Lost Souls (A Caitlyn O’Connell Novel) (20 page)

The way he said Morin’s name erased any doubts he knew about Morin’s role in her life—and her mother’s. “Not often. Only when I need advice.”

“Keep it that way. He’s a user. He may have powers, but look at the mess he got himself into. You’re best to stay away
from all that. Your mother didn’t learn her lesson until too late. She still hasn’t.”

She still hasn’t.
Cait held still. “Do you see Mama?”

“Like I’m seeing you now?” He shook his head. “Haven’t since she summoned me. I was at peace, but then she called me back. To ask for forgiveness. What she really wanted was permission to move on—to him.” His expression turned bitter, his lips twisted. “I’m not sorry she did, though. You might still need me.”

“I’ll always need you.” They shared a long, poignant glance. “She didn’t try to send you back?”

Paddy snorted. “Said she didn’t know how. Hadn’t realized I couldn’t find my own way.”

“Have you looked?” Cait canted her head. “Sylvia here is in a similar predicament.”

Paddy turned to Sylvia for the first time. “She call you?”

Sylvia’s arms were folded. She gave an emphatic nod, her lip curling in a snarl. “She did. And for nothin’. Now I’m stuck. If my asshole husband could see me, I’d haunt his ass.”

Paddy grinned. “You don’t have to appear to him to cause him grief.”

Sylvia’s dark gaze glinted. “Really?”

“Stick with me a bit—until this one figures out how to send you back,” he said, pointing to Cait. “In the meantime, I’ll show you what a poltergeist can do.”

The two of them slid from the bench. Her dad gave her a final wink, and they headed out of the bar together, fading through the door.

“Great, I lost my boyfriend, but my dad has a date.” She sipped her Coke.

“Since it’s pure soda I served you, I’m gettin’ a little worried here, Cait.”

Cait glanced up to find Pauly standing right beside her, his glance going to the opposite empty seat. She wondered how long he’d watched her talking to the air. “I’m just practicing a few arguments for the next time I see Sam.”

Relief lit his eyes, and he grinned. “Can I bring you something else?”

Cait was tempted. Her gaze flicked to the various bottles at the back of the bar, scanning the shapes for her favorite.

Pauly’s silence said he knew it too.

But she shook her head. “Better not. I have a lot of thinking to do.”

“Anytime you want to talk to someone who might talk back, I’m all ears, hon.”

She gave him a sheepish smile. If he only knew.

As he ambled off, she reached for her phone. Several taps later, she listened to the dial tone.

“That you, Cait?” Jason asked. “Still have an ass?”

Shaking her head, Cait made a face at the phone. “We’re off the case.”

“Can’t say I’m not surprised. You scared years off Sam’s hide. Never saw a guy that size move so fast after I told him what you’d done.”

Cait sighed. “He doesn’t want us anywhere near the hotel. Said the officers guarding the door would turn me away.”

After a long pause, Jason asked, “So what do you want me to do?”

“That’s what I like about you.” Cait smiled. “No fussing or cursing. No lectures or fingers wagging in my face. Just a helpful segue.”

He groaned. “Cait, you can’t be thinking about going back there.”

“I have to get inside. And I have to do it tonight. The demon in the hotel knows about us. He consigned his lieutenant to the past. Right now he’s got to be nervous. He won’t dare strike with the place covered in cops.” Her grip on the phone tightened. “Not again. I want to see what the TV crew has. See if their film will reveal that point of conflux. I have to know if it’s more specific than just the hotel or just the third floor.”

“And when you find it, what then?”

Cait shrugged and raked a hand through her hair. “I don’t know. But knowing where it is would be helpful, even if only to make sure everyone stays clear. Maybe if I can do this without getting anyone killed, Sam’ll let me back on the case.”

“Must have been a hell of a fight.”

You have no clue.
“Oh, he was angry.”

“Huh.” Jason grunted. “You at O’Malley’s?”

