Page 75 of Possessed By Shadows

Chapter 24

Ididn’t normally dream when the shadows took over, at least not that I recalled. Most of the time it became a black void that my brain would try to fill in later, but give up and call it ablackout.

This time the dreams were vague and scattered. Like I could see Adrian, his lips moving, but not hear him. The worst part, was that he wasn’t really doing anything. Not moving, running away, or anything, just trying to say something. Staring with a sort of hollow gaze that looked right through me.

I reached for him as though I could somehow clarify what he said, but he vanished.

I blinked my eyes open and found myself in Micah’s lap, an entire sprawl of strangers towering around me. For a minute I thought they were ghosts, but they all carried cameras, and Jason was there too, leaning in close.

“Fuck,” I said.

“Alex?” Micah sounded unsure.

“Yeah? What happened? I hope I’m not laying in rat shit.”

Everyone seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. Micah leaned over to hug me tight. His face was wet with tears. “Don’t do that to me,” he whispered.

“Sorry.” Had I been out long? We were still in the abandoned school building. The light didn’t look different, so at least I hadn’t lost days. “What happened?”

Jason held up a recorder. The one I’d been holding? He clicked it and a second later it played,“Gone, gone, gone.”It was my voice coming through.

What the fuck?

“Supposed to meet him.”

“Meet who?” I asked of my own voice being played back.

“Gone, gone, gone.”My voice echoed sounding more hollow with each pass, like I was running out of breath.

“Who is gone?”Micah’s voice asked on the audio. He hugged me tighter.

“Cop,”came the reply.

My breath caught at the word. “Lukas?” I wondered. Had anyone asked.

“You were supposed to meet the cop?”Micah clarified on audio. Of course, he would have known.“Lukas?”

“Gone. Gone. Gone.”

Jason clicked off the audio.

“Fuck,” I said. I reached up to rub the tears off Micah’s face. “Sorry.”

“I tried to help,” he said quietly, partially muffled by the mask.

“We’ve never had a response like that,” Jason said. “Not even when Lukas is with us. But you did that at the bayou house too. Channeled something?”

Wasn’t that a scary thought. Channeled. I guess it sounded less terrifying than being possessed.

“You said Adrian before you blacked out. Did you see him?” Jason asked. “We have to check the feeds to see if we caught something.”

How crazy would I be if I acknowledged it? “I did see him. Could tell he wasn’t a person.” The latter part I said more to Micah than the others. “He was sort of faded? Like maybe he didn’t have enough energy?”

“You offered him yours,” Micah said sounding tense.

“We do that on hunts sometimes.” Only in low-key locations in the past, the group as a whole offering upenergy, whatever the fuck that meant. It had never amounted to much. At least until now.

I tried to sit up and felt like I’d been hit by a bus. Everything hurt, hip all the way up to my back. Had I fallen hard? It didn’t seem that was possible when I’d been crouched on the floor to begin with. I also felt filthy, like I’d been crawling through the mud, and maybe I had been. And I’d touched Micah with my nasty hands.