Other Half (PsyCop book 12)
Page 26
“Then what? We look for repeaters?”
“We’d have a heck of a lot more guinea pigs to choose from, that’s for sure. But repeaters aren’t quite the same as ghosts. They’re more like afterimages. If the sentient part of them is already crossed over, I think they’d be even harder for you to get a bead on than regular spirits.” Heck, for all I knew, they weren’t even etheric, but some other plane I was seeing with an entirely different subtle body.
Jacob stroked his short beard…which really did look even sexier than the goatee. “So if the ghost were an active threat…you’d have no qualms about me getting rid of it.”
“You realize this is the equivalent of handing a gun to a baby, yelling, ‘Good luck,’ and throwing it in a pit of scorpions. You have no training whatsoever.”
“That’s not true—you’ve been training me.”
“If that’s what you call training—”
“You have,” he insisted. “And I might not be able to see the etheric, but you can. You’re my eyes.”
“Jacob, this isn’t some goofy trust exercise in a church basement. A pissed off spirit is a lot more dangerous than a folding chair to the groin.”
But my overconfident husband was not to be dissuaded…which was why, later that night, we pulled up in front of our local ATM with a fresh bag of salt and a whole lot of trepidation. Last time, the ghost of the dead mugger took us by surprise, but we weren’t about to make the same mistake twice. Not only had we gorged ourselves on mugwort tea—supposedly a natural psyactive—but I’d found a pump spray-bottle with really good range and filled it with Florida Water.
We’d even done a few yoga poses.
We’d done our research, too. The mugger had been haunting that particular stretch of concrete since my Police Academy days, and us none the wiser. He had no family to speak of, and the officer who’d gunned him down had succumbed to a coronary last year.
There was no reason not to show him the door.
We’d decided to don our black G-man suits. They might attract more attention than our street clothes, but if we needed to clear out any civilians in a hurry, they’d be more likely to take orders from us if we came across like authorities, and not just a couple of guys carting around some really weird props.
It was late and the hardware store was closed. Foot traffic was sparse. The few people who did stop for cash were dissuaded with a vague warning about official business. I’d pulled down so much white light I was feeling a little spinny. And yet all of our prep work was starting to feel like one big, disappointing exercise in futility.
I had my eye on the spot I’d seen our mugger before. Jacob was ranging up and down the sidewalk, feelers out, trying to get a signal. And both of us were picking up a whole lot of nothing.
“Maybe he’s tied to a particular time,” Jacob said.
I checked my watch. “If he is, that time has come and gone.”
“Day of the week, then.”
It didn’t seem likely that a ghost would only appear on, say, a Wednesday. That simply wasn’t how humans marked their big events. The anniversary of their death? Maybe. But I didn’t particularly care to stand there for an entire year to find out.
Holding onto the white light, especially in the absence of panic, wears me down. Especially these days, now that I no longer take periodic breaks from my talent with Auracel and Seconal. By the time it was dark enough for the street lamps to power on, I had a dull throb pounding deep in my head. No matter how many times I reminded myself to top off, my light reserves felt slippery and low.
“Do you feel a chill?” Jacob asked.
“I do…but I think it’s just a breeze off the lake.”
“Maybe we can summon him.”
I’d never been able to do anything like that before. And given the sí-no’s assertion that I was already at the top of my game, I wasn’t too confident I could suddenly learn. “Look, it’s possible that when we tangled with this guy before, we got rid of him for good.”
“You didn’t seem too sure of that at the time.”
“Maybe not. But if he made it across the veil, he’s gone.”
“If,” Jacob repeated. He didn’t want to throw in the towel—he was pulling the stubborn-face I knew so well—but he was also smart enough to realize that standing out there all night wouldn’t prove a damn thing if there was no ghost to prove it on. He mulled it over for a moment, then gave in with a sigh of disappointment. “We’ll come back tomorrow. In the meantime—I’m starving, and I’ve got a serious craving for Thai.”
