Authors: J. Joseph Wright
THE ELEVATOR OPENED directly to the penthouse in a crystal-laden lobby. Elyxa strode past a giant aquarium, and exotic fish of all shapes, sizes, and colors, darted at her quick motion, shimmering in the reflected overhead lights. A set of immense, ornate doors opened and she entered a large, bright chamber. All white with gold accents in the wainscoting and cornices. She stopped to study the classical frescos, the ornate corbels, the Grecian columns. The entire spectacle took her to a time long ago. A time she’d forgotten. But now it was flooding back to her, the days she and her former companion, Aros, had spent in Nice, on the Mediterranean Coast, sipping wine and forgetting about an even more distant past when mankind didn’t have such luxuries as seaside resorts or fermented spirits.
“You’ve been doing quite well for yourself,” she glanced around the room.
Opulence at every turn. Opal vases. Bejeweled mirror frames. Diamond chandeliers. A massive marble hearth. Aros was there, somewhere, shrouded in his own decadence. “What kind of place is this? Such a luxurious apartment on top of such an edifice of dereliction?”
“It’s called a penthouse,” Aros spoke confidently, yet Elyxa sensed a slight feebleness. “I had it built on top of an abandoned warehouse because I like the ironic juxtaposition. The elegance and the neglect—a charming contrast.”
Elyxa grinned a telling grin.
“And if I know my Aros, he has more of these
penthouses
to take refuge in?”
“You might say that,” f
inally, he stepped into the roaring firelight, as tall as ever, his long, beautifully silver hair glistening.
“Something’s different,
Aros. What is it?”
He tilted his head and didn’t answer for a moment. Then he smiled.
His perfect teeth glimmered.
“I never could keep anything from you, could I?”
“Aros? Are you crying?”
He opened his arms.
“I’m just so happy to see you, my love. Come. Come to me.”
“I’d rather stay right here, if you don’t mind.”
He lowered his gaze.
“Is that a
ny way to treat a long lost lover?”
“You seem to think I don’t have a memory,
Aros.”
“Come now. Can’t we let the past be the past,
Elyxa? You’ve been gone a long time. Things have changed since you’ve last been around. This world is a different place.”
“So I’m discovering,” she
crinkled her brow, then realized what she was doing and flattened it out again, smoothing it with her palm. “Did you know that women, normal human mortals, are visiting witchdoctors in order to make themselves immortal? They call it plastic surgery?”
“
Elyxa,” he laughed. “You have a lot to learn about this age. Let me teach you. I can show you all you need to know. And we can, as they say…rekindle the old flame.”
She breathed hard again.
“Aros, the only reason why I came here is to tell you goodbye. Forever.”
“But what about the hunt?
You have to come back to me, Elyxa. We were so close before. Now that so much time has passed, nobody will be expecting us. And with my new skills, I am almost as powerful as you. Together we can take them by storm. The spirit world will never know what hit it.”
“It’s tempting,” she observed the
decorative skylights on the ceiling. “But I hunt alone now.”
“
Elyxa, be reasonable. We go back so long. How can you just turn away so easily? Time heals all wounds, does it not?”
“
Aros, time has no meaning to me. It doesn’t exist to an immortal. You know that.”
He
sat down and leaned back in his chair.
“You’re right. I should have never done what I did to you. I thought after three hundred years, you might have found it in your heart to understand.”
“You did the only thing you knew to do, Aros. It’s your nature. You’re a hunter, just like me. We were created to destroy souls. And destroy souls we must.”
“But isn’t there any room for anything else? Can’t
we love too?”
“We already tried that, remember?”
“Can’t we try again?”
With her mind, she
forced him to stand, pulled him in close to her, and surprised him with a bold, sensuous embrace. Their lips merged. Tenderly. Passionately. Then she separated from him and slid her finger across her mouth slowly.
“No.”
He wiped the tears from his eyes, staring into the fire.
“So, now where are you going? What are you going to do?”
“Hunt souls. What else is there for an immortal to do?”
“
Elyxa, I feel I must warn you. Things aren’t like they used to be. Something’s happening out there. It started as a mere annoyance, but now it’s gotten to be quite troublesome.”
