Abandoned by Abigail Livinghouse (distant reading txt) 📕

once more. She sucked in a breath, which caused her to nearly gag. The stench of sweat was suffocating. She had to focus. She was here for a reason.

 

Tessie quickly scanned the faces of the sickly men, trying to find one she recognized. Nope. None of them registered as familiar to her. There was one face at the end of the lineup that was exceptionally young.

 

Tessie moved silently among the bustling nurses, deftly avoiding one with a pail of water rushing to the side of a man who was pleading for God to help him. She made it to the side of the young man. His skin was deathly pale, his hair was a dark mahogany, limp and resting flatly on his pillow, which was soaked in his own sweat. His eyes were a beautiful chestnut, with specks of gold in the irises. Even though they were gorgeous, they stared blankly up at the ceiling, showing no emotion. His stare was dead.

 

Even though ill, he was handsome. Tessie could tell this boy had given up any ounce of hope he had once held. He knew that he was going to die. He knew that he didn’t have long.

 

 An elderly nurse moved over to the boy’s other side, feeling his forehead and quickly withdrawing her hand.

 

“You’re burning up, dear.” She murmured, eyeing him with a grandmotherly concern.

 

The boy paid no mind to her. He simply continued to look up at the ceiling with flat eyes. He looked maybe a year older than Tessie, but compared to the other men, he was just a child, about a ten years difference between him and the patients near him. The boy’s eyelids fluttered suddenly, causing Tessie to suck in a sharp breath.

 

No. She pleaded silently. Don’t let him die. I can’t take this. Please. No. But all the begging in the world couldn’t stop the inevitable.

 

She had to do something. She couldn’t stay here and watch this. Sudden inspiration came to her. With great effort, she threw herself backward, her head breaking her fall with a painful thump. She saw stars for a moment. Silver and blue bursts of white light dotted her vision, until she felt herself returning to reality.

 

The vision dissolved around her, but not before she glimpsed the boy’s eyes shutting as he let out his final breath.

 

Her eyes snapped open, and she was grateful to see the foyer of the house around her instead of the awful hospital scene. She let out a grateful sigh, only to feel the cold fingers of the person gripping her on her lips, constricting her breathing.

 

“Lemph mefh gooooo!” Tessie’s command came out sounding like gibberish since she was speaking with a hand over her mouth.

 

 She wriggled in the person’s grasp, but it did nothing but make her even more tired than the vision had left her.

 

“Cade! Let her go!” Brandy thundered into the room, her hands clenched into tight fists at her sides.

 

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Brandy shouted at him. “Let her go or I swear to God I’ll kick your ass straight to hell if I have to!” She shrieked with so much conviction in her voice it sent a chill up Tessie’s spine.

 

The hands on her mouth only pressed tighter, forcing her lips against her teeth. She let out a plea that just sounded like a moan. Brandy moved up so close to Tessie that if either would move, their chins would collide. Brandy was looking above Tessie’s head. She strained to look up to see who Brandy was addressing.

 

“You better get off of her, or there will be hell to pay.” She growled.

 

The hold didn’t lighten up in the least, but it didn’t tighten either. Tessie relaxed slightly.

 

“Cade, please.” Cyndi begged from somewhere near Tessie’s waist. Again, not loose, not tight.

 

“What is she doing here? She shouldn’t be here.” A deep, velvety voice came from somewhere above Tessie’s head. She stiffened automatically. Whoever this was, they were strong, much too strong for her. She wouldn’t be able to throw whoever this was off. She shut her eyes tightly.

 

Please. She thought. Just let me go.

 

Even though she wanted to beat the crap out of this asshole, she knew that if she would try to take him, she would lose.

 

 “She lives here.” Brandy cautioned, her eyes shooting a warning at the person holding Tessie. “Her family bought the school a few months ago. It’s hers now.”

 

“Are you kidding me? I knew that damn realtor should’ve been taken care of the moment she stepped in here.” The voice growled, a hidden threat in his tone. She took as much of a deep breath as she could with his hand still pressing against her mouth.

 

“Get off her.” Conner walked down the hall, his face darker than Tessie had ever seen it.

 

Before anyone had a chance to do anything, Conner clocked the person holding Tessie straight in his jaw. The arms around her disappeared. The person who had been holding her stumbled backward from the abrupt punch.

 

 Conner grabbed Tessie’s arm and tugged her to his side, where she spun around and could now see who Cade was. Her breath caught in her throat.

 

 It was him, the youngest boy from the lineup of death in the old hospital. He wasn’t shirtless like the last time she saw him, he wore a thin cotton tee, and loose jeans. This boy’s color wasn’t as vibrant as Brandy, Conner, or Cyndi. He looked washed out, like when you clean a very bright shirt a couple of times, after about the fifth or sixth wash, you can tell it lost some of its color. It’s not as bright as it used to be.

