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Have you experienced anything out of the ordinary before now? Any sign that you might have special abilities?”
    Ruth was flat-out dumbfounded.
    He thinks I’m a reaper?
    She was torn over how much to tell him. She wanted to talk about her gifts with someone who might actually understand. Maybe “reaper” was as good an explanation as any for what she could do, but how could she trust a man who’d stalked her and broken into her house? Of course, if he had planned on hurting heror doing more than chitchatting, he’d already had ample opportunity. She closed her eyes and dove in.
    “I’m just a girl…but I can see people’s auras. And I know that the light around someone turns white when they’re close to death.” She shifted, uncomfortable now that she’d gushed her crazy all over him.
    “What else do you know about the colors?”
    “Yellow is happy, green is peaceful, mustard is angry, brown is unhappy, and red is I-want-to-get-down-your-pants-then-steal-all-your-cookies. But that’s all. I’m not anything. I can only guess at everything else,” she lied. She knew a
lot
about auras and their colors. Too much maybe. Trying to decode the colors and their meanings had been one of her first research projects. It was what had set her on her nonexistent career path.
    “Ruth, if you can see auras, you already know that you’re more than
just
a girl. And if you touched anyone else with a white aura, you might have hindered their passing by detaching their souls prematurely, making them difficult to retrieve. If that happened, their souls are likely still near their bodies. I reaped your mother’s soul. Have you ever knowingly touched anyone else who has a white aura?”
    She hesitated. “My father maybe? When he died, it was the first time I realized what the white aura meant.”
    Deacon sighed. “Anyone else?”
    Ruth picked nervously at her fingernails. “No, I don’t think so. Ever since then I’ve tried to stay away from people. I keep to myself. I don’t like knowingevery little thing about how strangers are feeling, or worse, people I know. I feel compelled to tell them things because of what I see. Like that they should probably get their crap in order and make up with their loved ones because they’re about to
die.
Stuff that I’m smart enough to know will land me right in the nut house if I don’t shut up about it.”
    Deacon sat quietly for several long minutes, probing her with his sharp eyes. Ruth squirmed under his scrutiny. She didn’t like being looked at, period, let alone this intensely. She felt as if he was counting her pores or wondering if her size-eight skin might fit well into his collection.
    “Where is your father buried?”
    “Why? You aren’t thinking of digging him up, are you?” She tried not to scream the words at him.
    “I’m not going to dig him up…not exactly.” Deacon rose to pace the floor in front of her. “We need to go see if his soul is still hanging around. If it is, he’ll be stuck haunting his grave until he’s collected. I assume he’s been dead for quite some time now? He’s not going to be too happy about that. They never are.”
    Ruth tried to process this random new development in her overstuffed brain. It wasn’t computing. Up until twenty minutes ago, she’d managed to keep her secret in a nice tight box in the back of her mind. Now that box was opening like Pandora herself had peeled back the lid.
    Maybe I
am
going crazy.
    She tried to keep it together, but the effort strained against her throat, threatening to come out in a nice loud scream at any second. Deacon approached her cautiously and held out his hand.
    “Take my hand, Ruth.”
    “Why?”
    “I can help calm you.”
    She took it. God help her, but she did. His hand was warm and comfortable. Familiar even. She didn’t know how else to explain it, but holding his hand seemed like a perfectly sane and acceptable antidote to the insanity that was building inside her.
    Her brain