He suppressed a growl. “What do you mean, no? You were over there!”
Albert walked across the cavern, hands locked behind his back. “So?” he said, raising a brow. “I asked if you wanted to see what you might be able to do. You said yes, so I showed you.”
“That’s impossible! Are you telling me you could control my fall from up there all the way across the cave? And by the way, it’s not okay to toss someone around like that.” Dave felt his feet leaving the ground again, and held up his hands. “All right, all right, I’ll shut up.”
“Allow me to decide what’s okay and not okay in this situation, and yes, I did have full control of your fall. Just wanted to shake you up a little bit.” Albert stopped a few feet from him and crossed his arms on his chest. “This is not shock therapy, Dave. I don’t expect your power to switch on while you’re all clammed up like that. I just wanted to see how bad it is, and teach you what I can for now. The block will disappear when you’re ready.”
Dave breathed out, somewhat disappointed. Being thrown through the air like a puppet had not felt good, now that he was supposed to be more than just a helpless human, and he realized begrudgingly that deep inside, he had hoped for a magic fix.
“Fine,” he said. “Let’s get this over with. But I want answers first.”
Albert cocked his head. “What kind of answers?”
“Why did Peter really send me here?”
“To learn. To change the scenery. He wants to help you, there’s nothing more to it. I have other reasons though.”
“What reasons?”
“I wanted to warn you.”
“About what?”
“About being careful. It’s a long story. I have to tell you first—”
“How you were turned?” Dave held the old man’s gaze, folding his arms on his chest. “This is not some typical old man’s paranoia, is it? Who are you hiding from?”
Albert sighed, dropping his gaze. He scratched his head, then looked back up at Dave. “I’ll try to keep it short.”
He went to sit on a big, flat rock, and Dave stood in front of him. For a minute, there was silence, as if Albert was getting his thoughts in order.
“Just tell me how you were turned,” Dave suggested, not expecting anything more than that.
“I volunteered.”
Dave blinked. “You what?”
“I volunteered. They were doing experiments, trying to turn a human into a Ghost, and I volunteered. Didn’t know what I was getting myself into.” The old man looked up at Dave, the hardness gone from his eyes for a change. “I was born in New York, and a childhood friend of mine was a Ghost. He found out about this experiment, said they would pay good money, and it was safe. I’d either turn into one of them, which didn’t seem like a big deal, or nothing at all would happen—and I’d still get the money.”
It must’ve been obvious from Dave’s expression how bizarre it sounded, because Albert said, “It was a century ago, and I was an eighteen-year-old orphan in a big city. Trust me, this was not the strangest thing I’d agreed to do for money.”
“All right. No judging. So you know how it can be done? How I was turned?”
“No. They never disclosed what exactly they did to me. I went in, got some shots, felt fine, got paid, so I agreed to do it again. Four times was a charm for me, I guess. I didn’t know until the Initiation. No one else had been turned, from what I knew, but then, I was the only one who’d risked returning there.” He grimaced. “Guess I was the most desperate kid in the Big Apple.
“I was crashing at my friend’s place those days. Right after the fourth procedure, I went to his apartment and found the door unlocked. The place was trashed, and he…” Albert rubbed his face, struggling with the words. “He was in the bathroom, his blood all over the walls. Whoever had done it, they were not human, not Ghost or Beast or whatever you call it. It looked like they’d had fun, slaughtering an innocent boy like that. That was my Initiation right there.
“I grabbed all the money I’d saved from under the floorboards, and my things all fit into a bag. On my way to the train station, I heard there was a big fire on the same street as the lab. I didn’t even stop to check—someone was erasing all of it, covering it as an accident.
“I hopped on the first train out of town and ran. Didn’t stop running until a year later. It took me fifty years to set foot in New York again. To make friends there again. Two of them, a young couple, had a son. Peter.
“I figured whoever had been hunting me was long dead, or maybe they didn’t know about me at all. I wasn’t even supposed to be at that apartment. Maybe they thought my friend was the one.
“I’d been trying to find more people like me, though, and I had found a couple. Kept it all quiet, never let anyone else know what I was. Then, a few years later, one of them went silent. I couldn’t go myself, was worried it was a trap. The local headquarters sent a team to check up on him. Said the whole family had been slaughtered, and the man himself had been dragged to the bathroom, same pose as my old friend, same everything… The bastards were sending me a message. They must have found out about me after they’d killed my friend, when they went to burn the lab, but I was gone by then.”
“More than fifty years later?” Dave asked, perplexed. “What is it, a cult
