How? He kept asking himself. How was Naomi doing any of this? How did she light a cigarette? How had she manifested a physical body so quickly and released it just as fast?
Spirits can move physical objects. This is a well-known fact. But it takes the average spirit a fair amount of natural talent, a lot of practice, and immense control. Naomi’s supernatural abilities were blowing his mind. What kind of otherworldly apparition was she? He had to find out as soon as possible. Making out with a spirit had never happened before. It had to be wrong, even if he presently liked it. Her evasiveness regarding exactly who she was and what she was doing here would not cut the mustard for much longer.
“Damn it! I lost them,” Todd said.
“We need to get out of here. You’re going to get us arrested,” Marlin said.
“No. That spying little punk is here, and I’m not leaving without him.”
Naomi broke the kiss. He all but felt her gaze lingering on his mouth. They listened to the two men move away from their closet. Crashing sounds echoed around the room as if Todd and Marlin collided with pool tables and a chair or two.
“This is crap. I’m outta here,” Marlin called.
Chris could tell Marlin was on the far side of the room.
“That’s enough tonsil hockey for now.” Naomi patted his chest and spun around, placing her back against him. Her fluffy hair tickled the underside of his chin before she released her physical form. Naomi was back in her spirit body. Chris longed to know more about her and the magic she used. She wasn’t dead, that much he knew. Her spirit was still tied to her physical body somewhere. But where? Where was she and why was she out of body? Astral projection could be a dangerous undertaking. Why was she doing it so haphazardly? Naomi slid out from the coats.
When he didn’t move to follow, she leaned back in. “Don’t pout, sport. We can commence canoodling later.”
Chris registered the jibe and shook off the hormonal haze. Just as he was about to follow her, the metal door handle creaked, and a wash of daylight spread across the room.
Marlin held the emergency door open. Chris saw his seal of protection break, bursting like a popped bubble. It had not been a permanent seal, given that he created it in seconds and only with a simple prayer and a small, focused burst of energy.
“If you leave me alone in this haunted place I’ll tell the cops you were the one who hit that blowhole and shoved him inside the truck,” Todd said.
That grabbed both Marlin and Chris’s attention. It was both a good and a bad thing that Marlin opened the door. Good because Chris saw that Todd wasn’t where he thought he was. He stood near the smoking room. Just where Chris would have gone next. Bad because the spiritual protection broke and the ghosts waiting outside had an open door to enter through.
Naomi froze in place as she stared at Todd. Chris threw his gaze back to Marlin and the open door. Ghosts of all sizes and shapes flew into the billiard hall. One barged into Marlin, knocking him aside. The hefty construction worker screamed in terror, went down on one knee, and then bounced back up. Marlin appeared stricken with some form of self-inflicted mania as he brushed and slapped at his body.
Todd couldn’t see Naomi in her spirit form standing almost right in front of him. He did see his friend acting like a lunatic. Naomi must have forgotten she was invisible. She ran to move out of Todd’s way. Chris’s jaw clenched with frustration as she panicked and ran the wrong direction.
“What in the hell was that?”
“It ran me over. This is crazy! We gotta get out of here!” Marlin cried out as he darted away from the still open door.
As soon as he moved the door swung closed. Chris jumped out of the closet after Naomi and caught up with her a few feet from the hallway leading toward the kitchen. The ghosts also headed that direction, and he knew what would happen as soon as Naomi spotted them.
A blood-curdling scream tore out of her when a ghost rushed past, bumped her, and disappeared into the kitchen.
“Calm down. We’re getting out of here right now!” he told her.
“There he is!” Todd yelled after hearing Chris speak.
The mistake couldn’t be taken back. He knew it, but Naomi suffered from a crippling fear of ghosts, and he had only been thinking of her when he spoke. He forced her to move toward the back door, but she somehow put on the brakes, and he couldn’t move her. Ghosts, hell-bent on finding the vortex in the storage room, poured down the hallway from both directions.
