Chapter Fourteen
JUST BECAUSE SOMETHING is the right thing to do doesn’t make it easy. On the way home, I had a hard time looking Jacob in the eye. Good thing he wasn’t an empath. My guilt would’ve given me away in a heartbeat.
And good thing I’m the poster child for resting bitch face. All it took was a few random complaints about the changes to Mood Blaster, and Jacob had no idea I was busy flagellating myself for going behind his back and dashing his high hopes.
At least…I didn’t think he had any idea. Though when we were crawling through a clogged intersection and he said, “I hope your day was at least more productive than mine,” I wasn’t so sure.
Normally, I might have “thanked” him for leaving me to do a bunch of paperwork myself, but it was bad enough I made off with Jacob’s quarry. I wasn’t about to compound the situation with playacting. He knew me well enough to spot any lie I might concoct.
A distraction, though? That, I could do.
“Pull over,” I said, as we crept up on a parking spot someone else was just freeing up.
We were maybe halfway home, on a mostly-residential street faced by storefronts with apartments above.
Old Chicago architecture with carved lintels and turn-of-the-century design, cheapened now by garish posters and neon signs.
There was a shop on first floor of the building, a typical mom-and-pop corner store where you could buy a pack of smokes, some overpriced toilet paper, or a dozen kinds of energy drink. And according to all the Illinois Lottery signage, you could grab yourself a chance at a better life.
Jacob and I had both agreed to deal with the etheric vermin in Evelyn’s hotel lobby newsstand some other time—no sense in flexing Jacob’s extermination power right under National’s nose. But that didn’t mean he had to totally abstain.
Jacob eyed the store dubiously. “There’s plenty of food at home.”
“We’re not here for groceries. Let’s bag ourselves some habit demons.”
I caught the brief flare of Jacob’s nostrils, like a bull getting a flash of a matador’s cloak, though he tried to cover his excitement with skepticism. “We don’t even know there’s anything here to bag.”
I cut my gaze to the seedy storefront, then looked back at Jacob meaningfully.
“But I suppose it can’t hurt to check,” he allowed.
We stepped into the shop and a bell announced our arrival with a wan jingle. A teenage girl with blue-tipped hair sat behind the counter, thumb flying across her phone screen. Her expression suggested the universe had personally wronged her by making her work this shift.
The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, casting a sickly glow over crowded shelves of dusty, overpriced necessities with questionable expiration dates.
The air felt thick, almost sticky with potential.
The lottery machine by the register practically hummed with desperate hope.
And if that wasn’t infested, what about the cigarette rack behind the counter? Surely that was a beacon for addiction.
And yet, no customers were here trying to feed their fix. Other than the cashier, the store was empty.
The girl finally glanced up, treating us to a look of bored suspicion.
“You guys want something, or...?”
“Just browsing,” Jacob said affably.
Her eyes narrowed. The shop was on a main drag. No doubt plenty of random guys in suits stopped off on their way home from work for dish soap or a TV dinner. But they probably just grabbed what they needed without standing there taking in the ambience.
We stuck out like a sore thumb. So I did my best to give her something else to worry about. I flashed my ID and said, “Gaming Commission. We’re here to verify your equipment.”
That wasn’t even a thing. But it sounded official, didn’t it?
Maybe not. I thought for sure I was busted…but then the girl heaved out a huge sigh and her shoulders sagged. “I thought you were with the Health Department.”
“Nope,” I said. “No Health here.”
“’Cause we’re trying to get an appointment with the exterminator. My dad called like eight of ’em. They’re just all booked up.”
“Exterminators,” I said with a sympathetic nod. “They’re, uh…yeah.”
Smooth. Real smooth.
The clerk hit a few buttons and her machine chugged out a printout, which she tore off and offered to me.
I glanced at it. A column of meaningless numbers stared back.
She said, “Good thing it’s not the first of the month, you’d be fighting off the regulars—you gonna do a software update or just the usual? ”
Great. Verifying the equipment was a thing. And I didn’t have the first clue what it might entail.
Luckily, Jacob’s a better liar than I am. “Neither,” he said, as he pulled out his phone and held it up like he was using it to scan the lottery machine. “We have software of our own to test.”
