Spirit and Dust

2


I’VE BEEN READING spirit remnants since I was a kid. “I see dead people.” The whole shebang.

Because I was raised by a family of witches and psychics, I never thought I was crazy, though I did have some unpleasant moments on school field trips to battlegrounds of the Texas Revolution. I don’t think they’ll ever let me back into the Alamo.

My gift does tend to isolate me from the living. One, I suppose I seem a little weird—I mean, aside from my wardrobe choices. And two … Well, everyone wants to know if there’s something left of us when we die, but most people are a little afraid of the answer.

I’d stepped off the pavement and was following the psychic smears on the grass—the trail of Bruiser’s dragged body. I moved with purpose, Taylor scrambling to catch up, Gerard and Logan trailing behind as we rounded the building to the stretch leading to the small lake. There was crime-scene tape there, too, but the area must have been searched for trace evidence already, since no one stopped me from crossing it.

“Why are we headed back here?” asked Taylor, a logical question. I’d just said that I wanted to talk to the victim’s shade, and usually I did that where someone died, or while holding something of theirs.

“Because he’s not there,” I said, jabbing a thumb back to where Bruiser had met his end. “There’s the imprint of his death, but not enough of his spirit for me to talk to. The remnant must be where his body was hidden.”

Only it wasn’t. Which was weird. And when I say something is weird, it is seriously weird.

I stopped in the middle of the lawn between the dorm and the little lake. I could picture coeds sunning themselves there on a much warmer day. I didn’t have to picture Bruiser’s body, poorly hidden by a clump of bushes, because I could See him there with my extra senses. But with a death this new, I expected Bruiser’s remnant to be standing there like something out of the Haunted Mansion, or at least a mist or shade I could draw out for a chat.

He couldn’t have moved on already, because there were still shreds and tatters of his spirit wisping around the site.

Taylor had nearly run me over when I’d halted so quickly. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “You’re not going Basingstoke on me, are you?”

That was our code for “batten down the hatches,” and it shook me out of my befuddlement.

“I haven’t even done anything yet,” I said, because Gerard and Logan hadn’t caught up. “I’m not that big a wimp.”

He glanced toward the older men and lowered his voice. “Well, I don’t know what you’re Seeing. It’s not … You don’t See her, do you?”

Then I felt like a total heel, because when he’d asked me if I was going Basingstoke, he must have been imagining the worst. I mean, he’d been in that Texas desert, too.

There was no sign of a murdered college girl, but before I let either of us be relieved about that, I said, “Give me a second so I can be sure.”

With my eyes closed, the spirit traces of Bruiser were bright, vile yellow scraps of fog, eddying closer to me. I ignored them for the moment, ignored Gerard and Logan coming up to us, ignored the damp and cold seeping through my sneakers.

I perceive the spirit world through the five senses already wired into my brain, plus the emotions we all have. I’ve learned to dial the volume up or down on the psychic impressions—the visit to the Alamo taught me the importance of that skill—but mostly it’s like seeing in color. I just do it.

Harder to describe is how I interact with that layer of reality. I pictured my psychic self as a sort of ghost me living in my skin, part force field, part sensory array. When I sought out spirits, remnant traces of human souls, I imagined my psyche rushing with my blood out into the smallest capillaries of my skin to my pores, where it could mesh with the energies around me.

That was what I did in the wet grass behind the girls’ dorm in Elk Butt, Minnesota, searching for any sign of a murdered girl.

Nothing. A relief, but not in any way an end to my worry.

I opened my eyes and looked at Taylor. Gerard and Logan had joined us. “What’s the girl’s name again?” I asked.

“Alexis Maguire,” said Taylor. “She’s a senior, in her last year.”

“I don’t get any hint that she was killed here,” I told them. “But if you give me something of hers, I can tell you for sure if she’s still alive.”

Chief Logan nodded slowly. I didn’t know what he really thought of the psychic stuff, but he seemed to like my professionalism. Which was why I worked so hard at it. “We can do that.”

Then I gestured to the image half hidden in the bushes, even though they couldn’t see it. “You said Bruiser over there is the driver for the missing girl? Is that some kind of code for ‘bodyguard’? Because this guy looks more like a WWF wrestler than a chauffeur.”

“Driver and bodyguard,” said Logan. “Her father is a rich, powerful man.”

