Chapter 5

I see ghosts. It’s what I do. And now that I’ve given up on Auracel, I see them all the time.

All. The. Time.

And so, my “traipse” through the lab should’ve been a walk in the park. But having the uptight lab manager tagging along—not to mention my history with one of the cadavers—I suddenly found myself second-guessing my every last impression.

That weird draft on the back of my neck—HVAC, or the cold spot of Jennifer Chance?

The distant whooshing—lab machinery, or a disembodied whisper from Jennifer Chance?

That odd shadow…well, you get the drift.

It didn’t help that Jibben kept talking to me.

“Once a week really isn’t enough to form a proper attunement—”

“Look,” I said, “the better I can focus, the sooner I’ll be done.”

Jibben narrowed his eyes, then resettled his lab coat with a twitch.

The experiment rooms were all clear, and the hallways were empty. We headed through an open plan office section where the atmosphere was more relaxed. It was nowhere near as private as the office I shared with Carl, but it was a lot less generic than the research areas that had to be held to such exacting standards. There was paperwork. There was clutter. There was a stupid pun on the whiteboard: Our ideas are sharper than our pencils!

Normally, this area housed a half-dozen sciencey folks doing stuff that was incredibly normal, considering the fact that they were conducting top-secret psychic research in an underground bunker. Typing. Chatting. Betting on the football pool. Today, it seemed weirdly quiet.

I paused beside a desk with an impressive dual monitor setup. There was a scratch pad nearby with an equation on it that nearly made my eyeballs bleed…and candid photos of smiling kids taped around the monitors. There was a husband in one of the shots, a good-looking Hispanic guy with a bit of a paunch and a laughing toddler on his hip. I tried to recall if the scientist whose butt usually warmed this seat was a man or a woman, but I came up blank. Either way, the husband, the kids….

Was that what Jacob actually wanted?

I didn’t think so. At least, not until Keith and Manny went and brought the whole kid thing up.

Boy, Jacob was gonna be thrilled to hear you-know-who was back. Maybe I could use that information to derail any potential conversations about adoption. Sure, I was spooked about her reappearance. She’d offed my doctor, and kidnapped me, and drugged me. And she definitely wouldn’t have hesitated to “terminate” our experiment—meaning, me—in a heartbeat. But that was all normal. Normal…ish, anyhow, at least in terms of what we think is physically possible.

But Jacob was the one who’d been forced to hold her flailing cadaver down in a tank of antiseptic fluid while her vengeful spirit struggled to escape. True, in the end, we’d shoved her through the veil—but if Bob Zigler was scarred for life by seeing a few bodies twitch in a zombie basement, Jacob’s intimate encounter with the animated corpse would definitely be expected to leave a mark.

I was about to head back for one final check to make sure Chance’s ghost had not somehow slipped back through the veil when a text dinged my phone.

Clayton.

There’s nothing to eat.

I knew for a fact this was untrue. Not only was there oatmeal in the cupboard, but at least half a dozen eggs.

But did I really want an unsupervised thirteen-year-old monkeying around with the stove?

Toast, I texted back. Then I decided that didn’t sound particularly responsible, and added, I’ll grab us lunch in a few.

I paused in the cold storage doorway—no doubt letting all the cold out—and scanned the wall of hermetically sealed vaults. A bank of innocuous square cubbies, not unlike the metal lockers back at McKay School. But there were no scribbled-on textbooks and abandoned lunches behind these plain metal doors. Each door was marked with a simple engraved number. I knew which cubby Chance’s cadaver used to reside in—I couldn’t help but double-check—but for all I knew, now that I’d banished the ghost, they could have moved her. Or incinerated her. Or chopped her up in tiny little pieces.

I’d meant to get in, get out, and get on with my life. Unfortunately, the memory of that haunting encounter was pretty hard to push through. Even for me.

So, of course, Jibben noticed my pause—and felt the need to comment.

“It’s perfectly normal to have a negative reaction to cadavers, Agent. Our society regards the dead in such a taboo and superstitious light—”

“I did twelve years in homicide,” I snapped. “You don’t need to tell me about death.”

