Rosen's Bodyguard

by Lisa Daniels

  “Naturally. But you see, I did suggest things like that to James. But there were other things he preferred doing.”

  That sounded like a red flag to Albert. It also sounded like the relationship most likely had troubles from the beginning. Again, not his place to say anything, but still… he wondered just how exactly Rosen planned to navigate herself through this. If she even did plan at all. As the detective remained deep in thought, Albert felt a tiny prickle of excitement. Maybe… since they were alone, and since she seemed so receptive to his words right now… maybe he could ask her about his father. If she happened to, say, feel any spirits lingering around. It was part of the reason why he carried the locket. He’d read that spirits were attached to the remnants of their once physical forms. Even ashes. But of course, they moved on, too.

  Just as he opened his mouth to ask, her phone rang, and she answered it, getting sucked up into a conversation with her sister. So Albert stuffed away his question for another time. Back to work. Back to protecting Rosen Grieves, because by the sounds of it, this hostile spirit might cause a fatal accident to head their way, too.

  On the way back to their suite, they witnessed a woman, probably a student, accidentally fall down a flight of steps and break her leg. Off to the hospital she went, too. Rosen kept giving him a meaningful look, as if to say, See? This is why I can’t leave. And to think people believe this is all a coincidence…

  Rosen kept her own department informed of what was going on. In the meanwhile, every action she did was with great care. Ordinary things to her seemed to become potential dangers. Some spilled water on the floor by the sink, for example. That one knife still poking innocently out of a drainer. Amelia Hargraves calling in later gave her a huge start, before she registered the sight of the anthropologist’s half-moon glasses, her severe yet focused expression now bearing upon them. He, of course, had recognized the sound of her approach with his sensitive hearing.

  “Bad news,” Hargraves said, her voice brisk. “The medium’s here. You better come with us to supervise.”

  Rosen’s face dropped as if she’d been punched. “That fool,” she whispered.

  “He’s bull-headed and doesn’t take too kindly to people telling him what to do. He probably did this to spite us both,” Hargraves said, beckoning for them to follow.

  “This is madness,” Rosen said, hurriedly catching up while Albert prowled behind. “He can’t do this. He’s risking the lives of everyone here with his pig-headed arrogance!”

  This caused Hargraves to walk that little bit faster. “I tried to rope in the two nearest necromancers we knew—the board agreed to getting two more, but not people directly related to you. Seemed to think it might be a little biased.”

  They entered the lab room where the bones were kept, and Sten turned his grizzled face toward them, a polite smile quickly dissolving into a scowl.

  “She has permission to be here,” Hargraves said. “You know this. If something goes wrong, we may need a necromancer on our side.”

  The person in the room that Albert didn’t recognize was probably the spirit medium. Esther Leroy. She looked small, more made out of bones than flesh, and had a pinched, white look about her, as if she’d had her blood drained. Compared to Rosen Grieves and Amelia Hargraves, she looked almost like a child.

  Not exactly an inspiring look for a person about to channel the dead spirit of someone potentially malevolent and wrathful.

  “A necromancer?” Esther raised one wispy, brown eyebrow at Rosen. Her tone was one of disdain. “You’ve called one of these here, too?”

  “Yes,” Hargraves said. “She works with the police, and has solved many cases. She seemed to be a good choice.”

  “Hmph.” Leroy didn’t say anything else, but the condescension was clear. She didn’t care much for someone like Grieves.

  “I’ve tried to persuade them to send her away, but she sticks like gum to a shoe,” Sten said, not bothering to hide his disdain.

  “They’re like that. Crawling out of the woodwork. I must say, though, this is an honor to be here. Attending to the famous Laogh McKenna’s spirit myself.” The medium was setting up candles in a circle, sprinkling salt around the circle out of a shaker, while Rosen looked on, unable to hide her own light sneer of contempt. Mediums and necromancers seemed to really dislike one another. Seemed a shame to Albert. They both had something in common, but only the necromancers got condemnation, because their process involved using remains, rather than their own body.

