Chapter 28

“You’re lucky it didn’t hit your eye,” Jacob said as he carefully de-glassed Jibben’s hair with a piece of duct tape.

“Somehow, I don’t feel so lucky.”

Jibben’s hazmat suit had protected him from the majority of the shards, though one of them had worked its way into his collar, and now his neck was smeared with blood.

While they worked, I was holding the flashlight in one hand, surreptitiously checking out the Telekometer in the other.

It had clicked all the way around to 11.

I pictured the hallway like a crime scene. Where I’d been standing with the clicker. Where Jacob had been, off to the side with Alisha. As for Jibben, well…hard to forget his position, directly beneath the jagged remains of the fish eye lens.

Maybe it was sabotage. Maybe it was the stress of the storm shaking the building. I couldn’t say for sure, but between the Telekometer having a party in my pocket and the lab crashing down around us, I was willing to call it telekinesis.

Even if Movie Mike, the strongest TK I’d ever encountered, could barely flutter a sticky note.

The malfunctions in the lab weren’t Jacob’s doing, though. True, during the exorcism of Darnell’s repeater, Jacob had earned a click. At the time he’d been focused on the etheric, though, which was where his abilities functioned.

But the glass breaking all around us was most definitely physical.

Thinking back, the problems had started small. Flickering flashlights. Moving papers. A falling pen. And one by one, they escalated.

I cut my eyes to Alisha—sitting up against the wall, propped by couch cushions—and considered her for a moment. What if her childhood poltergeist hadn’t been some vagrant walking through the upstairs apartment? What if it was her own latent TK talent creaking something in the floorboards? It made sense, if the anecdotal evidence of poltergeists haunting adolescents could be chalked up to the pubescent onset of telekinetic ability. My light hadn’t jumped into her before, but maybe that’s just because she wasn’t focused in the etheric.

And if Alisha did turn out to be a TK—and her hold on her self-control was getting worse and worse as the storm wore on….

I swept the Telekometer past Alisha.

Nothing.

To earn a click, the subject probably had to be actively doing their thing. I patted myself down and felt a familiar plastic crinkle in my breast pocket. I reached under the clean suit and pulled out a granola bar. “Hey, Alisha, look what I found.” I crinkled the granola bar for emphasis, then lobbed it in her direction. It landed on her lap.

The Telekometer didn’t budge.

“Thanks, Blue Eyes,” she said softly as she opened the wrapper and tipped granola crumbs into her palm. “You’re all right.”

Hardly an exhaustive test, but it did help me narrow down my focus. Jacob’s TK wasn’t physically directed. Alisha didn’t register. I turned back to Jibben. He might have scored a click earlier, but I couldn’t seem to replicate the finding. And there were only four of us down here.

Unless you counted the cadavers.

We knew one of them, all right—far too well. But who else was in cold storage?

To Jibben, I said, “What information have you got on Dr. Chance’s frozen roommates?”

“That data is on an encrypted server.” He shook bits of glass from the fold of his sleeve. “Though I know where we might find a backup.”

I followed as Jibben wheeled over to a door marked Copy Room. He told me, “We went digital several years ago, but Director Kim said it’s not a priority to re-outfit this room as something else. Personally, I think she’s keeping it around in case we need it again someday.” He lowered his voice. “Or maybe she knows it’s where Dr. K keeps anything he thinks should stay on paper.”

Walking into the Copy Room was like stepping back into the 90s. Outdated copiers stood dormant, though the peculiar smell of toner still lingered. The entire far wall was dominated by boxes of paper reams that would never see any use, so old that the labels were starting to curl and fade.

Jibben wheeled over and pulled out a box, wincing as the corner dropped onto his wounded leg, and pulled out the top two reams of paper. “Check around. He moves it every so often so as not to leave an obvious trail.”

Given all the Spy vs. Spy stuff I’d seen at the FPMP, hiding files in a box of paper was hardly a high tech solution—but it turned out to be a lot less obvious than a toilet tank. The boxes were heavy, and there were a lot of them. And even knowing there was something there to find, it still took us several tries before Jibben finally hit pay dirt.

“Here you are. Cold storage.” He handed me a file.

The first corpse belonged to a precog who predicted the date of her own death, though not the manner. (Turned out to be a brain aneurysm.) She was found in her bed, neatly dressed, lying atop a plastic tarp covering the bedspread. Grim…but considerate. Her finances were in order. Her pet parakeet was rehomed. Her bank account was divvied up among her kids, and extensive instructions were left as to what should become of her body.

A photocopy of a handwritten note was attached to the paperwork. It read, I want my death to have meaning. As my final act, I wish to contribute to the advancement of psych research, so all future precogs can benefit.

Not exactly the type of person to leave a pissy ghost behind.

