by Eliza Lainn
“Yeah,” Cyril muttered.
Rose and Bronte had said a few things I’d missed, listening to Oliver and Cyril. Bronte continued what she’d been saying. “—it out with Oliver or Cyril. But if we take some time between our next case, we could have you learn it before we confront the ghost?”
“Do you think it works different on ghosts as opposed to monsters?” Rose asked.
Bronte shrugged. “When Roger was exorcised, it didn’t look all that different from when Stella took care of Nathan Elgin. They were both monsters, though. Against normal ghosts? I don’t know what will happen.”
Rose threw herself back against the back of the couch. The impact jostled me, causing her eyes to dart over in my direction. A smirk stole across her lips. “Too bad it wasn’t Stella trying to learn exorcisms. I bet you Sebastian would have been all over mentoring you.”
I scoffed. “Hardly.”
“He was into you,” Bronte added, her own mischievous glint sparkling in her eye.
“Was not.”
“Was too.”
I rolled my eyes but didn’t tell them to stop. If our topics of conversation were Rose learning exorcisms, Noah concerned about quitting Apparition Investigations, and Sebastian, I though Sebastian might be the best right now. He could serve as a nice distraction. We needed one, I thought. Tomorrow would be soon enough to deal with our other problems.
“He was cute,” Rose added. “And did you see the telekinesis he had? God, why does everyone else get the cool superpowers and I’m jilted?”
“Wish I had telekinesis,” Bronte mumbled.
“Not as cool as yours though,” Rose said, looking at me. “Everyone felt that shout of yours. Think it’s a new power?”
“Sebastian said he’s seen powers evolve before, so I don’t think it’s new.”
Rose and Bronte exchanged smirks. Bronte threw herself back onto the carpet. “Oh, well, if Sebastian says.” Then she immediately bolted upright, her eyes locked on something over in the book nook. “Oh, wait, Cyril—”
Rose and I both turned to look, though neither one of us could see anything.
Bronte bit down on her lip, looking guilty and embarrassed. “I didn’t mean to make him upset.”
“It’s fine,” Oliver said, “he’s just not a fan of Mr. Adair. Neither am I, to be honest. But he’s fine. Don’t worry about it.”
I rose halfway out of my seat. “Are you sure? Should I go in there?”
A coolness touched my shoulder. It felt slightly solid, applying pressure so that I sat back down on the couch. “It’s fine. Let him be—we have more important things to discuss, anyway.”
“Such as?”
The cold left my shoulder as the Frodo figurine floated up from the coffee table. “Such as my role as ghost-bait. I think it worked well, and I’m eager to do it again. But I have some ideas on how I can be of even more help in our next case. Stella, if you’d convey this to Rose, please. I have a list.”
I rolled my eyes. “Get comfy, Rose. I think we’re going to be here a while.”
Chapter Thirty
An hour after Oliver had finished his list and Rose had left, my phone rang.
Bronte had dominated the kitchen, baking chocolate chip cookies and chocolate croissants because she couldn’t decide which she wanted more. Oliver and Cyril were, for the moment, occupied with reading. I, for my part, had collapsed onto the couch and hadn’t moved. No TV, no book, just dozing on the couch in my best sloth impression yet.
Which meant I was a tad annoyed when Rose’s face flashed on my phone.
“You just left,” I grumbled in greeting. “What could be so important?”
“I forgot something. Is Bronte there?”
Grudgingly, I sat up and put the cell on speaker. Then I put it on the couch beside me. “Why didn’t you just call her?”
“I did. She didn’t answer. Is she there?”
“Here!” Bronte sang. I glanced over at her, prepared to pepper her with my annoyance, when I saw the flour and sugar caked to her hands. Then the smell of chocolate chip cookies hit me, and all irritation evaporated.
“Good—I meant to warn you but Noah’s bombshell on the plane distracted me. But I’ve been thinking about it and I don’t want you to admit you’re a psychic to anyone, ok? You too, Stella.”
Bronte paused with a frown, halfway bent to check the oven. Then she opened the oven and started pulling the cookies out. “Because they could be dangerous?” she mused, her voice surprisingly thoughtful.
Surprised, I watched her. She was lost in thought, a thousand miles away.
“Yeah,” Rose continued, “I wasn’t really expecting to run into any psychics anytime soon, but then, boom, Obscurity Consultants. We didn’t have a plan in place and we winged it—and we were lucky. But what if we had run into someone bad, like the green man?”
The cookie tray slid from Bronte’s fingers. It clattered, loudly, on the floor. Cookies were shot off, rolling along the floor, smashing against the counters.
And she just stood there.
“Bronte?” I was already up and moving. My voice sliding underneath Oliver and Cyril’s cries of surprise, their figurines swooping into the kitchen.
She stared at my phone, right where I’d left it on the couch. “Say that again.”
