“Hell to the yeah,” he said, dry as a bone.
“Oh, come on, half-dead guy! This is huge. Monumental—ginormous—tremendous. Work with me, would ya?”
His hands tightened on the steering wheel, his face unreadable under the glow of the hotel’s sign. “I’m still absorbing.”
Delaney couldn’t contain herself anymore. She grinned, giddy with excitement. “Okay, you process, I’ll get a happy on. Don’t you see? It explains everything! Jesus. That’s why we can’t find an obituary for you, Clyde—because you’re not dead! You’re alive—in a hospital somewhere. What I want to know is why there was no police report—arson, something. This had to be big news out here in Nowhereville. Why it wasn’t reported in at least the local papers is beyond me. But that’s neither here nor there right now.” Delaney paused, taking another stilted breath as realization washed over her again. “Omigod—this is—is—amazing, and crazy, and amazing.” How in the fuck did this happen? How had Clyde been able to pull off being out of his body for this long? But it also gave her hope. If Clyde was in a hospital somewhere, he was alive.
And she was überpsyched about that.
Because it meant he could stay.
With her.
She looked around as though she’d spoken the words out loud. Disentangling herself from the grip she had on Clyde’s arm, she sat back in her seat.
“What hospital am I in?”
“Crap, I have no idea. I could just barely understand what she was saying, but I understood the alive part. That’s all that matters. You’re alive. Alive, Clyde Atwell. The rest shouldn’t be too hard to find out. What I’m having trouble with is how your soul got out of your body and landed you in Hell . . .”
“Not nearly as much trouble as I’m having with it,” he commented in wry observation—still showing no signs of even a glimmer of happiness.
However, Delaney was now lost in finding a theory about what had gone wrong. “It makes no sense. I just don’t understand this. Your soul’s all wandering around like you actually exist on this plane—you manifested, you can touch things—but your physical body’s in some hospital?”
Clyde shrugged his wide shoulders in what almost looked like indifference. “Don’t look at me. You’re the ghost expert—got some ghost friends you might consult about it?”
“No . . .”
“Well, you might if you—”
“Got that life you keep trying to talk me into. Yeah, yeah. Whatever. Stop knocking my self-imposed seclusion and let’s get to the business at hand—which is figuring out where you are. And getting you out of there.”
“I suppose my chances are grim if I’ve been in the hospital all this time—I’m probably in a coma, and I bet I’m pretty crispy. My chances of surviving were . . .”
Clyde’s voice became all slo-mo, warbling in and out, leaving her only a word or two about percentages to pick from the gobbledygook of slurred sentences.
Because out of the blue—epiphany—stark realization—total understanding—had just wailed her like a punch to the gut.
Holy. Shit. A coma . . . she grabbed at Clyde’s arm again, almost unable to string her thoughts into a coherent sentence. She bounced up and down on the seat. “Remember that lady that showed up—the ghost lady who spoke German or some foreign language?”
“I do. The typical blame on your part was involved. Then my usual apology for throwing a monkey wrench in your ghost communications. What about her?”
“Right! That’s her. She said Das Koma, remember? She kept saying it over and over. I don’t know who she was, but when we get inside, we’re looking her and those words up online.” Delaney’s thoughts blurred together, stringing triggers of memory. Discovery, much the way it always does, claimed her thoughts in one fell swoop. The missing piece of the puzzle fell into her lap like manna from Heaven. All she had to do was put it into the puzzle to complete the picture. “And the doctor with the decapitated head, remember him?”
Clyde blanched with a shudder. “Unfortunately.”
“We thought he was saying uma—but I’d bet my left ovary he was saying coma!”
Clyde’s frown deepened, but Delaney pressed onward—her quest for an answer was right at her fingertips. “Don’t you see, demon? The spirits were trying to give us clues all along. Whoever the German chick was, she was trying to help us—help you. She knew you were in a coma.”
“Then who’s the doctor?”
She rolled her eyes. “Does it really matter? Sometimes spirits, if they can help, even if the information they bring you is disjointed and often confusing, will try to help if they’re invested in some way in seeing you cross over.”
“So how’s the doctor or the German lady invested in me?”
“Didn’t you say your mother had a doctor whose head was decapitated in a brutal accident?”