by Jenn Burke
Ben shook his head. “No. You’re—you’re wrong.”
I let myself slide into the otherplane—but only halfway, so I looked like a traditional ghost, with see-through body and ethereal voice and all. “I’m not wrong.”
The computer was loud when it smashed to the ground.
* * *
Twenty minutes later, we were in a Starbucks, broken computer and all. The computer occupied the seat beside Ben—as though it was his friend out for a coffee too—so I took the chair next to Hudson. Not a hardship. Except Ben kept shooting wary looks my way instead of paying attention to Hudson’s questions seeking out every last detail he could provide. He seemed to expect me to do... I don’t know, something sketchy. I wasn’t sure what he’d do if I did. Run? Piss himself? Pass out? All three?
After about five minutes of darting glances and nervous shifting, I decided to give both him and Hudson a break. I got up, squeezing Hudson’s shoulder, and held up my cell. “Gonna call Evan.”
I moved over to the wall near the washrooms and eyed the ads up on the bulletin board as I waited for my call to connect. My eyes about bugged out of my head at the rent someone was asking for a studio apartment for sublet. I knew real estate in the city was stupid these days, but man.
“Hey, Wes,” Evan answered.
Caller ID—I loved it, but after decades of it not being a thing, I still found it weird for someone to greet me with my name instead of the traditional hello. “We found Ben.” I summarized our conversation—about Arwin Salzwedel’s plan to reconfigure ghosts to serve his own needs, whatever they were.
“Holy shit,” Evan said. “Isk, you got all that?”
“Yeah.” Isk’s voice grated over the line. “We found something too.”
Because Ben wasn’t the only string we had to tug. We’d left Evan and Iskander back in the office to dig up any connections they could find between Professor Salzwedel and the old lady who’d pawned her brooch to keep her lights and heat on.
“More details on what kind of entertainer Silvia Samuels was,” Iskander continued.
Evan jumped in. “The weird kind. She put on one-woman burlesque-like shows where she told attendees their future.”
“Uh...” I blinked. “Okay, yeah, that’s one of the weirder things I’ve heard. So, what, she danced and stripped and paused midway through to give someone lotto numbers?”
“Dude, I have no idea. But she was pretty popular for a while.”
“Until the makeup couldn’t hide the lines anymore, am I right?”
“Seems like. In the eighties, she switched to only the fortune-telling without the dancing.”
“And by 2010, she was broke.” I flicked the “call now” tabs of one of the ads on the bulletin board. “Tragic, but I don’t see how—”
“Ah, ah, I wasn’t done.” Evan sounded way too smug. “Silvia Samuels had no family.”
“Right. I already knew that.”
“But Silvia Salzwedel did.”
I froze. “Come again?”
“She changed her name to Samuels in the sixties, before she started performing. I’m guessing the family wasn’t thrilled about her profession.”
“Holy shit.”
“Right?”
“Where does she fit in the family tree?”
“She’s Arwin Salzwedel’s great-aunt.”
“Mother of Vincent?”
“No, that’d make him Arwin’s cousin something-something removed, not his uncle. She didn’t have any kids, as far as we can tell.”
My mind whirled. “That’s the connection we were looking for, but fuck if I can figure out what it means.”
“At least we’ve covered the how. If the professor’s figured out how to reprogram ghosts and get them to do what he wants...”
The idea still made me want to puke. Hijacking someone’s soul—to commit crimes, or be used as a power source, or whatever else Salzwedel had thought up—was so...so...
Casually evil.
“But why? Why kill his uncle? Why steal his great-aunt’s brooch now, years after she pawned it?”
“That, we don’t know.”
I glanced over my shoulder at Hudson and Ben. The kid seemed to be a bit more relaxed. His hands weren’t trembling anymore. “Okay, I’m going to ask Ben some more questions. Keeping you on speaker.”
“Got it.”
