Chapter Thirty-Eight
TINY ELECTRONICS SCATTERED. But it wasn’t like dropping a bag of groceries. More like dropping a bomb. I sensed the blast just a fraction of a second before it hit me, and did the only thing I could think of.
I clenched my subtle bodies for all I was worth.
As waves go, the energy discharge was hardly seismic. More like a breeze sneaking through a gap in the window frame to make a candle flicker.
But the results were massive.
Subtle bodies blew out like party horns all around. But Jacob’s didn’t budge. And Sarah’s body had none to lose.
Evelyn was a trained empath, and she caught her subtle body before it flew off like a kite with a broken string—barely.
Boswell, on the other hand, was over capacity, and the surge did what the stun gun couldn’t.
Sarah’s etheric and emotional bodies were shocked right out of the driver seat.
They wavered a moment as they got their first good look at the dark veil and saw what true rock bottom looked like.
And then they did what any good survivor would do, and plunged back into their proper body.
Sledge wasn’t so lucky. His emotional body, an ugly, shadowy thing, lurched out of him, confused.
Before it could gather itself to snap back in, a psychic dust devil, a flurry of half-seen chaotic energy, hurtled straight toward it.
What the hell could it be—the empathic plane’s equivalent of a habit demon?
I was reaching for white light to guard myself against it when the answer clicked into place.
Humans weren’t the only ones with empathic bodies.
Haw-haw-haw.
The dust devil flurried around the head of Sledge’s subtle body, ripping off bits of shadow like it was plucking petals from a daisy.
The dark form howled and batted at the bird spirit.
And then, as if it sensed the presence of fresh meat, the dark veil went into overdrive.
Where the blackness met reality, the edges started to disintegrate, widening the gap.
Reflexively, I threw a white balloon around Sledge. Yeah, the guy was an asshole of the nth degree, and yeah, he deserved to have a piece of himself sucked into oblivion. But he was still a person. And whether or not I was on the force, I’d sworn an oath to serve and protect.
I gathered up the mojo I’d been clutching and flung it out hard—
And it didn’t do a damn thing.
The white balloon was etheric, but the spirits weren’t. And neither was the dark veil.
“Oh god what is that??” At least Boswell sounded like himself as he reeled away from the shadowy whirlwind.
Jacob lurched into the fray. “Stay back,” he barked as he stepped between Evelyn and the gaping rift like a human shield. She’d nearly lost the struggle to keep hold of her empathic form, but it bounced off him like a brick wall and jack-in-the-boxed back into her physical body.
Meanwhile, the bird spirit struck, and struck, and struck again. Without a physical shell, Sledge’s subtle body reacted to this plane like it was acid. Tufts of darkness flew every which way, dissolving as it met the physical.
I scrambled to do something, to use the part of myself that resonated with the dark flurry, but it was like trying to hold onto a cup of coffee—minus the cup. It slid through my grasp and my empathic form stayed right where it was supposed to be. Inside my body.
Step by agonizing step, the bird spirit drove Sledge’s spirit toward the rift.
And with every one of those steps, the maw opened wider.
If I could just grab hold of Sledge’s darkness, I figured, I could sling it around and throw it back where it belonged.
One last time, I braced myselves and stepped into the fray.
But when I grabbed for the thing’s hand, it scattered like smoke. The bird spirit struck again as the black veil gave a pulse I felt deep in my marrow, and Sledge’s empathic body hurtled through….
And then it was gone.
It left nothing behind. Nothing but a black-feathered dust devil that drifted up toward the ceiling, and reseated itself inside the bird. Which had the tactfulness not to chuckle. Though in its own birdish way, it did manage to look pretty damn pleased with itself.
In the profound stillness that followed, we stood there, all of us, looking at one another like we’d just come through a war.
It was as close to a shared experience as I was ever likely to have, with Boswell able to see the subtle bodies, Jacob and Evelyn to feel them, and Sarah actually taking an active part in the whole fiasco.
As for Sledge, he just looked a bit…puzzled. As if he was delivering a letter and couldn’t quite make out the address.
Evelyn was the first to approach what was left of him. “Mr. Sledge? Are you okay?”
He gave a half-shrug and mumbled, “I guess.”
But his heart wasn’t really in it.
Thankfully, somehow, he was the only casualty. Unless you counted the jumble of broken electronics on the floor. Maybe it would be a quick, superficial repair. But given that wave of energy I’d felt the SPECs discharge, I knew that was a longshot.
Jacob offered Sarah a steadying hand, though knowing how cautious he could be, he was probably checking to make sure her subtle bodies were contained.
I wasn’t under any illusion that his decision to protect Evelyn meant they were best buddies now.
He was acting out of the same impulse I’d had to protect Sledge.
But there was hope. Even with the culmination of her life’s work in pieces, in checking with Sledge, Evelyn had put another person first. If that didn’t prove to Jacob that she wasn’t just some threat from National, nothing would.
I crouched down beside the broken SPECs, and Evelyn joined me. I said, “I didn’t mean to block his fist with your device.”
Evelyn touched the bridge of my nose. It stung a little.
“I’m glad it didn’t do more damage to your face.
” She looked back toward the bits on the floor and sighed.
“I guess it’s back to the drawing board…
.” She trailed off, stared for a moment, then plucked a bit of wire and plastic out of the jumble.
She held it up and said, “This shouldn’t be here. ”
To my untrained eye, it looked no different from all the other electronics. “Maybe it’s the guts of some other part.”
“It’s not. I assembled every component myself. But I never installed a transmitter.”
Ice shot through my veins as if I’d just been injected with some experimental serum. And I realized that it didn’t matter how much I liked Evelyn. How much I trusted her. That she was a decent human being.
Whether she knew it or not, National was still pulling the strings.
And none of us could afford to let down our guard.