Maybe Faun Windsong had been wrong about that whole peyote thing—’cos I could tell he wasn’t astral. He’d be glowing blue, or at least sort of transparent, if he was. He could have been high, staring into the smoke like that. Unless “spirit walking” wasn’t a form of astral projection at all, and it was more of a trance, an inner journey, and Chekotah was actually more of a clairvoyant than a medium.
Although, if that were the case, if he wasn’t a medium, how had he managed to exorcise the Criss Cross Killer? Maybe “spirit walking” was just his name for meditation. After all, I was a high-level medium, and before I’d started watching the projection channel, I’d never experienced a lucid astral journey of my own.
I tossed the axe aside in disgust, and it made a couple of wobbly loops in the air before it disappeared into the wall beside Chekotah’s bed. “You were supposed to be astral,” I snapped at him. He stared straight ahead, while the Indians on the tape continued their atonal chanting and drumming.
“You know something more than you’re telling us,” I said. “I know you do. Damn it. There you are, with your stupid sage stick, and your stupid drum—and what the fuck is happening to these women?
Women who trusted you. You ought to be ashamed.” The chant droned on.
I glared at him for a few minutes, which he didn’t notice, and I considered whether or not it might be possible for me to make Chekotah’s astral body come out and play. His astral body existed—it was just lined up with his physical body at the moment. He was already in some kind of trance. Maybe if I focused, I could pull it out of there and make it give me a straight answer.
Where I should grab him, though? That was the question. I don’t really like touching other people. Not people I don’t intend to sleep with, anyway—and he might be some new age, ethnic prettyboy, but given what I’d learned about his reputation, I’d sooner head over to Lyle’s room for a “quickie” than do the nasty with him.
His arm seemed impersonal enough. I made a grab for it, and my hand passed right through. Damn. I squatted next to him, and I glared some more. “I went through all this trouble to talk to you,” I said, “you’d damn well better come out here and say something.” I sucked white light again and grabbed for his arm.
I might as well have tried to grab the sage smoke. In fact, that would’ve probably been more effective. At least in the physical, when you pass your hand through smoke, it moves. Grabbing Chekotah’s arm? Nothing.
So he couldn’t hear me, wasn’t going to talk to me, didn’t feel it when I grabbed him, and didn’t look like he was going to do anything but sit there and look miserable. Talk about a bust.
The floor where I stood felt too solid to sink through, as if Chekotah’s protections still held. I turned around to head back the way I came, and froze to the spot.
There was a door next to Chekotah’s bed that hadn’t been there before, and framed in that doorway, a blood-covered woman stood, holding the astral axe.
“Are you okay? Ma’am? Ma’am?” Thank God for cop-mode or I swear I’d just shut down like an unplugged blender. I’d never injured a civilian in the line of duty, and frankly, given that I almost never need to draw my weapon, I thought I’d retire free from that particular privilege. Leave it to me to nail someone with a careless toss of an astral axe.
If she even was astral.
She had the bluish, whitish, transparent and glowy look that Faun Windsong had when I’d first discovered Faun in the astral. The blood…well, that was different. It looked like the axe had cracked her sternum right in half. The blood looked black. It spread over the front of her flowing white dress in a rapidly-spreading stain, with sparks playing over the edges of it as she moved. It was hard to take my eyes off that bleeding, sparking wreck of a wound, but for just a second, I did. Long enough to determine she had no silver cord.
She flickered like a ghost from a B-movie and appeared beside Chekotah. The axe stayed there beside the ghost door, dropping first on the top of the blade, like it had actual weight and heft, and then dissolving into the floor as it tipped over sideways, gone by the time the handle would have hit the floor. Flicker—her, staring down at him with a grief-stricken look on her face. Flicker—her hand reaching toward his hair to stroke it.
“Ma’am?”
No reaction. If she was a ghost and I was astral, she probably couldn’t hear me. Different planes, right? Er…maybe. Then she wound her hand in Chekotah’s hair and tugged—and his hair moved.
She could touch him.
Her face contorted, and at first I thought it was just the facial acrobat-ics people do when they’re gonna start bawling, but then I realized that she wasn’t exactly sad. It was more like she was…triumphant.