Ben tensed up again as soon as I sat down, but I didn’t have time for it. “Warm again? Yeah? So why did the professor reprogram a ghost to steal a brooch from a pawnshop and another to kill his uncle?”
“Jesus Christ, Wes.” Hudson rubbed a hand over his face.
“What?”
“There’s such a thing as subtlety and tact.”
“Huh. Is there?” I turned back to Ben. “C’mon, man. My gut is screaming at me right now that we’re scratching the surface of the bad that your prof is involved in.”
“But that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. He’s not bad. He’s crazy smart.”
I’d buy the crazy part of that description, for sure. “They’re not mutually exclusive, you know.”
“He’s going to solve the energy crisis.” His gaze bounced from Hudson to me and back. “I’m serious!”
“By using souls.” I held up a hand when Ben opened his mouth to argue. “I’m not going to debate that with you. You mentioned he’s got a workshop. Where?”
Ben’s brow wrinkled. “In a garage on his property. Why? Oh—no. No, no, no. No way.”
“No what?” I said innocently.
Ben leaned over the table. “You want to break in,” he whispered. “No! I’m not going to help you.”
I leaned forward too. “You owe me.”
“I don’t—”
“You put my best friend in a coma to save your own ass. She has a dislocated shoulder. She has a fucking fractured skull. She was in the hospital for more than a week. She’s still got regular headaches and she might for months. You owe her so much, but she’s not here right now, so I’m gonna collect on her behalf.” I straightened. “Unless...oh hey, did I mention Hudson here used to be a cop? We’ve got lots of friends downtown still.”
“Lots,” Hudson echoed.
“Fuck.” Ben collapsed forward, resting his head on the table and nearly upending his half-full coffee cup. He banged his head once, twice, and looked up. “Okay,” he said on a sigh. “But after this we’re even.”
I arched a brow. “No. You don’t get to call that.”
“Wes—”
I crossed my arms as I looked at Hudson. “He doesn’t. He could have killed her. Because of him, her family, me, you, all of her friends—we were all scared out of our minds. So no.” I turned my glare to Ben. “He doesn’t get to say when we’re even.”
For once, Ben met my gaze without flinching. “Fair,” he breathed. “I fucked up and I’ve got to own it. But you’re not—you’re not going to hurt the professor, right?”
“That’s not our intention,” Hudson said. “We want to know what he’s doing, and we want to convince him to stop. Through words, not violence.”
I saw the hope in Ben’s eyes—but there was skepticism there too. I wasn’t sure if he was doubting Hudson’s word, or if he knew something we didn’t about the good professor.
* * *
Arwin Salzwedel lived in Downsview, in a modest brick bungalow with a detached garage tucked to the side. It sort of reminded me of Hudson’s place—his destroyed place—minus the ornate metal fence. Someone had shoveled only one side of the double driveway. The other side sported about a foot of snow that was not at all pristine—we went through too many melts and freezes for accumulated snow to look pretty after a month or so. Christmas lights flashed sullenly from one of the bushes next to the front door, crowded in bunches and uneven as though they’d been placed on the tree as an afterthought and th
eir existence forgotten.
There were no lights on in the house, and I couldn’t see any windows in the garage to determine if it was equally dark in the interior as it was on the exterior. Hudson stopped at the corner and turned right, as though the little bungalow was of no interest to him. About a block away, he pulled to the side and parked the rented SUV.
“I don’t like this,” Hudson murmured.
I kissed his cheek. “If I could leave you out of this, I would.”
Entering—without breaking, thank you—was my thing. When we’d started dating in 1980, Hudson had been a rookie cop, idealistic and keen, but he’d been surprisingly okay with my job. Okay, not happy with it and wishing I would find a new career, but never telling me I had to change. Which, looking back, was probably the biggest sign he was into me. I’d respected that, and made sure my profession didn’t touch him in any way, shape or form. But I needed Hudson to keep watch over Ben while I ghosted through the garage door.
“I don’t want to be left out. What happens if you get caught up in this...pied piper song when you go ghost?”
