Ghost Guard (12 page)

“Madam Dominika,” she straightened her thick, colorful coat and rubbed her wrists.

“Okay, Madam Dominika
,” Rev said. “What do you want from us? So we used your identity for a mission. We’re sorry. What the hell else do you want? Restitution? Fat chance.”

Dominika face
d him.

“I came here to—” her eyes met Rev’s and she stopped short. Rev felt powerless for a frightening moment.
Trapped in a strong riptide. Both of them just stood there, staring. It made Abby’s skin crawl.

“Hey!” she pulled the old woman and twirled her in a half circle, breaking her fixated gaze on Rev. “
You’re a little…
old
for him, don’t you think?”

“And you’re a little young!” Dominika snapped. She let her
stare fondle Rev up and down. “Besides, what do you know about pleasing a man?”

“
Eww!” Rev cringed.

“I know plenty!” Abby got in her face. Dominika might have been as old as dirt, but she sure was feisty.

“Ladies, ladies,” Morris arbitrated. “Let’s try to remain civil. Besides, I just don’t see how any of this matters.”

Dominika stepped to the center of the concourse. Still open from the earlier chase, the entryway doors let in the
lights from the neighborhood of St. Johns across the Willamette.

“It matters to
Elyxa.”

“Wait,” Abby said. “Did you say
Elyxa?”

Dominika grinned, placing several shiny silver caps on display.

“You know her, do you? How much do you know?”

“We don’t know a darn thing about her,” Morris spoke up. “We butted heads with her, though. Darn near lost two members of our team.”

“Good.”

“
What do you mean,
good
?” Abby tilted her head.

“Yeah,” Rev’s patience became a scarce resource. “What are you talking about, lady?”

“I don’t know how to say this, so I’m just going to come out and say it. You’ve stirred the ire of some forces you cannot begin to understand, let alone defeat. You cannot win. You’re up against an unbeatable opponent.”

“Shows what you know,” Rev flicked his wrist. “Nobody’s unbeatable.”

“
She
is.”

“What makes her so special? Tell us,” Morris demanded.

Dominika’s laughter sent a chill through the room. Ruby swooped down and circled the woman, wagging her tongue like an excited hound.

“Hold on, Ruby,” Abby crossed her arms. “Lady, just who the hell do you think you’re dealing with, anyway?”

“Yes,” Dominika nodded. “I know. The exulted Ghost Guard,” she leaned in and peered into Abby’s eyes. Her cataracts made the pupils look dull and sickly. “Don’t let your arrogance get the better of you, Abigail. You’ve never met, nor have you ever gone up against anything even remotely as powerful as Elyxa.”

She started for the exit, reclaiming
the container she’d had earlier, a box made of thick pressed glass encased in stylish metal latticework. She gave it a sharp tap. At the sound, her strange friends, the pale beings, appeared from the cracks in the floor and slipped into the vessel. One last word before she slipped away, her sights fixed firmly on Rev.

“If you don’t want to hear my warning, so be it.
Elyxa will be ready.”

DOMINIKA LOOKED STRAIGHT ahead, striding into the dark recesses of night. On her face she had the smile of a young woman, a lustful lilt on her lips. In her head she had but one thought—Rev. Who was this being? A spirit, most definitely. But what kind of spirit? Her intrigue was matched only by her jealousy. Abby would be a problem. That she could tell.

As her face passed through a shadow, the wrinkles
over her eyes diminished. The milky film on her retinas cleared. Another shadow went by and her skin tightened even more.

By the time s
he emerged into the full moonlight her face looked completely different. Creases had vanished. Droopy eyelids were now lifted and new. Even her pallid, sunken cheeks appeared rosy and taut. She shed the garments of the old woman, furthering the metamorphosis, revealing a slim form, supple skin, and bouncing breasts as she bounded toward the street. As the cars passed, she smiled, knowing any one of them could be hers if she wanted. Too easy, though. The souls she was after presented much bigger challenges.
Rev
. She slipped into her awaiting Mercedes. She didn’t need to travel by automobile, yet loved the feel of the Corinthian leather against her bare legs, the bare legs exposed by a short, sexy skirt.

One last glance over her shoulder at the old, decrepit Gasworks and she giggled. This
will be exciting, she thought. A touch to the steering column and the Mercedes roared to life. No key. No need. Without looking for traffic, she sped onto the highway and turned right, zipping past two semis and veering toward St. Johns Bridge. Horns blared and headlights flickered in the rearview mirror. She didn’t take notice.
Rev
. He was all she could think about now. She had to possess him. Elyxa peered over the side as she crossed the bridge. She’d be back.

