by JL Bryan
“Nicholas,” said the woman who'd been sent to fetch us. He looked up and flashed a smile.
“Great. Thanks, Tina. Hey, everybody clear the room a sec, okay? That's great, move along.” He waited until everybody but Stacey and I were gone.
“First off.” Nicholas pointed at Stacey. “You. Welcome aboard. We're looking for some exciting things from you, Tolbert. Should I call you Tolbert?”
“Stacey's okay.” She shrugged. “Okay, I'm here. What else?”
“Right to business. See, I like her.” He looked at me while he said it, as if I'd been on the edge of my seat, dying to hear his opinion. “I like both of you,” he added, as if to soothe what he probably assumed to be my bruised ego. “I look forward to putting all this unpleasantness and confusion behind us as fast as possible and moving forward, getting to work. Protecting the living against the dead—that's why we're all really here, isn't it, Ellie? Our shared goal. Our common war.”
“Is this supposed to be an inspiring Winston Churchill kind of thing?” I asked. “Because it isn't.”
“We all have our inner demons driving us forward,” Nicholas said. “There's nothing attractive about this line of work. Some inner distortion, some psychological breakage brings each of us here. Don't you agree?”
“Let's hear about your psychological breakage, then,” I said. “Why are you hunting ghosts? There must be easier, more profitable lines of work for someone who can read minds. If you really can.”
“You want to test me?” He took his feet off his desk and smiled, leaning forward in his chair. “Have a seat.” He gestured across the desk to the chairs facing him, where Stacey and I would normally sit when talking to Calvin.
“I'm comfortable standing. Is this why you summoned us here?” I asked.
“Among other reasons.”
“Okay, fine.” I crossed my arms. “I'm thinking of a number between one and one hundred.”
“No numbers,” he said.
“And you say you can read minds.” I shook my head.
“Have you ever tried to read a document while you were dreaming?” he asked. “That part of your brain can't handle written text or numbers very well. It's the same with the Sight.”
I knew this—Jacob, our psychic friend, rarely succeeds in coming up with specific names and dates. I was just giving Nicholas a hard time, but not in a friendly way.
“So what kind of test would fall within the extremely narrow range of your abilities?” I asked.
“Think of a color.”
“Wow. Okay, if you want to start with something easy.” I closed my eyes and imagined the entire room painted in shades of red, the color of the rage brewing under my skin because of everything that had happened today. And it was still fairly early in the morning.
“Red,” he said quickly.
I guess that would have been obvious from my emotional state. I switched quickly to green—green Christmas trees, green grass, green four-leaf clover.
“Sneaky. You changed to green. You're thinking of...Father Christmas? Leprechauns?”
“Not exactly.” I opened my eyes. “Well, I can see why Kara outranks you.”
“Ha. You'll be happy to know, Ellie, that I'm sending you away for the day. I know you may be uncomfortable with the first day of transition. That's normal.”
“Yeah? So you have a lot of experience taking over other people's businesses?”
“There's an inquiry from a potential client. It came into your agency's public email address.” He turned the screen to face us. “Go out and seek revenue.”
“How did you get into our email?” I asked.
“You mean our email,” Nicholas said. “Apparently the lady has been seeing things in her nursery, disturbing her baby—oh, no!” He spoke with overdone mock concern. “Someone must go out there right away and have a look, don't you think?”
“I'll be happy to get out of here for a while,” I said. “But Nicholas, you have to understand that the loose ghost we're talking about, Anton Clay—he really is dangerous. He nearly killed both of us just two nights ago. He'll be hunting us, and he could kill others. Particularly women. You have to let us investigate. Pressure Kara to change her mind.”
“Honestly, I agree with your viewpoint on this,” Nicholas said.
“Really?” I felt surprised—or maybe like he was joking.
“I would like to see that pyrokinetic ghost trapped. He does sound like a monster. I'll do what I can to persuade her. Of course, you'll have plenty of opportunity to speak with Kara as well.”
