Thelma didn't dream. It was impossible, being a ghost, since that particular state of affairs meant she didn't have to sleep anymore. The closest she got to REM these days was following attractive girls around CD shops. The closest she got to dreams was when she slipped inside other people's, peeking into their inner selves and discovering all the things they kept hidden, as much from themselves as each other.

She did daydream, though. Nightdream, sometimes. She allowed her thoughts to wander, in whichever direction they decided to go, and followed them. A day was a long time without the need to rest to separate the hours, and old habits were hard to break. She didn't need to eat anymore either, but she still did it, and not just because she could indulge all she liked and never put on any weight. It was simply something to do.

Boredom was never something that had bothered her about her eternal unlife, although subconsciously at least she might have acknowledged it as a concern when she was wandering the dusty old passages of Medenham Hall, trying to find a way of passing the hours. Loneliness was always the bigger worry, the one that would have kept her awake at night if she'd still needed to sleep. There were people to talk to - Ella, Leon, even Malachi in a crunch - but it wasn't the same as talking to someone who knew what it was like to be an illegal immigrant in the land of the living. To be part of the action, and yet removed from it, as permanently as it was possible to get.

Thelma wasn't lonely anymore. Not now she had Maya: her lover, her companion, and her student in the art of being there, but not quite being. The relationship was the result of Malachi's most recent evil trick, playing on her solitude so she'd cherry pick a soulmate. He'd killed an innocent girl just to get Thelma on side, something she might actually have been flattered by if it hadn't been so despicable.

Or working so well.

The best way out of being blackmailed was to just be honest. But Thelma couldn't bear to be. It was starting to dawn on her that she'd do anything to stop Maya finding out the ugly truth about how she'd died. She'd already talked Ella into going on a date with Malachi, despite it being the last thing she wanted her to do; the very last thing she should have been doing with the battle between them so finely poised.

She ached over what she was doing, what she was going to do, just to keep Maya. The only way to stop it hurting was to find a way of justifying it all to herself. It was something she'd done routinely since she'd sloped off to the morgue that first time, drowning out the misgivings with a flood of excuses.

It's my fault she's dead...I'm responsible for her...it'll be a one-off...what's the point in both of us being alone when we could have each other?

You could talk yourself into just about anything if you were desperate enough to believe it was true.

Today, on a fit of whimsy, Thelma had decided that it wasn't really Malachi's fault that Maya had died. It was just a coincidence that he'd been there, which meant she could tell him to go screw himself the next time he tried to order her around - something she was seriously looking forward to doing. Really, Maya's death was the universe's twisted way of giving her a gift, of making amends for taking her life from her and then taking away the only reason she'd had still to live it. The same reason that had, somewhere along the line, warped into the best, most multi-purpose, excuse of all.

It's what Cassie would have wanted...

Her head was full of Maya, her body burning with the passion they'd discovered for each other. Her heart, though, still belonged to Cassie. She'd been the first to claim it, and although she'd never loved Thelma back quite in the way she'd wanted - the way Maya did - somehow, even beyond both their graves, she'd never let it go.

She was lying on Ella's bed while she waited for her to come back from class, closed eyes pointed up in the direction of the ceiling, her thoughts darting uneasily between the two very different women who'd shaped her life, when she felt soft fingertips brush against her arm.

She turned around, assuming it was Maya, materialising out of thin air without warning to touch her up. But instead she saw Cassie, looking straight at her. Looking as she always had before that terrible night in the church when she'd disappeared into nothing, leaving behind a shapeless mass of fabric where her body had been. Apart from the satanic son currently swaggering around her former school, it was the only sign that someone called Cassie Hughes had ever existed.

"Whoa," Thelma said uncertainly, scrambling up to a sitting position, the neatly pressed sheets creasing wildly beneath her. "You're - dead."

"So are you," Cassie reminded her with an impish grin.

"Yeah, but you're dead dead - oh God, I sound like Leon -"

In the bleak weeks after Cassie's death, Thelma had thought about her endlessly. With Ella busy pretending not to care and everyone else either spreading salacious gossip or hunting for a body they were never going to find, there had been little else to do. She'd been alone, really alone, for the first time, struggling to make sense of a world without the person who'd been at the centre of hers.

Sometimes she'd blamed Ella. Sometimes, it was Cassie. But mostly she'd blamed herself, for not having the sense to realise that no mother would be able to stand back and watch her child be killed, whatever kind of monster he would grow to become. If she'd been alive, she might have cried herself to sleep over it. At least then there would have been some escape from the sadness. But since she couldn't do that anymore, she had to live with her grief - or rather, be dead with it - twenty four seven. The only release she'd had was in her daydreams.

