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“Take the job.” The advice written on the whiteboard didn’t surprise Sam at all. Benny had always wanted what was best for Sam, and through seven years of college and law school, Sam had listened. Now, with the end of law school in sight, it was time to face moving on. Jobs in Palo Alto or close enough that he could stay in this apartment were not going to be easy to come by, and he had an amazing offer… in Lawrence.
“I can’t just leave you,” Sam protested. The longer they were together, the more Benny was able to affect the real world. He could lift heavier objects. Two years in, he managed to manifest himself enough that Sam could see a ghostly image; four years in, that image was quite solid. The more practice he got, the more stamina he had, and by now Benny just used the whiteboard out of tradition since his voice still sounded a bit hollow and dead. If he needed to speak, he could, but he and Sam both preferred the writing.
Leaving Benny would mean he faded back into the colorless dreary existence he’d had in the forty years between his death and Sam’s arrival. Condemning him to that loneliness was unthinkable. It would have to happen eventually, Sam would die and Benny would still be stuck, but now that he wasn’t trying to do law school, Sam planned to start doing some research into how to help a ghost move on to the next world. There had to be a way.
While he’d been thinking, Benny wrote more. “Call Dean. He has a graduation present for you.”
Calling Dean was also nearly always good advice. Sam followed it. “So I have a dilemma. Morgenstern and MacLeod came through, bigger than we could have imagined. They’re not offering me an internship or a clerk job to get my feet wet. They want to bring me on as an assistant to one of the senior partners, with the idea that in five years or so when he’s ready to retire, I’ll be the one stepping into his shoes.”
“Holy shit, Sammy.” That summed up how Sam felt about the offer. This was one of the most reputable law firms in the country, the senior partner they wanted him to work with worked in Sam’s preferred specialty of family law, and the salary offer was more than Sam had dreamed of asking for straight out of school. Sam was still trying to figure out the catch – aside from having to move to Kansas and leaving Benny. “You got some time tonight for me to come over and give you your graduation present? Because it’s kind of complicated to explain and has to happen in your apartment.”
“Only if you bring pizza.” Benny had drawn a pizza on the whiteboard, and Sam could take a hint. After all, it was tradition. “Benny’s orders.”
Dean came in with two pizzas and a big box filled with, as near as Sam could figure, random occult crap. Chalk, a bell, a set of black and white candles, feathers… “What’s this all about, Dean? What are you doing?”
“There’s a ritual. When you started law school, I did something Dad nearly disowned me over.” Sam’s eyebrows shot up. “I reached out to Bobby Singer to ask him to help me track down a rumor I’d read about.”
Bobby Singer was their dad’s best friend when they were growing up, until Bobby got heavily into the occult and John refused to believe any of it was real. John had cut ties the day Bobby pointed a shotgun loaded with rock salt and told him to drive away before he got the worst stinging of his life, because if he had to reload, it wouldn’t be salt. “What did Bobby have to say?”
“That ghosts are a real thing, that he’s shocked that Benny’s been around since the 60s without going violent or evil. That the amount he’s able to manifest shouldn’t be possible, not unless there’s something special going on. See, ghosts have unfinished business here on Earth, but being trapped between worlds usually drives them mad. They become violent and almost mindless.”
“Not me. I’m harmless, I swear,” Benny wrote on the whiteboard. “Still stuck between worlds, just not mad.”
“But you are tethered.” Dean nodded at the box. “Bobby found a ritual that can change his tether from whatever it is holding him here, whether that’s his bones like most ghosts or some object he’s haunting, to you. Since you’re living, you can share that life force with him. Bring him back from the dead.”
“Benny? Is… is this what you want? Because it sounds like you’d be tied to me for the rest of our lives,” Sam said. “Like marriage, only without the possibility of divorce.”
“Not a problem, cher,” Benny wrote. “Dean broke in last week to explain the ritual to me, show me how it works, answer my questions. He wouldn’t be doing this without my consent.”
“And if it doesn’t work out once he’s alive, you can separate,” Dean added. “You’re not literally tethered together and have to live within ten miles or some nonsense like that. Just means that if one of you dies, the other won’t outlive him long.”
Sam’s eyes welled up, and he held out his arms. Benny manifested, walking into them and hugging him. “Gonna be great to be able to do this for real, cher,” he whispered in his haunting voice.
Dean set up what he needed for the ritual. “Last step, give me your hand, Sam. This is probably gonna hurt.” Sam held out his hand, and Dean uses an iron knife to cut his palm. As soon as the blood landed in the middle of the sigil Dean had drawn, red smoke began to rise, flowing toward a spot next to Sam. It slowly coalesced, becoming the familiar figure that Benny had manifested as – a young man of around twenty.
“Heya, Sam. Thanks, Dean.” The Cajun accent sounded so much better without the hollowness of the dead, and Sam couldn’t stop himself as he reached out to pull Benny into another hug. The warmth, the solidness… he could feel Benny’s reaction matching his, that this was so much better than they had been living with for seven years. “So… take the job, cher.”
“I’ll do that. What are you going to do? I should be making enough that you won’t have to go to work right away, but you’ll want to find something…”
Benny laughed softly. “Bobby’s setting me up with a high school transcript. Soon as he knows what community college for me to apply to, he’ll walk me through doin’ that. Figure a lot of my school knowledge is pretty well useless, so I’ll work my way back to a university. Get a part time job at the college or something nearby, while I can still blame any social miscues on being a small-town boy from Louisiana transplanted to Kansas for love.”