Chapter 17
I found Alexander alone in the containment vault again last night. He says he’d rather risk brain damage than live without knowing how to protect himself, but if you ask me, the kid’s got more dogged determination than sense.
“Are we the only ones on the team who can hear ghosts make any noise at all?” I ask Nico, glancing over my shoulder to make sure Bob isn’t trying to limp after me. Donny promised he’d keep an eye on him.
Nico doesn’t look back. “Yes.”
“Really?” I ask. “What about when they scream?”
“All of us could hear a ghost scream,” Nico says. “But ghosts trying to talk sounds like gibberish to anyone who hasn’t made a neural connection. Donny calls it ‘speaking in tongues.’”
I pull a confused face. “Like from the Bible?”
“Donny’s idea of humor,” Nico confirms. “Speaking in tongues for us means random noise that sounds like a language but isn’t.”
Nico punches a code into the keypad lock, and I watch his finger dart between each button: 0-3-1-9-0-1.
I pull the zipper of Dad’s jacket all the way up to my chin. Yesterday I was unprepared for how cold it was, but not today. “I’m not thrilled at the prospect of going down there again.”
“Do you have trouble doing things you aren’t thrilled to do?” Nico punches the green button.
I make a face at his back, scrunching my nose and baring my teeth.
The locks disengage with a series of heavy clunks. Nico pushes the door open and descends without waiting for me. I rest a hand on the doorknob. “Do you want the door closed, or…?”
Nico’s head snaps up from the base of the stairs, and the look he gives me could strip paint. “The door always stays closed.”
Uh huh. I pull the door until it clicks and walk down into the containment area as Nico flips on the main lights. Goosebumps spread across my arms under my jacket as I rub them for warmth, but I’m not convinced it’s just the chill making my skin prickle.
In the center of the room sits that glass dome Billy was in, and now that I’m looking at it without a serial killer staring me down, I can see the web of wires leading to a generator the size of a small refrigerator.
The dome is connected to a control panel that resembles a scary version of the one from Inside Out.
The whole setup looks as if a morgue and a mad scientist’s lab had a baby.
I count thirty of those morgue drawers on the back wall. Each one is the size of a library computer monitor, with a metal handle on the front. I’m close enough to make out a couple of the names:
NAME: Caine, William
ALIAS: “The Parking Lot Strangler”
ACTIVE: 1987 - 1989
CLASSIFICATION: Possessor
DATE OF DEATH: December 27, 2025
NUMBER OF KNOWN VICTIMS: 5
CONTAINMENT DATE: January 15, 2026
HANDLING NOTES:
NAME: Keller, Marianne
ALIAS: “Mommy Dearest”
ACTIVE: 1959 -1967
CLASSIFICATION: Possessor
DATE OF DEATH: January 3, 2022
NUMBER OF KNOWN VICTIMS: 9
CONTAINMENT DATE: August 5, 2022
HANDLING NOTES: Prone to hysterics.
Are all the drawers full? Am I really in a room with thirty serial killers?
Nico flips switches on the control panel, bringing up various displays on monitors mounted on black arms that extend from behind it.
He’s dressed for the cold, too, and has a brown leather jacket layered over a hoodie, with the hood up.
When he exhales, his breath comes out in a visible cloud that he seems to watch with annoyance.
He shifts his weight from foot to foot like he’s already trying to keep his blood moving.
I lean against the wall right next to the stairs. “So. Do you come down here often?”
My voice echoes, bouncing off the metal walls.
His jaw tightens. I wonder if he really is counting in his head before trusting himself to speak. I begin counting in my own head, and I get to ten before he finally says: “As much as is required.”
I glance around at the closed drawers. “Is Billy in one of those drawers?”
Nico gives a curt nod. “We don’t keep entities in the main chamber unless we’re studying them.”
“Do you use the questionnaires to study them?” I ask.
“I sure don’t do it for fun,” he snaps, then sighs, and rubs his temples like he’s rubbing out a headache.
“Donny’s researching how death changes behavior.
I collect data for him.” Nico presses a button, and a soft hum fills the room.
“I interview each entity using questionnaires Donny developed, and I transcribe the sessions so Donny can compare each entity’s post-death psychology to their living psychology. ”
“And then you use the information to build profiles,” I say. “So you can find Possessors before the police do.”
“Yes.” He side-eyes me. “Sometimes that means talking to them when they’re most active, no matter the hour.”
