Dead Stare (Ghosts & Magic Book 3)

by M. R. Forbes

  Dead Stare

  Ghosts & Magic, Book Three

  M.R. Forbes

  Published by Quirky Algorithms

  Seattle, Washington

  This novel is a work of fiction and a product of the author’s imagination.

  Any resemblance to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 by M.R. Forbes

  All rights reserved.

  Cover illustration by Tom Edwards

  tomedwardsdesign.com

  Contents

  1. Good friends are hard to find

  2. Serious

  3. No Regrets

  4. Pushing Daisies

  5. Morally Compromised

  6. My Best Imitation of Myself

  7. Breakfast at Six

  8. Wtf???

  9. Dominoes

  10. Never-neverland

  11. Klimpt

  12. Carrots

  13. Something stupid this way comes

  14. A gentle interlude

  15. All apologies

  16. Smooth operator

  17. At least we agree on something

  18. Guilty until proven

  19. D.C

  20. Harder than I thought

  21. Don't mansion it

  22. Decisions, decisions

  23. The choice

  24. Hot mess

  25. Tokyo Express

  26. Foxy lady

  27. The gift

  28. Swish

  29. Frank and beans

  30. I knew that I would

  31. Why did I ask?

  32. Dead man walking

  33. It's complicated

  34. Playing games

  35. Whatever works

  36. Love and marriage

  37. Brand name asshole

  38. Brown-eyed girl

  39. 8-ball, corner pocket

  40. Beach bums

  41. What you see is what you get

  42. Traced

  43. Breaking up is hard to do

  44. Elusive Illusion

  45. When you gotta go

  46. Gotcha

  47. Don't get carried away

  48. Dignity, or lack thereof

  49. And I thought I was creepy

  50. Pompous

  51. Making it angry

  52. Throwing stones in glass houses

  53. Now you sea me

  54. Museum quality

  55. Black and Night

  56. Choices? What choices?

  57. Why not?

  58. Fear no evil

  Dead End.

  About the Author

  1

  Good friends are hard to find

  “Prithi, I need another way out. And I mean right now.”

  I was still for a second, covering my right ear with my hand while I waited for her to respond through a burst of white noise. The interference was being caused by an atmospheric somewhere within the vicinity of the overly sterile hallway I was standing in. I had been doing my best to avoid him for the better part of the last three minutes, not wanting to get close enough for him to steal the air around me or find some other nasty way to see me to my end.

  “Prithi,” I repeated.

  The noise was too thick. I lowered my hand and reached out to the thread of magic tracing its way from me to my partner in this exercise, a corpse I had named Daisy. I had sent her to the western wing of the research facility while I had headed east. In most circumstances the distance would have been enough to snap the thread of control I held over her soul, called back against its will from the whatever beyond to do my bidding. This wasn’t most circumstances, and I had chosen my ally wisely.

  I found her near the western corner of the facility and smiled. While I was here trying to avoid the weatherman, she was about to drop in on the secure store room through an unguarded air duct.

  Mr. Black thought I was beneath re-animating children.

  The sad truth was that when it came to staying alive, nothing was beneath me.

  I started moving again, turning a corner and staring down yet another long, sterile white corridor. The facility was a hospital. Sort of. Like the way Auschwitz had been a resort. It was the place where Mr. Black kept the dirtiest of his laundry, the stuff even his son might have been disgusted by, or possibly in awe of if I hadn’t already killed him. Not animal experimentation. Human experimentation. Leathers, mainly. He hadn’t given up on reversing the geomagnetic turn that had brought a whole host of new sapiens back to the world. I hadn’t given up on trying to stop him.

  It was an interesting dance. One that I had never imagined I would be part of, made possible by the intervention from, of all things, a dragon. Even six months after meeting Tarakona, even after transporting his newborn offspring to him somewhere he made sure I had forgotten, I still woke up sometimes in utter confusion, wondering if any of it had been real.

  I had only to look at my ring finger to know that it was. Circling it was a simple black band, made from the same bone as the mask and pair of dice I carried in my trench coat pocket. I didn’t know where Tarakona had gotten it. What I knew was that he had given it to me, along with a book and a pretty large bankroll in exchange for stopping Black from using his unhatched egg to destroy the world.

  Go me.

  I also knew that the demon that resided in the equipment had been ecstatic when I had opened Tarakona’s briefcase to uncover the ring. It had nearly burned a hole in my chest with the heat that had risen from the mask, and the first time I had put it on the demon had cackled like it had just won the lottery.

  “It is almost complete,” it had said.

  That had scared the shit out of me. It had also almost been enough to convince me to give up the mask, the dice, and the ring, and stand out in a field somewhere to wait for Death to drop by and take me.

