Oh my God. Was that how demons worked? Was that what this witch was?
Amanda Lee was already shaking her head, anticipating my questions. “I’m sure I would have known if she were a demon, but I can’t explain what this spirit was. Either way, I’m safe, and I am a practicing medium, after all. Channeling spirits is par for the course. Besides, this witch didn’t leave anything behind in me.”
“Neither did the dark spirit when you channeled him during that fake séance at the Edgett mansion.”
“True.”
“Maybe you just don’t feel any residue from dark beings.”
“Jensen, stop fussing. I’m all right.”
Her voice was motherly—the kind of tone you want to hear when something goes wrong, like if there was a storm outside your house and you were afraid of the thunder closing in.
So I decided to believe Amanda Lee as I pulled ahead of the group to lead the way to the road. At night, it wouldn’t be hard for a human to get lost.
But when we came out of the trees, we also found another disturbing sight.
On the power lines above us, Scott was waiting . . . and he wasn’t the only ghost, either: there was a colorless bundle slumped next to him, drawing energy from the lines.
The only thing that identified the ghost was his hiker’s backpack. Daniel?
As the oblivious hunters deposited 10 in the van and secured her, while Marg kept her restrained, I told Amanda Lee that Scott and Daniel were here, and she rushed beneath the power lines to stand next to me and listen in.
I flew up to them. “How is he?”
Scott pulled a hand through his dark, greased-back hair. “Better. I found him huddled near a big rock about a half mile away from his death spot, you know, where he had his heart failure. He was this close to a time loop, too. Luckily, there was a generator from one of the houses close to us, so I pep-talked him over to it and he juiced up enough to move on. We thought he’d have enough strength to go to you, but he sputtered out and needed to rest here. I was just about to let you guys know, when you came crashing out of the woods.”
“Stolen,” Daniel whispered, his cheek by the wire, his arms circling it like he was slow dancing with a partner.
“It was the dark spirit,” I said to him. “He took part of your essence, right? How long ago?”
Daniel only closed his eyes.
“He told me that it happened yesterday,” Scott said, “after you saw the ghost hunters for the first time in the forest and you left him behind. After the attack, he held out by that rock for a while. I found him juicing up from a radio someone must’ve lost.”
So that had been my killer in Daniel’s guise at the happy house. Shit, how beyond creepy . . . It was a violation, like I’d just found out that I’d been babysitting in a house with a lot of glass windows and the dark spirit had been outside, seeing me put the kids to bed, talking to my friends on the phone, and eating popcorn in front of the TV. . . .
Scott added, “That’s why you saw Daniel’s face on the dark spirit when the orgonite sucked him in—because your killer had taken a part of his essence.”
So it’d been one last joke from my killer, teasing me with Daniel’s face because he knew that would steer me in the wrong direction in finding out his identity.
But my gut told me that he had even more in store for me. That the wrangler who’d escorted him out of Wendy’s condo did have something to do with all of this . . .
Below me, Amanda Lee had already gone to her car, and the hunters had started their van’s engine.
“I gotta go,” I said to Scott. “One of the hunters knows more than she was letting on, so we’ll be giving her a good interview.”
“Wish I could be in on it, but I’m going to Wendy’s. I’m gonna make sure she’s safe, even with all that orgonite she has.” Scott jerked his chin toward the woods. “You know Louis is still in there somewhere.”
Louis. Randy. I’d known I could miss humans, but not other ghosts.
“I know,” I said. “He would’ve shown himself if he wanted to.”
I couldn’t think about what might’ve happened to him if he wasn’t avoiding us. Seriously couldn’t.
After one last check on Daniel, I wished them luck and followed the vehicles’ taillights down the road as they wound through the night. I pulled up to Amanda Lee’s car, slipping through the crack of the window and rolling to the floor.
I pulled juice from the car battery, and she tried to keep her eyes open as she drove. The woman needed a nap, bad.
But that didn’t keep her from accessing the phone unit on her dashboard. Ruben answered the call, and she told him she’d gotten psychic information about a boy in the woods on the night of my death, so maybe he should go alone to that appointment with Franklin Anson Bruckner’s brother tomorrow while she pursued this lead instead.
“Are you sure you can’t come with me?” Ruben coughed, then recovered. “What if there’s something important to pick up on in Bruckner’s brother? A vibe that my own radar doesn’t sense?”
She slowly blinked, then shook her head like she was getting the fuzz out. I wondered if I should touch her and give her a chill that would keep her awake.
Ruben continued. “You know I value your input. It’s steered me in the right direction more than once, but what if you’re wrong this time? You can’t just let go of a lead this good.”
“I don’t think I’m wrong about this boy.”
He sighed, coughing again. “Okay. How about you explore your options, and I’ll do the same with mine? Then we’ll meet in the middle and see where we are.”
She barely smiled. “You’re fantastic, Ruben. Has anyone ever told you that?”
“Not nearly enough times.”
After she disconnected, she said, “Someday he’ll believe me unconditionally about the paranormal. I can feel it.”
