Come, Seeling Night

by Daniel Humphreys

  Roxanne made a face. It’s nasty in there. I didn’t see any of our stuff.

  “Kind of what I figured,” I said. The trio of cloned familiars I’d faced when I’d first had a run-in with Mother’s crew had left pretty disgusting messes behind. I felt a sudden swell of pity for the poor crime scene investigator who had to clean that black, cloying goop off Roxanne’s magical Trapper Keeper.

  What now?

  “Now to see if we can get out of here.” I gave the fence an appraising look. “If I can pull this off, the night isn’t a total loss.” When I phased, my clothes and anything on body came along for the ride—would the same be true of something larger? There was only one way to find out. I pushed the bike over to where I’d phased through the fence, took a deep breath, and …

  Oh, man, I thought. Not only did it take me longer to feel the effect come into play, but physically speaking it felt like I’d just tried to bench press a refrigerator. I leaned forward on shaking legs and pushed the front wheel through the fence. There was no going back now—I’d never tried it, but I figured it would be pretty bad for the engine if I phased pieces of chain link fence into it.

  As soon as the Kawasaki was clear, I cut the spell short. Waves of exhaustion rolled over me, and I barely got the kickstand popped out before I collapsed onto the ground. Quivering, I met Roxanne’s eyes as she stepped through after me. “For future reference,” I managed. “That is not recommended.”

  To make matters worse, I wasn’t out of the woods yet—I still had to get past the gate guards. Rather than double down on phasing, I dug another Pop-Tart out of the box I’d stashed in my backpack and downed it while I waited for the shakes to pass.

  You can really hurt yourself that way.

  “No shit? You don’t say.” I was going for subtle sarcasm, but the comment came out far nastier than I’d intended.

  She frowned, cocked her head as though considering whether to speak, then continued. We almost did the same thing until we learned to tap. Your mom taught us how to reach outside of ourselves—there’s plenty of energy in the world, you just need to know how to get to it.

  I finished off the Pop-Tart and considered that for a moment. If nothing else, that explained Mother’s ability to use her magic so effectively. The first time I used the push, I passed out and woke up in the hospital. So far as I could tell, Mother had never so much as broken a sweat.

  “Nothing I can do about that now unless you can teach me how to do it.”

  She frowned. I can feel my magic, but without a body… she waved her hands in frustration. Nothing happens.

  “Great.” Balling up the wrapper, I stashed it in my pocket. Worn out and ready to crash, I considered the insane and stupid idea of starting up the bike and riding away for a few moments before I shook it off. Suck it up, I told myself. I got to pushing.

  I saved my mystical strength until I got closer to the guard station, then went invisible. It was a bit of a strain to increase the radius of effect, but not as bad as phasing had been. I could handle this for more than long enough.

  The guards didn’t so much as look up as I wheeled the bike past. Sweat dripped down my forehead as I rolled out onto the street and kept pushing. I wanted to be out of their direct line of sight before I dropped the spell, and after a few more nerve-wracking moments of pushing, I looked back and couldn’t see them.

  Throwing a leg over the seat, I inserted the key and twisted it. After all that, it would be just my luck that the battery would have gone dead in the interim since I’d last ridden. But the engine roared to life, and I let myself smile as I reveled in the sense of freedom that controlling my own mode of transportation gave me. Checking both ways, I did a U-turn in the middle of the street and headed back toward the interstate.

  I’d earned some well-deserved rest. When the morning came, it was time to double down.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Valentine—Tuesday morning

  Randolph, Maine

  They hadn’t yet arranged for another cargo plane to haul their mobile command center back from Phoenix, but it was for the best. In a small town like this, the thing would stick out like a sore thumb. Commandeering the agency’s Gulfstream to fly to Portland, Maine, and renting a car was as low-key as Val was willing to go.

  On the plane, Morgan had said, semi-jokingly, “Maybe you should drop the Men in Black routine. Try some plaid.” The look he gave her ended any further discussion on that particular topic, though he had at least foregone a tie. After so many years, he felt naked without a suit coat, and the good people of Randolph, Maine, weren’t likely to react well to a stranger carrying a quartet of holstered pistols, badge or not.

  Less than two hours after they’d landed, Val pulled their rented sedan to one side of a picturesque suburban street and growled in frustration. There were two main roads in town—Water Street, which ran along the Kennebec River, and State Route 226. They’d made a circuit of each, pausing every so often for Morgan to take a sounding with the tracker, but the mystical divining rod didn’t behave any better for her than it had for Val.

  “Could it have, I don’t know, worn off?”

  Morgan shook her head as she turned the rod over in her hands. “No, once you have it locked onto a target, that’s it until you set it to another.”

  “All this stuff you can’t touch drives me crazy. Give me something tangible any day of the week.”

  “Or shoot,” Morgan smirked.

  Val ignored the jibe. “Allow me a moment to go off into the weeds, here. If Helen was able to manipulate the nexus to move her between two points in space, what’s to say she couldn’t go through time, too?”

  “I’m not saying I’m disagreeing, but know that every time manipulation spell I’ve ever seen was of limited utility. We’re talking back and forth hops of something like five minutes. Months or more would be so far beyond the pale, I can’t imagine the energy requirement. Then there’s the fact of accounting for physical displacement.”

