Cars immediately started honking behind us, and I was about to ask Micah what the hell that was about when I looked up and saw what had made him stop the car. Standing in the middle of the road were two ghost beasties.
One was tall and spindly; the other was short and wide. The tall one was slimy, dark green, and had six arms, each of which ended in a circle of deadly claws. Its mouth was also a circle of razor-sharp teeth, and it had three pairs of eyes. The other one was purple; sported two massive, muscular arms; and had horns protruding all over its body.
I’d been in this line of work for a few years, but it still stunned me that a human ghost could turn into something like this. Research done by dead witches long ago hinted that what the ghosts turned into was drawn from nightmares that had been locked in their human brains, but that research was inconclusive. As it was, the two beasties stood in the middle of the road, and their attention was focused on the three of us. Micah and I had our rune guns out immediately.
“Stay in the car,” I said to Ethan, who just nodded and crouched next to the door as though that would keep him safer. Micah and I got out of the car, running toward the beasties.
It wasn’t uncommon for beasties to manifest out of the blue, but this really wasn’t what we needed right now. The people behind Micah had forgiven him for stopping so abruptly. Now they were abandoning their cars and running away screaming.
Micah and I fired, but the beasties became a blur, and our bullets caught air as they ran to either side of us. It took a few seconds of turning around before I realized that the beasties weren’t interested in Micah and me. They were interested in what we’d left sitting in the car.
Shit.
“Ethan, get out of the car!” I screamed, running back toward Micah’s car, which the beasties hurtled toward.
My heart felt like it stopped when the monsters pulled the doors off Micah’s car and started rampaging through it. When I looked at Micah, he was staring at his wrecked car with his mouth agape, but he quickly refocused himself. I was still freaking out; where the hell was Ethan?
“Selene!”
I looked over and saw Ethan crouching behind an abandoned car; he’d gotten out in time. However, calling my name alerted not only me but the beasties to his location, and they immediately switched from looking for him in the wreckage they’d made of Micah’s car to barreling down on him again. Micah and I kept firing, but the beasties were fast, and we had to be careful because there were still a lot of people running around. Our bullets mostly landed in abandoned cars or ricocheted off the ground.
The purple beastie picked up the car Ethan had been crouching behind and threw it backward, which meant it came right at me. I dove out of the way, rolling painfully across the ground as I heard the car crash behind me. The sound momentarily deafened me, but I quickly got to my feet to see both beasties thrashing through cars as they pursued Ethan.
Micah had climbed on top of a car and was firing at the raging beasties. The green one jumped up and slammed into the car, flattening it only seconds after Micah jumped out of the way. He fired almost point-blank into the beastie’s face. It screamed but didn’t fall. This thing was strong.
I ran back into the fight, but I was now clear on one thing: the beasties were only after Ethan, which was not typical beastie behavior. Ghost monsters were never this precise about their target, which meant these beasties had been sent specifically for Ethan, and I knew it could only have been by Trevor. How he could even control ghost beasties was something I’d have to figure out later.
I fired a round of shots into the purple monster. It turned glowing red eyes on me and howled so loudly that the air around me vibrated. My shots landed but didn’t drop the beastie. It rushed me. I tried to dash out of the way, but it caught me across the chest with one of its massive arms, and I fell back. I fired up as I did so, landing more shots but not seeming to slow the monster down.
It jumped over me and ran. When I dragged myself up, I saw that the green one had four of its arms holding Ethan tightly to its chest, and the purple one was trying to catch up as it fled. I didn’t see Micah until I ran forward and found him lying between two upturned cars with blood dripping from his forehead.
He groaned and opened his eyes, and I almost collapsed with relief. I helped him up, but we had no time to assess each other’s injures because the beasties were getting away with Ethan.
“They only want Ethan. What does that tell you?” I called to Micah as we ran, having to dodge debris and climb over cars in order to move forward.
“Trevor!” Micah called back.
