The Ravaging in Between (The Reanimation Files Book 3) (13 page)

I woke up the next day feeling better than I’d expected to, but that was thanks to the painkillers I’d received from the paramedics.

After the police arrived, I had been questioned within an inch of my life. I told them the long and short of what I knew about Grant Pano and let them take it from there. I wasn’t sure what was going to happen when it became known that a violent ghost that was sent to the Afterlife was back, but there’d been no way for me to keep that a secret. It was all very puzzling to me, and very concerning. What if Grant wasn’t the only ghost that had somehow made his or her way back over here?

Well, Luna for one wasn’t interested in letting me lay in bed all day thinking about it. She wanted to be fed. I loathly got out of bed and got breakfast ready for both of us. While I was digging into my bowl of cereal, my phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Selene? Where are they taking my husband, what are they doing to him?” It was Glenda, and like yesterday, she sounded hysterical. I had briefly seen her at the hospital since I had gone with Harvey in the ambulance, but she’d been too busy losing her mind over his condition to chat much.

“What are you talking about? He’s at NYU Langone.”

“Not anymore,” she said. “I went there this morning to see him, but they would not allow me to. There was a horde of PTF officers everywhere and I saw them take his body out of the room to a white van outside. It wasn’t even an ambulance! Where did they take Harvey?”

“Glenda, I have no idea, I just woke up. I don’t have an inkling as to what happened at the hospital this morning.”

“You must know because your boyfriend was there,” Glenda cut in. That caught my attention.

“What?”

“Your boyfriend,” she repeated. “Micah? He was there. He looked like he was supervising the whole thing.”

I frowned. If Micah was there, it had to be on the orders of Tielle. But why the hell would Tielle take a beaten-up man from his hospital bed?

“I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m going to look into it and let you know.” I hung up before she could say anything more and quickly finished eating. I wasn’t going to waste time calling Micah or Tielle. I’d just go straight to them and see if I could find out what the hell was going on.

I cleaned up, took the fur-ball for a walk, and then headed to the Paranormal Control Center.

* * *

Micah was surprised to see me, but seemed happy that I had stopped by.

“Hey,” he said, giving me a hug. “I figured you’d be home resting after what happened last night.”

The news had clued Micah in to what had gone down in the warehouse and we’d spoken about it briefly last night before I called it quits out of exhaustion. The conversation had been along the usual lines of him expressing his displeasure that I had not told him what I was up to. And it irritated me because I didn’t feel the need to tell Micah about every little decision I made. But I’d hung up before getting into all of that with him. The truth was that it just hadn’t crossed my mind to call him and tell him anything about my encounter with Glenda.

He probably thought my coming here today was some sort of effort to mend our broken bridges. I wasn’t quite on that wavelength at the moment, but instead of launching into an inquisition about Harvey Whittle and the location of his body, I let him take me on a tour, which he expressed an eagerness to do.

He took me to the twentieth floor. This floor was less swanky than where Tielle and the other head honchos were five floors up, but was more practical for the work they did here. It bustled with necromancer and dead witch scientists. The entire floor was open and consisted of many stations where scientists were gathered around large tables working with runes, or sitting at desks typing on a computer.

Micah greeted several people, and introduced me as we walked through the floor. I noted how at ease he seemed here, and the people seemed genuine in their friendliness. I was engaged in a lot of small talk about how I was doing after the ordeal with Renton, and everyone expressed their amazement about my survival.

“This is where I usually am.” Micah walked me over to a table close to the back wall where a couple scientists were working. “Right now I’m doing a lot of archiving of Renton’s notes. He kept hard copies of everything.”

“I recall all the papers I saw in his bunker,” I said. “Guess it was not easy to get Internet access hooked up down there.”

“Not just there, but he had a similar set up in D.C. So I’ve been scanning, typing, and organizing all his notes.” Behind the worktable was a desk with a computer. The monitor was obnoxiously large. On the floor nearby were boxes that I assumed contained Renton’s files.

“So you haven’t been working with runes?”