  “Leroy,” Rosen said, desperate to get it through how insanely stupid this was, without telling her outright that she was stupid. “This spirit is exceedingly dangerous. If you go through with this, it might be a possession you’ll struggle to shake off.”

  “Please,” Leroy said. “I’ve done this many times before. I know my own powers. And I’m not about to let one feisty soul get the better of me. Still...” She indicated her salt circle. “This will keep me trapped if something should go wrong.”

  “Salt,” Rosen said lightly, in the tone of someone long suffering, “won’t stop this kind of soul. It’s not yet demonic. I keep trying to warn people, and they absolutely insist on ignoring me.” She directed daggers at Sten.

  Esther Leroy paused in her preparations. “You claim that this soul is beginning to corrupt?”

  “Yes.”

  After a thoughtful pause, Leroy finished off her salt circle. “Even the slightest corruption will ensure that it stays within. But I’ll be fine.”

  Rosen looked about ready to scream with frustration, but Albert nudged her slightly, trying to warn her to keep her tongue to herself.

  Salt.

  Salt wouldn’t do a damn thing! She stared at him with fiery, hot, dark eyes, a pulse ticking in her neck. They’re insane, she mouthed. She looked like she wanted to fling herself at Esther, body tackle her to the ground and yell not to do it. Except all that would result in would be a stint in a cell, and the operation would continue, just without her.

  Amelia Hargraves folded her arms, nervously shifting her weight.

  They watched as Esther Leroy lit up each of the fat, white candles, after Sten had helped dim the room, shutting all the windows and leaving them in the faint glow of dancing orange-yellow lights, suffusing Leroy’s face in multiple shadows. She sat in the center of her candle and salt ring, assumed a meditative pose, and began glowing a soft, golden light herself.

  “I sense another in this room,” she said with her eyes closed then, but turning her face toward Albert. “They are not the one that is sought, but there is… something strange about this one...”

  “There are many spirits,” Rosen cut in. “Stoneshire is notorious for them.”

  Esther Leroy let out a soft chuckle. “Getting out your little claws? No worries. My energy is only for one. Laogh McKenna… I call to you from your hallowed rest. I call for you to approach, to share your soul with mine, to confess to us your life. Come in peace and leave in peace. Come in peace and leave in peace...” she repeated this a few more times, her golden aura glowing brighter and brighter with each repetition.

  It looked beautiful and resonant, honestly, compared to the stark, empty silence of Rosen when her body became stiff, as if made of wood, and she didn’t respond to anything they said, as if she’d left her body behind in her search for the soul.

  The necromancer he once knew did this, too, the first time Albert was able to meet his father again after death. It would be easy to see a spirit medium as a force of good, and a necromancer as ghoulish as the bodies they hung around with.

  In a single eye blink, Leroy’s golden light winked out, and the candles surrounding her simultaneously blew themselves out, as if a huge gust of wind had specifically targeted each flame. In the murky view of the room, they saw Leroy instead glowing with a strange mix of red, white, and black, the flickers around her form violent and irregular.

  When she opened her eyes, they shimmered an ethereal blue.

  Rosen had stop
ped breathing by his side, focused on the soul. Sten looked mildly alarmed at the sight, while Hargraves was already at her phone, stepping back to get herself in touch with someone.

  “Hmm,” Leroy-McKenna said, glancing around with those eerie, blue eyes. She casually leaned forward, brushing a finger over the salt and easily smudging it. “I am no demon,” she said. “This will not contain me.”

  “L-Laogh?” Sten said, attempting to take the lead. Albert was listening to Hargraves ask for a perimeter around the institute—and it seemed McKenna was listening as well. “I am an anthropologist. I have a great many questions for you, if you would be so kind as to answer them.”

  She paid him no attention whatsoever, stepping over the line of salt, the noxious pulsing of her aura wavering around her. “I’m afraid I have somewhere to be.”

