The lead agent made a hand signal and his guys shifted to low ready. He holstered his gun and said, “I’ll make a call.”
“There’s no time for that. How about this? I’ll leave my sidearm with you.” As I spoke, I did my best to project, Scary ghost! Right now! Really! But who knows what the hell telepaths actually hear?
The lead guy already had someone on his phone. A quick exchange, and then he said, “Sorry, Agent. I’m not authorized to let you in.”
He had no idea what damage Jennifer Chance could do inside a human host. She could insert a dose of Kick into all those prescriptions. She could murder someone just to prove a point. Hell, she could tell everyone Morganstern was definitely not in Japan!
“I’m talking ghosts,” I said desperately.
One of the guys in back flinched, but the lead guy repeated, “I’m not authorized.”
Jacob tried to reason with him, but I could tell we were dealing with a guy who wasn’t about to risk his career over the word of a couple of regional agents. We operated differently in Chicago than they did in DC. Con Dreyfuss hadn’t hired agents for blind obedience, and Laura Kim didn’t micromanage us. Our culture wasn’t about asking permission. We thought on our feet—hell, we had to, given that the scariest shit we came up against was usually something no one had ever dealt with before.
And then we did whatever it took to handle it.
If the agent wasn’t authorized to let me in, I realized…someone inside most definitely was. “Jacob? Call The Clinic’s emergency number.”
With his eyes on the agents, he asked, “What should I say?”
“That one of their high-level patients is having an emergency.” And before I could second-guess myself, I stepped to the side and slammed my hand in the car door.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Oh god. The pain.
I was bent over double and couldn’t catch my breath. One good thing about my hand-slam. It made Jacob sound really convincing when he called in my emergency. He ran around to my side of the car and demanded, “What the hell were you thinking?”
That it was just my hand. Which, I could totally see now, was beyond blasé.
Someone in scrubs burst through the door with a wheelchair—Gina. I almost didn’t recognize her with her skin glowing like an Instagram filter. Did she even know she was a precog? No clue.
It speaks volumes about how stunned I was that I actually climbed on. It was easier than arguing—and besides, my vision was starting to tunnel. The goons from National gave us a wide berth—and one guy actually held the door. But the lead asshole moved to intercept Jacob. “The medium is the Psych with the medical emergency, Agent. Not you.”
Trembling with adrenaline and bursting with red veininess, Jacob ground out, “I am his emergency contact.”
“You heard him,” Gina said in her most authoritative mom-voice. “Agent Marks has the legal right to accompany his fiancé. Now, get out of his way.”
We banged past Troy Malone’s window and into the fluorescent-lit hallways of The Clinic, and the closer we got, the more the GhosTV’s signal hummed through me. I stole a glance at my hand. I’d nailed myself just above the knuckles, and all four fingers were swelling up and turning a mottled shade of purple.
The pain wasn’t a steady thing—it was a throb. And through my blurred vision, I saw the ghostly outline of my etheric form making a fist, squeezing and releasing, in time with the throbs. I tried to force my subtle body to stay still, but no luck. My physical brain might be begging it to stop clenching, but my etheric brain (if such a thing even existed) was operating with its own agenda.
Gina pushed me toward the exam rooms at a good clip. “The doctor’s on his way,” she told me reassuringly.
“Gina, wait!”
She didn’t quite stop, but she did slow enough for me to tumble out of the chair beside the stairwell door and land in an ungainly crouch.
“But your hand—”
“There’s no time to explain. C’mere.” I grabbed her keycard on its springy lanyard and swiped open the stairwell. When I released it, the card snapped back and bapped against her thigh. “Now go to the break room, grab me all the salt you can find, and bring it to the pharmacy. Quick!”
Gina dashed away, and we headed in. Jacob thundered down the stairs with me fast on his heels, and together, we spilled out onto the basement level: conference rooms, janitorial, storage, and pharmacy. If begging the white light to come down and fill me up was effective, I should be lit up like a jack o’lantern. But between the throbbing in my hand and the GhosTV broadcast buzzing in my head, it was hard to know for sure.
