Spirit Breaker (7 page)

Seconds before impact, Benson froze in midair. An invisible force clamped around his ankle, the nerve endings of his skin lighting up with fiery pain. The air crackled with energy and then he was being pulled up, faster and faster.

The force flung him aside like a ragdoll and he landed hard on the second floor balcony. It was a brief reprieve as two hoodies lurched toward him, murder in their eyes. Benson was spent, no strength left in him. He bowed his head and awaited his fate.

Red dots found the two hoodies and then their chests erupted with a burst of gunfire. The cultists collapsed.
 

Weakly, Benson craned his neck toward his savior. A man garbed in black emerged from the shadows, machine pistol up and ready, night vision goggles giving him an insectile quality. One gloved hand reached for him while the other fired a burst of rounds at three more incoming skaters. The hoodies went down in the darkness.

Benson allowed himself to be pulled to his feet, and a beat later they were moving down the concourse, the cultists hot on their tails.

But the detective didn’t worry about the men rushing after them. All he could think about was the inhuman face of the Reaper. Benson sensed that despite the arrival of the armed stranger, there would be no escape from the cursed mall.

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TALON DEPRESSED HIS finger on the trigger and fed lead into the fast-approaching cultists. Two hooded figures crumpled in a mist of red.
 

Talon whirled toward the downed man who’d barely escaped death mere seconds earlier. He still didn’t quite understand what he’d just witnessed. The man had gone off the balcony and should’ve fallen to his death. But some strange force had pulled him back into the air, halting his deadly descent.
 

Fear of the unknown gave way to the immediate pressure of the situation. More cultists were zeroing in on their position. Talon’s combat-hardened instincts took over and he lifted the man to his feet. Seconds later, they were surging down the concourse, the previously sepulchral silence replaced with shouts, hissing spray canisters, and the wheels of skateboards rippling over cement. Talon kept firing into the darkness, the grunts and moans telling him that his bullets had found mortal enemies.
 

Up ahead, JC Penney loomed into view and they tore into the dark department store, Talon’s night vision mapping the way. A creepy landscape of junk and dust-caked mannequins awaited them. At the center of the empty store, Talon made out a group of mattresses. There were backpacks, wrappers of junk food. The walls tattooed with graffiti. The barcode skull dominated the tags—no surprise there. Talon guessed this was where the skaters dwelled when they weren’t kidnapping their victims and hunting them through the mall’s endless hallways. What power could the Lightwalker wield to control so many people? To organize these lost souls living on the edge of society into a de facto army of murderers?

A terrible stench of decay interrupted his thoughts. Judging from the expression of disgust on the other man’s face, he’d picked it up too. Death was in the air.
 

Talon followed the stomach-turning odor, brushed through a row of racks and empty boxes and froze. Nine rotting bodies lined the floor, empty eyes turned toward the ceiling.
 

The missing kidnapping victims.

The old rage boiled up inside Talon, and his heart grew cold. It took all his self-control not to dash back into the mall and take out the rest of these psychopathic bastards.

There was a sudden sound to his right, and Talon whirled, eyes focusing on three eerie mannequins.

His companion fixed him with a haunted stare. “We can’t outrun the dead,” he muttered.

“What are you talking about?”
 

“The Reaper’s here. I shot him but he’s still here. He’s never left this place. All these years, he’s been waiting for me. He won’t let me leave.”

Almost as if to lend credence to the panicked man’s words, Talon’s breath misted in the sudden cold. It was as if someone had cranked the AC all the way up. For a split second, he was reminded of the terrible cold he’d experienced back in Norway when he had confronted the wrath of the winter warlock.

“We’re both getting out of here… Now…”

Talon shifted his gaze toward the exit but now found a row of mannequins blocking their path. He could’ve sworn the area was clear mere seconds earlier…

Without warning, one of the mannequins moved, a lifeless arm lashing out at him. Talon fired, bullets shredding the mannequins, sending plaster limbs flying. His pulse quickened as he crouched before the bullet-riddled dummy. Did he imagine the movement after all?

