by Gareth Otton
Stella struggled for words as something inside her screamed that this wasn’t right. She wasn’t the only one to feel that way.
“Where are your dreamwalkers?” Lizzie asked, manoeuvring her camera to catch the action. Stella could do without her filming this, but Lizzie’s question was good. Where were her dreamwalkers?
“Harry, where’s Chakikra and Gary?”
“We couldn’t find them, so we came alone,” Harry said without looking back. He was headed back for the building, waving for his men to follow when Stella rushed after him, her temper slipping free as she recognised the blatant lie.
She grabbed Harry’s arm, which was larger in circumference than one of her thighs, and she pulled him to a stop. She might have used a little too much force as Harry was pulled back hard enough to get whiplash. A flare of light burst from beneath his t-shirt, telling her he activated one of his dreamcatchers, and he shook free of her grip with the kind of strength that made her fingers hurt. It had been a long time since she felt strength like that, long before the Merging and her own supernatural changes.
“Keep your hands to yourself,” Harry snarled, pointing a gloved finger at her face.
“Why did you leave the dreamwalkers behind?” Stella demanded, refusing to back down even in the face of a pissed off giant like Harry.
“Fuck off. Now isn’t the time for questions like that.”
He turned to walk away again, but Stella wasn’t having that. She reached for him a second time, only this time he was ready. He turned on her, shoving her so hard she fell backwards into Freckles, bearing them both to the ground.
“Don’t you dare touch me, bitch,” he snarled, stalking forward with his hand raised like he might smack her. He never got the chance as suddenly Leon was between them and he shoved Harry back.
“Back off,” Leon said. “Your boss was just asking a question.”
Harry sneered at the word boss and his face reddened.
“I’ll teach you to shove me you little—” he said, advancing on Leon, who was a fraction of his size. He was cut off again as Leon pushed him once more, this time sending Harry stumbling backward a good six steps.
A look of surprise crossed Harry’s face as it continued to change colour until he almost resembled a beetroot, then he snarled and rushed forward. Once more light flared from under his t-shirt and Stella was terrified for her cousin. He looked like a child standing in front of a raging bull.
That raging bull rushed right into him shoulder first as though he would knock Leon aside. Leon stood his ground, planting his feet and absorbing everything Harry had to give. It was like Harry had shoulder barged a wall as Leon barely budged an inch.
Harry grunted in pain as his body collapsed against Leon, and by then it was too late. Leon got behind him and wrapped an arm around the big man’s neck, squeezing hard. Harry dropped his gun and reached for the arm, his muscles bulging and veins popping as he pushed his dreamcatcher hard enough that smoke rose from beneath his collar. However, for all his strength, Leon didn’t budge.
Suddenly Stella remembered her first meeting with Leon when he casually lifted a sofa with a person sitting on it as easily as she might lift a beach ball. She thought she was strong with her changes, but she was witnessing something else entirely.
However strong he might be though, he wasn’t bulletproof.
As Harry struggled to break his grip, the three Dream Team members he brought with him rushed up with their guns trained on Leon.
Visions of the only member of her family Stella had ever liked being filled with bullets flooded her mind, and she panicked. Climbing to her feet, she shouted, “Stop!”
The world listened.
The few members of the panicked crowd who hadn’t fled yet, stopped screaming and froze on the spot. Freckles who had found his feet and was heading for one of the men pointing a gun at Leon also stopped. Each of Harry’s men lowered their guns as though ashamed to be holding them. Finally, Leon let Harry go and Harry fell to his knees, gasping for breath.
Everyone was quiet and watching Stella as though waiting to see what she would say next.
What the hell was that, she asked herself, sure that this sudden stillness wasn’t natural.
“What the hell was that?” Lizzie asked, repeating Stella’s internal thoughts as she turned her camera to record Stella. Typical that whatever affected everyone else would somehow skip the annoying reporter. Stella forced that irritation aside and focused on Harry.
“Enough,” she said. “Why did you leave the dreamwalkers behind, Harry?”
Still recovering from being choked, Harry could only glare at her with tear-stained eyes and plenty of hate. It fell to one of his men to answer for him.
“They’d just get in the way.”
“Get in the way of dealing with mad ghosts, the very thing they’ve dealt with all their lives?” Lizzie asked incredulously, turning the camera again. Her expression was one of disgust, but Stella knew she must love this. The footage would result in her biggest show yet.
Stephan, the man speaking up for Harry, sneered in response to Lizzie’s question.
“They’re untrained idiots who used to be useful because we had no other way of dealing with these things. These mean we don’t need them anymore,” he said, flexing his right arm and drawing attention to the tattoos inscribed over his bulging muscles.
“Don’t need them anymore?” Stella asked. “That’s news to me. I don’t remember signing off on that.” The man sneered again and was about to say something else, but Stella spoke over him as suddenly she understood why she felt uncomfortable when the ghosts were destroyed. “You never gave them a chance to move on.”
“What?” Harry snapped, regaining his voice after glaring at Leon with naked hatred.
