by N. P. Martin
I shook my head. What a disaster. “All right,” I said in a vain attempt to explain things. “I can see how this all looks. I know it sounds crazy and everything, but Leona, you have to believe me. I came here to confront the real killer, the person who murdered that poor woman right there. I called you to tell you to meet me here as well. Only when I got here, the killer set off a spell that erased all memory of him from existence…and I got caught in the blast. So now, all memory of me has been wiped out of existence as well.” I paused to see if she believed me or not. It didn't appear that she did, going by the look of disdain on her face. I couldn’t say I blamed her. It was a lot to take on faith. “Don’t look at me with that face…I know that face. You think I’m some crackpot trying to lie my way out of this…I’m not, I swear.”
She sighed and shook her head. “Turn around and put your hands on your head. I’ve heard enough of this bullshit.”
She didn’t believe me. It was Leona after all, so I should have known. She didn’t care about the sob stories that spewed out of the mouths of those she hunted. She only cared about catching them and bringing them in. The rest she left up to Brentwood, her boss at Division.
I couldn’t let her take me to Division HQ as a total stranger, for they would send me to the “Containment Unit” and I would just be another powerless inmate among dozens of others. I had to do something, and quick, before she handcuffed me. Not that I couldn’t slip the cuffs if I wanted to, but why make things harder for myself?
“I know you, Leona,” I said in a last ditch attempt to get through to her. “I know you have a birthmark in the shape of a star on the inside of your left thigh, and a scorpion tattoo on your back. I know you work out every day and that your favorite exercise is barbell squats, simply because you know so many people hate doing them, which motivates you to do them. I know your favorite food is Chinese and you like to eat at the little restaurant near where you live, which is in Worthington, by the way. And I also know that you love oral sex and that when we sleep together, you hold my head down there so long sometimes that when I come up, it feels like I’ve been deep sea diving.”
A snorting laugh involuntarily left her mouth when I said that, but she quickly caught it and shook her head, resetting her stony expression.
“You also have a hell of a grip,” I continued, fully aware I was now at serious risk of pissing her off beyond the point of no return. She had a habit of shooting people when that happened. “Which is why you favor big guns over small ones, like that Beretta you’re pointing at me right now, which you had custom made two years ago by a gunsmith called Tony Brasco over in Pinehurst. I could go on, but we both know I’m telling the truth here. And given the crazy magical world we live in, is it so beyond the realms of possibility that this shit could happen? You’ve encountered stranger, Leona. I know you have.”
Doubt was creeping up on her, I was glad to note, causing her normal stone cold expression to falter somewhat. She never lowered the gun though, despite the fact that she was clearly having doubts. “Either you’ve read my file or you’re using magic somehow,” she said, though her voice wasn’t as certain as it was before.
Building upon her growing uncertainty, I said, “We both know your military and government records are completely sealed. It would take a top level hacker or a highly skilled Technomancer to get a hold of your files, and I wasn’t aware that ‘loves oral sex’ is on your file anyway.” I gave a small chuckle when she didn’t respond, and she just kept staring at me with those cold blue eyes that always seem to lock on like magnets. I shook my head. “All right, you know what I’m saying. I’ve never seen your files. And I’m also not working any magic either. Don’t forget, you’re wearing that talisman around your neck, underneath your top. The talisman I gave you shortly after we met. It’s Alexian crystal, bright blue, imperfectly cut, and it wards you against most magical attacks. I have a similar one around my own neck.”
Her eyes narrowed, and she tilted her head to the side slightly. “All right. Let’s say I believe you—”
“Yes, let’s do that. Good idea. Then you can finally lower that cannon from out of my face.”
“Are you always this annoying?”
“Only when guns get pointed at me.”
She shook her head. “So let’s say I believe you. Maybe you did know me, though I can’t believe I’d ever sleep with you. I mean…” She snorted as she trailed off, leaving her supposed lack of interest in me as a fuck buddy (we were more than that, but whatever) hanging in the air for me to notice.
I started shaking my head at her. “You see, you say that now, but you actually couldn’t resist my charms, and if you’d just lower the gun, then you—”
Leona pressed the gun to my forehead. “You talk too much.”
“Only when—”
“Yeah, I know. Only when you have a gun pointed at you.”
“Something like that.”
“Fact is, whether you knew me or not, it doesn’t matter. You still could have killed that woman there.”
“True,” I said.
“So then I wouldn’t be doing my job if I just let you go, would I?”
I couldn’t argue with her logic. Leona had a habit of doing that, mentally or physically maneuvering people into corners they couldn’t escape from. It was a special skill of hers, honed to perfection when she was an interrogator in Iraq. “No, you wouldn’t.”
Which is why, the whole time I’d been talking to her, I’d been inwardly reciting a spell, and charging up my magic. A spell that I knew would bypass the defensive capabilities of the talisman I had given her.
But just as I was about to unleash the spell, something dark and screechy whooshed over our heads, causing us both to flinch and duck.
