Ascension by Bailey Bradford (desktop ebook reader txt) 📕

It had been so obvious in the glee his killer had taken in torturing him. Sometimes he could still feel that knife piercing his skin and muscle so, so slowly, trailing agony behind it and racing terror in front of it. Conner had lived for hours under that sadistic bastard’s blade. He had literally got off on torturing Conner to death.

That last probably explained why, though he’d enjoyed watching Laine and Sev and some other people having sex, it hadn’t really occurred to him that he could do any such thing. After all, if, when you died, you were free from physical pain—except in your memory—and able to zip around the world, and get to fuck, where was the downside to dying then? Granted, not everyone who died turned into a lingering spirit, but some did.

What would happen if two lovers, completely devoted to each other, died, and only one was a spirit? Conner shivered, more of a wispy movement for him but the same concept, he thought. He didn’t know where the people went who didn’t hang around post-death. And he didn’t want to find out. Conner liked being where he was. Going somewhere…else scared him.

Maybe that was why he was still on the planet.

Conner’s musings ceased when Sev and his nephew came in through the front door. Conner had had what he called ‘jumpy brain’ lately, his mind not being able to focus on any one thing for long.

For the first several years after his death, Conner had been unable to concentrate for long. He just wanted to have fun, but he’d been able to focus when it’d been important to do so. Death had made him more of a flighty person than he’d been in life. Once he’d realized that, it had started to bug him. He didn’t want to be vapid in form and personality both.

So he’d started trying to have more substance, started paying attention to those around him more. Part of it was that he’d taken an innocent spirit under his wing, so to speak, and the rest was that he couldn’t deny the changes in those living people he cared about.

Just like his worries and observations about Laine and Sev aging, and yes, whether or not those two would get to be together in death, either in spirit form or wherever they’d go after. Conner worried, but he just couldn’t focus on it. To do so made him jittery. He’d even dropped Sev’s ridiculously expensive eye cream a few days ago when he’d just meant to hide it behind the towels. Jesus, Sev could shriek.

He could also laugh and sound just as young as he’d been all those years ago when Conner had been a lost and terrified spirit with a message he’d needed to get to Laine about who had killed him. Hearing that laugh made Conner warm inside, so he floated up to the ceiling, his spiritual form no more substantial than the air that he let hold him up. Less, actually, he guessed. He’d always sucked at physics. All he could say for sure was he was up.

And that it wasn’t just Sev’s laugh that made Conner want to hang around and observe for a while. Though it made him feel like a skeevy pervert, he couldn’t force himself to disappear when Sev’s nephew, Rogelio Martinez, was around. The boy was beautiful, and Conner knew he wasn’t really a boy, having had an eighteenth birthday party some time ago. Years, but how many, he couldn’t remember. Enough that Rogelio’s form, though lithe and on the short side—yeah, even in death, Conner wouldn’t have admitted that to the kid—was obviously that of an adult. It showed in the slight delineation of muscle and the confidence with which Rogelio carried himself.

When Conner was around him lately, all the memories of arousal that he had suppressed tried to come back to the surface. He’d learned that touching another spirit felt like he remembered it did when touching as living beings. He just hadn’t applied that to a sexual manner of touching. Possibly because his main companion in the spirit world was Stefan, who, despite having died as an adult at nineteen, still seemed like a kid to Conner.

Part of that was because Stefan had been… Conner searched for the politically correct term. Things had changed a lot since he’d died, and he liked trying to keep current. Intellectually challenged? Conner shrugged. Stefan didn’t seem so different now, as if death had freed him of the physical limitations of his body and mind. He’d always be a kid to Conner, though.

“And so will Rogelio,” Conner murmured, needing to hear himself say it. Sev cocked his head and frowned and Conner slapped a hand to his own forehead. He knew Sev could hear him on some level. Sometimes he heard him clearly. Other times, like today, hopefully, not so much.

Sev held a hand up to shush Rogelio, who glanced nervously around the room and whispered, “Is he here?”

That wasn’t a thrill he felt at hearing Rogelio enquire about him. The kid wasn’t interested in him. For God’s sake, he was dead! That was probably it. Morbid fascination on Rogelio’s part. Conner wasn’t around the kid constantly, because even dead, he had a life. So to speak. He’d deliberately kept himself from teasing Rogelio, because—well, he wasn’t sure why. Probably because it was Sev and Laine who were Conner’s friends, and Rogelio had been an awkward teenage boy when he’d moved to McKinton. God, Conner wasn’t sure of anything right then as Rogelio turned his head toward him.

Rogelio’s eyes widened when he looked to where Conner was floating. Conner twitched, feeling that gaze like a heated breeze over his skin. It was too weird, too…intense for him. Conner zipped himself right out of the house, popping in instead on Laine in his office.

Laine, still handsome, still sheriff, but damn, he was sure looking his age. Conner tried to figure out how old that was exactly but