“Keep your gun holstered,” I called out as we careened down the hall. “You need your hands free.”
Jacob lurched to a stop outside the pharmacy door. Whatever channel the TV was on, it made him look big and scary, even without a weapon in his hand. I lowered my voice and said, “We can’t fuck this up—not like we did with Jackie and Trinity. I shove Chance out of the body and you drag that monster to the veil. Got it?”
“Got it. Let’s go.”
At the last minute, I realized I should’ve held on to Gina’s keycard—but thankfully, when Jacob gave the pharmacy door a good, solid tug, the overhead lights flickered, and it opened.
He paused just inside the door. “This doesn’t feel right,” Jacob growled. I’d be surprised if it did. “Do you feel it?”
“I don’t feel anything but my goddamn hand.” Besides, my feelings were the last thing I trusted. I took a look instead.
The room was just like I’d seen it last, cramped and cluttery, with a new bluetooth speaker up on the shelf. One thing was very different, though—an unassuming door that had always been closed now stood ajar.
And there was movement behind it.
White light—white light—white light.
The pharmacy might be filled with clutter and stuff, but the room beyond was a freaking nightmare. It was narrow, cramped and dimly lit, and stuffed to the gills with discarded medical equipment. And thanks to my time at Camp Hell, just the sound of a gurney was enough to bring on a panic attack. Let alone a bunch of medical surplus with a big fat ghost inside.
“Erin?” I called out.
Something shifted in the dimness.
I turned to Jacob for reassurance. He was so pumped up he hardly even looked like himself anymore—unless you counted the set of his shoulders, which was totally him. Maybe the GhosTV upstairs wasn’t just showing me his talent. Maybe it was enhancing his talent.
I took a centering breath, wrapped myself in white light, and tried again. “Erin…come out where I can see you.”
Erin peered out from the gap in the door. And when she spoke, she sounded stilted and strange. “Well. If it isn’t Victor Bayne. It’s been a while.”
Nowhere near long enough. “I’m onto you. Whatever it is you think you’re cooking up here, it’s not gonna happen.”
Half-seen, Erin twitched and shuddered. “But…it already has.”
A frantic knock on the pharmacy door made me jump. Jacob hauled the door open and Gina burst in, reading glasses swinging on her bright beaded chain. She clutched a cardboard tub of table salt in one hand and two smaller plastic shakers in the other.
I’d sorely underestimated how terrified I was of Jennifer Chance, so when I saw the salt, I made a grab for it. Unfortunately, my left hand was so swollen now I couldn’t close my physical fingers. Oh, my etheric fingers made a valiant effort. But it didn’t mean squat in the physical world. I boffed the salt out of Gina’s hands and the tub fell to the floor and rolled into the shadowy room. With Erin…and the thing inside her.
“Give me that,” Jacob said, and grabbed a salt shaker from Gina. He twisted off the top with a crunch, then jammed it into my good hand while she struggled to open the other shaker. There was a jolt when his fingers brushed mine, but the white light didn’t jump over to him like it usually did. More like a weird combination of resistance and catalyst. My eth
eric arm recoiled, and my physical hand went clumsy. The salt dropped and scattered.
Luckily, Gina had her shaker open…though I couldn’t be entirely sure my light wouldn’t jump over to her if we touched. I gave my arm a shake to align all my subtle bodies. “Careful,” I said, and took the salt shaker very gingerly from her outstretched hand.
Just my luck. It was practically empty.
“Stay back, Gina,” I said, then turned to Jacob and pointed at the salty floor. “Can you activate this yourself?”
“I’ll try.” He dropped to one knee and slapped his hand down on the spilled salt. The floor lit up to my inner eye.
I’ve always thought optimism was a crutch, but in that moment, seeing him bursting with psychic energy and able to actually channel his power? I felt a tentative surge of hope.
Unfortunately, we weren’t the only ones scrambling around for an advantage, and our fumbling with the salt had given Erin time to break out the big guns. When the door creaked open, she had a syringe in her hand—an old-fashioned glass-and-metal syringe with a bead of fluid glistening at the tip. She smiled all wrong and said, “Don’t worry. You’ll hardly feel a thing. I’ve had plenty of practice.”
