Josie's Phantom: In Between Tales, #3

By Jess Reece

Josie Harper has had a few weeks to get used to the idea of being dead. That doesn't make the little things any easier; she still has to wait for the living to get out of her way, she can't open doors or do any other cool ghostly things, and she is getting tired of waiting around in the In Between.
Until a chance encounter on a Seattle Metro bus leads her in the direction of someone - or something - that might need her help. Can she solve the mystery in time? Will her efforts help her escape this odd, urban, coffee-fueled purgatory?
She'll find out when she comes face to face with ... Josie's Phantom.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jess Reece
• Release date: Aug 29, 2016
• ISBN: 9781540195098

Jess Reece

Jess Reece was practically born with a pen in her hand. She wrote her first story, about a dog taking a ride on an alien spaceship to the moon, at four years old. As a teenager and young adult, she won various local writing awards for her poetry and short fiction. Jessica's goal is to draw her readers into worlds that are as real to them as they are to her, and have them fall in love with the characters that they get to know. She also writes nonfiction, using her skills to mentor adult survivors of childhood abuse and trauma - healing that pain, sometimes decades old, through creative writing and storytelling. Jessica also paints and designs her book covers, as well as finds time to relax with her husband, daughter, and motley crew of rescue animals.

Book preview

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 1

It’s been eight weeks since I discovered three things: under the right circumstances evil spirits can attach themselves to the souls of the recently departed, a sunbeam in Seattle can be your best friend, and I had been dead for a year. You would think two months would be enough time to come to grips with such momentous discoveries, but then, you probably wouldn’t be me. Those eight weeks had passed in a strange, stream-of-consciousness kind of flow, and I was stuck in one place, the way that you were when you dreamed that you were running away from something chasing you, but your feet were mired in mud or cement or butterscotch pudding.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. For a few days after defeating the Shade—the evil spirit that had been summoned by a supremely narcissistic and dying software developer—I had been high on victory. Figuring out a way, with the help of the Seattle Public Library and a group of teens engaged in a fantasy role-playing game, to release the poor man’s soul while dispatching the evil shadow back to whatever realm it normally inhabited made me feel like a superhero.

Josie Harper, evil-spirit-defeater extraordinaire.

Superheroes need villains to fight, however, and considering that no other clues revealed would-be targets of my newfound derring-do, I was a sorry superhero indeed. The invisible messenger in my café de Purgatoire had failed to produce any other cards on creamy ivory cardstock with directives on them, and though I wandered far and wide—at least as far and wide as Seattle’s mass transit system would take me—I didn’t find anything suggesting what I needed to do to help another soul in distress. And it wasn’t for lack of trying. In fact, if I was honest, I was probably looking a little too hard, desperately chasing leads that weren’t leads at all, and winding up more defeated than ever.

After eight weeks, I would have been happy to help a cat out of a tree.

Being a resident of the in between, my name for whatever this purgatory-like place was, where I was neither dead nor alive, was tricky however. I couldn’t affect anything physically, like move objects or rattle windows, but that didn’t stop me from a lifetime of behaving as if I could interact with the world around me. I’d lost track of how many times I had waited for someone to move out of the way, or walked around an object, or sneaked on board a Metro bus to travel somewhere before remembering that I didn’t really have to do that. I had decided that the things I could do, like apparently opening the door to the In Bean Tween café, holding an umbrella in the rain, or sleeping, were nothing more than echoes, simply a holdover from being alive—a way for my brain to make sense of what I was doing, and what I wanted to do—but which weren’t actually happening in reality.

Until today, that is. Today, I moved a feather. Yes, really. It wasn’t the breeze, it wasn’t my imagination, I really did it.

It happened after I visited the cemetery.

I’d spied on my best friend crying, talking to her mom about the anniversary of my death, and hearing her describe visiting my grave, was much too painful to repeat. Several times, I caught myself walking in the direction of her house, fully intending to spy on her again, not with any malicious intent of course, but because I missed her voice, her smile, her presence. Every time, I turned back before I even reached her street, defeated by the crushing weight of guilt and pain.

The idea of visiting my own grave had taken root, however. No matter how many times I pushed the unpleasant thought away, curiosity gnawed at me. What did it look like? Where was it? Had people brought flowers? This morning, I decided to just go see it, hoping the sight of it would squelch this need once and for all.

Which is