NINE

RUBY SQUEALED PASSIONATELY about the strange visit from Dominika. The old lady had been gone a half hour and still the Ghost Guard team was baffled by the encounter. Ruby, as usual, voiced her concerns the most, prattling and babbling incessantly about the terrible sense she got from the whole ordeal.

“You felt it too?” Abby settled into her usual chair. “Because I got the distinct impression something wasn’t right about that woman.”

“That’s a polite way to put it,” Morris studied his computer screens, scanning for viruses or malware or anything foreign, searching for some kind of answer. “There’s just no way. I don’t care how much she’s in tune with the spirit world, or how many minds she can read, there’s absolutely no way that woman could have penetrated my electronic shield—unless…”

“
Unless what?” Abby asked.

“Unless she had help,” he wrung his hands. “Darn!”

“Would you stop obsessing?” Rev hovered near the window, staring up at the bridge. “We’ve got bigger problems. Elyxa is obviously not to be taken lightly. If what Dominika said was even half right, we’ve got trouble.”

“We don’t know, Rev,” Abby said. “She may have been lying to us.”

“Abby, who do you think you’re talking to? We all saw what Elyxa is capable of.”

She nodded reluctantly.

“What do you think Dominika meant, though?” Rev asked nobody in particular. “That part about us stirring the ire of something we can’t understand? What did that mean?”

“This!” Morris indicated the video footage of their encounter with
Elyxa. He had it playing on one of his monitors. “Elyxa’s
very
powerful,” he glanced at Brutus, then Ruby. “Look what she did to you two, how she overpowered you so easily.”

Brutus directed his eyes to the floor while keeping his chin high. He kept a silent vigil in his own shadow.

Ruby squeaked, saying Brutus didn’t want to talk about it.

“He never wants to talk about it,” Morris rolled his chair to the other end of his workstation.

Abby got up and stepped between them.

“
Morris, now’s not the time for finger pointing.”

Morris held his forehead.

“I know, I know,” he got up and went to the dark corner where Brutus was loitering in his own morose stew of smoke and ash.

“I’m sorry, Brutus. I didn’t mean any disrespect, okay? It’s just that-that—I’m a little rattled
…okay?”

Brutus exhaled. His breath was gray mist. Without a word he forgave his friend.

“We’re all rattled,” Rev tried to diffuse the tension. “I don’t know what gave me a worse feeling: the ass-kicking we got from Elyxa, or the social call from Dominika.”

Abby shook her head.

“I don’t like any of it.”

“THANKS FOR BRINGING us here, Mistress Elyxa!” Ogilvy dragged his knuckles in the soft dewy grass. The early evening showers had made the cemetery ground quite pliable. Perfect, Elyxa thought, for digging. “Master never takes us to cemeteries.”

“Ye
s,” agreed Renault. He raced behind his twin, each taking turns chasing the other around a small columbarium, six plaques in all, six spaces for urns. “Why don’t you take us to cemeteries to hunt, Master?”

“Because it’s beneath us,
that’s why,” Aros cast a scornful glare across the broken-down graveyard. A lonely, forgotten place on the hill in the outskirts of a tiny town. He wondered exactly why such a dignified, omnipotent being like Elyxa would come to a place such as this. Elyxa pretended not to hear his thoughts. He didn’t need to know anything. As far as she was concerned, Aros was lucky she allowed him to come along.

Elyxa
marched with determination, scanning the marble slabs, the carved crosses, the statuettes of cherubs in flight. Checking the dates, she saw most were right along the timeframe she was looking for—the late 1920s. That didn’t really matter. She already knew this was the place. She knew
he
was here.

“Why,
Elyxa?” Aros’s displeasure got the best of him finally. “I have to know why you’re taking us to this…this place. You know as well as I do that only the lowest of the lowly hunters come to these places.”

Elyxa
remained silent. Not a word, mentally or vocally. She had but one focus, and wouldn’t allow Aros with his inquisitions, nor the twin ghost goons and their antics, to distract her now. Not when she was this close.

“Honestly,
Elyxa,” Aros wouldn’t stop berating her decision-making. “We all know the reason immortals hunt spirits. Not to feed from the spirit energy or revel in the supremacy. We don’t even hunt souls for conceited, self-centered reasons such as competing for the title of the greatest hunter of all time. Those are all secondary motives. We all know this. So why, Elyxa? Tell me why a graveyard? It’s too easy. There’s no dignity in it.”

“I don’t know about
that
,” Ogilvy flew between two headstones as a wisp of steam, then materialized into his full, lanky and powder-white physical form. “I think we can have fun here.”

Renault burst into existence from a puff of ashy fog next to his
comrade.

“A soul is a soul, right
?” he spied left to right to left, twitching his hairless eyebrows and licking his mottled lips with his mottled tongue. “And there
has
to be a soul around here somewhere.”

