Smith's Monthly #23 Page 15

  Not even for a passing second, which when she thought about it, was very sad. Her living life had been pathetic.

  And she really didn’t miss being alive in the slightest. This was much, much better.

  One of the very weird things about being dead was that the food tasted better. Everything around her seemed more alive as well, and from what one of the other ghost agents had hinted at, the sex was better too.

  With other ghost agents.

  But she was far, far more interested in having sex with Cascade.

  And he seemed to be interested in her as well. He had a smile that could melt the paint off a freeway sign at a half-mile and she loved just sitting across from him over dinner and seeing that smile.

  And he said, and she believed him since she could read his thoughts when she wanted, that he loved her long brown hair, her button nose that others found cute and she found sort of weird, and her blue eyes.

  She only came up to his chest in height, but since very few people could see them both, that made no difference at all.

  The biggest thing was that she could make him laugh and he liked that.

  And she loved watching him laugh.

  Since she had been inside his head, she knew he liked her, was attracted to her, wanted to be with her. They just hadn’t figured out the logistics of a relationship yet between superhero and ghost. If she had anything to say about it, they would.

  Especially the sex part.

  It might take time. Both of them had all the time in the world.

  She was dead, he was basically immortal.

  Worked out perfectly.

  NINE

  CASCADE HAD REALLY missed Eve during her days away training in Las Vegas. So he had focused on just learning more about the job as deputy sheriff and also more about being a superhero.

  He and Reanna had talked a few times. One lunch at a small café with little traffic and decent sandwiches, they had had a great conversation. They had moved out onto an open patio so no one could overhear them. The day wasn’t hot yet, but it was warming up quickly. Reanna even took off her hat for the first time since he had known her.

  She had longer hair than he had thought she had, but it had been tucked up under her hat and pinned there.

  Over a grilled ham and cheese, he had been surprised to find out that he was fairly unique. That only about ten superheroes worked in law enforcement around the United States and less than one hundred total around the world.

  “We can’t help everyone,” Reanna had said as she worked at her club sandwich. “But we try to recruit superheroes like you in critical areas and the Portland area is a critical area into the future.”

  She didn’t explain why and Cascade hadn’t pushed.

  “I’ll have Screamer, who is one of our superheroes and working with Poker Boy at times, come and talk with you. He’s a Las Vegas detective.”

  “Screamer?” Cascade had asked.

  “A nickname that has just stuck,” Reanna said. “He can read minds and connect two people in thoughts through him. He can also plant images in people’s minds and one day got a really nasty slime-ball to give up a location of where he had buried a young girl alive by putting horror images in the guy’s mind and making him scream.”

  “Am I going to be able to do things like that?” Cascade asked, not really sure he liked the idea of making people scream. Not his style.

  Reanna had shrugged. “Everyone develops their own powers in their own time. No telling what you will be able to do. Give it time.”

  The only thing he could do was just nod at that and go back to eating.

  After a week of Eve being gone, she appeared in front of him one day while he was eating lunch at Denny’s. She was smiling and looking worried at the same time.

  “Be right back,” she said, looking around and laughing.

  Then she vanished again.

  Two minutes later she was back, really smiling. “I can teleport anywhere I want!”

  He laughed at the excitement in her voice.

  “I’m learning a lot,” she had said. “You up for dinner tonight?”

  “I would love that,” he had said. “My place.”

  And after that, every night for the rest of the month or so of her training, they had had dinner together.

  And that made him missing her feel a little less intense.

  But when she jumped away every evening to go back to her hotel room in Las Vegas, his apartment once again felt empty.

  He had no idea how he could miss a ghost as much as he did.

  But there was no doubt how he felt about her.

  No doubt in the slightest.

  TEN

  EVE WAS SO glad that Cascade’s boss in the superhero land had given him the power to see and hear her. And so in public all they had to do was be careful that he wasn’t seen talking to himself too much, since no one else could see her.

  To solve that problem, he had gotten a thin microphone that extended from an earpiece. She had laughed when she saw it and wished she could kiss him for being so smart. Now if someone did see him talking to her, that person would think he was just talking into his microphone.

  The only other thing they had to be careful of was the dash camera inside his patrol car when he made stops. That was the only time it came on.

  On her first full day back from training with the other ghost agents, she and Cascade had figured it would be a good idea for her to just ride along with him on a standard patrol.

  She liked that idea. Neither of them was sure how this “working together” was going to be, so a standard patrol day seemed like a logical place to start.

  The first time she had ridden with him in the patrol car to the restaurant, sitting there beside him had felt right to her.

  The patrol car smelled faintly of his soap combined with a leather smell from his belt and a computer smell from the equipment between the seats. She liked this car. It had been her refuge from the rain after her car wreck the first hour she was a ghost.

  Now she felt comfortable in the front seat beside him, sitting in her jeans and white blouse, her hair pulled back.

