by A. J. Locke
Micah, Ethan, and I crowded her doorway when she tentatively came out. Vicious was now curled up on the ground in front of the television where the boy was watching cartoons.
“Yes?” Beth didn’t look too happy to see us again.
“Beth, this is going to sound a bit strange,” I said. “But there’s a ghost cat in your living room, and it’s imperative that I have a word with it.”
Micah poked me in the back.
“I mean, I really need to get closer to it.”
Beth looked over her shoulder with wide eyes, then looked at me like she thought I was crazy.
“I’m a necromancer, remember?” I said. “I can see ghosts, and there’s one in your living room. Can you let us in?”
“A cat? A ghost cat?”
I fought the urge to heave a sigh. I didn’t want to waste time going back and forth with Beth about this, but it wasn’t like I could just barge into her apartment.
“Yes, Vicious the cat,” I said, somewhat impatiently. “Look, Beth, I need to get to the cat in order to get to Larry. The reason why is a long explanation, but I’m trying to round up the person who put your husband in the hospital. Please.”
Beth regarded us for a moment, all the while wringing the dishcloth she was holding in her hands. Finally she stepped aside and allowed us in. Micah, Ethan, and I immediately headed into the living room while Beth called her son to her side. When Vicious saw us advancing on him, he got up and started to run, but I ensnared him with my power so he couldn’t get away.
“So happy you didn’t go far,” I said. Vicious did not look pleased that he was trapped, and I was glad he wasn’t a real cat because we’d have long been clawed up and rushing off to the hospital to see if we’d contracted rabies. “Let’s just do this right here.”
Micah and Ethan stepped back to give me room. I knelt in front of Vicious and pulled out the two rune stones. I put the green one down, then held the black one out toward the cat, who looked none too happy about having a rune stone shoved in his intangible face. I wondered what sort of joy a cat named Vicious, who even as a ghost was still hostile, could have brought his owner. Maybe he’d been a guard cat or something.
I cleared my head and tapped into my power to activate the rune stone, and after a few moments, I felt the stone thrumming in my hand. I then focused on extending the power in the stone toward the ghost cat. After Vicious had been covered in the rune’s power, I went searching. It didn’t take long for the stone to find and attach to what it was searching for: Trevor’s energy. It was like a handprint all over the ghost of his cat, and I smiled as the stone absorbed that energy. When it was done, I placed the stone near the other one, then sat back and waited. Behind me, Micah and Ethan leaned over my shoulders, watching.
Suddenly, the absorption rune started shaking as it lay on the floor. Seconds later, a flash of power erupted from the tracking rune, and it started pulsing as well. I felt the energy being pulled from the absorption rune into the tracking rune. The tracking rune then started glowing and the other rune fell silent. I snatched it up and pocketed it, then carefully picked up the green one and held it in my palm.
Immediately, I felt it pulling me toward the door, and I smiled at Ethan and Micah.
“Let’s track down your body,” I said to Ethan.
We said a hasty thanks and good-bye to Beth, leaving Vicious behind since there was no time to take care of him, then left the building and headed back to Micah’s car. As he drove, I directed him on where to go, growing excited and hopeful that this time, we would be more successful against Larry.
The directions I felt from the rune took us out of the Bronx, back into Manhattan, and I wondered if Larry was with Trevor somewhere in the Underground. Maybe they’d just moved shop elsewhere. After about twenty minutes of driving, I told Micah to stop. We were in Harlem, outside a three-story brownstone. The three of us got out and faced the building.
“Here,” I said, feeling my anxiety grow.
Micah looked at me and nodded. He’d pulled out two rune stones that worked like our necromancer magic did when it came to immobilizing ghosts. Its purpose was to strengthen the invisible net we were able to throw out, and seeing how strong Larry was, we’d need all the strength we could get.
