A Gift of Grace Read online

  The voices are driving him crazy. And he’s driving them crazy, too.

  For Noah Blake, pretending to be normal is getting harder by the day. A brush with death in Iraq has left him suffering from chronic auditory hallucinations. Ignoring the voices he hears isn’t always easy, but Noah knows it’s better than the alternatives.

  Yet when a mysterious redhead hands him a seemingly innocuous business card, a new voice — that of a teenage boy — becomes too insistent to deny. It wants him to go to Tassamara. It swears he’ll find help there.

  It’s bad enough to have hallucinations, but doing what they say is bound to lead to disaster.

  Isn’t it?

  A Gift of Grace

  A Tassamara Novel

  Sarah Wynde

  Rozelle Press

  Contents

  1. Dillon

  2. Noah

  3. Grace

  4. Noah

  5. Dillon

  6. Grace

  7. Noah

  8. Grace

  9. Noah

  10. Dillon

  11. Grace

  12. Noah

  13. Grace

  14. Dillon

  15. Noah

  16. Dillon

  17. Grace

  18. Noah

  19. Grace

  20. Dillon

  21. Noah

  22. Grace

  23. Dillon

  24. Grace

  25. Noah

  26. Dillon

  27. Noah

  28. Grace

  29. Dillon

  30. Noah

  31. Dillon

  32. Grace

  33. Dillon

  34. Noah

  35. Dillon

  36. Noah

  37. Grace

  38. Dillon

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  Books and Stories by Sarah Wynde

  Copyright © 2018 by Wendy Sharp

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  A Gift of Grace is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is coincidental.

  * * *

  Published by Rozelle Press

  independent publisher of unexpected fiction

  rozellepress.com

  * * *

  Cover design by Karri Klawiter, artbykarri.com

  Created with Vellum

  1

  Dillon

  Dillon had never seen so many ghosts in one place.

  He came to a dead stop. His mother, oblivious, continued walking down the hallway of the federal courthouse, still talking on her cell phone. “It’s a fishing expedition,” she was saying. “The grand jury’s calling everyone and anyone.”

  The hallway was crowded with the living, mostly men in suits. The lawyers looked sleek and comfortable, while the witnesses wore their ties like nooses, their suits like costumes.

  Among them, ghosts wandered in uncanny profusion.

  A translucent woman wearing long flowing skirts paced toward Dillon, her eyes empty. “Sleep my love, and peace attend thee,” she crooned a soft lullaby. “All through the night. Guardian angels God will lend thee, all through the night.”

  Another woman, hair bundled into a knot on top of her head, scrubbed the floor on her hands and knees, heedless of the living legs walking through her.

  An older man, head down, shoved through the crowd as if they were the ones who didn’t exist, muttering furiously, “It’s not right, it’s not right.”

  Transparent blurs floated in the corners, wisps of white drifted along the corridor, balls of light bobbed in the air. Spirits — or the bits and pieces left of them after decades of slow erosion — were everywhere.

  Halfway down the hall, Dillon’s mom, Sylvie, stopped by a closed door. She spoke to the uniformed guard standing next to it, nodded at his response, and turned away from him. Moving across the hall, she settled in to wait. As she stood, her back against the wall, her eyes skimmed over the people around her.

  Slowly, warily, Dillon made his way toward her. Should he tell his mom about the ghosts? In the weeks since he’d met her, she’d come to accept his presence, but he didn’t think she’d be thrilled to learn that the courthouse was haunted.

  Seriously haunted.

  Like, haunted to the max.

  Nah, he probably shouldn’t mention it. But a thrill of anxiety tingled along the back of Dillon’s neck. Ghosts could be dangerous, not so much to living people, but definitely to other spirits. He’d only been dead for six years but he’d already had a couple of bad experiences. Would this be another?

  A soldier in desert camouflage was leaning against the same wall as Sylvie. He was young, his hair cropped short, and he looked as solid as a living person, but Dillon was almost positive he was a ghost. Next to him a woman in a long black robe, her hair covered by a tight scarf, crouched by a small boy in a brightly striped t-shirt, her head bent to him in conversation. They had to be ghosts, too. And the teenage girl sprawled across a bench, ignoring the men on whose laps her body rested, was definitely a ghost.

  Had all these people died in the courthouse? As Dillon paused, uncertain, two living people walked through him, one offering low-voiced instructions to the other.

  The soldier noticed. He straightened. “Hey, welcome to the party.”

  The girl on the bench sat up. She stared at Dillon, her gaze accusing. “Who are you?”

  The scrubbing woman lifted her head to look at him. “Oh, dear, oh, dear,” she mumbled before bending back to her work. “I’ll never get this floor clean.”

  “Um, hi.” Dillon gave a tentative wave in the direction of the soldier as he answered the girl’s question. “I’m Dillon.”