  “How’s that?”

  “The Earth rotates and travels through space at the same time. We perceive this as a fixed point, but we’re in motion in a multitude of vectors. If we don’t account for that in the geography of the casting, there are any number of things that could go wrong.”

  He cocked his head to one side, imagining it, and grimaced. “Like what, appearing over the river, or something?”

  “Or inside a hill, or outer space. Like I said, lots of flashing red letters and warnings. The magical equivalent, anyway.”

  He gave her a sidelong glance. “I don’t recall anything like that in the archives.”

  Morgan’s expression remained placid. “There’s a reason for that. We’re not meant to know certain things. I didn’t trust myself to learn any of the incantations, much less potential researchers at Division M.”

  Val shrugged. “Fair enough. Since I don’t see Helen sticking out of the ground around here, I’m going to assume the worst. Let’s say she was able to jump across months-long periods of time. For that matter, why wouldn’t she just go back to last March?”

  “If she had, I’d assume we’d be seeing some sort of sign of that. Unless we stopped her then.”

  He laughed. “That’d be a fun trick, considering we don’t know how to do what she did, ourselves.”

  “All kidding aside, I think it has to be a jump forward if she wants her son there. How else would she expect him to make it on time?”

  “Which begs the question, what’s the point?” He waved a hand outside the window. “If she needed him for the ritual, why not take him instead of the girlfriend? Why goad him into coming after her? Does she want him to try to stop her?”

  “We never did determine what sort of ritual she was trying to perform when she killed the husband in front of the son. Maybe it’s a reenactment, and she needs him in the audience again.”

  Val frowned. “How does that work?”

  “Powerful emotions can supercharge a spell, far beyond the met
aphysical abilities of the caster. Killing her husband in front of her son? That’s a double whammy—betrayal and horror. Maybe the depth of a relationship between a girlfriend and boyfriend doesn’t compare to a father and son, but it has to come close. Then you’ve got the repeat performance aspect of it. He already has strong emotional reactions to her mere presence. Putting him back into the same sort of scenario? That’s akin to a walking nightmare, and doing it here, in a nexus?” She shuddered. “It won’t be good.”

  “I know you say this is a nexus, but it looks like a standard-issue cozy northeastern small town. Why here? I expected more Silent Hill and less Cabot Cove.”

  “George plays enough console games in the command center that I’m familiar with the first reference. The second one is over my head.”

  “Murder, She Wrote,” Val said with a frown. “And if you tell anyone else in the Division, you’ll regret it.”

  “Oh, your fascination with Angela Lansbury is safe with me,” Morgan said. Unable to contain herself, she giggled.

  He tried to glower at her, but he couldn’t hold it, and he ended up shaking his head. “Fine. Answer the question.”

  “The warding does a lot to keep things wholesome, I guess you’d say. You can’t completely close a nexus, so something’s going to pop out every now and then, but the spells keep it from opening any further and encourages the creepy crawlies to move on. Which, admittedly, leads to people seeing and hearing things that puts Randolph on a list of Maine’s haunted places.” She shrugged. “But it’s better than the alternative.”

  Val drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “So, we’re in a holding pattern until she pops back up. We’ve got the field office in Portland—we have any agents assigned to observe and report the conditions up here?”

  “Not really. There are a couple of guys in the police department who are read-in. If they spot anything, Portland’s less than an hour away by helicopter.”

  “I almost want to park some people here, but who knows where to tell them to watch. Think Helen would spook if we set up in force?”

  “After what she pulled in San Francisco? I doubt it.”

  “Right,” Val frowned. “This small a town, the cover-up would probably be harder, ironically enough. Everybody knows everyone else. I think our best alternative is going to be to leave some pictures of Helen and Cassie with the local police and have Portland loop us in on any reports they get. I hate being reactive, and it’s not ideal, but it’s the best of a bad lot. What’s the exact date?”

  “The Ides of March? March 15th—it corresponds to Julius Caesar’s assassination. We have some time, yet—what do we do for the next few months?”

  Val put the car in drive and pulled back on the road. “I want you to go home for a bit and shake the trees. See what falls out. It’s looking like it wasn’t local talent that hit us, but they damn near decapitated the entire agency. Figure out who, or what, we’re up against. With the Lockes on the loose, we don’t have time to deal with anything else.”

  “If I’m right about what she needs him for, you need to track the boy down. He’s a pawn.”

  “We didn’t get off to the best start,” Val admitted.

  Morgan laughed. “I’m shocked that you rubbed someone the wrong way, truly. But seriously, Val—I’m not going to be around forever. The more I learn about him, the more I think that Paxton Locke looks at himself as some sort of superhero. We could use that, especially now.”

  “You planning on retiring?”

  “We’re all in the same boat—we don’t get that option. But I’m not lucky enough to be able to shake it off after the medical teams shovel my guts back into place like you and Eliot. Sooner or later, my number’s going to come up.”

  “I’m not that lucky,” Val murmured. “Sometimes I think I’m playing with loaded dice.”

