The Stubborn Dead

by Natasha Hoar

  As usual, no answer came. Instead, the air was filled with the familiar hum of surveillance equipment and the soft fwap of ash falling from his Benson & Hedges cigarette into the ashtray.

  “Once a child is that type of broken, when they realize the power they have in being able to cut out their own heart and use it in a tantalizing puppet show when the need arises, well, that’s called a recipe for disaster.” He picked up the cigarette and jammed it between his teeth.”

  He stared at the monitor intently, watching as Sylvia paced like an agitated cat along the wall farthest from her apartment windows. Earlier she’d kicked over the entrance hall table and smashed a bottle of Perrier against a kitchen cabinet. Now she alternately wrung and clenched her hands, her pretty face marred by a nasty, sour scowl.

  As he studied her, he knew two things for certain. Reagan Tuckwell, her ex, was standing outside the building again, simply staring up at the windows. And Sylvia was replaying her every move over the last few hours, trying to figure out how he’d known she’d come back to the apartment instead of one of the hotels she rotated through.

  “No getting out of this one, sweetheart. Not through your usual channels, anyway.” Mr. Grey breathed out a jet of smoke while stubbing his cigarette out in the metal ashtray on the side table jammed against his office-style chair. He flicked a cursory glance at several other monitors scattered around his one-room apartment. Each was linked to discreetly placed cameras and sound devices in Sylvia’s various hiding places. No matter where she happened to go, the minute she was in, he sent an anonymous text message to Reagan. And Reagan, the dependable son of a bitch that he was, immediately moved in to intimidate his little escapee ex-wife into cold sweats and acts of desperation. No questions asked.

  If he had believed in karma, Mr. Grey might have said Sylvia had it coming to her in spades. Initial evaluations showed she’d been an emotionally manipulative child. Her parents had foolishly blamed themselves for her issues, even when they’d discovered they had a child who felt no remorse. Once free of all responsibility for her own actions, little Sylvia had allowed her craven tendencies to flourish.

  It hadn’t taken long for her to graduate from trying to be the sole focus of her parents’ attention, to playing friends and authority figures like chess pieces. Like the friend she’d motivated to fake her own suicide so they could skip finals in the eighth grade. That poor girl had survived. Pity about the besotted ex-boyfriend from sophomore year in university, though. “Romeo” never stood a chance.

  “I wonder—” he tapped the top of his cigarette box absently, “—if you just sensed you weren’t special—that the family secret that could have made you something to be treasured, protected, was alive and well in your brother. And it just pissed you right off.”

  It was possible. With freaks, one couldn’t tell.

  As it stood, Mr. Grey knew karma was a fairy tale. Bad people got away with shit all the time. He’d seen it himself, over and over. Luckily Sylvia was fairly low down the “evil bitch” food chain, so enlisting her to help acquire his real target had been easier—and cheaper—than initially anticipated. Unfortunately, he’d learned he couldn’t rely on that Prada-wearing narcissist to do the right thing by herself. Not until she was backed into a corner so tight she blacked out from the impending contact with her conscience. The fact that she’d finally called the rescue medium was a goddamn miracle. That she hadn’t followed his express instructions as to what to do after that…made him want to light another smoke.

  She came to a stop, released her hands and pounded the wall once beside her, the sound a muted whomp through the monitor’s speakers.

  He eyed her curiously. Hello, hello?

  “Enough.” The word pressed awkwardly between her clenched teeth. Avoiding the windows, she retrieved her cell phone and dialed rapidly. Mr. Grey noted the motion of her fingers and grabbed a second file lying open on the table beside the central monitor. The number she dialed matched that of a car collector down in Seattle who had been bugging her to let him purchase the Eldorado ever since he’d spotted it on a newscast detailing Kit’s disappearance.

  Mr. Grey rubbed his chin thoughtfully.

