“And if they don’t talk?”
Jennie peered over the top of her glasses.
“Riiight.” Worthington ran a finger across his neck.
When they made it to the edge of Central Park, they hung back a moment and stared at the trees. The whole thing was incredibly impressive, reminding her of St James’s Park in London—an area in the heart of the bustling city where nature was allowed to thrive.
“Jennie, look.”
Jennie followed Worthington’s finger toward the edge of the park, where the trees cast a shadow over the streets. It was past midnight now, a time when the clubs and bars would be heaving.
This side of the city was incredibly quiet—except for the huddle of five hooded figures nearing the gate into the park.
The head honcho, a man with wide shoulders and a wiry beard poking out of his hood, looked cautiously around to check that they weren’t being followed before they disappeared underneath the canopy of trees.
Jennie caught a glint of gold around the head honcho’s neck. “That’s them.”
“Are we sure?” Worthington asked.
Jennie smiled. “Trust me on this.”
He gave her that look again. “Like that time I trusted your promise that I wouldn’t be able to be sucked up by a vacuum cleaner?”
“How was I supposed to know Dysons work on spectral beings?” Jennie gave the group a few moments before running across the road and ducking behind the trees. If she stayed off the path, she could remain in the shadows.
She craned around the trunk to keep an eye on them. “Keep close,” she muttered
“I live to serve,” Worthington replied dryly.
The park was nearly empty except for a few late-night dog walkers and some rather brave joggers. Only occasionally did they have to duck out of sight of the group who strolled through the park as though they owned the place. They spoke, but she couldn’t catch their words.
“Where are they going?” Worthington asked.
Jennie shrugged. “Back home, I guess.”
“Really?”
Jennie scoffed. “Of course not.”
Worthington shook his head. “You could answer me seriously for once. You’re going to give a guy trust issues.”
Jennie kept her eyes concentrated on the group ahead. “I can’t help it. I’m a natural-born liar. Lies live in my blood. Try me; ask me what star sign I am.”
“What star sign are you?” he asked wearily.
“Aries.”
“Really?”
Jennie grinned. “Nope, Capricorn.”
Worthington narrowed his eyes. “That was going to be my next guess.”
“Well, I lied again. I’m a Cancer. See? Now you have no idea where you stand.”
Worthington sighed. “I never do.”
“Do you even stand?”
“Of course, I do,” he replied. “I’m standing right now.”
Jennie broke her stare from the group and looked at Worthington’s feet. “Strange. I always thought you just kind of bobbed along.”
Worthington ran a hand over his face.
“Quick, they’re moving out of sight,” Jennie hissed.
They ran ahead, keeping low and tight to the trees. As they crested a small rise on the park green they slowed down, realizing that the group had stopped.
There were more of them now. At least a dozen gathered around a large boulder that was as black as onyx. As the group Jennie had been following approached, the others bowed their heads and put their hands together.
The larger group mimicked the greeting. The one Jennie had identified as their leader stepped forward and waited in front of a woman wearing a blood-red robe. The color looked deep crimson in the shadows.
“Rico, at last,” the woman crooned, her voice deep and sensual. Her words dripped from her tongue like hot caramel off a spoon. “I was worried you’d keep us waiting, or worse, not arrive.”
“We came as fast as we could, Spirit Mother,” Rico replied. “We didn’t want to draw any unnecessary attention to ourselves on our way here. The city’s eyes are always open.”
The Spirit Mother nodded.
Jennie imagined the name was an honorific because the woman hardly seemed old enough to be the mother of a toddler.
A smaller cloaked figure stepped forward, their body so shrouded Jennie couldn’t tell whether they were a man or woman. “Please, Spirit Mother. It is nearly time.” They pointed to the sky where the moon was at its zenith.
A full moon ritual? How cliché.
“Lupe is right,” the Spirit Mother said. “Everyone, into position. We await Lupe’s signal, and then the ritual can begin at last.”