  Almost. Not quite.

  The ring was dormant. It was always dormant. Unlike the dice and the mask, its power was completely passive. Apparently, it made me invisible not only to Death but Mr. Black and other high-end wizards as well. I didn’t quite get how that worked, since Death was, well, Death, and Mr. Black was, despite his immense magical abilities, still only mortal. Whatever. The point was that I hadn’t been bothered by Death, Black, or any of their cronies since I had put it on.

  Go Tarakona.

  I wish I could have said that everything was all peaches and cream after that. The trouble was that all of the augmentation in the world couldn’t do anything for my most pressing situation. I had an incurable disease, and the only thing in the world that could hold it at bay was getting to be in shorter and shorter supply. Worse, I was degrading at an increasing pace, and where I had once been able to last a couple of months on a dose of meds, now I was lucky to get through a couple of weeks.

  Because of the ring? It was more than possible. It was the likeliest explanation, and given a choice I would have taken it off and taken my chances. Except there was no chance involved when it came to Death or Black. It wasn’t if. It was when.

  The fact that I felt safer breaking into a lab of his that nobody was supposed to know about to steal more of the medicine said all that needed to be said on that front.

  I walked briskly down the corridor, keeping my senses attuned to my surroundings as I did. I was getting further away from Daisy, which I didn’t like. The thread was already stretching, and I could feel her beginning to push back against my control.

  I lifted my hand and did my best to cough silently into it, managing to muffle all but the heaviest of the hacks while I pressed tight into a narrow door frame.

  I was still there when the atmospheric turned the corner. For once, it worked out that I was so
damn thin. I had my gun drawn and aimed before he even noticed I was there.

  Of course, that was too late. By the time I squeezed off a couple of rounds he had condensed all of the water vapor in the air into a shield thick enough to stop the bullets. Two of Black’s thugs spread to either side of him, aiming their firearms back at me. I put my hand on the door lock behind me, quickly spitting out some phrase I had memorized but didn’t understand. It changed my experience of the death magic frequency somehow, allowing me to corrode the lock to rust in under two seconds. I fell into the formerly sealed room at the same time the bullets started peppering the door where I had just been standing.

  “Damn it, Prithi,” I said, falling onto my back while I tried her again. “I’m getting cut off in here.”

  I got nothing but static back in reply. Maybe if she hadn’t been hanging out with her girlfriend in Vegas, she might have worked a little harder to find a way around the user’s jamming. Things just hadn’t been the same since she’d moved out there to live with Myra and started working remote. Not only was she getting sloppy, but I was getting increasingly lonely. Friends had been in short enough supply since I had left my prior life behind. Losing the only three I had made in the span of a year might have caused anyone else to consider giving up.

  I jumped to my feet, moving forward and throwing the door closed, holding it with my foot while I got a look at my surroundings. The room was dark and sparsely decorated. A large fridge hummed in the corner next to a painting of a sunrise with curtains around it as if that was a reasonable substitute for a window. A huge bed sat in the center, with heavy chains anchoring both it and its occupant to the floor.

  The occupant. I saw his face at the same time he saw mine. A troll, or maybe half-ogre, half-troll. He had a run of pustules down the side of his face, but he was way too big to be pure. He looked at me quizzically for a second. Then he looked at the door.

  “Looks like you’re in a bit of trouble, pal,” he said, his voice surprisingly soft for something so large.

  He shook his wrists, shackled to the bed and the chains.

  “You help me; I help you. What do you say?”

  2

  Serious

  I stared at him.

  “Hey, you want to die, that’s fine with me,” the trogre said. “But at least undo these things first.” He rattled his chains again. “One last act of charity, you dig?”

  I could hear the footsteps approaching the door. I didn’t need to think much about what to do. I darted to his side, putting my hand on the first part of the tether I touched and whispering the same foreign incantation. The chain decayed beneath my hand.

  “They have a user,” I said.

  “Robert. That shit. This isn’t going to be pretty.”

  “I can stop his magic for about five seconds,” I said.

  The singular benefit to the ring causing me to deteriorate faster was that my magical ability was directly proportional to my closeness to dying. Right now, it meant that I could choke off the Atmospheric’s attack. Just not for too long, or I would wind up too ill to stand.

  “I only need three,” he said, wrenching his arms away from the chains, sitting up, throwing off his sheets, and unstrapping the tethers on his legs.

  I couldn’t help but notice he was completely naked. His body was lined with more of the pustules, as well as some bruises and scars.

  “I didn’t come in here with those,” he said, slipping off the side of the bed.

  Black’s people were getting close. I held my hand out, hearing the chaos of the death magic rattling between my ears.