  It didn’t take long for the call to connect, and for his suspicions to be confirmed. “Cole? It’s Sylvia. I changed my mind. You can have the car as soon as you can get your trailer up here. Tomorrow will be fine. Bring cash.”

  The moment she hung up, she began fishing in a secret compartment in her cavernous handbag. He could guess from her movements that she had pushed past the small leather-bound book she always carried with her. A brief look of dread crossed her face, and she opened the bag a little wider. She rummaged frantically in the pocket, finally pulling the book out into the light to give her more room to look inside. A folded business card fell from inside the book, and she snatched it up with something that sounded like a whispered cuss. She’d carried the card for almost four months, always beside the book. She’d barely looked at either, except to move them from handbag to handbag, and on the rare occasion, to a coat pocket.

  Now, though, she stared at the card like it was the key to her salvation. Even on the monitor, he could see how her hands shook as she held it. She stared at the card several long moments. Her expression soured.

  “Sucks when you have to admit you’re wrong, doesn’t it?” he said around a fresh cigarette, cupping one hand close as he flicked the tab of his lighter with the other, finally getting a decent flame on the third try. Oh yes, the last thing someone like Sylvia Elkeles ever wanted to do in their life was come crawling back to anyone. “How didn’t Kit see straight through that sorry face of yours?”

  Easy—he was family. Family didn’t turn their backs on each other. Not unless the one doing the turning was utterly broken.

  She opened her eyes again and almost on cue her expression became cool, calm and impeccably schooled. She dialed without hesitation.

  The phone beside the ashtray rang once before Mr. Grey picked up. “Yes, Sylvia?”

  “You wanted that rescue medium, Rachel Miller.” She licked her lips. “Are you still interested?”

  He enjoyed a moment of silence, watching her reaction on the screen. “Yes.”

  “She’s on the case. Come and get her.”

  “That wasn’t the agreement. She has to fail before you get paid.”

  Sylvia grimaced. “That’s up to you to ensure, not me. I got her to engage the thing. That’s all I agreed to do.”

  “You took your sweet time getting her on the case.”

  “She’s taken the damn job. That’s all that matters.” She drew a quick, sharp breath. “As for the rodach, clear him out in one piece like you said you would, and you can have him for free.”

  “You mean the wraith, don’t you?” He took a relaxed drag on his cigarette. “Like you, we have little interest in reversing the process your brother undertook.”

  She straightened her back, rolling her head from shoulder to shoulder.

  “Why the price break on the wraith?” he pressed.

  “Just come and get them.”

  He blew out a breath of smoke through his nostrils. “No.”

  “No? What do you mean no?”

  “You took too long. I needed this over months ago.”

  “But you just said you were still interested!”

  “Oh, I’m interested. Interested in seeing the rescue medium try to snuff your brother out. Interested in watching you try to walk away from this situation and move on with your life without so much as a backward glance. You’re a fascinating person, Sylvia. A real medical-grade case of crazy.”

  She balled her fists, her shoulders rigid, her face a mask of rage. “I don’t need to listen to this.”

  “Course you do. You have a house that won’t sell and a brother who might experience a miracle at any moment by coming back to humanity. Now, that would put a crimp in your plans. I mean, Spain has just been weeping at the thought that sweet little señorita Sylvia hasn’t ye
t graced its shores. It would be tragic if you didn’t manage to get there because of something as mundane as your brother’s life insurance never making it into your hands. Say, how much are tickets to Acapulco these days? That might be a viable option for someone trying to disappear on a suddenly limited budget.”

  “You said there was no way Kit could come back without my help, that he could be banished like any run-of-the-mill spirit and I would be free to go on living my own life!”

  “Strange, I don’t remember saying that. The banishing part, that is.”

  “You said—”

  “I said there was a chance he could be exorcised, but it was slim, and you’d have done better to put your trust in me and let my organization deal with the wraith. Provided you first helped us to sabotage and then acquire Vancouver’s resident rescue medium, that is. However—” he tapped his cigarette once over the ashtray, “—you tried to use what I’d told you to get rid of the wraith ‘on the cheap,’ so to speak. Why is that?”