I do believe he was interviewing Billy last night. It’s the most logical reason for him to be down here, and who am I to judge what a normal time for talking to a ghost is? But he is acting weird about why the door was open.
I push all thoughts of the door from my mind. I have bigger problems right now. Hearing ghosts makes me even more of a liability than before. What if he’s right? What if I can’t learn this fast enough, and Nico has to watch another team member lose their mind?
I’m going to learn this fast enough. I have to.
Nico moves to the center of the room, gesturing for me to join him. When I don’t comply, he sighs. “This will go faster if you cooperate.”
“Can we do this farther away from all the scary drawers?”
“You have nothing to worry about. This facility is secure.”
“That’s what they said about Jurassic Park, but the velociraptors still figured out how to open doors.”
“These aren’t dinosaurs.”
“No, just the disembodied souls of murderers. So much better.”
He raises his eyes to the ceiling like this is the most tedious conversation in the world, then tilts his chin toward a thermostat that reads thirty-six degrees.
“This is an old root cellar. Each containment unit is individually sealed. Cold weakens ghosts. Doesn’t stop them completely, but makes them easier to manage.
We keep it as cold as we can without risking frozen pipes or equipment failure. ”
“They really can’t break out?”
“No, Eden,” Nico says, sounding so annoyed you’d think I was a kid asking him, ‘But why?’ nonstop. “They really can’t break out.”
I stare at the drawers, my skin crawling at the thought of all those twisted minds just stuffed in there. “Do you hear them talking to you through the floors every night?”
“They can’t talk unless they’re let out of their containment unit.”
“But Billy—”
“Billy was in the main chamber when you heard him,” Nico says, and there’s an unsteadiness in his voice that makes me look at him more carefully.
“Trust me. I wouldn’t get much sleep around here if all our long-term residents could call up to me whenever they wanted to.
Now that I know you can hear them, you’ll need to be present for every conversation I have.
We can’t risk another entity trying what Billy did when you’re unprepared. ”
“So yesterday won’t be our last late-night hangout sesh,” I say, unable to keep the sarcasm out of my voice.
“Unfortunately for both of us, no.”
I feel as comforted as I can be for someone who’s been violated by four ghosts in six days. As long as Billy could only talk to me because he was already out of his containment unit, I’m not in danger of him getting into my head again.
“Of course, I won’t be able to conduct any interviews with you in the house until you learn how to block them out,” Nico adds. “So, we have some work to do.”
“Why are you and I the only ones who can hear them?” I ask.
“Because we’ve seen things the others haven’t.”
“Like what?”
His hands grip the edge of the control panel, and the only sound for a couple of seconds is him breathing. “Evil.”
I find Dad’s dog tags and grip them hard. “What evil did you see?”
Nico’s eyes soften, looking almost lost, but then he schools his features and sits on the floor with his legs crossed, gesturing to the space across from him. “Sit.”
I stand firm, folding my arms. “I’m not a dog.”
“No. If you were a dog, you’d follow my instructions.”
The casual arrogance in his voice makes me want to march right back up those stairs just to prove I don’t have to do what he says. He raises his eyebrows and waits.
I sigh and lower myself onto the hard metal floor. The cold bites through my layers, and my legs are going numb, but I’m not about to complain when this is clearly the last place he wants to be, and he’s doing the last thing he wants to do with the last person he wants to do it with.
He sits so straight that he could probably balance a book on his head. My old ballet teacher would love him. Everything he does is annoyingly graceful, and his posture makes me very aware of how I’m probably sitting like a hunchbacked pretzel.
“Ghosts operate differently than humans,” Nico says. “They feel negative emotions more intensely than we do.”
“Sounds like you should be giving them therapy instead of interviewing them,” I say.
“I shouldn’t be giving anyone therapy.” He runs his tongue across his bottom lip, huffing a breath that on some planets could be misconstrued as a laugh.
“They don’t feel happiness or empathy. At least, not the way we do.
And they lie. Ghosts like Billy will say anything to get you to do their bidding. ”
I tuck my legs under me, trying to get comfortable. “Are they human at all?”
“No,” he says. “They’re pieces of what once was human, distilled down to their most fundamental drives and emotions. The longer they exist after death, the more concentrated those emotions become, like… reducing a sauce until only the strongest flavors remain.”
I can’t help the snort that escapes me. “Yummy.”
“What’s left of Billy isn’t the person he was when he was alive. It’s the worst parts of him amplified and stripped of whatever humanity might have balanced him out. All of his cunning. All of his sadism. None of his restraint.”