Money and enemies. So, the girl came from a political or crime family. And going by my sense of Bruiser, I was thinking crime. I was thinking enforcer.

“How long was his body hidden?” I asked, trying to figure out the weirdness of his spirit traces—not to mention the timetable for the missing girl.

Logan was obliging with answers. “All night. We know that the driver was supposed to take the girl into the city to go clubbing. She never showed up, but her friends didn’t think anything about it until she didn’t come to class this morning. A search turned up the body shortly after that.”

So Alexis was the type of girl likely to ditch the club scene but rarely miss class. Not exactly the stereotype of a mafia princess.

“Okay,” I said, rubbing my hands together, getting blood and psyche flowing. “Let’s see what Bruiser has to say.”

I crossed the short distance to where his body had lain for twelve hours or so. The grass had been trampled by the crime techs, but the ground was soft from the misty rain. I squatted and dug my hand into the dirt where blood and brains had seeped from the hole in Bruiser’s skull. Since he’d been moved there after the fact, there wasn’t more than a trace, but gray matter always made the best connection.

It should have taken just a fraction of willpower to bring him into focus, like tuning in to the right radio station. But nothing about this remnant was behaving normally.

Normally the death imprint and the actual spirit of a person are closely linked this early in the game. The spirit moves on quickly; the remnant—what most people call a ghost—erodes and fades unless something keeps it here.

This spirit was in tatters, something that usually happened with time. But the shreds were strong with personality, which I only Saw with the newly dead or remnants kept vivid by the memories of the living.

The wisps tangled around me, creeping over my skin, crawling up my sleeves and down my collar. I grabbed the threads and knit them together, exerting my will on the frayed—no, torn—edges until they started to mesh.

What could tear apart a ghost?

Suddenly it was done, and the shade of Bruiser stood in front of me—big and brawny, shadowed by his sins and screaming like the hounds of hell were after him.

My psyche was the bungee cord holding him together, and his terror earthquaked across that link with a discordant screech. Instinct said to let go, but I clamped down tighter, gripping the reins on Bruiser’s visceral panic.

“Stop it!” I shouted over the scream in my head. The agents jumped; they couldn’t see or hear Bruiser. I was just a long-legged, red-haired college freshman squatting in the soggy ground, yelling at the air.

“No one is going to hurt you,” I said, my voice less shouty but still pitched high with effort. I didn’t have to speak aloud, but thinking at him was too much work. My psyche, that invisible ghost of myself, staggered under the effort of keeping the shade knit together. If my attention slipped, he started to dissolve back into bilious fog and discordant screaming.

Seriously. Weird.

A tattered remnant should have been too weak to pull apart once I brought it together. And, yeah, with murder victims, panic was normal sometimes. But this was extreme. I didn’t like to admit there was anything ghost-related I hadn’t seen before. But this was something ghost-related I had never seen before.

Finally, the shade stopped yelling. He looked around, bug-eyed with terror, jerking with surprise when he saw me.

“Who are you?” Bruiser demanded. “What’s happening?”

“I’m here to help you.” It wasn’t a lie. He could be the vilest vile thing on the planet, but it went against my principles to let a spirit suffer on this side of eternity.

Bruiser was dressed as he had been when he died, in a dark suit and white shirt, jacket bulging over his muscles and a pretty obvious shoulder holster. The shade’s hand jerked toward his weapon when he noticed Taylor beside me and Chief Logan and Agent Gerard behind him. “What about them? Cops? I didn’t do anything.”

“They don’t care about you,” I told him with authority. You have to let freaked-out spirits know you’re in charge. “We just want to ask you some questions.”

“What’s he saying?” demanded Gerard, who clearly believed enough to boss me around while I was doing my job. “What happened to the girl?”

“Give her a chance,” said Taylor. Then, to the confused Chief Logan, he explained, “We can’t see or hear what Daisy sees and hears. Whether the ghosts see or hear us depends on the type. Also, she says murder victims are sometimes a little discomposed by the event.”

“Scrambled in the head” was what I’d actually said.

Bruiser watched Taylor with a deepening scowl. “What’s he talking about? What murder victim?”

“Focus on me,” I told the shade as he started to blur and waver. “Tell me what happened when you arrived at the dorm to pick up Alexis.”

