by A. J. Locke
I exited the warehouse, called nine-one-one, and told them there was an altercation happening at my location. After I hung up, I reentered the warehouse. Help was on the way, so I would see what I could do before they got here.
I was happy that I’d brought my rune gun with me. Holding it in a two-handed grip, I quickly, but carefully weaved through all the junk toward the back. When I got close, I stopped behind a stack of crates and peered around.
There were two men about thirty feet away engaged in a brawl. It seemed very one-sided though, since one man was on the ground getting pummeled by the other. And the one doing the pummeling was without a doubt the same man from Glenda’s pictures and my Internet research.
The ghost of Grant Pano. I couldn’t believe my eyes.
He was furiously beating up another man—Harvey—who at one point may have tried to defend himself, but had long given up and just submitted to the beating. Well, I couldn’t very well let Grant beat him to death, which was definitely what would happen before the police arrived.
I stepped out from behind the crates and pointed my gun.
“Hey!”
The element of surprise worked. Grant’s fist stopped mid-air and his head whipped to the side. When he saw me, he looked shocked, but that was quickly replaced by anger. Guess he was not a fan of being interrupted mid beat-down.
“This doesn’t concern you, bitch, get out,” Grant snarled.
“Help…pl-please…” wheezed his very bruised and bloody victim. “Grant, please…”
“Shut up!” Grant yelled. He raised his fist again, but I fired off a shot that hit his shoulder. Sparks flew and he dropped Harvey and turned to me with fury in his eyes.
I fired another shot, aimed at his left leg, but he moved out of the way and I found myself body slammed. My gun flew from my hand and skittered out of sight, and I had a painful slide on the floor that ended when I crashed up against some wooden crates. Grant was advancing on me.
I spied a crowbar on the ground nearby so I rolled out of the way and snatched it up, then came up on one knee and swung the crowbar as hard as I could. It connected with Grant’s knee and he buckled. He wasn’t down for the count though. He managed to slam his elbow into the side of my head on the way down and I literally spun, then fell to the ground.
Grant grabbed my leg before I could move out of the way. He pulled and twisted, making me scream in pain. I still had the crowbar though, so I brought it up and slammed it into his head.
But the unfair thing about fighting with a ghost was that even though my blows could connect, they couldn’t hurt him. My rune bullets could, but I had no idea where my gun was. He grappled with me until he was able to wrap his hands around my throat and he did not hesitate to try and squeeze the life out of me. This was too reminiscent of my encounter with that ghost at the memorial.
I struggled, but I was at a disadvantage since my strength had not built back up yet. My vision was starting to get eaten by darkness and my lungs burned for air. Then I spied the energy rune around his neck and realized I had been going about this fight all wrong.
Even without my reanimation power, I was a necromancer, and if there was one thing I could control, it was a ghost. I yanked the energy rune from around his neck and threw it away, making him intangible. He was shocked to find his chokehold abruptly gone, and now I was able to move away from him. With some distance between us, I opened up my necromancer power and threw that invisible net over Grant to immobilize him. But to my surprise, after struggling for a bit, Grant broke out of my net and ran for the exit.
I ran after him and tried to net him again, but wasn’t able to. Before long Grant had used his ghost advantage to run through walls until I had lost him completely.
I stood there for a moment to catch my breath. It was upsetting that I hadn’t been able to capture him, and was again reminded of the ghost that had barreled through the memorial ceremony. It had escaped my hold too. And that ghost also wasn’t dropped by rune bullets.
Why the hell were these ghosts so damn strong?
My body, especially my throat, was sore, but I wasn’t too badly beat up. So much for not putting myself in harm’s way. I guess Grant decided to exact his revenge on Harvey in the same spot where he’d tried the first time around and gotten knifed. Which reminded me, Harvey was still in there.
I headed back inside the warehouse to where Harvey lay. I knelt down next to him and gently moved him so he lay on his back with his head in my lap. He groaned, and tried to open his eyes, but they were almost completely swollen shut. His face was decorated with bruises and there was a gash on his forehead that bled down his face.
“Is he gone…did he…” Harvey coughed, and blood came out with it. Not a good sign. Grant must have beaten on his chest something fierce. Shit.
“It’s OK,” I said. “Help is on the way.” It would do him no good to know that Grant had escaped.
The man continued to wheeze and look agitated. “He’s not…shouldn’t be here…Grant…”
“I know,” I said. “Your wife Glenda asked me to help you. I’m sorry I couldn’t get here in time to stop him from attacking you.”
“Thank…you…” He lapsed into spasms, coughs, and wheezes that I could do nothing to help except try to hold him still. Once the fit passed, he fell unconscious. He likely had a concussion.
Thankfully, I soon heard sirens in the distance.
How nice for help to arrive when it was all over.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I woke up the next day feeling better than I’d expected to, but that was thanks to the painkillers I’d received from the paramedics.
After the police arrived, I had been questioned within an inch of my life. I told them the long and short of what I knew about Grant Pano and let them take it from there. I wasn’t sure what was going to happen when it became known that a violent ghost that was sent to the Afterlife was back, but there’d been no way for me to keep that a secret. It was all very puzzling to me, and very concerning. What if Grant wasn’t the only ghost that had somehow made his or her way back over here?
