by Laura Bickle
But where was the original spark? What could have ignited the man in the first place?
Her gaze passed over the untouched dinner in its tray, moved to the fireplace. That would be the obvious place to look. On her hands and knees, she shone a flashlight up into the firebox. Through her gloved hands, the hearth felt cool as stone, colder than the TV table closer to the body.
This wasn’t the source. But she smelled the bitter tang of magick here, more strongly. After carefully recording the condition of the firebox and hearth with her camera, Anya pulled a pair of stainless-steel barbecue tongs from her kit and dug into the blackened ashes of the hearth.
A lot of paper had been burned here. Fragments flaked away, irretrievable. Anya was amazed that Bernard had ever disposed of anything. Whatever this was, it must have been important for him to destroy. From the grate, she plucked a corner of an envelope, frowned. Bernard seemed to have stockpiled all of his junk mail. With tweezers, she pulled a scrap of green paper from the envelope’s remains.
A check. The watermark was unmistakable. In the upper left-hand corner, a name was legible: Miracles for the Masses. The address was for a location in Detroit’s warehouse district.
She placed the scraps into an empty paint can to go to the lab for analysis and continued her poking around in the ash. Her tongs rang against something with a note like a bell: glass.
From the grate, Anya pulled the neck of a shattered bottle, charred black. It was smaller than a wine bottle, stoppered with an ornamental silver seal. Whatever it contained was obscured by the carbon black skin coating it. She turned the broken edge toward the light.
She’d expected it to be an empty vessel, for water or wine. Or perhaps a glass prison like the ones on the mantel, holding preserved fragments of bones. But looking into the darkness of the bottle was like looking into a geode: Shining, rock-crystal teeth glinted back at her, seared obsidian-black from the fire.
Around her throat, something fluttered. Anya’s hand slipped up to the metal collar around her neck. A warm shape inside the metal shifted, peeled away from her skin. Delicate salamander toes unfurled and marched down her shoulder as the metal sizzled and released a living creature. Taking the shape of a hellbender, a fire elemental salamander leapt to the hearth, growling at the magick-soaked bottle in the grate. His tongue flickered into the black of the firebox, and he incandesced with an amber glow.
“Sparky,” she hissed. She had no fear that Marsh or any other living creature could see him; Sparky was invisible to ordinary humans. But Sparky only bothered to wake himself up under three conditions: when it suited his preternatural whims, when ghosts were around, or when danger was near.
Anya swallowed. As if handling a piece of radioactive debris, she placed the fragment of the bottle on the hearth. Sparky stalked toward it, his feathery gill-fronds flaring. His tongue flickered over the carbon on its surface.
Anya held her breath, watching for Sparky’s reaction. She knew he smelled the magick on it, too. But she had no way of knowing how dangerous that broken bottle really was. For all she knew, it could be a magickal time bomb… a bomb that blew up Jasper Bernard. A bomb that could still be active.
Sparky turned around, presented his speckled rump to the artifact. He scraped his back feet at the ash disdainfully, as if he were a cat burying a turd in a litter box.
Anya rolled her eyes. The salamander couldn’t speak, but he managed to be expressive, just the same. Perhaps the bottle wasn’t a source of danger; perhaps the elemental was busy expressing himself and being a pain in the ass.
Or… Anya looked around the room, back at the grease stain that had once been Jasper Bernard.
Anya whispered at the stain, “You still here, Bernard?”
Perhaps Sparky was picking up on something else that had disturbed his nap. Perhaps Jasper Bernard hadn’t gone peacefully to the Afterworld, and was still hanging around. If so, she could talk to him, get the real story of how he’d managed to dissolve himself from this plane of existence and leave just his foot and slipper behind.
A translucent orb welled up in the grease stain: a balding head and bespectacled eyes. Anya noted that a piece of electrical tape held one side of the glasses together.
“Jasper Bernard?” Anya asked quietly. She didn’t want to startle him. The freshly dead were always skittish as feral cats, and she expected Bernard to be no different. She could feel Sparky slithering behind her legs, and she stood on his tail to keep him from crawling forward and scaring the ghost off.