The confusing thing about possession is that the voice still belongs to the poor schlub who’s got a ghost puppeteering their body. I’d convinced myself I was dealing with Jennifer Chance, so it took me a moment to register the lilt of the accent. And then I got a load of the way Erin held that needle. Not like Chance, but an entirely different doctor, one from my distant past. Visions of drug-addled field trips with Faun and Richie and Darla bubbled up from my memory. I was dealing with someone I hoped I’d never see again, all right, but it wasn’t Dr. Chance. And once I made the connection, another face flickered briefly over Erin’s features—the wizened face of an old man.
In a dry whisper, I said, “Dr. Kamal.”
Erin bared her teeth. I’d never once seen her smile. But if I had, I’d wager it didn’t look anything like that.
Jacob scrambled to his feet and looked frantically around, as if he’d somehow managed to miss a fifth person in the pharmacy. “Kamal? Where?”
I pointed at Erin and said, “Stay back.”
But Kamal wasn’t intimidated by me. Never had been.
Reflexively, I backed up a step and did my best to power-charge the salt shaker in my hand—the one that contained maybe half an inch of salt.
“What’s the matter, Mr. Bayne?” Kamal asked through Erin’s mouth. “You’ve always taken the needle in stride.” With a jerk of the arm, he elbowed the door wide. It smashed into the old medical equipment with a thunderous clatter. Suddenly, knocking the ghost out of Erin’s body seemed a hell of a lot more daunting than it had as a sketchy plan. Spilled salt rasped under the soles of my shoes as I scanned the room, scrambling to locate the veil.
“What’s happening?” Gina demanded. “Should I call a doctor?”
Jacob got bossy. “No doctors. You’d only put them at risk. Now get back!”
Gina shuffled backwards, muttering fragments of a prayer—I think it was the type of blessing you’d say at mealtime. I took a step sideways, placing my body between Erin’s and hers. No doubt Kamal could just blow right through me to get to her if he wanted…especially since mediums were a lot easier to displace from their physical bodies than anyone else. Hopefully he wasn’t after Gina.
I gorged so hard on white light I probably popped a vein in my other eye. And when I was bursting with as much as I could hold, I felt the telltale pull of the veil.
It was in the shadowy room full of creepy, disused medical equipment.
Of course it was.
“The veil is in there,” I told Jacob, and while Kamal thought I was still dithering about what to do, I launched the contents of the salt shaker in his direction. It hit Erin’s body square in the lab coat. She lit, briefly, with a sickly bluish aura—an aura filled with slithering movement. It was so horrid, it left an afterimage in my mind’s eye…and I made sense of the squirming nimbus only after it disappeared.
It wasn’t just Kamal we were dealing with. It was a metric shit ton of habit demons. Not just tethered to him either, but merged with him.
And the salt had been scarcely more than an annoyance.
Before I could warn Jacob, he was striding across the salty floor like he was hell-bent on tackling Erin. “Wait,” I called out. “Kamal’s not alone.”
Maybe not. But Jacob? He was all Hulked out on his Superstiff equivalent of white light, and before I could stop him, he lunged forward and batted the syringe out of Erin’s hand. The tube shattered on the floor, spraying the salt with broken glass and whatever drug cocktail Kamal had been hoping to stick me with.
The sight of Jacob going in for the jugular broke open something inside me. That stupid, secret part of me that doesn’t know when to admit defeat. I opened my white light capacity even harder, and hallelujah, there was that spike of pain deep inside my head that told me I was doing it right.
Hopefully I wouldn’t stroke out before we got rid of all the parasites.
My sight shifted, and the wispy forms of nonphysical entities tugged around the periphery of my vision. Erin was covered in habit demons like a sunken ship crusted in barnacles and seaweed. Once I focused on them—once my brain figured out what I was trying to look at—they took on substance and form, until they were so thick I could hardly see Erin anymore at the center of them all.