“You’re right, because someday he’s going to see one of us ghosts and be a true believer. I can materialize to him, if you want. I mean, I’d like to say thank you for everything he’s done, and I can’t exactly do it properly when I’m invisible.”
“In time.” After a hesitation, she changed the subject. “Marg was certainly helpful tonight, wasn’t she?”
Oh, this. But I guessed we needed to hash it out. “She did great.”
“Do you still think she’s . . .”
“Amanda Lee, it’s the X. I want to believe there’s nothing to it, but when everything around me has the potential to jump out and haunt me, plus the humans and spirits I care about . . . Well, I get a little suspicious of anything that’s off.”
She didn’t say anything else. Probably she was too tired to argue, probably because she knew the mist’s paranoia had me in its grip, even if I was learning to mellow it out.
When we arrived at her place, we got out of the car at the same time the hunters exited the van. J.J. was still handling 10, with Marg invisibly cuffing her. Sierra closed the driver’s door, then looked around at the Mediterranean splendor of the property.
“Not a bad crib,” she said to Amanda Lee with a smile, but it wasn’t the flirty grin I’d seen on her before. She was only trying to play down the tension in the air.
Maybe she felt it all around, just like I did. . . .
I listened for a sec, but there was only the hum of electricity from the house and the pool area in the night. Or maybe there was an extra hum from something else . . . ?
“How about using the casita to get 10 settled?” I said.
“Sounds good. I’ll also de-ghost-proof anything that might keep you and Marg out.”
“Do you have some orgonite for any negative spirits in there?” It might not have worked on my killer after all, but it was our only line of defense besides prayers.
“Yes, yes, and yes.”
“Good. Be right there.”<
br />
“Is something wrong?”
“No. I only want to check in with Elliot and Angel and any more lookiloos.”
She herded everyone toward the casita, and as I moved toward the back of the property, Marg watched me from J.J.’s back as she handcuffed 10 and he carried our interviewee. She’d given up fighting and was merely swinging back and forth from her prone position as J.J. walked.
I continued on my way toward the back, stopping to investigate my surroundings on the way—the bushes, the garden. Then I went to the pool.
When I discovered what’d been making that extra humming noise there, I froze in surreal confusion.
What the hell?
On the fence, Elliot and Angel were stretched and pinned like two Halloween decorations that a mean kid had nearly destroyed. They were so weak that they couldn’t even lift their heads and . . . Shit. They were flickering.
I knew what that meant: they were close to turning into residual hauntings, time loops, where they’d play out their deaths over and over again.
God dammit, I needed batteries for them. No, I needed to get the humans out here so they could bring batteries to them—
Just before I took off to get the hunters, Elliot stopped me.
“Spirit . . .” he hissed. “Held on . . . long as we could . . .”
Next to him, Angel tumbled off the fence, and I ghost-gasped, because he wasn’t the missionary Indian Angel I’d always seen around the backyard. He was like a hazy mockery of himself, lying on his back while floating in the air, pale and still. He was acting out his last few seconds of life, dying of scurvy.
I started to go to him—as if I knew what to do!—but then his image swirled into a column of white, spinning for a moment, then zooming away.
And I knew he was on his way to his death spot so he could haunt it as an imprint, dying over and over and over again, just like I had before Amanda Lee had pulled me out of my time loop.
“Elliot?” I could still save him. “Hold on . . . I’m going to get to one of the humans and—”
But the ghost in the straw hat and pale early-twentieth-century suit tumbled from the fence, convulsing, holding his stomach and looking down at his dark blood-coated hands as he reenacted his stabbing. He fell the rest of the way to the ground, dead.
Then he was gone in a swirling flash, too.
Fear overpowered the grief and wailed through me. I didn’t want to look around to see if my killer was here. What had he done to Elliot and Angel? How much of their essences had he taken, and what had he put them through?
On a jerking shiver, I bolted toward the casita, hoping Amanda Lee had already cleared the place for us ghosts in record time. But it didn’t matter, anyway, because I was willing to see just what would happen if I barged inside a protected domain. I wanted to get inside that much.
She was outside the casita with Sierra and J.J., their hands full of horseshoes, cinnamon sticks, rowan branches, and that Kabbalah tube, just like the objects she’d put over her main house door, too. When she saw me, she dropped everything.
“Get inside,” I yelled.
No dummy, she jumped for the door and held it open for the humans and me, shutting it after we made it in.
She’d done it, lifted all incantations that affected us, and I materialized, stunning Sierra and J.J., who were still barely used to me. In a chair, Marg was restraining 10’s wrists and ankles, her essence still hardened into those cuffs.
Her braids rustling, 10 laughed at the scardey-cat image I must’ve been. I hadn’t really noticed before now, but she didn’t have the kind of face you’d remember. Her beaded braids were the most noteworthy thing about her.
“Talk now,” I said, my voice splitting the room.
She flinched and stopped smiling. But she was pressing her lips together again.
So I blasted to her, coming to a stop before running into her, then lightly touched her neck, hoping I was as cold as hell while I tried to enter her for empathy. But she had that black wall up, and I smacked into it.
She laughed again. “Good try.”
“What connection do you have to the dark spirit?” I asked, not giving up.
