Page 74 of Possessed By Shadows

We finally entered the big room where we had found the camera and one of the other teams left it to us. Letting us know they’d be wandering around, which meant some ambient noise. They weren’t expecting ghosts in the middle of the day, I supposed. Since I’d already seen two ghosts today, I wasn’t buying into that myth.

There were three cameras set up in the big room, angled to capture every corner no matter how dark. The pale dredges of light filtering through the edges high up on the boarded windows, offered more to the eerie vibe of the room than I had expected it to. I’d have thought in the middle of the day, with only a mildly overcast sky, things would be a bit less intense.

“You feeling anything?” I asked Micah. I didn’t see anything. No person lingering that I thought might be a left behind member of the team and would turn out to be a ghost. We were alone.

“No.”

“How much do you see since Texas?” I wondered. He could see Precious most of the time, I thought. And had seenDeathand the demon that followed me. But regular ghosts? Had that changed?

“Shadows sometimes. Movement that is weird? Not people who look real,” Micah admitted. “Other than the kid.”

The black-eyed child. “You see them recently?”

“No.” That one word told me he didn’t want to either. It was firmly in the yokai category for Micah and he hated the idea of that thing being tied to me somehow. Had explained that he was marked by something when he disappeared, but I was owned by the kid, whatever it was.

I approached the corner Lukas talked to, searching it for signs of anything. The debris was a mess, but I couldn’t tell that there had been a body there. For all we knew there had been a dozen bodies there and we were standing in the dredges of their lost fluids rotting and adding to the stench of mold.

I crouched low, closing my eyes a moment when my hip locked and screamed in pain, breathing through it. I thought about what Dion had said about control, and imagining what I wanted. I imagined opening up my mind, releasing the hold on whatever power I had, and calling out beyond. It felt a little silly. A bit like playing make believe. But when I opened my eyes, I was face-to-face with a young man.

It was all I could do not to scream and flail and run away like I’d gone mad. He wasn’t living, face too pale, and the area filtering through him like a bad projection. I sucked in a hard breath, my hands tightening into fists as I tried to steady myself. Facing my fear was important. The military should have taught me better. Rather than being Rambo and running headfirst into danger with a death wish, it should have taught me to face the fear of death. Strange to realize how much that day in the desert had catapulted my fear into something maddening. Perhaps it was facing the incarnation of Death, if that was what it had been, rather than those who died around me.

“Are you Adrian?” I asked softly. He looked a bit like the picture, though fading and a bit gray. Maybe running out of energy? “Can you use my energy to talk to me?” Would I hear him in real time? The girl had been more solid, but also on a busy street full of people passing. The homeless guy had said the energy under the bridge got charged from the storm. Would Adrian be charged?

He shuffled backward, close to the wall, knees tucked into his chest, shaking and swaying. He looked like he was on the edge of a mental breakdown. But if he was speaking, I couldn’t hear him.

“Adrian? Have you seen my brother? Looks like me? He helped you out. Maybe you talked to him sometimes?”

Micah crouched beside me, and pressed the audio recorder into my hand. He didn’t try to interrupt, but he clung to my arm.

“Facing my fear,” I muttered as I crawled a little closer. “Adrian? Can you use my energy? Help me find my brother?”

He turned, gaze finding me again, almost seeming to see me? Then he reached up a hand as if to ward off a blow, and vanished.

“Fuck,” I said.

“What?” Micah asked.

Murdered? Probably. He’d been afraid, that was clear enough. Maybe he hadn’t been tweaking as much as killed for something he knew? Was that what frustrated Lukas? Adrian wouldn’t tell him who it had been? There was no other person, or even a shadow outlined when the attack happened, only Adrian’s fear, surprise, and reaction. What was it Micah called those? Residuals? Repeaters?

“Adrian was murdered, I think.” Was it suddenly cold in here? I shivered. “Couldn’t see who it was, but someone attacked him.” Would we have caught something on the audio? I turned toward Micah, but his face was lost in a swirl of darkness. Not shadows. My vision going out. “Micah?” I called, reaching for him.

Then Adrian was there, overlayed with the writhing edge of the Death shadow thing we’d seen before. A wriggling monster of lost souls, mouths gaping, eyes wide in terror. I hadn’t meant to invite that thing. And this wasn’t a war zone. Perhaps it had something to do with them being murdered?

I only had a few seconds of thought before it slammed into me and dropped me into the void.