“Is everything ok?” Rose asked.
Bronte dodged me, shrugged through where a ghost hovered–judging by her shiver–and pounced on my phone. Clutching it with both hands, she held it tightly in front of her. “Say that again. A green man? You said something about a green man?”
“What?” Cyril hissed.
“Oh no,” Oliver whispered. Dread layered his voice. Like when you pull into your home, only to see an ambulance and police cruisers out front with lights flashing.
I whipped between the two of them. Bronte’s panic and Oliver’s fear. And Cyril’s rage.
“The green man?” Rose repeated, unsure. “One of the front desk agents mentioned a psychic riling up the ghost—and called him the green man. Bronte, Stella, what’s happening?”
Bronte had been kneeling on the ground beside the couch. Hearing that, she dropped the phone and fell back. She shook her head. “No, no, that’s not—it can’t be.” Her eyes swung to mine. “I saw him, Stella. Saw him murder Nathan Elgin—that’s how he became a ghost. I didn’t know if I should tell you…I thought it might be silly considering that was such a long time ago, and I didn’t know if murder somehow made ghosts, but…”
The two Lord of the Rings figurines dropped to the floor.
“It isn’t,” Oliver hissed. “It is not possible.”
“Everyone just–just–calm down,” Cyril said, his voice wobbling. “It’s not the same man, Oliver. Oliver, it’s—"
One of the bowls Bronte had been using flew from the counter. It smacked against the wall, then dropped to the floor, spilling cookie door in globs everywhere.
For a moment, I just stared at the bright red bowl against the white floor, rolling along its rim.
Then the other baking ingredients began to rattle.
“Calm down,” Cyril ordered, his voice aiming for hard and commanding. But it shook. Sounded uncertainty. Afraid.
“I…I don’t…it can’t…”
“Name him, Stella!” Fear still layered his voice.
That rocked me more than anything. Cyril being afraid. And telling me to order Oliver. I froze, not sure what to do.
Then I heard the items on the coffee table began to shake.
“My name is Oliver Esteed,” Oliver’s voice shook. I could barely hear him over the rattling. “Stella—I can’t control—I’m panicking—I—”
“Oliver Esteed,” I said, filling my voice with power. It hurt my throat, still rubbed raw by my shouting, but my voice still came out layered with absolute authority. “Calm down, ok. I need you to breathe—or, I don’t know, whatever ghosts do to stop panic attacks. Just…calm down.”
Slowly, the rattling began to les
sen. And lessen. But nothing quieted completely.
“Cyril Albright,” Cyril whispered. “Me too, Stella.”
My blood went cold. I stared at the dropped Samwise figurine, my eyes swinging up to the eggs and measuring cups and all the other things still shaking on the counter.
“Please,” he whispered.
“Cyril Albright,” I said, wrapping my arms around myself. “Please just…just calm down.”
The rattling slowed. One by one, the objects went silent. Until the last cooking spoon went still.
“You…” Bronte whispered.
I turned to her. She still sat splayed on the ground, her eyes focused on something behind me. Wide. Confused and surprised and afraid all at once. “Oliver, you know about the green man?”
“Wait,” Cyril whispered, his voice tight, barely controlled, barely heard. “You know about him? What do you know?”
“What is happening?” Rose shouted from the phone.
I looked between Bronte, the dropped figurines, and the destruction in the kitchen. And I hugged myself tighter, the realization at how bumbling ignorant we were in the grand scheme of things causing my stomach to twist into knots. “I think…I think we have a problem.”
Case #4
Friendswill High School
Chapter One
I stared at the candle’s flame. It danced in the darkness of my bedroom, the only light aside from the muted, midmorning sun behind my black curtains. The scent of tropical pineapple floated through the room.
And, you know, the voices of my ghost roommates.
“She’s been staring at it for a while,” Cyril mumbled, trying to be quiet. But when the room is deathly silent…wait, no, that won’t work because the dead were the only ones making noise.
“Does sitting on the floor, cross-legged like that, help?” Oliver asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe?”
“Bronte sits like that for yoga sometimes.”
“And it’s supposed to meditative, right?”
“I think so.”
They were silent for a moment, lulling me into a relieved calm.
And then Oliver broke it. “What is she moving her lips for?
“I think it helps. She’s trying to remember the name she used when she commanded fire that first time.”
Oliver snorted. “The only time.”
“That’s it!” I barked, jumping up to my feet. I stormed to the light switch and flipped it on. “Out! Everyone out!”
“We were being quiet!” Oliver protested.
Cyril had the good sense to sound guilty. “Actually, I don’t think we were.”
I couldn’t see them. They weren’t even holding their Lord of the Rings figurines to give me a general direction to look toward. So, I waved vaguely, broadly, at my closed bedroom door. “Everyone who was born prior to 1950, skedaddle!”