“How do I grab him?” Jacob shouted.
I stepped up to guide him…or at least I tried to. Gina caught me by the back of the jacket and tugged hard enough to almost unbalance me. “Wait!”
Major liability.
I swung around to bark at her to get the hell out of there. She blinked back at me with a look of utter confusion, and said, “You have flowers. Oh god. What am I saying?”
Then, thankfully, she spun on her heel and dashed out the door.
Once I was sure Gina was good and gone, I turned and found Jacob grabbing Erin by the upper arms and shoving her back into the storage room. Since Kamal was still in her, at least it would bring his ghost closer to the veil.
But the habit demons were in an uproar.
The ones who weren’t stuck to Kamal dive-bombed Jacob like a mass of angry bees. Big, gelatinous, etheric bees the size of oranges. That was how they described tumors, wasn’t it? By comparing it to fruit? Jesus Christ, he was being swarmed by etheric tumors.
I scanned the floor, hoping to scoop up whatever salt I could. But thanks to the broken syringe, not only was it littered with shards of glass, it was spattered with fluid, so it would only stick to me if I tried to toss it. I reached for the etheric fairy dust I often conjured in my panic, same as always…and nearly blacked out from the pain. Here I’d thought I was so smart, slamming my left hand in the car door. My non-dominant hand. The one I don’t use for writing, or shooting, or wiping my ass.
Not considering that it was the hand responsible for all the fairy dust and ectoplasm.
No Florida Water. No salt. No fairy dust. But there was still one ace up my sleeve….
A dose of Kick rattling around in my pocket.
I whipped out the contact lens case and flicked it open with my thumb.
My first thought? Wow. Kick looks just like those belchy multivitamins in our medicine cabinet.
And then…realization dawned.
It was one of those belchy multivitamins. And the real Kick?
It was coursing through Jacob’s veins.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
“What the hell were you thinking?” I demanded. Probably because that’s exactly what Jacob yelled at me when I fucked up my hand.
“That I’m sick of being the most useless one on the team.”
“You? But you’re a human shield!”
“Not good enough,” he said through gritted teeth. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who felt like a one-trick pony—and evidently Jacob had no compunctions about going through my po
ckets, and he wasn’t particularly deterred by a used tissue. “I can feel the veil now.”
No no no. I crunched across the broken glass to make sure he wasn’t getting sucked in. And now that I knew he was not only on GhosTV waves but a volatile, fast-acting psyactive? No freaking wonder he was bulging with red energy fit to burst.
Me? The TV enhanced my panicked white light, and I saw the veil too. Or I could tell where it would be if I could see it, judging by the way a couple of the free-floating tumors got sucked in. But the more deeply I peered into the etheric, the worse it got. The whole room was thick with habit demons. Ever see a microscopic video of sperm battering an egg? That was those goddamn etheric parasites struggling to attach to Jacob.
Every Psych who’d come through The Clinic’s door covered in those things had been heading right here, to some nightmarish etheric spawning ground, drawn by their habit demons, pulled by some nonphysical resonance. And at the center of it all was Dr. Kamal. Seething with symbiotic monsters, feeding one another on siphoned etheric energy. Pumping out experimental drugs even after he was dead and gone.
The drugs attracted habit demons. The demons rode to The Clinic on the dying psychics, whose energy was released with their death. That power generated more demons in an orgy of stolen psychic mojo.
And Kamal? He soaked up all that power, took over Erin’s body and made a fresh batch of Kick...and the vicious cycle started again.
From my vantage point in the doorway, I pointed to a gap between an exam table and a banged-up gurney. “There, Jacob! There’s the veil.”
Jacob shoved Erin toward the spot. But while the demons couldn’t quite snag Jacob, the parasite-riddled ghost in Erin was clinging to her hard. When the veil pulled, the parasites doubled down, drawing up against her like a protective etheric shell. Jacob shoved her, head and shoulders, into the distortion where the veil seemed to be…but all the etheric trespassers just squeezed in tighter and stayed right where they were, sealing Kamal in.
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