 

Tessie swallowed the lump in her throat. The sight of this boy reminded her of the terrible hospital where patients were sent to die. The boy’s eyes, which were such a beautiful color, narrowed with coldness as he locked gazes with her. She could see a flicker of recognition before the hard mask of bitterness replaced any emotion.

 

“Get out.” He said simply. Tessie recoiled instantly. Conner placed his hand on her shoulder, his gaze trained on the boy. She was shocked, to say the least.

 

Conner had never shown her that he cared, or even liked her. And he had hit the boy to get her away from him. She felt a flutter of warmth in her chest.

 

 “You don’t belong here.” The boy spoke, the warm moment breaking sharply away at his angry voice. She bit back the comment she had ready. Oh, she could say so many things.

 

Instead, she said, “What the hell are you doing here?”

 

About all eyes in the room except for the boy’s shot her a warning glance. The boy cocked a surprised eyebrow. “Me? Oh, nothing. Except I’ve been here for the last few centuries, and I’m not about to haul ass just because you’re here.”

 

 She snorted, folding her arms across her chest. A gesture that said bring it on. “You don’t have to ‘haul ass’ for anyone. But for all I’m concerned, you can either stay here and I can help you, or burn in hell with the rest of the uncast souls. Your choice.”

 

She knew it was harsh, and she regretted it instantly after the words had left her mouth. Everyone in the room seemed to stiffen, everyone except for Tessie and the person standing across from her. Someone squeezed her shoulder in caution, but she didn’t look to see who. She was focused on the spirit who she was locked in a stare down with.

 

His name must be Cade, that’s what they were all calling him. He also had to be the dying boy in her vision. Either him or a ghost strikingly similar to him. There wasn’t a break in the icy frozenness of his calm. Just chiseled features and a pouting mouth. Tessie kept her expression hard, hoping to look just as unfeeling as him.

 

“You think that you can tell me what to do? You think you can give me an ultimatum?” He gave a short, humorless laugh.

 

 “Oh, please.” She said with a mimic of his icy laughter at the end of her sentence, which only came out sounding squeaky and fake, which it was.

 

“Who died and made you king?” Tessie said, with a bit more venom then needed but she didn’t care.

 

His hard expression stayed locked in place, as unreadable as English to someone Greek. “Who abandoned this place and made you head bitch?”

Chapter 19

It was odd, having Cade there. He wasn’t like any other spirit, not like Brandy, or Cyndi, or even Conner, who brushed off his brief hero moment with nothing more than a mumbled counter to Tessie’s grateful apology.

 

Even though Cade seemed to appear out of nowhere, Cyndi said that he was always there, he just never paid much attention to any of them, ignoring them and acting like they weren’t even there. When Tessie asked Cyndi if there were any others, she said there were many spirits in the house, but not all of them would ever show themselves. Some didn’t even show themselves to Cyndi or Brandy, who seemed to be the gentler of the ghosts.

 

Cade was actually the oldest of them all. He had been in the school for nearly two centuries. He had lost consciousness in St. Joseph’s hospital and everyone thought he was dead, but his body was still latched onto his spirit when they wheeled it off to the morgue. He died there. He returned to the hospital, since the morgue was filled with the dead which always reminded him that he was no longer living. He was one to shy away from the pain and rejected what he had become.

 

Cade wandered the hospital for decades before it was shut down and ordered to be ripped away from the ground it was built on. Cade was terrified. Without a place to stay, he would be cast away to hell.

 

He couldn’t go outside, not literally, in a way, he fooled the system by jumping into a slave carrier on its way to an auction. He caught sight of the school while passing by, and from then on, he’d been there. He was there when the school opened and when it closed. Cade had always thought of the school as his, after all, it saved him from an eternity of burning in hell.

 

When Tessie’s family came into the picture, it was natural that he’d be super pissed. Now that he knew about Tessie, he mostly just skulked around the school, casting dark shadows down the hallways, always popping up in her peripheral vision and then disappearing before she could decide if she was seeing things or not.

 

The kitchen had been remodeled, out of Tessie’s own pocket, along with her allowance for the next ten years. She would be broke until she went off to college, even a little after that.

 

“Marry rich and young.” Her mother snickered when Tessie asked her what she could do without any cash.

 

Marry rich and young my ass, Tessie thought as she headed upstairs and into her room. She opened the door,  slamming it behind her. She spun around, about to fling herself onto the bed when she gave a little yelp of surprise when she saw that her