They waited in tentative silence as clouds floated by, catching the silver moon’s rays. Somewhere nearby, an owl hooted.
“Isn’t this the part where you stop the ritual?” Worthington whispered. “Bust out your gun and go all badass on them?”
“The Big Bitch,” Jennie told him distractedly.
“Excuse me?”
Jennie nodded to her hip. “She’s called the ‘Big Bitch.’”
“Oh.” Worthington chuckled. “I get it. ‘BB,’ as in BB gun?”
Jennie looked at Worthington and shook her head. “No. ‘Big Bitch’ as in, ‘if you mock my gun again, the Big Bitch is going to blow your face off.’”
Worthington gulped. “Roger that.”
Jennie watched the group through narrowed eyes. She had learned over the years that it was better to understand the motives of a cult before you got involved and blew them out of the water. For all she knew, these were desperate nobodies seeking to cast magic that was beyond their ability to control.
“It is time,” Lupe’s voice croaked.
The Spirit Mother lowered her hood, revealing a woman so beautiful that for a fleeting moment, Jennie considered crossing over to the opposite team to spend one night with her. Her hair was the deepest black, her face pale, with lips so red they could have been made entirely of blood.
The Spirit Mother closed her eyes and held out her arms. Each member of the group followed suit until they formed a ring around the boulder.
The Spirit Mother began to hum. Beside her, Lupe began to mutter words in a tongue so ancient that Jennie couldn’t recognize it. It had the familiarity of Latin, but the guttural sounds had a twist she’d never heard.
At first, nothing happened, then something began to glow within the boulder. A white-hot light emanated from inside it, as though a fire burned in the center of the rock.
“May the spirits of old, from tombs long gone cold, arise, arise, arise!” The Spirit Mother’s voice sounded faraway, as though someone else was talking through her. Someone in the depths of a well. She spoke over Lupe, raising her arms as the glow within the boulder grew.
A faint shimmer of blue uncoiled from Lupe’s chest and extended outward.
“May the ghouls that were slain come alive again, arise, arise, arise!”
“Catchy tune, isn’t it?” Jennie muttered. “Think it could make the iTunes top twenty?”
Worthington’s nose wrinkled. “I’ve stopped paying attention to that chart nonsense ever since the Beatles left the scene.”
“You know who gave them the idea for Yellow Submarine, right?” Jennie pointed her thumbs at herself.
Worthington scoffed. “Bullshit.”
“Nope. Bumped into Lennon and McCartney in the Lamb & Flag, and they told me they were struggling with a song title. We joked about songs with simple names, and McCartney suggested a color and a vehicle. Luckily, I convinced them to go with Yellow Submarine. If it had been left up to them, they would’ve chosen Blue Blimp.”
The rock flared, and beams of light pulsed from the center.
Worthington groaned, his eyes fixed on the boulder. “Oh, no. I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
“What are they doing?” Jennie muttered.
The light continued to grow as the group repeated the Spirit Mother’s words in
a unified chant. The coil of blue light connected from the small, hooded figure of Lupe to the center.
From their hiding place, they could now make out individual figures floating inside the boulder. The light shone through the translucent skin of their pre-natal home. They looked like tadpoles inside an egg to Jennie.
Lupe’s voice reached a crescendo, accompanied by a final chorus of “Arise, arise, arise!” The Spirit Mother’s arms dropped, which broke the circle. The boulder fractured, splitting into large chunks, and light exploded in a column, reaching from the broken boulder to the sky.
For a moment, Jennie could see the people in perfect color as the light illuminated the group staring open-mouthed at their creation. Several of them turned, afraid that the light would give away their position. That anyone within the park would suddenly know where they were.
Which would be true, Jennie thought, if the light was on this plane of existence.
The light escalated to a final blinding glare, then vanished into nothing. The group was left standing in silence.
“Did…did it work?” Rico asked.
The Spirit Mother turned to Lupe. “Well? Did it?”
Jennie nodded silently. In the center of the circle stood two spirits, a man and a woman. The woman examined her hands and legs as if she couldn’t believe what she was seeing.
