Specter

Chapter One: Specter

My name is Joel, and I died once.

I was thirteen when it happened. My mom was driving when some old man crossed the center line and smashed into us head-on. I wasn’t wearing my seatbelt. I went straight through the windshield.

The next thing I remember is floating above my own body, watching doctors work on me like I was already a corpse. Oxygen mask. Heart monitor. Tube in my arm. Blood everywhere. I remember thinking, Oh my God, I’m dead. Then I started screaming for my mother.

I woke up the next morning with her sitting over me. She looked like she hadn’t slept in days. When I asked if I was still alive, she started crying and told me I was safe.

The old man had panicked and crossed into our lane. The car was totaled. I had a severe concussion, broken ribs, and internal bleeding. They had to cut me open to stop me from bleeding out.

I spent the next few days in the hospital drifting in and out of sleep. That was the first time I remembered leaving my body on purpose—at least the first time I was aware of it.

A year later it happened again. I was a freshman in high school and skipped class to smoke with a friend. Whatever we smoked that day was laced with something stronger.

I felt off for hours. That night, right before I fell asleep, I felt my soul violently shift inside my chest—like something was trying to tear loose. Then everything went still.

When I opened my eyes, I was floating above my own body again. I panicked. I screamed. I forced myself back into my body so hard I woke up gasping on the floor, tangled in my blankets.

For weeks after that I slept under my bed or wrapped myself up like a burrito, like that would somehow keep me inside my own skin. It didn’t.

The third time it happened, I didn’t wake up screaming. I was half-asleep when it started. This time I stayed calm. I floated above myself and just… watched. I didn’t feel the same terror as before. I felt numb. Curious. And for the first time, I wondered if I could actually control it.

After that it became easier. Every time I slipped out, it lasted longer. The fear faded. I started testing how far I could go. At first I only left my room. Then the apartment. Then the building. I learned that if I focused hard enough on a place or a person, I could move toward it. Not instantly—not at first—but the more I practiced, the faster and farther I could travel.

I also learned something else. If I got close enough to someone while they were sleeping and placed my hands near their head, I could hear their thoughts.

Not clearly at first. It was like trying to listen to a radio with bad reception. But the closer I got, the clearer it became. I could hear what they were dreaming. What they were afraid of. What they wanted.

And once I figured that out, I started wondering what else I could do.

I never told my mother. She already thought something was wrong with me after the accident. She was scared I had brain damage. If she found out I was floating out of my body at night, she would’ve dragged me to a psychiatrist we couldn’t afford—or worse, tried to have me locked up somewhere. So I kept it to myself.

At first I was careful. I told myself I was just exploring. Testing limits. But the more I did it, the more I realized how much power this gave me. People were completely defenseless when they slept. They had no idea I was there. No idea I could listen to their most private thoughts. And the more I listened, the less I cared about right and wrong.

I started thinking about all the things I could do with this. All the things I could take. All the people I could watch without them ever knowing.

Especially one person in particular.

There was a girl at school. Jenna. The kind of girl who never would’ve looked twice at someone like me. Beautiful. Popular. Untouchable. I used to watch her in the hallways, surrounded by her friends, laughing like the world belonged to her.

I told myself I just wanted to know what she was really like. That was a lie, even then. Because deep down I already knew what I wanted. I wanted to get inside her head. I wanted to know her secrets. And eventually… I wanted to make her want me. Even if I had to force it.

Due to the accident I’d already been held back a year, so I was older than most of the kids in my class. My mom had to support us with two shitty part-time jobs. She was hardly ever home, so I usually had the apartment to myself.

After school one day I found a note on the table:

Joel, I have to work late. Food in the fridge. Clean your room. Don’t wait up. Love, Mom xoxoxo

“Don’t wait up” meant she was staying with one of her “friends” again.

When I first started experimenting with my “ghost powers,” I began with my mother. I wanted to know what would happen if I touched another person while I was out. I had never done that before, so I wasn’t sure what to expect.

I waited until she was asleep. I hovered above her and slowly placed my hands near her temples—close, but not quite touching. The closer I got, the louder her thoughts became. After a few minutes of concentration I could hear everything.

Apparently my mom had been quite the hell-raiser when she was my age. She ran with a wild crowd, slept around, partied hard—sometimes drunk, sometimes high, but always knowing exactly what she was doing.

Everything was fine until she found out she was pregnant with me. She never knew who my father was. There had been too many.

When she told her parents, they kicked her out. She’d been on her own ever since. She straightened up for the most part and tried to be a good mother, but now that I was older she was starting to slip back into her old life.

She never brought men home, though. She didn’t want me to see what she really was. She didn’t want me to lose respect for her.

The double standard burned in my mind. Single mothers like her protected their sons with ferocious instinct while raising their daughters to be soft, entitled, and ready-made victims. I saw it clearly that night in her thoughts.

After reading my mother I needed to know if the power worked on strangers too.

I found my first real test subject at a 24-hour gym before dawn. Vanessa—Vanna to everyone who knew her—was a well-endowed office worker, freshly divorced, and already testing the waters again.

She had come in early, worked out, showered, and now lay in one of the private tanning beds wearing nothing but a towel and tanning goggles.

I waited until the lid was closed, then stepped inside the small room. I placed my hands near her temples. Her mind exploded into mine. At first the flood was overwhelming—raw emotion, memories, insecurities—but I pulled back until I could control the flow. Then I drank.

She had cheated on her husband before they were married, gotten pregnant, and begged him to stay. She swore she’d never betray him again. They raised their daughter to sixteen. Then he left her for a younger secretary. Now Vanna worked in an office where a quiet, aloof man named George kept watching her. She and her girlfriends mocked him at lunch—called him a harmless creep, a loner who ate by himself.

I smiled in the dark room and began to work.

I pulled every erotic memory she owned—dangerous movie spies, the high-school dropout who used to finger her in the back of his car, the married man she’d fucked in a hotel two years ago, the celebrities she touched herself to late at night. Then I took George’s face and slowly, deliberately fused it with all of them.

Not a creep, I whispered straight into the core of her mind. Mysterious. Different. Dangerous. Alpha.

Vanna’s breathing changed. Her hand slid under the towel. I kept going, anchoring new feelings so deep they would feel like her own:

When you see him tomorrow you’ll get wet. You’ll remember every filthy thing you used to want. You’ll wear shorter skirts. You’ll find excuses to be alone with him. You’ll crave him treating you like the cheating slut you’ve always been underneath.

She moaned openly now, legs parting, fingers working frantically between her thighs. Joel held the new version of George in her mind like a brand, searing it in alongside every man who had ever made her lose control. He watched her full breasts rise and fall, watched her body arch and shudder as she came hard inside the tanning bed, gasping and whimpering like the desperate woman she was about to become.

When it was done I stepped back. Vanna lay there panting, skin flushed, towel fallen open, completely unaware that her desires had just been professionally rewritten by a stranger.

I left the room with a calm, satisfied smile.

I wasn’t a hero fixing the world.

I was the consequence the world had earned.

And I still had one very important test left.

The link to the book is on my wall, please go!