Todd and Marlin were coming at him from the billiard room. Chris had no other option but to leave through the back door at the end of the hall. Nothing in this world would let him leave Naomi behind with these warped and twisted souls. The vortex was creating an unprecedented phenomenon, and it attracted malicious and foul ghosts.
The building creaked and groaned around them. A loud crack came from overhead, and the ceiling seemed to shift. Enough was enough, and Chris took charge of the situation. He picked her up off her feet, spirit to spirit. Astral traveling witch or not, she couldn’t resist the immense power of his true self. She clung to him as he sprinted down the hallway. Crashing sounds boomed out of the kitchen and storage room. The building moaned and the paint split and began to crumble. He should not have looked, but he couldn’t help himself. The kitchen overflowed with ghosts who looked possessed with rage. He didn’t stall or stumble, but as he dashed out the door, he caught a glimpse of Todd being shoved into the kitchen by a horde of frenzied ghosts. As the door swung shut again, Marlin dove into the kitchen after his friend.
* * *
Chris sprinted to the truck. Jack’s Corner Pocket screeched and snapped as the southeast corner of the building caved in. He yanked open the driver’s side door and jumped inside. Naomi scrambled across the cab to the passenger seat. Her dark chocolate eyes were glued to the disaster, and her whole body trembled.
“Where is your physical body, Naomi?” He needed to get to the bottom of this mystery. Her insistence to come to Jack’s made him think she must be here.
“That’s a gray area.” Her eyes rolled skyward in a half circle as if searching for the answer inside her head.
As she stalled, his patience slipped to a precarious degree. It had been tenuous to start with. “I do not understand ‘gray area.' How do you not know where your body is?”
She swallowed and stuck her tongue in her cheek before speaking. “Listen here, bucko. Not everyone has a firm grip on the location of their physical body. I’ve meant to ask you to help me find it.”
Chris’s brows drew together. This was new. Everything about Naomi seemed new to him. “Were you in an accident?” He needed to know how urgent her situation was. Things were already bad enough with two hooligans chasing after him and a vortex that needed to be closed before the town was bombarded with energy vampires and wayward spirits.
“Hmm… Well… It’s hard to remember.”
Her stalling coupled with vague answers compelled Chris to draw in a long calming breath. He tried another tactic. “What is the last thing you remember?”
“Leaving work. Kind of like what we’re doing now, except I’m pretty sure it was dark outside.”
Chris frowned. “Were you ill?”
“I don’t think so.”
Her answers didn't help.
“We have to get out of here. Is there any chance you’re inside the pool hall?”
Chris nailed the gas pedal and the truck peeled out of the parking space.
“No. I remember leaving for the night and going to my trailer.”
As he rounded the building, the truck fishtailed and came within inches of crashing into the camper and Subaru still blocking half of the driveway entrance. He swerved, held his breath, and prayed for a miss. No screech of metal followed, and he gunned the accelerator to high-tail it out of there. Chris chanced a look back. Todd was dragging Marlin from the building.
“They made it out! I can’t believe it!” Her gaze was fixed on Jack’s. The entire back side of the b
uilding fell apart. “Todd needs to go away… like to prison,” Naomi added.
“I wish you could call 911 for me,” he said as he concentrated on not wrecking the truck as they bounced over potholes.
“I’ll ruin your phone if I touch it. My vibe is too powerful for a sensitive device like that.”
“I know. I’ll call, and then we’ll figure out where you are.” With one hand gripping the wheel, Chris pulled the phone out of his pocket.
“Come on, come on,” he urged as he held down the power button and willed it to wake up. The irony that he actually wanted his electronic leash to be in working condition when he regularly cursed the device for existing at all didn’t escape him. At the moment, Chris was both repulsed and grateful for the phone — that is, if it still worked.
He had no idea if his phone survived the close proximity to the vortex. Forever and a day seemed to pass before the screen lit up. He glanced at Naomi and saw she wasn’t looking at him, or the phone is his hand, but back at the car and the travel trailer in the driveway.
He glimpsed the Subaru in the rearview mirror and the epiphany struck him like a sledgehammer at the exact same time Naomi said, “That’s my car!”