  The soldier directed his thumb at himself, the woman in the robe, the boy, the girl on the bench, and the cleaning woman, and rattled off a list of names. “Joe, Nadira, Misam, Sophia, Mona. Don’t worry about the others.” He waved a hand through a ball of light drifting near his face, then gestured wide, indicating the rest of the spirits as yet another ghost, a man in a dirty white apron, emerged from the wall next to him. “Some of them say stuff, but they don’t really talk. Not to us, anyway.”

  “It’s nice to meet you,” Dillon replied with automatic politeness, nodding at each of the others in turn.

  “Salaam aleikum,” the woman in the robe, Nadira, said, with a gracious nod of her own.

  “Peace be unto you,” the boy, Misam, offered with a wide smile.

  “Uh, and to you?” Dillon answered.

  From their closeness and matching dark eyes, they must be mother and son. Or maybe brother and sister? Now that they were looking at him, Dillon could see that Nadira was young, with clear unlined skin, bright red lips, and smudgy dark makeup around her eyes. She couldn’t be much older than the soldier, if that. Still, the protective arm she had curled around the little boy looked maternal to him and so did the approving smile she gave his reply.

  The girl perched on the bench, hands tucked around the edge of the seat as if gripping it, didn’t look related to the others. With wrists like toothpicks and collarbones jutting forth from thin shoulders, she reminded him of a fledgling bird. Sophia, that was her name.

  And Mona was the woman still scrubbing the floor.

  The man in the apron gave Dillon a cheerful smile and said something indistinguishable before strolling forward and disappearing into the opposite wall.

  Joe chuckled. He no
dded toward the wall. “That guy talks, but we don’t understand much. We think his name is Chaupi.”

  “He doesn’t speak English,” the little boy volunteered. “I would teach him, but he doesn’t want to learn. He is searching for something.”

  Dillon stepped closer. None of these ghosts seemed threatening, not even the nameless grumbling man, and his fear was dissipating, replaced by enthusiasm. Dillon knew he was lucky to have learned how to communicate with the living, but texting his parents was no substitute for talking, and he hadn’t spoken to another soul in days. All the ghosts he’d met since leaving home had been faders, only repeating the same few words over and over again.

  “So what are y’all doing here? Is this where you died?” he asked.

  The teenage girl, Sophia, snorted. “Here? With all those metal detectors at the entrance? What do you think, bomb? Mass poisoning?” She rolled her eyes and flopped back down across the laps of the men sitting on the bench.

  Joe’s mouth twitched, but he answered easily, “No, we didn’t die together. Except for Nadira, Misam, and me. We were in the same place.”

  “Not here, though?” Dillon asked.

  “Nah. Long time ago, long way away.”

  Dillon glanced around the hallway, wondering what he’d missed. Ghosts were often trapped where they died. But if these ghosts could go anywhere, why choose the courthouse? “Why are you here, then?”

  “We’ve been captured,” Sophia said, without changing her position. “Taken prisoner.” She was staring at the ceiling, but a lone tear rolled down the side of her face, and she sniffled.

  “Captured?” Dillon’s heart sank. For several years after his death, he’d been stuck in the car where he’d died. He’d only been free for a few months and he truly didn’t want to find himself trapped again. “By what? The courthouse?”

  “Not the building, no.” Joe pointed at a dark-haired man sitting underneath Sophia. “By him.”

  The man had the finely hewn, perfectly even features of a male model, or maybe an actor on one of those teen dramas where all the kids looked way too old for high school and no one ever had a zit, but he held himself as if he would jolt upright any second, grabbing for a weapon he wasn’t carrying.

  A quick, unpleasant suspicion popped into Dillon’s head. “Is he your killer? Did he murder you?”

  “No, of course not.” Joe gestured toward the woman in the long skirts, drifting toward them through the crowd of business-suited men. “What do you think, he was around for the Civil War?” He waved toward Mona. “World War II?”

  “Oh, right.” Dillon hunched his shoulders, sheepish. That should have been obvious. But he’d never heard of ghosts being trapped by a person before.

  “Speak for yourself.” Nadira rose, sweeping her hands down the sides of her robe.

  Joe turned to her. “You know—”

  “I know, I know,” she interrupted him, flapping the fingers of one hand in his direction.

  “Mama, you promised.” The little boy, Misam, leaned into her side. “No fighting with Joe.”

  “Did I start?” his mother asked, spreading her hands.

  Joe turned back to Dillon. “His name’s Noah Blake. He was my buddy. The day we died, he did, too.” Joe circled his finger around himself, Nadira, and Misam to indicate who he was talking about. “But they brought him back and we came with him. At least that’s what we think happened.”

  Sophia heaved a melodramatic sigh. “He definitely didn’t kill me.” Tears started running down her face in earnest and she began to weep, her body shuddering with gasping breaths.

  Two of the men on the bench didn’t react but the one that Joe had pointed out shivered, pulling the collar of his leather jacket up around his neck.

  Dillon was fascinated. He hadn’t even known that ghosts could cry. Where did the tears come from?