His ugly face twisted in concentration. “It was my night to babysit the little princess. I texted her that I was waiting. When she came down, all tarted up for the club, I got out to open the door.”

With the returning memories came more of his personality, and it wasn’t a nice one. Hollow eyes raked over me. “She used to give me the same stare you’re giving me right now. I’m in big trouble if the little tease is dead, but I won’t miss her and her snooty looks.”

The agents were waiting expectantly, so I ignored that comment. For the others I said aloud, “So, you got out of the car to open the door for Alexis. What happened then?”

The shade’s face went blank. His eyes darted, looking for clues or answers. “I don’t know. How did I get here?”

Gerard ran out of patience. “Ask him who took Alexis Maguire. Was he in league with them?”

“No!” said Bruiser, who could hear the question perfectly well. “It’s my ass if anything happens to that little bitch. I’m not crossing Devlin Maguire for anything less than a private island and an army to protect it.”

“He says no,” I relayed.

“Could he be lying?” asked Chief Logan.

“No,” I said. “Spirits can’t lie.” They can misinterpret or misremember, but they can’t state an untruth.

“What do you mean, ‘spirits’?” demanded Bruiser, with way more insight than I’d have expected. “You mean me?”

Crap. Panic started to pull at him again, and I shook with the psychic strain of holding his shade together, my muscles burning as if they supported all his weight.

“Tell me what happened after you opened the door for Alexis,” I repeated, now that he was facing his end.

“Blackness,” said Bruiser, panting with fear, even though he had no lungs. “Snarling. And the black dog.”

“Dog?” I asked, totally confused. “What black dog?”

“What black dog?” echoed Taylor. Faintly I heard him ask Chief Logan, “There wasn’t any kind of dog bite on the victim?”

I lost the chief’s answer in the rising wail of Bruiser, the thug becoming one big terror-stricken tremor. “Ripping and tearing.” Then his gaze latched on to mine with a flare of hope. “You! You can send me where the dog can’t rip me up.”

His certainty about that rocked me as much as his desperation. I was already on my knees in the wet grass or my legs might have failed me. “How do you know?”

“I just do.”

He wasn’t lying. Somewhere in his scrambled mind, something told him I could help him, even if he didn’t know how.

Distantly, I registered the men talking behind me. “She doesn’t look so good,” said Chief Logan.

“She hasn’t given us anything useful yet,” snapped Gerard. “Why do I put up with this malarkey if it doesn’t get us anywhere?”

Then Taylor, crouched beside me, his voice reaching through the cold net of psyche that tied me to Bruiser. “Come on, Jailbait. It’s time to wrap this up.”

“Okay,” I said, through chattering teeth. When had my lips gone numb? I was barely upright. But I couldn’t leave the job unfinished.

Calling open the Veil wasn’t difficult. A whisper from me and it shivered into my view, ready to put things in their proper place. Our world was for the living. The dead belonged … somewhere else.

The threshold between here and eternity was only a waver in the air, like a curtain of liquid mercury. But Bruiser shrank away from it. “What is that?”

Whatever’s next, I told him silently. That was as much as I knew. I could See the Veil, but not what was beyond it. “It’s what you wanted. To get away from the black dog.”

Maybe. It was an empty promise when I didn’t know what he was talking about.

“I don’t want to go.” He swung around, pulling his gun from its holster and pointing it at me. “You can’t make me go.”

Probably not, but whatever lay beyond was happy to reach out and pull him in. I couldn’t See that, either, but Bruiser could, and his screams raked my bones.

I loosed my hold on him, my strength giving out. He dropped into the next world like a pebble into a pond. The Veil shimmered with a promised glimpse into a place outside the walls of time and space, lingered until the moment when my curiosity became a longing ache, then vanished.

It was always that way. I could almost hear a whisper. There’s something stupendous here, but not for you. Not yet.

But this time … this time, in the closing shudder in the surface tension between there and here, I thought I saw a shape. Something that might have been the inky silhouette of a lean, feral-looking dog.

That was all I got, a corner-of-the-eye impossibility. Then the recoil of all that effort to hold Bruiser together slammed a ball-peen hammer of a headache right between my eyes.

“Basingstoke,” I gasped.

But not in time for Taylor to catch me before I face-planted into the Minnesota mud.