We ran up to the front door, and Micah kicked it in. It flew open with an explosive bang, and I took a split second to admire Micah’s strength before running behind him into the building. He kicked in another door at my direction, and we ran into a living room where we were met with screams. My eyes widened when they landed on not Larry or Trevor, but on a middle-aged man and woman sitting in a living room filled with antiques. The woman was clutching a Pomeranian to her chest.
Micah, Ethan, and I stopped so abruptly that we collided with each other. We stood there, staring at the woman, man, and dog. My reanimation magic suddenly gave a pulse, and my jaw dropped when I focused on the dog.
“What’s going on? What’s going on!” the woman shrieked.
Damn it. Why was I so slow on the uptake when it really counted? “The dog has been reanimated,” I told Micah and Ethan. “By Trevor, no doubt.”
“We’re s-sorry,” the man said. “We know reanimation is wrong, but we just missed Mr. Wellington so much when he died that we sought the help of a reanimator. We’re sorry; please don’t take our dog away. Please.”
It said a lot about their love for their dog that they were more concerned about us taking him away than they were about getting arrested for seeking the help of a reanimator. I sagged against the wall, feeling like the biggest idiot. Though I was highly amused by the pretentious name Mr. Wellington.
“Trevor has been making a living reanimating animals for the past few years,” I said. “So this stone isn’t going to lead us just to Larry; it’s going to lead us to every animal Trevor has ever reanimated.”
Micah and Ethan gave me mirrored looks of disbelief.
“Really, one of you should have thought about that before. Let’s go.” I stomped out of the apartment without bothering to say anything to the frightened couple. They could spend a few days living in fear of us coming back. Right now, we had a bigger issue on our hands.
The three of us convened in Micah’s car, where the stone was already telling me another direction to go.
“How are we going to make this work?” I said, staring at the glowing stone. “If we have to go through a hundred cats, dogs, rabbits, and birds first, Larry could slaughter half of Manhattan before we get to him. Though if he did, I guess we could just follow the trail of bodies, but somehow that seems like the least desirable option.”
I dropped my head back against the headrest. I’d gotten a rush of adrenaline when I thought we were about to confront Larry and Trevor. Now that it had waned, I felt drained. And discouraged. Micah and Ethan’s silence told me they didn’t have any suggestions for how to overcome this hump either. Which meant that we were left with following the stone to every animal Trevor had reanimated, until it led us to Larry.
“Let’s go,” I muttered. “The stone will eventually lead us to him.” Micah looked at me skeptically. “You have a better idea?”
He sighed and started up the car.
Chapter Nineteen
Three hours later, we had surprised over a dozen people at home or on the street as they walked their dogs, had driven through all of the boroughs and gone as far as Long Island, and still hadn’t come across Larry. We were discouraged, to say the least.
Micah’s jaw was doing the tight clench thing it did, and Ethan was slumped wearily in the backseat, which made me wonder if he was actually tired or if he was just trying to convey his frustration that we’d spent the last three hours tracking animals while a murderous ghost ran around in his body. I was too bummed to ask. Back in Manhattan, we headed uptown after confronting a young woman and her reanimated parrot. I listlessly gave Micah directions, still holding the rune stone on my palm, when Micah suddenly slammed on the brakes. I would have brained myself
on the windshield if I hadn’t been wearing my seatbelt.
Cars immediately started honking behind us, and I was about to ask Micah what the hell that was about when I looked up and saw what had made him stop the car. Standing in the middle of the road were two ghost beasties.
One was tall and spindly; the other was short and wide. The tall one was slimy, dark green, and had six arms, each of which ended in a circle of deadly claws. Its mouth was also a circle of razor-sharp teeth, and it had three pairs of eyes. The other one was purple; sported two massive, muscular arms; and had horns protruding all over its body.
I’d been in this line of work for a few years, but it still stunned me that a human ghost could turn into something like this. Research done by dead witches long ago hinted that what the ghosts turned into was drawn from nightmares that had been locked in their human brains, but that research was inconclusive. As it was, the two beasties stood in the middle of the road, and their attention was focused on the three of us. Micah and I had our rune guns out immediately.