“Where else? The apartment was too quiet after he dropped me off.”

Another pause stretched, then he asked, “You drinkin’?”

“No. Not like I didn’t want to, but I have to keep my head screwed on. Too much at risk. Sam and everyone else who goes in and out of that place are all in danger.”

“Trying to save the world?”

“Not the world, Jason. Just my little piece.”

“I’ll be there in fifteen.”

She ended the call and slid from her booth. Her heart still felt heavy. Remorse burned a hole in her belly. Sam had every right to his fury. She could see his point. The moment the elevator doors had opened to the paisley wallpaper, she
really thought she’d been lost. That she’d never see Sam again, or that she’d have to wait decades to tell him she was sorry. The other possibility, of winding up inside a wall, her guts yanked out and her body looking like jerky, wasn’t one she could ponder without throwing up.

Yeah, she’d been that scared. She just hadn’t had time to process everything she’d seen. Now that she had, she realized she’d learned something useful too.

The demon was scared.

“Cait, the stairwell door is clear,” Jason whispered.

She lowered her phone and ran up the final set of stairs to slip through the door to the third floor. The cop who should have been watching the hall was nowhere in sight.

How Jason had managed that feat, she didn’t want to know. Plausible deniability and all.

At the room assigned to the Reel PIs, she knocked, hoping they didn’t have any other visitors inside or she was toast.

The door inched open. Clayton’s large bulbous eye appeared in the crack.

“Cait!” He opened the door and grabbed her arm, hauling her inside. “Sam said you weren’t coming, but we have so much to show you. Madame Xavier said you were a witch. That you were the most plugged in to all this. Truth is, we don’t know what we’re seeing.”

“Take a breath.” Cait turned the deadbolt on the door. “In case I need a second to hide,” she said, offering him a conspiratorial wink. Her nose wrinkled at the smell of stale pizza and beer. Their mussed hair and the equipment tossed willy-nilly on the beds and floor clued her in that they’d been hard at work for a while.

Clayton waved her to a chair. “Mina, play back the tape.”

Cait nodded to Booger, who sat on the edge of the bed.

Mina gave her a smug half-smile. “We’re gonna be famous.”

That thought had Cait hiding a grimace, but who was she to rain on their parade? No doubt Leland would make sure the recording never saw the light of day. She took her seat in the armchair beside Mina’s metal folding one and with Clayton hovering over her shoulder.

She watched as the camera panned wide to fit Madame Xavier into the frame.

“I see a spirit! Her essence is bright, luminous. She’s right beside you, Cait.”

The camera rushed forward, peering around the psychic’s shoulder.
“I see a large smudge, roundish, next to Cait,”
came Mina’s voice.

“Round is a shape.”
Cait heard herself say a few moments afterward, her black-and-white expression puckish.

The moment Cait watched herself aim the flashlight past the camera and squint her eyes, she gripped the chair’s arms.

Cait was gesturing to Sam, in the direction of the hallway where the bodies were found.
“Sparky hasn’t joined us yet?”

“Not a peep,”
he said. In the infrared, his face was a study of harsh lines.
“Beginning to think this might be a bust.”

The camera made a sickening swing back to the medium. In the background, a shadow ducked from around the corner of the hall, and then back.

Clayton’s pointing finger extended past Cait’s shoulder. “Stop it there. Go back. It’s not what I want you to see, but this part is interesting too. How’d
he
get on the floor? Recognize him?”

In the freeze frame, Eddie’s face shone, peeking around the corner.

“The EMT guy who worked on Cait!” Mina said.

“You see that? Somebody else is up here,”
Cait said.

“We sure about that? Booger, Clayton!”
Sam’s voice rang loudly.

“We’re watching the feed,”
came Clayton’s faint voice from a distance.
“We’ve already got some great stuff. Orbs, that round smudge Madame Xavier saw.”

“Shush, the only one who can hear you is me,”
Cait hissed.

“Uh, who were you talking to?” Mina asked, turning to Cait.