  Albert blocked McKenna’s way out, letting a growl rumble in his throat. “I’m afraid you’re not going anywhere.”

  Mckenna smiled. “Yes, I am.” She raised her hand, and a shock of pain went through Albert’s body. He was flung aside like a ragdoll, hitting the wall hard. Pain arced through his back, but he was able to land on his hands and knees with a grunt, already beginning his transformation into panther. Rippling into a snarling, glossy-furred beast, tail lashing in a frenzy behind him, he attempted to pad after the possessed medium. He needed vengeance for her humiliation of his power. The animal in him wanted to crunch bones, feel hot blood gush in the cavern of his mouth.

  But the scent trail he’d been attempting to follow vanished in seconds. His cat senses rebelled in confusion, unable to discern where McKenna had gone. She’d only left a few seconds before, but it was almost as if she’d teleported. People screamed and leaped out of his way as he thundered past them, searching, searching, trying to pick up a scent…

  But nothing.

  Why was there nothing?

  He let out a frustrated, hateful growl, tail twitching madly.

  Chapter Seven – Rosen

  Idiots. I’m surrounded by idiots. Rosen glared at Sten, who did not have the presence of mind to look guilty or feel any sudden need to apologize to her.

  Instead, the man had the gall to claim that she clearly had done something to Laogh’s soul, otherwise this wouldn’t have happened.

  “Sten, I know you hate necromancers with a burning passion, but you can’t keep stretching the facts to fit your world view forever,” Hargraves said, somehow keeping her patience, when Rosen suspected she wanted to punch the anthropologist somewhere into next week.

  “There’s simply no other explanation,” Sten spluttered. “This is a world-renowned spirit medium. We should never have allowed a necromancer here in the first place...”

  Ignoring him, Rosen watched Albert slink back into the room, his panther form screaming failure and anger. Not that she expected him to be able to do anything—the way he’d been flung aside, just like that… her heart had stopped for a moment, imagining her bodyguard being killed on duty. All because no one bothered to listen to her.

  The big lunk acted as if the attack hadn’t phased him in the slightest. Thank goodness for that.

  “She’s gone,” he said, after shifting back into human form. “I can’t sense her at all.”

  Hargraves stamped the ground, fists clenched along with her teeth, and let out a thwarted half-grunt, half-scream. “I don’t care if you have seniority over me in this, Sten, but I swear to god, I’m getting your ass fired if it turns out that this spirit’s about to go on a murder rampage!”

  “I—”

  “When will you take responsibility for all that you’ve DONE?” Hargraves roared, and Sten shrank back from her furious outburst. “You stupid, stupid, imbecile! If you’d listened...”

  Rosen left them to bickering, feeling a sick, nauseous feeling in her stomach. The spirit had escaped. Despite all her extra precautions, her efforts, her decision to stay here longer to ensure that the spirit did get disposed of safely…

  Well, now it was in the body of a respected spirit medium. Doing whatever it intended to do.

  Which was what she now needed to figure out. She fought through the throbbing, tight band of stress in her skull, while people snapped and panicked around her, thinking, thinking where Laogh McKenna would go.

  She steepled her hands together. Some revenants were stronger than others… and it was generally acknowledged that the older the soul, the more powerful it became. She felt ill at the thought of a three-hundred-year-old soul exerting its influence.

  Focus. She dipped herself into the Other Side in an attempt to pick up a spiritual trail. Might be a little hit and miss, given the fact that if the spirit had gone far enough into revenant transformation, she wouldn’t sense it on the upper levels. Again, that strange soul lingered in the room. As tempted as she was to interrogate it, knowing it would be receptive, she didn’t particularly want to place it in Laogh’s bones. Some spirits absolutely flipped out when someone else was placed over their remains…

  But maybe it’d call her back… She contemplated the possibility, before she saw new, flickering souls enter the room, moving with a purposeful intent that reminded her of police officers. So she yanked herself out of the Other Side, in time to see Sten yelling hysterically and pointing at her, and police officers bearing down upon her, yelling for her hands to be raised above her head.