“
Troublesome?”
“Yes, it’s a
specialized team. Mortals working together with ghosts, protecting the spirit world.”
“A team of
spirits and living humans?” suddenly Elyxa was interested in what Aros had to say. “Tell me more.”
“They’ve been a thorn in
my side for quite some time. I’ve lost several spirits thanks to them. They’re a menace, and I’ve been trying to track them down, but they’re smart. They know how to hide from me. All I know is their name...Ghost, uh—”
“Ghost Guard,” she said with a straight face. He itched with intrigue.
“So you’ve heard of them?”
“You know what,
Aros?” she seduced him with a smile. “Maybe we
can
hunt together. Just this once. I’ll help you track down that…menace, as you call them. I’ll help you eliminate Ghost Guard.”
“You will?” her words were music to his ears.
“How?”
“Just leave that to me. For now I need to use your two gho
st slaves.”
“Ogilvy and Renault?
What for?”
She stared out at the
pastel moonlight.
“I need to do some…investigation.”
EIGHT
MORRIS HUNCHED OVER his workbench, peering left, then right, then down at his latest creation. Actually it wasn’t his—not completely—though he tweaked the design just enough to make it his own. He had his calculations up on the main screen and the prototype in his hands. He knew it was dangerous. At any second one of his colleagues could burst—or float—in and catch him red-handed.
He
choked on a kernel of popcorn when his workstation came alive with blinding red lights and ear-piercing alarms.
“What the hell
?” Abby asked breathlessly, sprinting from her office to his.
“
A perimeter alert!” Morris dropped his new invention to the table, burying it under a pile of spare parts and electronic accessories.
“
Perimeter alert?” Abby marched up behind him as he collapsed the forbidden data off of his screen. A close one indeed. “We’ve never had a perimeter alert before.”
“I know,” t
oggling the customized control, Morris launched the camera system he called Z, a cloud of airborne nano-drones. Z’s compound cameras had unique panoramic ranges, encompassing the entire Gasworks complex. He pushed his glasses up on his nose and peered closer at the screens. “Hmm.”
“What
?” she reached for a Stat-Mag Emitter. “It’s that damned Elyxa isn’t it? I knew she’d find us here…we should have planned for this!” she slapped her forehead. “Stupid! Stupid!”
“No, no
…it’s not her. It’s something else. Somebody else.”
“How do you know?”
He looked at her, and his face lost all color.
“I don’t.”
“Oh, shit! Oh, shit!” she pointed the emitter at the door, then the ceiling, then back to the door.
“What use is that?” Morris couldn’t contain his dejection. “Th
e emitters are worthless against Elyxa. You said its effects on her were minimal at best.”
“
This is
not
worthless,” she glanced at the device in her hand. “Besides, what the hell else am I supposed to do? This is the only thing you’ve come up with that even remotely slows down a supernatural entity.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“I didn’t mean it that way, Morris. Your inventions are great. Just great.”
More
sirens, bells, and buzzers. Morris switched cameras again, then again, and again. Whoever, whatever it was, it kept giving his sensors the slip.
“Can somebody turn off that damn
alarm!” Rev passed through the wall in a damp mist that chilled both Abby and Morris the instant he arrived. “It’s giving me a splitting migraine. And for a dead guy, that’s sayin’ something.”
Rev
gazed deep into the largest computer display, at the data cycling in endless loops. One page after another, faster and faster until it became a blur. Then it stopped on the alarm control. On or off. The
OFF
lit up and the deafening noises stopped.
“There,” he sighed.
“Okay,” Morris challenged Rev. “
You
locate the intruder.”
“No problem,” Rev
narrowed his eyes. The computer screens flashed with activity, buzzing at a speed too fast for the living to pick up. To Rev, everything made perfect sense. He pored over the sensory input, replaying the sequence of events that had taken place as the intruder came in. He played the footage from outside Gasworks, down in the basement, and, finally, on the dilapidated first floor. It was a woman, her face shrouded by a large shawl. She stopped in the middle of the once magnificent lobby and reached into her pocket. In her hand she had something, a box. It shined in the dim light.
“Do we have audio?