“What the fuck was that?” she asked, looking around her, the gun still on me.
“That,” I said, “is something that might be trouble if you don’t take that gun away and let me deal with it.”
She seemed to consider hard for a moment as the dark entity continued to rush around the room, still making that awful screeching noise as it went. Then she finally shook her head and lowered the gun. “Goddamn it. Sometimes I hate this fucking job.”
“I know you do, love,” I said, breathing easy once more. "But you’re also the best I know at it, so let’s kick this thing’s ass before it kicks ours, shall we?"
3
Specter
THE SCREECHING ENTITY whooshing about above our heads was called an Atavism, which is distinct from a Trauma Ghost. A Trauma Ghost is, as the name implies, the spirit of someone who has died in generally traumatic circumstances, and who refuses to move on until they correct their unfinished business as it were. The thing flying around above our heads was not so much a ghost as a specter. It was the ectoplasmic leftovers of the dead girl’s soul. While the girl’s soul had by now probably risen into the Astral Plane and beyond to the River of Souls, the extreme emotions she gave out just before her violent death remained behind in the form of the ghostly specter that was swooping and darting around the room like a trapped bird, as it made an unholy noise that was part terror and part fury. A noise that sounded like scores of long fingernails being scraped along a blackboard. Both Leona and I had our faces screwed up as we flinched away from the noise.
Leona was trying to draw a bead on the specter as it rushed blindly overhead.
“Don’t bother,” I said, speaking loudly to be heard over the constant wailing and screeching. “Your bullets won’t do any good. Haven’t you come across one of these things before?”
“I’ve seen ghosts,” she said, still eyeing me suspiciously, almost like I had called the specter here myself as part of some elaborate escape plan. “Not quite like this, though.”
We both ducked when a plastic chair came flying toward us, which sailed over our heads and crashed into the wall behind us. Then the specter itself—somewhat approximating the previous physical form of the dead woman, only more stretched and transluce
nt, its face twisted and grotesque—barreled right at me at speed. Before I could move, the specter hit me like a gust of screaming, Arctic wind, passing right through me as it took my breath away and filled me with a psychic pain that manifested as deep fear and dread. For a long moment, I was all but crippled by the emotions the specter had elicited. I doubled over as my body tensed with such debilitating fear that my chest became so tight I couldn’t breathe properly. It was like the specter had left behind enough of itself, in passing through me that is, to ensure that I would feel everything she had before her death. I found myself unable to move as the woman did, then felt the stabbing pain in my eye sockets as if someone was carving out my eyes with a blunt knife. Then over various parts of my body, I felt a sharp, burning pain as if my flesh was being carved. And finally, the quick but shocking pain across my throat as if someone had just slit it open. The pain only lasted a few seconds, but it was some of the most intense I had ever felt, especially with the feelings of sheer terror that underlined it all.
I jumped when I felt Leona's strong grip on my arm as she tried to pull me up. "Come on!" she shouted. "We're getting out of here!"
"No!" I said, my paralysis easing a bit so I could at least stand up again. "We can't let that thing roam free. It'll just get more powerful, and then it will cause real damage somewhere else. I have to take care of it."
“Take care of it? How?”
The specter turned at the end of the room and began to fly toward us—toward me—again. Leona raised her Beretta and fired twice at the atavism. The specter seemed to disintegrate for a second as the bullets passed right through it and hit the far wall. Then it reformed as it started doing circles in the center of the room, creating a whirlwind of energy that began to pull whatever was lying around on the floor—chairs, bottles, dead rats and pigeons, even the pools of water on the floor caused by the leaky roof, as well as the dead woman’s blood—into itself. For a specter, its power was unusually strong. Normally, such entities didn't exhibit such poltergeist abilities, the extent of their influence usually being no more than a faint spirit manifestation and perhaps the transference of whatever emotions it held on to. In this case, the girl's death had obviously been so horrifically traumatic that the accompanying emotions were among the strongest I've encountered. It made me wonder what kind of monster the killer was, if they could inspire such terror in their victims.
Free now from the negative emotions put in me by the specter, I stood up straight and started to gather myself, beginning to shape and form the magical energy that was already crackling inside me. The only option was to destroy the specter. The dead girl's soul had already moved on, so obliterating her insane and translucent ectoplasmic leftover wouldn't cause the girl's soul any harm. Unless of course the girl's soul was still in the Astral Plane and she was actually manifesting and controlling this spectral thing herself, using it to lash out at the world she had been so cruelly snatched away from. The only way to tell is to travel to the Astral Plane to find and confront the girl's spirit whilst there, but I didn't have time to do so myself. If the specter was being controlled, the worst that would happen to the girl's spirit when I killed the specter was that she would experience little more than a bit of psychic pain. She was already dead after all.
“Are you going to do something or not?” Leona asked me. “Before this thing gets any stronger.”
Yes, I was going to do something. I was already sub-vocalizing the appropriate spell to deal with the specter, a Disintegration Spell, and it was almost ready to go. First though…
“That depends,” I shouted above the noise and the wind now howling throughout the room. “Do you believe me yet?”
