Page 88 of Possessed By Shadows

The child turned toward the garage door. I honestly expected nothing to happen, but the glass shattered outward, not inward like it should have. It was the first time I’d actually seen it do something physical, this incarnation of it at least. I had no desire to see a repeat of what had happened in the desert that day. A little glass breaking didn’t seem like a big deal, but everyone around me gasped and closed in.

“Please tell me someone got that on camera?” Jason asked.

“I think I did.”

“Me too,” said someone else behind me.

I stared at the kid, my grip on Micah probably hurting, but his gaze was focused on the kid too, not the window.

“Thank you for letting me have him back,” Micah whispered. “We need to find Lukas now. He’s not yours either, is he?”

The kid tilted their head as it shifted its gaze toward Micah.You are not ours, but would have taken you when you offered before if I could.

“You’re not taking him anywhere,” I said. “He’s mine.”

Dad reached in through the broken window and unlocked the garage door. Yeah, this was very much breaking and entering. We might just end up getting shot tonight. He shined the light inside the garage first before holding it open and heading inside. If he was going in, so was I. My brother was in there. And I intended to do anything I could to bring him home.

Micah glared at the kid as we passed, keeping close to me. “You could have let me wake him up before he got here.”

The kid shrugged.Find brother. Owe me.

Well, that was a startling thought. What did I owe it? Time using me? I thought it could do that any time it wanted anyway. I sighed and followed my dad into the dark garage. No cars inside, but a lot of boxes that smelled like dust and mold.

“This is the shit from the house,” Dad said as he opened the first few and held up bits of clothing. “Like kids clothes? All sizes?”

I was reminded of all the kids in the attic. Kids clothes. The cop had owned the house. Why have all the kids clothes and suddenly have ghosts in the attic? My stomach sank.

“Micah,” I whispered. “I think that cop was killing kids in the house Lukas bought.”

“What?”

“There were a lot of kids ghosts in the attic. And the angry thing, demon, yokai, whatever it was that took over and brought me here? It was mad its stuff was gone.” I waved a hand at all the boxes. “This stuff?”

“A ghost led us here to retrieve this crap?” My dad asked. “What about Lukas?”

The child said Lukas was here. Not in the garage, as it appeared to be the typical cement slab, four walls, nothing organized or any closets that I could see. The house was up a half-dozen stairs and in. There was a little standing water in the garage. The boxes of clothes on pallets to keep them raised off the ground. I headed toward the door to the house.

“In for a penny, in for a pound, right?” I asked Micah, thinking of that old saying. We were already in trouble. If saving Lukas got us all arrested? Well maybe he would bail us out? I hoped I wouldn’t get any of us shot.

The ghost team filtered in after us, chattering about batteries and police radar. One of the girls stared at the pile of stuff. “Lots of hoarders in this town,” she remarked.

“This isn’t even all of it,” my dad said. “There was probably another ten or so boxes like this?”

“They took them all?” I asked.

“Never talked to them. Just through text message. Hauled stuff out and left it on the curb. Thought people might pick through it, but it was gone,” Dad said. I wondered if it was the guy in the video taking Lukas’s stuff? How was he involved?

The door from the garage to the house was unlocked. There was an open kitchen inside the doorway, a small half bath, a cookie-cutter dining and living room spin-off, and the stairs upward, with a door tucked beside it. I listened to the house for a minute wondering if anyone was asleep upstairs, before I opened the door first, expecting a closet, but finding a sort of small den. It was pretty sparsely furnished. A handful of books on a small shelf, a narrow desk along the wall, cords that seemed to go to a computer, though there was no computer.

Micah used the light from his phone to shine around the room. “Ugly rug,” he muttered, staring at the mottled blue and gold sprawl of a worn area rug that took up most of the floor.

My dad was coming down the stairs before I even left the den. “No one upstairs.”

“That was fast,” I said.

“Small house. Two rooms and one full bath up there? Not as big as it looks from the outside.”

“No Lukas?”