“Stay in the car,” I said to Ethan, who just nodded and crouched next to the door as though that would keep him safer. Micah and I got out of the car, running toward the beasties.
It wasn’t uncommon for beasties to manifest out of the blue, but this really wasn’t what we needed right now. The people behind Micah had forgiven him for stopping so abruptly. Now they were abandoning their cars and running away screaming.
Micah and I fired, but the beasties became a blur, and our bullets caught air as they ran to either side of us. It took a few seconds of turning around before I realized that the beasties weren’t interested in Micah and me. They were interested in what we’d left sitting in the car. Shit.
“Ethan, get out of the car!” I screamed, running back toward Micah’s car, which the beasties hurtled toward.
My heart felt like it stopped when the monsters pulled the doors off Micah’s car and started rampaging through it. When I looked at Micah, he was staring at his wrecked car with his mouth agape, but he quickly refocused himself. I was still freaking out; where the hell was Ethan?
“Selene!”
I looked over and saw Ethan crouching behind an abandoned car; he’d gotten out in time. However, calling my name alerted not only me but the beasties to his location, and they immediately switched from looking for him in the wreckage they’d made of Micah’s car to barreling down on him again. Micah and I kept firing, but the beasties were fast, and we had to be careful because there were still a lot of people running around. Our bullets mostly landed in abandoned cars or ricocheted off the ground.
The purple beastie picked up the car Ethan had been crouching behind and threw it backward, which meant it came right at me. I dove out of the way, rolling painfully across the ground as I heard the car crash behind me. The sound momentarily deafened me, but I quickly got to my feet to see both beasties thrashing through cars as they pursued Ethan.
Micah had climbed on top of a car and was firing at the raging beasties. The green one jumped up and slammed into the car, flattening it only seconds after Micah jumped out of the way. He fired almost point-blank into the beastie’s face. It screamed but didn’t fall. This thing was strong.
I ran back into the fight, but I was now clear on one thing: the beasties were only after Ethan, which was not typical beastie behavior. Ghost monsters were never this precise about their target, which meant these beasties had been sent specifically for Ethan, and I knew it could only have been by Trevor. How he could even control ghost beasties was something I’d have to figure out later.
I fired a round of shots into the purple monster. It turned glowing red eyes on me and howled so loudly that the air around me vibrated. My shots landed but didn’t drop the beastie. It rushed me. I tried to dash out of the way, but it caught me across the chest with one of its massive arms, and I fell back. I fired up as I did so, landing more shots but not seeming to slow the monster down.
It jumped over me and ran. When I dragged myself up, I saw that the green one had four of its arms holding Ethan tightly to its chest, and the purple one was trying to catch up as it fled. I didn’t see Micah until I ran forward and found him lying between two upturned cars with blood dripping from his forehead.
He groaned and opened his eyes, and I almost collapsed with relief. I helped him up, but we had no time to assess each other’s injures because the beasties were getting away with Ethan.
“They only want Ethan. What does that tell you?” I called to Micah as we ran, having to dodge debris and climb over cars in order to move forward.
“Trevor!” Micah called back.
I reached into my pocket for bullets to reload, and my hand brushed against the binding rune. I’d forgotten I had it on me. It pulsed when I touched it, and I suddenly knew how I could stop these beasties—blast them into the afterlife. I knew the dangers, but our rune guns didn’t seem to be doing more than tickling them.
I pulled the binding stone out, and it started glowing and pulsing more intensely. My reanimation power flowed into it; cycling through it like a circuit, and the power I felt growing from the stone was stronger than anything I’d ever felt from a rune stone before.
My entire body felt like it was connected to the binding stone. Power built inside me, and the stone glowed so brightly I felt as though I was holding a star. It went from warm to almost too hot to hold, but I kept my grip on it.