“I have,” Micah replied. “Renton had a lot of projects in the works that Tielle would still like to see come to fruition. Apparently he had been trying to revive Dr. Perlysse’s rune therapy and I’ve been back and forth to various hospitals testing it out.”

“Using human guinea pigs, huh?”

“We’ve been helping people, Selene. There’s a little girl whose body is riddled with pain from a bone-eating disease. Using rune therapy, we send small amounts of ghost energy into her body and it deadens the pain. Then we draw the ghost energy out. She’s had a vast improvement and is in far less pain that she was before. She’s even been able to get up and walk for the first time in months.”

“Cheap shot, telling me a story that pulls on the heartstrings.”

Micah gave a half smile. “Not trying to pull heartstrings, just want to be open about what we’re doing here.”

“I know. It will just take some time to find comfort with all this.”

“I’m really glad you came to visit. I know this is a point of contention between us and I think it’s great that you were willing to come here.”

He didn’t know I’d been here already. Guess Tielle had not told him. And truth be told, I wasn’t really comfortable being here, nor was I comfortable with how at ease Micah was in this environment. I could barely remember that he used to be a working necromancer helping ghosts. It was like this was what he’d always done.

That aside, I had come here for a reason and it was time to let it be known. “Actually, there’s something I want to talk to you about.”

“What’s going on?”

“Harvey Whittle. I was told that you oversaw the transportation of his body out of NYU Langone. Why? And where is he?”

Micah wouldn’t make eye contact with me. “Selene, this isn’t really something you need to be involved with…”

“That man’s wife came to me directly and asked for help, and after what I’ve just been through I’d say I’m very involved. Especially when you factor in that his attacker was a ghost who was sent to the Afterlife almost a decade ago.”

“It’s under our jurisdiction,” Micah said. “We’re taking care of the situation…”

“Cut the bullshit and just tell me what’s going on. I may not be able to sneak around here and poke at things until I find the answer, but what I can do is make noise about it in the media and shine a light on you guys in a way I’m sure you’d rather avoid. I can easily call up that reporter, Taj, and spin some sensational story on this whole reappearing ghost thing. Would you like that?”

“Certainly not.”

It wasn’t Micah who answered, but Tielle. I turned around and found her standing a few feet behind us. Her pinstriped pencil suit went well with her token high, tight bun and severe expression.

“Well? Are you going to tell me why you took Harvey from the hospital? Is he here?”

Tielle flicked a glance at Micah, then back to me. “Come with me.”

She turned and started walking away, and I quickly followed, as did Micah. Tielle led us to the elevators and we went two floors down. The layout was less open than the floor we’d just been on. This one was all corridors and closed doors.

The left side of the hallway we stopped in was one massive room that spanned its entire length. The wall was basically one huge window broken up by several doors. There were a few doctors inside, either at desks typing or writing, or at one of several large tables doing their thing with runes. On the right side, there were multiple doors but the wall was solid so I couldn’t see into the rooms.

Tielle stopped at one of the doors and opened without knocking. We entered into a medium-size room that instantly gave me an uncomfortable flashback to the room I had been held captive in before Tielle had tried to strip my reanimation power. It was all white walls and floor, and bright florescent lights. The only color came from the metal on the medical equipment. Oh, and I guess the beige bedsheets was a nice contrast too.

Said bedsheets were on the bed that Harvey Whittle lay on. He was asleep—or sedated—and a middle-aged male doctor was checking his vitals.

“Gaines,” Tielle said. Dr. Gaines looked up and gave Tielle a nod. He had graying brown hair, that middle-aged paunch, and glasses that went out of style somewhere in the eighties.

“This is Selene,” Tielle said as we walked over.

“I know who she is,” Dr. Gaines said, offering me a smile and handshake. “Nice to meet you.” He looked from me to Tielle to Micah. “Is she here to…”

“She wanted to see Harvey,” Micah said. “She was the one who found him last night.”

“Right, I did hear about that.”

“What I want to know is, why is he here?” I turned to Tielle. “Why do you have a personal interest in his recovery? The hospital was well equipped to take care of a man who’d gotten punched around by a ghost.”