I reached into my pocket for bullets to reload, and my hand brushed against the binding rune. I’d forgotten I had it on me. It pulsed when I touched it, and I suddenly knew how I could stop these beasties—blast them into the afterlife. I knew the dangers, but our rune guns didn’t seem to be doing more than tickling them.
I pulled the binding stone out, and it started glowing and pulsing more intensely. My reanimation power flowed into it; cycling through it like a circuit, and the power I felt growing from the stone was stronger than anything I’d ever felt from a rune stone before.
My entire body felt like it was connected to the binding stone. Power built inside me, and the stone glowed so brightly I felt as though I was holding a star. It went from warm to almost too hot to hold, but I kept my grip on it.
Seconds later, light and power erupted from the rune stone and flew at the beasties, who weren’t too far ahead, thanks to our boosted speed. The power threw me back, the light blinding me and a thunderous sound deafening me like it had exploded in my head. The world around me felt like it was shaking, like I’d unleashed a slew of natural disasters all at once, and if I hadn’t understood how dangerous this stone was before, I definitely understood now.
“Selene!”
I heard Micah’s voice as though from a great distance even though he was standing over me, trying to help me up. He looked worse than when I’d seen him a minute ago. He was covered in dirt and looked more bruised and banged up, but at least he was on his feet. A dust cloud slowly settled around us. The purple beastie was gone, but a shocking amount of damage remained in its wake. The rune stone had done worse than the beasties. There was a huge crater in the middle of the road, numerous cars had become lost causes, light posts had been toppled, and many of the nearby storefronts had been blasted through.
People had cleared the area once they saw the beasties barreling through, but I really, really hoped no one had been killed by what I had just done. I was happy to see one beastie down, but the other one was still up ahead with Ethan.
Micah and I spared each other a glance, then started running again. I tried to ignore the aches and pains in my body as best I could and kept the stone in my hand. It was still pulsing to attack, but I was afraid of using it again.
After chasing the beastie for a few blocks and seeing its increasing lead, it was clear that saving Ethan would be a lost cause if we kept going by foot. There were a few abandoned cars on the road, and Micah stopped and called me over to where he was getting into a car that still had the engine running.
We caught up to the beastie in no time.
“I think we should let it take Ethan,” I said to Micah. He immediately gave me an “are you insane?” look. “The beasties didn’t want to kill him, they wanted to capture him, and where do you think green guy up there is taking him?”
A knowing look came over Micah’s face now. “To Trevor.”
“Precisely,” I said. “And possibly Larry. I know Ethan must be freaking the hell out right now, but I think we should switch our tactic from chasing to following, then I can blast the beastie away, and we can deal with Trevor and Larry.”
“Okay,” Micah said. “Though what you just unleashed to blast the other one away seemed extremely dangerous.”
“That’s an understatement,” I said, releasing a shaky breath. I quickly told him what Ilyse had told me about the extent of the powers of the binding stone.
Micah cursed, not because of what I’d told him, but because he’d had to execute a sharp, last-minute turn as the green beastie rounded a corner. I was thrown against the door, reminding me that I wasn’t wearing a seat belt. I quickly strapped myself in.
“Looks like the only ways we have of forcing ghosts to the afterlife are dangerous,” Micah said, stepping on the gas since the beastie realized it was being chased and had started doing leaps that ate up more ground than we were on four wheels.
“Agreed,” I said. “But I’ll do what I have to do.”
Micah drove like a reckless madman, breaking numerous traffic laws, but since we were in pursuit of a beastie, I’m sure the people whose cars he accidentally hit would forgive him. I expected the beastie to stop and turn back so it could try to shake us, but it seemed resolute to get Ethan wherever he was supposed to be taken. I had my rune gun and the binding stone ready anyway.
I caught sight of Ethan a few times as we chased the beastie. He was securely held against the beastie’s long torso, but from the look on his face and the way I could hear him wailing through the car window, he most definitely wasn’t enjoying the ride.
