“Let me go?” Ava suggested, though her voice trembled as she spoke.
Wolf’s head rolled back as laughter erupted from him. Sam and Sarah edged closer to Ava.
“You said you knew how to make me into her so I could be real again,” Emma said. Her tone made it unclear whether she was reminding Wolf of his promise or demanding it from him. She caught sight of Sarah and Sam edging closer and stomped her foot. “Stop it,” Emma said in a hiss through clenched teeth as she reached over, past Wolf, and grabbed Sarah by the dress, dragging the girl over to her. “You’ll get us into trouble!”
Wolf finished laughing and looked back at Ava, shaking his head. “No. Sorry, kiddo. You don’t get to go. At least not yet, you’re too good a distraction.” There was an air of quiet menace to this man that made Sam worry. He had no doubt that this man could follow through on any threat he made, without batting an eyelash. Of course, he also knew that this Wolf fellow had casually ordered one of his minions to kill a cop a few weeks ago, so that likely added to his unease.
Sam pulled on that connection he had to Lauren, and he could tell she was closer than she had been. He only hoped they could get here in time because while he could handle Emma, he wasn’t sure what tricks this Wolf guy had up his sleeve.
Wolf hunkered down to be eye level with Ava and held out his hand. “You’ll leave here alive if you’re a good girl. Now, let me see that hand of yours,” Wolf said. He was deliberate in ignoring Emma, much to the girl’s annoyance.
Ava was visibly trembling as she did as she was told and held out her hand to the man. Her eyes darted to each of the ghosts as if pleading with them to make this end. Fresh tears were streaming down her cheeks, but she cried silently, too afraid of Wolf to make a noise.
Wolf examined the girl’s hand and forearm, running his black leather gloved fingers over her smooth skin. “Perfect,” he said, his voice quiet. A few houses away a dog began barking. Wolf looked up, listening to the sound then looked to Emma.
“Emma, are we the only ones here? You, me, and the girl?” Wolf’s dark eyes were hard as he looked at the ghost girl.
“Well, Sarah is here. She’s always with me though,” Emma said with a shrug, looking down at her shoes. She was getting the feeling that Wolf was perhaps trying to shirk out of his promise to bring her back to the land of the living.
“Emma!” Wolf’s voice was like the crack of a whip through the quiet, unfinished house.
“Well I dunno how he followed me,” Emma said, backing away from Wolf a bit.
“Who?” Wolf’s tone made it more of a demand than a question.
“I never cared to get his name. The young man that follows that lady around.” Emma was trying to back peddle quickly, knowing that Sam’s presence there was upsetting Wolf.
Wolf sighed and closed his eyes for a moment, centering himself. Sarah took the opportunity to grab Ava and teleported her down to the basement of the house. Sarah wasn’t strong enough to teleport a living human too far, but she knew that would buy Ava at least a few more minutes away from Wolf. Emma yelped as Sarah and Ava disappeared suddenly, her yelp coinciding with a scream from beneath them in the basement.
Wolf, once centered, opened his eyes. Looking around the room, he found Sam. “A white knight for the young princess, huh?” he said. “What do you think you can do here, boy? I can do far more damage to you than you can to me.”
“I guess we’ll just have to see about that,” Sam said with a shrug.
Wolf gave a slight wave of his hand, and the wounds that had killed Sam when he was mortal shimmered to life. Sam flinched, not prepared to feel the sting, but there was no blood, just light.
“Recognizable handiwork,” Wolf said. “It’s curious that you ended up here. I guess it doesn’t matter in the end. You still can’t stop me.”
“Stop you from doing what?” Sam looked over to see Emma had taken the opportunity to flee as well, while Wolf’s attention was on him. “What is this child to you? Why go to such lengths?”
Wolf chuckled and turned as if dismissing Sam. He froze when he saw Ava was gone. His body went rigid and his face flushed with anger. He whirled back to Sam, and Sam could feel the anger radiating out of him almost as palpable as he had felt the menace earlier.
“Where is she?” Wolf demanded.
