“We’re both getting out of here… Now…”
Talon shifted his gaze toward the exit but now found a row of mannequins blocking their path. He could’ve sworn the area was clear mere seconds earlier…
Without warning, one of the mannequins moved, a lifeless arm lashing out at him. Talon fired, bullets shredding the mannequins, sending plaster limbs flying. His pulse quickened as he crouched before the bullet-riddled dummy. Did he imagine the movement after all?
“Oh my God… He’s here… The Reaper is here…”
Talon spun toward the panicked man…and that’s when he saw the apparition. It lasted for only a blink of an eye, more like an optical illusion than anything else. A white, misty silhouette stood outlined about thirty feet from them. There was a jerk, almost like a jump cut in reality, and then the same figure loomed before them.
Talon brought up his machine pistol, but the barrel was pointed at thin air, the specter having vanished once more
A hiss of a spray canister made Talon whirl. Where was it coming from?
He didn’t spot the canister but he saw the graffiti bleeding over the floor. Two Greek letters: Alpha and Omega. Beginning and End.
Death is only the beginning.
“Go! Get out of here! Save yourself before it’s too—”
The words were cut off as an invisible force twisted the man’s arm. Bone snapped, and he exhaled in pain. He slumped to his knees, gasping. There was no time to recuperate from the spectral attack as the entity pounded his face into the ground with savage force.
Again and again.
Talon sprinted toward the twitching, groaning man. He had crossed less than half the distance when a force lifted him into the air and tossed him aside.
Talon slammed into a row of metal clothing racks and collapsed on the floor. He lay there, groggy, as the spectral attack intensified against the stranger. The force yanked the man backward, bending his spine unnaturally before dragging his whole body along the floor at breakneck speed, up the wall and along the ceiling.
For a split second, the man remained suspended on the ceiling before his lifeless body came crashing down right before Talon’s feet. Despite his training and years of combat, terror seized him. The former Delta operator had seen many a man die in front of him, but he had never experienced anything like this.
The air crackled and hissed with electricity, making Talon’s hair stand on end. Energy filled the abandoned department store. The man he had failed to save claimed the Reaper’s spirit haunted this mall, and now Talon believed him. But how to fight an enemy he couldn’t even see?
Before Talon could process the horror, the invisible force that had destroyed his companion reached out for him. A violent burst of energy shredded his combat suit, and black marks burned over his skin. The contact with the strange force took his breath away. He gasped in agony and dropped the machine pistol, which clattered ineffectively over the floor. A boneless face materialized, bloodshot eyes squirming with hatred.
The Reaper’s presence was upon him. The entity lifted Talon upward and pinned him against the wall like a puny insect. There was pressure against his diaphragm, and he couldn’t breathe. He was about to share the broken, bloodied man’s fate.
The Reaper’s skeletal features grew visible, lips dried with blood, eyes pools of pure blackness. Not flesh but made of an unstable, translucent material. Constantly reforming, exposing muscles as the thin membrane shifted and shredded.
A hand reached out for Talon’s chest, bony fingers vanishing inside his ribcage like spectral scalpels. He could almost visualize those fingers closing around his hammering heart, intent on squeezing the life right out of him.
No, it couldn’t end like this…
Talon stared into the Reaper’s inhuman eyes. The spirit had become death itself, living up to his namesake.
There was a sensation of heat and his pentacle amulet lit up, responding to the proximity of the supernatural being. Crackling energy ignited the air and the Reaper recoiled, dispersing as it unleashed a bone-rattling inhuman shriek.
Talon tilted forward, nothing holding him aloft any longer, and tumbled back to the ground. He gasped, coughing up blood.
Nearby, the spirit of the Reaper was reforming, filaments of concentrated light hanging in mid-air as the spooky wisps coalesced back into the shape of a man. Talon had no idea if the amulet would save him one more time. The Reaper wasn’t like any enemy he’d ever faced before.
