Chapter Thirty-Two
THE ANTIQUE MALL wasn’t slated to open for another hour, but we’d called ahead and convinced one of the vendors to meet us there beforehand. I wasn’t sure exactly how many favors I owed Crash at this point. No doubt he’d enjoy reminding me.
The Still Goods antique mall was quiet and peaceful, in a dusty kind of way, with early sun streaming through the windows, casting prisms through the various crystals that dangled there to catch the light.
Outside, rush hour was rushing, and elsewhere in the labyrinth, someone’s classic rock played as they mopped their floor and tended their stock.
But Curious Curios, Crash and Red’s corner of the sprawling old building, felt like a haven.
Even Boswell seemed relaxed. And that guy never let down his guard. He went straight to a shelf of esoteric books and started scanning titles, while Sarah listlessly spun a jewelry rack.
We’d left the cat at home.
Crash breezed in looking just as edgy and casually put together as ever, with nary a spiky bleached blond hair out of place. He took in my black suit with a glance and said, “Either you’re working on a Sunday or going to mass… or a funeral.”
Hard to lay someone to rest when you can’t figure out who died. But I was in no mood to banter. “Do you have it?”
“Lucky for you, I just got an entire case of Florida Water. You’re one of the only ones who buys it.”
The smell was definitely an acquired taste. Which made me wonder if Evelyn might lend me her SPECs. Say, Evelyn, can your one-of-a-kind, no-doubt-insanely-expensive invention come out to play? I promise to have it home in time for dinner.
Yeah, that wasn’t gonna happen. Not without her tagging along.
Crash plunked a cardboard box onto his counter. “How many do you want?”
I considered the dying wheeze my pocket sprayer had given off with a bloody ghost right in my face. “…all of them?”
“Well.” He seemed pleased, for once. “Good. I’d been hoping you’d make it worth my while to get out of bed at this ridiculous hour.”
Then he was in luck. I added a bag of sacred salt to the order—I’m not sure if it did much more than the table salt from the supermarket aisle, but I wanted every advantage I could get.
White candles, dressed in essential oils.
A big hunk of amethyst I’d put in my pocket and forget until I went fishing for change. And a bundle of smudge sticks.
“Anything else?” he said expectantly…then dropped his voice and added, “Because I’m starting to worry.”
Crash might be an empath, but he and I didn’t explore our emotions together—especially not with Jacob standing vigil by the door, looking uncomfortable and stern. “I’ll be fine,” I said. “It’s not really a ghost.”
“How convincing.”
“It’s no threat to me. At least…it shouldn’t be.” Unless it decided it needed a host—and I was the most appealing one in the room. No, the fragment had co-existed for over a month with Boswell, and he was none the worse for wear.
Unless that was the reason his paranoia had spiraled out of control.
“Is there such a thing as protection from negative emotions?”
“Is Mercury Retrograde a royal pain in the ass? Pick your poison. I’ve got incense, hand wash, and even a St. Michael medallion, if you swing that way.”
I’d never been religious. But I bought it anyhow and tucked it into my breast pocket.
Laden with enough paraphernalia to open my own pop-up shop, I headed to the apartment.
Sarah rode with Jacob and me, and Boswell followed in the peemobile.
I didn’t worry about him scurrying back under the baseboards anymore—not now that we had something he wanted, namely, a living exorcism.
“I think the office is expecting us,” I told Jacob.
“Pretty soon Laura will start to wonder.”
“I’ll handle Laura,” Jacob said. He seemed awfully confident about it, given the “satisfactory” business. Better him than me, though. I’m usually a passable liar—until you know me. And then I’m riddled with guilt.
But it really was in his best interest to refrain from touching those SPECs.
As we pulled up in front of the haunted apartment, I spotted a scrupulously clean black sedan parked near the courtyard. Shit. “I had HQ put eyes on Haskel so he didn’t get any ‘special deliveries.’ We’d better go around back.”
Jacob turned down the alley, and Boswell followed. And he was beyond pleased with himself to show us how he’d jimmied the back window to crawl in from the porch.
“What’s the plan?” Jacob asked, and suddenly everything seemed to click into place. One Psych, one Stiff. The power-couple we were always meant to be.
“We’ll set up our perimeter around the repeater like a standard exorcism. But instead of the veil, we nudge it toward Sarah.”
With a single nod, Jacob got to work. He might not be as methodical as Carl, but I had to admit, I felt a lot better knowing that when push came to shove, he’d be able to do some actual shoving.
We set candles at the cardinal points, sifted out a careful ring of salt, droppered a tincture of mugwort under our tongues, and grounded ourselves in our own particular ways.
Jacob did a red-energy visualization—though he claimed he could never tell if it did much of anything—and I called down my white light.
And then I reached for my earbuds…and remembered Mood Blaster was ruined, and I had no binaurals to help me.
Damn it, I hate technology.
“Feel anything?” I asked Jacob.