  “Decidedly ironic, given your history, wouldn’t you say?”

  Paxton—Tuesday morning

  Phoenix, Arizona

  I bent my push rule to convince an annoyed-looking clerk at a Days Inn close to the interstate to let me pay cash for a room without scanning in a credit card or driver’s license. The look of suspicion he offered up made me think he suspected I was going to use the room to cook meth or something. After the night I’d had, my idea of a wild party was a sack of tacos, a ridiculously-long shower, and crawling under the covers. The mattress wasn’t the most comfortable thing I’d ever slept on, but it was a damn sight better than the one in Division M’s holding facility. I was even tired enough that Roxanne’s presence in the room didn’t keep me from falling asleep. As I drifted off, I half-considered asking her if ghosts needed to rest, but I slipped into dreamless oblivion before I could muster the effort to speak.

  After sleeping a solid eight hours, I took another shower—I was bound and determined to get my fifty bucks worth out of the place—put on clean, familiar clothing, and headed out for the day.

  One of the workers at a nearby Denny’s pointed me toward the closest department store. Less than an hour after my late breakfast, I sat down in the snack bar of a Super Target and went through the process of activating a prepaid cell phone. A few purchases and the hotel had put a serious dent in the cash I’d taken off Darrell, but all the same, I felt like I was marking things off of my mental checklist. It was time to touch base to see if I could track down the De La Rosa brothers. This whole thing would be smoother with corporeal backup. Roxanne had been a great help thus far, but there wasn’t much she could do to watch my back. And I had to sleep, sometime.

  What’s our next move?

  I gave her an annoyed look and held back my response. The last thing I wanted to do was become ‘the weird dude talking to himself in the snack bar.’ The more attention I drew to myself, the greater the chance of Division M catching up. She laughed at my expression—she’d known I couldn’t respond.

  Great, I’m hanging out with a ghost that’s a bigger smart-ass than I am, I thought. Thankfully, the store had all the accessories I needed. The Bluetooth earpiece was neither charged nor synced, but it didn’t need to be. I just needed it to be there to serve as a red herring to any curious onlookers. Pulling it out of the package and hooking it in place, I said to Roxanne, “I’m glad you’re having fun with this.”

  Give me a break—I’m dead. It’s not like there’s much else for me to do.

  “Fair point,” I agreed, gathering all my trash into a plastic bag. “I’d probably be worse than you.” Given my calling, it was a foregone conclusion that my death would be horrific in some way. The people who die peacefully in their sleep don’t generally go in for haunting, and for good reason. The spell that granted me the ability to speak with and summon ghosts had explained that they weren’t departed souls at all, but rather the psychic afterimage of trauma. Knowing that they were semi-sentient copies of formerly living people lessened the guilt I felt at banishing them, but not by much. It still felt like needless cruelty applied on top of prior trauma.

  My focus on my new electronics must have bored my companion, because she turned and strolled through the seating area, pausing to snoop over the shoulders anyone piquing her interest. I shook my head and murmured, “Whatever floats your boat.”

  Without my old phone, I honestly had no clue what any of my friends’ contact numbers were, but the way that the De La Rosa brothers had set up their cell phones worked out in my favor. Using the store’s free WiFi, I hit their homepage and selected the ‘Contact Us’ link. They’d purchased their phones in a block from their provider, even the cell phones. Seeing the main office number flipped the light switch in my noggin. The next number in series was the person I needed to talk to, Karen Gallardo, but I was going to have to be careful about it. Any agencies that were looking for me would know of my association with the brothers, and they’d have the phone lines tapped. Calling the main switchboard with my new cell phone number was a surefire way to get myself caught. A text message was the best way to go, but I couldn’t drop my n
ame in there, either. I was going to have to make a reference that both she and I would get. As I considered my options, I realized that we had history on our side.

  Carlos’ wife, and Esteban’s niece, Karen took it upon herself to be an honorary big sister over the years. I’ve lost count of the number of friends she’d set me up with, and most of the dates were pleasant enough. The problem with dating was more on my end—in the years immediately after gaining the push, I didn’t trust myself to lose control and abuse my powers. So for the most part, I cut things short before they had the potential to get serious. There were a few ruffled feathers, but none of the blind dates topped the one that made me pull the plug on any future hook-ups.

  I don’t know if Becca Evans saw me as some sort of challenge, or what, but by the end of our second date, she dragged me into a jewelry store in the mall and proceeded to marvel at the engagement rings. As far as signals went, that was the equivalent of a raging bonfire.

  Later that night, when I told her in what I felt was a gentle way that I had no interest in continuing our relationship, the crying and carrying on that ensued was as impressive as it was baffling. When it didn’t stop for over half an hour, I turned and left her alone in my apartment. It was that or use the push to make her leave, and I wasn’t prepared to do that.

  Over the next few hours, I’d swing by the parking lot, check to see if her car was still there, then leave to go somewhere else. I ended up spending the night on Carlos and Karen’s couch, and the next morning, Becca was gone. She wasn’t destructive, as far as I could tell, but I thanked my lucky stars I didn’t have a pet rabbit and proceeded to throw away my toothbrush and other assorted toiletries. Just in case.