PsyCop 5: Camp Hell (33 page)

Jacob had been squinting in the direction of the ghost, but the sound of my molars knocking drew his gaze to me. “I can see your breath.”

Not his. Just mine. Cripes.

“White light, Vic. Center yourself.”

I sucked in a gout of energy just as the flames leapt high. Fire ghost started strobing faster—here, there, appearing and disappearing. Always in the same pose. Just standing, head down.

I lit the second candle from the first and set it in the south. I pulled a third candle from my pocket and moved to light it from the second.

Her face filled my vision—mouth gaping. I fell back, and she was on me. No sound. Just the sight of her face. And now, close, closer than ever before. Close enough to see her lips were cracked, and white gunk was built up in the corners of her mouth, and her tongue, her horrible tongue, was coated, pale and furred.

“No.” Jacob had stepped into the circle I’d been trying to create and stretched his hand toward the ghost. “Get off him.”

The lank mats of her hair flopped over her thin shoulders as she swung around to look at Jacob when she realized that he could see her, too. In a sense.

“She’s coming at you.”

Jacob closed his eyes and cocked his head, and left his hand out there as if he was asking her to dance. “She’s in pain,” he said.

“You don’t get it,” I yelled over the roar of ghostfire in my ears. And I don’t think he did. Because Jacob, fucking Jacob, he thinks he’s indestructible. I sucked white light.

The fire ghost strobed, and strobed again, and I threw a white balloon around Jacob as if it was a fastball. She slammed into my barrier and shattered. Ghostfire dropped to the floor in a shower of sparks, then coalesced again in the center of the room, in the shape of a woman, mouth open, eyes wide and jittering.

“What did you just do?” Jacob snapped.

“She was barreling toward you—”

“I know. I felt her.”

I picked up the south candle, set it right side up, and lit it. My breath vapor froze to my eyelashes, and the ice crystals acted like a dozen tiny prisms that cast sparkles around everything I saw. “But you can’t see how horrible—”

“I don’t care. Listen to me. She’s in pain.”

I glanced up. A bunch of expressions snapped over her face in rapid succession—scream, sob, rictus grin—shifting fast from one to another in stop-motion cuts. I sidled around the circle and planted a third candle at the western point. She blipped in front of me, scream-mouthed, and I dropped the candle. She flickered back again to the center.

Jacob took a couple steps forward.

“Stay out of the circle, would you?”

He planted his hands on his hips and glared. My hands were so cold it took me five tries to light the wick. His staring didn’t help. Once the flame took, I ran in a crouch to north point and set down the final candle.

The temperature dropped so low that each inhalation felt like knives in my lungs.

“Can she hear me when I talk?” Jacob said.

“I don’t know.” My eyes watered, and the tears froze to my cheeks. “Ask her.”

“Miss? Ma’am?”

Shit, he was serious.

“You need to remain calm, and listen to me. You’re in the wrong place. Do you understand me?”

She blipped and flickered like crazy, but after a few seconds, it seemed that she’d rotated to face Jacob. Mostly. Every few strobes, she faced me to make sure she kept tabs on what I was doing, too. But the majority of her appearances faced Jacob.

“The only thing here for you is suffering,” Jacob told her in his most reasonable tone of voice. “You need to pass over. Let it go.”

The ghostfire dimmed against my sacred circle, in the way stars dim when streetlights flicker on. But the ghost woman still seemed pretty damn solid.

“Can you channel any healing energy toward her?” Jacob asked.

“Do I look like a healer to you?”

“At least try. White light—whatever you want to call it.”

What did he expect from me? If he wanted a healer, he should have stuck with Crash. I drew down more white light anyway, because I suspected that if I just said I did without actually trying, Jacob would be able to feel whether I’d made the attempt or not.

Once I was topped off with white light as far as I could fill myself, I jogged the last few steps toward the east point of the circle, where Jacob faced off with the fire ghost.

“We’re here to help you,” he murmured.

“Um. Hey. I don’t exactly know how to change my settings to ‘heal.’”

Jacob clucked his tongue and grabbed me by the arm, presumably to demonstrate what I should do. Pressure changed in the room so sharply I thought I’d end up with a case of the bends, and the white light surged through me, and into him.