Perhaps it was a sign of madness. Perhaps it was a sign of missing someone so much that you couldn't bring yourself to believe they were really gone. But what did the distinction between real and unreal matter when you were dead as a dodo and still hanging like a bad smell around the school you'd never got a chance to graduate from? It had seemed a harmless fantasy to curl up in the darkness, shut her stinging eyes and pretend that Cassie was there helping her through it, holding her close and whispering words of comfort in her ear. The way Ella wouldn't: and couldn't, even if she'd wanted to.

Eventually, though, Cassie's absence had become a fact of life instead of a gaping hole in the fabric of Thelma's universe. She'd learned to live without her - and when that had happened, there had been no more need for fancies that were never going to come true. They'd faded away, the same way Cassie herself had done.

Or so she'd thought.

"You trespassed into enough of my dreams," Cassie was saying. "It's only fair that I get to invade one of yours."

"I don't dream."

"You daydream."

"Not about you. Not anymore." As she said the words, Thelma felt a stab of some emotion she couldn't quite place. She pondered on it for a second before realising it was guilt. It felt familiar: as if it was something she'd been living with for so long that she'd accepted it as part of herself, a second skin that she'd never realised was there or stopped to wonder why.

She wasn't quite sure why it was there, when she'd dealt with Cassie's death and moved on, better than anyone could be expected to when they'd watched the love of their life dissolving into dust right in front of them.

"I mean, I think about you - of course I do - but I'm, you know. Getting on with my life. So to speak..."

"Good," Cassie said, sitting up until her eyes were level with Thelma's. "Because you know that's what I'd want."

"I suppose I must do if I'm dreaming about you saying it."

"It helped, didn't it? That we got to say goodbye."

Thelma admired the shape of her lips as she spoke, remembering what that first - and last - kiss had felt like. "It did," she agreed.

"And we said everything that needed to be said."

"We did."

"So why are we still having these imaginary conversations?"

"So you're not really here," Thelma said, half-hopeful even though she knew that given the circumstances of Cassie's death a return, much less a resurrection, was never going to be possible. Cassie just smiled mysteriously.

Embarrassed at saying something so stupid, she added hastily, "I don't know why I'm dreaming about you. I mean, I've got Maya now."

"Oooh," Cassie said. "I bet you have some very interesting daydreams about her."

"What's the point in make believe, when you've got the real thing? And Maya doesn't play games with me, unlike you, you bloody tease. You knew how I felt and you just used it to control me..." She broke off the rant with a sigh, realising it was Malachi, who had done exactly the same thing to murderous effect, that she was really angry at. "Like mother, like son, hey?"

"I told you I loved you."

"Eventually."

"Oh, Thelma," Cassie chided her. "You always knew."

Thelma nodded, cherishing the memory of that last farewell, grateful for it. Grateful to Azazeal, for all his faults, for making it possible. She regretted the result; what her reunion with Cassie had cost Ella - for a brief time her sanity, almost her life. But eternity was a long time, and it would have seemed even longer without having the chance to say goodbye.

"You gave him the stone...you stupid, selfish bitch..."

"Sometimes you just have to forget about the world and follow your feelings..."

Maybe by now she should have realised it was the other way around. She should have learned her lesson, the one Ella never could. The one about the greater good being more important than whatever you happened to be feeling. But was it, really? Where exactly was the good in doing the right thing, only to end up lonely, and miserable?

Don't I deserve more than that?

"You don't know how much it helped, hearing that. Seeing you again. I didn't know how I was supposed to go on without you. But you told me my place was here, helping Ella. You gave me a reason to carry on."

"And you have. And I would be very proud of you for it."

"I know you would," Thelma said. She smiled wryly, noticing for the first time that Cassie was fully dressed. In jeans and one of the cardigans she used to love so much, no less. "This is a bloody useless fantasy, isn't it?"

Cassie rested the palm of her hand under her chin. "So why have it?"

Thelma looked down at the duvet to steady herself, and then back over at Cassie, hungrily passing her gaze over the contours of her face, the blonde hair that framed it like a halo. She'd committed her image to memory, poring over photographs like a woman possessed, determined not to let any of it fade away. But already, the details were growing dim, receding into the distance the way they always did with people who were gone, no matter how well loved they'd been.

Enough time had passed that she couldn't instantly recall things like the shade of Cassie's eyes, the shape of her nose - even the sound of her voice. She had to dredge deep into her memories to bring back what her devotion should have been able to keep just beneath the surface.

She knew her ability to remember the smallest detail was no measure of how much she'd cared. But it felt a lot like it.

After a moment's pause, she admitted, "I guess...because I feel guilty."

"Because you're starting to forget about me?"

