Ghost Guard (24 page)

ELYXA STRODE STRAIGHT to the ghost gun and snatched it off the floor where Aros had dropped it. Without a moment’s hesitation, she aimed it at Ogilvy and pulled the trigger.

“Mistress
Elyxa! NOOO!” he fizzled to nothingness in a thousand tiny lightning cracks. Before he could get away, she did the same to Renault. Now, suddenly, with all of her acolytes gone, Elyxa could breathe freely once again.

“That felt good,” she said. “Every once in a while one must shed one’s encumbrances.”

She stepped purposefully up to Rev with a genuine offer on her mind.

“
Take this,” she gave him the ghost gun. “Use it on your friends. That will be your test of loyalty. If you can destroy your ghost friends, then I will know you’re telling the truth about your devotion to me and only me.”

Abby kept repeating to herself it was only a dream.
A bad, bad dream. She and Morris exchanged desperate glances, though neither of them spoke. The situation had exhausted the fight in them both. Only thing left now was to watch the inevitable conclusion at the hands of Elyxa the invulnerable. Elyxa the almighty. Elyxa the reprehensible.

The immortal blonde shook a finger at them and just smiled. She heard their thoughts like a radio. No translation needed. They vilified
yet respected her, as they should have from the very beginning. Maybe now they’d know the true meaning of veneration.

Rev
glanced at the ghost gun, then shot Morris an evil eye. Without words, Morris understood Rev’s intent.
I told you this was a bad idea!
Morris had no other answer but a sheepish shrug.

“
What will it be, Rev?” Elyxa purred, rubbing his upper thigh. “Eternity with me or…do I have to say it?”

Rev energized the gun
. The electronics warbled. The readout went green—the ready signal. Brutus stood his ground, his silent rage spilling over in puff after puff of smoke, billowing ever outward and then collapsing inward again and again. Rev steadied his breath and raised his hand, leveling the gun into the heart of Brutus’s smokescreen.

“No!” Abby coughed the lump of fear out of her throat. “Rev, don’t do it!”

Silence. Rev alternated his aim between Brutus and Ruby. Brutus locked on with his glowing glare. Ruby shuddered and stared, unable to move. With a click and a sigh, Rev lowered the gun.

“I can’t,” he let out a breathy confession.

Elyxa rushed and seized Abby, cinching an arm around her throat.

“Either you destroy your ghost friends, or I destroy
your living friends,” she dragged Abby, kicking and complaining, toward Morris, where she snatched him with her free hand. Her strength startled him. All the research, studying the ins and outs of immortals couldn’t prepare him for the real thing. To say she had unhallowed preternatural power would have been an understatement.

Abby fought to be heard
. Her only utterances were incoherent groans. Rev knew what she was trying to say. He had no choice. His friends would understand. He aimed again and, with a heavy heart, squeezed the trigger, panning the barrel left to right. A high squeal. A low moan. Two pops and two flashes, then both Brutus and Ruby were gone.

Abby held her breath, fighting back the tears. The second
Elyxa let her go, she stood her ground, getting in the face of the stunningly gorgeous immortal.

“You bitch!” she slapped
Elyxa in the face. Hard. Elyxa tasted blood on her upper lip. She dabbed her finger at the wound and puzzled over the crimson stain on her skin.

“What-what happened?” she stammered. A wave of shock rushed through her system. A mortal had made her bleed. She recovered from the surprise and spun on her heel, intent on crushing th
e impetuous creature’s skull. Another blow from Abby, this time a knee to the midsection, sent her to her back.

“What
did
happen?” Abby panted, watching Elyxa writhe in agony. “How did I do that?”

“Because of this,” Rev held up the ghost gun
.

“
What the hell is that, Morris!” Abby demanded. “Is that really a ghost gun? Did you actually make a ghost gun? Did Rev just shoot Brutus and Ruby with a goddam ghost gun!”

