Body & Soul полностью

But that was easier said than done. What I'd accomplished was rare — possessing a body for any length of time was virtually unheard-of. Getting me out would be one hell of a trick. Keeping Lily alive without me would be another. Her body was now, in theory, dependent on the energy my spirit provided. So, in short, even if we could find a way to get me out, I couldn't leave unless we could find a way to save Lily, too — a way to bring her spirit back from the light or some kind of energy substitute or something.

Essentially, we were looking for a two-for-one miracle. But after only a few weeks, we'd exhausted most of our semibrilliant ideas and reached desperate-measures level. We'd take anything now, any clue to point us in the correct direction.

Hence, Malachi the allegedly Magnificent.

“What's so special about this one again?” I asked as Will pulled into a parking space. “Aside from raising our chances of catching hepatitis, I mean.” I looked at the nail salon and shuddered again.

Malachi would be the third “psychic medium” (a.k.a. “big faker”) we'd seen in the last couple of weeks. And frankly, he didn't seem any more promising than the others.

“He has a star by his name… I think,” Will said, cutting the engine.

“You think?” I demanded.

He shifted uneasily in his seat. “It's not exactly clear, okay? I'm pretty sure it's a star.”

“So, just to clarify, we're here in janky-land because of a possible doodle?”

He looked at me, stung. “Hey, we've been over this. If you have any better ideas—”

“Just… let me see it again.” I waved my hand impatiently at him in a “gimme” gesture.

He glared at me but twisted to the side to reach into his back pocket, and I tried hard not to notice that doing so made his shirt pull tighter against his chest and brought him so much closer to me. Like, touching close.

Heat crawled up my neck into my face, and I looked away, hoping he wouldn't notice. God. This body thing — technically, in this case, I suppose it was his body and my reaction to it — was killing me. Could I please be non-corporeal again? Now? I did not like this… flesh and blood intensity. It was all out-of-control feeling, and I did not DO out-of-control.

“Here.” He bumped my arm with the back of his hand, holding out a carefully folded rectangle of yellow paper.

I snapped it from his fingers, and he sucked a breath through his teeth. “Careful!”

Will treated the page like an artifact from a previous age, and I suppose, for him, it was. After our other resources (pretty much just the Internet) had failed to produce any new information on my predicament — or really, any information at all, other than calling for a priest — Will had dug into some boxes of his dad's stuff in the basement. Most of it was random useless junk his mother couldn't bring herself to throw away — a half-finished pack of gum, old birthday cards from Will's grandma, an almost empty bottle of cologne, an old answering-machine tape, grocery lists with Will's dad's illegible scrawl.

I suspect Will had been hoping for a secret journal — something detailing his father's struggle with being a ghost-talker over the years — that his mother had somehow overlooked or written off at the time as an attempt at fiction. I know he wanted to get a better handle on who his dad was, the kind of person he'd been, since his dad had lied to him for most of his life. But there was nothing like that in the boxes. And for the record, my hopes had been dashed as well, since he didn't conveniently find a vial of mysterious liquid labeled EMERGENCY ONLY: FOR WHEN YOUR SPIRIT GUIDE BECOMES TRAPPED IN A BODY.

So… no diary of confessions, no bottle of secret formula, but tucked into a city map of Decatur was this folded-up page torn from the P section in the yellow pages. The Psychic section, specifically. But what Will was interested in was the strange marks and undecipherable notes in his dad's handwriting near several of the names/ads, even though we had no idea what any of the nonsensical scrawls meant.

Will's dad was a bit of a mystery to him, so no matter how cryptic the messages on the page, it was more than Will had had before. From what Will had told me, his dad was never particularly chatty about the gift they both shared. Daniel Killian preferred to pretend that everything was normal, no matter what kind of toll that took on him and his son. I personally thought that was kind of crappy of him, especially given that he then bailed on Will and Will's mom by offing himself a few years ago.

But whatever. I guess maybe I wasn't the best judge of parental behavior at times, either.