Agonal Breath (The Deadseer Chronicles Book 1) (33 page)

I was worried that we were going to discover Tony and Becky in another shoot-out, popping off rounds at each other while the evil spirits closed in on them both. What we
actually
found was the two wannabe gunslingers standing back to back, with a violently-coughing Brandon shielded behind them both.

With their shirts pulled up to the bridge of their noses, the three of them looked like a gang of bank robbers pulling off a heist.

What worried me more was the pack of seven ghostly attackers who had surrounded them in a horseshoe-pattern, fanned out and closing in. Becky and the boys couldn’t step backwards, or they would be off the edge of the roof and falling six floors to their deaths.

That didn’t leave them with too many options. We all knew that physical bullets wouldn’t hurt spirits — even in their most physical incarnations, the most a round or piece of buckshot could ever be was a minor inconvenience — but my buddies were fighters, and if they were going to go down, then they were going to go down swinging.

Damn, but I
loved
that about them.

I watched Becky squeeze off another round. Even now, despite the intense pressure she was under, she refused to panic and fire blindly or to snatch at the trigger.

The shot was well-aimed, flying through the chest of a Neanderthal-looking male orderly who barely flinched as the lead struck home. The wound didn’t bleed; if he had been struck by a
spirit
weapon or body-part, that would have been a different story, but the ghosts knew that they had nothing to worry about from material sources.

Becky squeezed the trigger again.

Click.

The hammer had fallen on an empty chamber. Her magazine was totally out.

Flames were starting to flicker up and over the parapets behind her tiny little group now, and the crackling meant I couldn’t hear worth a damn.

With a curse that I couldn’t lip-read, Becky pitched the useless Glock at the phantom orderly’s head with all the force she could muster. It missed, sailing over his left shoulder to clatter harmlessly onto a section of rooftop behind him.

“Lamiyah,” I roared, struggling to be heard over the howling inferno that surrounded us. “Is there any way you can take these guys down?” I gestured helplessly at Spiessbach’s cronies, knowing that there wasn’t a damn thing that
I
could do to them.

She had to stand on tiptoes to shout back her reply.

“I’m afraid that I am more of a thinker than a fighter, Daniel…this is more of a job for
those
gentlemen.”

With a sweep of the arm, Lamiyah gestured back behind us towards the golden spirit portal, now barely visible as little more than a blurry smudge through the billowing clouds of smoke.

Suddenly a man burst through the smoke. He wore the uniform of a combat infantryman, and his entire semi-transparent body was outlined in blue. Five other ghost soldiers, similarly dressed and toting what I recognized as M16A2 assault rifles, rushed up to join him, weapons held at the ready.

My eyes went back to their leader. He bore a look of concern on a face that was…

“
DAD!”

I squealed. I
actually
squealed, which made me inhale a lungful of burning smoke and sent me into yet another coughing fit.

“Hello son,” my father said solemnly.

Then, with a grin that I would have given a billion dollars and my entire set of
Star Wars
collectibles to ever see again, he said: “I understand that there are a few asses that need kicking?”

It might sound weirder than weird, but however you slice it, the concept of ghost Marines packing ghost machine guns is freaking
amazing.

A few quick bursts of well-aimed automatic weapons fire was all that it took for my dad’s squad to make Spiessbach’s cronies see sense.

They didn’t even have to put rounds on target; once the chickens realized that Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children had arrived to save the day and were packing spirit weapons that could really
hurt
them, they threw up their hands and pretty much surrendered on the spot.

Which was just as well really, because Long Brook’s roof was about to come down, taking all four of us survivors with it.

“This is it man,” I could hear Bill Paxton’s Corporal Hudson from
Aliens
bleating in my ear. “Game over, man. Game over!”

While the other Marines efficiently trussed up the wrists of their prisoners, I locked my dad into the fiercest hug I have ever given another human being, alive or dead. I didn’t care in the slightest about how cold his body felt. It was him, my dad, and he had come back for me in the end.

That was all that mattered.

And now I was going to die, but that was okay too, because we’d be together again.

Almost as if he were reading my mind, Dad broke the hug. Holding me at arm’s length, he yelled to ask me what was wrong.

“There’s no way we can make it off this roof,” I screamed back. “I get that, and it’s okay. We can be together again, all of us.”

I looked around at Becky and Brandon. I could only see their eyes, but they were both streaming with tears as they watched our totally unexpected family reunion. Even Tony seemed to be choking up, although that might have just been the smoke.

But then my fantasies of a blissful new afterlife spent in the Summerland with Dad and Becky and Brandon and Lamiyah were rudely shattered when another thought crowbarred its way into my brain.

What about Mom…how was she going to cope, losing first her husband, and then her only son?

It would utterly devastate her. She would be a broken woman. And what about Becky’s family, her Wicca-loving parents…and Brandon’s? Hell, even Tony had to have
somebody
who would miss him, somebody to mourn his death when he died here tonight.

Another spirit-form materialized out of the smoke, moving over to stand with Brandon. I couldn’t hear a word either of them was saying, but I really didn’t need to. This was the one time that I could totally read his mind.

Here on this burning roof, standing on the very edge of death, he was finally able to see his grandmother again. I came close to crying like a newborn baby as I watched them both embrace, the old lady patting her grandson’s back in that protective maternal way that’s completely instinctive to grandmothers the world over.