“I was busy talking to you,” Sam shrugged nonchalantly, though he was ready to move quickly if needed. “How should I know? I guess that’s why they say you should always keep an eye on your kids, right? They can disappear in the blink of an eye.”
“You people need to stay the hell out of my business. That goes for you and the living you work with,” Wolf said, his voice nearly a growl. With that, he turned and began striding for the door.
Sam could feel that Lauren was almost there. If they could call the cops and get Wolf arrested for kidnapping that might put a big dent in whatever nefarious plan he had going on. But if he left or worse took Ava elsewhere, there would be little hope.
“That’s not what you told Mike Caulfield.” It was Sam’s Hail Mary play, to try to shock Wolf into stopping, into forgetting what he was about to do. It worked.
Wolf turned back, his dark eyes glittering with malice in the moonlight. “What do you know of Caulfield?”
“I know he worked for you. I also know he wasn’t really Caulfield.” Sam was talking, throwing things out there to try to reel Wolf in, get him to stay in place.
“That’s why I said the handiwork of your death is recognizable. I know who you are, Samuel Riley,” Wolf said. It hadn’t clicked together in his mind before, but when Sam mentioned Caulfield, it fell into place. Wolf was gratified to see a look of shock cross Sam’s face.
“How do you know who I am?” Sam was genuinely flat-footed at that revelation, and he was scrambling to try to figure out how the man knew him.
“Please,” Wolf said, waving a hand dismissively. “The massacre at the college was big news. And we’ve already established that you and I both know about Caulfield.”
“But it was ten years ago. That’s a lot of time to pass to remember my face,” Sam said.
“Photographic memory,” Wolf said, tapping his temple with a black, leather-clad finger. “It’s a gift and a curse. Now stop stalling and tell me where those two vaporous twits hid the girl.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Sam said as the sound of an engine roared into the driveway, headlights flashing through the beams of wood still left open. “But I don’t think it matters now.” Flashing red and blue lights could be seen now too, as the sound of car doors opening and closing echoed in the quiet night, exciting some nearby dogs again.
“Damn it,” Wolf said through clenched teeth. He turned again and exited the room in a hurry, making his way towards the back of the house. Footsteps sounded on the floorboards as people made their way quickly inside.
“Ava!” Lauren and Derrick called in unison. Two officers came in behind them, yelling at them that they should be waiting outside. Sam teleported to Lauren and touched her arm, just to make sure the connection was ironclad between them.
“I’m not sure where she is, I think Sarah took her to safety. Wolf made his way out the back,” Sam said to her.
“I think I see a guy running away from here that way,” Lauren said, and one of the officers dutifully ran in the direction she pointed, the way Wolf had gone. The other officer stayed behind with Lauren and Derrick.
Sarah appeared beside Sam and tugged on his elbow. Sam turned and knelt down. “Is she safe?”
“She’s in the basement. She’s cold, and she stepped on a nail, but she’s okay,” Sarah said.
“Basement,” Sam said to Lauren through their connection, and she relayed that to the officer. The three breathers then hurried to find the way downstairs. Sarah and Sam teleported down to the little girl who was huddled up in a corner behind the stairs. Her foot had a carpenter’s nail clean through the middle of it, and she was doing her best to be as quiet as she could in spite of
the pain. Emma was there as well, looking genuinely remorseful and guilty. As footsteps came down the stairs, Ava seemed to draw in on herself, as if trying to pull back further into the shadows.
“Ava?” Lauren called out.
The girl let out a sob of relief. “Here!” she called, recognizing Lauren’s voice. Lauren, Derrick, and the officer rounded the staircase and were visibly relieved to see the girl was alive and for the most part, unharmed. The officer radioed for an ambulance and to the officers who were apparently stationed at the house with Robin and Doug that their daughter had been found. Derrick took off his coat and put it around Ava.
“He wasn’t gonna do what he said,” Emma said in disbelief.
Sam looked over at the little southern belle. “You sound surprised,” he said.
“Gentlemen don’t make promises and not keep ‘em,” Emma said, her confusion genuine.
