“What the hell are you two yammering about?” Mac growled, stomping toward them, Jude hard on his heels.
Rawls released Faith and nudged her to the right until a thin man, his forehead sheathed in a bloody bandage, came into view. She froze, her mouth dropping open in startled shock. She could see the cavern wall, and Zane and Beth, through his translucent frame.
“Would you look at that?” An ugly smile spread across his transparent face and sank into vicious, muddy brown eyes. “We got a new member in our exclusive club.”
The cavern went eerily silent. A hollow pit opened up in her belly. Her legs went weak and shaky. And then an electrical buzzing took over her brain.
Her gaze dropped to the big black knife sticking out of his chest, and her legs shook harder.
The ghost laughed, his bald head gleaming wetly beneath the reflection of multiple flashlights.
“Boo!” It lunged at her and laughed harder as she shrieked and cringed back.
A howling, spinning storm spun through her mind. Slowly an image took shape. A memory.
A wood-grained kitchen . . . a man bound to a kitchen chair, his bald head gleaming beneath the dim lights . . . shouting . . . raging . . . blood pooling on the floor.
“Looks like you remember me,” Rawls’s ghost said with a smirk.
Of course she remembered him. She’d watched him die. That wasn’t something a person forgot.
“What the hell’s wrong with her?” she vaguely heard Mac ask.
Maybe she was simply dreaming, because she could swear she heard concern in his voice.
“This will be so much more fun with you in the mix.” Pachico grinned, his teeth sharp and menacing in the flickering light. He took a threatening step toward her. “Look how much fun we had in the kitchen yesterday. You remember that, right? Remember how hard you screamed?”
“—there’s this possession thing he’s got goin’.”
Alarm flared across Jude’s face, pulled the muscles of his face tight. “It has skin-walked?”
Possession. Skin-walking. That agonizing acidic pain flashed through her mind.
Oh . . . God . . . her stomach heaved. Revulsion rolled through her. This . . . this thing had been inside her? She’d never feel clean again. Drinking a dozen gallons of bleach wouldn’t come close to washing away the loathing.
“Yeah, well you’re not so peachy yourself, you condescending bitch,” the thing that used to call itself Pachico said. Its muddy, inhuman eyes promised retribution and agony. It took an ominous step forward, the hub’s stone walls shimmering within its translucency.
Possibly she should have tried to mask her revulsion and horror.
“Rawls?” Faith stumbled backward, a film of sweat, cold as ice, slicking her skin.
“Jude!” Rawls’s arms slid around her, dragging her tight against his chest.
“Here.” Jude’s voice, much closer.
Pachico’s expression darkened with rage. “You—”
His transparent image flickered, in and out, like a hazy satellite image. And then it was gone.
Still shaking, Faith turned her head. Her gaze locked on Jude’s tight, uneasy face. Slowly, her eyes dropped to his chest. A slight bulge against the fabric of his T-shirt hinted at the location of the weaving that carried his ghost-protection spell.
The hiixoyooniiheiht that had protected her too.
“You want to tell me what the hell just happened?” Mac asked, his sharp question echoing through the chamber.
How odd . . . the commander’s voice—which until now had always sounded too loud and hard and twitchingly angry—sounded comforting. Familiar. Safe. Downright trustworthy.
“What happened”—Faith’s voice climbed shrilly. She scanned the cavern for a translucent monster—“is that I tapped into Rawls’s hallucination.”
And she wanted to believe that. She wanted to believe that so bad. Shared delusions existed after all. They’d been studied. There was plenty of empirical evidence to back them up.
“You tapped into my hallucination . . .” Rawls repeated dryly. He tilted her chin and stared into her eyes, a combination of amusement and irritability on his face. “You’re not gonna seriously go with that.”
“Hey, it happens. Read up on Point Pleasant back in 1966. Shared delusions are an accepted psychological phenomenon.” She tried to interject rock-solid certainty into her voice—but alas, it faltered.
“Which you don’t believe in.” Rawls’s voice was impossibly gentle.
“I want to,” Faith whispered, scanning the hub again.
“I bet you do.” His arms tightening around her, he leaned down to kiss the top of her head.
“Does anyone have a fucking clue what these two are talking about?” Mac sounded more confused than angry now.
With a sigh, Faith straightened in Rawls’s embrace, and realized for the first time that everyone was watching them. Everyone. She glanced from curious face to curious face.