The man was small. He wore an old-fashioned pinstripe suit that looked as though it had been lifted straight out of a seventies gangster movie. His two-tone shoes were immaculate, as was the Tommy gun he held. “I can’t believe it!” He laughed. “I’m free. Dear God, Jesus, and all that is good and holy, I’m free!”
“What does this mean?” The woman held her hands in front of her face, then patted down her frilly white dress. A dark crimson line stretched from one side of her throat to the other. Her words were laced with a strong Virginia accent. “This cannot be true.”
“Truer than the dirt you’re standing on.” The man laughed again and took a deep sniff of the night air. “Ah, can you smell that? Freedom. Sweet, unadulterated freedom. Now to work out where we are.”
“And when we are,” Frock added.
“Did it work?” the Spirit Mother hissed. She looked straight through the spirits on the other side of the circle. “Did it? Lupe, answer me!”
The lady in the frock snorted. “What’s her problem?”
“She’s the one who wanted to summon us, clearly,” Pinstripe told her. He strode toward the Spirit Mother and waved a hand in front of her face. “Strange. I always thought the person who summoned us would be able to at least acknowledge our existence.” He turned back with a devilish grin. “Oh, the fun we can have with this.”
“Fun? You think we’re going to have fun?” Frock replied. “I’ve been trapped in the in-between for two hundred years, and you think I’ve broken free to come out and have some fun?”
Pinstripe gave her an incredulous look. “You don’t get sarcasm, do you?”
“The lowest form of wit.”
Lupe stepped forward, arms spread wide, his face still hidden by his hood. “Friends,” he intoned in a thick Latino accent, “it is with the greatest pleasure that I see you reborn into our modern times.”
The Spirit Mother looked from Lupe to the empty space where he was speaking with a smile on her face and confusion in her eyes.
Pinstripe approached Lupe. Both were small, but Lupe was smaller. “You summoned us? Well, I suppose there ought to be a thank you there.” He shifted his gun to the other hand and offered a hand to Lupe.
Lupe ignored the gesture, his dark eyes glinting beneath his hood. There was a trace of a leer in the shadows that hid his face.
“Excuse me, sir, but I have a question for you,” Frock told him. “What’s a strange-looking man like you doing awakening spirits in the middle of the night? I mean, we sure are thankful, but you gotta admit, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”
“Yeah,” Pinstripe added. “I mean, not to cut this short or nothing, but I gots me a place to be.” He opened up his jacket pocket to reveal a hole where his heart should have been, crimson stains flowering around the point of impact. “Revenge is a dish best served cold, right? I’m sure Jonny De Marco has kids around here somewhere I can really fuck up. Maybe he’s still alive, and I can finally watch his heart stop ticking. Who knows?”
Lupe reached for his hood and lowered it slowly.
Frock recoiled at the sight of what lay beneath.
The man’s face was a map of scars. His hair was cornrowed, and his eyes held the milky glaze of blindness. Dotted inside his mouth were gold teeth, and a wiry beard twisted down his chin.
“You’re not going anywhere,” Lupe replied flatly. He held his hands in front of his face, touching the thumb and forefingers of both hands together to create a diamond. As he started chanting, the rest of the group fell obediently into the chorus, and the Spirit Mother’s eyes grew wide with excitement.
“Fuck this,” Pinstripe told Lupe, making to leave the circle. He reached its edge and was about to pass through a small gap between two of the hooded chanters when a blinding flash of light threw him backward. “What the…”
Frock’s hand went to her mouth. “Dear, are you okay?”
He looked at her in horror. “I can’t…I can’t get free…”
Lupe leered. The blue trail that had connected to the rock now reached out and connected to the two specters. “You thought it would be that simple? That I would release you and let you go without any recompense? You are bound to me.”
The Spirit Mother looked uncertainly at Lupe. “To you? Shouldn’t they be swearing to us? We’re the Spectral Plane, not you.”