“We don't really get along,” I said.
“Perhaps that will change. She's riding along with you to meet the potential client.”
“What?” I snapped. “You can forget that.”
“Policy,” Nicholas said, sounding almost genuinely apologetic. “Since you have not internalized PSI procedures, you'll need a supervisor on-site for the client intake. Kara will be your supervisor for those procedures.”
“You can't be serious,” I said, but he only shrugged. I looked at Stacey. My only options seemed to be to go along with it, to refuse to work—to quit, basically—or to ask Nicholas if he could come with us in Kara's place. I didn't want to beg him for any favors, though, and really he was only slightly more tolerable than she was. I didn't want to invite any more date invitations from him, either. I sighed. “Fine. Kara's coming with us. I'll call this client and set something up for the afternoon.”
“The afternoon?” Nicholas asked. “Why not this morning?”
“Because it's already past my bedtime. Plus I need to go home and feed my cat.” I nudged Stacey. “Come on. Let's go move Calvin's truck and get out of everybody's way.”
“Move his truck?” Nicholas asked.
“Yeah, he wants it out in the parking lot so your friends don't go rooting through his personal property.” I nodded at Stacey and we both stood up. I snagged Calvin's spare truck key from a nail on the wall.
“When exactly are you expecting to return?” Nicholas asked.
“Don't call us, we'll call you,” I replied, and then I closed the door as we left the office. It seemed like an okay exit line.
Everyone looked up from their counting and picture-taking as Stacey and I climbed into Calvin's truck. I punched the remote clipped to the sun visor, and the garage door behind us rattled its way up.
Calvin hadn't actually said anything about his truck, but it seemed like my best chance to grab the file and gear we'd left behind. I parked it right outside, next to my Camaro, and quickly transferred the backpack of gear and the envelope stuffed with all of Calvin's notes about Anton Clay.
"So they're really taking over," Stacey said. We stood between our cars, and she looked toward the black-glass front door that led to the lobby, lettered with ECKHART INVESTIGATIONS in peel-off vinyl letters.
"I'm not even sure how private our conversation is out here," I said. "Let's go get a coffee. Your favorite place."
"Ooh, we're already talking in subtle code like gangsters," Stacey said. Then she horrified me with her attempted Marlon Brando imitation. If any Paranormal Solutions people were spying on us, I'm sure she horrified them, too. "We gotta go to the place and take care of the guy with the thing on the issue of that related subject."
"Yeah. I'm getting in my car now, before anybody tries to stop us."
We drove away, each in our cars, and met back at The Sentient Bean downtown, where all the coffee beans are cage-free and organically raised according to an individualized Montessori education plan before getting dumped into the roaster.
I ordered green tea, since I still harbored some hope of cramming in a few hours of sleep before we went to meet the new client. We sat at one of the little wooden cafe tables, and I ran down everything for Stacey. She was really my only ally left in all of this, so I didn't see any reason to keep anything from her.
"They seemed pretty eager to get their hands on all the big, bad stuff," Stacey said, after she was caught up.
"It's like a top priority for them."
"Well, maybe they want to make sure all the dangerous stuff is properly contained and none of it's going to pop out and cause problems."
"Maybe." I thought of the almost gleeful look in Nicholas's darkening eyes as he looked over the artifacts in the safe. "They don't seem too worried about getting Anton Clay properly contained."
"Because that could cost time and money, and these people are mostly interested in making money, not in serving the public or protecting the living because it's the right thing to do or whatnot."
"I almost hope their motives are that easy to understand," I said.
"What else could they be?" Stacey looked puzzled.
"Think about their lab. All those captured ghosts, and the way they were trying to control them, like animals."
"Somebody has to do that research, though," Stacey said. "I mean, someone had to invent the gear we use, and it's not as if the gear that exists is really all that useful when it comes to stopping ghosts. It would be great if they could find a better way. Right?"