Well, Luna for one wasn’t interested in letting me lay in bed all day thinking about it. She wanted to be fed. I loathly got out of bed and got breakfast ready for both of us. While I was digging into my bowl of cereal, my phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Selene? Where are they taking my husband, what are they doing to him?” It was Glenda, and like yesterday, she sounded hysterical. I had briefly seen her at the hospital since I had gone with Harvey in the ambulance, but she’d been too busy losing her mind over his condition to chat much.
“What are you talking about? He’s at NYU Langone.”
“Not anymore,” she said. “I went there this morning to see him, but they would not allow me to. There was a horde of PTF officers everywhere and I saw them take his body out of the room to a white van outside. It wasn’t even an ambulance! Where did they take Harvey?”
“Glenda, I have no idea, I just woke up. I don’t have an inkling as to what happened at the hospital this morning.”
“You must know because your boyfriend was there,” Glenda cut in. That caught my attention.
“What?”
“Your boyfriend,” she repeated. “Micah? He was there. He looked like he was supervising the whole thing.”
I frowned. If Micah was there, it had to be on the orders of Tielle. But why the hell would Tielle take a beaten-up man from his hospital bed?
“I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m going to look into it and let you know.” I hung up before she could say anything more and quickly finished eating. I wasn’t going to waste time calling Micah or Tielle. I’d just go straight to them and see if I could find out what the hell was going on.
I cleaned up, took the fur-ball for a walk, and then headed to the Paranormal Control Center.
* * *
Micah was surprised to see me, but seemed happy that I had stopped by.
“Hey,
” he said, giving me a hug. “I figured you’d be home resting after what happened last night.”
The news had clued Micah in to what had gone down in the warehouse and we’d spoken about it briefly last night before I called it quits out of exhaustion. The conversation had been along the usual lines of him expressing his displeasure that I had not told him what I was up to. And it irritated me because I didn’t feel the need to tell Micah about every little decision I made. But I’d hung up before getting into all of that with him. The truth was that it just hadn’t crossed my mind to call him and tell him anything about my encounter with Glenda.
He probably thought my coming here today was some sort of effort to mend our broken bridges. I wasn’t quite on that wavelength at the moment, but instead of launching into an inquisition about Harvey Whittle and the location of his body, I let him take me on a tour, which he expressed an eagerness to do.
He took me to the twentieth floor. This floor was less swanky than where Tielle and the other head honchos were five floors up, but was more practical for the work they did here. It bustled with necromancer and dead witch scientists. The entire floor was open and consisted of many stations where scientists were gathered around large tables working with runes, or sitting at desks typing on a computer.
Micah greeted several people, and introduced me as we walked through the floor. I noted how at ease he seemed here, and the people seemed genuine in their friendliness. I was engaged in a lot of small talk about how I was doing after the ordeal with Renton, and everyone expressed their amazement about my survival.
“This is where I usually am.” Micah walked me over to a table close to the back wall where a couple scientists were working. “Right now I’m doing a lot of archiving of Renton’s notes. He kept hard copies of everything.”
“I recall all the papers I saw in his bunker,” I said. “Guess it was not easy to get Internet access hooked up down there.”
“Not just there, but he had a similar set up in D.C. So I’ve been scanning, typing, and organizing all his notes.” Behind the worktable was a desk with a computer. The monitor was obnoxiously large. On the floor nearby were boxes that I assumed contained Renton’s files.
“So you haven’t been working with runes?”
“I have,” Micah replied. “Renton had a lot of projects in the works that Tielle would still like to see come to fruition. Apparently he had been trying to revive Dr. Perlysse’s rune therapy and I’ve been back and forth to various hospitals testing it out.”
“Using human guinea pigs, huh?”
“We’ve been helping people, Selene. There’s a little girl whose body is riddled with pain from a bone-eating disease. Using rune therapy, we send small amounts of ghost energy into her body and it deadens the pain. Then we draw the ghost energy out. She’s had a vast improvement and is in far less pain that she was before. She’s even been able to get up and walk for the first time in months.”
“Cheap shot, telling me a story that pulls on the heartstrings.”
Micah gave a half smile. “Not trying to pull heartstrings, just want to be open about what we’re doing here.”
“I know. It will just take some time to find comfort with all this.”
“I’m really glad you came to visit. I know this is a point of contention between us and I think it’s great that you were willing to come here.”
He didn’t know I’d been here already. Guess Tielle had not told him. And truth be told, I wasn’t really comfortable being here, nor was I comfortable with how at ease Micah was in this environment. I could barely remember that he used to be a working necromancer helping ghosts. It was like this was what he’d always done.
That aside, I had come here for a reason and it was time to let it be known. “Actually, there’s something I want to talk to you about.”
“What’s going on?”
“Harvey Whittle. I was told that you oversaw the transportation of his body out of NYU Langone. Why? And where is he?”
