Page 69 of Possessed By Shadows

I winced.

“I hate you for making me love you.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” he said. “I love you too much to walk away. But I need you here.”

“And being here means learning control. Facing this crap instead of constantly running away or waiting for it to just use me again.”

“I hate that. We never asked for any of this.”

I kissed him again, just a brush of my lips on his. I didn’t care if there were people around and I could tell others were annoyed. We weren’t blocking traffic or even the sidewalk, but sometimes PDAs between two men were not acceptable anywhere. “I love you. If going through all this was required to be here, with you, I’d do it all again willingly. I love your face. I love watching you sew. I love curling around you to watch some stupid show on TV. I love listening to you breathe as I sleep. You are my center. All this hardship, this curse, whatever it is, brought me to you.”

“Lukas brought you to me.”

“Yeah, he brought me home. Found me a home. Now I need to bring him back.”

He let out a long breath. The fight going out of him. “If he’s just off doing something stupid, I am going to hurt you both.”

I smiled at him. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me when you get possessed by one of these things.” He took my hand and led me down the street. Some dude was glaring at us. “Fuck off,” Micah snarled at him as we passed. The man opened his mouth to say something, but I added a glare that probably looked a bit more intimidating coming from me, than from the pretty half-Asian guy. “You better come back to me. No matter what,” Micah demanded.

“That’s my goal. But I’m wondering. You said something about the yokai and the yurei? Can you tell the difference if you feel something?”

“Yes? Mostly. The yokai are the fire, sometimes intense ants. The yurei is more like spider webs. Uncomfortable, but more fleeting than constant.” He pointed toward an area down the street. “I think the girl died there. In the alleyway.”

“Yokai are the demons? Yurei are the ghosts?” I clarified.

“Yes. But the yurei can shift. Like Dion said, it’s a change of energy.”

“When Precious changes? You can feel her going from yurei to yokai?”

He nodded.

That made sense. “How close do you have to be to feel the change?”

He contemplated that for a minute and shrugged. “Not sure? Sometimes not close at all, like the Lalaurie place. That whole block seems to be tainted with something. The original house burned and was rebuilt, so maybe it was scattered from that? The church is like that sometimes. Most places I have to be pretty close and stay a while before it changes. Or an event.”

“Like the murder in the French Market?”

“Yeah. That was awful.”

“Okay. So we walk Lukas’s route. See if anyone will talk to us. You tell me if you feel something that is a yokai, or something shifting to yokai?”

“Won’t you see it before I feel it?”

“Not always. Could you tell something was under the bridge? I couldn’t tell it wasn’t a person until I got close.”

“Started as webs,” he said quietly as we approached the spot where the girl had died. There was still a memorial there. Faded mostly, pictures and some fake flowers, but there was a batch of fresh carnations sitting on a ledge above the shrine.

“Feel anything here?” I asked as I looked around. There was movement in the streets and the buildings. But nothing dark or shadowy. The shrine pretty peaceful.

“No.”

“Someone still brings her flowers. That’s nice. Maybe she doesn’t stay because she’s well remembered?”

“Hmm,” Micah said.