Every Breath You Take

by Chris Marie Green

  “Who eventually got you?” I asked.

  “Not one of you bitches.”

  Too bad.

  I played to his ego. “Did your own killer know you were so good at what you did?”

  He gave me a suspicious look, like he knew I was taunting, then obviously decided I wasn’t making fun of him. He got a little arrogant again. “I suppose it had to happen sometime, even if I had an amazing run. Of course, I would’ve preferred for it to go on a lot longer. And it wasn’t the cops who put an end to me. All the trips around the country I took, paying cash, never leaving a paper trail because I was using money my grandparents had left me . . . I was so careful. But in the end, it was some random idiot boyfriend who got lucky.”

  Hell, yeah.

  “I saw his girlfriend in a Missouri bar,” he said, “listening to a band, drinking from her beer bottle. When she left, I was waiting outside for her, but I’d gotten a little careless by then. Everything had become too easy. I’d even stopped wearing masks. She came outside and went for her truck, and I was right behind her in the dark, ready to push her toward my newest van, since I’d trashed all the rest. You know what I was going to do to her there . . . Plastic lining the interior, chop-chop, wrap ’er up, use some lye, and move right on.”

  Fuck him. Fuck this little, grotesque man-boy.

  “But,” he said, “she had a boyfriend or someone I hadn’t seen with her inside that bar, and he laid me out when he saw me coming up behind her. Cheap shots, really, and if I’d been on my game . . .” He released his fists. “I got away from him, hiding on the side of the road until he and that bitch drove by. He’d beaten me around the head, and by the time someone found me, it was too late. The authorities chalked my death up to a random mugging, and no one was ever the wiser.” He tilted his head, watching me. “Does that make you feel better, knowing I suffered, too?”

  In his gaze, I could see anguish, but it wasn’t a normal kind. It was more like regret that he’d gotten caught.

  My misty temper ate at me, and I couldn’t stop my mouth from motoring.

  “Am I supposed to feel sorry for you?” I asked. “Was that the point of this whole story?”

  “I don’t want your sympathy.” He leveled a stare at J.J., who hadn’t moved an inch. “I merely decided it was time to leave information for the record, if you know what I mean.”

  Too late, I saw the recorder on the table next to where J.J. was standing. He’d been taping the whole thing?

  And my killer had known it?

  “Of course,” Dennis said, “some of my voice will come through on the EVPs; some of it won’t. But it’ll be enough to make me interesting, as far as the public is concerned. People will talk for years about what I did. How’s that for controlling my own legend? I won’t be able to say the same for you, though.”

  “Scumbag,” I said.

  The humans all took in breaths behind me.

  But Dennis was only watching me with a smirk, like I was a feisty cat he was going to hang from an avocado tree after I stopped batting at him.

  “Sticks and stones,” he said. “That would hurt if I didn’t already dominate you, Jensen. Remember, you were the first dead victim I found in Boo World when Amanda Lee let me out of that portal. I know there are others out there, but I haven’t found any more of my local blondes in this dimension yet, so I decided to spend my time not hunting them down, but perfecting the game with you. After all, you thwarted me once by not dying like I wanted you to, so I wanted a second chance. And I wanted to make sure I’d best you at every move.”

  Fear . . . don’t give him your fear . . .

  “How did you learn your game?” I asked.

  He shook his head like he was disappointed in me. “As if you don’t know.”

  A heinous sound rolled over the roof—something like a baby’s cry. My mist heated up like it was a fire at my feet, burning me from the bottom up.

  “You have your friends,” he said, “and I have mine.”

  The crying kept on, getting louder. Amanda Lee, J.J., and Sierra covered their ears, closing their eyes.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “It knows how much I want to see you screaming mindlessly after I destroy your sanity.”

  It?

  Dennis raised his voice like he was talking to whatever was crying outside. “But it also knows that I want to finish this by myself!”