Micah wouldn’t make eye contact with me. “Selene, this isn’t really something you need to be involved with…”
“That man’s wife came to me directly and asked for help, and after what I’ve just been through I’d say I’m very involved. Especially when you factor in that his attacker was a ghost who was sent to the Afterlife almost a decade ago.”
“It’s under our jurisdiction,” Micah said. “We’re taking care of the situation…”
“Cut the bullshit and just tell me what’s going on. I may not be able to sneak around here and poke at things until I find the answer, but what I can do is make noise about it in the media and shine a light on you guys in a way I’m sure you’d rather avoid. I can easily call up that reporter, Taj, and spin some sensational story on this whole reappearing ghost thing. Would you like that?”
“Certainly not.”
It wasn’t Micah who answered, but Tielle. I turned around and found her standing a few feet behind us. Her pinstriped pencil suit went well with her token high, tight bun and severe expression.
“Well? Are you going to tell me why you took Harvey from the hospital? Is he here?”
Tielle flicked a glance at Micah, then back to me. “Come with me.”
She turned and started walking away, and I quickly followed, as did Micah. Tielle led us to the elevators and we went two floors down. The layout was less open than the floor we’d just been on. This one was all corridors and closed doors.
The left side of the hallway we stopped in was one massive room that spanned its entire length. The wall was basically one huge window broken up by several doors. There were a few doctors inside, either at desks typing or writing, or at one of several large tables doing their thing with runes. On the right side, there were multiple doors but the wall was solid so I couldn’t see into the rooms.
Tielle stopped at one of the doors and opened without knocking. We entered into a medium-size room that instantly gave me an uncomfortable flashback to the room I had been held captive in before Tielle had tried to strip my reanimation power. It was all white walls and floor, and bright florescent lights. The only color came from the metal on the medical equipment. Oh, and I guess the beige bedsheets was a nice contrast too.
Said bedsheets were on the bed that Harvey Whittle lay on. He was asleep—or sedated—and a middle-aged male doctor was checking his vitals.
“Gaines,” Tielle said. Dr. Gaines looked up and gave Tielle a nod. He had graying brown hair, that middle-aged paunch, and glasses that went out of style somewhere in the eighties.
“This is Selene,” Tielle said as we walked over.
“I know who she is,” Dr. Gaines said, offering me a smile and handshake. “Nice to meet you.” He looked from me to Tielle to Micah. “Is she here to…”
“She wanted to see Harvey,” Micah said. “She was the one who found him last night.”
“Right, I did hear about that.”
“What I want to know is, why is he here?” I turned to Tielle. “Why do you have a personal interest in his recovery? The hospital was well equipped to take care of a man who’d gotten punched around by a ghost.”
“It’s not so simple,” Tielle said, and I detected hesitancy in her voice. “There are some complications…”
“Like what?” I prompted.
But I never got an answer, because suddenly there was a huge explosion that sent debris flying everywhere and knocked us all down.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Selene? Are you all right?” Micah uttered the words around multiple coughs.
I lay sprawled on the floor, up against the far wall. My body had been hit with multiple chunks of what I could see was the wall on the other side of the room. Micah, who was covered in dust, came over to help me up. I looked over to see Tielle struggling to her feet.
“Your head,” I said, alarmed. Blood tricked down the side of Micah’s forehead. Thankfully, when I moved his hair aside, the wound was not deep.
“It’s shallow,” I told
him, then took stock of my own body. Plenty sore, but no blood. I was going to need more aspirin.
Harvey’s bed had been thrown onto its side and Harvey lay on the floor, still blacked out. All the medical equipment had been upturned as well and was going haywire. Dr. Gaines was shakily getting up a few feet away and Micah went to help him after helping Tielle. The room was filled with smoke and rubble.
“What the fuck just happened?” I asked.
“I…I…I…I…” Dr. Gaines was in shock, he’d be no help.
Micah looked stunned, but I got the feeling he might know what had caused this. I got the same feeling from Tielle, who was paying more attention to the other side of the room than to anything else. She was as dusty and bruised as the rest of us, but she wasn’t bleeding.
I looked over at the blown-out wall into the adjacent room. Whatever had exploded had come from there. I started to pick my way over rubble to investigate. The room was already being explored by the doctors who’d been across the hall. Some of them came into Harvey’s room to stabilize him. They were trying to appear calm, but I could sense the tension among everyone.
“Wait…Selene!” I didn’t listen to Micah’s call. I stepped into the room and tried to make sense of what I saw. Debris and lots of it, sure, but what were those huge smoldering lumps lying all over the room?
Something rolled near my foot and I looked down. Seconds later, I gasped and stepped back.
“A head?” I whipped around to look at Micah, and then back down at the head. Most of the skin had been blown off, so it was more accurate to call it a skull. Now the lumps made sense. I could see a leg and an arm nearby, and toward the middle of the room a torso was definitely lying there. It appeared to be a female torso. Bile rose in my throat as I realized that the acrid, burning scent I smelled was a burned-up human body.
I backed up into Harvey’s room and turned to Tielle and Micah. I pointed to the smoking lump behind me.
“That’s a human head,” I said. “And I need to know what the hell is going on here.”