“Everyone calls me Bernie. You… you can see me?”
“Yes, I can see you.”
The phosphorescent eyes shifted right and left, and panic twitched through his voice. “The cops didn’t see me. The firemen didn’t see me. How can you see me?”
Anya crouched beside the stain in the floor, conscious of Sparky straining beside her. “I’m a medium… of sorts. I can see spirits and talk with them.”
Bernie’s eyes narrowed in assessment . “I’ve met mediums. You’re more than that.”
Anya chewed on her lower lip. She didn’t want to panic Bernie, but she didn’t have time to construct a plausible lie. “I’m a Lantern. Ghosts are drawn to me.” Anya deliberately left the other part out, the part about how she could destroy what remained of his spirit with little more than a breath. Spirits came to her, moths to the flame, and—if needed—she incinerated them.
The frightened eyes peered over a bifocal glass line at the salamander. “Is that what I think it is?”
“Um… This is Sparky. He’s my friend.” My friend who would also like to have you for lunch.
Sparky growled at him.
“A salamander? How did you ever tame one of those?” Curiosity and a note of avarice resonated in the ghost’s voice.
“I, uh, have had him since I was a child.” Again, not the whole truth, but Bernard didn’t need to know the whole truth. Nor could Sparky be really considered “tame.” Anya eyed him suspiciously. “What do you know about salamanders?”
Bernie’s fingertips steepled above the oily black pool. “I’m a collector, of sorts.”
Anya glanced at the bottles over the fireplace. “A collector?”
“A purveyor of magickal artifacts.”
Anya protectively angled her hip before Sparky. “That’s why this place stinks of magick.”
Haughty eyebrows wrinkled over the glasses. “My house does not stink.”
“Bernie.” Anya crouched before the spirit, mindful not to disturb the grease stain with her knees. Bernie might not have fully digested the knowledge that he was dead, and she didn’t want to send what was left of his personality into a tailspin before she could extract some useful information. “Is that what happened to you? Bad magick?”
“I remember… the fire.” Bernie’s lower lip turned down and began to dribble off the side of his face. The force of the recollection was beginning to disincorporate him.
She’d have to work quickly. “Do you remember what started it?” Anya pressed him. “Were you burning something in the grate? Smoking?”
Despite Bernie’s magickal surroundings, experience had taught Anya to seek the most mundane explanations first.
The ghost shook his head. “It wasn’t me. It was her.” The eyes behind the glasses rolled upward. “Wait. If you can see me, can she see me?”
“Can who see you?”
Ghostly fingers gnawed at the edge of the stain. Bernard’s eyes flicked to the ceiling. “Oh, shit…”
The ceiling opened, a vortex of wind reaching toward the floor, cold as the breath of winter. The vortex didn’t disturb any of the physical surroundings, but it reached for Bernie as surely as a child rooting through a toy box for a favorite plaything. Like a marionette jerked on its strings, Bernie’s ghostly body was yanked out of the floor. His body, clad in pajamas and a chenille robe, flailed in resistance to the invisible force.
Anya lunged forward, instinctively reaching for the ghost. Sparky grasped Bernie�
�s pant leg with his teeth, growling. The salamander pulled back with all his might, struggling to ground Bernie to the ruined floor. But the old man was rising like a helium balloon, and Anya didn’t know how much longer they could hold him. The reek of sour magick, like expired milk, made her gag.
Bernie pedaled in the air, his fingers beginning to char. Ghostly flames licked under the collar of his robe, and the chenille burst into flame.
“Don’t let her find the vessel!” Bernie shouted.
The artifacts dealer was yanked from Sparky’s grip and fizzled away into the ether. The hole in the ceiling closed up, leaving the room ringing in silence.
Anya landed on her butt on the stained carpet, slack-jawed. Frigid air steamed from her mouth. She’d seen ghosts disincorporate as the result of exorcisms, or willingly, when they chose to walk into the afterlife. But she’d never seen anything like this, nothing so violent. The ghost had been sucked up like an ant in a vacuum cleaner, but… to where?
“Bernie?” she called, into the half-light of the room.