“Oh my God… He’s here… The Reaper is here…”

Talon spun toward the panicked man…and that’s when he saw the apparition. It lasted for only a blink of an eye, more like an optical illusion than anything else. A white, misty silhouette stood outlined about thirty feet from them. There was a jerk, almost like a jump cut in reality, and then the same figure loomed before them. Talon brought up his machine pistol, but the barrel was pointed at thin air, the specter having vanished once more.

A hiss of a spray canister made Talon whirl. Where was it coming from?

He didn’t spot the canister but he saw the graffiti bleeding over the floor. Two Greek letters: Alpha and Omega. Beginning and End.

Death is only the beginning.

“Go! Get out of here! Save yourself before it’s too—”

The words were cut off as an invisible force twisted the man’s arm. Bone snapped, and he exhaled in pain. He slumped to his knees, gasping. There was no time to recuperate from the spectral attack as the entity pounded his face into the ground with savage force.

Again and again.
 

Talon shot toward the twitching, groaning man. He had crossed less than half the distance when a force lifted Talon into the air and tossed him aside. Talon slammed into a row of metal clothing racks and collapsed on the floor. He lay there, groggy, as the spectral attack intensified against the stranger. The force yanked him backward, bending his spine unnaturally before dragging his whole body along the floor at breakneck speed, up the wall and along the ceiling. For a split second, the man remained suspended on the ceiling before his lifeless body came crashing down right before Talon’s feet. Despite his training and years of combat, terror seized him. The former Delta operator had seen many a man die in front of him, but he had never experienced anything like this.

The air crackled and hissed with electricity, making Talon’s hair stand on end. Energy filled the abandoned department store. The man he had failed to save claimed the Reaper’s spirit haunted this mall, and now Talon believed him. But how to fight an enemy he couldn’t even see?

Before Talon could process the horror, the invisible force that had destroyed his companion reached out for him. A violent burst of energy shredded his combat suit, and black marks burned over his skin. The contact with the strange force took his breath away. He gasped in agony and dropped the machine pistol, which clattered ineffectively over the floor. A boneless face materialized, bloodshot eyes squirming with hatred.

The Reaper’s presence was upon him. The entity lifted Talon upward and pinned him against the wall like a puny insect. There was pressure against his diaphragm, and he couldn’t breathe. He was about to share the broken, bloodied man’s fate.

The Reaper’s skeletal features grew visible, lips dried with blood, eyes pools of pure blackness. Not flesh but made of an unstable, translucent material. Constantly reforming, exposing muscles as the thin membrane shifted and shredded.
 

A hand reached out for Talon’s chest, bony fingers vanishing inside his ribcage like spectral scalpels. He could almost visualize those fingers closing around his hammering heart, intent on squeezing the life right out of him.

No, it couldn’t end like this…

Talon stared into the Reaper’s inhuman eyes. The spirit had become death itself, living up to his namesake.

There was a sensation of heat and his pentacle amulet lit up, responding to the proximity of the supernatural being. Crackling energy ignited the air and the Reaper recoiled, dispersing as it unleashed a bone-rattling inhuman shriek.
 

Talon tilted forward, nothing holding him aloft any longer, and tumbled back to the ground. He gasped, coughing up blood.
 

Nearby, the spirit of the Reaper was reforming, filaments of concentrated light hanging in mid-air as the spooky wisps coalesced back into the shape of a man. Talon had no idea if the amulet would save him one more time. The Reaper wasn’t like any enemy he’d ever faced before.
 

Driven by his desire to live, Talon staggered to his feet and stumbled for the exit. Renewed bursts of energy erupted, still struggling to take shape and reach out for him, but he blocked it from his mind. His complete focus was on the arched exit ahead.
 

Unloading a clip into the lock, he ran full bore toward the door. Talon didn’t know much about spirit beings like the Reaper, but among the whispered legends and half-forgotten lore, one detail stuck out. Ghosts were often bound to the place of their death. Maybe, just maybe, the Reaper wouldn’t be able to follow him beyond the walls of his retail tomb.