The second body was once a human rights activist, and a pretty high empath, who died of natural causes at the ripe old age of 82. No lofty bequeathals here. But there were several newspaper clippings showing him doing sit-ins and peaceful protests, going back decades.

Again…not the type of person who’d typically haunt someone.

Let alone spray them with broken glass.

Even so. If I was going around exorcizing threats—even distant ones—I’d be an idiot not to take care of those cadavers. For all I knew, the old guy had a bone to pick with Jibben, or the precog had experienced a last-minute change of heart. And so, I gathered up my exorcism kit and Jibben’s keys, and did my best not to think about what I was actually getting into. I cocked my head for Jacob to follow, and together, we headed off toward cold storage.

Whenever Jacob jerks awake in the middle of the night, he might tell me it’s just one of those dumb thrillers he reads at bedtime catching with him, but I don’t buy it. The room beyond that insulated door was what figured in all his nightmares.

And now Chance’s dead body was back.

“You don’t need to do this,” I told Jacob as we approached the door.

“The hell I don’t.”

So much for hoping he’d take the gracious “out” I’d been offering. I longed to slip my hand into his and give him what reassurance I could, but my head was already buzzing in anticipation of the work to come.

I approached the door of cold storage, picked up the gel mat across the threshold, and used it to give the metal bar on the door a shove. A rubber seal offered token resistance…then broke with a gentle suction.

Darkness. Followed by a rush of cold air. It would have been refreshing…if not for the contents it was designed to keep frozen.

While the power grid might’ve been down, my internal circuit breakers were working just fine. I flipped the psychic switch and mojo flowed in. I tried to pace myself, but as Jacob swept the room with his flashlight revealing one horror after the next, psychic energy blew through my etheric pathways like a fork of lightning.

To the untrained eye, cold storage wouldn’t have looked like much—stainless steel worktables, a dozen square doors set into the wall, a warming room hung with plastic—but looks were deceiving. Every one of those innocuous things held a scarring memory for me.

A chatter behind me. I glanced over my shoulder. Jacob was shivering, and given where he was born and raised, it wasn’t from the cold. “Let’s get this over with,” I said, and pulled out the wonky compass.

The regular needle found north. The other one didn’t budge.

Jacob cleared his throat. “Do we need to pull out the…bodies? Set the candles around them?”

“We got rid of Darnell’s repeater without him being in the center of the circle. We don’t need to start screwing around with the vaults.”

“Thank God,” Jacob said under his breath.

But in the spirit of being thorough, I dug a charcoal puck out of the bottom of my kit and got some incense sparking. On one hand, I was in my element, and it felt good to have purpose—to have a task in front of me I’d done so many times before it was practically muscle memory.

On the other, if there was a worse place to do an exorcism than a morgue of a psychic lab, during a thunderstorm, in a basement, I sure as hell couldn’t think where that might be…even though I scanned the room for ghostly presence and found none.

Once the candles were lit and the incense was smoking, I faced the vaults. A cloud of condensation was forming on each square, like frost settling around the edges of small windowpanes during a cold snap. I swallowed hard and pulled out my Florida water. The smell was particularly obtrusive combined with frankincense and myrrh. It would cling to my nose hairs for a week. I gave the area a good dousing, and followed up with the salt, flowing white light all the while.

And once I was done, everything felt pretty much the way it had when we’d first walked in.

Except maybe a few degrees warmer.

I pulled out the Telekometer and checked the second dial. It was still at 11.

“What’s wrong?” Jacob asked. “Did we set the candles wrong—do we need to start over?”

“No, it’s fine—”

Just as the all-clear was about to leave my mouth, a violent hiss filled the room, and the thick plastic wall that divided us from the warming chamber shuddered wildly. The Telekometer dial spun like the Wheel of Fortune as Jacob dove between me and the plastic, and I danced back just in time to keep from shooting my psychic load all over him.

I scrambled, flashlight flailing, as I searched for a ghostly silhouette somewhere in the flapping plastic—and Jacob matched me step for step, always keeping himself squarely between the threat and me.

I knocked the hallway door open with my elbow and nearly landed in Jibben’s lap, dropping my flashlight. “What’s wrong?” he demanded. “We heard yelling!”

I couldn’t have even told you if that was Jacob or me—probably both.

I grabbed for the back of Jibben’s chair to keep from tripping over a caster, but ended up grabbing Jacob instead. My white light surged into him so fast it left me crispy inside.

“Dammit,” I snapped—he knew better. And even though he’d been Johnny-on-the-Spot when it came to putting himself between the apparition and me, he knew we couldn’t afford to—

“Vic?” Jacob said urgently—and I realized he was still several steps away, in the doorway.

He hadn’t stolen my mojo after all….

My light had jumped to Jibben.