When the beastie took us to a decidedly grittier neighborhood, I was sure we were getting to the end of this chase. Sure enough, after driving down deserted streets past a lot of boarded-up stores and rundown apartment buildings and homes, the beastie seemed to disappear in the blink of an eye. Micah stopped the car, and we ran down the block, stopping where the beastie had disappeared and finding a short flight of steps that led to a basement apartment. The door had been barreled through by the seven-foot beastie.
“Ready?” Micah asked. I nodded.
We ran into the apartment. The room we entered was small, dark, and empty, but if I knew Trevor, there was probably a hidden room somewhere. Sure enough, it took only a few moments of searching before Micah found a door in the floor of the bathroom. This apartment had clearly been made to house shady dealings. I wouldn’t be surprised if it had been around during the Prohibition days.
Micah opened the door, and we took a second to assess the means by which we’d get to the bottom. There was a ladder, so we headed down.
The room we ended up in reminded me of Trevor’s Underground shop in that it was windowless, musty, and lit by candles, though it was a lot larger. It was almost like a basement under a basement. It didn’t take long for us to spot Trevor, the beastie, and Ethan.
The beastie had dropped Ethan but hovered over him as though standing guard. Trevor’s eyes widened when he saw Micah and I walking toward him with our guns pointed at his chest. He whipped his head to the beastie, and it roared, then charged—which was exactly what I wanted, since that would draw it away from Ethan.
“Give me your other gun and keep Trevor here,” I called to Micah, who quickly tossed me his second gun. I caught it and ran into one of the adjoining rooms with the beastie close behind me. There were no candles here, so I couldn’t see very clearly, but I ran halfway into the room before turning around to face the beastie.
We played dodge and weave for a few moments, and I almost ended up flattened several times but was able to keep myself from being skewered. The binding rune practically sang for release at this point, but if using it out on the street had done that much damage, then using it in a small, underground room would probably collapse the entire building on top of us.
I put the binding rune away. I had to bring this beastie down the old-fashioned way, and since it was strong, having two guns on my side might get the job done. I unleashed a fury of bullets into the beastie, and with that much ammo pumping into it at so close a range, the beastie’s strength was no match. The rune bullets unleashed sparks of colorful electricity all over the beastie, so it was enveloped in a crackling cage. When both guns were empty, I dropped my hands and stepped back, because the beastie had reared up, screamed, and was falling forward.
It hit the ground hard, shuddered, then went still. Moments later, it started to fade until it disappeared. I always hoped that ghosts that turned into beasties regained their human form once they were sent to the afterlife, but there was no way to know that, so I sent a quick prayer out for this beastie’s soul and went back into the other room. One problem down, a couple more to go.
Micah still held Trevor at gunpoint and had made him put his hands up to stop him from trying to use rune stones to attack us. When Ethan saw me, he ran over, looking relieved.
“Are you okay?” I asked, looking him over.
He nodded. “Physically, yes,” he said. “Mentally, I think I’m going to need a lot of therapy.”
I smiled. “I’ll look into if there’s a therapist who specializes in this sort of thing.”
I turned my attention back to Trevor while Ethan hovered behind me. Trevor looked scared, which made me happy.
“Nice to see you again, Trevor,” I said, taking a few steps closer. “I see you moved shop. You should have left me your forwarding card.”
“Selene, please, I can explain…”
“Explain?” Now I was really pissed. Everything I had been through as a result of his practices had been one hell of an ordeal, and he thought he could just explain it away? “You think you can explain what you did? Well, I think I can explain it just fine myself. You revved up your reanimation power by binding yourself to your brother’s ghost, then you decided to shove Ethan out of his body so Larry could take over and do your murderous bidding. When you two realized I was on to you, you ran. How’s that for an explanation?”
To my surprise, Trevor broke down sobbing. Micah and I were taken aback. We hadn’t anticipated this.
“It was never supposed to go this far,” Trevor said. “Larry has become consumed with the fact he has a physical body again, and he’s not going to stop killing.” He gave me a desperate look. “I want to stop him!”
My eyes narrowed.
“What do you mean it wasn’t supposed to go this far?” Micah asked before I could. “How far was it supposed to go?”