A final roar of bestial, frustration accompanied his escape, and then Talon was sprinting across the parking lot. He hated to retreat. Leaving the bodies of the fallen behind wasn’t his style, either. But nothing would be gained if he faced the Reaper and allowed himself to become just another rotting corpse in the mall. He would strategize with Casca and return to face this entity.
 

If there was a way to defeat a ghost…

Moments later, he reached his rental car and kicked open the hinged door, still unwilling to hazard a glance behind him, praying the entity wasn’t following him.
 

He sucked in sharp mouthfuls of air, fired up the ignition, and tapped the accelerator. Only once the Regional Mall had receded in his rear view mirror did his hands stop shaking.
 

***

A half an hour later, a battered Talon used his keycard to let himself into his hotel room. One of the reasons he avoided five-star hotels, even though Casca could afford them, was that the cheaper, more rundown places offered more privacy. People knew to keep to themselves. Not having to trudge past a reception desk to get to your room didn’t hurt either. In his current beaten-up state, he would’ve drawn plenty of raised eyebrows.

He staggered into the bathroom, flipped on the light switch, and stepped up to the mirror to assess the full extent of the damage. His skintight black sweater had been shredded by the spectral attack and the skin underneath felt bruised and sensitive. His chest burned as he pulled off the shirt. He tossed the ruined garment on the floor and inspected the twin black marks that ran down his pectoral muscles in long, fat lines. The new injuries framed the inverted pentagram scar Zagan had carved into his skin back in San Francisco. The wounds resembled electrical burns of some kind. Making matters worse, his stab wound was bleeding again too.
 

I’m falling apart here
, Talon thought.
 

He shouldn’t be complaining. At least he was alive. The same couldn’t be said for the man he’d failed to save back in the mall.
 

I shot him but he never left this place.

Talon considered the dead man’s words and concluded he must been one of the cops who put a stop to the Reaper’s wanton massacre five years earlier.

Talon rubbed an anti-burn salve on his fresh wounds and bit his lips. The cream stung like crazy. He wrapped his chest in gauze and swallowed a few painkillers.
 

He’d faced demons and cults, but he’d never confronted a ghost before. His amulet had saved his ass, but he was in dire need of a different kind of weapon and a new strategy if he was to face the Lightwalker and his spectral master again.
 

He can speak to the dead.
 

What did it all mean? Was this cult leader controlling the Reaper’s spirit somehow? Casca would no doubt have some ideas on the matter.

Talon staggered to the small desk which fronted the bed and switched on his laptop. A Google search produced a piece on the Reaper. A photo of a familiar face confronted Talon: the police officer he’d left behind at the mall. His name had been Officer Rob Benson, one of the first officers to arrive on the scene. Over the years, Talon had walked into enough combat zones to know the kind of horror Benson must’ve encountered on that horrific day. After his partner was hit, Benson drew fire. Four bullets cut down the Reaper. Many of the followers lost heart after their leader went down. Who knows how many more innocent lives would’ve perished if not for Benson? The man deserved every commendation he had earned that day.

Talon also knew Benson probably didn’t even see himself as a hero. Like soldiers, victories lost their luster when it came at such a high price. Benson had stopped the Reaper, but he failed his partner.

Talon logged off the website and clenched his teeth. A good man had perished today, just another casualty in this war against the darkness. He vowed to do everything in his power to stop the Reaper and his new killer cult. But how to defeat a ghost? The weapons he’d mastered over his military career were useless against the spirits of the dead. It was time to call Casca.
 

Even though it had to be two o’clock on the West Coast, the billionaire sounded bright and alert when he answered the phone. Was some pretty new conquest keeping Casca up this late? Or were the man’s demons denying him a much-needed rest? Either way, Casca was awake, and Talon was glad for it.

In a voice drained of all emotion, he asked, “So Casca, do you believe in ghosts?”
 

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