  Her expression became that of a sullen child caught in the act. “That doesn’t need to be a part of this discussion.”

  “I know it isn’t guilt. You tried to kill him nine or so times since the first change took place, so I’m wondering if someone else made a better—”

  “I said this doesn’t need to be a part of the discussion!” she shrieked.

  He grinned. “Well, sorry, sweetheart. Just like in real life, when you try to cut out the specialist middleman, you tend to get screwed over. There’s always a price to pay. For you it looks like that price is hanging around a little longer and maybe letting your face become reacquainted with Reagan’s steel-toed boots.”

  Her fingers reached for her right cheek, never quite connecting. “How do you know about him?”

  He chuckled. “Are you serious? You don’t bat an eyelid when I approach you out of the blue months ago, but now you start asking how I know things?”

  “You said you learned Kit was sick from contacts he’d made to help him acquire the rodach manual and that—”

  He ignored her completely. “A better question might be, is there anything I might not know that could be used against you? And the answer would be that my organization has kept close tabs on families of freaks, like yours, for a very long time. So, no, Sylvia, there is nothing that I don’t know about you.” He stubbed out the cigarette, and before she could reply he ended the conversation with, “I’ll be in touch.”

  He watched her intently as she cradled the phone against her chest, then slipped it, the book and the business card back into her handbag. Her eyes darted back and forth, and she chewed her lower lip pensively. Sometimes the key to keeping people like Sylvia in check was a healthy dose of paranoia.

  His cell phone rang in his hand. He drew a deep breath and took his time pressing the answer button. “We’re close.”

  “How close?” the curt female voice of his handler replied.

  “She’s got the rescue medium on the case.”

  “Finally.”

  “And she’s selling the car.”

  “Hmm.” A thoughtful pause. “Are you still working the ex?”

  “Yes.”

  “Drop him. Drop both of them. Your focus is now exclusively on the medium. I want her pushed. If she fails to make the necessary successes, I want her eliminated.”

  “If she fails to do what she’s supposed to do, there won’t be much left of her to eliminate.” He reached for his cigarette pack with his free hand and stifled a sigh when he realized it was empty.

  “Rescue mediums are a tricky, tricky collection of souls. As a field reconnaissance agent, you haven’t experienced just how unwieldy they can be when cornered. Even if she isn’t the creature we think she is, she’d have developed a voracious survival instinct from working so close to death.”

  “So why am I on this mission again?” As the words escaped his lips, he flinched.

  “Because—” his handler’s tone became syrupy sweet, “—we are a little shorthanded. Otherwise Luke would have been on this assignment, instead of you.”

  “Ah, yes.”

  “Any other questions?”

  “How is Luke’s current mission going?”

  “He brought the child in. Turned out she wasn’t what we had expected her to be. That’s why we want you to be sure before we either move to bring this woman in or have her taken out.”

  He fidgeted with his jacket’s lapel. “You’ll know as soon as I’ve confirmed her ID.”

  “Of course.”

  The line went dead. He stared at the monitors without seeing them. Then he crossed himself and said a short prayer for the family of the little girl whose body would be found in the following days. If his coworkers did their jobs correctly, the media would portray the girl as the victim of some terrible “accident.” If her single father was smart, he’d accept that story, bury his daughter and leave it at that.

  Life wasn’t fair for some children, especially when they fell into the freak category. Even less so when they were suspected of being monsters capable of bringing the world to a fiery end.

  Adults, on the other hand, he felt little sympathy for.

  He refocused his attention on the monitors. Sylvia was tapping away on her laptop. She kept glancing at the windows, no doubt wondering if Reagan was still there, but unwilling to face the truth that he was. What a mess.

  He stood, scooped up his car keys and black gloves from the kitchen counter and headed for the door. He needed to be in position when the medium walked to her demise.