No one answered her.
Sparky waddled to the stain covering Bernie’s ruined carpet. He circled it twice and began scratching it with his back feet, as if he were burying another dead thing.
“IT WAS LIKE A BASS on a fishing line… he just struggled and got pulled out of the water. To where, I don’t know.”
Anya stared into her drink. In the milky depths of the White Russian, she kept seeing Bernie being hauled back into the ether.
Her voice carried. At this hour, the Devil’s Bathtub bar was nearly empty. The former speakeasy retained most of its 1920s charm, from the polished, railed bar and the original woodwork, to the claw-foot tub containing wish-pennies in the center of the scarred wood floor. The bathtub wasn’t original; the original had been destroyed in a botched exorcism several months ago, when Anya had contracted a nasty case of demon possession.
The Devil’s Bathtub always retained some degree of secret comings and goings. Though bootleggers no longer brewed bathtub gin there, it was now the headquarters for the Detroit Area Ghost Researchers, a group of paranormal investigators of which Anya was reluctantly a part.
They were the only patrons in the Devil’s Bathtub tonight. Jules, behind the bar, led the group with stern authority. He was still wearing the meter-reader’s uniform from his day job, capped off with a Detroit Tigers ball cap. The tattoo of a cross peeped out from under his sleeve. His ebony brow wrinkled as he supervised Max, a Latino kid with sagging jeans, filling water balloons with holy water from a large two-liter bottle shaped like the Virgin Mary.
“Keep your fingers off the Madonna’s holy bosoms.”
Max rolled his eyes and kept his fingers splayed over her plastic breasts. “You don’t want me to drop her, do you?”
“Have some respect for the Holy Mother, willya?”
Max stuck his tongue out and licked the bottle. Jules slapped him on the backside of the head, and the kid yelped.
“Apologize to the Madonna.”
“I’m sorry, Madonna, for licking your holy tits.…”
Katie snorted, her pale hand covering a chuckle from her perch at a table. Her witch’s Book of Shadows lay open before her, scrawled with notes of spells and potions. Being a modern witch, she’d used tiny colored sticky notes to earmark some of the pages. One had even insinuated its way into the curtain of long blond hair over her shoulder.
“You’re not helping, Katie,” Jules growled.
“Hey,” retorted the witch, “she’s not my Goddess. Mine has a sense of humor.”
“See?” Max ducked another swat from Jules. “Hecate likes having her tits licked. Or Isis. Or whoever Katie’s worshipping this week… Hopefully Isis. Hecate is a real dog.”
Jules snorted. He wasn’t a big fan of witchcraft. He tolerated Katie’s presence on the team because she was effective… lately, more effective than his own methods.
Katie threw a cardboard beer coaster at Max, striking him on the back.
“Ow!”
“Quit insulting the heavenly ladies who protect your scrawny ass from evil, or I’ll hex you. I’ll make you unappealing to girls until you’re old enough to collect Social Security,” Katie told him. A witch was not to be fucked with.
“The witch is less forgiving than the Holy Mother. Now, get over here.” Jules snagged Max by the ear and marched him off behind the bar to wash glasses.
The water balloons lay on the end of the bar like forlorn breast implants awaiting a home. “You guys getting ready for a run?” Anya asked.
“Yeah.” Brian, DAGR’s tech manager, looked up from his keyboard. Tucked away in a dim booth, he was surrounded by wires and illuminated by green light from his monitor, looking more machine than man as the glow reflected off his glasses.
But Anya knew better. She admired the muscles moving in his chest as he stretched. She and Brian had been taking things slow. But every once in a while, an unintentional gesture like that made her heart skip.
He caught her watching, and the corner of his mouth quirked up.
Anya blushed, looked down into her drink.
“Typical generic haunting, we think,” Brian said. “Interesting because it’s a full-body apparition of a woman, but in modern dress. We can’t find any record of any suspicious deaths at the location… very boring history. The apparition won’t speak or tell the owners who she is. She paces through the halls at night, but doesn’t interact with anyone.”