Chris braked, slammed the truck into reverse, and jolted forward as the truck switched directions. He punched in the number for emergency services, turned on the speakerphone, and threw open the door. Naomi and Chris ran toward the Subaru. A dispatcher came on the line and asked what the emergency was. Chris blurted out the address, and a brief description then hung up.
A huge smile spread across Naomi’s face. You'd think that all was well in her world, but Chris didn’t like what lay before him. Naomi’s body was slumped over in the driver’s seat. He couldn’t tell what was wrong with her.
“You found me!” Naomi planted a smacking kiss on his cheek. “I knew I had the right man for the job.”
He found her cheerful response inappropriate given the collapsed building, the horde of unstable ghosts, two irate thugs, and her passed out body. He gave her a stern look.
She revised, even though her happiness didn’t waver. “Okay, so maybe I was slightly skeptical for a little while there. I mean you and Mr. Talks to the Wind tried to scare the life out of me, but I shouldn’t have doubted. You totally did it. I was right here the whole time. Duh! I’m an idiot.”
“Are you sick?”
“No. I think I was driving away, and the vortex opened. The shift was so powerful. I got scared, and I didn’t know what to do. Then I was inside your house.” She looked both apologetic and surprised by her admission.
Chris cocked a brow and frowned. He reached for the door handle, but it refused to open. “Unlock the door, Naomi,” he ordered. “It’s time for you to return to your body.”
Without answering, she disappeared from his side. He watched her slip into the front seat of the car and back into her body.
“Wake up!” Chris knocked on the window.
She didn’t respond. He continued yelling and pounding on the car. He strained to check her breathing and barely saw the rise and fall of her chest. His anxiety lessened a few degrees. But why was she unresponsive? Unintentional, and unprotected, astral travel is extraordinarily dangerous. Without her spirit inside her physical shell, she was vulnerable to walk-ins, possession, and death.
Chris saw her hand twitch. “Naomi!”
Through the screen of her curls, he thought her eyelids wavered. That’s when he heard it. The engine roared, and he recognized the sound. Chris looked up in time to see the construction truck round the side of Jack’s Corner Pocket. The heavy-duty pickup fishtailed just as Chris’s truck had. In his mind’s eye, Chris saw the accident coming and threw up a shield of protection. He called for his spirit guides. Talks to the Wind arrived almost instantaneously and shoved Chris aside. His sphere of protection warped, wobbled, and didn’t reach out as far as he wanted it to. Chris hit the ground. The back of Todd’s truck swung hard to the left, tires throwing up a spray of gravel like a shotgun blast. Todd gunned the engine and overcorrected causing the truck to swing around the other way. The rear quarter panel and bumper smashed into Naomi’s Subaru, slid along the side, and crushed the steel as if it were made of tin foil. The camper wobbled, slid, but stayed upright.
The passenger side windows of the Subaru burst. Naomi ricocheted from right to left. She collided with the driver’s side door, moaned, and blacked out again. Chris thought she would vacate her body once more from the trauma, but he didn’t see her spirit leave. He jumped to his feet. The flash of Todd’s sneering face as he rumbled by didn’t last more than half a second. The truck already unstable after the collision, and with a reckless driver behind the wheel, hit the end of the driveway, took the turn onto the road, and rolled. Chris flinched as a horrific crunch of steel echoed down the street through the morning air. The truck landed on its roof, tires spinning. The scream of approaching sirens told Chris help would soon be there.
With the windows shattered, he reached inside and unlocked the doors. Chris slipped off the medicine bag he wore around his neck and placed the leather cord over Naomi’s head to keep her spirit within her body.
“Naomi, you must stay inside your body. The elements of earth, air, water, and fire now protect you. The four directions and the ancestors of my people protect you. Do not vacate this form. Stay and be healed. Be whole.”
The way the impact tossed Naomi around inside the car, he guessed she suffered whiplash. Paramedics would be there in a few more seconds. They could stabilize her neck with a cervical collar. Until then, Chris squatted down next to her, channeling healing energy and praying for her body and spirit.