  He was in his full uniform, blue with dark trim, with a wide-brimmed hat just behind him on the floor between the seats so he could grab it easily.

  The Portland July weather was only in the 80s, with bright sun promising to warm up the afternoon.

  They had started their patrol at seven in the morning, and since there were no cameras or microphones in the car unless they were stopping someone or in pursuit, they chatted about her training, about the few other ghost agents she had met, and so on.

  Then a half-hour into the ride, he saw a speeder in a blue Ford sedan passing cars in a no-passing area.

  “There’s an accident waiting to happen,” she said.

  “Let’s see if we can stop it from happening,” he said, flipping on his lights and pulling out after the speeder.

  At that point the inside camera and microphone were working, so he had to be careful, but she could talk to him out loud just fine, since no one but him could hear her.

  As he pulled out after the speeder, Cascade tapped a button on his steering wheel and on the computer screen she could see he was connected to his dispatcher.

  Through a shorthand form of talking that she really needed to learn, he gave their location and what he was after and where the speeder was heading.

  Eve had never been in a car chasing another car before.

  It felt weird.

  And exhilarating.

  It would have been scary, but nothing could hurt her. So instead she worried about Cascade.

  But it was clear he was an expert driver. And very comfortable behind the wheel. Maybe that was one of his superpowers. She would have to ask.

  The moment the blue Ford saw Cascade’s flashing lights, it signaled and pulled over, sliding to a stop in the gravel shoulder of the highway.

  “Guy is in a hurry somewhere,” Eve said.

  Ca
scade pulled in behind him, reporting their position.

  “Give me a moment to check it out,” Eve said.

  She knew that cops walking up to a car were in a lot of danger. So she liked how this could be part of her job with him, and help keep him a little safer in a dangerous job.

  She went out through the door and up to the driver’s side. What she saw through the driver’s window shocked her for a moment.

  The guy was a young man, sweating, and clearly scared, his eyes round and his breathing rushed. And slouched down in the passenger seat beside him was a very pregnant wife who was also sweating and shouting in pain. The woman’s black hair looked like it was glued to her head.

  From the way she was sitting with her legs splayed open and her nightshirt up, she looked to be about to pop a kid right onto the floor mat.

  “Shit, just shit!” Eve said and waved for Cascade to hurry.

  He got out of the patrol car, walked at a fast pace up beside Eve.

  He took one look at the scene and said to the driver. “Can she make it?”

  Oh, shit. Eve couldn’t help deliver a baby. She was a ghost and wouldn’t have a clue what to do anyway.

  “I think so,” the guy said, glancing at the woman.

  “Hurry!” the woman shouted and then screamed in pain.

  Eve at that moment was counting her lucky stars she had never been pregnant. That did not look like fun in the slightest.

  “Stay on my bumper all the way.”

  “Thank you, officer,” the young, soon-to-be-father said.

  Cascade and Eve both ran back to the patrol car and with lights flashing and sirens cutting through the morning air, Cascade pulled out and the blue Ford did the same, staying right with Cascade as he drove and reported in what was happening, alerting the hospital to stand ready.

  Six minutes later at the closest hospital, the blue Ford was met with a doctor, a couple nurses, and a stretcher. The almost-mother was rushed inside.

  From what Eve could tell, they made it with minutes to spare. That kid really wanted to be born.

  Cascade smiled at Eve as they climbed back into the cruiser. “Now that’s the kind of thing I wish would happen more often.”

  “Nice way to start my first day on the job,” Eve said, taking a deep breath and relaxing. Just helping a couple get to the hospital had stressed her.

  But it was a great way to start the day.

  She felt great. And right at that moment she knew she was going to like this job for far more reasons than just being with a hunk of a superhero.

  Although, that sure didn’t hurt.

  ELEVEN

  CASCADE REALLY LIKED the fact that Eve had been able to go up and take a look at the situation in a stopped car. Not only had it saved time today and got a woman in labor to a hospital on time, but Cascade had no doubt her doing that might save his life at some point.

  And they had never talked about her doing that. She had just offered to do it automatically.

  They were already working as a team and he really liked that more than he wanted to admit.

  And that got him thinking about other ways they could work together. He had to get used to the fact that he was the real world side and that she could see and do things he could never see or do.

  He could actually arrest someone, but she could read the person’s thoughts and find out intent and so much more.

  After just one event on their first morning, he now felt even better and actually excited about working with Eve.

  The rest of the morning was uneventful and they stopped for lunch at a Denny’s Restaurant. Cascade kept his microphone on his head and she sat across from him so they could talk like a normal couple.

  He liked that more than he wanted to admit, actually.

  He ordered a French Dip and fries, which had sounded good to her as well, so when it came, she just took the ghost component of his meal. Before she took it, they did an experiment. He took a fry and tasted it, then she took the ghost components of everything and he tasted another fry.

