Chapter 53 #2
The building has more cameras than I expected. At least one in every room, and multiple for larger ones like the playing area. He probably has them outside, too, but we just didn’t see them.
My breath snags.
If he has cameras outside—
I spin my wheelchair around and start rolling as fast as I can toward the exit, my palm burning from the friction of the wheel. In seconds, Griffin has grabbed the handles and taken off at a dead sprint, pushing me so fast the walls blur.
I press the button on my earpiece. “Zoey? Zoey, can you hear me?”
Nothing.
We burst through the door and hit grass. The wheelchair lurches to a stop and I pitch forward, catching myself on the armrest.
Griffin lets go of the handles and dashes past me, sprinting toward the van. I can hear Bob barking.
No.
DJ rushes past me after Griffin. Benji pushes my chair over the grass, the wheels fighting the uneven ground. The fence gap slows us down, and I want to scream at my useless legs, at this stupid fucking wheelchair, at every second it takes to reach the van.
Griffin gets there first and wrenches the back doors open. My stomach drops when he staggers back, a strangled yell tearing through him.
DJ’s running so fast that she can’t stop in time and collides with Griffin. The impact seems to snap Griffin out of whatever daze he’s in because when Benji and I reach the back doors, Griffin has launched himself into the back of the van. DJ swears and darts around the outside.
Bob is pressed under the seats, teeth bared.
Zoey is slumped against the wall of the van, one hand clamped around a crowbar that lies limp on the ground.
Her eyes are unfocused and staring up at Morrow, who’s writhing in the air above her.
His features are sharp enough that I can make out every hair shimmering on top of his head.
He’s so focused on Zoey that he hasn’t noticed Griffin just a couple of feet away, with his hand deep in a salt bag.
Griffin pelts salt at Morrow, who undulates in the air, his connection with Zoey snapping as he turns to confront this disruption.
Morrow lunges at Griffin with a roar.
DJ fires rock salt from the side door. The spray tears through Morrow’s torso and shatters the window on the other side of him, glass exploding outward. Morrow lets out a shriek so high and sharp it feels like someone’s driving nails through my eardrums. He whirls on DJ, his form condensing.
“Any second now, Genius Boy!” Griffin yells.
Benji runs to stand behind DJ and begins yelling Latin from memory.
Griffin twists the cap off a containment jar and slams it onto the van floor. Morrow swipes a hand at him that Griffin barely dodges.
DJ fires another shot at Morrow, and his form scatters before reforming. He tries to flee, but Griffin gets the big ghost vac Donny used in the parking lot, attaches it to the jar, and turns it on.
The pull from it keeps Morrow pinned. He stretches like taffy being pulled apart, tendrils reaching for Griffin’s face, for DJ at the side door, for anything solid to grab onto.
A tendril lashes out toward Zoey. Griffin throws himself sideways, his shoulder slamming into the van wall as he blocks Morrow’s path.
One smoky hand wraps around Griffin’s wrist.
Griffin snarls through his teeth. DJ lunges forward and grabs Griffin’s other arm, trying to yank him free, but Morrow’s grip tightens. Griffin’s knees buckle.
I can’t sit here and watch them. I can’t be useless while Zoey is on the floor staring up at nothing.
I grab the door frame with my good hand. My legs don’t want to hold me, but I force them to anyway, hauling myself into the van.
“Get off him!” I yell.
Morrow’s head whips toward me.
I grab the bag of salt from the back and fling a handful at Morrow’s face. It passes through him but leaves gaps, breaks in his form where the crystals cut.
“That’s right, asshole,” I say. “Remember me?”
“You bitch,” he says, his voice pressing up against the borders of my mental walls.
Benji scrambles for his bag, pulling out a railroad spike.
“Call me that again, I dare you,” I urge. “You have no idea how much worse this can get for you.”
Benji drives the spike into Morrow’s arm. The smoke parts dramatically where the iron jabs through Morrow’s form, leaving a tunnel big enough that Bob could leap through. The tunnel widens, severing his smoke arm.
Morrow’s amputation isn’t enough to stop him from using his arm, which hovers in place, thrashing and yanking, but his grip on Griffin loosens, and DJ pulls him free.
The ghost vac pulls harder.
Morrow’s fighting it, tendrils whipping out in every direction, at the racks, at the walls, at the floor, and then recoiling like the eyestalk of a slug. My walls are up, but when he screams, it’s not inside my head. The others flinch, but grimace through the pain of Morrow’s furious shrieks.
His eagerness to find Zoey, alone in the van, must have overruled the part of him that was cautious and planned ahead. Only now that he’s trapped does he seem to be coming to terms with the reality of his situation, that he’s going to be sealed in an iron tomb.
He sinks lower, his reach growing shorter and shorter. His face is contorted, brows furrowed deep, lips peeled back in a snarl.
I laugh. It’s like the sound wounds him, judging by the way his tendrils suck in.
One thick tendril bursts out of Morrow’s chest, lashing toward me.