The clerk tilted her head. Sure, now she was intrigued. “It’s proprietary,” I said. She blinked. I cleared my throat. “Give us a little space.”
“Oh. Whatever.” With a shrug and a crack of her gum, she wandered out from behind the counter with her eyes glued to her phone, and began to halfheartedly straighten a shelf of canned goods.
Jacob dropped his voice. “See anything?”
I pulled out my phone for cover and held it up as well, looking around it. I didn’t see a damn thing, other than an insidious way to bilk someone desperate out of their whole government check on a luxury they couldn’t afford, all for the false hope that someday, they’d hit the big score.
Habit demons are tough to spot, though, and I need a running start to perceive them. I ran through my checklist of centering techniques—the subtle ones I use when I’m out in public, anyhow, where I imagine the white light and time my breathing, and encompass everything in a white balloon.
Nothing.
Jacob’s eyes flicked from the machine to me, questioning. I shrugged helplessly, looked closer, then even pretended to tie my shoe to drive a little more blood to my brain.
Still nothing.
Damn it.
If only my Mood Blaster hadn’t been replaced by that stupid Blip.
Jacob scowled harder at the machine. He wouldn’t see anything—he never did.
But if I was in my head and he was grounded, and the two of us were in sync, I could tell him where the creatures were, so he’d be able to make a grab for them.
In a sense, Jacob already had a pair of SPECs. And those glasses were me.
Unfortunately, all my performance did was remind him that Jacob never got to play with any of the cool toys.
The one guy whose opinion really mattered to me, and I managed to let him down.
Maybe he’d be better off with a piece of tech, at least where ghost hunting was concerned.
Our current partnership was underwhelming at best. We’d turned up a heaping helping of nothing in Boswell’s apartment.
And now I couldn’t even treat him to some habit demons.
Driven by my own disappointment, I sucked in even more white light—to the point where I felt a little loopy and something throbbed vaguely behind my right eye. And I looked again.
Aside from a dead fly feet-up, the lottery machine was clean.
Sometimes, I reminded myself, I didn’t see anything simply because there was nothing there to see. “Sorry to get your hopes up,” I told Jacob…just a prickle of unease skittered down my spine, and my eardrums flexed as if the air pressure had just shifted.
“Hope’s a funny thing.” The words came from behind me, where moments ago there’d been nothing but a spinner rack of cheap kitchenware. “It usually ends in disappointment.”
I must’ve been a glutton for punishment, because I did have hope—mainly the hope that the voice was coming from a perfectly mundane source. But even as I entertained the notion, I knew damn well I was in for a big, fat, ghostly letdown.
I turned slowly. The spirit had materialized not two feet away, as if he’d been standing right behind me in line for the register…
way too close. He wasn’t transparent, exactly—but somehow, hard to see.
I wasn’t really looking with rods and cones, iris and pupil, but with whatever spirit-stuff my third eye was made of.
He was solid, but drained of all color. Like a gray plastic model waiting for its coat of paint.
All except…his hands. Dripping with blood that was redder than red.
“What is it?” Jacob hissed, but before I could even put a word to it, he moved to insert himself between me and the threat he couldn’t see. He didn’t need to, not really. All he had to do was look at me.
“Hope makes men weak.” The ghost’s voice was awful, the sound of a chain link gate scraping across buckled concrete. “It makes them think they can have it all: the job. The house. The loving, faithful wife. Hope is for suckers.”
On instinct, my adrenaline manufactured a white balloon, which I immediately expanded to contain me, Jacob, and the blue-haired girl down the aisle.
“My sweet, sweet, Helen,” the ghost sneered.
He was still hard to look at—my gaze kept wanting to slide off him—but he was a lot more solid now that he knew he had an audience.
“That ungrateful bitch tried to run off, first chance she got. I lost my shirt in the stock market…and her true colors came out. A door-to-door bible salesman. So much for honor thy husband!”
“Whatever happened, you need to move on,” I said.
Usually, that’s when the veil makes itself known.
It’s a kind of swirling vortex that links the physical plane to the other side.
I don’t know if it’s always there and I just call attention to it, or something in my exchange coaxes it out.