  The sounds stopped, and Dennis shook his head. “Demons. This one attached itself to me and it’s having trouble letting go, even though it knows my education is complete and that this is a game I like to play alone, now that I’m prepared.”

  “You’re talking like you can ditch a demon.” Was he insane?

  Dumb question.

  “It found me after I left you the first time,” Dennis said, glancing at the shuttered window like we had company outside. Like it was about to start scratching at the window to come in. “I’d already manipulated that Tim Knudson moron into killing his neighbor. . . .” He glanced behind me. “By the way, hi, Mrs. C. Good to see you, too.”

  I’d forgotten Marg was here, and I slipped a look to her, only to find that her X was throbbing with oozing blackness. It was one hundred percent obvious that she’d never had anything to do with this monster, and the relief bathed me.

  But not for long.

  “I would say Mrs. C. isn’t doing so well tonight,” Dennis said. “Seeing her murderer’s partner in crime might have something to do with that. In any case,” he said breezily, swooping back to the old subject, “my demon friend had been busy spreading hate throughout the country, and it was bored by the time we met. When I told it my story, it made me an offer: it would teach me some tricks that would make any of my ghostly victims wish they could die again. That was perfect, since I didn’t want you to go into a glare unless I drove you there.”

  Nice. But I had to know more.

  “Are you working with a wrangler?” I asked, remembering what’d happened at Wendy’s earlier.

  He belly-laughed so hard that he held his stomach, shaking his head. “I love that you think a wrangler made off with me. My demon was around when I got captured by that orgonite, and my friend took inspiration from how you materialized a wrangler when you tried to scare me off, so it did the same thing. And good for you—I’ll admit to being thrown off my game by your trick. For about three seconds.”

  He was lying. The little dweeb had been more scared than that.

  “Oh, also, orgonite?” he said. “I know how to escape it now, by the way. Child’s play. You’ll need a mountain of it to get someone like me contained.”

  “That wrangler was your demon,” I said. Duh.

  “Fooled you with our act, did we? The best part is how my friend knows how to cloak its vibes around others, too, just like I do now. That is, when it wants to.”

  He gave a pointed look to the window.

  A new wave of shivers got me. “It also taught you how to mess with computers, like you did with Ruben’s online forums and e-mail.”

  “Ding,” Dennis said. “We have a winner . . . but not for long. You’re not nearly as batty as I’d hoped you’d be by now, so there’s a lot more haunting coming. But I have to say that you’re good, Jensen. Real good.”

  Asshole. We’d see just how good.

  “You know your problem?” he asked. “Your attachments in this world aren’t very practical. And I’m going to dominate you even more because I made a much better one.” He gestured to the window, but the demon hadn’t sounded off for a while. Was it even around anymore?

  “My attachments don’t concern you,” I said.

  “Actually, they do. Yours are human attachments, and the beauty of that is you have no idea from this point on what I’m going to do to any one of those meat-and-bone bags.”

  He’d upped the stakes, and I starte
d counting everyone who meant anything to me: Amanda Lee, Wendy, Gavin, Suze . . .

  Dennis was already smiling, because he saw how my eyes had widened in barely contained dread, and he started to change into his blob form.

  “Which one do you think it’ll be, Jensen?” he asked in a screechy voice. “Which of your darlings should I operate on first?”

  20

  And he didn’t stop with that, not even as panic pumped in me.

  “I have to say that there’s one blonde I never did get to. Have I mentioned that my sister, your old friend, lives close by in San Marcos?”

  Betsy?

  I hadn’t seen her since high school, but that didn’t mean I didn’t care about her. And I wasn’t about to let Dennis torment anyone on my account.

  This wasn’t just a game to me.

  I braced myself, ready to stop him from going anywhere out of this casita, but Dennis thought my scrappiness was hilarious. He showed me what a threat I wasn’t by laughing and casually whirring the rest of the way into his dark-spirit blob form, tentacles and all. He used one of them to point to the window and, in an electric flash, manipulated the air and shattered the shutters and the glass, diving toward it and roaring into the night.