Suddenly, my head was clamped in an icy vice-like grip. Dad turned my head towards him and stuck his face right in front of mine. He screamed every word slowly and clearly, making sure to enunciate it perfectly so that there could be no misunderstanding.

“You. Are.
Not.
Going. To. Die. Here. Tonight!”

And incredibly enough, I didn’t.

What happened next was pretty much a blur.

I’ll tell it as best I can, but you have to understand that it was all over so incredibly quickly, a lot of it seems like a dream to me now.

Oh, and there’s the fact that I was so frightened for most of it that I was concentrating
really
hard on not peeing my pants.

The Marines produced ropes from somewhere. The coils glowed an ethereal blue, just like they did. Visibility was down to practically nothing now, but somehow they managed to secure the ropes to some kind of anchor point on top of the roof.

Dad scooped me up in his arms again, crushing me close to his chest and yelling at me to hang on for dear life. Before I knew it, Dad had jumped up onto the parapet of the roof and turned back to face the rope again.

“
Might want to close your eyes, son!
”

I took him at his word and screwed my eyes tightly shut.

The next thing I knew, that sickening floating feeling was kicking up a storm in my stomach — you know, the one you get at the top of the rollercoaster’s first big climb, right before it plunges back down again at Mach 2.

I remember feeling incredibly hot for a moment, as if we were falling into the open mouth of an oven. Then the feeling went away again as quickly as it had arrived, and suddenly it was
back,
fiercer than before
;
I figured out later that we had pretty much rappelled down six floors in about thirty seconds, and although Dad had done his best to choose a spot that was, in his own words, “a bit less flaming than the rest,” I was still a little scorched as we passed each burning floor on the way down.

The thud of his combat boots on solid ground was my cue to open my eyes again. Dad was sprinting away from the building, and as I looked over his shoulder I could see smoke and flame pouring out of most of the open windows and doorways.

Also standing in most of those same windows were the motionless apparitions of hundreds of Long Brook’s former patients, all of them watching silently as the tiny squad of Marines dashed out of the inferno and headed towards the safety of the treeline.

Dad lowered me to the ground gently. Just a few yards away, the other members of his squad were doing the same for Becky and Brandon. The Marine that had been holding Tony just let him drop, and the meth dealer howled in agony when his wounded leg hit the floor.

“Sorry,” said the Marine flatly, sounding anything but.

Lamiyah hadn’t needed the help, and came striding up under her own steam.

“It’s so good to see you, son,” Dad said quietly, clasping my arms. I was still crying, and I thought that I probably would be for quite a while yet. My next question came out as more of a sob.

“Dad…
why did it take you so long?
”

Dad took a seat on the grass next to me, in the same way he’d always done when he had something to explain.

“Danny…when I died over there, it was…things were pretty bad, son. That’s about as much detail as I want to go into, but let’s just say that I wasn’t in the best state, either mentally or emotionally. It was my second tour, remember, and the sh…the
stuff
I was seeing was starting to get to me.”

“You mean like PTSD?”

He nodded. “That’s right. There’s more to it than that, but the constant strain was a big part of it. When everything went down that day and I died, when
we
died—” Dad nodded to indicate the other members of his squad, who were all very politely and pointedly pretending not to notice our impromptu father-son conversation “in that ambush, I didn’t go straight to the Summerland. In fact,
none
of us did.”

“Where
did
you go?”

“To a special place, a house of healing. Sort of like a hospital, but way less formal and sterile. My spirit body was fine as soon as I opened my eyes, as good as new but
this
—” Dad pointed to his chest, and then at his head “and
this
needed some rehab, son. It took a lot of working through issues with some truly wonderful and supportive healing souls to get me back on my feet again.”

That made a lot of sense to me. I’d heard of similar things happening to spirits who died under really traumatic circumstances — murder victims, people caught up in terrorist attacks and nasty stuff like that — and having to get some kind of intensive care and attention from specialists on the other side. Why had it never occurred to me that
that
was why I hadn’t heard from Dad?

“I would have come sooner, but I didn’t want to burden you with my problems, son. To tell you the truth, I think I still have a little further to go, but when the charming young lady over there—” he nodded towards Lamiyah, who curtsied politely in return “—came and told me what kind of trouble you’d gotten yourself into, I talked them into letting me out for a little field trip. It actually feels pretty good to get back into the old battle rattle again,” he grinned, referring to his combat gear.

I grinned back. The tears had stopped.

“What happens to the sanatorium now, Lamiyah?” I wanted to know, fighting to speak around another bout of hacking coughs.

In the background, Long Brook was still fully involved, burning heavily and pushing a massive column of dark smoke into the Rocky Mountain night sky. Lamiyah seemed to consider her answer for a long minute before answering.

“When von Spiessbach awakens momentarily, he has a significant choice to make. Even taking into account the sheer amount of harm that he has done since his demise, he cannot be forced into entering the light and progressing to the next phase of his spiritual development. “ She sighed. “That is
one
option, certainly, and the most beneficial for him in the long run; but blighted souls such as his often choose to remain bound to the mortal realm, afraid of such judgment as will come in the next world.”

“
What about my grandmother?” Becky interjected, a definite edge of concern in her voice.

“She will be given the same choice that all are offered under such circumstances: to accept the light and the consequences of her actions, or to reject it and remain earthbound.” Lamiyah squatted next to where Becky lay on the ground and laid a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “From what I have seen of her behavior tonight, Rebecca, I suspect that she will make the correct choice. Have no fear.”