Seconds later, light and power erupted from the rune stone and flew at the beasties, who weren’t too far ahead, thanks to our boosted speed. The power threw me back, the light blinding me and a thunderous sound deafening me like it had exploded in my head. The world around me felt like it was shaking, like I’d unleashed a slew of natural disasters all at once, and if I hadn’t understood how dangerous this stone was before, I definitely understood now.
“Selene!”
I heard Micah’s voice as though from a great distance even though he was standing over me, trying to help me up. He looked worse than when I’d seen him a minute ago. He was covered in dirt and looked more bruised and banged up, but at least he was on his feet. A dust cloud slowly settled around us. The purple beastie was gone, but a shocking amount of damage remained in its wake. The rune stone had done worse than the beasties. There was a huge crater in the middle of the road, numerous cars had become lost causes, light posts had been toppled, and many of the nearby storefronts had been blasted through.
People had cleared the area once they saw the beasties barreling through, but I really, really hoped no one had been killed by what I had just done. I was happy to see one beastie down, but the other one was still up ahead with Ethan.
Micah and I spared each other a glance, then started running again. I tried to ignore the aches and pains in my body as best I could and kept the stone in my hand. It was still pulsing to attack, but I was afraid of using it again.
After chasing the beastie for a few blocks and seeing its increasing lead, it was clear that saving Ethan would be a lost cause if we kept going by foot. There were a few abandoned cars on the road, and Micah stopped and called me over to where he was getting into a car that still had the engine running.
We caught up to the beastie in no time.
“I think we should let it take Ethan,” I said to Micah. He immediately gave me an “are you insane?” look. “The beasties didn’t want to kill him, they wanted to capture him, and where do you think green guy up there is taking him?”
A knowing look came over Micah’s face now. “To Trevor.”
“Precisely,” I said. “And possibly Larry. I know Ethan must be freaking the hell out right now, but I think we should switch our tactic from chasing to following, then I can blast the beastie away, and we can deal with Trevor and Larry.”
“Okay,” Micah said. “Though what you just unleashed to blast the other one away seemed extremely dangerous.”
“That’s an understatement,” I said, releasing a shaky breath. I quickly told him what Ilyse had told me
about the extent of the powers of the binding stone.
Micah cursed, not because of what I’d told him, but because he’d had to execute a sharp, last-minute turn as the green beastie rounded a corner. I was thrown against the door, reminding me that I wasn’t wearing a seat belt. I quickly strapped myself in.
“Looks like the only ways we have of forcing ghosts to the afterlife are dangerous,” Micah said, stepping on the gas since the beastie realized it was being chased and had started doing leaps that ate up more ground than we were on four wheels.
“Agreed,” I said. “But I’ll do what I have to do.”
Micah drove like a reckless madman, breaking numerous traffic laws, but since we were in pursuit of a beastie, I’m sure the people whose cars he accidentally hit would forgive him. I expected the beastie to stop and turn back so it could try to shake us, but it seemed resolute to get Ethan wherever he was supposed to be taken. I had my rune gun and the binding stone ready anyway.
I caught sight of Ethan a few times as we chased the beastie. He was securely held against the beastie’s long torso, but from the look on his face and the way I could hear him wailing through the car window, he most definitely wasn’t enjoying the ride.
When the beastie took us to a decidedly grittier neighborhood, I was sure we were getting to the end of this chase. Sure enough, after driving down deserted streets past a lot of boarded-up stores and rundown apartment buildings and homes, the beastie seemed to disappear in the blink of an eye. Micah stopped the car, and we ran down the block, stopping where the beastie had disappeared and finding a short flight of steps that led to a basement apartment. The door had been barreled through by the seven-foot beastie.
“Ready?” Micah asked. I nodded.
We ran into the apartment. The room we entered was small, dark, and empty, but if I knew Trevor, there was probably a hidden room somewhere. Sure enough, it took only a few moments of searching before Micah found a door in the floor of the bathroom. This apartment had clearly been made to house shady dealings. I wouldn’t be surprised if it had been around during the Prohibition days.