The Ravaging in Between (The Reanimation Files Book 3) (9 page)

It was mid-afternoon so Chinatown was bustling with activity. It was even more clustered and aggravating to maneuver through than usual because of all the construction that was going on. There were men in hardhats everywhere and the sounds of construction were deafening. Entire blocks were inaccessible because of the damage they sustained from Isabelle’s beastie. It left a sick feeling in my stomach to see just how much destruction had occurred because of Renton. Despite the ruin surrounding me, I could tell some good progress had been made toward rebuilding.

I parked on a quieter block and continued on foot. As I wound my way down the narrow streets, I saw several ghosts flitting about. There were a couple ghost agencies in the area so hopefully they would get drawn to one of them, or maybe a necromancer on track and retrieval would pick them up. Right now they weren’t my concern.

One of the ghosts I passed was dressed in an outfit that looked like it was from Jane Austen’s time. Ghosts wore what their human died in. This chick must have died during Halloween shenanigans. Or maybe she was an actress in a play and died of stage fright. Terrible joke, I know.

I made my way to a small park where children were playing on the swings while their parents looked on. Others were gathered together nearby practicing tai chi. Next to the park was the entrance to an old subway station that had been abandoned in the eighties. It was badly boarded up, or rather, it had been well boarded up, but people using it to get in and out of the Underground had taken its toll.

I slipped through the loose boards and carefully walked down the stairs. Once I was in the station, I hopped over the rusted turnstile and jumped off the platform onto the tracks.

Only the smallest amount of light filtered down from the grates. The flashlight app on my phone would have to help guide me. I started walking, but didn’t come across any activity until I walked through two stations. In the third one, there were ghosts milling around, and ramshackle shops set up everywhere.

The station was large and consisted of multiple platforms and tracks that were crammed with necromancers, dead witches, and probably a reanimator or two. Some were experimenting, some were attempting to help ghosts settle their affairs, and some were sitting with Leech Baby junkies helping them get their fix. What was it about having your energy drained until you were about to collapse from exhaustion that was a high? I had no idea.

I meandered through the Underground workers and their customers, scanning all the ghosts and wondering if there was anyone worthwhile asking questions of. People who worked or sought help here were not keen on being questioned about anything.

“Wanna try?” Someone grabbed hold of my wrist and attempted to tug me over to their table. I pulled my hand away and resisted the urge to wipe it off. Underground workers did not make showering a priority. This one was missing a few teeth, so he also didn’t make time to squeeze in his dental appointments. His head was wrapped up in cloth that was probably once very colorful, but was now faded and dirty. He was thin and his clothes draped off him. Behind him was the ghost of a young boy. The clothes he wore looked like they were from the fifties. A few other ghosts I’d seen had been wearing old-fashioned clothes. One woman had on a glitzy flapper dress complete with strings of pearls and a fascinator headpiece.

Did a bunch of people get killed on their way to Halloween parties?

“It’ll make ya feel real good,” the man said, lowering his voice as though he was telling me this in confidence.

“And what exactly would this be?” I asked, glancing at the glowing blue rune in his palm.

“Filled with ghost energy,” he said. “Pulse some into ya, and you gonna feel real good for a li’l bit. Cool, calm, buzzed.”

“Full of Rot!” I smacked the rune out of his hand before I caught myself. He looked startled for a moment, and the boy ghost ducked behind the post he was standing behind. The old man quickly retrieved his rune, and gave me a less friendly look.

“It ain’t enough to give ya Rot,” he said. “Just a little thrill, then I’ll pull it outta ya. Fifty bucks for five minutes.”

“I’m a necromancer, so it won’t have the same effect.”

I knew that non-paranormal humans often felt a chill if a ghost passed by them, and for the most part, it was uncomfortable. However, some people liked it, and I’d heard about people who would walk around cemeteries in the hopes that a ghost would pass near them. Ridiculous, if you asked me, especially since ghosts tended to rise long before the body was buried, but everyone needed a hobby.

I knew this old bit’s rune wasn’t enough to give me the Rot, but I had good reason to be paranoid about ghost energy entering my body these days.