” Abby shouted. “Turn up the audio!”
“Shhh!”
Rev nodded and the sound came up. The woman’s voice sounded lower than Elyxa’s, but Abby attributed that to the microphones. She recited something Abby had sworn she’d heard before. The box shined brighter with each word, then it cracked open at the sides, letting out two equally pale white beings, each dashing off in a different direction.
Abby, for one of the few times in her life, was genuinely mystified.
“What was that?”
“I don’t know, but I’m gonna find out!” Rev
rose up and burst into a million microscopic particles, dissipating into the atmosphere, becoming nearly invisible even to Abby’s finely-tuned senses.
“I hate when he does that,” she frowned, and Morris
offered her a pair of his special HeatSpec goggles, which enabled users to see the slightest variations in temperatures, as well as objects not normally in the visible spectrums of light and color. She didn’t actually need them. Her natural abilities to see spirits never failed her. Nevertheless, she accepted the offer from Morris, knowing how sensitive he was about his inventions.
Armed and ready, she flew down the stairs,
leaving the remodeled and restored splendor of their second floor dwelling and finding the main floor quiet and still. Too quiet. Too still. She imagined the place in its heyday. Took the edge off seeing it the way it was now. Crumbling and rotted. Dusty and moldering. Plaster peeling from the walls in chunks, leaving random slat boards infested with rat holes and insect trails. Floorboards missing, and the ones remaining were broken, loose and disintegrating. Spider webs festooned the walls, under the staircases, inside the rundown reception counter. The only saving grace of the entire room, the centerpiece clock tower, stood as a reminder of its more illustrious time, a day when chivalry was king and life much simpler.
Once
she rounded the corner, she saw movement behind the clock, a shadow scurrying into a darker shadow. She took a breath. How bad could it be? Then, for the first time, she realized what she’d gotten herself into. What was she thinking? What if it
was
Elyxa who’d unleashed these strange creatures?
S
he hustled to the other side of the tower, keeping both emitters pointed at the corner where she’d seen the furtive stirring. Then the thing moved again and she stopped cold in her tracks, a rock steady pulse pounding in her ears.
Scuffling.
Scratching. Scurrying. She bit her lip and breathed hard.
Not afraid. Not afraid.
More movement. Morris’s special glasses wouldn’t show her anything. Whatever it was, it had found a hiding place in the recesses against the wall.
“All right!
Get out here! NOW!”
Her sudden command shocked the entity to action, lifting into the air, shrieking. Abby realized she was screaming too, and she trained her emitters, both at the highest
energy extraction settings, aiming for the heart of the bulbous blob. Then she recognized something else. The thing she was tracking looked quite familiar.
“Ruby!”
They both sighed, their terror evaporating into smiles, then relaxed giggles.
“What were you doing?” Abby searched the dark fissure where Ruby had been hiding. “Something down there?”
Squeaking and popping, Ruby told Abby what she’d seen. Something ugly and frighteningly pale. It slipped into the hole, and she wasn’t sure if she should follow.
“You shouldn’t be out of your SME chamber, let alone chasing down anomalies.
You and Rev both. You should know better. At least Brutus has some sense. He’s staying in his. Why can’t you be more like him?”
A deafening sound from the
lobby entrance made Ruby shoot up ten feet in half a second. Rolling, barreling, shouting—like a herd of stampeding elephants. A blast of wind blew the ancient wallpaper into tatters and took pieces of decayed boards with it, lumber smashing into lumber, cracking and splitting. Two ghastly white obscurities swished past. A split-second behind them, roaring like thunder, was Brutus. Abby’s goggles showed him cooking on the infrared scale.
“Brutus!” Abby was
dangling from her last nerve. Ruby hurried away, looking to join the action.
“Get back!” Abby
knew she really couldn’t do anything to prevent the ghost from doing what she wanted. Ruby glanced at her, and felt a little guilty, but passed through a boarded window anyway, squealing something about needing to help. Abby sighed.
As Ruby rematerialized
outside in the hall, a hurricane-force wind brought a torrent of gravel and dust and dead leaves rushing through her in a heavy cloud. The pallid beings were running from Brutus, zipping through the doors, blowing and swinging them hard on their hinges.
