Spook Squad (39 page)

The physical body looked terrible, though. It wasn’t the first corpse I’d ever seen, and it probably wouldn’t be the last, but the fact that I’d had several conversations with her over the past few months must have led me to gloss over the fact that she was dead. Seeing the empty shell brought home her death with way more impact than chatting with her ghost. The body was half-submerged in the fluid, which smelled like the stuff they keep the combs in at the barber shop. It was covered by an opaque plastic sheet drawn up to its chest—to protect its modesty or spare us the shock of seeing both death and nudity? Since there was something distinctly brain-shaped in a Tupperware container beside her tank, I presumed they’d made a cranial incision. The cut was hidden by her lank blonde hair, combed straight back in a style in which she never would have worn it. The stitched ends of an autopsy Y-incision did show over each collarbone, angled out to her shoulders like grisly bra straps.

I considered the sheer deadness of the form on the table, and then I pulled down a fresh stream of white light, looking deeper. No one was home. The thing before us was nothing but thawed meat.

“This isn’t the anchor,” I said. “Jennifer Chance was pragmatic. What use would she have for a dead body—even one that used to be hers? We need to turn on the TV to get her attention.”

“Let the psyactive kick in before you do that,” Jacob suggested.

My seized up calf muscles were bringing tears to my eyes. “Oh, they’re locked and loaded, believe you me.”
 

Jacob looked at the TV and frowned. He was having cold feet about firing it up, but he didn’t second-guess me. Not now, not in front of Bly, and not when we’d established that the two of them were going to follow my lead no matter what. If our roles were reversed, it would eat me up to watch him march head-first into danger too. But that’s what we both signed up for—and that’s what made us lousy partners for the sorts of regular people we were trying to protect.

I knelt before the TV and peered into the modified speaker well. I could twirl the settings, screw them up so that neither of us was at an advantage, but what if I ended up tipping the balance so the ghost got a better signal than I did? I should have been practicing all this time, gotten to know this thing inside and out, rather than deliberately ignoring it. Of course that was only dawning on me now, because when FPMP Washington got here I could kiss the GhosTV goodbye.

What was it anyway that made the goons decide to take another sweep? They’d been pretty damn thorough the first time around. Had they found something on one of the computers they took? There was nothing there they couldn’t have seen ages ago from the servers. The only source of intel I could think of was Jennifer Chance herself. Dreyfuss must have mentioned having access to her body outside the flower shop, somewhere she was eavesdropping. She’d realized it was a liability and she prompted her flying monkeys to come and take it away.

But how?

Not through Richie or Laura, since they had Santiago watching their thought patterns. But it wasn’t as if the three of us were the only mediums on the planet. I imagined Chance pushing against people to see if any subtle bodies were easy to jar loose, like an opportunistic criminal trying the doors on a line of parked cars to see if someone with a nice stereo might have neglected to lock up…like the dead guy down on Maxwell Street. If she was currently hunkered down in a living body, she could be anywhere by now, and how would I find her? Despair churned in my gut, despair and futility and a horrible sense of helplessness, because if I couldn’t do this thing, then no one could.
 

Bly cleared his throat and said, “I could take the edge off that discouragement.”

“Nah. I need all the edge I can get.” I looked at him, the eyes showing above his mask round in their sockets of muscle beneath his transparent skin. And I looked to Jacob, with his bulging webwork of veins. These things were so visually clear that my talent was off the charts, and yet I couldn’t do a damn thing about Jennifer Chance if she wasn’t fucking there. I tried to stand and my cramped legs didn’t comply. I cracked my knee on the plastic-covered tile and spun awkwardly on it to glare at the body.

And then I saw it. A glint. Hard to spot among the dangling plastic suffused with its white ambient glow, but when I cocked my head, when I squinted, I saw it again. A tether—hair thin, practically invisible—extending from the body’s solar plexus.

When Bert Chekotah compared the connection to a spider’s web, I’d figured it was more of his contrived Native American phraseology. But that was exactly what it looked like, one of those long, thin, single strands you don’t notice until it brushes against your face. Bly gasped—he felt the revelation as acutely as I did. Jacob looked between us, gleaning some idea of what was going on in my head by body language alone. I nodded to him, and that was enough. I wasn’t sure how sensitive this thin cord was to vibration, but in case it was the equivalent of a ghostly listening device, I opted to speak in our micro-expression language rather than give out any information.