“Then maybe ya wanna buy an enchanted object? They got real ghosts trapped inside. Real spooky.” He indicated his table where there were several items that were not at all aesthetically pleasing. There was an old-fashioned table clock that was falling apart, two dingy horse figurines that looked like they’d been broken off a carousel decoration, a dirty ceramic geisha figurine, and a faded, black and white photo of a man standing in front of a river in a cracked picture frame. The shopkeeper picked up the picture and showed it to me.

“The eyes be moving,” he said. “His soul is trapped inside the picture.”

I resisted rolling my eyes at his hustle. I could feel ghost energy coming from the picture as well as the other objects on the table, but I was a hundred percent sure there were no ghosts trapped in these items. Rather, small pieces of runes filled with ghost energy had been hidden inside the objects to trick people into thinking ghosts were trapped within them. The man’s eyes in the photo didn’t move, but if you really wanted to believe it, then you’d see whatever you wanted to see.

There used to be stores aboveground claiming to sell haunted items, but in the past decade they’d been cracked down on a lot, and a lot of them had moved to the Underground. There were still plenty of gullible people to sell to.

“Buddy, I’m a necromancer with a Grade A education behind me. I know there are no such thing as haunted items. Just garbage you picked out of someone’s trash and hid pieces of energy-infused runes in.” The energy would eventually deplete, at which point the purchaser may or may not realize they’d been scammed, but the seller certainly wouldn’t care.

The man sucked his teeth and turned away from me. “Damn it.”

“Hey, quick question.” I pulled a twenty out and shoved it in his hand. “Have you seen a ghost that looks like him?” I pulled out my phone and showed him a picture of Ethan. He was alive in the photo…well, he was in his body. I’d never really thought of Ethan as being dead since his body had been jacked. I had saved the picture from his Facebook profile some time ago. I had a feeling I’d done it to tease him in some way or another, but never got around to it.

The man squinted at the screen for a moment, then shook his head. “Nah, ain’t seen no ghost like him round here.”

“OK.” I tried not to be discouraged. It was only one person I had asked and this was only one part of the Underground. If anything, I should be discouraged that if I truly wanted to search for Ethan in the Underground, it was going to take forever and a day. I walked away to inquire elsewhere.

I showed Ethan’s picture to more vendors. No one had seen him, and I had given out more twenties than a wealthy man at a strip club.

“Excuse me.” I was walking up to a vendor who’d set up shop in a shadowy corner of the station. While everyone else was practically piled on top of each other, this person had more space because no one else had set up their tent or table too close to her. Good for her, she’d scoped out some prime real estate.

She wore a dark cloak with the hood drawn over their head, and all I could see of her face were her nose and mouth. There was also a fall of dreadlocks from under the hood that were streaked with dark blue dye. Whoever this woman was, she sure had the enigmatic thing going for her.

“Greetings.” She tilted her head up slightly as though to look at me, but I still could not see her eyes. A slight smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. A shiver passed over me. There was something unnerving about this woman.

“Have you seen this ghost anywhere?” I thrust my phone forward, hoping to get a yes or no without having to offer money.

“If you would like a bit of my time, how about you give me a bit of yours?” She indicated the stool in front of her table. I sighed and took a seat. I’d have to endure her hustle just to get a yes or no on Ethan’s whereabouts. And my hunch said it was very likely to be a no.

As I looked over her table, I realized that her particular hustle was Rune Telling. From what I knew, there were some necromancers and dead witches who were able to use runes and a person’s energy to make small predictions or assessments about their lives. It wasn’t a talent many people genuinely had, and the majority of people who claimed to be Rune Tellers were fakes. This Teller had a neat row of colorful, round runes. They were pretty, and looked like large marbles with their strands of various colors that twisted around each other within the clear rune. She also had a stack of large, weathered tarot cards.

She raised her hand and held it out to me. “A bit of your energy?”