He let go of my arm like he’d just grabbed a live wire. He hadn’t sucked out all my juice, but he’d made off with a good portion of it. He spread his arms wide, and a benevolent glow surrounded him.

“All right,” I said. My head was spinning. I locked my knees to keep myself from kissing the concrete. “You grabbed the energy, you heal her.”

He looked at me, wide-eyed and open-armed.

I was miffed he’d taken the white light I’d been hoarding all night, accidentally or not. “Go on. Do it.”

Jacob was too far into the zone to argue with me. He turned toward the center of the circle, and he focused. The white glow that surrounded him reached out toward the fire ghost. It surrounded both of them. If the white light ran like a faucet inside me, it rose from Jacob like a gentle morning mist.

Fire ghost’s strobing slowed. She stared at Jacob with a look of both agony and bewilderment. I started to look away, but forced myself to keep my eyes on her—and when I did, when I made myself really, really look, I saw the chain around her neck.

-THIRTY TWO-

 “Shit.”

Jacob’s white light wavered. “What?”

“She’s chained here.”

“Restrained? Like a straightjacket?”

“No, literally chained—like a dog. Like some sick fuck hid her down here.” For sex…or torture? Or both. “Goddammitall.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know who. She’s not talking. Wouldn’t I have said something if she was talking? Maybe she can’t talk. Maybe she never could.”

Jacob’s eyebrows drew down and the veins in his neck bulged. His white light glowed steady. The fire ghost clawed at the chain—a choke chain—and I saw the red gouge around her neck where it sat, and the fingermarks where she’d tried to pry it off. And maybe she could have. If she’d been sane, or at least mentally competent. If she’d realized that all she needed to do was stop pulling.

“Tell her to stop pulling,” I said.

“What?”

“She doesn’t like me, she likes you. She’ll listen to you. It’s a choke chain, and the harder she pulls on it, the tighter it gets.”

Jacob’s focus narrowed to a pinpoint, and he looked at her so hard, I would’ve bet money that he could see her, too. “Don’t worry, Miss. I’m here to help you. I need you to calm down.”

Fire ghost stared at Jacob, mouth open, tongue working.

“She’s listening,” I whispered.

“It’s a trick chain,” Jacob told her. “Step back and it will loosen. Stop pulling, and you can slip out.”

She flickered, doubtful. Her hands went to her throat.

I spotted a hospital band around her wrist, an old-fashioned thing that looked like it’d been through an industrial typewriter. “Jacob,” I said. His name left my mouth in a visible stream. “I think I can get an I.D.”

“Miss? My partner’s going to approach. I need you to stay calm. I’m here to help. We’re both here to help.”

I stepped inside the circle I’d created, and the spirit-cold fell away so suddenly that at first I thought it had actually plummeted more, sub-zero and capable of singeing my fingers and toes with frostbite. But no. The burn I felt was an actual burn, and smoke seared my lungs when I took a breath.

The ghostfire that looked blue from the outside glowed red from where I stood. And the scenery shifted, too. The ductwork and corrugated boxes had turned into coal bins and shovels, and big, hulking, black furnaces with fire glowing behind closed grates.

“Look, lady, it’ll all be over soon. You want me to get you out of here? Just stay still for a second. Okay?”

It cost me to say even that much. Tears ran down my face and I gagged on the thick, charred air. I read the bracelet, got a first initial, last name, and a date. M. Connoley — Ward 5, April 12, 1949. That narrowed things down. Under that, just before she blinked back a few steps, I caught a glimpse of a word,
...hizophren....
I’d had no idea the medical profession had even diagnosed schizophrenia way back when. But it explained a lot.

I staggered back out of the circle, choking on my own breath. “Connoley,” I told Jacob. “And Ward 5, whatever that means. Probably the psych ward.”

“Miss Connoley,” he said in his most velvety, it’s-all-gonna-be-okay voice. At the sound of her name, she stared at him like he’d just whacked her with a tire iron to get her attention. “Listen to me carefully. What I need you to do is step back two paces, then reach around to the back of the chain and loosen the part where the links pass through one another.”

Jacob sent her more white light, bathed her with it, and she stood there for a long moment, just staring at him. I figured she’d been hypnotized by his voice, his face, his smooth white light. But then her face twisted up as she struggled against herself, and she stepped back.

The last expression that flickered across her face was surprise.

