“All right, if we’re going to work on this together, you stay here and observe Julianne or work with the ghosts—you know better what’s yielding information in this situation than I do. And be very careful—I don’t want you to have another problem with a ghost trying to harm you. I’ll get started finding those other patients. Send me the audio files as soon as you can and I’ll send you the information I dig up. When we’re both up to speed, we can get together and decide how to proceed.”
Stymak nodded. I started to leave, pausing for a moment by the bed. The dark shape that had descended over Julianne wavered and heaved like a sail in a gusty wind and as I listened, it sighed and groaned, “Leave, leave, leave . . .” No one else seemed to have heard. I wanted to touch the dark form and see if I could communicate with it, but I was afraid the motion might seem sinister to Goss and Wrothen.
“Ms. Goss,” I began, then turned my gaze to include the nurse. “Ms. Wrothen, would you mind if I touched Julianne?”
Wrothen scowled. “In what way?”
“Just my hand on her hand.”
Wrothen looked at Goss, who bit her lip but nodded assent.
I drew as close to the bed as machines and rails would allow and reached out to take Julianne’s left hand. The first thing I felt was wet paint and I realized she’d been using that hand to paint with. Then I felt a cold jolt that traveled up my arm and zinged across the back of my eyes, warping my vision into a static-filled haze of darkness shattered by jagged curtains of shifting colors. The shock stole my breath and I gasped, taking in air gone ice-sharp. There was no summer here. The darkness hovering over Julianne lashed at me with thin whips of silver mist that left a howling despair and anger behind as they passed through my flesh. “This is mine! Go away!” They weren’t so much words as they were the strongest mental impression of a shout.
I held out for a moment against the pressure, pain, and cold, trying to see the shape of whatever held sway over the body of Julianne Goss, but all I could make out with either eye was a dull, unbroken blackness that cloaked her form like a drenched blanket. No more enlightened than I had been before, I broke the connection and pulled my hand away from hers, easing back from the edge of the Grey.
The two women beside me stared at me with expectant expressions—Lily’s more hopeful than Wrothen’s.
“What did you see?” Lily asked, hesitating as if she wasn’t sure she wanted the answer.
“Just darkness.”
“Is that . . . bad?”
“I don’t know.”
“Does something have possession of my sister?”
“In a way, but what it is and why it’s acting like this is still a mystery to me. It doesn’t seem to be harming her . . . any more than she’s already been harmed, but it’s not helping her heal, either. It’s a lot of angry and confused something—it might even be Julianne herself.”
Goss grabbed the hand I’d laid on her sister’s, her head enveloped in hopeful shades of blue with white sparks. “Can you help her? Can you figure out what it is?”
“I will, one way or another, with Mr. Stymak’s help. You and Ms. Wrothen need to keep her safe and well until we do.”
Wrothen made a soft snorting sound in the back of her throat, but didn’t say anything while giving me the evil eye, her aura spiking out in an annoyed shade of pumpkin orange. At least she seemed to be back to her normal grumpy self—which was better than conflicted and confused—and I had the impression she didn’t like me much. Not that that’s new: A lot of people and things don’t like me.
FIVE
I didn’t see Quinton that night, but I did talk to him on the phone while the ferret played the clown and tried to hide one of my boots under the living room bookshelves. I had been poking, searching, and sneaking around databases trying to get information on Kevin Sterling and Jordan Delamar, so while I was pleased to hear from he-who-dislikes-the-phone, my mind was not quite on his track at first.
“Hey,” he said. “Just a heads-up: Your friends with long teeth might have attracted unwanted attention.”
I puzzled over it for a moment before I connected what he was saying to what he meant. Quinton was busy making trouble for his father’s project because he didn’t want to be sucked back into the covert machine; he was also dead against the project on moral grounds, since it had something to do with “investigating” paranormal creatures and using them in horrible experiments for purposes that I wasn’t quite clear on. Among other things, Quinton didn’t want his father to discover that I was a sort of paranormal creature myself, because the gods only knew what James Purlis would do if he thought he had a “freak” so close to hand, much less one who had access to monsters and the deep secrets of the Grey. He was still thankfully ignorant of it, though he must have been close to figuring out that there was an interface between the normal and the paranormal. So if Quinton was warning me about trouble for folks with fangs, Purlis must have been close to or actively targeting vampires.
The local blood-sucking society wouldn’t like that and since they were still making the transition to new management—the fall of the old regime was three years ago, but vampires don’t like change—and if Quinton’s father was messing with them, that would put certain people on the spot, which could upset the current calm among the life-challenged and lead to a hell of a lot of mess that would spill out into the normal world in the guise of gang violence and murder. I hadn’t heard anything about this from them, so it might not be an issue yet, but with my almost-father-in-law involved it would come my way eventually.
“Great,” I muttered. “Any idea what the problem is?”
“Not in a position to discuss it. If they don’t know, they will soon.” He sounded harried and nervous.
“OK. I’ll look into it. And you do remember there’s a meal-thing in a couple of days, right?”
“Meal . . . ? Oh. Right. I’ll make it.”
He disconnected without further conversation. I sighed—I hadn’t mentioned Stymak’s digital recordings to him. I wouldn’t be able to run the same sort of high-end analysis on them that Quinton could have. I’d have to muddle through it on my own, since it sounded like Papa Purlis’s plans were dangerous and advanced far enough to require a lot of Quinton’s monkey-wrenching to derail. I hoped he’d be safe and that he would actually show up for our dinner with Phoebe and her family—it had been planned for a while and I wouldn’t be forgiven easily for missing it. Quinton, though, usually got off the hook of Phoebe’s ire through sheer charm. Still, I’d rather be chasing my comparatively mild case of possession than dealing with James Purlis and whatever gang of human spooks he had with him.
I couldn’t talk directly to the local vampires during the day and in this situation I thought it best not to leave a detailed message with their daylight assistants, but I left call-back requests and hoped for the best. No one called back.
Frustrated, I put that task aside and tried to listen to Stymak’s recordings, but they were static-filled and confusing. I don’t know how it happens, but electronic voice phenomena, or EVP, is always lousy—full of background noise, electronic feedback, pops, hisses, dropouts, and overlapping voices that have to be filtered, isolated, and pulled apart for analysis. I didn’t have those skills or the right tools on my computer even if I knew how to use them. Stymak had filtered quite a bit, but Julianne’s voice was still broken and difficult to pick out and the only thing I was able to hear consistently was a sudden clear voice that said, “Beach to bluff,” which put me in mind of Julianne’s paintings but didn’t clear up any of my questions. The whispering of ghosts overlapped Julianne’s strange mutterings and the sharp screech of electronic feedback in the presence of the uncanny marred the playback, making me wince. After an hour of gritting my teeth and trying, I had to give up and put it aside for Quinton when he had time.
I went to bed that night without having heard more from Quinton or gotten any response from the vampires. I’d keep trying on both scores, but the most pressing thing was finding the other PVS patients. In the morning I went back to tracking Sterling and Delamar through cyberspace.
It’s easier to get information about politicians’ questionable funding and personal activities than it is to get information about medical patients—which is as it should be. The back door to this stuff, however, is insurance. As