I hesitated. There wasn’t much she could do with my energy, since even if she stored it in one of her runes it would eventually deplete, but I still wasn’t keen on going along with her hawk. It wasn’t worth it just to hear that she hadn’t seen Ethan. I told myself I was just gonna get up and leave, but instead found myself raising my hand and placing it in hers.

A strange tingle went through my body when we touched, and my breath caught for a moment.
Why the hell had I given her my hand?
I frowned.
Why was she so alluring?

The woman smiled again, then picked up one of her runes and lightly touched it to my palm. The swirls of blue, yellow, and purple within the rune started moving once my energy touched it. The way the colors twisted around each other was mesmerizing.

After she took a small amount of energy, she released my hand. My heartbeat had accelerated for some reason, and even though I still wanted to get up and leave, it was as though I was glued to the seat.

The Rune Teller shuffled her deck of cards then placed a row of eight cards face down in front of her. She moved the rune with my energy over them a few times, very slowly. Finally, she put down the rune and turned over the third card from the left. It showed what looked like a grim reaper holding a scythe. There were grinning skulls at his feet, crows above his head, and lightning strikes falling around him from the gray sky. It did not look like a card that boded well.

“The Shadow Mystic,” she whispered. “You have walked the line between life and death more than once. It is a path you cannot get away from.” She tapped the card with her slim fingers. “Have you ever felt like you destroy all you touch?”

“Yes,” I replied. I didn’t mean to play along in such seriousness, but for some reason I couldn’t dismiss her the way I did old toothless who’d been selling so-called haunted items.

“Hmm.” She turned over another card; the first one on the right. This card was of an angelic-looking woman surrounded by rays of light, holding a jeweled chalice in both hands above her head. However, below her feet was darkness and tendrils of it were reaching for her.

“The Grave Martyr,” she said. “You will fight, sacrifice, and lose in order to win.”

A chill went through me. That pretty much summed up my life these past few months. She wasn’t telling me anything I hadn’t already experienced. She’d probably seen me on the news so she knew what to say about my life.

“One more,” she said. She turned over the one next to the Shadow Mystic. The top half was of a human woman, but the bottom half looked like the tentacles from a black octopus. All around her there were creatures that looked like half one thing and half another.

“The Changeling,” she said. “You will evolve. Many around you will stay the same, but you will become a vessel, one that can either destroy—” she tapped the Mystic card, “—or save—” she tapped the Martyr card. “Though you may not be able to save yourself. Which path will you walk?” Her voice was a bare whisper.

“Thanks for your time.” I quickly got up. Her fortune telling had been generic—life, death, power, paths to choose from, but this entire exchange had unnerved me in a way I could not explain. This woman’s aura seemed to draw me in and that was scary.

I had never come across an Underground worker like her. Maybe she was one of the rare Rune Tellers who were legit, maybe she just put on a good show. Either way, I had wasted enough time here.

I walked away and she said nothing. I could feel her eyes on my back, but I didn’t turn around. I felt out of sorts. Even though I wasn’t near her any more, I felt her presence as though she’d been stamped on me and now I had to carry her everywhere. I shook my body out as though that would fling this uncomfortable feeling off me.
What a weirdo
.

Time to move on to another station. After walking about halfway through, I stopped abruptly in the middle of the tunnel. Some distance away, a ghost was staring at me, and the reason I stopped was because I felt as though I recognized him. But for the life of me, I could not place him. He was good-looking, had hair on the long side swept back into a loose ponytail, and a faint stubble of facial hair. Did I know him? From the way he stared at me, it certainly seemed as though he knew me.

Well, I wasn’t going to just stand in a dark tunnel and have a stare down with a ghost. I started walking again, but between one blink and the next, the ghost was gone. Guess he wasn’t interested in saying hello. I shrugged. Ghosts acted strangely sometimes, and who could blame them?

An hour later, I was doubling back after going as far as I felt I should go. I was exhausted from all the walking and discouraged over the fact that I had not found Ethan or anyone who had seen him. I showed his picture to as many people as I could get an answer from without having to bribe them, and the response was the same across the board. No one had seen him. I guess I wasn’t going to find him around these parts.