“It won’t be there anymore. We’ve got the device they left at the youth home. Even if there are more—” as Ben had suggested “—by removing the first one, it’ll have disrupted the system. Right?” I said to Ben.
He shrugged.
Hudson glared at him and turned back to me. “Are you sure, though? What if—”
I cupped his cheeks and gave him a soft kiss. “Hud. It’ll be okay.”
Especially if Ren and Rosanna were right and I was a god.
Maybe.
I shoved all thoughts of potential godhood out of my brain as we got out of the SUV and hiked through the cold to the professor’s house. Ben wasn’t enthusiastic, but he’d stopped protesting, at least. Rather than make ourselves conspicuous by tromping through the snow-covered yard, we walked up the cleared side of the driveway as though we were going to ring the doorbell to sell him magazines or something.
At midnight. Sure.
It didn’t matter anyway because the street was dead. No cars drove by, no lights on neighbors’ houses came on, nothing. I could hear the constant thrum of traffic in the distance from larger streets, but Nash Drive remained quiet.
Ben nodded at the garage’s side door. The windows were boarded up, so there was no way for us to prepare ourselves for what might be inside.
Before Hudson could get more worried—and ramp up my own worry—I stepped into the otherplane.
And something...tugged at me.
It wasn’t like the voices I’d heard at one of the murder scenes in the spring—whispers that I couldn’t quite make out but felt compelled to get closer to. And it wasn’t a force like the trap I’d fallen into at the same scene that tried to drag me through the otherplane to the beyond. This was...it was...
I needed to go inside.
Dazed, I stepped through the door, and my heart sang with the rightness of it. Yeah, that was it. This was where I needed to be. Inside, safe, with the others already gathered here, waiting...waiting...
Wait.
Wood rattled against wood, and my memory came rushing back.
I stumbled into the living plane, breathing hard, and fell against the door.
Behind me, a feminine voice shouted, “What the—”
I flipped the lock open and stepped back, then turned to face the interior of the garage as Hudson and Ben burst through the door.
The girl who I’d seen with Ben at the Ghost Squad meeting—his girlfriend, Joelle—and Arwin Salzwedel stared at us in confusion and anger, respectively. We all kind of froze in this weird standoff of a tableau, until I noticed what was in one of the bays where a vehicle was supposed to be.
A dozen angry ghosts staring at me.
The faces closest to me were set in nearly identical expressions of rage. If they were intelligent once, I was pretty sure those motionless scowls meant they weren’t any longer. Had something Salzwedel done caused that, or had they lost their sense of individuality after being cooped up together? Either outcome was horrifying. The energy rising off them was uniformly negative, making the hair on my arms and neck stand up. But the worst part?
One of the ghosts was Charlie, the biker I’d met in Aurora House.
A series of machines that looked like pylons about a foot tall encircled the crowd, and I could see something that looked like a pentagram etched into the concrete floor beneath their feet.
“Ben?” Salzwedel’s query cut through my building horror.
“Professor, I’m sorry, they forced me—”
“What the hell is going on?” Salzwedel demanded, stepping forward to confront Hudson and me.
I waved a hand at the circle of ghosts. “What is that?” My voice shook—with horror or rage, I wasn’t even sure.
“None of your goddamned business,” Salzwedel snarled. “Get the hell off my property.”
Hudson laid a hand on my shoulder as he stood close behind me. “What?” he murmured in my ear.
“Trapped ghosts. Oh my god, Hud. They’re...it’s horrible. And Charlie—she’s right there, but she doesn’t—there’s nothing intelligent there anymore.” I took a step in the direction of the circle because I couldn’t let it stand for a moment more.
“No!”
Salzwedel leaped out in front of me—which was a mistake. Hudson was suddenly there between us, his arms out to either side to prevent Salzwedel from getting past. Claws extended from each of his fingers and he crouched in a fighting stance.
“Jesus Christ!”