White light. I pointed to the ceiling, then to my forehead, and then made a drawing down motion. Jacob nodded. Good. Bly nodded too. Excellent. We were as ready as we were ever going to be. I fixed the position of the slender cord in my mind, and then I closed my eyes and opened the faucet wide.

Although it’s been explained to me, I can’t claim I technically understand what the crampy psyactive does. I felt it, though, like my capacity for white light had been doubled, and my ability to draw it in reached farther and pulled harder. I flooded myself, checked to see if it felt okay, then sucked down even more. My inner vision went so bright that everything was white, and I could no longer tell if my eyes were open or closed. I opened them experimentally, and everything was white on white, and yet I could see it all with a vitreous clarity. Jacob, Bly, the plastic, the dormant TV, and the body. The spider’s web blazed as if it was the most solid thing in the room, like anyone who walked through it would fall into two halves like a big, ripe cheese. I held up my hands to keep Bly and Jacob where they were—probably looking like a sweaty faith healer, kneeling there in my damp shirt with my arms outstretched—and the three of us went completely still.

The slender silver cord glittered.

I wasn’t seeing an astral cord, I realized, but something that led to a different subtle body, the stuff that ghosts are made of. This cord could lead us to Jennifer Chance…though it would be a heck of a lot more convenient if it could reel her in. I looked at it, got a feel for it—sharp, yes, and strong too. But delicate, in a brittle way. Like glass, something that could cut just as easily as it could shatter. Maybe Chekotah was able to brush it away, but he’d had Hugo Cooper in the room with him while he did so. I couldn’t risk severing the tie while Jennifer Chance was out and about. Because what if that left some poor medium huddled in the corner of their own mind while Chance ran the controls? Nope, I needed her here, where I could see her. So I stared hard at that cord, really fixed on it, and mentally, I pulled.

Nothing.

Nothing but a familiar throbbing in my skull, anyway. It was the Triple-Shot scene all over again. Me straining fit to burst a brain vein, and no reaction whatsoever in the spirit realm. Only now I was twice as hopped up. Probably twice as likely to rupture something important by pushing too hard in the wrong direction. The more I thought about it, the more I realized it felt exactly like Triple-Shot, and me sitting here mentally grasping at Jennifer Chance wasn’t going to get us anywhere at all.

Bly cleared his throat again. I glanced over my shoulder. Between the thin-skin and the surgical mask, I couldn’t read his expression. “Despair doesn’t really give you an edge.”

“I’m only going to say this once,” I told him, enunciating each word very clearly, since he couldn’t see my face. “If I don’t suddenly feel like a crazy female egomaniac to you, then stop nosing around my head.”

Jacob’s eyebrows went up. Mine, too. I wasn’t usually that direct. And what the hell happened to teamwork?

“Gotcha.” Bly didn’t sound particularly threatened, but I supposed I’d made my point. “And by the way, anger’s a lot more useful than despair.”

Oh. There was a reason I was suddenly so pissed off.

While at least he told me when he was tweaking my emotions, thanks to him shifting my despair into something more active, I wasn’t particularly mollified by the full disclosure. I gave him a very nasty look, then turned back to glare at the silver strand, too. Attempting to think at it was getting me nowhere, so what did that leave me? I aimed some white light at it…but that was just a variation on pulling at it with my mind. What, then? Pluck it like a guitar string and see if I got an answer?

I reached toward it, fully expecting my finger to pass straight through, like it would any other ghost or repeater—and got the psychic equivalent a 110-volt shock. I pulled my hand away and shook it, expecting the tip of my latex glove to open up like a banana peel, but the glove was untouched. I shook my tingling hand again, and muttered, “Sonofa….”

The word escaped me in a cloud of frost. The surgical mask trapped it, mostly, but some shot out around the edges, blowing down the front of my neck and up my cheekbones, fogging the scene that was already sparkly white to my inner vision. Two gasps followed. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who could see the frost. And then a spike of fear knifed at my chest…except a detached, pissed-off part of me knew I wasn’t actually afraid. “Get a grip, Bly, you’re leaking. Put a lid on it.”

