Shadows Fall (39 page)

“Yeah, man. Will do. I’ll call around.”

“Thanks.” Charlie hung up without further discussion. He wanted to keep his line open in case Titus called in. He paced the kitchen for a few more seconds before giving in to his frustration. “Fuck this.”

Grabbing his keys and slinging his badge chain around his neck, Charlie started toward the door. When he passed the wall mounted light fixture in the foyer, it popped and rained a shower of sparks down on him. He spun away, dropped into a crouch and crossed his arms over his head to protect himself from getting burned.

With that initial explosion, all the lights within the apartment winked out, one by one, and the inside was only illuminated by the dull glow of the balcony light filtering in through the vertical blinds. Charlie peeked at Sonny; he was still on the phone with his back to Charlie, looking out over the cemetery green. If it was an outage, why hadn’t all the lights gone off?

Once the sparks had fizzled, Charlie cautiously lowered his hands and looked toward the door, seeing the faint gleam from the hallway lights coming through the cracks. When he turned back to face the empty room, he stiffened and let out a sharp shout as he received the shock of his life.

Standing before him, looking as pale as…well, a ghost, was Brandon Meyers. He was all dark hair, bright blue eyes and thin, frail limbs. He was ganglier when he died than he had been before his HIV—Charlie had seen pictures. Here, he just looked sickly and sad and…“What the fuck am I looking at?” Charlie said in a ragged whisper when he realized he’d just been sitting there analyzing the physical appearance of a ghost, rather than analyzing the actual
appearance of a ghost.

Pulse pounding in his ears, Charlie squeezed his eyes shut and counted to ten. When he opened them again, Brandon was still standing there, hip cocked, eying Charlie with a reproachful stare. As if turning around to find a
dead person
in one’s home wasn’t a reason to fucking freak out a little.

A glance at the balcony told Charlie that Sonny was still blissfully unaware of what was happening if, in fact, Charlie wasn’t hallucinating. His hairs stood on end, and he got that same dizzy, disoriented feeling he’d gotten at SevenTek. Maybe that was just his body’s way of telling him something was wrong.

“What do you want?” Charlie whispered. He wasn’t proud of the way his voice shook, but they hadn’t covered this at the academy.

The apparition said nothing, only stared.

“Fuck. You did this. Are the lights even really out or are you making me see this?” Charlie ran trembling hands through his hair. He had a newfound appreciation for Titus, knowing that he dealt with this every day of his life, a hundredfold.
Titus
. “Something’s happened to him, hasn’t it? That’s why you’re here?”

When he still got no response, Charlie surged to his feet from where he’d still been crouching on the floor. “Fucking tell me!” He reached for Brandon, but his hands closed around cold, empty air, just before an electric shock jolted him back.

He clutched his chest because it almost felt like he had a small heart attack. He knew it was all an illusion, but it felt so incredibly real. “Okay, I get it. I’ll shut the fuck up and listen.”

In the span of a blink, Brandon appeared as he had been when Charlie had seen him on the slab in the morgue. Even more pallid than before, his arms were adorned with deep, precise cuts—the ones the killer had used to bleed him dry—and he had the marks on his neck that Charlie now knew spelled out ‘monster.’
I wonder what the Slayer would carve on Titus’s neck…

The thought, having risen unbidden from the depths of his mind, startled him. Had he really come up with that, or was Brandon trying to tell him something? “You are, aren’t you?”

Brandon looked over his left shoulder, and when Charlie followed his gaze, he let out a gasp and rushed forward, only to be immobilized by some invisible force. Behind Brandon was a hazy, flickering image of Titus. His blue eyes were huge and round with fear and his forearms were carved up similar to Brandon’s.

Charlie let out an anguished roar. “Is this what’s going to happen, or has it happened already? Answer me, you fucker!”