And then she was gone.

The ghostfire dwindled and disappeared. The air pressure changed again, and my eardrums flexed painfully until I worked my jaw and made them pop. I swayed, and Jacob’s hand was on my shoulder.

“We did it,” he said. Pleased. Proud, even. But not surprised, not really—in the way people who think they’re capable of anything are never too shocked when it all shakes out in the end.

I swatted his hand from my shoulder. “You stole my light.”

“I didn’t mean to,” he said, totally earnest.

I picked up the candle at my feet. When I stood up, Jacob pressed into my back. I blew the candle out.

“The white light,” he said, “it felt like warmth to me. Vibration. You see it as light?”

I sighed. I wanted to snap at him, that greedy light stealer. But it was his big day, his first triumph as a non-NP. So who was I to rain on his parade? “Yeah. It’s all a big TV show for me. Sights and sounds.”

He pressed his forehead against the back of my head and breathed into my hair. “And the temperature drop?”

“Dunno. It’s a ghost thing. Always has been.”

“Can spirits hear your thoughts? Did I need to speak to Connoley aloud, or could I have communicated mind to mind?”

Since when did I have all the answers? Or any at all, for that matter. “I don’t know. I’ve never been able to Vulcan Mind Meld with ‘em, but that doesn’t mean it’s not possible. Carolyn hears thoughts, right? Maybe there’s a medium out there who’s got a touch of telepathy.” And maybe a different medium actually could get a reading off a dead person’s possessions, if the medium’s talent came through a clairvoyant-looking route. Who knows?

Jacob took me by the shoulder and maneuvered me around to face him. Our lips brushed. Mine were cold, his warm. He touched my cheek. His hand was trembling.

“You okay?” I asked him.

He smiled against my mouth. “Yeah. More than okay.” He cupped the back of my head and put an end to our conversation with a long, deep kiss.

**

“Detective Bayne?” I wondered if Betty was using her normal tone of voice, or if she was especially chipper. Hard to tell. “Sergeant Warwick wants to see you before you go to LaSalle General this morning.”

I tallied up my mental scorecard and decided that the chances of me getting called on the carpet for something I’d screwed up were exponentially higher than anything else: a pat on the back, a harmless question, or a couple free tickets to a Bulls game. And yet, Betty wasn’t doing that thing with her eyes—the thing that said, “be careful—he’s in a mood.”

“Like, uh, now?”

She glanced back at his office as if to see if he was listening in, and then nodded.

I wouldn’t even get to talk to Zigler, tell him that we’d sent the fire ghost on to wherever it was that tormented, crazy spirits went when they were done haunting the spot they’d died in.

I brushed some bagel crumbs off the front of my sportcoat, waited for Betty to buzz Warwick and give me a nod, and went in.

Ted Warwick was scowling at his computer. He didn’t use a mouse, just the touchpad. I watched his blunt cop-finger stroking the plastic square as he scrolled something on his screen. I couldn’t really gauge how irritated he was. His face had a few permanent lines on it that tended to be misleading.

“Sit down, Bayne.”

And again, that could be either good or bad. I straightened my tie, and I sat.

Warwick closed his laptop, and sighed. “I need advance notice if you plan to venture out with Detective Marks in any official capacity.”

I can’t imagine how blank I must’ve looked. Scratch that, I can. Pretty blank.

Warwick looked at me hard. He didn’t seem angry, exactly. Just really, really focused. He stared at me for a second, then swiveled in his chair and pulled a sheet of paper off his inkjet printer. He slid it in front of me.

It was a candid photo, slightly dark. A three-quarter view of Jacob striding by in a black suit and overcoat filled most of the frame. My God. He was so hot.

And there, just behind him, was me. I don’t photograph well. I was opening my mouth to talk. But it was definitely me.

“Cameraphone,” Warwick said. “One of the nurses snapped a shot of Marks so she could show her girlfriends.”

“This was taken last night,” I said. “How did you end up with it?”

“I’m getting phone calls and e-mails about you left and right. This one came from D.C., though. So I figured it was time to lay down some ground rules.”

I wanted to balk. I’ve never been good with rules. But I couldn’t get over the fact that Warwick wasn’t angry with me. Warwick was always angry. He’d been angry with me since day one. So naturally I was curious about what had changed.