Brutus, reddish-brown eyes shining against
a dark gray backdrop, had a dead focus on the ethereal intruders. He moved fast. The prowlers moved faster, screeching and scratching along the floor with long, dangling arms and shiny claws like stainless-steel meat hooks.
Ruby joined the chase, enjoying it thoroughly, even though Abby and Morris wanted desperately to hold her back.
The two breathers watched their otherworldly teammates chase the strange entities along the tall ceiling, around the ancient light fixtures, through the walls and back again.
“Don’t you get
it!” Abby warned. “She’s trying to exhaust you! Don’t let her do it!”
“Abby
’s right!” Morris adjusted his HeatSpec goggles. “You’re both dangerously close to terminal expiration. I mean it, you’ve got to stop!”
Brutus
only growled. It was his duty to protect the team. Period. No matter how diminished his energy, he had to keep going. He’d never fail to uphold his duty. Not again.
Ruby felt the same
as Brutus. These enigmatic trespassers might have been dangerous, and she and Brutus were the only ones standing in their way.
Abby covered her eyes. She was afraid to look. Then a swirling sound invaded her senses. Another rush of wind surrounded both her and Morris. And, as suddenly as they came, the intruding spirits were gone. Abby and Morris looked up and saw Rev dragging a
n elderly woman, spitting and complaining, by her thick, lavish overcoat.
Abby squinted, trying to place where the hell she’d seen her before. The woman peered right back, wrinkles over wrinkles folding atop one another.
“You!” the old woman spat. “You’re the one! The imposter! They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery—Bullshit!” she spat again.
“What are you spouting about, lady?” Rev’s hands became cuffs around her wrists when she tried to reach for the liner of her patchwork overcoat. Abby recognized the eclectic clothes, the elaborate ensemble, yet it still didn’t quite register in her brain.
“I’m talking about
her
!” she pointed her sagging chin at Abby. “And you!” her eyes poked out from their fleshy folds when she got a good look at Rev’s face. “All you damn imposters. Imitating me and my spirit guides. You should be arrested and go to jail for life. Do you even have any idea what you’ve done to my business?”
Rev tilted his head at Abby. She did the same to him in return, wrinkling her face in confusion.
“Don’t just stand there acting stupid!” the woman went on. “You should be held accountable. All of you. Ruining a psychic’s good name—a name I’ve been building for almost fifty years. Fifty years I’ve been toiling in the trenches every day. Every night too. And for what? For a bunch of young punks to come along and ruin it all!”
“Madam Dominika!” Abby blurted. She felt stupid for not knowing it sooner. “It has to be you, right?”
Dominika frowned. Abby stepped toward the old woman.
“Just what were you trying to do, anyway? Spy on us?”
Dominika laughed and her long, beaded earrings jangled.
“Dear, if I wanted to spy on you, you would have never known.”
It was Abby’s turn to laugh.
“I don’t think so, lady. You used those specters as a diversion. You were trying to sneak in on us. Confess. You were trying not to get caught.”
“I was trying to get your attention, imposter. I want answers. Why were you dressed as me? Why did you imitate me at that Forsythe dinner party?”
“I knew
you shouldn’t have impersonated her,” Morris shook his head dismally. “What was I thinking? We should’ve known it was going to get back to her.”
“
We had to use her persona,” Abby stuck out her chin. “It was the only way Dianne Forsythe would deal with us. Dominika’s name carries a lot of weight in the local paranormal circles.”
“Ha!” Dominika exclaimed. “Not anymore! Not after that stunt you pulled! Now I’m lucky to get a job giving readings at birthday part
ies. The phone calls have stopped. My regulars have abandoned me. Why’d you do it?”
Abby started to steam. How dare this woman bust into their place and start making demands
?
“We don’t owe you any explanations, got it?”
Dominika scanned the faces. Rev, Abby, Morris, Brutus, shrouded by smoke and shadow. Ruby stayed out of sight.
“And just who the hell do you people think you are, anyway? Are you somehow above the laws of the spirit world?”
Rev loosened his grip, letting her free while keeping close, just in case.
“Listen, lady…”