“Emma,” Sam said with a sigh, “I told you before. The world doesn’t work the way it used to anymore.”
“But a promise is a promise,” Emma argued.
“Not anymore. Nowadays people can lie at the drop of a hat and not care,” Sam said.
“Or maybe he wasn’t a gentleman,” Sarah said, her voice soft.
“I’m tired,” Emma said after a moment. “And I don’t like the way your world works,” she added, looking at Sam.
“Do you want to go back to your rest?” Sam knew who he could send the girls to if that was the case. And Bethany Saxon could see to it that they were both safe, that Wolf couldn’t summon them again.
“No,” Emma said after thinking about it for a minute. “I wanna get the wolf for lying to me. Come on, Sarah, we’re going.”
“I’m not going,” Sarah said.
Emma’s jaw dropped in shock as Sarah so openly defied her. “What do you mean? Of course, you are. I said so.”
“No. I don’t belong to you anymore,” Sarah said. “I don’t have to do what you say.”
Emma narrowed her eyes and looked from Sarah to Sam. “Fine. I’ll get the wolf for lyin’ and you for taking her away from me.” Emma Barton then disappeared with one last furious glower.
“Can you send me back to wherever I was before that man summoned us?” Sarah’s brown eyes were hopeful.
“I know someone who can,” Sam said with a smile, offering Sarah his hand.
Chapter 24
Snow was fuming. He sat in the large box contraption, unable to get out of it, and in plain view of the two breathers and their cameras. He was silently but vehemently chastising himself for not having caught onto Mr. Pruitt and his intentions sooner. He should have known that the man wasn’t off tending to his charges. He should have followed his and Cadence’s gut instincts that something was terribly off. But the information they had about the prison itself made him chalk up their misgivings to the natural unpleasantness left over from so many lives taken violently here over the years.
Snow’s only consolation was the fact that Aiden was a good man. He trusted the breather to do his best to either damage or hide the video evidence or perhaps come up with some story to say it was all smoke and mirrors concocted by the television duo for their show. So he sat silently, angry at himself and the situation, but not even attempting communication with the breathers despite the woman’s repeated tries.
“I don’t get it,” Teeny said with a sigh. “There should be enough energy built up in there for the ghost to draw on to communicate with us.”
“Maybe the guy doesn’t want to communicate,” Aiden said with a shrug, unable to do much to help Snow yet.
Teeny looked incredulous at such a suggestion. “They always want to communicate. He’s got to have questions, why he is there, who we are, things like that.”
“Dude just looks kind of pissed off if you ask me,” Aiden said, giving Teeny one more shrug of his shoulders.
“Which is more reason for him to be trying to communicate,” Teeny said. “Even if he just wants to cuss me out for trapping him in there.”
Snow idly entertained the thought of taking a page out of his partner’s book and flipping the young lady the bird, but he decided against it. He was determined that while he was stuck in there, he was going to make no move to comply with what she wanted.
Another terrible howl from the gallows yard echoed through the stone halls of the prison and both breathers, and the trapped ghost looked towards the origin of the sound with worry. Snow frowned. If something evil was here and was waking up, as that sound seemed to portend, he needed to get free of this damned cage. Cadence was just back on her feet, not even wholly out of pain yet. He couldn’t leave her to handle something like that on her own.
“Do you think Liam’s okay?” Teeny asked, her attention focused down the hallway her partner had disappeared down.
“I would guess he is. That sure as hell didn’t sound like him yelling for help,” Aiden said. He had noticed Snow’s movement and guessed his concern, but wasn’t saying a thing about it to Teeny. In fact, he had moved to stand between the camera and its view of the cage that Snow was caught in while Teeny’s attention was diverted.
Snow noticed Aiden’s position and the woman’s lack of attention. In a swift movement, he tried to punch his arm through the barrier that was holding him inside the box. He felt a sharp impact, almost like he had just tried to strike a wall of electrified knives. His hand did not break through the barrier, but it hurt like hell now. The impact sounded like a truck hitting an electric fence.
“Dammit,” Snow muttered without thinking. His voice and the sound of his punch got the attention of the breathers once more.