Whatever it is, I’ve got no illusions that it’s my own ability at work.
More like two winds colliding to form a funnel cloud…
or the universe leaping on a chance to balance itself.
“You sound just like that four-flusher that tried to take Helen away from me.” He moved to lunge toward me, stuttered, and appeared right up against Jacob.
My white balloon hadn’t done squat. But Jacob’s natural aura stopped him.
The ghost’s confusion bought me a fraction of a second as he registered a barrier he hadn’t expected, while I swung around to the shelves, hoping against all hope to find a canister of salt at hand.
No such luck…the shelf was crammed with cleaning supplies, trash bags, and watery, off-brand laundry detergent. But there, by the bottom, a row of dusty prayer candles caught my eye. And peeking out beside them was the familiar vintage label of Murray & Lanman Florida Water Cologne.
Good thing I’d been doing so much yoga lately, or I would’ve thrown my back out for sure snatching it up off that low shelf.
“Get back here, you spineless coward,” the ghost taunted, as I danced around to keep Jacob firmly fixed between him and me. “You’ll take Helen over my dead body.”
Great. Now he thought his wife was running off with me.
The bottle lid came off easy enough, but a pesky foil seal stood between me and the stinky cologne. I picked frantically with my thumbnail while the ghost tried to ram his way past Jacob.
Jacob rocked as if he’d been physically pelted.
The ghost was strong and fueled with hate.
And he’d confused me for the bible salesman—who was probably just an innocent bystander in the whole sordid thing.
Anyone spiteful enough to murder his own wife to stop her from leaving was likely seeing threats everywhere.
But unlike Boswell, who donned a tin foil hat and carried on, this guy made sure the people around him suffered for his delusions.
Jacob could feel the ghost now, which gave him a better idea how to block me as I struggled to open the damn bottle. But Jacob’s interference only made the vengeful double down. My breath huffed out in a visible cloud as Bloody Hands powered up.
I fumbled the bottle, caught it, then shoved my thumbnail under the seal. Florida Water splashed out, covering me in clove-stinking perfume. But the smell was as familiar as it was cloying, and my white light valve opened wide, and let the spigot of the universe fill me with psych juice.
A crimson hand swiped at me over Jacob’s shoulder as my vision went white around the edges. I flailed the Florida Water—mostly across the back of Jacob’s neck—but at least some of it must have splattered the ghost. “You’re dead. And you don’t belong here. Not anymore.”
I don’t know what he thought he’d do once he got to me. Try to kill me—or slip inside. But it wouldn’t come to that. I wouldn’t allow it.
At some point, a switch flipped inside me, and I went from pulling at the white light to letting it flow.
The air behind the ghost rippled and the atmosphere thinned—the veil.
I sloshed out the rest of the Florida water and grated out, “You’re dead, now.
Dead and gone.” And with one great shove, I sent Bloody Hands spiraling through the rift.
My eardrums flexed again as the funnel between planes sucked shut, and I swayed on my feet. Jacob didn’t ask if the ghost had been taken care of—he trusted his feelings, and he didn’t need to verify what he already knew.
The connection I’d had to the white light sputtered to a stop. If there’s a way to taper off gracefully, I’ve never figured it out. One minute I’m hopped up on mojo and the next I’m incoherent and loopy. Belatedly, I tried to ground myself. But I was using the candy display to keep myself standing.
Jacob hovered beside me with concern creasing his brow. “Is it safe to…can I…?” His hand flapped.
I let go of whatever was left of my white balloon. “Yeah, it’s fine.”
Even so, he got a little zap when he grabbed my arm and our energies leveled. “You look pale.”
“I’m fine.”
He leaned in. “And you’re squinting. I know by now what it looks like when you overextend your ability—”
But before he could launch into a full blown “take it easy” lecture, a pointed clearing of the throat reminded us that while the ghost might be gone, we weren’t exactly alone.
We turned and found the clerk watching us with her hands on her hips.
She was going for assertive…but her eyes were a little too wide.
Still, she gave the tough-cookie act her best shot, nodded at the dripping bottle of Florida Water dangling from my grasp, and said, “You gonna pay for that?”