“You idiots can’t be this stupid,” Lizzie said. “She means you just killed three people who couldn’t help themselves. It’s like shooting a crazy person off their meds rather than trying to help them.”
“No, it’s worse,” Stella said, a true rage building that was making her voice tremble. “Those poor ghosts are now nothing. They don’t get a chance to move on to an afterlife, they have been obliterated because you took it upon yourselves to rewrite the rules.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Harry asked. “We just saved these people. Don’t turn that into a bad thing.”
“You did the most horrible thing I can think of,” Stella disagreed. “Those ghosts didn’t mean to turn into those things. A dreamwalker could have calmed them, could have let them move on rather than being destroyed. You didn’t even stop to think… you just…”
Stella’s words trailed off as she started to understand what she was saying.
They were gone. Those ghosts weren’t just dead, or moving onto another realm of existence. They had been snuffed out completely, their souls obliterated into nothingness.
Stella felt sick.
“You’re twisting things,” Stephan said, but unlike Harry, who was confident in his own pigheaded way, he didn’t sound sure of himself. In fact, he was looking a little sick, as were his friends. One of them glanced back over his shoulder and a fresh horror gripped Stella.
“No. Please tell me you’re not all doing this?” When no one answered, Stella stepped forward and grabbed Stephan by the front of his bullet-proof vest, dragging him down to her eye level as she asked again, “Please tell me Trevors is not destroying more ghosts.”
Stephan’s eyes widened and he shook his head, unable to answer.
“Oh my god,” Stella gasped before throwing Stephan away like he was poisonous and sprinting for The Phoenix, a supposed safe haven for desperate ghosts, hoping she wasn’t too late to stop a massacre.
6
Wednesday, 16th November 2016
18:31
At some point the building’s power had gone out, so darkness consumed Stella the moment she crossed the threshold. It took a few seconds for her eyes to adjust.
Cre
ated with the ambition of becoming Cardiff’s premier hotel, the reception was enormous. A large desk dominated the wall in front of her, there were doors to her left and right, and doors in the corners of the room that led deeper into the hotel. Next to those corner doors were the start of a grand staircase that lead to the first floor and beyond, starting at the sides of the room and meeting on a balcony in the middle that overlooked the reception.
There was no sign of life, and even when Stella closed her eyes and focused on her hearing, she detected nothing other than the voices behind her.
“Who are you? Are you a dreamwalker too?”
Stella turned, not thrilled to find Leon had followed her inside with Lizzie one step behind him, grilling him about who he was.
“What are you two doing here? This is Dream Team business.”
“You need backup,” Leon argued.
“What he said,” Lizzie echoed, though she was more interested in her camera than providing any kind of backup.
“Lose the camera.”
“No.”
“Lizzie, I’m not joking. You want to come with us, lose the camera.”
“No,” Lizzie said again, deadly serious. “Mr muscles over here brings whatever superpowers he has—”
“I don’t have superpowers,” Leon interrupted. Lizzie ignored him.
“—to the table, and Freckles over there has already proved how he’s going to back you up. Well, this is my weapon of choice.” She nodded at her camera. “You think your guys want to be seen murdering ghosts while there’s a reporter with a camera nearby?”
Stella made a sound that was almost a growl, but whether that was from annoyance with the reporter or annoyance with herself for not being able to argue against her logic, she didn’t know. She also didn’t have time for this, so turned her thoughts to other matters.
“I don’t know which way to go,” she admitted, hoping someone might point her in the right direction. She was right to hope that, but felt stupid for not thinking of the answer sooner.
“Looks like he has an idea,” Lizzie said, pointing at Freckles who was sniffing the air and heading for the stairs. Stella focused on her dog and tried something she only started practising recently. She focused her Eidolon senses on him.
Her most reliable gift, one she had used for most of her life, was her ability to spot lies, but her use of it had always been intuitive. She focused on changing that recently so she didn’t have to rely on instinct. As her constant companion, Freckles became her test subject, and it didn’t take long to discover a new aspect of her talent.
Stella suspected her ability was an extension of reading body language. Whether micro-expressions, slight changes in body temperature, maybe even certain pheromones that were released in the process of lying, Stella thought she could detect clues and intuit the truth. Tad favoured a more magical explanation, but if Stella’s theories were true, then it stood to reason that she could use those same clues to discover not just lies, but also intent.
Focusing on her dog, she looked at the way he moved, the tension in his muscles, the way he held himself; focused on absorbing as much information as possible while trusting her talent to process that data. It didn’t disappoint.
An image formed in her mind, almost like a memory of something that hadn’t happened yet. Freckles was rushing up the stairs, bearing right like he was about to turn into the corridor on the first landing. His hackles were up and his teeth were bared. At the same time another image flashed through her mind, one of her dog keening in frustration at being held back as he waited for Stella and the others to catch up.
The images lasted a fraction of a second, but it was long enough. Freckles had a scent he wanted to follow and was impatient for the others to catch up.
“Freckles, go. We’ll follow,” Stella said, long past the point of feeling awkward about giving complicated commands to her dog. Freckles didn’t need to be told twice. He rushed off faster than anything with two legs could follow, though Stella attempted to keep up.