She pulled harder, and Chekotah’s hair starting glowing where it was wrapped around her hand.
“Step away,” I barked, because her body language told me she’d be happy to tear the astral hair right out of his head.
She ignored me and yanked.
Chekotah’s head blurred. Or maybe it stretched. His physical body was just sitting there, like it didn’t feel anything at all—but the top of his head was stretching like a piece of Silly Putty.
“Police, step back.” Useless, I know, since it carried zero weight in the astral—and besides, she couldn’t even hear me. But that’s the thing about training. You repeat it enough times, and when push comes to shove, your body goes through the motions for you while your mind is busy looping on the words
holy shit
.
Since I now knew how to do a wristlock from every conceivable angle, I grabbed for her wrist. I must not have thought I’d actually make contact, because it shocked the hell out of me when I grabbed, pulled and twisted, and ended up with a bloody ghost in restraint.
Chekotah’s head snapped back to normal. Maybe he felt it—I think he sagged forward a little. Or maybe he was just getting tired of sitting there staring into his smoke.
The ghost cried out, or maybe she roared. It wasn’t a human sound from a human throat. It was like feedback and static channeled through a disembodied voicebox. Vinyl tie. I reached in my pocket to grab it, but right as my hand closed around the spot where it would be, I realized that I was in civilian clothes, so of course I wouldn’t have the vinyl tie with me.
At that moment, the moment I doubted myself, I lost my grip on the bloody ghost. She flickered and disappeared.
I’d touched her? Maybe she’d been able to hear me after all, and she’d just been ignoring me—at least until I subjected her to the ol’ snap-and-pop. A chill ran through my astral body. I hadn’t realized it was possible to be astrally cold. I scanned the room. The door? Gone.
The axe? Gone. Chekotah? Useless excuse for a man. Some big-time shaman he was, if he didn’t realize blood ghost and me were having a wrestling match right behind his head.
Unless she’d done something to him. Messed him up, emotionally, mentally. As the thought occurred to me that I needed to get a better look at Chekotah and make sure he was all right, the room changed, and I was right up against him. “Can you hear me?” I hollered in his ear. Either he was paralyzed, or he couldn’t. I took a look at his hair.
It seemed to still be there. Not even messed up. Whatever had just happened, it must have left his physical intact and instead affected his subtle bodies. It had sure as hell looked like his physical body was stretching, but physical molecules and cells and atoms couldn’t actually do that.
At least I hoped not.
I circled around him to try to get a good look at his eyes. Thanks to my time in the nuthouse, I knew crazy eyes when I saw ’em, and it looked to me like there was someone home upstairs in Bert Chekotah’s head…someone who wasn’t doing anything particularly useful at the moment, but at least the attic apartment was occupied.
I was itching to get back, but I figured I should do a final check for injuries—astral injuries—if there even was such a thing. I checked him out the best I could. Face, hands, body, all normal. As I was getting ready to fly back to the relatively safe confines of my own skin, I noticed the light catch on something that had been camouflaged by the checkerboard pattern on the yoke of Chekotah’s traditional native smock.
I squared myself up to it and looked harder. It was glistening.
He’d been slimed.
By the blood ghost? Or by me? The goo glistened just below the spot where I’d grabbed her in a wristlock. Since Chekotah was in the same position, I attempted a reenactment to see if I could tell where the ectoplasm had originated. It had all happened so fast it was hard to tell, even if I hovered my hand around the back of Chekotah’s head and tried to imagine that eerie stretching effect. Which I had totally seen…hadn’t I?
I checked out my hand. It was dry. So it couldn’t be my hand-juice on Chekotah’s shirt—evaporating, growing smaller even as I tried to figure out where it had come from. In fact, I didn’t even think I was capable of producing ectoplasm while I was astral, because it was a physical manifestation of my power. That’s what Dreyfuss had said.
And he wasn’t being a smartass at the time, either.
Could I, though? If I tried? Both times I’d slimed myself, I’d been wound up tight with anxiety and siphoning white light for all I was worth. I currently had anxiety in spades—so I opened up the flood-gates, and I pulled.
My astral body glowed, and a wave of disorientation washed over me. But my hand stayed dry.
While I was busy sucking light, someone managed to approach the room in the physical just as I was too dazzled by white light to notice.