"I'll never forget," Thelma vowed through gritted teeth. She stubbornly tried to summon a memory of another time they'd sat together like this, putting the world to rights, back in the days before Azazeal had showed up, when they'd both had their entire lives ahead of them. But another, more recent, memory drifted up instead: of being with Maya, tracing circles on her bare skin, overcome with the wonder of being able to touch her. The new overwrote the old, pushed it further into the past; replaced it.

Thelma sank back onto the pillows, suddenly realising why it was she felt such a sickly, silent sense of guilt.

"It's because of Maya, isn't it?"

Cassie shook her head. "It's because that's just the way it's meant to be."

"But I loved you - I loved you more than anything. You were everything I wanted. I thought you were the only thing that could ever make me happy. And yet here I am, finding happiness with someone else."

She stopped to take a breath she didn't need, to ask a question she'd never quite managed to answer.

"How can I love someone enough to die for them - and let go of them so easily?"

"Because it was the only thing you could do," Cassie said. "And I wouldn't want you to grieve for me forever, you know that. I would want you to be happy."

Thelma snorted. "See, now I know I'm dreaming. All this 'you-would-want' crap. It's what I keep telling myself - but I'm not so sure it's what Cassie would be telling me.

"She might be dead, but dead people? Contrary to popular opinion, we're not saints. We don't always do, or say...or want...the right thing. We do have feelings - we actually like feeling things..."

Cassie raised an eyebrow and folded her arms across her chest to block the view.

"...and if it was Cassie who'd found someone else, if it was Cassie who was merrily carrying on with her life as if I'd never been there and we'd never meant anything to each other, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be smiling down on her. I'd be pissed off."

"You were," her former roommate reminded her. "You hated it when I was going out with Troy."

"Well, I was jealous, wasn't I?"

"But I was happy. Didn't you want that for me, even if it couldn't be with you?"

"But Troy," Thelma spluttered, "for God's sake, he had a pe-"

Cassie cut her off with a horrified shriek.

"I was going to say, perm... God, you had terrible taste in men. And I haven't even got to Azazeal yet..." She looked over at Cassie sceptically. "And I really don't believe you were happy with him. He did nothing but make your life a misery."

"Sometimes," Cassie said softly, "you'd rather be miserable with someone than without them. I loved him. Even though I knew it was wrong. Even though it was only ever going to end in tears..."

Thelma stared at her, the words hitting home. Cassie narrowed her eyes sternly. "Didn't you want me to be happy, Thelma?"

"Maybe a bit," she conceded grudgingly.

"A bit..?"

Thelma abandoned the pretence of not caring. "With all my heart," she said sincerely.

"And I want - would want - the same for you. So don't ever think that by being with Maya, you're somehow betraying me. You're not."

"I'm betraying Ella though, aren't I?"

"This isn't about Ella. It's about you, and Maya - and me."

"Now that would have been an interesting daydream," Thelma said, grinning wolfishly.

"What you feel for Maya doesn't change how you felt about me," Cassie continued, as if she hadn't spoken, as if it was convenient to ignore what she'd said. And Thelma couldn't deny that it was convenient. It suited a part of her, a very big part, not to think about Ella, or Leon, or anyone else Malachi might trample upon to get what he wanted.

What about what I want? Why is it always me who has to make all the sacrifices?

"It doesn't change how I felt about you."

"Eventually..."

"You've got a shot at happiness here," Cassie reminded her, the words soft pearls of persuasion. "So stop being so bloody stupid - and seize it."

Thelma sighed, the consequences of being at Malachi's beck and call flitting briefly before her. Then came the consequences of not doing what he wanted, and they chilled her to the core. He could take Maya away as quickly as he'd given her, and he didn't have to kill her again to do it. All he had to do was tell the truth. If she knew Thelma was responsible for her death - if she knew how many lies she'd told - Maya wouldn't even want to look at her, let alone be anywhere near her.

She was supposed to be on Ella's side, but she was allowing Malachi to pull her strings.

Weak.

She took pride in going her own way, yet he was issuing orders, and she was following them.

Wrong.

She was helping him get what he wanted - just so she could carry on getting what she wanted.

You stupid, selfish bitch...

Facilitating a date with Ella had been an innocent enough request. Thelma could justify that one easily enough, tell herself that it was driven more by hormones than some evil masterplan. And there was nothing malevolent about a spot of matchmaking - not that Leon would have seen it that way, of course. But Malachi wasn't going to let her off the hook that easily, and if she carried on helping him, who knew what it would lead to? There would be a terrible price to pay if he was allowed to fulfil whatever dark destiny had been laid out for him.

But losing Maya somehow seemed far worse a fate.