“Shit. Oh, shit.” Not exactly the stalwart ex-PsyCop federal agent I’d come to know and tolerate. At least he figured out some way to stem the flow, leaving my gut reeling with the abrupt roller coaster of anger and fear that settled finally at a cool, clear lucidity. I looked for the strand again, and it was plainly visible now to my mind’s eye, sharp and bright. Now that I’d touched the thing we were acquainted, and there was no squinting and searching required. Even though I was crawling with white light, I sucked down some extra, and I sent it toward my fingertips as I reached for the strand to give it a tug.

I’d braced for the contact, and this time the rush was different. Instead of the silver strand zapping me, I was the one who zapped. My white light raced down the strand like flame through a fuse. My gut screamed at me to stop, but I couldn’t, not now. Chance was surely onto me, and if I hesitated, she’d ensure that the next thing FPMP Washington hauled away was my drugged carcass.
 

No hesitation, then—I couldn’t afford it. I closed my eyes, opened up the top of my head, and let white light flood in to replenish whatever juice was getting pulled up the strand. It thundered through me, and my physical eyes snapped open. There was my physical hand, steady in its physical latex glove. And around that, another hand, oversized. And another, with longer fingers. Around those, still more. Multiple subtle bodies, all slightly off-kilter from the physical, like a stack of misaligned transparencies. I had no idea which body was required to reel in the ghost of Jennifer Chance, so I gathered up my will, and using every damn one of those hands, I pulled.

All the air whooshed out of the room—and the heat, and the light, too. The plastic around us went dusky blue, flexing in as if it was breathing. Jacob’s breath gusted out around his mask in a visible puff. Bly’s too.

And then I felt the impact.

Chance’s ghost roared up the silver strand and slammed against me like lightning. She tried to slip into me like a coat, one arm, then the other, but my subtle bodies were too fortified for her to stay put. Every part of her that slid in slid right back out, while I was there jerking around like I’d just invented a new punk dance. It wasn’t enough to resist her ghost, though. I needed to command it. To break it.

“Oh God,” Bly called out, “she’s here!”

I ignored him. “More light,” I told Jacob, and held out my hand. He was there, right there, and without hesitation he locked fingers with me and squeezed—I’d feel it in my knuckles later, I realized, just like I’d feel my calf muscles later—but for now I was so much more than physical that I transcended mundane things like pain, and cold, and fear. I saw him as the Cro-Magnon Red Energy Super-Stiff with one of my subtle bodies, and with another, as Jacob, just Jacob, the man I loved with all my heart, and trusted with my life. As the universe fed white light energy through my head, he pushed tingly tactile energy up my arm. When the ghost of Jennifer Chance tried to slip into that arm, she yowled.

“More,” I gasped, and the tingle became a buzz, and then a roar. I knocked away my surgical mask to try and catch my breath, and my words streamed out on a thick white cloud. “Keep gathering it while you—” I didn’t need to explain. He was already doing it.

I didn’t have the fine control to grab Chance with the proper subtle body, so I went at her with all of them in a big, ungainly sweep. Her arm was flailing near mine, trying to align, and I grabbed it by the wrist. It turned into jelly, which drooled to the floor. Somewhere behind us Bly was retching, but I shut him out, grateful he was at least keeping his terror out of my head, even if he couldn’t keep his lunch in his gullet. The arm-gooping didn’t seem to do Chance any damage. She pulled herself together and tried one more time to jump into me, but she bounced off as if an electrical force field was in place.
 

Her eyes glowed with rage—literally glowed, with a crackling silvery light—and then, since she couldn’t get into me, she swung around and took a stab at getting into Jacob. It was a sight to behold. She dove in hard, and where she touched him, she dematerialized. It was like watching someone fling a human-shaped water balloon against him and seeing it explode. He rocked back, ectoplasm raining around us, and I squeezed his hand tight enough that he couldn’t pull it away. “You’re fine!” I called to him. “She can’t do anything to you, not a damn thing.”

Unfortunately, Chance could hear me as well as Jacob could. The ethers gathered, and the ghost re-formed yet again…and then those ghostly eyes lit on Jack Bly.