“All right, time for you to go back and lie down,” I said, sweeping him off his feet and carrying him to the couch, where I gently put him down. “You’re taking some Tylenol now. Do you have any?”
He scrunched up his face. “I can make some willow bark tea, but I don’t like pills.”
“But you’ve taken them before, and you’ve prescribed them to others, so you must see the value there, yes?”
“Yes, fine,” he whined, too sick and tired to argue.
“I have some in my bag. You lay there and tell me about diabolical infestations,” I ordered, standing up and crossing the room to my duffel. I noted, when I dug around in the outside pocket, that all my ginger cookies were gone. Sian had borrowed them all.
Grabbing my prescription-strength bottle of ibuprofen, I went to the kitchen, checked a few drawers, found the junk one that everyone has, and lo and behold, there was the thermometer. It wasn’t the gun one, but the kind that goes into your ear, so I put a new plastic sheath on the end, filled a glass with water, and carried everything back over to Benji, who had been explaining that diabolical possession was where a house or object, sometimes even your pet, could be possessed by a demon, but that was not, he assured me, what had happened with his patient.
“And why was that?” I asked, interjecting a question so he’d keep talking. I was surprisingly quite interested in hearing how he’d started chasing ghosts.
“Well, because her house wasn’t inhabited by a demonic presence, she knew it had to be haunted.”
“All right,” I conceded. “But since she had a priest over, couldn’t he have gotten rid of the ghost or whatever while he was there?” I asked, putting the glass down on the table before I tilted his head sideways so I could check his temperature. “I mean, kill two birds with one stone, as it were.”
“That’s a horrible expression, second only to the one about skinning cats, but to answer your question, ghosts aren’t under a priest’s purview,” he replied authoritatively. “They were people once, and there’s nothing evil about them. They’re just hanging out.”
“Okay,” I grumbled, reading the thermometer and not liking a temperature of a hundred and two at all. “Since you ate, you’re going to take one of these monster 800 milligram ibuprofen tablets while I call your doctor.”
He scoffed again with the same raspberry ending from earlier. “I don’t have a doctor.”
“Fine, we’ll go to Urgent Care.”
“I assure you this happens a lot. My body is amazing at burning out infections, so this is not a big deal in the slightest.”
I stared at him.
“You’re saying that’s a no, then?”
I smiled at him as I nodded. “Yeah, that’s a no, kid.”
“Kid?” He was indignant. “I’ll have you know I’m older than you.”
I scoffed.
“I’m forty-two,” he declared dramatically, throwing down the gauntlet. “How old are you?”
“Really?” It was a surprise. I wouldn’t have guessed he was a day over twenty-five.
“You don’t believe me?” he asked as he took the horse pill I gave him.
I shrugged instead of committing.
“Do you have any idea how long it takes to become a licensed clinical psychiatrist?”
“A while?”
“Yeah,” he retorted, “a long-ass while.”
“Who paid for school?”
“My parents,” he groaned loudly. “My father’s a cardiovascular surgeon, and my mother’s a neurosurgeon. Imagine their disappointment when I didn’t want to cut people open and wanted to delve into their brains through the ancient art of talking instead.”
I chuckled, and he sighed deeply.
“Is there any way, before we go to the Urgent Care, you would consider wrapping your arms around me?”
“As long as you finish the story about becoming a Ghostbuster.”
He whimpered before he crawled over to me in the most graceless, awkward, herky-jerky way possible. His arms went two different ways, his knees got tangled in the blanket, and at the last moment, I had to grab hold of him because he would have toppled into my lap if I hadn’t. He was clumsy and uncoordinated, and it was somehow, someway, terribly endearing.
“Sit down,” I husked, manhandling him, moving him so he was sitting in my lap, legs draped over mine under the swaddling of blankets and his head tucked under my chin. “Try and rest for a second, okay?”
“Whatever you want,” he murmured, snuggling against me, yawning loudly before settling and, in moments, feeling boneless and five times heavier. The snoring was a dead giveaway.
He was passed out, which meant that I alone saw the face at the window.
6
Amazing how fast adrenaline went from nothing to blowing off the top of your head. It took mere seconds for the jolt of fear to wash through me.
Wrenching Benji sideways, I had him facedown on the floor in seconds. Then I sprinted toward the front door, took a second to unlock it, and then hurled it open in time to see a guy in a black hoodie hop the white picket fence out front.