I flinched at the sound of a door opening, and Faun Windsong slipped into the room. “Bert?” she loud-whispered, in a voice that conveyed
I know I’m interrupting you so I’ll do a funny voice to make up for
it.
“Did you want me to chant with you? Maybe it’d help you focus.”
Seriously—they talked like that in the privacy of their own room?
Do
you want me to chant with you?
Although I guess I shouldn’t throw stones, given the fact that Jacob was probably telling me to focus on my forehead or my collarbone or my elbow at that very moment.
Chekotah’s shoulders sagged. “It’s not going to help. The problem is me. The ancestors won’t talk to me because…my heart is closed to them.”
Maybe so…but the top of his head seemed pretty accessible.
Faun approached and knelt beside him just beyond the fringe of his mat. “How can you say that, after everything you do for us—all of us—here?” She took his hand and wove their fingers together. “Taking over for Dr. Park when he was too much of a coward to deal with Five Faith. That took courage. Your heart isn’t closed. It’s stress that’s bothering you, pure and simple. That’s all it is.” She moved behind him and began to rub his shoulders, and I backpedaled until I was flat against the wall from my sheer horror at the thought that I might be about to witness Faun Windsong’s seduction technique.
“Did you ever think that maybe the missing women brought it on themselves?” she said. “They never fit in here. None of them. The students were always complaining about Debbie….” Brought it on themselves? I’d had myself convinced that Faun Windsong was an innocent bystander in this whole mess…but hearing her talk when she thought no one was listening but Chekotah made me wonder. I was straining forward to make sure I caught every bit of their “private” conversation when a sudden lurch knocked me on my astral ass. Blood ghost, back for more? I tried to rally, to whip around and face her, but before I knew it I was flying through the ball pit so fast I thought I’d end up with skidmarks on my forehead.
My flight ended with a bodyslam into the physical that left me gasping for air. Blood ghost hadn’t dragged me down; my own silver cord had.
“Vic?” Jacob shook me by the shoulder. “Are you with me?” My head spun. Not like Auracel-spins, and not even like sucking-too-much-white-light spins. It was the feeling, I suppose, of having my astral and my physical lined up so suddenly, and so violently, that my subtle bodies were reverberating like a big Tibetan gong.
“Lyle called. He said Katrina was heading for their room.”
“No kidding—and she was saying some pretty fucking incriminating shit.” I pushed myself up into a sitting position and my hand landed in something wet. Actually, no. My hand
was
wet. Ectoplasm.
“Sonofa—why’d you pull me back now, right when they were getting to the good stuff?”
“What was I supposed to do? Leave you standing there so Katrina could see you questioning Bert in the astral?”
“See me? She couldn’t see me in the astral if I poked her in the eye.”
“I figured you’d rather play it cautious.”
Right…like I always do. “Chekotah wasn’t astral. And Faun couldn’t see me.”
Jacob took my hand by the wrist—gently, for all that we were currently none too thrilled with each other—and turned it palm up so he could see the psychic jelly cupped in my hand. I sighed hard and gestured for him to go ahead and touch it. He dragged his finger over my palm, and I shivered.
“Why did this happen again?” he asked. “Is this how I’ll know that you’re really astral and not just asleep?”
I almost said, “How should I know?” in a fit of snippiness, but I had to admit, it was a legitimate question—and if I didn’t know, who else would? “I don’t think there’s any way for you to tell if I’m projecting or not. I didn’t slime myself on either of my other trips…so this must’ve happened here in the physical while I was trying to see if I could summon ectoplasm there in the astral.” I explained the whole thing to him—the astral axe, the blood ghost, the slime on the back of Chekotah’s blouse, and even the stretched head. I felt a little crazy talking about that last part. But you never know which piece is going to make the whole puzzle come together.
Jacob didn’t say anything when I finished. He just sat there cradling my hand, which was long-dry but still a little bit cold, and he stared at me.
“What?” I said finally.
“Do you realize how big this is?”
“I dunno. What, specifically?”
“The ability to travel anywhere, to see a location without being physically present, to hear a private conversation?” He made it sound awfully empowering. What it had felt like to me was that I was flailing around, making up the rules as I went along.