Oliver laughed. “I think we made her angry.”
“Out!”
A timid knock came from the other side of my door, followed by Bronte’s muffled voice. “Stella, is everything ok?”
I jerked my hands through my hair, trying to remember all those calming techniques that kept popping up on my Facebook scroll, for some reason. Counting, breathing, going still—I tried them all.
And then Rose burst through my bedroom door and ruined it.
She held a book, the front cover curled back so she could hold it with one hand. I caught the yellow streaks of highlighter and the smudged gray of pencil marks in the margins before she thrust it underneath my nose with a frustrated grunt. “It says holy water will help but nothing actually says what holy water is.”
“Out!”
She looked startled, her head swinging back around to take in Bronte still hovering at the door. “Why is she in a bad mood?”
“Because she was concentrating,” Oliver grumbled, knowing perfectly well that Cyril and I were the only ones who could hear him.
Bronte shrugged.
I pinched the bridge of my nose.
For two weeks, this had been going on. No cases. No ghosts (minus the two we lived with). Just the five of us crammed together, grating on each other’s nerves.
I loved them all dearly, but this was getting out of hand.
“Rose, don’t you think you’ve studied enough for one day?” I asked through clenched teeth. “Shouldn’t you head home? Relax? Take a bubble bath? Watch some TV? Something like that—in your own comfy apartment?”
“No, I’m good,” she said, spinning to Bronte. She thrusted the book under Bronte’s nose next. “Want to help me figure out exactly what holy water is—and how’s it made. I think that’s more important, really.”
Bronte took a step back. “I’m sorry, I’ve got my own…” her voice drifted off vaguely as she gestured over her shoulder, toward her bedroom. Then she skirted off. “I’m sorry!”
Rose rolled her eyes.
“I can offer some assistance,” Cyril said. “Oliver, you could—”
“I’ll help Bronte!” he shouted, his voice already fading with distance.
“Cyril’ll help,” I told Rose before he could change his mind. “Just point him toward whatever book you want him to read.”
She blinked. “Oh. That’s a good idea. Yeah, two eyes are definitely better than one. Follow me, Ghost Boy.”
As she headed out of the room, I heard Cyril mumbling under his breath, “Ghost Boy?”
Then there was quiet.
I sighed into it, relishing the feel as it washed over me. Then I noiselessly closed the door, flipped off the lights, and dropped back into criss-cross-applesauce in front of the Pineapple Paradise candle.
But my mind wouldn’t focus.
There were too many thoughts swirling through my mind, demanding my attention: demons, Obscurity Consultants, Noah, Rose, exorcisms, Sebastian and Seth Adair…and the Green Man.
Sighing, I massaged my temples as my eyes fluttered shut. It had roughly been a month since this whole thing began. A month. Four weeks. Thirty days. Hardly any time at all, really, and yet here we were.
My perceptions deepening, threatening to open me up to demon attacks.
An organization of psychics who worked as ghost and monster hunters.
A teammate totally fine with murdering innocent ghosts.
A boss struggling with being a good leader, keeping her boyfriend, and learning exorcisms.
The mysterious and arrogant Adair brothers and their warnings and advice.
And the Green Man.
My eyes slowly opened.
He’d rattled all of us. I’d never seen Cyril and Oliver so panicked, never seen Bronte so afraid. But her voice had been shaking as she told us that she’d seen him when she touched Nathan Elgin, when she bore witness to his life. That he’d been the one to end it. That the Green Man had talked with Nathan about death before strangling the life out of him.
Rose and I had learned he’d been the one behind Roger Whitaker at the Horton Grand Hotel. That he’d used his psychic ability to cause Roger to decay to the point where he’d devolved from a ghost to a monster. Or, as Sebastian would have put it, from a Type 1 to a Type 2.
And then Cyril and Oliver had known him, were afraid of him, but they wouldn’t tell us from where or how. Oliver let slip that it had been when they’d been alive, but that was it. Rose believed—and we agreed—he had had a hand in their deaths. Not that we would ask them about it. Asking ghosts about how they had died, even ones we were friends with, seemed too callous and tasteless. All three of us agreed that if Oliver or Cyril wanted to share, we’d listen, but we wouldn’t go digging for that information.
I sighed. It was an impressive feat, somehow running into all five of us. Especially considering the timeline of it all. Our time in the present. Running into the living Cyril and Oliver in the 1900s. And murdering Nathan Elgin in the 1880s.
Staring at the flickering candle, my thoughts drifted to Cyril and Oliver. Why hadn’t they told us? It had been bad, whatever that
meeting was. Just mentioning him had caused both of them to feel fear so strong, they had lost control. I’d had named them to calm them down. Whatever the Green Man had triggered had been too much for them to handle alone.
A knock came from my door.