“And how do you think I can prove that?” A glance showed him that Oscar was looking even more miserable.
“I don’t know. All I know is that it isn’t fair—”
“Life isn’t fair, buddy. Why should death be?” But then the way Oscar’s voice had broken off tugged at Logan’s attention, and he looked at the spirit again.
The spirit named Oscar seemed to be enveloped in a strange, multicolored aura, all the intensely bright colors swirling and dancing around him.
Logan didn’t see auras.
“What the hell?”
Oscar shook his head slightly, as though trying to throw off an unwelcome distraction, while at the same time his expression was straining as though trying to hear something. And then he looked frightened. “I . . . I don’t . . . I don’t . . . Oh, damn, there won’t be time. Promise me, Logan. Promise me you’ll come back here and help me prove Lucy’s innocent.”
“Come back from where? Oscar—”
“Prosperity. When you come back from Prosperity.”
A weird sensation of unease was beginning to crawl over Logan’s skin, unfamiliar and distinctly unpleasant. And his head had begun to pound. “What are you talking about, Oscar? I’m not going anywhere. My job—”
“You have to take a leave or quit or something. You have to go to Prosperity, Logan. You have to help them.” Now he looked terrified. “We’ll all be in danger if you can’t help them stop it. The living and the dead.”
Logan wondered abstractedly what sort of danger could or would trouble a spirit. Before he could even form the words to ask, Oscar and his rainbow aura vanished like a soap bubble.
Decision out of my hands, Logan told himself with relief, ignoring the stab of guilt.
“Nothing I could’ve done anyway,” he muttered, straightening and turning to head back home.
After only two steps, he jerked to a stop and stood very, very still, only his eyes moving as he scanned the park in front of him.
There were people moving around, just as there had been before. Couples holding hands, dog walkers, a couple of guys tossing a football and another two throwing a Frisbee. There were a few people on benches or just leaning up against a tree here and there with a book or tablet or laptop. Normal, even on a slightly chilly but sunny October day.
What wasn’t normal were the others.
The spirits.
They looked as real as the living, not transparent. But as his gaze rested on them one by one, he saw them shimmer almost like heat off the pavement or a jittery image on a computer or special effects in a movie before becoming solid again. And every single one of them was just standing there, utterly still.
Turned toward him.
Staring at him.
That was new. That was . . . different.
Logan turned in a slow circle, scanning as much of the park as he could see from his position.
They were everywhere. Dozens. Scores. More.
A lot more. More than he’d ever seen in one place. Ever.
As he completed the slow circle, he started in surprise to find one of the spirits standing only about three feet away. A woman. Too young to be dead, though people did die young and, anyway, he had learned that he didn’t always see spirits as they had appeared at death, but at some earlier stage of their lives. And he almost never saw what had killed them, spared at least that horror of nightmares of the living dead haunting him.
He had no idea why.
He didn’t care.
All he knew was that he was far colder than the October day, cold down to his bones, that the unpleasant crawly sensation roving over his entire body was getting stronger and more unsettling, his head was really hurting now, and a very strong sense of foreboding gripped him.
“No,” he said softly.
“You have to go to Prosperity,” she said, her voice a bit hollow and distant, as they were sometimes. Her face was without expression, which was something else that was occasionally true of the spirits he encountered.
This time, the total lack of expression on her face and in her voice was creepy as hell.
Trying to hold his voice low and not betray to the living around him that he was a madman who saw what they didn’t, that they were moving blithely about among spirits, too many spirits, nothing normal about that even out on the paranormal fringes of his reality, he said, “I don’t have to go anywhere. Leave me alone.”
“They need you. We need you, Logan.”
They always knew his name. It had always bugged him.
“Tap another medium,” he advised her. “It’s got to be somebody else’s turn.”
“You have to go. Please, Logan. It’s so important.”
“What—” But the half-formed question was never finished, because the spirit faded away quickly and with an eeriness he’d never seen before, like she just became smoke dispersed by the slight, chill breeze.
It was a long moment before Logan could force himself to scan the park as he had before. But when he did, he saw no spirits. Only the living, going about their business as they probably did every ordinary day of their nice normal lives.
“Goddammit,” he whispered.
The day felt colder than he knew it was.
* * *
? ? ?
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 7
Reno Bellman was congratulating herself for what had so far been a successful brunch date. She had not, after all, absently told her date, Jake Harper, any of the bits of information that had floated through her mind like flotsam on a calm sea since they’d met at this sidewalk café more than an hour earlier. She hadn’t reminded him not to forget his mother’s birthday next week, or told him his treasured high school football championship ring was not gone forever but had instead rolled under his nightstand, or even that he was going to get that promotion he was anxious about.
She didn’t mention any of those things. Instead, she had chatted casually just as Jake had, on the safe topics generally reserved for a first date. Likes and dislikes, the undoubtedly miserable winter looming ahead for Chicago, and how the Cubs had done during the season. They both tacitly avoided politics and religion, those trickier subjects more suited to later—if there was a later—when disagreements would either be handled amicably or else judged to be insurmountable differences.
Everything was fine, just fine, so when she became conscious of a rustling sound like dead leaves skittering over pavement, she glanced around in surprise. This sidewalk café was moderately crowded for a Tuesday morning in October, but nobody else seemed to see or hear anything unusual, and she couldn’t see any leaves or anything else skittering past.
Reno was about to just chalk it up to her generally heightened senses when the rustle of dry leaves became instead whispering. Whispering by many voices. Or by . . . something else. Something tugging at her with increasing insistence, causing the fine hairs on the back of her neck to stir and the skin all over her body to go unpleasantly pins-and-needles. Her head began to hurt. Badly.
“Reno?”
At first, it was only whispering, just sounds that seemed normal and ordinary, the background hum of a busy city neighborhood. But then, slowly, she believed she detected a sort of pattern to what she was hearing. And then words. Words whispered by many voices, all saying the same thing.
“Reno—”
“Hush,” she said absently, all but forgetting her date in the need to concentrate on listening. What was it? What were they saying? She wasn’t sure at first, but slowly some of the static faded, and she was just able to make out words.
Words that gradually became clearer.
Come . . . come to . . . come to Prosperity. They . . . need you. We all need you. You have to come to Prosperity—
“Reno?”
She never found out if she might have heard something more, an explanation, a reason, something she could glean safely and peacefully, in warm daylight and without fear, without being touched by violence, because in that moment Jake reached across the small table and laid his hand over hers.
Before she could warn him.
So he was yanked with her into the hellish maelstrom of a vision.