Driven by his desire to live, Talon staggered to his feet and stumbled for the exit. Renewed bursts of energy erupted, still struggling to take shape and reach out for him, but he blocked it from his mind. His complete focus was on the arched exit ahead.
Unloading a clip into the lock, he ran full bore toward the door. Talon didn’t know much about spirit beings like the Reaper, but among the whispered legends and half-forgotten lore, one detail stuck out. Ghosts were often bound to the place of their death. Maybe, just maybe, the Reaper wouldn’t be able to follow him beyond the walls of his retail tomb.
A final roar of bestial, frustration accompanied his escape, and then Talon was sprinting across the parking lot. He hated to retreat. Leaving the bodies of the fallen behind wasn’t his style, either. But nothing would be gained if he faced the Reaper and allowed himself to become just another rotting corpse in the mall. He would strategize with Casca and return to face this entity.
If there was a way to defeat a ghost…
Moments later, he reached his rental car and kicked open the hinged door, still unwilling to hazard a glance behind him, praying the entity wasn’t following him.
He sucked in sharp mouthfuls of air, fired up the ignition, and tapped the accelerator. Only once the Regional Mall had receded in his rear view mirror did his hands stop shaking.
A half an hour later, a battered Talon used his keycard to let himself into his hotel room. One of the reasons he avoided five-star hotels, even though Casca could afford them, was that the cheaper, more rundown places offered more privacy. People knew to keep to themselves. Not having to trudge past a reception desk to get to your room didn’t hurt either. In his current beaten-up state, he would’ve drawn plenty of raised eyebrows.
He staggered into the bathroom, flipped on the light switch, and stepped up to the mirror to assess the full extent of the damage. His skintight black sweater had been shredded by the spectral attack and the skin underneath felt bruised and sensitive.
His chest burned as he pulled off the shirt. He tossed the ruined garment on the floor and inspected the twin black marks that ran down his pectoral muscles in long, fat lines. The new injuries framed the inverted pentagram scar Zagan had carved into his skin back in San Francisco. The wounds resembled electrical burns of some kind. Making matters worse, his stab wound was bleeding again too.
I’m falling apart here, Talon thought.
He shouldn’t be complaining. At least he was alive. The same couldn’t be said for the man he’d failed to save back in the mall.
I shot him but he never left this place.
Talon considered the dead man’s words and concluded he must been one of the cops who put a stop to the Reaper’s wanton massacre five years earlier.
Talon rubbed an anti-burn salve on his fresh wounds and bit his lips. The cream stung like crazy. He wrapped his chest in gauze and swallowed a few painkillers.
He’d faced demons and cults, but he’d never confronted a ghost before. His amulet had saved his ass, but he was in dire need of a different kind of weapon and a new strategy if he was to face the Lightwalker and his spectral master again.
He can speak to the dead.
What did it all mean? Was this cult leader controlling the Reaper’s spirit somehow? Casca would no doubt have some ideas on the matter.
Talon staggered to the small desk which fronted the bed and switched on his laptop. A Google search produced a piece on the Reaper. A photo of a familiar face confronted Talon: the police officer he’d left behind at the
mall. His name had been Officer Rob Benson, one of the first officers to arrive on the scene. Over the years, Talon had walked into enough combat zones to know the kind of horror Benson must’ve encountered on that horrific day. After Benson’s partner was hit, he drew fire. Four bullets cut down the Reaper. Many of the followers lost heart after their leader went down. Who knows how many more innocent lives would’ve perished if not for Benson? The man deserved every commendation he had earned that day.
Talon also knew Benson probably didn’t even see himself as a hero. Like soldiers, victories lost their luster when it came at such a high price. Benson had stopped the Reaper, but he failed his partner.
Talon logged off the website and clenched his teeth. A good man had perished today, just another casualty in this war against the darkness. He vowed to do everything in his power to stop the Reaper and his new killer cult. But how to defeat a ghost? The weapons he’d mastered over his military career were useless against the spirits of the dead. It was time to call Casca.