Jibben wisely shut his mouth.

I eased into the room, carefully skirting the vaults, and visually scanned for ghosts. Nothing. Listened hard. Also nothing. And while the breath leaving my parted lips in a slight curl of frost would normally be a sign to break out the exorcism gear, with the temperature in the room at a constant zero, it was no cause for alarm.

“Welp,” I said as I turned to leave, “no one’s got up and walked away.”

“What?” Jibben’s startled tone made me realize I’d been talking to him like he was Carl—like he’d done the perimeter check with me so often it was just a routine. “Were you expecting something else?”

“Let’s take this discussion out into the hall,” I said, since one of us wasn’t wearing a nice big lab coat.

Even as I shouldered past him out the door, he kept on talking. “You can’t blame me for being curious—and, I’ll admit, skeptical. I am a man of science. And the only recorded evidence of motion in a cadaver comes from an oddball case involving jimson weed and precogs that was never definitively proven.”

“Yeah. That was me.”

“Oh.” Jibben plucked at his sleeve a few times. “Well, your documentation was shoddy.”

I wanted to throw him into a dark basement full of twitching corpses and see just how eager he was to freaking document.

Jibben said, “There’s a pervasive cultural belief that the etheric body holds an attachment to the physical after death, but this notion is not supported by any scientific evidence. In fact, once the etheric connection is severed, there’s no reason to believe that the body itself retains any kind of special connection to the spirit world. It’s simply a lifeless vessel. No more likely to be haunted than a table or a chair.”

It irked me that I agreed with him. The newly departed might follow their dead body in confusion, at least until they found the veil. But lingering ghosts had a tendency to stick to the spot where they’d croaked. Not wherever they were eventually planted.

With Jennifer Chance, though, it was a double-whammy. Not only was her corpse back in the cooler, but she’d smothered herself in a holding cell just one floor above us. Which, I reminded myself, I’d already checked. And no one was there, living or dead.

“At any rate,” Jibben went on, “even if a spirit were able to reanimate one of these bodies, their tissues are frozen. They’re in sealed vaults. And the lab is on its own shielded power grid with a 48-hour generator backup. So clearly, there’s nothing to worry about.”

Peachy.

I was eager to get away from the bodies, popsicled or not. Though my relief turned out to be short-lived, once another text from Clayton pinged my phone.

How do you turn off the smoke alarm???

“Sonofabitch.” I jabbed the call button, went to voicemail, then hung up and repeated it three more times, until the kid finally picked up.

“Go outside and call 911,” I said.

“Everything’s fine,” he said testily—I could practically hear him rolling his eyes—as the smoke alarm bleated away in the background.

If I took off now I could be home in fifteen minutes flat—

“There was just some bread stuck in the toaster. That’s all.”

My adrenaline spike was insisting I hurry back before the whole city went up in flames, but since I’d accidentally smoked plenty of bread myself, I turned my panic down a few notches.

“So, nothing is currently on fire?”

“No,” said his voice…while his tone said duh. Even over the shrilling of the smoke detector.

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Thankgodthankgodthankgod. “Okay. Fine. But put on some oven mitts and go put the toaster outside. Just to be safe.”

“It’s raining out.”

Was it? In the swaddling of the underground science bunker, everything was as calm and quiet as the grave.

I shuddered. Heebie Jeebie did the same.

“There’s a button in the middle of the smoke alarm,” I told Clayton, “and there’s a broom behind the kitchen door. Grab it by the bristles and use the handle to push the button.”

Several long seconds of jostling sounds, and then the shrilling on the other end of the line went quiet enough for me to hear Clayton’s mouth-breathing where he held the phone too close to his face. “When’re you coming back?”

“Soon.” I was acutely aware of Jibben staring at me again, and knew I wouldn’t get away with cutting any corners in the lab. But if I had the pizza delivered instead of stopping to pick it up…. “Half hour. Forty-five minutes tops.”

“Whatever.” Clayton hung up without any sort of actual “goodbye.”