  The same taste. What she took didn’t seem to bother at all what he was eating.

  At lunch he told her how he had gone to college, had two degrees, then served four years in the Marines, seeing minor combat in the last stages of the Iraq war. Then he had gone through the police academy and discovered he was really, really good at everything to do with law enforcement.

  At one point he asked her why she didn’t actually know all of this already since she had been in his mind so much.

  “Not surface,” she had said. “And I respect your privacy so I never went digging.

  And since he could be in her head when she was touching him, he did the same thing. So even though they knew each other’s thoughts when touching, they were going to take time, like a regular couple, to learn all the deeper stuff.

  And he liked that more than he wanted to admit.

  “So is when you joined the force that you were recruited to be a superhero?” Eve asked.

  He nodded, finishing off his last fry. “I still don’t know much about this superhero business, but I’m learning.”

  “So we can both learn together,” she said, laughing.

  “I like that idea a lot,” he said.

  And he did.

  TWELVE

  EVE REALLY HAD enjoyed their lunch. She wanted to learn everything about Cascade without digging into his mind, even though she now knew how to do that easily. But for the time, with him, she would stay on the surface, and she knew he was doing the same with her when inside her head.

  That showed that not only did they both care for each other, they both respected each other.

  She couldn’t remember if she had ever had a boyfriend who respected her in any fashion at all.

  After lunch, they headed back out on patrol and thirty minutes later were working along a winding two-lane paved road that stayed next to a river and connected two of the smaller towns outside of Portland.

  It seemed that Deputy Sheriff Cascade’s territory to patrol was very, very large. The county was underfunded and thus the sheriff’s department understaffed. Every day on patrol they were going to cover a lot of territory, much of it Eve had never seen before.

  As they came around a corner, Eve spotting an old white panel van tucked up in the pine trees on her side. Something about it gave her a chill and she mentioned that to Cascade.

  “Let’s take a look,” he said, frowning. “One thing I have been learning to trust is that gut-sense about things. Seems to come from somewhere.”

  He reported in where they were, what he was investigating, and then pulled up the small dirt road off the pavement and parked a distance behind the van.

  The van was in a small clearing where the road turned around. Sun beat down on the panel van, but the trees around it looked dark and very uninviting.

  Cascade started to run the plates while Eve got out to see what was happening.

  As she did, a man came back down a trail out of the trees with a shovel. He had on bib overalls, a dirty white T-shirt under them, and heavy boots. He looked muddy, like he had been digging a while.

  She had no idea really where they were at, but she had a hunch digging anything in this area was going to be illegal unless this guy owned the land, and from the looks of him, his greasy black hair and an old panel van, that seemed unlikely.

  And as she saw him, every alarm bell she had in her head went off. Something was very wrong with him and it took her a moment to see it.

  When in training the last few weeks, she had learned to look at people’s auras. Her aura was extremely bright and full of colors, but she had it contained behind a shield because she was a ghost and even ghosts had enemies, she was told.

  Cascade had a very, very bright aura as well, and her aura and his seemed to match in a lot of places. That had pleased her more than she wanted to admit, but so far had never told Cascade.

  She had also learned that human auras often told a good story about w
ho the person was.

  This man’s aura was black and very small.

  He saw the sheriff’s car and she could see him hesitate, clearly trying to calm himself and keep walking toward his van as if nothing was wrong.

  “Time to see what you have been up to,” Eve said.

  She moved toward him and just let him walk right through her.

  Evil.

  Pure evil.

  No wonder his aura was pure black. He didn’t have a redeeming feature about him.

  The guy had just buried a young girl he had killed, had another at his home in a basement, and was thinking about how he was now going to have to bury a cop as well. It didn’t worry him, just annoyed him.

  He had no guilt, no sense of anything but that he owned the world and could do what he pleased with other people’s lives.

  Eve let the man walk on, then she just bent over and threw up her lunch.

  Never, in all her life, had she experienced anything like that. She had no idea that people like this man even existed on the planet.

  As she tried to gather herself from the horrid thoughts of that piece of trash, behind her she heard Cascade open his car door and climb out.

  Shit!

  She had to do something. This guy had a large pistol stuck in his belt and was about to just gun down Cascade without a hesitation.

  And Cascade was too far away to warn in any real way.

  She turned and in three steps was back inside the blackness that was the guy she called human trash.

  He had his hand on the revolver and was turned slightly toward his van to set down the shovel. He planned to set the shovel down, draw the revolver and kill Cascade.

  But not on her watch.

  Not on her first day.

  Not today.

  Not any damn day, actually.

  She made him freeze like something had encased him in metal.

  She could feel his panic start to rise as he tried to move.

  “Nope, trash man. No moving for you.”

  The guy panicked even more hearing her voice.