  Chapter Five

  Rachel was so close to a eureka moment, she could taste it.

  She’d decided to narrow her list of “suspects” for the rodach-wraith as quickly as possible by first eliminating the most common causes of aggressive entities—violent or tragic deaths on the property in question. She’d finished her discussion with her mother and immediately headed for the local municipality to research any major incidents that might have resulted in a death on Sylvia’s property—fires, explosions or the like. The property had turned up clean, but that didn’t mean no one had died or suffered tragic incidents there. It just meant she had to tap one of her special resources to acquire sensitive information the municipality refused to give to the public.

  The upside to discreetly clearing a nest of bloodthirsty revenants from a VPD superintendent’s ski cottage? Said superintendent tended to be extremely willing to make equally discreet folders of information, even from outside police detachments, rapidly available. Rachel pored over the contents of the unmarked yellow folder for the third time while waiting in the cool, quiet foyer of a local snowboard company, Wild Ride Boards.

  The top sheet confirmed that according to police records, there had never been a significantly violent event on Sylvia’s property. But it was the extra information Rachel had asked for on a gut feel that snared her full attention. Reports detailed Kit’s disappearance, pertinent interviews and possible leads, as well as a less than flattering background check on Sylvia. Rachel also noted that in the month prior to Kit’s disappearance, he’d signed over practically everything to his sister. Everything, she mused, except for his share of Wild Ride Boards and his car. Or if he had, there was no legal proof of it.

  She snapped the file closed with a frustrated sigh and a stifled groan as her bruised back and shoulders protested her sitting in a hard plastic chair. Ignoring her aching body, she leaned her head against the wall behind her, closed her eyes and replayed the scene in the house for the hundredth time.

  The sigil hadn’t worked because the wraith was still technically alive. Because he was alive, Rachel technically had no business dealing with him. Rescue mediums could call back souls to revive the recently departed or banish the stubborn, disembodied dead. They were not trained to revitalize the memories of, and then banish, the living. Even if the living happened to be trapped in the form of the stubborn, disembodied dead.

  In the middle ages this sort of thing would have be
en the responsibility of the local priest, or in a bigger town, whoever was in charge of law enforcement. However, times had changed, and because the human population had abandoned its old beliefs in the true nature of the paranormal, the rescue mediums had inherited the duty of dealing with rodachs along with all the other aggressive disembodied paranormal riffraff, of which only the tamest fraction seemed to make its way onto those “haunted” reality shows or into TV scripts involving Jennifer Love Hewitt. It was a pity the average rescue medium hadn’t actually been trained to deal with rodachs, mostly because these creatures were supposed to be extinct.

  Hello, Officer? I have this little living-wraith problem. Bring your Taser.

  “Rachel Miller? Hi, I’m Kevin—Kit’s business partner.” She looked up at a casually dressed man in his late twenties with overly styled hair, a five o’clock shadow and a set of large white earphones around his neck. He shook her free hand and gestured towards a nearby hallway. “This way, please.”

  He led her through a small maze of well-lit rooms filled with either large sheets of paper plastered with outrageous designs, or people huddled around huge computer screens, working on what she assumed were the next batch of board graphics. He ushered her into a large, airy office with an entire wall covered in colorful snowboards and pictures of people enjoying using them. The room filled Rachel with a sense of deep camaraderie, but she also couldn’t avoid the lingering energies of stress and sadness that brushed at her temples and inched across her scalp.

  “Would you like something to drink?”

  How about a venti-sized cup of sweet herbal tea and one of those greasy fast-food breakfast sandwiches to help fill the steadily growing hole in her stomach she hadn’t had time to fill since her life took a nosedive that morning?

  “No thanks. I’m good.” She smiled in a polite, professional manner.

  “I’ve already dealt with two sets of investigators from the insurance company. I’m surprised they’d send out a third so soon. And on such extremely short notice.”