  The door swung open. Slowly, like it had been pushed by a toddler. I’m sure that wasn’t the effect Robert had been going for. Too damn bad.

  My new friend was out the door before I could yell “charge!” I held up my end by keeping the pressure on the user, moving forward slowly while the ugly straining of the death magic drowned out the more organized tempo of his frequency.

  I heard gunshots and saw blood spray from the trogre’s side. He took at least half a dozen hits without slowing, heading right for Robert. He picked the user up in his arms like he was a balloon animal. He popped the magician like one too, crushing him in his grip before dropping his corpse to the ground.

  I dropped my hand, feeling the wave of tiredness pass over me, along with the urge to finish coughing up whatever pieces were left of my lungs. I doubled over while the trogre made short work of the two guards, grabbing one by the arm and flinging him into the wall with enough force to break his neck, and taking the head of the other in a massive hand and squeezing it like a ripe melon.

  Whatever they had been doing to him in here, the gory violence of his retribution made the horrors of it crystal clear.

  He stood over the dead for a few seconds. His entire body was heaving. I thought about saying something and decided against it. How did I know he wasn’t in some kind of experimented-on-leather berserker rage?

  I returned my attention to Daisy instead. She was out of the shaft and into the storage room. I needed to get closer to use her eyes and find the meds I was looking for. At least the user was out of the equation.

  I started forward, inching my way to the door, trying to get out without disturbing the behemoth in front of me. Of course, he chose the moment I was closest to him to turn around.

  His entire face was red. A massive vein on his forehead was thumping. His eyes were wet and puffy.

  Was he crying?

  I used to be good at emotional stuff, back when I was as close to normal as anyone could be anymore. I wasn’t the most sensitive guy around, but I wasn’t a total dick either. That hadn’t come until after the cancer. I stood in the hallway and didn’t move, keeping my eyes on the big guy and hoping he wasn’t waiting for a hug.

  I was able to hold out for about ten seconds. I had a job to finish.

  “Can I help you?” I asked.

  “I never killed anyone before.”

  “I’m having a little trouble believing that.” I motioned to the scene. It was nasty, and would have made me puke if I hadn’t been so accustomed to nasty.

  “I swear. I don’t know what came over me. Ah, to hell with that. Yeah, I know what came over me. Those assholes had me locked up in here for the last three years, and I wanted to pop their skulls. I didn’t think I was ever getting out.”

  “Well, you’re out. You don’t have to thank me; I broke into your room to try to save my own life. It could have been any of these doors.” I paused, looking around at the other doors. There were a dozen of them in visual range, all identical. Plain steel with a handle that I only now noticed had a biometric scanner on it. “Or are you alone in here?”

  “I don’t know if there are others. I never saw anyone else. Maybe we should check?”

  “Maybe you should put on some pants.”

  He smiled and nodded, trudging past me into his room. He came out a moment later in a huge hospital gown. He did a pretty good job getting it closed in the back. “I don’t have any clothes.”

  “Why not?”

  “I didn’t look like this when I came in here.”

  “What were you? Full troll or full ogre?”

  “Are you serious? I was full human.”

  3

  No Regrets

  “You’re telling me they turned you into a leather?” I asked.

  “Yeah. About a year after they lifted me from prison, along with twenty or so other guys. They brought us all here, told us we were dead to the outside world, and basically had their way with us any way you can think of except one.”

  That explained the mess on the floor. “Did they say what they were trying to do?”

  “Turn us into monsters. They never tried to keep that secret. Why should they? They had total control. I can tell you I’m the only one of my group that survived.” He paused. “By the way, pal, who the hell are you, and what are you even doing here? Nobody wants to break into a place like this.”

  “The
n you can call me Nobody. What do you know about the Houses?”

  It was a standard question for a ghost to ask someone they weren’t quite sure about, especially someone they found in an area that was haunted.

  “Houses? I’m not a real estate agent.”

  Ignorance confirmed. “It’s not important right now. My name is Baron. I came here to steal-”

  I stopped talking, the realization hitting me hard. Jin had once told me that the meds turned most people who took them into monsters. She had also said work on the stuff had been stopped because the formula was considered a failure. That’s why it was so hard for me to keep any kind of supply on it. That’s why I had to steal it from people like Mr. Black, despite the inherent danger.

  Black had called his son an asshole for experimenting on ferals. He was such a fucking hypocrite. The only difference was his goal, which I had a feeling I understood.

  “Mr. Black is refining the compound, to learn how to make a leather,” I said.

  “What? Who’s Mr. Black?”

  “You don’t want to know. Anyway, it’s complicated. Look, you should make a run for it while the coast is clear. I can’t guarantee it will stay that way. I’ve got to finish my job and do the same. I’m glad I was able to help you out.”