Now that he mentioned it, after a week in small-town Wisconsin, I was pretty steak-and-potatoed out. Our favorite Thai joint was just a few blocks away, and their green curry chicken was so good I could shovel it down until it hurt—but the cashier gave you the stink-eye when you tried paying with plastic. “Do you have any cash on you?” I asked.
“Not much.”
“I blew all of mine on tips when I was feeling especially magnanimous.”
“Pastor Jill would be proud.”
Of my vocabulary choice? Or the fact that I’d bestowed a windfall on so many local busboys? I swiped my card through the reader and turned toward Jacob to ask—only to realize it wasn’t Jacob standing right over my shoulder…but shadowy guy in a hoodie.
The temperature plummeted, and I sucked down white light for all I was worth. But my reservoir felt shaky and unstable, worn thin from hoarding white light for hours with nowhere to turn it loose. Mojo oozed from the seams like green curry through a soggy takeout container. And even the adrenaline of panic wasn’t enough to fill my energy quicker than it leaked out.
“The mugger,” I gasped. The words left my mouth in a cloud of frost, and suddenly I didn’t have nearly enough hands. I dropped my cash card and dug for the salt, spritzing Florida Water left-handed for all I was worth. So naturally, the trigger-squeeze was one of the particularly atrophied gestures I should have been working on with a physical therapist, and the spritz fell woefully short.
“Gimme the money, asshole! Gimme the fuckin’ money!”
I dropped the Florida Water and went for the salt, but I’d put it in a heavy freezer bag, and the plastic didn’t tear. I fumbled with the zip-lock while my vision narrowed stupidly to the bloody, blown-out eye socket. I pawed at the plastic, slippery with sweat, and strained for more light—but it was no good.
I’d hit the upper limit of my ability. And that level was nowhere near enough.
“I’m here,” Jacob barked, stern and commanding and way too full of himself for his own good. “Be my eyes.”
My biggest enemy isn’t ghosts—it’s despair. And Jacob’s show of confidence distracted me from it enough to let him try and help me.
“Don’t grab my light,” I reminded him, “pull in your own.” Jacob’s gasoline is a different octane from mine, or maybe an entirely different fuel, this crackling red energy he draws up from the earth. I might not be able to see the energy now, but I could picture how he looked with it coursing through his bulging veins.
“Where’s the veil?” he asked.
“I don’t know—damn it—”
I backpedaled, nearly dropping the bag, and the ghost was matching me step for step.
“You think I’m playing? I will blow you away right here. How fancy is that suit gonna be when I put a bullet hole through it?”
“He’s lucid, and pissed off, and—eleven o’clock—”
In a move better choreographed than anything we might have managed on the dance floor, my True Stiff stepped in, as close as he could possibly come without his shoulder blades brushing up against me. The eye-shot mugger was crowding me so bad, Jacob didn’t quite slide between us, but rather, into the ghost. With a crackle of energy, it jolted back a couple of paces.
And now it was livid.
“What the fuck was that? You think you’re some kinda tough guy? Huh?”
More testily now, Jacob repeated, “Where is the veil?”
“I don’
t know.” And I couldn’t wait any longer for him to find it. I freed the salt—finally—and grabbed a good handful. Filled it with light. Pushed with all my will to disrupt the angry spirit and flung it over his shoulder.
If this were a carnival game, my toss would’ve bounced harmlessly off the rail.
But where I was running on fumes, Jacob had just now powered up. And when the street distorted behind the mugger with a subtle bending of light, I didn’t know if we’d found the veil, or if Jacob had somehow forced it to appear.
“Dead ahead,” I told him.
It might be harder for him to spot the veil, but with me pointing him in the right direction, he could lock onto it with his other senses. As Jacob focused, it became more solid to me. I wasn’t just guiding him…we were guiding each other.
“You got it,” I said. “Push him through!”
Without a psyactive or a GhosTV, I couldn’t quite see Jacob’s energy—but I could feel it. Just barely. Not because it was subtle, but because it was operating on a level that was a real stretch for me to perceive, like the long, low rumble of thunder in the far distance.
Jacob gathered himself—and he shoved.
Bullseye.
The streetlight beside us flickered. The atmosphere flexed. And the ghost reeled backward, flailing, his one remaining eye wide with shock as he was pulled, inexorably, through the veil.
