Possession

FOUR

“Kevin Sterling and Jordan Delamar. Do you recognize the names? Could they be the other patients?”

“I’d guess,” Stymak replied, shrugging. “That is the information you were after, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but ghosts don’t always give the answers you ask for.” I looked away from him and back to Lily Goss by the bed. “Do those names mean anything to you? Either of you?” I added, turning to fix the nurse in my gaze.

She blanched, but Goss just looked confused and shook her head. “Nothing,” Goss replied. “I don’t recognize those names. They aren’t anyone I know. Or that Julianne knew, so far as I can remember.”

I looked harder at Wrothen, and said, “But you know.”

Wrothen shook her head, conflicted, but what she said was, “I can’t—I can’t tell you.”

“You don’t have to. But do you recognize either of those names?”

Trembling, she nodded, her aura glowing a sickened shade of yellow-green as she said nothing.

“Patients, like Julianne,” I guessed.

She nodded again, breathing a little easier, as if I was taking some weight off her.

I put my hand on her shoulder and offered a grateful smile. “Thank you.”

I don’t think I have a movie-star smile, but I guess it was good enough. Wrothen seemed to sag, sighing out the last of her confusion as she slid from under my hand, her head bowed. “I’m supposed to help people. . . . I hope I haven’t done the wrong thing.”

“You haven’t done anything wrong. You’re helping us find out what’s happening to Julianne. You haven’t said or done anything to harm anyone.”

Lily jumped up and ran over to hug Wrothen. “Thank you! Oh, God, thank you, Eva!”

Wrothen looked almost comically startled and stiffened in Lily’s embrace before she put her arms around the other woman and returned a weak hug. I turned away from them, wanting to give them a moment’s privacy, and focused on Stymak again.

“You OK?” I asked as he plopped into a chair.

He blew out a breath and pushed his hair back from his face. “Yeah. That wasn’t quite what I’m used to.”

“I think that was my fault. I was afraid the first ghost was hurting you and I pushed it away.”

“It was. That’s—I mean the whole thing was just wrong from the beginning. That was just really, really weird. Usually I just get impressions, ideas, a few words, but this was . . . painful. Scary. I’ve never been afraid of a ghost in my life and that was . . . really scary. What happened at your end?”

“It was . . . very loud. There are a lot of ghosts in here and they’re clustered around Julianne, waiting for an opportunity to . . . use her, I guess. But they were very interested in you once you started calling to them. And then they were babbling and it sounded like a bunch of pieces trying to make one whole or . . . well, more like a jumbled signal that needed to be adjusted. So I tried to ‘tune’ the ghosts a bit, I guess you’d say, trying to get the bits of the noise to line up into an intelligible sound. It was just a guess, though.”

“Seems to have been the right one. But, man, that was really unpleasant.”

“Ghosts generally are.”

He frowned at me. “I don’t find them to be. They’re just . . . needy. Scared. Lonely. Like the living.”

“That’s a nice commentary on your fellow man.”

“I mean the things that make them seek help are the same things that make living people do it. And like us, they sometimes do the wrong thing or don’t know how to express themselves. People don’t get wiser when they get deader.”

“That’s the truth.”

“So, now what do you plan to do?”

“I need to find those other patients and see if they truly are manifesting anything like Julianne’s behavior. With three cases, I might find something they have in common that could tell me what’s happening.”

“I’d like to come along.”

I hesitated. I wasn’t keen on having an impromptu partner, but I had to admit Stymak had been able to make contact with the ghosts in a way I couldn’t. I wasn’t certain I’d have been able to get any information out of them on my own. “I’m not sure it’s a great idea . . .” I started.

“It’s a better idea than keeping our information to ourselves. We both want to find out what’s going on with Julie and I’m not sure what would have happened if you hadn’t been here to push that ghost off me. I’m scared, to be honest. But you’re not scared.”

I made a face. “Oh, I’m scared. I just know it doesn’t help, so I’m going ahead anyhow.”

Stymak brightened up. “Good! Then I’m sticking with you.”

Whether I liked it or not, it appeared I had a sidekick. Or something like that. “It may take a while to track these guys down,” I said. “I can start on that. Could you get started deciphering yesterday’s recording?”

“Oh, crap! I forgot to send it to you. I knew I’d forgotten something.” He looked abashed. “I’ll get it done today. I still haven’t figured out what language it is—if it is a language.”

“Don’t worry about it. Once you get it to me, I’ll have a friend of mine work on it too. It’ll go faster that way.”

Stymak nodded. “All right. I’ll stay with Julianne for a while and then head back to my place to work on the file. She usually gets pretty quiet in the middle of the day.”

“Maybe she’s exhausted by then.”

“Could be. . . .”

I turned back to Lily Goss and Eva Wrothen, who had settled down near the bed. Julianne was apparently asleep—or whatever one called the state she was in. Wrothen kept shooting me furtive glances. I wondered what she thought I was going to do. Maybe she’d noticed my tendency to become a bit see-through when I dropped toward the Grey. Most people ignore it, but those who do notice are often a little freaked out at the sight. I hadn’t been too hard on her . . . had I?

I frowned and turned my attention back to Stymak.

“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.