“
Now just hold on a second, Abby. It’s not
really
a ghost gun,” he smiled timidly. As he did, two otherworldly forms spun and warped into existence. One impressively large and billowy. The other little and round and stubby. Brutus and Ruby were both dead and well. “I mean it is, but it’s not
just
a ghost gun. It’s been vastly modified for nano-biochemical frequencies, specifically the adenosine triphosphate breakdown of—”

“English, Morris
,” she interrupted him. “English.”

“Oh,” he coughed into his hand. “Sorry.”

Rev offered his take.

“What he’s trying to say is the gun
has two functions. Just before I hit the trigger, I switched it to a frequency that neutralized Elyxa’s immortality. Right, Morris?”

“Well, in a way, yes. You see, it uses an inverse wave telemeter to reposition the static energy field around her mitochondria, changing the negative polarity to positive
. Then it transposes the—”

“Morris!”
Abby kept an eye on Elyxa. “You’re telling me this…all this was part of some wild plan?”

“You might say that,” he raised an eyebrow.

“And you getting caught by Aros—that was just to get the ghost gun in here?”

“Part of the plan,” Rev said.

“Brutus?” she gazed up at him. “You were just pretending to be under Elyxa’s control?”

He nodded gloomily.

“And Rev with that stupid Righteous Brothers routine—that was part of the plan?”

“Yep,” Rev announced proudly.

“So you set this whole thing up. That was pretty risky.”

“Abby, relax,” Rev said. “We planned everything to the smallest detail.”

“Uh, guys,” she gestured toward Elyxa, who sprang to her feet. The ancient being wasn’t giving up without a fight. “I think you might have forgotten one little thing.”

Elyxa
stood proud, eyeing every one of her assailants equally.

“
You might have taken away my immortality, but you haven’t taken away my power!”

Brutus was startled by a sudden
assault on his consciousness. A fireball caught him before he fell to his knees, the searing agony of being burned alive.

At the very same instant Brutus fell into his own personal hell,
Elyxa caught Morris’s gaze. He flinched at the sight in front of him. The rec room had disappeared, replaced by a mountain of hardware—wiring and circuits and microchips. The thought occurred to him that he could spend eternity in this place.

Then
Elyxa snagged Ruby with a stare that brought her crashing to the floor, all of a sudden lonelier than a black hole in space. Not in hundreds of years had she felt such abandonment.

TWENTY

REV KNEW HE HAD TO do something drastic, and do it now. Morris was a drooling statue. Brutus had become a frozen storm. And Ruby hid away like a frightened child. Rev recognized what was happening the second Elyxa placed her evil charm on Brutus. Abby knew it too. She felt Elyxa’s attempt at getting into her mind, and deflected the psychic attack with a wall of furious sound. Elyxa also tried it on Rev. He was ready for it with a barricade of modern music as well. He’d learned from the master how to defend against such mental onslaughts.

Annoyed,
Elyxa amplified her offensive on the others. She would break Rev. She would force him to be with her. And if that meant she had to destroy his friends, then so be it.

What
Elyxa didn’t count on was that Rev had Aros’s dagger, and he knew how to use it. A youthful summer romance with a magician’s assistant from a traveling vaudeville troupe was about to come in quite handy.

“Let them go,” he
brandished the dagger. “Or so help me, I’ll do it. I
will
kill you, Elyxa.”

“You don’t have the guts,”
Elyxa spoke emotionlessly.

He
angled his elbow. It was only the matter of a flick of a wrist.

“Rev,” Abby said breathlessly. “If you kill her, you’ll die too.”

“You’re right,” he answered.

“We’re not sure if you’ll come back as a ghost, remember.”

“Yeah.”

“Stop
conspiring!” Elyxa began boiling over with emotion, something she hadn’t felt in many, many eons. She thought she’d lost the capacity for such dread, and relished the moment. Deliciously on the precipice of her own end. She had an appetite for such excitement, and consuming it from the souls she’d hunted was becoming jejune and artificial. This genuine exhilaration evoked tingles in her skin, and she wanted Rev even more. “Rev, if you come to me now, I’d be willing to look past all this. Of course I’d have to kill your friends, but at least you’d live, and I know you want to live.”