Even though it had to be two o’clock on the West Coast, the billionaire sounded bright and alert when he answered the phone. Was some pretty new conquest keeping Casca up this late? Or were the man’s demons denying him a much-needed rest? Either way, Casca was awake, and Talon was glad for it.
In a voice drained of all emotion, he asked, “So Casca, do you believe in ghosts?”
Chapter Ten
The scenic drive through the untamed canyons and folds of the Santa Ana foothills almost made Dr. Adira Austen forget the grim reason that brought her out here today.
Five weeks earlier Airblue Flight 191, headed from Las Vegas to Los Angeles, had gone down when the plane slammed into a cloud-covered mountain ridge. All 162 passengers and crew perished that day.
At twenty-nine, Adira was the youngest parapsychologist working at the Nexus Foundation, and her objective was to scan the crash site for signs of survival. Not survival in the traditional sense—the bodies of everyone onboard the flight had long been cleared from the debris field. She was searching for evidence that human consciousness could survive after death.
She was hunting for ghosts.
In the past, most of Nexus’ research had focused on the study of reincarnation and near death experiences, where subjects could be interviewed and records compared. Investigating hauntings and apparitions had been beyond their reach until recently. Ghosts were far harder to measure and quantify. But scientific breakthroughs—helped along by the generous backing they were receiving from their billionaire benefactor, Simon Casca—had super-charged the investigative tools at their disposal.
To Adira’s mind, it wasn’t a question whether ghosts existed. She’d barely survived a haunting when she was a teenager and knew that spirits were all too real. Her hope nowadays was to produce scientific proof that would convince the rest of the world.
The Jeep she was traveling in slowed, and Adira knew they would soon reach their destination. There were no throngs of onlookers, no signs of news vans or satellite trucks anymore. After a month, both the media vultures and the world had moved on, busy reporting on newer, more pressing horrors.
The Jeep rumbled up the tire-eating dirt lane, crested a peak, and reached the top of the hill that overlooked the site where the plane had gone down in a giant fireball.
A chill rippled up Adira’s spine as she took in the gouged black earth before her. A section of the forested hillside had been decimated by the vast explosion. Death permeated the air. In her mind’s eye, Adira visualized a debris field of twisted wreckage, smoking fuselage, and scattered luggage, but the area had mercifully been cleared. The barren stretch of land was the only reminder of what had happened here. The place felt like a graveyard.
162 souls had blinked out in the prime of their lives in a terrifying flash of disintegrating metal. There had been no time to prepare for death. This raised a question: Had some of the passengers failed to cross over into the afterlife? Nexus was hoping Adira would find the answer. The Foundation was targeting areas where sudden deaths had occurred as these psychic hotspots shared a higher likelihood of producing spectral activity.
The head of the Nexus Foundation, Dr. Richard Mason, was a quantum physicist with a keen interest in the paranormal—and one of the smartest men she’d ever met. He believed that there were two worlds: the world of the living and the world of the dead. Sometimes they overlapped. His words echoed in her mind as she studied the site.
“If, when we die, our memories, fears, feelings of bitterness and vengefulness, are too strong, we can become earthbound. Trapped. Once separated from our bodies, consciousness might grow clouded. There is no difference between a day and a hundred years in this state. Some of us will be doomed to live out our last moments over and over again. Tied to the place where we died, not even aware that we’re dead.”
She remembered the chill she had felt after those words. The theory was terrifying. Death, like birth, might be an imperfect process. Sometimes consciousness…souls, if you will…failed to phase into the next world and became trapped in our plane of existence. Did anyone still linger in the mountain clearing? That was for her to find out.
The driver parked the Jeep and Adira got out. She climbed a grassy shoulder, which offered a better view of the immense wasteland that stretched out before her. Dry, gnarled vines and trees framed the black swath that had been carved into the earth. A few lonely crosses and wreaths of flowers left by family and friends of the survivors served as the only sad reminders of the lives lost here.
