THE PRESENT

Twisting to her right in the front passenger's seat, Liv admired a panoramic view of the Olympic mountains as Graham drove over the floating bridge connecting the Kitsap and Olympic peninsulas. Cloud cover to their west had cleared just enough to make out the range's craggy, snow-capped peaks. They reminded Liv of old men laying down in a bed of clover, wrinkled skin adorned with the long, aged beards of the withered and wise.

As they exited the bridge, waiting in a line of cars turning north, she finally answered the question that had been dancing on her tongue since they'd left Port Townsend. "What do you want to know, Graham?"

Liv half expected him to maintain his stony silence, but instead, her question seemed to wake him from his stupor. "So many things. Like, why the note behind the door bothered you so much that you ran out of the gallery, or how you figured out Ted is a dude named GnochiGhost from that paranormal forum. I thought he and Helina met at the town's wooden boat festival, not online discussing the very thing that might be responsible for Helina's disappearance. Or how about, why the hell you didn't you clue me in earlier on this online conversation between the two of them."

"That's a lot to unpack," she said, stalling for time. "What do you want me to answer first?"

Graham slowed down the car as the yellow light ahead of them turned red. Windshield wipers flung drops of rain off the glass, clearing their view, only to have it obscured again by the ongoing storm, slowly at first, then heavier, with a fervor that made Liv feel like the clouds had traveled from the mountains to purposefully wage war on the lowlands, their army of raindrops sent to assault Graham's Subaru like machine gun fire.

He turned the wiper speed up to high. "Have you communicated with Penelope since... since she helped you find Allen Chen's body?"

A surprising choice of a question, and one Liv could answer honestly.

"It was never really her. I wanted it to be, so, so badly. But it was a deception. A mirage. I never spoke with her after she died."

"How can you be so sure? It sounded like her, right? Couldn't she be in the ghost realm?"

"The ghost realm isn't a world full of dead people, Graham."

"Are you kidding me?" Liv watched as a tiny spark of hope burned out in his soul. "But it's ghosts."

"That's just what we call them. Ghosts, spirits, otherworldly beings. They exist. They're alive, if you can call it that, but the rules of life are different there. Everything is different."

"So, if you're dead, you can't exist there?"

"Not any more than you can exist here. That's my best guess, of course. Take it for what it's worth."

"It's worth a lot to me."

"It shouldn't be." Liv leaned her head against the car's window. "It's all I have though. Penelope is dead. Whether her conscience lives on in an afterlife or not isn't for me to say. I hope so, obviously. I just know she can't come back here and she's not in the ghost realm." And thank God for that. Penelope's brief foray into that world had been traumatic enough to make her claw her way back into this reality with a level of desperation that had ended with her death. The idea that someone as pure and good as her would be subjected to that hell forever made Liv want to obliterate all of existence—human, ghost, monster, or otherwise.

"The first night after you arrived," Graham said, "When we took those edibles. You spoke... you sounded just like her. Like Helina."

A warning signal went off in Liv's mind. Get out, get out, get out!

"We've been over this before. Both of us were high, not thinking clearly. You wanted to hear her and so you did."

"Is that the truth, or is it what you want to believe?"

"Can't it be both?"

The rain tapered off, from deluge to a moderate downfall as they made their way into the forest surrounding Graham and Helina's property. A half mile from the house, Graham slowed to a halt, the purpose of their unscheduled stop a large Douglas fir that had fallen across the narrow road. He cut the engine and assessed the situation before saying, "No way around it, and not much light left. I'll bring a chainsaw out here tomorrow, but for now, we'll just have to walk the rest of the way."

Helping Liv over the tree's massive trunk, hand in hand he pulled her forward, through the paratrooping rain army.

"What about my sister?" he asked. "If she's in the ghost realm, that means she's alive, doesn't it?"

"Not necessarily." Liv hopped over a puddle, didn't entirely make it, and swore under her breath as muddy water sloshed onto her pants. "I don't mean to piss on your hope, but there are a million ways to die there. Imagine if all the strange, impossible things that happen to you in a nightmare could happen to you in reality too—that's what that place is like. And if she's dead, there's no coming back."

"But what if she's not dead? You've travelled back and forth. Allen seemed to have, Penelope did as well...Helina could come back too."

Liv tried to focus on the road, one foot ahead of the other, avoid the largest puddles that slagged in long lines where ruts from Graham's tires had formed.

Your kind is rarer than being hit by lightning.

It didn't work that way he wanted it to, not for someone like Helina, but she couldn't tell him that because then she'd have to tell him how she knew that to be true and she couldn't. She wouldn't. She refused. She would destroy him but not tonight, not now, not for as long as possible.

A porch light beckoned them out of the woods, out of the mud and rain, away from miserable thoughts. Once they were inside, waterlogged boots discarded, Liv showed him her phone. "I've been meaning to have you read this." She opened Gene's frequencing article, the one she'd saved from Helina's computer, the very same essay she'd had memorized for years.

He read the first paragraph. "I've seen this before. Helina kept this in her file, right?"

"Yes." She gave him time to read on.

"Interesting," he said.

"What do you think?"

"I think the better question is, why did you choose to show this to me now?"

"Because it fits with everything. With the drawing, with the stuff I found on the forum. With what Ted was talking about."

"You think she used this... frequencing thing, found a way to retune herself?"

"And found a way to enter the ghost realm. Yes."

"Or, she opened herself up to it and ghosts kidnapped her."

"Sure."

"This isn't a new theory." He handed Liv her phone. "We'd already pretty much figured she'd found a doorway in."

"Yes, but this is how she did it."

"If she's there, why haven't you found her? Isn't it the same place you go?"

"It's a huge place. Endless." The truth, but not an answer. She would wait as long as she could to destroy him. "I'm going to work upstairs in Helina's room for a bit tonight. If she found a way to use frequencing on herself, then the answer has to be up there."

A private conversation, a link that Liv wouldn't click on. An answer. The answer. It was up there in Helina's room, all right, but it had also been a part of Liv for a whole year. She was still lying to him. Still withholding. Maybe for his own good. Definitely for her own.

"What happens if you find it?" He pealed Liv's jacket from her shoulders, lifted her damp sweater over her raised shoulders. She watched as he discarded his own soaked clothes, then pressed him back towards the couch. He sat willingly.

"Do you want to find her?" she asked.

"Of course!" He grabbed her around her back and pulled her on top of him. Brought his forehead to hers, sighed a deep sigh that made Liv want to scream and cry.

A stillness formed. No swirling clouds, no voices of monsters or missing sisters speaking through her, only Liv's voice and this man's touch. When things crashed down, when he was forced along a path of destruction, Liv would be the cause of it. The kindling and the match. The burnt and the burning.

She focused now on another heat as it built between them. Not now. Not for as long as possible. He broke their connection long enough to form another one, lips meeting, bodies harmonizing. A union of longing, as though one of them would be leaving for the warfront in the morning. She let it be, let this storm brew, build, culminate. A raincloud unleashed. A trillion tiny soldiers falling to earth.

"Would you go there to find her?" she asked him later. "If I can find the way in for you, will you follow me?

_____

Author's note: If I can find a way in for you, will you follow me? What does Liv have planned? Will she take Graham to the ghost realm? Is there any hope of finding Helina and retrieving her? And if so, what would be her motivation?

Three more chapters to go!