“But it’s so unbecoming,” argued
Aros. “The hunt is a grand dance, a beautifully choreographed ballet between the predator and the prey. There’s a formality to it, a—”

“
Looky! Looky!” Ogilvy stopped in midflight and pointed.

“We gotta dead one!” Renault shouted, and the chase was on, both ghosts jettisoning into the gloom.
Elyxa had sensed the wandering spirit long ago. Aros had also, but wanted nothing to do with hunting in a cemetery.

“You two stop it!”
Aros ordered. The thuggish ghosts paid their benefactor no mind, blinded by the thrill of the chase. The spirit they were after was a woman. Middle-aged and quite thin. It didn’t matter to Aros. He just wanted his slaves to quit wasting his time and their energy. “I said stop!”

Hooting.
Howling. The spindly specters made great sport of cornering the terrorized lady, each coming at her from a different side. And then she slipped away and they started over with howls of delight, ignoring their master’s commands completely.

Elyxa
watched the chaotic proceedings with an ember of irritation smoldering in her gut. And when it became obvious Aros had no control over his little dogs, she took it upon herself to yank the leash. Using thoughts only, she shrieked at them so loud they dropped from the sky instantly. Her nonverbal message came through to them quite clear:
End this foolishness now or I take your souls!

It didn’t take any more convincing than that. Ogilvy rushed front and center, adopting a tall, rigid stance. A
half second later, Renault was by his side, both scared witless but doing their best not to show it. Elyxa knew she’d shaken them, and that pleased her greatly. Obedient little ghosts. That’s what she needed right now, for this, most delicate of operations.

“That’s better,” she said with satisfaction. The
gravesite she’d been looking for was right in front of her. “I have a job for you,” she gestured to the ground. “I want you to dig up this grave.”

“What?” Renault studied the inscription in the marble. “This guy?” he read the name.
“Rever Ott?”

“What kind
a stupid name is that!” Ogilvy slapped Renault’s back and laughed hard. Then Renault retaliated with a backslap of his own.

“Hey!” Ogilvy scowled and whacked Renault across the left cheek. Again Renault hit back, copying Ogilvy with an openhanded blow to the face.

“Son of a bitch!” Ogilvy bellowed, and locked arms with his gangly brother, the two becoming but swirls of milky white, snaking and bending around each other wildly.

Elyxa
was on the verge of extinguishing these two insubordinate spirits, and, with a rapid burst of thought, showed Ogilvy and Renault exactly what fate awaited them. The emptiness. The nothingness. More terrifying than death. The true and final end. No more spirit. No more consciousness. No afterlife. No reincarnation. The soul was obliterated, and that chilling image made the two specters stop bickering and stand at attention once again.

“Like I said,”
Elyxa hated repeating herself. “I want you to dig up this grave.”

Both
ghosts, without turning their heads, sent their stares to Aros. Before Aros could answer, Elyxa commanded with a voice like thunder.

“GET DIGGING!”

In a snap the two got to work, long, spindly fingers scratching deep in the earth, reaching into the soil up to their elbows. Arms flying. Movements so rapid it was difficult even for Elyxa to keep up. For once she was impressed with the otherwise inept beings.

“At least they know how to dig a hole,” she said aloud.

“Pray tell, Elyxa. How is exhuming a body that has been in the ground since 1928 supposed to help us find and eliminate Ghost Guard?”

“It will help
me
,” she told Aros flatly. “Beyond that it is none of your concern.”

“I think it
is
my concern,” he wouldn’t accept her vague response. “We could be hunting right now. Really hunting, not shooting fish in a barrel. And you said we’d hunt down Ghost Guard. You said it.”

“I did. And we will,” her tone signaled the end of the conversation.

The ghosts produced a monstrous mess, tossing aside handful after handful of soil, making swift progress and delighting in their task. In no time they’d made it several feet down, carving out a near perfect rectangle in the ground. Like everything else, they made a competition of it, seeing who could dig faster. Unfortunately they forgot they were looking for a casket, and when Renault scratched the wood, he splintered it. One more good scrape with his muddy claws and he would have mangled the coffin and the body inside. Elyxa saw this and shouted for them to halt immediately, and they did, shivering with terror at what she might do to them if they made a false move.

“Open the box and get him out of there…carefully!”

They snapped to action, shaking and moaning in fear.

“Y-y-yes, Mistress,” Ogilvy cowered. “W-w-we
’ll bring him to you. We’ll bring him…see?”

They laid the rotten corpse at her feet.
Aros turned up his nose. Elyxa, on the other hand, positively beamed.

“He’s perfect…just perfect,” she sparkled with joy. “Put him in the car and let’s go.”

“What are you up to, Elyxa?” Aros asked. “Who is this Rever Ott?”