“What?” Leona shouted back. She was still pointing the gun at the specter, not because she thought she could hurt it by shooting it, but because it made her feel better when she pointed her gun at things, less insecure about situations she couldn’t always control due to the magical forces involved.
"Do you believe I didn't kill the girl and that we are friends?"
She shook her head at me in angry frustration. “Just get rid of this fucking thing, will you?”
I knew that was as much as I was going to get by way of agreement so I turned my full attention to the crazy specter busy tearing up the room around us. My magic crackled just below the surface of my skin like electrical energy begging to be released. Magic didn't like to be held in too long once conjured. It always wanted to be out there, bending and shaping reality to whatever form intended by the user. In this case, I intended for the magic to wipe the specter out of existence, which the magic would happily do as long as my control over it was strong enough. You still had to be careful though. The spells that conjured and propelled the magic had to be exact, and your control and belief had to be spot on, otherwise things could go awry.
Fortunately for all concerned, I'd had a lot of practice at that stuff.
Muttering a few last words in a language which wasn't well known to anyone outside of wizard circles, I directed the magical energy I had inwardly conjured so that a sphere of amberish light the size of a soccer ball formed in my right hand. The ball of energy turned bright yellow in the center as I charged it up further, and the air around the ball crackled and sparkled with animated light particles.
The specter stopped in the center of its whirlwind and gave an ear piercing screech that would have cracked the windows in the room if they weren’t already broken. It was reacting to the magical energy in my hand, even though it didn’t know what it was. The specter was just having a primal reaction to something it didn’t understand. Everything it came across was a threat to it. Everything was worthy of being lashed out at.
Then, just as the specter burst from out of the center of the maelstrom it had created, I launched the ball of energy in my hand at it. The magic blast cut through the air at the speed of a cannon ball and slammed into the specter, spreading its blue colored energy throughout the ghostly entity until the specter gave one last screech as it exploded in a ball of blinding light, its form completely disintegrating in the air. The wind it had created stopped instantly and the objects it had swept up fell to the floor all at once. Then all was silent, and nothing remained of the specter apart from a few cobalt sparks floating in the air like fireflies, eventually fading out a moment later.
"Fuck yeah!" I said, still buzzing from the magic flowing through me, turning to Leona for a high-five, only to see she was pointing her gun at me again. “Oh, for gods sake! Seriously? I just saved us from a malignant specter.”
“That thing seemed pretty pissed at you,” she said. “Why would that be?”
“Because specters like that often fixate on the type of person who traumatized and killed them. It could just be that the girl was murdered by a man. They don't have much of mind, as you seen. They run on raw emotion, nothing more."
“You seem to have an answer for everything, don’t you?”
I nodded. “I normally do, yes. It’s kinda my job to sort situations like this out. You would know that if you remembered me.”
“Which I don’t.”
"Ah!" I said. "So you admit it is possible you do know me?"
“I’m not admitting anything,” she said, finally lowering the gun. “As far as I’m concerned this is just another fucked up situation that I find myself in. Sometimes I wonder—”
"Why you ever took the job at Division? Yeah, you say that a lot."
A slight smile creased her thin, but perfectly formed, lips. “All right. So maybe you didn’t kill the girl. What now?”
"Now, I try to find a way to reverse the spell I got caught up in. Then you'll remember me, and we can get back to being best buddies again."
"You're kidding, right? Best buddies?" She shook her head as if the idea didn't compute. "I just don't see it."
I smiled back. "As much as this spell I'm under is a pain in the ass, it's still going to be fun breaking down your barriers again to get to the soft center that I know lies under
neath all that armor."
“I don’t have a soft center,” she said, almost in disgust. “Fucking chocolates have soft centers. Not me.”
As Leona put her gun back in her holster, I went and picked mine up off the floor, sliding it inside my trench coat. "So this is where we part ways for now," I told her. "I'll call you when I find anything out. I have your personal cell number."
"Of course you do," she said with characteristic sarcasm. “Because we were such good friends, right?”
I grinned at her. “You go it.”
She stepped in front of me. “I don’t think I should be letting you go anywhere. I should keep you here until Brentwood arrives.”
“Look,” I said sighing. “I know you have your protocol and everything, but that would be a waste of time. Brentwood would have me taken into Division HQ and I don’t have time for that. It would be better if you let me go so I can start looking into this mess and maybe find a way to fix it so we can catch this killer.”
“We?” she said, raising her eyebrows.
I smiled at her as I began to walk away, glad when she didn’t try to stop me. “The two of us work well together. You’ll see.”
“That’s what I’m worried about. And Creed?”
I stopped and turned around. “Yes?”
“Don’t make me regret letting you go. If I find out you tricked me, or had anything to do with that woman’s murder, I’ll hunt you down and kill you. You can bank on that.”
My smile widened. “I wouldn’t want it any other way.”