  Gradually, I realized that Amanda Lee had been uttering prayers out loud from her spot on the love seat behind me. Sierra had been on her knees on the floor near Amanda Lee all along, too, her head bent, her hands clasped to her forehead, her mouth silently moving.

  She was such a tenderfoot that she hadn’t even known you had to say the prayers out loud.

  “Amanda Lee,” I said, “we’ve got to find out if there’s a Betsy Smith in San Marcos on the computer.”

  She stopped praying. “There’s bound to be more than one. And what if she got married?”

  Marg stunned us all by taking off toward the window and busting through it without a word to anyone, in hot pursuit of Dennis.

  Amanda Lee stood. “Don’t!”

  But Marg was gone, and Amanda Lee’s expression crumbled, ruled by the same fear that was stalking the edges of my own essence.

  She shook her head. “Marg isn’t equipped for a showdown with him.”

  “She should know by now how to manipulate airwaves so that she can call you on your phone to tell us where Dennis went,” I said. “You just need to have it handy.”

  Amanda Lee grabbed her phone from the love seat, held the device to her, and went to the window to stare out of it. Was she trying to feel if the demon was still around?

  I shifted toward the window, and Amanda Lee spun to me.

  “Don’t you dare follow her out there. You’re not going anywhere!”

  Seeing how afraid she was about the demon kept me rooted.

  Sierra and J.J. had walked, holding each other’s hands, over to 10’s body.

  “I can’t believe this is happening,” whispered Sierra.

  What had the witch of the woods said back in the forest about humans who trespassed? Nothing bad is going to happen to us . . . That was what we’d all thought at some point in our lives.

  J.J. drew Sierra into a hug, but I thought it was just as much to comfort him as it was for her. She held her arm open to Amanda Lee, inviting her to join them and, much to my surprise, she did, becoming a part of their warm, human circle.

  I retreated toward a battery pack on a nearby table and embraced it.

  It was only then, as I lingered on my own, that the fear truly caught up with me. I’d been fending off most of it, trying to seem brave in front of my killer when I hadn’t been so brave at all. Jagged electricity seemed to knife out the heart of me, and I melded tighter to the electricity from the battery.

  What was Dennis going to do to his sister, Betsy? And who would he haunt after that?

  I knew one thing for sure: I needed to bring together as many ghosts as possible so my human friends would be guarded. Thank God Randy was supposed to be covering Suze, and Scott was, by now, back with Wendy and Gavin and, hopefully, Eileen. I had Amanda Lee taken care of, but how safe was she with me, the target of all Dennis’s games?

  I just hoped that Kalli, our favorite Wiccan, had already put her human witches into protective-spell motion. Maybe they were even praying to their gods and goddesses for help.

  Then an idea struck.

  I closed my eyes and accessed the energy in the air, thinking about the happy house with all those friendly ghosts around. Thinking of McGlinn.

  He had to have a phone. Didn’t all humans come with one these days?

  Come on, McGlinn. Answer. Please . . .

  When he did, his voice was gritty, like he hadn’t used it in a week.

  “Huh?” he asked, and I could just picture him sitting in his chair at the happy house, as stoned as a wall in a lovely country field, shocked that someone had called him, even though nobody would be able to see his expression under all that dark, ratty hair.

  “McGlinn, this is Jensen Murphy.” I hoped I was coming through crystal clear on his line.

  “Uh . . .”

  Another idea. “Please . . . put Twyla on?”

  Be there . . . be there . . .

  I heard the human seer shouting, and within a snap, Twyla’s voice came on his phone. I’d never expected to miss the Valley Girl sound of it, but . . . yeah.

  “Jen?”

  In the background, some music had started up—the kind of country shit that Old Seth liked. The song immediately turned to A Flock of Seagulls, no doubt thanks to Twyla.

  “Listen to me,” I told her. “Please. We’re in big trouble.”

  “Why . . . ?”

  “Twyla, is Kalli still there with you?”