I throw myself to the side, my good hand grabbing at the salt water bottle on the seat. I go down hard on my knees, pain exploding through both kneecaps, but I have the bottle. I twist the cap off with my teeth and fling the contents at Morrow.
The salt water hits him in the face. Where it touches him, his billowing form sizzles and pops like bacon grease on a hot pan. He shrieks again, the sound so loud it makes the van windows rattle.
His mouth opens, unhinging like a python, but the containment unit drags him down in a spiral of furious mist. His eyes find mine.
The jar swallows him whole.
Benji slams the lid on and twists it shut so hard the threads grind. Griffin disconnects the ghost vac. Inside the jar, angry smoke presses against the glass, swirling and battering against the sides.
I drop the bottle and crawl toward Zoey, who’s still lying on the floor.
But Griffin is already at her side, checking her pulse. “She’s breathing. Zo? Zoey, can you see me?”
Zoey blinks slowly. “What—” she starts, then her eyes go to the jar on the floor. “Did you get him?”
I collapse into a heap and release a trembling breath.
“We got him,” Griffin croaks, and the relief in his voice is so palpable I can practically feel it filling the van. He crushes her into a hug and her muscles tense, but she accepts it.
DJ sinks onto the bench seat, her shotgun still clutched in both hands. She’s shaking so hard that the gun barrel is rattling against her knee.
Benji kneels in the center of the van, staring at the jar, and then turns around to look at me. “Eden, are you okay?”
I give him a thumbs up with my bandaged stump.
The adrenaline is starting to ebb, leaving me shaky and cold. I need to tell Nico we’re okay. I didn’t hear him say anything during all that. Is he still on the phone?
I push myself up to the passenger seat, careful to avoid the shards of broken window glass as I grab the phone from the dashboard mount.
Stringy ectoplasm slimes my fingers, and I quickly drop the device and wipe my hands on my pants.
The phone is doused with it, and the screen is dark.
I wonder if the ectoplasm messed up the speakers.
I find Griffin’s phone wedged into the glovebox and get him to unlock it before using it to call Nico again.
He picks up on the first ring. “What happened? Is Zo—”
“Zoey’s fine.” I put him on speaker so that the others can hear him. “We got Morrow. Everyone’s okay.”
“You’re sure?” He sounds wrecked, his voice unsteady. I can’t imagine how scary it must have been for him to be on the phone listening to that when he was too far away to help. “You’re all—”
“I’m sure,” I say. “We’re all okay.”
“And Benji?” Nico asks.
“Did amazing,” I say.
“Am I on speaker?” Nico asks. When I tell him yes, he says loudly, “Benj, you hear that? I’m so proud of you.”
I hear a shaky laugh and glance over my shoulder to see DJ wrapping Benji in a hug so tight I feel soothed just looking at them.
I want to stay and talk to Nico more, but I realize we forgot something again. I pass the phone to Benji, who launches right into a detailed account of the extraction. DJ’s hands have calmed down when I ask her to help me back into the wheelchair.
She and I head back into the building and find Henley exactly where we left him, curled up against a wall with his knees pulled to his chest.
He scrambles backward when he sees us, his hands coming up to protect himself.
“Hey,” I say, making my voice as gentle as I can. “I’m not going to hurt you. None of this was your fault.”
Tears are streaming down his face, glistening in the small amount of light reaching him from outside. He looks at my bandaged hand. A sob tears out of his throat.
“I didn’t—” His sobs are too powerful for him to get the words out. “I don’t—I didn’t mean to—”
I tell him everything, explaining Morrow, explaining possession, and how none of what he remembers doing was actually him.
It’s not how I’m supposed to tell him, but the time for gentle explanations passed at some point after Benji salted his eyes.
He shakes his head the entire time I’m talking.
DJ takes over when Henley starts to panic, assuring him that we’re going to take him to the hospital.
Eventually, he nods and walks out of the building with us on unsteady legs.
On the ride to the hospital, Zoey gives me the phone, and I press it tightly against my ear as I tell Nico every detail of what happened.
“He must’ve thought if he could kill the rest of the team, he could get away with possessing and killing as long as he wanted,” Nico says. “In his mind, he’d already killed three of us. He wasn’t expecting to see you alive.”
“Guess we really sold it, huh?” I say.
There’s a long pause. Did I say the wrong thing?
I wish I could crawl through the phone and be there in the hospital with him, so I could see exactly what his face is doing and reassure him that all of us are okay.
“Yeah,” he finally says. “I guess we did.”
Part of me deflates when DJ tells Nico to rest and forces him to hang up the phone.
At the house, Griffin gives me a piggyback ride down the stairs into the containment vault so I can choose the drawer Morrow will rot in.
At least until we find his anchor. I fill out an ID card.
Griffin does an audible snort as I slap it on the drawer:
NAME: Morrow, Alan
ALIAS: “The Game Master”
ACTIVE: 1974 – 1979
CLASSIFICATION: Possessor
DATE OF DEATH: December 15, 2025
NUMBER OF KNOWN VICTIMS: 10
CONTAINMENT DATE: February 16, 2026
HANDLING NOTES: Tongue kiss in front of him as often as you can