Remembrance (The Mediator #7)(18)

“At the school?” Jesse sounded surprised. “The one you told me about earlier? A tourist?”

“Student.”

“Father Dominic must be slipping,” he said, sounding concerned. “I would think he’d have taken care of all of those when the semester first started, well before you got there.”

“I’m not sure he’d have noticed this one,” I said, carefully guarding my words, both because I was speaking in front of Becca and because I felt defensive on behalf of Father Dominic. “It seemed harmless at first, and barely perceptible.”

It was getting hard not to notice that one of Jesse’s other prejudices, in addition to cell phones, was against his own kind—well, what used to be his own kind, anyway. The closer he came to acquiring his medical license, the less interested he seemed in helping the dead.

I guess I could understand this. Having spent a century and a half as a deceased person wasn’t listed as one of the official causes of post-traumatic stress disorder in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), the bible of mental health professionals, but I figured it was pretty much a given that Jesse was suffering from it.

I hoped it was this, rather than what Paul was insisting, that there was a part of Jesse that was still haunted . . . and that, if his original grave was destroyed, might be unleashed.

“Are you on call until tomorrow morning?” I asked, figuring it was best to change the subject.

“Fortunately,” he said. Unlike normal people, Jesse preferred the overnight shifts at his rotation in the ER. According to him, that’s when all the really interesting cases came in. People went to their primary physicians during the daytime. Only people in desperate straits—or who didn’t have primary-care physicians—went to the ER in the middle of the night.

That Jesse preferred seeing these people as patients wasn’t at all an indication that the curse was true, I told myself.

You can take the boy out of the darkness. But you can’t the darkness out of the boy.

Shut up, Paul.

“I’ll tell you about it when I see you tomorrow,” I said. “Te amo.”

He laughed as he always did when I attempted to say anything to him in his native tongue, even though I’ve been taking Spanish for more than four years. My accent is hopeless, according to both Jesse and my various language instructors.

“I love you, too, querida,” he said. As always, the word sent warming rays of delight down my spine . . .

Almost enough to cancel out the sense of impending doom that Paul’s phone call had caused to settle there.

“Who was that?” Becca demanded rudely as I hung up. “Your boyfriend?”

“Fiancé,” I said, looking down at my phone. I’d gotten two text messages. The first was from Jesse.

Jesse Estoy contando las horas hasta que nos encontremos, mi amor.

NOV 16 1:37 PM



After all the long hours I’d spent wearing earphones in the language lab, I should have been able to translate it on sight. But I had no idea what it said (except that mi amor meant my love). Later I was going to have to cut and paste it into my Spanish-to-English translation app.

Damn! Why did he have to torture me like this? A part of me suspected he did it on purpose, to keep me on my toes. As if he had to.

The second text—which I’d received earlier from a number with a Los Angeles area code—needed no translation.

Dinner is Friday night @8PM, Mariner’s, the Carmel Inn. Be there or else.



It was only a kiss, for chrissakes, Simon. Stop being such a girl.

NOV 16 1:30 PM



Stop being such a girl. How like Paul to think being called a girl was an insult.

“You’re engaged?” Becca seemed super interested. “Can I see your ring?”

I held out my left hand and waggled my ring at her without really thinking about it. I was too busy debating what to text back to Paul.

The last time I’d been foolish enough to agree to meet Paul Slater somewhere alone, I’d ended up with a nasty scrape across my back that had been extremely difficult to explain to my mother (she’d been the one who’d had to slather on the antibacterial cream, since I hadn’t been able to reach it, and of course I’d had to hide it entirely from Jesse).

There had to be another way.

But short of killing Paul myself to keep him from knocking my old house down, I couldn’t think of one.

“Why’s your diamond so small? I can barely see it.”

I jerked my hand out from under Becca’s nose. I’d forgotten she was there. “What do you mean?” I demanded defensively. “It’s not small. It’s perfectly normal sized. This ring is vintage. It’s been in my boyfriend’s family for years.” Two hundred, actually, but she didn’t seem like the kind of person who’d be impressed by that, or how Jesse had managed to hang on to it for so long, especially after having been murdered over it, sort of. Not that I was going to tell her that.

“Everyone knows that anything less than five carats means the guy isn’t really invested in the relationship,” she said.

“That’s ridiculous. Who told you that, your boyfriend?” I narrowed my eyes at the phone in her lap. “Who were you texting just now?”

“No one.” A pink flush suffused her cheeks.