And then Jibben piped right in. “Smoke alarms are extremely important in any environment. Sensor technology is critical in the lab, for instance, where one preventable fluctuation could end up costing us months of work.”

His voice trailed off as I tuned him out. My thoughts were consumed with the image of Clayton standing in my kitchen, unsupervised, with nothing to entertain himself but a broom and a smoking toaster.

I strode off to finish my rounds so I could get the hell out of there before Clayton brought the cannery down around his ears. I was heading for the final quadrant when a text from Jacob pinged my phone.

Everything okay?

Why would he think otherwise? Hopefully I could air out the burn smell by the time he got home tomorrow night. A few waves of a smudge stick should cover up any lingering char.

Go enjoy your weekend,I texted back responsibly. I got this.

Before I could even pocket my phone, Jacob’s text turned into a call.

I quelled a sigh and picked up. “Listen,” I said, “you don’t need to check on me—”

“Where are you?” Jacob’s voice was laced with concern.

While it was tempting to claim I was home, lying felt like more trouble than it was worth. Or maybe I just wasn’t up for getting caught, since I couldn’t trust Clayton would corroborate my story, and for all I knew, he’d just ratted me out not two minutes ago. “I’ll be home soon—I’m just finishing up at the office.”

“I know. I’m in the car.”

But I’d watched him board the shuttle. “What car?”

“Our car. Here. In the parking garage, waiting for you.”

Good thing I hadn’t gone with the lie. “Your thing got canceled?”

“I didn’t like the look of the sky, so I stayed on the shuttle and came back.”

Didn’t like the look of the sky. Says the guy who went for a jog in a torrential downpour just last week.

“Are you serious? You’ve been salivating over that stupid scavenger hunt for weeks, and you blow it off because of a little rain?”

“Vic—”

“So, that’s how it is. You didn’t think I could manage without you.”

“I never said that.”

“You didn’t have to.”

“Where are you?” Jacob asked. “Specifically.”

“In the lab. Specifically.” I knew full well how snippy I sounded, but frankly, I was pissed.

And it wasn’t lost on Jacob, because now he was clearly in damage control mode. “I’ll be right down.”

I was a grown-ass man—perfectly capable of handling Clayton’s sleepover. Maybe it said something more about Jacob than me, that he was willing to cancel all his plans at the drop of a hat instead of doing something he’s been looking forward to for ages.

Lack of trust in his partner?

Or an overdeveloped sense of responsibility?

I pinched the bridge of my nose, then remembered I had an audience and cast a sideways glance at Jibben.

He plucked at his collar.

It would’ve been easy to give the remaining lab space a quick glance, call it good, and go resume my argument with Jacob somewhere more private. Instead, I stuffed down my self-righteous annoyance, put my feet on the grid, and resumed my scan. Anger doesn’t seem to affect my talent one way or the other, but my time on the force has taught me that when a situation escalates, if you don’t keep a cool head, you’re way more likely to make a dumb mistake. I hadn’t found anything new lately. But with all the experimental shit that went on down there, I wasn’t about to take any chances.

Because I was plenty responsible, too.

There’s no hiding from Jacob within the walls of the FPMP. He’s in the Oversight Division, so his clearance is just as high as mine. I was halfway through the “research bays” (basically bland rooms with bland furniture where the effects of various gizmos on psychic abilities were tested) by the time Jacob surrendered his sidearm to Darnell and came and found me. “I’m sure you and Clayton would normally be fine without me,” he said, and only then registered I wasn’t alone. “Excuse me,” he said to Jibben in an attempt to get rid of the guy so we weren’t airing our dirty laundry in front of a coworker.

“No problem.” The lab manager stayed right where he was.

Since Jacob needed to look all conciliatory for me, he settled for ignoring Jibben instead of telling him off. “I’m serious,” he said to me. “The clouds are black and the sky’s got this yellow-green tinge to it. Who knows if the flight will even get out? They might end up sitting at O’Hare all day, then heading right back home.”

“As if the flights from Terminal 4 are ever grounded.”

And then, as if to prove me wrong, the lights chose that particular moment to flicker.