By the time she reached the bottom step he was already on the first landing and when she was halfway up the stairs he had turned into the first corridor and his deep, booming bark echoed throughout the building, almost like he was sounding off to let her know where to go.
With him out of sight, Stella glanced back to the others and was surprised to see Leon about to overtake her. Lizzie was yet to reach the bottom of the stairs and looked like she was moving slowly to Stella’s eyes, almost like she was jogging. Stella didn’t have the mental bandwidth to figure out why the reporter was so sluggish and turned her attention to following her dog.
Leon reached the landing a few steps before her and entered the corridor by the time she made it to the top of the stairs. His eidolon gifts meant that both her cousin and her dog would reach Trevors before her, and that sent new worries through Stella’s mind, adding fuel to the fire that kept her moving. Somehow she found another gear and picked up the pace.
She thought the entrance was dark, but these corridors were near pitch blackness. Only slivers of light leaked into the hallway through the cracks under the doors lining either side of the corridor. It took Stella’s eyes time to adjust, forcing her to slow her pace to avoid tripping. However, soon she could see details again, even if they were only vague shapes. More than this, she heard sounds beyond her own breathing and footsteps. Raised voices came from ahead, accompanied by the rumbling growl of her dog.
“Get away from that thing. I won’t tell you again.”
Trevors’ voice, deep and resonant, added yet more fuel to the fire of her worry. As she approached the bend in the hall, the darkness receded. This wasn’t the electric yellow of the street-lights outside, but the white of the LED torches the tactical guys used.
“You can’t just destroy them, they don’t know what they’re doing.”
This was Leon’s voice, and Stella knew exactly how Trevors’ men would take criticism from him.
“Shut up and get out of my way. You shouldn’t even be here. You’re a civilian.”
Stella turned the corner and saw a tableau with so much going on she wasn’t sure what to be horrified by first.
The first thing she saw was Trevors squaring off with Leon, going so far as to raise his gun at her cousin. A little way behind him, two of Trevors’ men were approaching a cornered ghost with their arms outstretched, their tattoos already glowing while the ghost itself looked terrified. Rushing up behind those two men was Freckles, and he too had guns pointed at him.
Stella’s fear fed her instincts yet again, and for the second time she shouted, “Stop!”
Once again, the world listened.
Stella’s vision wavered, and she staggered, keeping herself from falling only by colliding with the nearest wall. Her vision blurred and her muscles became jelly. It only lasted a few seconds, and slowly the world came back into focus. However, those few seconds were long enough to worry her, and even now she felt like there was something wrong with her mind. It felt sluggish, like its gears weren’t spinning fast enough. Her muscles, especially those controlling her eyes, ached.
She worried she might be having a stroke, before a more rational side of her mind reminded her she had felt this way many times before. It just hadn’t happened in about six months.
She was tired.
She had grown so used to never sleeping that she had forgotten what weariness felt like.
Now she knew what it was, she could push it aside and refocus on the scene before her. The men were staring at her with varying expressions, but none of them were focused on the ghost who used that distraction to slip away. Unfortunately, its movement alerted the nearest of Trevors’ men and he reacted on instinct.
“No, don’t,” Stella shouted, but it was no good. Whatever she had done to stop everyone earlier was missing from her voice, and Trevors’ man was quick with his tattoo. Light flared from the dreamcatcher on his arm, and no sooner had his fingers brushed the trailing wisps of
smoke that the ghost left in its wake when there was another explosion of light that forced everyone to look away. For a second it was like daylight in the hallway, illuminating the burgundy and cream stripes of the wallpaper, the nut-brown texture of the doors, and even the light scratches on the brass of the handles. Then the light vanished, darkness reasserted its dominance, and there was one less ghost in the world.
“No,” Stella whispered, horror-stricken and feeling like the ghost’s destruction was on her. She should have done more to stop it. But that guilt turned to anger, bringing strength back to her muscles.
“What the hell is wrong with you? What are you doing here? And why the hell have you brought him with you?”
Trevors asked the questions rapid fire, returning to his normal self after whatever Stella had done wore off. Stella was about to answer when footsteps and laboured breathing announced Lizzie’s arrival and Trevors swore again.
“You’ve got to be kidding. Really? You brought the fucking media?”
“Hey. I’m hardly the media,” Lizzie protested.
Trevors ignored her, glaring at Stella.
“How many times do we have to go over this? You promised you’d keep your nose out of—”
“Call off your guys, now,” Stella interrupted, knowing that as she spoke he had more men in various parts of the building. “If one more ghost is destroyed, whoever does that is fired.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Trevors asked, ignoring Leon and stepping towards Stella. It was obvious by the set of his shoulders and the wobble in his voice that he was working himself into a rage. It was a far cry from the Trevors she used to know. He was confrontational at times, but he used to keep a level head. This was something new, something that had been building since the night Tad pinned him to a wall and made Trevors look as helpless as a newborn child.
“I’m serious, Trevors. Get on that radio now and—”