"You have a point. But it still feels sinister to me, digging into the unknown like that, trying to get dangerous ghosts to perform like circus animals."
"I'm just saying, if they could come up with a safer, more reliable way to capture ghosts, or get rid of them, we could sure use it. As many times as we get hurt and almost killed, you know...there has to be room for improvement."
"Of course." I yawned and stretched. "I'm going to improve things for myself by going home, sleeping, and trying to forget about everything for a few hours."
"Not me, I was ready to start work this morning. What should I do? Go back to the office?"
"No, it's way too miserable there. I want you to research my old house. See who owns that property now and what they're planning to do with it. Also look into the current ownership of Anton's old properties—the old theater where his town house was, the old gas station where his plantation house was. See what you can learn about any of those locations, particularly anything within the past ten years."
"Great," Stacey said, looking sour. "My favorite kind of research."
"There's not much else you can do yet. I'm not sending you inside either of Anton's old homes to set up gear without me. Too dangerous. Also, we only have one small backpack of gear for hunting Anton, unless we can smuggle more out of the office, so our options are pretty limited."
"Smuggling our own gear?" Stacey shook her head. "We've never had that kind of problem before."
"Welcome to the new normal," I said. "Now we get to fight against Kara and Nick at every turn."
"Maybe we should cut out," Stacey said. "Start our own place."
"That wouldn't be as easy as it sounds. It would be expensive, for one thing, and we'd also have these new people as competitors, and they seem to have a lot of funding on their side. Also...I don't trust them."
"Isn't that another good reason to leave?" Stacey asked.
"No. If we leave, we can't keep an eye on them. The only way to watch their organization is to stay inside it."
"Ooh, so we're secretly investigating the new bosses? I like the sound of that."
"We're going to stick around and see what we can learn from them," I said. "Which is why I'm being so cooperative with them."
"Really? I got the sense you were kind of being the opposite..."
"Believe me, I've been biting my tongue," I said. "Everything in me wants to walk out and never go back. But then Nicholas and Kara and all their shady friends will be unleashed on our city, free to do whatever they want, without us there to keep them in check. So I'm going along grudgingly—which is, honestly, the only way I can go along with it. But you should be chipper. Be good cop."
"I can do chipper!" Stacey said with a big smile.
"I know you can, Stacey." I shook the dregs of the tea in my cup. "Okay, you get researching. I'll call you when I'm awake. Then I guess we'll go see about the lady with the ghost in her nursery."
"Don't forget we have to pick up Kara first," Stacey said.
"How could I forget?" I sighed, feeling almost as powerless as I'd ever felt over my own life.
Then I went home and slept.
Chapter Seven
I'd been having fevered dreams about Anton Clay, the ghost who'd killed my parents and nearly killed me more than once. These seemed to coincide with the time he'd gotten free of the site of my old home. He'd been taunting me in my sleep, haunting me, stalking me, whispering seductively about the painful fiery death he was planning for me.
This time, though, after arriving home and petting the cat and throwing away the mail, I enjoyed a strangely blissful slumber on my bed. There was no reason for it. Anton had not been stopped, Michael had not awakened, Kara and Nicholas had not hopped a bus out of town to disappear forever.
Later, it would trouble me. It was as if Anton had slipped off the psychic grid, if such a thing exists. He'd been pursuing me, chasing me in my dreams, until our real-life confrontation in the burning cornfield. My peaceful sleep could mean he'd gone into hiding. Maybe he'd thought better of using his status as a newly liberated ghost to obsessively pursue me. Maybe he'd decided to somehow slip away.
I hoped not. I wanted him to come for me. It would make capturing him much easier. I had no intention of forgiving and forgetting when it came to Anton. I would pursue him wherever he went.
If sleeping too well and too peacefully bothered me, at least it didn't have a chance to bother me for too long. A loud banging at the door to my apartment woke me. My cat was perched on my feet, hissing in response to the loud banging, his claws digging helpfully into my ankles.