“You can speak,” Teeny said in surprise and delight, turning her attention back to her successful experiment. “Please, talk with us. We would like to help you.”
Snow cradled his arm, which felt like it had fallen painfully asleep. His head was bowed, and he let it remain so. He still had no intention of talking to them. He did, however, use a little bit of the excess energy being poured into him by the box to form a detective’s shield, like Cadence carried, clipped to his belt. Once he could feel it in place, he moved slightly. This adjustment to his position let his blazer fall open a bit, making the shield visible. This did not go unnoticed by Teeny.
“Aiden I think you were right,” she said, leaning forward, closer to the box to see. “Look, it looks like he has a police badge.”
“Derrick did say there were a couple of riots here over the years,” Aiden said. “It’s reasonable that a cop could have been here during one, just got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time while talking to an inmate or something.”
“Officer,” Teeny said, “please, we just want to try to help you. Please talk with us.”
Aiden still had himself positioned between the camera and the box. Of course, he had no fix for the camera he was wearing, having gotten used to the weight of the straps on his shoulders. He did his best to obscure what he could by crossing his arms over his chest, but that only hid half of the lens.
Snow didn’t move or respond to the young woman’s pleas for communication.
“Look, officer, I can understand your confused and upset at this situation,” Teeny said, still not yet giving up on communication with the ghost. “My name is Tina. I would love to know your name. We would truly like to learn about you and help you move on.” After a few moments of waiting for the spirit to respond but getting nothing, not even any motion from him, Teeny sighed.
“Maybe Liam is having better luck, huh?” Aiden said.
*****
Liam’s footsteps echoed in the dark hallway as Cadence walked, soundless, beside him. He was using the night vision on his handheld camera to see as well as record. Why he didn’t use a flashlight was beyond Cadence, but it wasn’t her decision. The dark didn’t bother her anyway.
“So I’ve left Teeny and Aiden with the experiment,” Liam said, talking to the camera. He was really just talking to take his attention off of his nerves as he made his way towa
rds the gallows room, but he would never admit that in a million years. “We heard this weird sound coming from out there. I’m not gonna lie, it was kind of a scary sound. But we here at The Dead Show don’t shy away from the strange and scary.”
“Yeah? What about real and terrifying,” Cadence said, keeping her voice low enough to be sure it wasn’t picked up by the microphones Liam had.
The hinges on the door to the yard were so rusty and disused that they seemed to scream and protest as Liam pushed the door open. The night was cold and quiet. Patches of snow on the ground seemed to sparkle under the dim light of the stars and moon. Out of that peacefulness, the gallows building rose, standing dark against the white snow. Liam stopped and let his camera linger on the two-story building.
“That building is where the people condemned to hang spent their last moments, their last breaths,” Liam said. “When the time came for a prisoner to be executed, a prisoner would be escorted from Death Row out to this yard, and this would be the last time they would see the sky, or smell the fresh air.”
The same terrible noise that had drawn him out here in the first place came again. Only this time it was much closer and coming from directly in front of him. Liam took a step back. “I, uh…I’m not sure what’s making that noise in there. It’s weird sounding, that’s for sure. Let’s go find out.”
“That’s your best plan?” Cadence knew she wouldn’t get a response to the question, but she had to ask it anyway. “Let’s go find out?” She shook her head in dismay as she followed him. “Idiot.”
The doors to the gallows room were chained shut. Liam paused and tucked his camera under an arm as he fished in his coat pockets for the keys to the prison. He tried one after another on the padlock until one finally worked. The doors opened silently, which both Liam and Cadence found to be unnerving.
Liam hesitated for a moment, but only that, before he stepped inside the building with Cadence right beside him. To Liam’s right was a staircase leading up to a second-floor landing in front of a closed door. To his left was another closed door. In front of him was an unadorned wall. Liam turned left and went through the unlocked door. A small corridor let out into a wide room of seats. The chairs faced a 2 story glass wall. The room beyond the glass was mired in shadow, but with the night vision on the camera, Liam could make out the gallows.
The Dead Show Page 16