Adira fought back the shiver of apprehension crawling down her spine. The symbols of grief stirred memories she’d rather not dwell on. Personal loss had driven her into the field of parapsychology, a need to come to terms with the ghosts of her past that still, well, haunted her.
Taking in the fallow land, she couldn’t help but think of how horrific the scene must’ve been for the first responders and rescue workers when they initially approached the broken plane. According to reports, black smoke pouring from the fuselage had risen a mile into the sky, a funeral pyre for those killed in the crash.
Adira eyed her two assistants. Chan was Japanese-American, in his mid-twenties, and an amateur bodybuilder, his bulging muscles straining under his T-shirt. Steve fit the cliché of a paranormal investigator a little more. Pasty and overweight, the 32-year-old man possessed an open mind yet had a precise, steel-trap intellect and was willing to apply the scientific method to the unexplainable. Both men also crushed on her hard, but she felt flattered instead of creeped out by their protective attention.
Chan scanned the area with an EMF reader designed to pick up fluctuations in the electro-magnetic field. The presence of spirits could produce spikes. This was ghost-hunting 101; the EMF readings were more of a warm-up exercise. The Nexus Foundation had developed new technology that made these old ways of measuring paranormal activity feel almost quaint.
Adira nodded at Steve. “Let’s do it.”
Steve lowered the metal case he was carrying to the ground. He snapped open a latch and removed a sleek electronic device from the foam lining. It was shaped like a black motorcycle helmet. He eyed the gadget almost lovingly before handing it to Adira. He sure was attached to his toys.
“Don’t worry. I’ll let you take a peek when I’m done.”
A smile lit up Steve’s face.
She slipped on the helmet and tapped a button located on the left side below her ear. An electronic view-screen filled her field of vision as the para-spectral visualization system came online, painting the crash area in a reddish light.
Steve proceeded to link an iPad with the helmet. Everything the micro-cams inside the helmet’s goggles recorded was now being relayed to the tablet, allowing her assistants to follow the action in real time. The typical human eye could only pick up a limited percentage of the light spectrum. It responded to wavelengths of about 390 to 700 nano-meters. Anything beyond that, like ultraviolet and X-rays, remained invisible. The necro-helmet was de
signed to make up for these physical limitations.
Spooks could materialize to regular people for brief moments, while those with greater sensitivity to the paranormal like psychics could somehow tune into these frequencies in a natural way. The para-spectral goggles and speakers were designed to enhance the visual and auditory range so that a normal human would be able to see and hear ghosts the way a psychic did.
“The helmet is online and ready to go,”Adira said and began to walk across the vast field. Her hands were trembling, yet somehow she managed to take one step after another.
This latest research project was another stepping stone toward fulfilling Dr. Mason’s vision. He wanted to eventually form a strike team that would not only help lost souls move on but also hunt down dangerous entities. What had once been a crazy pipe dream was becoming more and more a potential reality with Casca’s financial support. How the man planned to profit from their findings or even recoup his investment was beyond her.
The reason she was here today wasn’t to gather evidence that ghosts were real. What the Foundation hoped to achieve was to develop a way to help these lost trapped souls successfully make the transition into the next world.
Adira grew still as a flicker of static slashed over the helmet’s view-screen. It was followed by movement near the edge of the dense trees that framed the field. Reality shifted as more static frizzed. Adira swallowed hard and her nails dug into her palms.
She wasn’t alone any longer.
Some poor spirit lingered in this place of death. Without her help, how long would the entity remain trapped here? The crash site was isolated. It could take years, decades, maybe even centuries before the ghost would grasp the nature of its predicament. The possibility made her shudder again.
A creepy silhouette materialized from behind the row of crosses, as revealed by the crimson tint of the necro-helmet. Adira stared, mesmerized by the horror of the situation. She wanted to back away, but her legs wouldn’t obey her. She was frozen in place.
Occult Assassin: The Complete Series (Books 1-6) Page 38