Cait shrugged. “I forget.”

“Seriously, you’re gonna sing that?”
Then a beat later,
“Sylvia, this is not the place!”

Booger, Mina, and Clayton leveled their stares on her.

Me and my big mouth.
The last thing she wanted them to know was that she talked to spirits. But how could she explain away her words? She lifted her shoulders and stared again at the screen. “What did you want me to see?”

Mina glared and hit play again.

“You feel? Can you feel me? That tickled.”

“I didn’t touch you,”
Jason said, giving her a quick look.

“Wasn’t talking to you.”

“She still there?”
he whispered.

“Sharpie-outlined lips and all.”

The feed stopped again.

Clayton stepped around the chair to stare down like an inquisitor. “Cait, you’re a medium too? You’re talking to her. Sylvia Reyes. You see her.
Oh. My. God.
Do you realize what this means?”

Cait gave him her meanest glare. “Not a thing, because if you ever air that part, I’ll come after you.”

“I’ll say. And TMI, by the way,”
the Cait with the huge mouth in the recording continued.

Cait groaned as more of the one-sided conversation continued.

The camera work got jumpier, the picture jerking, because Mina was getting either jostled or overexcited.

Down the hall, Madame Xavier fluttered her fingers.
“I’ve never seen a spirit that dense or large,”
she said as she squinted toward them.

A damning, too-long second later.
“You’re growing on me, Syl.”

Just as the psychic reached the opening to the other hallway, Cait heard herself shout,
“Madame Xavier, come back!”

“I told her not to go within twenty feet of that hall,”
Sam muttered.

Thankfully, the recording halted.

“That’s all we have on that part,” Mina said, “but I spliced in the feed from the static camera I had set on a tripod. Watch this.”

No nauseating jerking going on with this part of the tape. A pop sounded as a bulb flared then exploded in the ceiling in the haunted hallway. The taped-off door swung open. A sudden brightness consumed the picture.

Mina stopped the recording again to fiddle with a dial on her console, and the brightness dimmed a notch to show the bright light was a bolt of electricity arcing like a whip out the door.

Madame Xavier turned her head to glance over one shoulder. Her hands jerked up, her back straightening away.
“Oh my Lord,”
she was heard to say a moment before another whip of light lashed out, wrapped around her wrist, and then pulled back, whisking her off her feet and through the door, which then slammed shut.

Mina hit reverse again, stopping on the slamming door. Then she slowed the recording so they could watch the scene progress, one frame at a time. The opened wall was visible, but liquefying and forming a circle that turned, the center sucking inward, forming a funnel with Madame Xavier’s large body folded in the center, her waving hands near her wiggling feet, the moment she was sucked through.

Three gazes swung from the screen and landed on Cait.

She blew out a breath and met theirs, knowing they deserved an explanation. They’d faced the monster and had lost a comrade. “You were right about this being a demonic haunting,” she said quietly. “He lives in the walls. This hotel has been his killing field. And you’ve found the point of conflux.”

“I knew it!” Clayton punched a fist into the air then jerked it close to his body. “Yes!”

Booger cleared his throat. “If he’s in the walls, can he see us here?”

“I’m not sure. But he knows we’re on to him.”

“Is it safe to be here?” Mina whispered.

“You don’t have to whisper. He’s fed intermittently, over decades. The fact he’s killed twice in just a few days might have drained him. I’m assuming he expends a lot of energy to do that,” Cait said, waving at the screenshot of him sucking Madame Xavier into a vortex.

“While his energy field is low, Booger could do an exorcism,” Clayton said.

Cait shook her head. “I have it on good authority that an exorcism won’t destroy him. He’ll simply move on to another place.”

“Then what can be done?”

“I don’t know. But you’ve been helpful. I needed confirmation that was the spot, although how the bodies were moved from there to other parts of this floor, I don’t know. I suppose he could simply have carried them around when he was in human form, opened a wall, and hidden them.”