His chest constricted with impotent rage when Brandon still couldn’t be moved to answer him. There he was, yelling at a ghost. He thought, he
knew
, Brandon wanted to tell him about Titus, but Charlie just couldn’t get through to him, nor Brandon to Charlie. It wasn’t as if he knew anyone else in the world like Titus. The man was one of a kind. Who knew he’d need to find
another
person who could talk to ghosts?

Wait
… “Hester,” he breathed, as the answer hit him like a stack of books. He was an idiot not to have thought of it already. No sooner than he had the thought, the apparition and the projection of Titus faded and disappeared, and the lights came back on as if nothing ever happened.

Charlie had to find Hester. He could only pray that she was still camped out in front of Titus’s house instead of wandering the city. He’d check Uptown on the way, on the unlikely chance that Titus had just locked himself in the stockroom to take inventory, blaring music through his headphones and ignoring phone calls. Charlie hoped to god that was the case, but the hairs standing up on the back of his neck told him otherwise.

He grabbed his spare apartment key from a kitchen door and dashed out to the balcony. He tossed the key on the table in front of Sonny, and spoke over his shoulder. “I’m gonna go look for Titus. Keep trying to run down Sever. Use that to lock the place if you leave.

Not waiting for an answer, Charlie sprinted to the front door in three strides and tore it open. He tried to control his breathing, but he was still feeling dizzy with panic, because the pulse thumping through his brain sounded a lot like a clock ticking…counting down to God knew what.

* * * *

Closed up tight, Uptown Java was completely dark inside, with no signs of life. It was the middle of the night, after all. Charlie tried the front door, futilely pulling against the deadbolt. Giving up, he walked down the street and rounded the corner of the block of buildings, making his way to the back alley.

He scoffed when he saw that Larry-the-asshole, as Titus fondly referred to him, had parked his ugly car back there again. He did that so he could walk to Center City and get drunk, and not have to worry about DUIs. While Charlie was glad the guy wasn’t driving, he knew the illegal parking pissed Titus off to no end. Maybe one of these days he’d have one of the Field Services units drive by and give ol’ Larry a ticket.

Bringing his mind back to the task at hand, Charlie tried the back door of the shop. Of course, it was locked up just as securely. He glanced around helplessly for anything that could give him a clue as to where Titus had gone. When he turned back around, he caught sight of a swath of green stuck underneath the corner of the dumpster.

He picked up the crumpled material and spread it out. It was Titus’s work polo. He didn’t wear it every day—he didn’t require it of his employees either—but he’d been wearing it that afternoon. He always said it was good advertising. Charlie lifted the shirt to his face and smelled it. Lots of things could be detected from smell: gunpower, blood…semen, so many things. All he got was a lungful of the clean, masculine smell of Titus. His body ached even as his heart rate skyrocketed because he knew there was no good reason for Titus to have dropped his shirt.

Gotta find Hester. Now.
Charlie tucked the shirt into his back pocket, leaving it hanging down like a bandana, he dashed off a quick text to Sonny to let him know where he was headed…just in case. As soon as he’d pocketed his phone again, he sensed movement behind him. His fingers drifted to the butt of his Glock, resting in his hip holster.

When he heard the scrape of a shoe on the pavement, he drew and whirled around in one smooth motion. He kept his index finger resting along the outside of the trigger guard. A good cop wouldn’t pull on an unknown assailant with his finger on the trigger, too much potential for an accident. With one eye closed, he sighted down the barrel and locked gazes with a wide-eyed, pale Hester.

“Jesus Christ!” Charlie snapped, lowering his weapon and reholstering it. “Mrs. Faa, you can’t sneak up on me like that.”

She blinked rapidly, looking around as if she couldn’t figure out where she was or how she’d gotten there. For the first time since Charlie had met her, her salt-and-pepper hair was loose, fanning out from her head in wild waves. It was so long, it brushed her hips when she wore it down like that.

She was dressed in sweatpants and a rumpled T-shirt and, for once, she wore no jewelry. It almost looked like she had just rolled out of bed and come straight to the shop. If he didn’t know better, Charlie would’ve been sure she was sleepwalking, from the way her eyes were wide and glassy, the pupils having swallowed up the irises.

