A Gift of Ghosts (Tassamara) Read Online Free PDF

—only privately, never publicly. Were the spirits just a form of
energy? Did it dissipate slowly for some, the faders, and burn out quickly for
others? Or did it change? The first law of thermodynamics said that energy
could neither be created nor destroyed, just transformed, so did spirit energy
become some other form of energy? And if so, what?
    But at the moment, the only important question was that she’d
just leased an old black Taurus for no real reason, and did she want to keep
it? She glanced back at the small airport building. She’d picked up the keys at
the desk, and dropped off the keys to her rental car, as Grace had told her to
do. She supposed she could go back in and say that she’d changed her mind, but
that might be just as hard to explain as wanting the car in the first place
could have been. She might as well just keep it.
    She slid behind the wheel and adjusted the seat, and then the
mirrors. Whoever had driven it out here had been a lot taller than she was. Set
to go, she slid the key in the ignition, backed out of the parking space, and
started to drive away.
    The scream was piercing in its intensity, terrifying in its
volume.
    Akira slammed on the brakes, throwing the car into a skid. A
flash of white, a loud bang, and suddenly the car was filling with smoke.
    The next thing she was aware of was the feel of a strong,
warm hand on her back as she tried hard to cough out her lungs to the sound of
a teenage boy’s voice saying, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,” over and over
again.
    “Just relax and try to breathe.” That was an older, but also
familiar male voice. Akira looked up. For a moment, she didn’t recognize the
face—it was too unexpected. But the dark hair, the blue-gray eyes—finally the
pieces fell into place and she realized it was Zane Latimer, her erstwhile
interviewer. “I’m calling an ambulance,” he continued.
    Frantically, Akira started shaking her head, while also
trying to wave off Dillon’s apologies. Through coughs, she gasped out, “No
ambulance. No.”
    “Uh, yes, ambulance, yes,” said Zane. “You were unconscious.
I had to pull you out of the car because of the dust from the airbag. God knows
what damage I might have done.”
    Through the coughing, through the pain that she was just
starting to feel, Akira had room to feel a little burst of fear. Ambulances led
to hospitals, and hospitals were bad. Very bad.
    She was sitting on the gravel of the parking lot, she
realized. Zane was crouched next to her, his hand on her back, and she was
leaning against his legs. Dillon was on her other side. He’d stopped
apologizing when she spoke, but he had his fist pressed against his mouth, his
face frantic with worry.
    She tried to smile at him, but it probably looked more like a
grimace. It hurt to breathe. She thought that was just from the coughing,
although she could tell that she would be bruised from the seat belt. And her
arms hurt, too—long marks along the inside of her wrists were almost like brush
burns, scraped and raw from the airbag’s impact.
    “I’ll be okay.” The words sounded strangled but she got them
out.
    “You were unconscious,” Zane repeated. “I’m no doctor, but I
know enough to know that unconscious is bad. You need to get looked at.”
    “I’m fine,” Akira insisted. “It was just the airbag. I wasn’t
going very fast. What did I hit?” She tried to stand, pushing herself up with
one hand. Zane slid his arm under her elbow and helped her to her feet, rising
with a smooth, unconscious grace that she couldn’t match.
    “Looks like a parking post. You didn’t do much damage, only
dented the fender. It’s too bad about the airbags, though. Cleaning up after a
blown airbag is expensive. And it’s an old car, and not worth much. The
insurance company will probably want to total it.”
    “Total it?” Akira looked at Zane in dismay.
    Standing by the car, Dillon’s eyes went wide, and he put a
possessive hand on the hood.