Lupe laughed darkly, ignoring her comments.
“You think we’ve waited in that chunk of rock for decades so we could be released and serve a magician with an ego complex?” Pinstripe asked. “Forget it. You can’t keep us contained forever.”
Lupe’s face soured, his brow creasing. He concentrated his energy on the pair, the cords connecting them growing thicker with each passing second. Whatever power was in him was draining the energy from the specters.
“What are you doing?” the Spirit Mother asked, clearly agitated. “Enough of this shit.” She shoved Lupe and sent him sprawling to the ground.
For the briefest of moments, his power weakened.
Jennie got to her feet. “I think that’s our cue.”
The Spirit Mother loomed over Lupe. “We made a deal, Lupe—your powers in exchange for a place in our organization. You promised us specters, so get your shit together and deliver.”
Lupe got clumsily back to his feet, re-establishing his connection with Pinstripe and Frock just as they were about to break free.
“You delivered on your part,” Lupe growled. “But the prizes are mine!” His voice rose as he punched the Spirit Mother in the face and reached for a small pistol hidden beneath the cloak.
He fired, taking out some of the group before Jennie pulled out her pistol and shot him.
She only needed one bullet to achieve her goal. The bullet ripped through his arm and forced him to drop the gun. He looked for the location of his attacker, his eyes widening hungrily as he saw Worthington trailing behind her.
Pinstripe and Frock used the distraction to flee from the circle. They moved fast, shooting into the trees.
Jennie fired another shot at his feet—a final warning shot. This time he grinned as he concentrated his powers on the spirits now disappearing from sight, and a final tendril of power shot out from him, latched itself onto Pinstripe and pulled him back to the group at an impressive speed.
Jennie thought about running after him but stopped when several of the surviving group aimed pistols at her head.
She turned slowly, looking each gang member in the eye. Their hands shook, their guns aimed more out of fear than anger. “In case you didn’t notice, I’m the one who just saved all your arses,” she told them angrily. “So put down your guns before I find a w
ay to do it for you.”
The Spirit Mother lowered her gun and signaled for the others to do the same. They obeyed reluctantly, still unsure what had just happened.
“Thank you for saving us,” she told Jennie, begrudging every word.
“Not a problem,” Jennie replied, eyeing the Spirit Mother closely. Now that she was closer, she could see the gold chain around her neck, its pendant tucked neatly into the cleavage of her clothing. “Let me guess. You guys are the Spectral Plane?”
The Spirit Mother nodded.
Jennie frowned. “Great. Then we’ve got a lot to discuss. Not the least of which is what the fuck happened here tonight."
Chapter Six
Midtown Manhattan, New York City, Present Day
“I’ve known for as long as I can remember that something lay beyond the great veil,” the Spirit Mother told Jennie. There was frenzied excitement in her voice as she traced a finger over a shelf packed with books. “Ever since I was a little girl and my mother died, I knew there was more to life than death.”
Jennie and Worthington sat side by side on a couch that looked a lot more comfortable than it was. The headquarters of the Spectral Plane was nothing more than a run-down rental unit on the south side of Manhattan. Several outdated rooms in need of a good lick of paint and a clean.
“Hardly the headquarters of a thriving organization,” Jennie whispered to Worthington as they walked through the door and saw members of the cult sitting in the rooms or lying on the floors asleep. “Looks more like a drug den to me.”
While Worthington kept trying to catch her eye, Jennie ignored him. It wouldn’t be right to reveal she had her very own specter sitting beside her right now.
Jennie smiled gently. “What happened to her, Spirit Mother?”
“Please, call me Tanya,” the Spirit Mother replied. “She was killed in a hit and run, murdered by a guy whose blood was more alcohol than plasma. Ah!” She pulled a book from the shelf and flicked through the pages.
She carried on her story, tongue poking out the side of her mouth intermittently. “It was a lot to take for a five-year-old girl, but time heals all wounds. That didn’t mean that I didn’t…feel her after she had gone.”
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