her chest, where the face of her locket had been embedded in her flesh. The clothing stripped away from the spot so she could see it. Pulsing red and gold in time with her heartbeat, the familiar heart shape made of whorls and dots remained in place. Once upon a time, her father had forged it to save her life. The stupid thing had caused a lot of trouble for her.

  “Wait.” She jabbed a finger at Rondy, determined to prove him wrong. “If I’m dead, how come I have a heartbeat?”

  “It’s your demesne. You can have anything you want. You expect it to be there, so it is.”

  Claire scowled. As she glowered at the ground, she noticed three distinct sensations like tugging on her locket, as if strings tied to it vibrated. “Okay, Mister I’m-So-Smart. If you know everything, how come th
ere are three things pulling on me in three different directions?”

  Rondy cocked his head to the side and stared through her. “I don’t know.”

  “Ha!”

  “But I can make a guess, at least about one. Your soul-bond with Enion is rather unique in that he’s a dragon instead of a more traditional form of transportation. As far as I know, no Spirit Knight has ever had a dragon for a sprite. Dragons have always been considered evil monsters before. As for the other two, I have no idea. You’ll have to follow them to see where they lead.”

  Claire nodded, pleased he could come up with some kind of answer, even an incomplete one. This whole situation of having a captive teacher made dying suck less. At least she could get real answers now, anytime she wanted them. “Any thoughts on how to do that?”

  “Grab one and pull.”

  Chapter 2

  Claire

  Until she made the effort to try, getting a grip on an invisible, intangible thread sounded simple. Claire swished her hands through the air, trying and failing to touch the unfamiliar sensation. While her fingers caused ripples in the illusion of her demesne, they accomplished nothing else. She paused to glare at Rondy.

  He chuckled. “You’re being too literal. These aren’t really strings or threads. It’s a spot on your soul that senses sympathy with something else. Like you and Enion are each a magnet separated by a piece of paper. In this case, I think the paper is the boundary between your demesne and Earth. This is all metaphysical. Magic.”

  “Great.” Everything since she met Justin involved magic, which no one seemed capable of explaining well enough for her to understand. Ask for a straight answer about magic? Either get a wave and a claim she didn’t need to know, or five minutes of gobbledygook “How do I do that?”

  “Try. This is your demesne. Your wishes and will create reality here. Want it hard enough and you can do anything here. It’s a great deal like the Palace.”

  The answer sucked, but Claire suspected Rondy couldn’t give her anything better to work with. He couldn’t feel these threads, so he couldn’t get more specific. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Then she remembered she had no reason to breathe, not even to speak. This ghost thing took some getting used to.