Too bad for her that my perseverance made her laugh again, made her cockier than ever, so that her defenses disappeared for the fraction of a second I needed to invade her thoughts.
I touched her again and . . .
Staring at the ceiling, the floor beneath so hard, so cold. But it would be so worth it!
Nothing on the walls, no curtains on the windows, no furniture . . . This place—the haunted house where everyone said blond, pretty Melanie Samson had died in the early eighties, even though the official word was that she’d run away from an abusive boyfriend.
So what if no one else wanted to come tonight? So what if everyone else who worked at the construction office said visiting Melanie’s house is a psycho thing to do?
Even the Spirit Stalkers thought she was weird, so she hadn’t asked them.
Just a bike ride away, in a Fallbrook neighborhood where mean dogs barked in the darkness and there were signs on fences to stay out.
Not scared.
Never scared, not even after reading Helter Skelter late into the night, watching true-crime shows on TV until eyes burned and sleep came with a lullaby of murder woven through it.
Murder. All her friends said she was too into it, but she didn’t care. Murder was fascinating. Horror made her feel like she had a life. And she wanted to know this suspected victim, wanted to lie here and imagine how Melanie might’ve died. She’d even dressed and styled her hair like Melanie to get that extra mojo going. . . .
Eyes closed, ears taking in every sound, every creak of the old house . . .
Then a voice. Rusty-sounding, almost like a soft screech.
“What pretty blond hair you have . . .”
Heart choking throat. Ice crunching through veins. Eyes still closed, wanting to see who’d said it, not wanting to see . . .
Breathing right next to her ear.
Eyes squeezed shut now. Is there a voice in my head? Am I so excited that I only imagined it?
But it doesn’t sound like Melanie . . .
“Open up,” it said again. “Pretty please?”
What else to do?
Peering through one eye, seeing a dark shape. A blob with tentacles.
A scream rushing up from belly to chest to throat, gurgling there, dead on arrival.
Then a body, misty with blackness. And . . . a face?
Yes, a nice gray-toned face with big, light eyes and mousy hair that feathered at the sides. A face you would see in any crowd, passing by you, forgotten in the next minute.
Heart thudding. Mouth, not working. Questions waiting to be asked.
“I’ve been hoping to find a friend,” said the ghost. “Will you be my friend . . . ?”
Slowly, the ghost went back to its original darkness, growing, expanding until it lay down over her body, spreading against her, pressing to her in an embrace and making everything go black . . .
Making her feel like a part of something for the first time in her life . . .
I popped out of 10, knowing it was a damned good time to end my spying.
I felt sick, and it hadn’t been that way with Sierra when I’d seen why she’d wanted to hunt ghosts. I knew J.J.’s story, too, and it was nothing like this one.
“She’s a groupie,” I said to everyone in the room. “Just like Ted Bundy had girls showing up to his trial, dressed like his victims so he would notice them—that’s what Landry did when she went to a haunted house where an urban legend said one of the dark spirit’s victims was killed. Maybe she didn’t know what she was inviting, but . . .” I leaned into her face. “You went there, combing out your own blond hair that night, hoping to look like Melanie Samson and to attra
ct attention from any spirits lingering there. Maybe even the murderer’s.”
As if she thought I was an idiot, 10 sent a harsh laugh at me.
Sierra stepped forward, shoving her finger at 10. “‘Let’s investigate Jensen Murphy,’ you said. ‘It’ll make us famous and get us a TV show.’ You were the first one to suggest it. But is that what you really wanted out of all this?”
Amanda Lee was sitting on an antique love seat, her head in her hand like she was getting strong vibes from 10. “Jensen’s right. When Landry suggested this to your team, she knew what she was doing. You didn’t know her as well as you thought you did in those community-college classes you took together. The dark spirit got to her a few weeks ago. He wanted her to expose what he did to Jensen so he’d live in infamy, since the police never did solve his crimes and he wasn’t able to bask in his glory. He was going to use her to give Jensen more pain and be celebrated like the criminal genius he believes he is.”
Just as if she’d tuned out, 10 stared through me.
When J.J. and Sierra started firing off questions at her, I backed away. Obviously, 10 was done with us, but, at some point, she was going to leave an opening for me, and I was going to be here to go back into her to exploit it and get even more information.
But when she opened her mouth for some reason, like there was a snake crawling into it, I held up a hand, encouraging everyone be quiet.
Making a sound like a dying beast, 10 started to jerk around.
“What’s happening?” screamed Sierra.
J.J. grabbed her and pulled her away from 10. Amanda Lee got to her feet. Marg held tight to 10, still restraining her in that chair.
Something was moving underneath 10’s windbreaker.
J.J. sprang for her, ripping off the jacket, exposing a tight T-shirt that was wavering right at her belly.
“He’s inside her,” Amanda Lee said, diving for an orgonite pyramid on an end table. “He’s been in this room, listening, making sure she doesn’t reveal anything to us!”
With a cry of anguish, 10 threw back her head, and an inky blob burst out of her mouth, bleeding over her chin and neck before whooshing to a corner of the room.
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