“Residual haunting?” Anya asked. Some hauntings were like supernatural tapes that played over and over in the spiritual memory of a structure. There was no consciousness behind them whatsoever.
“Maybe. We’ll find out when we get there in a few days. Since this one isn’t a violent haunting, it’s been pushed down on the priority list.”
Anya frowned. DAGR had been under too much pressure lately. Jules had even contemplated recruiting more staff. Detroit was suffering from more than the well-publicized economic malaise and spikes in crime. Something deeper was affecting the city, feeding on its despondent psyche. The number of reported hauntings and supernatural happenings had skyrocketed. Bars were full of people trying to deny that the city was slowly slipping away around them. Jails were full of those who’d snapped, and whom evil had taken hold of. Churches were full of penitents trying to wash away the despair. And DAGR’s schedule was full of people who were convinced that they’d seen something more, underneath all of it. And what they saw terrified them.
Sitting before the bar’s cash register, Sparky slapped the register keys and was rewarded with a series of electronic beeps. He chortled to himself, tail kinking in delight. He pressed another random series of keys, and the register emitted a foot of tape that curled over the edge of the bar. The only things Sparky could affect, other than Anya, were energy fields. The salamander loved playing with electronic equipment. Anya dreaded his unpredictable effects on it.
Jules stared at her. “Is it… is it on the register?”
“Yeah.” Anya knew that no one else could see him. Just her and the spirits. And animals. Sparky liked to chase cats. Jules had an intense disgust for all nonhuman entities. He’d been trying to be polite around Sparky lately. Anya considered that a sign of progress in human-salamander relations.
“It’s okay to touch him. He won’t mind.”
Jules gingerly glided his hand over Sparky’s body. To most humans, the only palpable signs of Sparky’s presence were changes in air pressure or temperature fluctuations.
Jules shook his head. “I don’t feel him.”
“Here.” Anya guided Jules’s square hand over Sparky’s chest. “Feel anything?”
Jules frowned. “Just… just a tingle.”
Sparky snorted, annoyed at being distracted from the bells and whistles of the cash register. His tail slapped the front of Jules’s shirt.
Suddenly, Jules’s cell phone blared to life. He jumped back, snatched it out of his uniform pocket and flung it on the bar, as if
it were a live snake. The phone smoked and hissed with static, and went dead. His hands shook… whether in anger or fear, Anya couldn’t tell.
Anya winced. “Sorry about that. I’ll pay for it.”
Sparky waddled across the bar to the cell phone, licked it. A blue arc of electricity curled from the darkened screen.
“Don’t bother. The wife’s been nagging me to get a new one, anyway. One with GPS, so that she can track where I am.” Jules growled, wiping his hands on a dish towel, as if he’d touched something filthy. “Just keep that thing away from the television. At least while the Lions are playing.”
Anya made a face at him. She scooped Sparky up in her arms and placed him, wriggling, on her lap, then reached forward to rub his round belly. The little chunker had been putting on weight lately. Perhaps he’d been nibbling at too many ghosts. She cooed as she rubbed the pale speckles on his amber tummy, and he squirmed in pleasure. Jules looked sidelong at her with barely disguised disgust.
Brian wandered warily over and plucked the cell phone from the bar. In seconds, he had the faceplate off and was tinkering in its tiny copper guts. “Interesting. The battery’s totally drained. I mean… the motherboard’s fried, but that’s kind of cool.…”
“I thought ghosts drained batteries sometimes,” Anya said.
“They can. Video recorder batteries. Camera batteries. It’s not uncommon during an investigation to have a fully charged laptop die.”
“Why does that happen?” Max stood on his tiptoes to peer over Brian’s shoulder. The teen had taken a shine to the electronics, and Brian had begun to take him under his technological wing.
“Well, the theory is that ghosts need to draw power from somewhere to manifest. That’s why the temperature drops in a room where ghosts are present… they draw energy from air. A battery of an electronic device is pretty much the same thing. Some people who are psychics or psychic vampires can even power down watch batteries.”
“What’s a psychic vampire?” Max asked.
“They’re humans who suck other people’s energy fields,” Jules said. “Like leeches.”