  Great. She did as asked. Best to comply with what the police demanded, no matter how unfair it seemed. Albert growled but did nothing as the police patted her over, pulling out her Glock and badge.

  “An officer,” her searcher grunted in surprise.

  We don’t have time to waste, she thought as the cuffs came onto her wrists. Hargraves apologized to her, Sten continued shouting, Albert was saying something, too, but it all washed over in a buzz of noise. If only they’d stop with their assumptions and just go away so she could focus on her new problem, and attempt to rein it in before any massive loss of life occurred.

  But she knew she’d be taking a little trip to the nearest precinct first.

  * * *

  “Apologies for the inconvenience, Miss Grieves,” Officer Jett said, the one responsible now for removing her cuffs, after they’d checked in with Lasthearth’s precinct and confirmed with the institution that she was whom she said she was, and had done nothing of criminal intent. “And you say that the real danger was able to make it right past us?”

  “Yes. While you were busy arresting me because one old guy hates necromancers, the woman escaped. And I bet, just bet we’re going to have a trail of destruction in her wake.”

  Officer Jett smiled kindly, but without conviction of her words. “Didn’t you say the danger was Esther Leroy? She can barely hurt a fly, begging my pardon, ma’am.”

  “Just… check the news. It’ll be accidents. An unusual amount of people being rushed to the hospital or killed due to things that would best be described as freak accidents.”

  Because she was vouched for by her department, and possibly because Albert was glaring in the background like he wanted to murder someone, the officer reluctantly nodded his head. “Supernatural activity, you’re saying.”

  “A possession gone wrong. Esther Leroy is housing a very dangerous spirit. She’s not herself.”

  Jett scanned his blue eyes around the precinct, until he spotted two officers talking to one another over coffee drinks, and yelled for them to come over. He ordered them to start researching information about freak accidents in the parameter of the last three hours, courtesy of Rosen giving him the timeline. Both officers appeared bemused, but did as they were asked. Meanwhile, Rosen asked if they had painkillers, because the headache encompassing her brain was practically a migraine at this point. He called someone else to get them, and Rosen decided she didn’t really like Jett. Clearly he much preferred getting other people to do his job. She liked to think she had more integrity than that.

  “We’re sorry again for the mistake.”

  “No problem,” Rosen said,
though yes, it was a big problem, and she half-wanted to shake him by the neck and scream. Instead, she took some deep breaths in an attempt to calm down, and glanced back at Albert, just to check he was well and not potentially suffering any after-effects from his direct contact with the spirit. Might be that he would suffer a short spell of bad luck… “How are you feeling, Albert?”

  “I’m fine, Miss Grieves. I am concerned about the current danger of this spirit, as I believe that you would be putting yourself in harm’s way to stop it.”

  “That is, unfortunately, my job occupation,” Rosen said dryly. “And this is partially my responsibility.”

  “It’s not your job to babysit idiots who don’t listen to you,” he said, perfectly echoing her sentiments, but she fed him back the generic line of needing to assume responsibility all the same, since she had intimate knowledge of the issue at this point in time. After all, that was sort of the point of her job. Couldn’t exactly shank it and pretend otherwise. Since people prone to madness liked to not listen. It was why they ended up in jail, ended up miserable, making her role that much harder.

  “If not me, then who?” she said, and he had no answer for that.

  She watched Jett boss around a few more people, character profiling him some more. No family pictures at his desk. Maybe single, or just didn’t like showing off his home life?

  Again, she felt that tight, throbbing band of stress in her head, that sense of severe worry, before swallowing it all up in a modicum of calm. Maybe it would be nice just to throw everything away and just do… nothing. Though sheer nothingness made her soul itch, because she had to do something. Anything, really. Because when there was nothing, she could hear her own blood rushing through her body, with nothing taking away her thoughts. Meaning she had to dwell… on herself.