He scowled hard at the spot where the luminol had lit up the wall, gave it a good stare, then shook his head. “Nothing.”
I followed his gaze and squinted. Yeah, me neither.
Jacob said, “Maybe once we get Sarah in place, the fragment will put out a stronger signal.”
It was worth a shot, since all we were currently accomplishing was pooling wax on the floor.
“Stay in the hall,” I told Boswell. I could tell he had no intention of doing any such thing, so I brought out the big guns. “There’ll be a lot of stray etheric energy floating around and you don’t want to get contaminated.”
Thankfully, his training hadn’t yet started, so he didn’t know I was improvising. He blanched and backed up a few steps.
Sarah was frowning at the salt circle as she ignored Jacob’s efforts to direct her to her mark. “Is this gonna hurt?” she asked.
“I don’t think you’ll feel any physical difference,” I said. Though emotionally, I suspected she’d be in for a major hit.
“You don’t seem to know much about this.”
“No one does.” And that was the truth. “Most repeaters don’t have awareness. They don’t have feelings. This one is nothing but feelings. Do you really want to leave part of yourself trapped in that night, endlessly repeating the worst moment of her life?”
Sarah didn’t seem entirely convinced. But I’d swayed her enough to give it a try.
“Remember,” I told Jacob, “no veil.”
“No veil,” he echoed, and we positioned ourselves in a triangle with Sarah at the center and the spot I’d seen her repeater right behind her.
I pulled down white light until I buzzed, careful not to touch anyone or anything, especially Jacob.
To an outsider, it must’ve looked like a lot of nothing.
A couple of black-suited guys staring at a vaguely apprehensive lank-haired woman in a dowdy sweatsuit.
White light, white light, white light.
Nothing.
I told myself I could do this. I’d just exorcised a raging cyclist from a moving vehicle. I could give a repeater a little nudge and let ghost-gravity do the rest.
“Maybe you should do some kind of countdown,” Boswell suggested from the doorway.
“I told you to stay out of this,” I said through gritted teeth.
“You told me to stay in the hall. Which is exactly where I am.”
“Don’t waste your energy on him,” Jacob said. “Focus on Sarah.”
He was right. “Let’s try that box-breathing from yoga,” I told Jacob, thinking that maybe the rhythm of it would activate whatever vibrations were normally enhanced by the binaural beats.
“In two-three-four. Hold-two-three-four. Out two-three-four. Empty two-three-four.” Instead of continuing the count, I tapped my foot in time since I couldn’t really talk with no air in my lungs.
And pretty soon we were all breathing to the same beat.
Maybe together, we activated something on one of the other subtle planes.
Or maybe it was just good for me to worry about something as immediate as breathing so my fear of failure could take a back seat.
Either way, as I leaned solidly into the rhythm, eventually, I glimpsed a faint flicker behind Sarah.
The emotional fragment.
“Push,” I whispered to Jacob.
He huffed out a gasp of effort.
And nothing happened.
“She should be behind the ghost,” Boswell piped in, “not in front of it.”
I wanted to tell Jacob to go shove him out the jimmied window. But what I said was, “He’s right. Sarah, could you back up a few paces?”
Sarah did so until she was leaning against the closet door that replaced the one Sledge had broken with her face…
though she didn’t seem unduly disturbed by it.
Now was not the time to wonder if I was doing the right thing.
Besides, I told myself, it wasn’t as if she was serene without her fear.
Just flat. “Breathe two-three-four…” I guided Jacob through a few more boxes of breathing, and when I felt as full of white light as I could hope to get, I said, “Okay, now.” I pushed.
And nothing happened.
“Again,” Jacob said.
“It’s no good,” I told him.
“Again,” he insisted.
There was no reason to keep going if it obviously wasn’t working, although we wouldn’t get another chance. “Okay, one more try. Ready…set….”
On the “go” mark, something jostled me and a weird sensation whooshed through my center of balance.
A brief second of disorientation—a lot like the loopiness I’d experienced from the SPECs, but without the burnt molar taste.
It was like stepping off the bottom stair and finding the floor was just an inch farther away than you expected.
Nothing to send you sprawling, just a little stagger.
But that stagger caused a ripple, and the ripple punched Sarah as hard as Sledge ever had. Her physical body didn’t register the hit—but her etheric body tumbled out. And when it did, her fragment flared bright, and merged with her etheric.
“This is just stupid,” her body said.
I turned around and found Boswell there, because of course he didn’t stay in the hall. “What did you do?” I snapped.
“I was helping!” Oh, I’d “help” him, all right…. “Did it work?”
Meanwhile, Sarah’s etheric form—and the emotional fragment she’d tried to leave behind—were so tangible to my inner eye that she was practically as solid as her body.
And as the shock wore off—she was not happy.
“What did you do?” her spirit demanded.
Boswell cocked his head. “Did you hear something?”
“What happened?” Jacob asked.
But as I pinched the bridge of my nose, the only reply I could muster was, “Cripes.”