Salzwedel jolted back into Joelle, who tripped sideways and knocked over one of the circle pylons. She screamed. Ben rushed forward, pushing me out of the way, and then Salzwedel shoved me from the other direction as he made for the door. I crashed to the floor and Hudson started after him, but skidded to a stop when Ben cried out.
The ghosts hadn’t moved but something had grabbed Ben and hoisted him into the air—tentacles of energy and malice that I couldn’t see, but I could definitely feel. Joelle crabwalked backward, away from Ben’s airborne form, staring up at him with her mouth wide and tears streaming from her eyes.
“What—”
“Help!” Ben’s voice was strangled and his face was turning red.
Here’s the thing about angry ghosts: they normally don’t give a shit about other ghosts or not-ghosts, in my case. Or things that are maybe, kinda, but not really dead, like Hudson.
But they really, really liked the energy given off by young people.
And these ones looked hungry.
Chapter Twenty-One
There have been a number of moments in my life that illustrate I’m not the best person. Like when I hesitated instead of immediately intervening when a woman was murdered in front of me. Or when I demanded that Evan keep my secret. I want to be good, and generally, I think I am. But sometimes...maybe not so much.
Like in this moment—I seriously considered letting the ghosts take Ben. It would be justice for them. Justice for Lexi. A lesson learned. Except I wasn’t sure he’d survive it, and that was too high a price to pay when I could prevent it.
I unboxed my magic and stepped into the otherplane. The pied piper’s song screamed in my ears, but I forced myself not to acknowledge it, not to recognize it, and certainly not to get swept up by it. I focused all of my attention on the crowd of fuzzy, indistinct ghosts. They needed to be contained.
First I had to pull them into the otherplane, where they belonged. I lifted my hands and imagined a giant bubble surrounding them. It instantly popped into being—which was weird, because up until now, the otherplane had been a static reflection of the real world. Creating something within it felt strange and unnatural. Then I focused harder and brought the ghosts through from the living plane into the bubble.
Step one complete.
&nb
sp; Step two was sending the ghosts into the beyond. Unlike the situation at the frat house, there was no tear here that I could shove them through—except, wait. Yeah, there was, because I’d used my magic. It was a lot smaller than the one at the frat house, but it was big enough for my purposes. I hoped. I would have to encourage them to leave, one by one, and that was going to take time.
I wasn’t sure I had the time, but I also knew I couldn’t leave the ghosts in the bubble. But maybe I could get Charlie to help me. If I could get through to her.
She was pressed against the bubble, her clothes and hair the same as I remembered from our talk at Aurora House. Her eyes were different—empty and dark—and her expression had no trace of the easygoing woman I’d spoken to.
“Charlie? Remember me?”
Nothing.
“We talked at Aurora House. Uh, at the old farm? You told me about ghosts appearing and disappearing. And their screams. I understand about the screams now.”
Still nothing. She stared at me, her expression as angry and devoid of humanity as it had been when I first saw her in the garage.
“I’m sorry this happened to you,” I whispered. “I’m going to send you home now, and I hope that fixes things.”
It had to fix things. I couldn’t stand thinking of all of these ghosts—these souls—existing as inhuman bits of energy for eternity. I wasn’t a praying sort of guy, but I sent up a whisper of hope that the beyond would repair whatever damage Salzwedel had inflicted.
I engaged my magic again, wincing as the tear grew larger, but I didn’t have a choice. Reaching out, I grabbed Charlie with my magic as gently as I could. She didn’t react—which told me more than anything that whatever was left of these people, it wasn’t what made them them. I tugged her through the bubble and over into the tear, and she didn’t even make a sound as it sucked her through to the beyond and she disappeared.
“Bye, Charlie.” I swallowed hard and set to work sending the rest of the ghosts home.
I couldn’t have said how long it took me, but when the last ghost was pressed through the border to the beyond, I stepped back into the living plane—only for my knees to give out. Hudson darted forward to grab me before I could hit the cement floor.