Neon Blue E Frost (speld decodable readers .TXT) 📖

scan it and email it to you?” I silently bless our office scanner.

“Sure, yes, that would be great.” He gives me his email address which I copy down carefully.

“Okay. Well, um, thank you very much for your time.”

“My pleasure, Miss, uh, sorry, I’m terrible with names.”

“It’s okay. So am I.” I smile for the first time during this conversation. “Please just call me Tsara.”

“Tsara. Call me Peter. I’ll give you a buzz tomorrow after my ten o’clock class, if that’s okay.”

“Thanks, that would be great.”

“I’ll, uh, need your number.”

My number. I give a mental shrug. It’s just my office number. I give it to him.

He repeats it back to me. “So I’ll call you tomorrow.”

Sounds like a promise. Which would be kind of nice if he wasn’t calling about an inferiarcus. And if he wasn’t Rowena’s ex. “Okay, thanks.”

After I hang up, I glance at the clock on my desk. Still fifteen minutes before my next appointment. Enough time to battle it out with the office scanner. Resigned, I pick up the English file.

Chapter 6

I wake in a sweat. Shaking. I hug myself tightly, fingers digging into the soft cotton of my t-shirt, and wait for my night terrors to pass.

When they don’t, and the bile spurting into the back of my throat gets the better of me, I climb out of the bed, run across the hall, and throw up in the toilet.

My grandmother’s ghost swims up through my reflection in the bathroom mirror while I’m washing out my mouth.

“The nightmare again, beti?”

I spray a mouthful of water across the mirror. “Dala, would you not do that!”

She winks out of the mirror and appears beside me. “Sorry, beti.”

I brace myself against the sink, scrub my hand over my face. “It’s bad enough waking up from that.”

She pats me on the back, the way she used to do when I was a kid. Only now her touch sends a cold chill up my spine and leaves a glisten of ectoplasm on my shoulder. “Was it the same dream?”

“Yes.” It’s been the same dream since I was twelve and my talent began to manifest. Walking along a path through the woods. Crows calling. Dappled sun and shade. The smell of wild garlic. Ahead, the path turns, and at the edge of shadow, a man’s silhouette. Standing tall. Standing still. Waiting for me.

Nothing more than that. Except the absolute sickening certainty that that man is going to destroy me. Not just kill me, destroy me. Cut me, beat me, choke me, rape me until there’s nothing left. Not even death with dignity. I’ll go begging, crying, groveling, pleading for him to stop. But he won’t. There’s nothing I can do to stop him. And that’s when I wake up. Knowing he’s out there. Waiting for me.

I pick up my toothbrush, glob some toothpaste on it and begin brushing my teeth.

“Have you talked to your friend Doctor Jill lately?”

“She’s not my friend. She’s a therapist.” I say around a mouthful of foam. “And I’m not paying her two hundred an hour to tell me what I already know.”

My grandmother’s ghost sighs heavily. “Beti, you make things harder than they have to be.”

Because I don’t want to end up trapped in Limbo like half of my relatives. “Is Uncle Billygoat around?”

“Of course.” She rolls up and a moment later, the ghost of my uncle perches on the rim of the tub, stretching out his legs and clamping the stub of a cigarette between his teeth.

“Those things will give you cancer, old Goat,” I say.

He winks at me. His left eye, which in life was glass and in death is an empty black socket. “What’cha want, káulochírilo?”

He’s using my family nickname, Blackbird, which means he’s in a good mood. I’d never met a grumpy ancestral ghost until my uncle passed over.

“I had the dream again.”

He takes a long drag on the cigarette, filling my bathroom with ghostly smoke. “Another visit from the beng, huh?”

I spit, rinse my mouth out. “I don’t believe in the devil.” Demons I believe in. But not the Devil. Except when he’s played by Al Pacino.

“Sure. The shadow man’s just an archetype of your unconscious.”

“An archetype of the collective unconscious,” I correct him. But I’ve stopped believing in my ex-therapist’s Jungian crap, too. All her talk didn’t help. Didn’t stop the nightmares. Neither did the Prozac.

“Whatever.” He picks a piece of tobacco off his tongue, flicks it into my bathtub, where it fades back into the ether. “Sounds like beng to me.”

“Uh-huh. I need a favor, old Goat.”

“Lemme guess. You want me to guard the dream door?”

I nod. There’s no other way I’m getting back to sleep.

He exhales another cloud of blue smoke. “Yeah, I guess I can do that.”

Like he has so much else to do, being dead and all. “Thanks.”

Instead of rolling up or fading, which my family ghosts particularly like to do, usually leaving some part of themselves to vanish last, like the Cheshire Cat’s grin, he follows me back into my bedroom. He watches while I stir the pots of dried lavender and chamomile on my bedside table and climb in between the chilly sheets.

He perches on the foot of my bed and blows smoke rings at the ceiling. “You don’t think the dream comin’ back has anything to do with this thing you’re looking for, do you, chavi?

I pull my Dala’s wedding-ring quilt up around my neck, clutch the soft, worn warmth of it close to me. “Of course it does.”

“Then tell the gorgio to find his own ring.”

“Manny Goldberg’s a friend. I owe him.”

My uncle’s ghost blows one smoke ring through another. A trick he got from watching the animated version of The Hobbit too many times, I think. I’ve never seen any member of my family get excited about modern technology, except the Billigoat when he discovered the VCR. “It was an accident, chavi. Everyone makes mistakes.”

Yes, but not everyone gets tanked up after breaking up with loser number four and gets behind the