Tonya Hurley_Ghostgirl_02 by Homecoming Page B

his pity.
    “Maybe you should go home and get some rest,” Damen said gently, sensing she was on her last nerve. “I’ll stay with her.”
    “I bet you will,” Scarlet said under her breath.
    “What’s gotten into you?” Damen asked.
    “These doctors aren’t doing jack squat,” Scarlet said, her frustration matching her jealousy. “But I’ve been thinking …”
    “Uh-oh,” Damen said, reacting to the serious look on Scarlet’s face.
    “There might be a way I can help Petula,” she said. “In fact, I might be the only one who can.”
    “How do you propose you’re going do that?” Damen was nervous to consider what Scarlet might be contemplating. “She’s got the best doctors, specialists, nurses, all doing the best they can.”
    Scarlet laid it out for Damen.
    “If Petula isn’t here, where is she?” Scarlet asked.
    “But she is here.” Damen pointed to the bed, treating Scarlet as if she were a child — or a lunatic.
    “Not her body, that’s just a shell,” Scarlet chided him. “Her mind. Her soul. Petula.”
    Damen shrugged his shoulders, not quite sure what she was getting at.
    “Look, I know ‘soul’ is a word none of us have ever used in the same sentence as ‘Petula,’ ” Scarlet acknowledged, “but even she has one.”
    “Okay,” Damen answered deliberately, for the sake of argument at least.
    “Well, then it has gotta be somewhere, right?” Scarlet asked.
    “That’s a pretty big question,” Damen answered, still unsure of where she was going with all of this. “And I just happened to leave my Philosophy 101 textbook at school, so …”
    “Don’t be so narrow-minded,” Scarlet said curtly. “You were there at the Fall Ball.”
    “Yeah, and … ,” Damen replied incredulously.
    “There is a whole other reality we know nothing about,” Scarlet reminded him. “Well, obviously, some of us don’t, anyway.”
    With that, she turned her back on Damen and crossed her arms, sulking.
    Damen reached for her shoulders and spun her back around with more force than she’d ever felt from him before. He held her tightly and proceeded to get rational.
    “I don’t know what happened that night,” Damen said, clearly having put much of that evening out of his head. “But whatever it was, it was a fluke. A once-in-a-lifetime thing.”
    “What if her spirit is dwelling on the other side and it is just a matter of time before she dies and her soul completely separates from her body? Maybe even sending her to Hell for all we know!”
    “Scarlet … ,” Damen said softly.
    “Maybe she’s in a circling pattern? Waiting to get checked off of a friggin’ list or something, and we’re just sitting here while she turns into firewood!”
    “Scarlet, you need to calm down,” Damen said more forcefully this time.
    “How do you know what I need?” Scarlet snapped, surprised at what just escaped from her mouth.
    Damen was worried. It was not like her to act so erratically, and he was starting to think she might be on the verge of a breakdown.
    “I’m sorry,” Scarlet said earnestly. “I just want to help Petula. She could be damned for all we know.”
    Scarlet was not just being dramatic, but she wasn’t being entirely honest, with Damen or herself, either. They both knew that Petula hadn’t exactly lived an exemplary life and that the odds of a good outcome for her in the Afterlife were slim at best. But Scarlet’s concerns were driven less by Petula’s spiritual deficiencies than her own guilty conscience.
    In her mind, she’d taken Damen away. And on some level it felt good, winning for a change and serving Petula up some just desserts. But the thought of never being able to make it right between them, to apologize, even if she didn’t really regret it, before Petula headed straight to Hell in an oversized handbag, was unbearable.
    “We don’t know that,” Damen uttered reassuringly.
    “No, we don’t, but I know someone who probably does,” Scarlet said,