My room was black as midnight, because I have the best blackout curtains. I couldn't see either my yowling cat or the door where someone was pounding away like I owed him money.
I could see the glowing numbers on the clock by my bed, though. It was only two in the afternoon. I hadn't been allowed a full day's sleep, not even close.
My first instinct was to yell at the person pounding on my door to be quiet and wait a second. There could be no emergency so great that it required me to answer the door in my underwear.
Then I considered that yelling would just verify that I was definitely home. Maybe if I stayed quiet, the unwanted knocker at my door would move on and leave me alone.
Maybe it wasn't a friend with an emergency, either. Maybe it was someone who was planning to break in and attack me.
I grabbed the tactical flashlight from beside my bed. It's made of heavy anodized aluminum and designed for SWAT team use, so in addition to searing ghosts with thousands of lumens of full-spectrum white light, it can also give someone a good hard whack in the skull if needed. Grabbing it was more instinct than thought. It's my sidearm when hunting ghosts, annoying any nuisance spirits into retreating if they aren't too serious about attacking me.
Gripping the flashlight, but keeping it switched off, I crept through the dark and peered through the peephole lens in my door.
My fingers immediately tightened their grip as the guy outside pounded again.
He was one of the PSI guys, wearing their apparently standard-issue black suit and white collared shirt, no tie. He'd added sunglasses to the ensemble, though the hallway outside my door is fairly dim, not to mention inconveniently narrow when it comes to moving furniture. He was a white guy with longish, curly black hair, and overall he reminded me quite a bit of David Hasselhoff.
Beside him, Kara stood with her arms crossed, smirking below her own solid-black sunglasses.
As tempting as it might have been to open my door and come out swinging, I forced myself to put my flashlight aside.
"What's going on?" I shouted through the door.
"You haven't been answering our calls." Kara held up her phone. "We wanted to make sure you were unharmed."
"I was asleep! I work at night. Don't you people sleep during the day, too?"
"I never sleep when there is work to be
done. Open the door."
"Hold your horses." I dashed through my apartment, pulling on jeans and a somewhat wrinkle-free plaid shirt. My hair was a mess and I didn't have any makeup on. I could already feel Kara smirking as she looked me over, but there wasn't much I could do in a reasonable amount of time. She was already shouting at me through the still-closed door.
"Okay, can you act civilized?" I asked her when I finally opened up. "Why are you here?"
"When you failed to answer, we initiated emergency protocols. You could have been in danger. We had no way of knowing." She was smiling now.
"So you agree there's a danger and we need to put resources toward capturing Anton Clay immediately," I said. "I'm glad we're on the same page now."
"I am not here to waste time with your pointless personal obsessions. We have an appointment with a new client in thirty minutes."
"What? Nobody told me that."
"We phoned."
I stepped away from my door and picked up the phone. Three missed calls, all from the Eckhart Investigations landline.
"I said I was going home to sleep," I told her. "This is my normal sleeping time. Did you talk to Nick? I told him."
"It is against our policy to be late for appointments with clients," Kara said. "I suggest you find a way to fix yourself up in the next five minutes. I am sure you were not planning to go looking like..." She curled her lip and made a vague gesture that seemed to encompass everything from my bedhead down to the hole in my socks. I wasn't wearing shoes.
"I wasn't planning to go anywhere. So make it ten minutes."
"Five." Kara leaned in, looking past me, her pale blue eyes absorbing my narrow studio apartment, from the tiny kitchen nook to the curtain at the very back of the apartment, which unfortunately was drawn back to reveal my messy, recently vacated bed. There was also the sagging sofa enhanced with scattered black cat fur, facing my empty TV stand. Someone had smashed my last TV and I'd never gotten around to replacing it. "Oh. This is where you live?" Kara asked, with the same tone she might have used if she'd just learned I had a terminal illness.