Remembrance (The Mediator #7)(11)

“A ghost? Is that all? I thought at the very least you’d found out you’d won the Powerball.”

“Ha! I wish. I’d buy you that cool new PET scanner you’ve been wanting.”

I knew Jesse was only acting as if he wasn’t concerned. He’s protective by nature, and when it came to the supernatural, he’s more than simply protective. He was what we call in the counseling trade hypervigilant.

Considering what he’d been through, however, this was only natural.

“Look out for yourself, then, all right, querida? The last thing I want is my fiancée being brought in to the ER as a patient.”

“You know that’s never going to happen. I can’t stand doctors, remember? They think they know everything.”

“Because we do know everything, actually. Te amo, querida.”

Thankfully he hung up before he could do any more extrasensory percepting (or turn me into a puddle of desire right there on the phone).

I hung up, too. There was no way on earth I was going to tell Jesse about Paul’s threat, let alone his proposition. It would only make him angry.

Angry? It would set off a thermal nuclear explosion inside his head.

And now—despite Paul’s assertions otherwise—Jesse was a gainfully employed, full-blooded citizen. Unlike before, if he was caught attempting to kill a fellow citizen, he had a lot to lose, what with his fellowship and our planned wedding next year in the basilica at the Carmel Mission. True, the invitations hadn’t gone out yet, but there were two hundred guests and counting on the list . . . none of them family from the groom’s side, of course, all of Jesse’s relatives having died over a century earlier, something Jesse pretended not to mind. But who wouldn’t be bothered by it?

It would be awkward to have to pay back all those deposits due to the groom having been indicted for murder.

And what about the private grant Jesse had applied for that, if he won it, would help pay back a substantial chunk of what he owed in student loans, and also help finance his own practice after he became certified? (As long as he agreed to serve uninsured and low-income patients, something he’d planned on doing anyway. One in five American households lives below the poverty line, even in a community as outwardly glitzy as Carmel.)

Jesse’s chances of winning it out of so many hundreds of applicants would be another miracle that I didn’t think we could count on.

I came out of Ms. Diaz’s office and waved the first-aid kit at the bleeding girl. “Let me take a look at that.”

“No, it’s okay,” Becca protested, backing away from me and pulling her arm close. “I’m fine.”

She was so far from fine this statement was almost hilarious—except no one was laughing. Besides the blood dripping from her arm, some had spilled down the front of her school uniform—the school had reinstituted a uniform policy after having relaxed it in the years I’d been there (I tried not to take the reinstitution personally). Now all students were required to wear a navy blue sweater over a white shirt, with either gray trousers or a blue plaid skirt. This girl had opted for the skirt.

Her mouse brown hair looked as if it had never met conditioner . . . or a brush. Her skin was pale and unhealthily blemished, her uniform a size or two too big on her. She was wearing glasses with frames that appeared to have been purchased in the early 2000s, or perhaps were hand-me-downs from the nineties.

To use the phrasing of a (soon-to-be) professional school counselor, this kid was a hot mess, and that’s not even mentioning the Non-Compliant Deceased Person hanging on to one of the pleats of her too-big navy plaid skirt, dragging it even further askew.

I was the only person in the room who could see it, but I was sure Becca could feel the extra weight. She probably had chronic back or neck pain for which her doctor could find no medical cause.

I knew the cause. It was a ghostly parasite, and I was staring right at it, and at the miserable expression it was provoking from its human host.

Then again, that misery might have been because Becca had just jacked up her wrist so badly, and was being hauled around by one of the state of California’s biggest busybodies.

“You sit down right here, Becca,” Sister Ernestine said, all but shoving the bleeding girl into the mission-style chair across from my desk. Only it wasn’t a chair designed to look mission style, it was a chair likely dating back to the 1700s when Father Junípero Serra, a Franciscan friar from Spain who had recently been sainted by Pope Francis, had run up and down the coast of California, frantically building missions so he could beat the Lord’s word into the Native Americans he had captured and held there. Judging by their extreme creakiness, I wouldn’t doubt most of the school’s office furniture has been around since old Father Serra’s time. “Let Miss Simon bandage those cuts. I’m going to telephone your parents.”

“No!” Becca cried, trying to leap back up from the chair. “I told you, Sister, I’m fine! This is stupid. My compass slipped in geometry, is all. You don’t have to call my parents. Mr. Walden was way overreacting—”

“Mr. Walden?” I raised a skeptical eyebrow as I snapped on a pair of latex gloves.

It’s completely humiliating that after nearly six years of postsecondary education, the only place in the entire state of California where I could find employment (and not even paying employment) is my former high school. But there are a few upsides. At least here I can tell when kids are lying to my face about the teachers.