  “Come on, Sophia.” Joe reached out and grabbed her hand, tugging her from the bench and upright. “You know it’s not so bad. Walk it off.” He gave her a gentle shove toward the lobby.

  “You just want to get rid of me,” Sophia said on a sob.

  The cleaning woman scrambled to her feet and hurried to Sophia’s side. She put an arm around the girl’s shoulder and began walking with her, murmuring into her ear.

  “Obviously,” Joe said under his breath when the two were far enough away to be out of hearing range. He turned back to Dillon, his smile wry. “Sophia’s a little temperamental.”

  “Temperamental?” Nadira said, her voice dry. “Is that American for sad? Depressed? Unhappy about her current situation?”

  “Yeah, it’s American for annoying as hell,” Joe said, but he kept his voice low. “Admit it, you get tired of the crying, too.”

  “Sophia cries a lot,” Misam said to Dillon. He looked four or five, no older, but his voice held a maturity that didn’t match his round cheeks and snub nose.

  “We think she is only recently one of us.” Nadira pursed her lips, her head turning to watch Sophia and Mona move away. “She will adjust.” Despite the confidence of the words, she sounded doubtful.

  The man on the bench blew on his hands as if they were chilled. His lips pressed into a thin line.

  “He’s cold again.” Joe jerked his head peremptorily toward the other end of the hall and began walking. “Come on, let’s move.”

  “You worry too much,” Nadira complained, but she took Misam’s hand and the two of them followed Joe away from the bench, Misam giving a skip and a hop as they went.

  Dillon joined them, trailing along as they moved down the hallway. He brushed through one of the wispy white blurs, hearing it whisper, “Slow down, Tom. It’s not safe.”

  When the trio paused, Dillon waved to indicate the random spirits drifting through the hallway, “So if you came back with him, where did all these guys come from? Did they come with you?”

  Joe shook his head. “No, it was just the three of us.”

  “For a long time, it was just us.” Misam leaned into Nadira’s legs.

  “We saw others sometimes,” Nadira contributed.

  “But they didn’t join us,” Joe finished for her. He glanced around them. “This started happening a while ago.”

  The hallway was too packed with both the living and the dead for Dillon to count, but there had to be at least two dozen ghosts mingling with the crowd, even if most of them were merely remnants of their former selves.

  “Lately it’s everyone.” Nadira paused while a cluster of men in dark suits walked through her. “We didn’t keep any nice Iraqi ghosts, no, but we come here and all the spirits are sticky. We meet them and they stay with us forever.”

  “Forever?” Dillon’s uneasiness returned. “All of them?”

  “So far, yeah.” Joe’s eyes were sympathetic. He nodded toward the exit. “Give it a try.”

  Dillon started walking. After fifteen steps or so, he began to feel a pull, a drag on his core tugging him back to the others. He resisted, pushing through it.

  The drag felt strong, but not nearly as strong as his tie to his car had once been. He might be able to break away from it.

  Maybe Noah Blake was something like a magnet, attracting ghosts the way a magnet attracts iron. If so, if Dillon could get out of the range of his magnetic field, the attraction would end. He’d be free.

  But if he managed to break the connection, he’d be leaving all these other ghosts trapped. And meeting them had been the most interesting thing to happen in his afterlife since he’d met his mom. He wasn’t sure he was ready to leave yet. He turned to face the other ghosts and let the pull draw him back, as if he were surfing along the tiled floor.

  “You, too, yes?” Nadira shook her head.

  “Like I said, welcome to the party.” Joe sounded apologetic. “But we’re a fun bunch. It’s not so bad.”

  The woman in the long dress wandered by them, her melancholy song just slightly off-tune.

  “Except for the singing,” Nadira said in a fierce whisper.


  Joe chuckled. “And the crying,” he added with a glance toward the other end of the hallway.

  “And the arguing,” Misam said with a roll of his eyes.

  Dillon bit back a smile. The little boy might look four but his expression was pure teenage disdain.

  Nadira flicked Misam’s nose with the tip of her finger. “You be careful your face doesn’t get stuck that way.”

  “It never has so far,” Misam said cheekily.

  “Last couple of months, it’s been someone new every few weeks,” Joe said. “We found Sophia in Rock Creek Park right after the holidays.”

  Dillon had once chased his mother on an interminable twenty-mile run through Rock Creek Park. He hadn’t noticed any ghosts hanging around, but he could have missed her. It was a big park. Or maybe Sophia had still been alive at the end of November.

  “Stop that, Misam,” Nadira ordered. The little boy was leaning into the air as if struggling against a strong wind.

  “I want to slide. Like he did. It looked fun.”

  “You’ll hurt yourself.” His mother tugged at the back of his t-shirt, pulling him closer to her.

  “Not really. If you practice, you can get farther away,” Dillon said.

  “How do you know?” Nadira demanded. “It’s painful for us to move too far from Noah.”

  “For me, it was the car where I died,” Dillon said. “I was trapped but I met a girl who knows about ghosts. She told me I could get farther away if I practiced. Do you get snapped back when you go too far?”