Rev
relaxed his stance and lowered the dagger.

“
Hmm. Let me get this straight. You want to destroy my friends and keep me as some sort of sex slave for all eternity. That’s a hard one. I’ll have to think about it,” he looked her straight in the eyes. “How about…
no
?”

“
Constantly making jokes,” Elyxa clenched her teeth. She’d had enough. Time to teach her insolent lover a lesson. “Say goodbye to your friends!”

Rev acted on impulse,
flinging the dagger with the speed and accuracy of a ninja. The blade spun through the air, straight and true, impaling Elyxa just below the jaw. She coughed up blood and stared at the floor, then dropped to her knees, immersed in disbelief.

How? How could this have happened?
Over and over the questions tumbled and turned in her mind.
These mortals. Mere mortals. How could they—

“Rev!”
Abby took him by his hands, but the damage had been done. A bittersweet moment. When Elyxa fell to the floor, holding her throat, and as Morris and Brutus and Ruby all awoke from their individual nightmares, Rev doubled over. Abby had to use all her strength keeping him upright.

“She’s dead,” Morris stood over
Elyxa. Brutus nudged her with a giant foot, then leaned closer for a better look. Ruby didn’t need to see. She knew Elyxa was dead, that’s why she flew to Rev like a lightning bug in an electric storm. She knew. Abby knew. Morris knew, and he had a plan to save him.

“Just hold on,” he fumbled through his pack. Brutus lifted
Morris by his jacket, depositing him beside the ailing Rev.

“Thank you, old man,” Morris tipped an imaginary hat at Brutus, still rummaging through his pack. “I have a pocket defibrillator.”

“You do? Well, use it…Hurry!” Abby begged. Rev was slipping. His heartbeat slowed to a crawl. His blood pressure tanked. His pulse dropped. And he was getting so, so cold.

Morris held the
paddles against Rev’s chest and there was a little jolt, enough to bring him back for just a moment. Time for one last message.

“Abby,” he held her hand. In his eyes, she saw all that never would be. “Abby, please listen to me,” he
was short of breath. “I’m sorry about going off-script on our missions all the time. I just did what I thought was best,” he cringed at a sudden pain in his chest. “And…” he dropped his head. “And I’m sorry about hitting on you all the time. Treating you like just another dame. You aren’t just another dame. You’re Abby.”

H
e lowered his eyes. For the first time, Abby felt genuine concern for his feelings. And, for the first time, Rev
had
genuine feelings. His new heart came with a new leaf, and he wanted Abby to see he was a changed man, even though that heart was about to stop beating.

“Oh, Rev,” she clutched onto him. “
Rev don’t go! Hold on, Rev, please hold on!”

Morris power
ed up the defibrillator again and shocked Rev one more time. No effect. He could only offer Abby a grave frown.

“There’s nothing we can do. His life is tied to
Elyxa’s. And now that she’s gone, he’s going too.”

“Rev,” she leaned
in, sensing the last puffs of his breath against her cheek. “Rev, I know we haven’t been getting along lately. But I just want to let you know that I…I’ve never felt like this before. I wanted to deny it to myself, to the team, and especially to you. But I can’t. I have to tell you that I…I love you.”

She pressed her lips against his. He summoned his last
particle of strength for their connection, the synapse of their young and hungry souls. The tragically brief yet tender union left them both with dreamlike thoughts of a love that might have been, yet a love apparently never meant to be. And when the time came for them to part, she remained close, staring into those marvelous emerald gems. 

“
So you see,” she said through her tears. “I’m not afraid. I know it’s going to be okay. You’ll come back to me, won’t you, Rev? You’ll come back to me because I love you, and I know you love me.”

Rev had almost no life remaining in the depleted husk serv
ing as a corporeal cage for his spirit. He felt his soul departing that dead body, and struggled for his last words.

“I-I will,” he coughed. “I
will
come back to you…I—”

And Rever Ott died for the second time.