"I suppose life's too short not to," she said, expecting Cassie to laugh at the irony. But she just nodded sombrely.

"Much too short."

"You know," Thelma said slowly, "even though I've got Maya now, and she means the world to me, there's a part of me that wishes..."

Some days...sometimes...

"It could have been you." She smiled through the hot tears suddenly pricking the back of her eyes. "You always wonder, don't you? I suppose...I always will."

Cassie clasped her hand tenderly in answer. The flesh felt warm and alive as it met hers, just like it had when they'd held hands out in the darkness of the school grounds, even though neither of them had been real then, even though neither of them was real now.

None of it ever was. It was the curse of their relationship that it only came to life in death and dreams.

"You gave me a reason to carry on," Thelma said eventually, breaking the silence. "But I didn't have a reason to live. Not until I met Maya. I love her...God help me. I really do."

"And she loves you."

It felt like a weight had been lifted from her as the tears finally leapt from Thelma's eyes and cascaded down her cheeks. She'd had life after death, and now she had love after death too. However it had been created, whatever it was going to be used to create, it was real love. Requited love. She'd never really had that with Cassie, and that fact alone filled her with a fierce determination to defend it.

However much she hated the fact that Malachi had her over a barrel - however selfish it was to put her need for Maya ahead of everything and everyone else - Thelma didn't want to lose her.

I've lost enough already.

She choked back a sob, not of misery, but of unexpected, unbridled joy. "Strange, hey?"

"No," Cassie said. "I think you're quite lovable."

"I'm dreaming about you, you cow, of course you're going to say that."

"But you know I'd..."

"...say it, if you were here. Yeah. I do."

"But I am here," Cassie whispered, as if she was revealing a state secret. "I told you I'd always be with you, didn't I? And I am."

"I know." She tapped at her head with her free hand. "In here."

Cassie took their entwined hands and placed them over Thelma's unbeating heart. "In here."

"What about Maya?" she asked, hesitantly.

"Oh, I think there's more than enough room in there for both of us."

Thelma smiled, reassured, the last traces of guilt melting away. She slid back down the silken bedspread as Cassie squeezed her hand, rubbing her thumb over the knuckles gently. It was a soothing motion, like the movement of the sea, and her thoughts drifted along with it, away from Cassie, and back to reality.

She opened her eyes to find Ella bending over her, staring at her.

With a squeal of shock, she leapt off the bed. "Just resting my eyes..."

Ella peered at her suspiciously. "You were drooling."

Thelma put a hand to her mouth and found her lips dripping with tears. "Actually," she said, drying her face with the back of a hand, paying careful attention to still-damp eyes, "I was daydreaming."

Ella glanced down at the crumpled sheets of her bed. Thelma smoothed them over obediently. And then, for a split second, out of the corner of her eye, she thought she saw it: a blonde hair on the pillow, glinting in the afternoon sunshine. She blinked in disbelief and looked closer. But there was nothing there except the thread running along the seam of the pillowcase.

"Trick of the light," she muttered, marvelling at just how nuts she must be to start thinking Cassie had actually been there. Being desperate enough to justify her behaviour that she was seeking approval from a figment of her imagination was bad enough. Being desperate enough to convince herself she'd got the thumbs up from the real thing - well, maybe they should have locked her up in the asylum with Ella and thrown away the key.

Cassie had been dispatched into darkness, body and soul. There was no coming back from that: as a ghost, as a dream-walking presence, as anything. It was nothing but a bad case of wishful thinking to suggest she'd somehow found her way back just so she could tell Thelma what she'd most wanted to hear. Wasn't it?

Ella looked confused. "Don't you mean trick of the mind?"

"What's wrong with that?" Thelma retorted, on the defensive.

"Nothing..."

"Ghosts have imaginations too, you know!"

"Very vivid ones," Ella remarked witheringly, clearly suspecting some kind of fantasy orgy had been taking place while she'd been suffering through an hour of David Tyrel.

"You have no idea," Thelma said. She ignored the questions written all over Ella's face and didn't offer any details. Instead she thought of the past, of Cassie, of everything they'd shared; and surrendered to the sadness for a second, wondering what might have been.

Then, with an enigmatic smile in Ella's direction, she headed off towards the door, and towards the future she'd never expected to have, but intended to make the most of. Towards Maya.

Because in the end it didn't really matter whether it had, by some impossible miracle, been real, or more likely, just a daydream. She would have come to the same conclusion either way: that whatever depths she might find herself sinking to in the days and weeks ahead, however many tears she was going to shed about it...

I do deserve to be happy. I want to be happy.

And, dead person's cliché or not - she was sure it was what Cassie would have wanted too.

END