“Good thing I shoved you out of the way. You might be knocked out like she is,” Talks to the Wind said from behind him.
Chris wanted to point out that if he had held his ground, Naomi and her car would have been protected. He bit back the cutting remarks. “How about some help?”
“Not my area of expertise.”
“Anyone can channel Great Spirit’s universal energy and put it to use,” Chris said trying his hardest to remain levelheaded.
“You’re doing fine on your own.”
Chris wondered again, for at least the tenth time that morning, why Talks to the Wind was his guide.
“You have a knack for finding good looking women with extraordinary gifts. If I were in your moccasins, I would gift her father a hundred of my best horses. You know,” Talks to the Wind said thoughtfully, “the other woman was never right for you, but this one has potential.”
“You can leave now if you’re going to stand there and do nothing,” Chris told Talks to the Wind. He was certain his guide was referring to Juliana. Talks to the Wind was right; Juliana was definitely not meant to be Chris’s girlfriend. Juliana and Nathaniel were together, and Chris could not imagine anything in this world — or the next — that would tear them apart. He’d made peace with her decision to date the fallen angel. They were good for one another.
“Whatever you say,” Talks to the Wind said. “I can’t handle all this pressure in the air. It’s dragging on me.” He gestured toward the destruction that used to be Jack’s Corner Pocket and left. Chris wasn’t sad to see him go.
A host of shrieking sirens raced toward them. Two sheriffs, an ambulance, and a firetruck tore down the street and parked.
Naomi whimpered, and her eyes opened. Before Chris could tell her to hold still, she murmured, “Wakey, wakey, eggs and bakey.”
He didn’t know where she came up with the nonsensical babble. He was starting to get used to it, and even anticipated when she might say something that made him cringe and wonder at the same time.
“We need help over here!” He waved his arm in the air to get their attention. The paramedics rushed over with their gear, and Chris reported what little he knew about Naomi Hutson.
Chapter Five
CHRIS ARRIVED at the construction site well before sunrise. Autumn was kind to the mountains this year, provi
ding warm, dry days, but the nights plummeted to near freezing temperatures. He climbed out of the truck and zipped up his insulated vest. If his ceremony failed this morning, at least he’d be warm in his layers of vest, T-shirt, and flannel. Not that he expected to fail, but he never expected a vortex to spiral out of the Earth in the middle of town either. Times were changing. The Earth was changing. His guides informed him on more than one occasion that the changes they witnessed since the turn of the century were occurring faster than they had ever seen. He always paid close attention to the messages from Spirit and tried to use the information wisely. Chris gathered his medicine bundle and approached the empty lot and energy vortex with his supernatural shields in place. He wouldn’t be caught off guard this time.
The ground near the center of the vortex appeared to have risen a few feet as if being shoved upward from beneath. The skid loader sat at a hazardous angle near the trench where Marlin worked the morning before. A slew of ghosts hovered around the lot like unearthly guards. Chris’s eyes burned from lack of sleep and his body dragged as heavy as his eyelids. Regardless of the detrimental sleep loss, his mind remained in overdrive.
Yesterday passed in a whirl of activity. After the excitement at Jack’s Corner Pocket, he rode with Naomi to the hospital, stayed by her side through the check-in process, and then visited the police station. By the time he was finished filing the police report, he had needed to find something to eat. He drove to his father’s house to consult with him on the unusual case.
Sherman White Wolf Abeyta shared food with his son and told stories through the night. Chris gained much-needed insight regarding the ghost world and energy shifts. In the early hours of the morning, he asked his father to come to town with him, but the elder shook his head and told his son he didn’t feel like it.
Chris had his own interpretation of his father’s refusal. Sherman once told him that he should develop his own methods and medicines for working with Spirit — without outside influence. Chris believed his father shared those words because he knew his son better than anyone else did. The elder understood that Chris worked best alone.
The Misplaced: An Angel Falls Novella - book #3.5 - Ghost Hunting with Chris Abeyta Page 5