I backed up a few feet and caught my breath, and considered telling Jacob he’d done it—but I sensed he already knew. Traffic had slowed to watch a couple of guys in black suits gesticulating and yelling, and Jacob did his best to look casual as I pocketed my salt, retrieved my ATM card, and withdrew a wad of cash. It seemed weird to be doing it right where the mugger met his demise—but, hey, it was no longer haunted, so why waste time tracking down a different machine?
We climbed into the car and sat there for a moment, absorbing what we’d just accomplished. All those sessions with Pastor Jill had seemed like so much red tape, something to plod through for the sake of getting to the altar. But looking back on the experience, I now suspected that Jacob and I got a lot more out of it than we’d bargained for. And while Lisa might’ve been technically right about my psychic talent being maxed out, she hadn’t accounted for how much I could do with it if Jacob was helping me.
If we were helping each other.
Jacob had just smashed a hostile ghost through the veil, so he had every reason to be smug. Yet he actually came across as diffident, even humble, when he asked, “Is it okay to touch you now?”
“Yeah. More than okay.”
We both leaned in for the kiss and met in the middle—and as our mouths found each other, a tingle of energy passed between us that might have been etheric…or maybe it was purely physical. I was lucky beyond belief to end up with a guy who was so much like me in certain ways, and so completely different in others.
Someone I trusted with my life…and loved with all my heart.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JORDAN CASTILLO PRICE prefers the pace of Wisconsin living to the hustle and bustle of Chicago…though she does miss the Thai restaurant by her last Chicago apartment.
She has never had occasion to use a self-tanner.
Connect with Jordan:
Facebook - https://bit.ly/jcp-facebook-profile
Twitter - https://twitter.com/jordancprice
Bookbub - https://www.bookbub.com/profile/jordan-castillo-price
Blog - http://jordancastilloprice.com
And explore her other stories at http://jcpbooks.com
ABOUT THIS STORY
I’VE LIVED IN Wisconsin for twenty years now, and it’s always fun when Vic and Jacob visit, because I get the opportunity to have them interact with a setting that’s very different from the big city. I experienced quite the culture shock moving to Wisconsin from Chicago. The sense of urgency here is greatly diminished. I still remember being disgruntled about the way people would chat with a cashier while I was waiting in line behind them, or the fact that I couldn’t get my Sunday newspaper on Saturday night. Thankfully, I’ve since relaxed.
Jacob’s hometown is a fictionalized (and unnamed) city somewhere in southwest Wisconsin. I picture many of its specifics as the small city of Mount Horeb, though without its close proximity to Madison. Mount Horeb is also full of big wooden trolls, which don’t exist in Jacob’s hometown, and would make the city seem more quirky than I need it to be. The bachelor party took place in Wyalusing State Park, which is gorgeous—definitely visit if you’re in the area. And Historical Marker 21 is not specifically about walleye, but the Wisconsin River Headwaters.
Driving down the two-lane, I often find myself intrigued by abandoned structures. Unused barns and silos start leaning and crumbling, and derelict houses slowly fall in. I’m usually surprised there aren’t homeless people squatting in these places—at least they seem totally abandoned as far as I can tell—I suspect because they’re just too far off the beaten path.
Though Jacob grew up in small-town Wisconsin, I think he’s more of a Chicago guy now. Will being married to Vic change him at all? Since Jacob is a serial monogamist, he probably had his mind made up by the third date and the wedding just made things official. Still, maybe he’ll have less to prove now. And although Vic never saw himself as the marrying kind, I think he’ll make a fine husband.
More ghostly PsyCop adventures are planned for the happy couple. I’ve always thought Vic and Jacob were a formidable team, and I’m pleased that both of them are beginning to realize it, too.
If you’re curious about the handy exclamation ope, find more here - http://bit.ly/ope-word
More Magical Goodness
The ABCs of Spellcraft is a quirky paranormal adventure where bad puns abound, the sunshine guy gets the grumpy guy, and magic is real. http://bit.ly/spellcraft-series