Unfortunately though, Charlie knew just what that look meant. He’d seen the same one on Titus’s face just before the seizure, and several times before and since. Hester was seeing the dead, probably hearing them too. That was perfect; it was what he needed her to do.

He opened his mouth to ask her what she was seeing, but before he could make a sound, she turned on the heel of her heavy boot and took off at a brisk walk. Charlie stood there gaping for about three-point-five seconds before he ran after her.

Leaving the alley, Hester wove her way through the plaza that separated Uptown Java’s building block, and the one beside it, until she made it out onto Tryon Street. Charlie was sure that letting her walk near a major road in the grips of whatever trance she was under was not a smart idea, so he grabbed her shoulder when he caught up.

She shook him off and walked faster, heading south. Luckily for both of them, it was so late at night—or early in the morning—that the drunken weekend crowd had dispersed and the traffic had dwindled to the occasional car now and then. Charlie called after her as discreetly as he could, not wanting to draw the attention of the few people who were out at that time of night.

Moving with purpose, Hester kept on with dogged determination. Her movements were stiff and jerky though, and again it brought to mind a sleepwalker. Charlie might’ve had a heart attack when she suddenly veered to the right, crossing Tryon, continued south and immediately crossed Fifth Street. All he could do was jog alongside her and try to make a big enough roadblock for oncoming cars.

She came to a dead stop somewhere between a noodle shop and Starbucks. Appearing bewildered, she blinked rapidly and looked around her. She ran gnarled hands through her long hair and locked eyes with Charlie. He wasn’t sure he was relieved or disappointed that he could finally see the pale gold of her irises.

“Hester?” he asked with a hint of caution. Disoriented people could sometimes lash out the innocent.

“You,” she answered. “You’re Titus’s Police man, the one who sleeps in his bed.”

Charlie was sure he turned about ten shades of red. He didn’t want to talk to Titus’s grandmother about their sex life—especially not when the man’s life could be hanging in the balance. “That’s me. Hester, do you know why you came here?”

“I…I think I was following the boy. The one with the blue eyes who looks like our Titus.”

Charlie shivered at her use of ‘our’ and of the fact that she’d just described Brandon Meyers. “Do you remember coming to the coffee shop? You came to me by the back door, but you didn’t seem to recognize me.”

“Wasn’t paying much attention to where. I followed the boy, didn’t see much else.” She sniffed. “Yer not much to look at anyway.”

Charlie rolled his eyes, but he was secretly relieved that Hester was acting like her old self again—mostly. She turned away from him and walked a couple of steps in the opposite direction, stopped, turned and walked back. Again, she took in her surroundings with a confused expression, like she couldn’t find something that was supposed to be there.

“This is where he wanted me to come,” she said in a small voice. “I don’t see anything.”

She took a step to the side toward the building, then two steps back towards the curb. Turning to face Charlie, she looked up and spun in a slow circle. Then she did the same while looking down. “Wait. What is that?”

Following her line of sight, Charlie saw that they were standing on a large storm drain. The metal grate covered a good ten-foot section of sidewalk. Looking down at it for the first time since God knew when, he realized he never noticed how dizzying the effect was—standing over some kind of bottomless pit, held up by what
looked
like nothing more than thin metal mesh. The stuff seemed flimsy, but Charlie knew it was strong enough to hold up the pedestrians who walked across it each day.

“What’s down there?” Hester asked.

With his body trembling with nervous energy, Charlie was finding it hard to move at the old woman’s lethargic speed. He sighed and gestured down at the grate. “Charlotte has an elaborate storm water drainage system, using manmade pipes in conjunction with natural watershed and old mine shaft drains.”

“And people can go down in these?”

“Well, yeah, I guess. I mean, it’s certainly not advisable, but it’s technically public property so we can’t stop it. I guess maybe some of the more determined or more curious people have found their way into them.”