  “Yeah. I think she’s still doing a Dalai Lama marathon attempt to, like, pull McGlinn’s uncle out of his time loop upstairs. . . .”

  Later. “I really need your help. We need to make sure that she’s had a human Wiccan contact Wendy. Also, we need her to get in touch with any other human she guides to see if they can put protective spells on some of our humans as soon as possible.”

  “Oh, rinse and repeat that. She’s already put out feelers to her people. I was with her when she was asking if they’d, like, be up for it. One of her witchy-poos called Wendy, too, just an hour ago or whatever.”

  Yes! “Good. That’s real good, but I have specific names now. Can they start directing their spells at Suze, Gavin, Wendy, and Amanda Lee? Oh, and Eileen Perez, Ruben, and these kids on the ghost team, since they’re involved?” I’d explain about 10’s death later. “I’ll get everyone’s location to you as soon as I can.”

  Twyla paused, and I barely recognized her mature voice when she said, “This sounds totally serious.”

  “Deadly. My killer’s on the move, and he’s after humans now.”

  “Gawd, what an asspop. Okay. What else can I do?”

  Awesome. “Can you come to Amanda Lee’s right away and escort her and the ghost team to the happy house? I want to know they’re safe.”

  “Okay, but what about you?”

  She was asking about me? Twyla, who mostly couldn’t have given less of a shit?

  “I’ll be fine, but I’m doing no good being around anyone right now. The farther away I am from you guys, the better.”

  “Jeez, Jen.” Another hesitation, then, “You can count on me to get this totally done.”

  I’d never heard her have more purpose. It was what she’d always wanted to prove, too—that she was valuable. Maybe that’s why we’d always semi gotten along, because we understood that about each other.

  McGlinn must’ve commandeered the phone because his voice came on. “Dude, does this mean an extralate night with the ghosts around?”

  I’d never heard him talk so much in my afterlife. “If you don’t mind.”

  He sighed, and I could already hear him retre
ating into Doobieland. “Cool enough, dude.”

  He hung up, and I found Amanda Lee watching me from the cradle of J.J.’s and Sierra’s arms. Sierra even had her dark curly head resting on Amanda Lee’s shoulder, and I was pretty sure Amanda Lee didn’t mind at all.

  She nodded at me, understanding the plan, since she’d heard me talking with Twyla. I kept juicing up at the battery, but my gaze wandered to the broken window, the splintered shutters and shards of glass letting in a mournful wind. Hell, if the demon was still around and intent on getting to us, a closed window wouldn’t have stopped it.

  In back of me, Amanda Lee whispered to the humans, something about what to do with 10’s body. Then Ruben’s name, and a whisper about the police.

  I kept looking toward that window. Louis. I could’ve used his level head and practicality right about now. Where was he?

  My chest seemed to swell, just like a heart would, and I remembered how he always used to say that if there was trouble, just call. If he was nearby, he would hear me and be right there. And he, a man of his word, had done just that before.

  I was more than willing to take the chance of having him around, imposter or not.

  “Louis,” I whispered at first, mostly because I couldn’t get his name past what felt like an emotional rock in my throat.

  The wind was the only answer.

  I tried again. “Louis! If you’re out there, please, I need you. Everyone needs you!”

  Still just the wind. Who knew if Louis was even close enough to hear?

  When Amanda Lee’s phone rang, I almost expected to find Louis in the room, holding a phantom phone to his head, giving us a buzz.

  She pounced on it, hitting a button that allowed everyone to hear the caller. Sierra and J.J. separated themselves from Amanda Lee and went to a corner to use one of their phones, probably to call Ruben first about 10’s body, like Amanda Lee had advised.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “Amanda Lee? This is Suze. Jensen’s friend?”

  Her voice was quaking, and I went frosty. Somewhere outside, I heard a travel tunnel explode open and, before Suze said another word, Twyla jetted into the room through the broken window and shutters, solidifying in front of Amanda Lee.