“It’s not so simple,” Tielle said, and I detected hesitancy in her voice. “There are some complications…”

“Like what?” I prompted.

But I never got an answer, because suddenly there was a huge explosion that sent debris flying everywhere and knocked us all down.

CHAPTER TWELVE

“Selene? Are you all right?” Micah uttered the words around multiple coughs.

I lay sprawled on the floor, up against the far wall. My body had been hit with multiple chunks of what I could see was the wall on the other side of the room. Micah, who was covered in dust, came over to help me up. I looked over to see Tielle struggling to her feet.

“Your head,” I said, alarmed. Blood tricked down the side of Micah’s forehead. Thankfully, when I moved his hair aside, the wound was not deep.

“It’s shallow,” I told him, then took stock of my own body. Plenty sore, but no blood. I was going to need more aspirin.

Harvey’s bed had been thrown onto its side and Harvey lay on the floor, still blacked out. All the medical equipment had been upturned as well and was going haywire. Dr. Gaines was shakily getting up a few feet away and Micah went to help him after helping Tielle. The room was filled with smoke and rubble.

“What the fuck just happened?” I asked.

“I…I…I…I…” Dr. Gaines was in shock, he’d be no help.

Micah looked stunned, but I got the feeling he might know what had caused this. I got the same feeling from Tielle, who was paying more attention to the other side of the room than to anything else. She was as dusty and bruised as the rest of us, but she wasn’t bleeding.

I looked over at the blown-out wall into the adjacent room. Whatever had exploded had come from there. I started to pick my way over rubble to investigate. The room was already being explored by the doctors who’d been across the hall. Some of them came into Harvey’s room to stabilize him. They were trying to appear calm, but I could sense the tension among everyone.

“Wait…Selene!” I didn’t listen to Micah’s call. I stepped into the room and tried to make sense of what I saw. Debris and lots of it, sure, but what were those huge smoldering lumps lying all over the room?

Something rolled near my foot and I looked down. Seconds later, I gasped and stepped back.

“A head?” I whipped around to look at Micah, and then back down at the head. Most of the skin had been blown off, so it was more accurate to call it a skull. Now the lumps made sense. I could see a leg and an arm nearby, and toward the middle of the room a torso was definitely lying there. It appeared to be a female torso. Bile rose in my throat as I realized that the acrid, burning scent I smelled was a burned-up human body.

I backed up into Harvey’s room and turned to Tielle and Micah. I pointed to the smoking lump behind me.

“That’s a human head,” I said. “And I need to know what the hell is going on here.”

Tielle gave the tiniest of sighs in a situation that would have called for a huge fucking sigh.

“Things will be dealt with down here. Come upstairs, get cleaned up, and we’ll talk.”

* * *

About an hour and a half later, Micah and I were sitting in Tielle’s office.

She had a small sitting area near the floor to ceiling windows at the side of the room, so Micah and I sat on the white leather couch while she sat on the adjacent armchair.

We had been given the patching-up and painkillers we needed, and there’d even been a place for us to shower and change. My clothes were ruined, so I was wearing a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt that someone had hastily been ordered to go out and buy for me. They were both too big. Micah’s new jeans and shirt fit better. Tielle was wearing another tailor-made pantsuit. Guess she kept her own change of clothes here.

“All right, I’m ready to hear it,” I said, looking from Tielle to Micah. “First of all, I wasn’t even aware that any of the other rooms down there were occupied. Or was that the point?”

“I would have informed you, had there been the opportunity to do so,” Tielle said. “We had initially been trying to keep everything under wraps, but thanks to you and the events of last night, that can no longer be the case.”

“Am I supposed to say sorry? And what are you even trying to keep under wraps? What’s going on? Why did someone explode? I have to admit, I’m having a difficult time with that one.”

“In that room, there was another patient in similar condition to Harvey Whittle,” Tielle said. “And there are three others. Like Harvey, they were victims of an attack by a ghost, but not just any ghost.”