Agonal Breath (The Deadseer Chronicles Book 1) (23 page)

Becky took off. I could hear her footsteps pounding away from us along the central corridor. She was heading toward the main building, unless the acoustics were playing tricks on my ears.

“Hey!” Jake yelled. I couldn’t see his features well because of the gloom, but his body language was telling me that he was torn about whether to go after her, or stay here and keep control of me. After a few seconds of indecision, he obviously decided to try and do both. A tattooed fist grabbed the front of my shirt. Jake began to drag me along the length of the balcony in the same direction that Becky had fled.

“You’re too late, man. You’ll never catch her now. She’ll be back with the cops in no time.” I hoped that I sounded braver and more confident than I felt.

Jake rewarded me with a growled “shut up!” and smacked me around the back of the head with his knuckles. White dots exploded in front of my eyes, making me gasp as pain flared through the rear of my skull.

He was picking up the pace now. I struggled to keep up and to keep my balance. My eyes were watering, making my vision blur. As we passed patient room after patient room, I could see the ghostly blue outlines of the occupants smudged against my field of vision. Some were sitting up in their beds, while others were standing in their doorways, all of them taking a keen interest in the goings-on.

Long Brook really
was
beginning to wake up, and unless I was reading the energies wrong, it wasn’t going to be in a particularly welcoming mood.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I was hoping that Becky was smart enough to just head for the closest exit and take cover in the trees, then work her way towards the highway. There’s no way anybody would be able to track her down if she kept her wits about her and just stuck to the treeline.

At least, I hoped not.

We had reached the end of the patient wing, the point at which it joined the main administration building. Jake hustled me into the stairwell. I was out of breath and wheezing from the exertion of being dragged the full length of the balcony, so the rest was actually kind of welcome.

What
wasn’t
welcome was the circle of cold metal that I suddenly felt pressed against my right temple. There was an ominous click.

Who the hell
was
this psycho?

“You had better get yourself back out here, Missy. I’ve got a gun to your little buddy’s head, and if you ain’t out here by the count of three, I’m gonna blow what passes for his brains right out of his skull. One…”

Jake didn’t get to count to two.

We were both motionless on the landing. The only light came from outside, bleeding in through the open window behind us, and it was just enough that I could make out each individual step on the staircase and the handrail that ran along the outer wall. She was heard before she was seen, tentative little footsteps on the landing above us, one after the other. They were coming slowly towards us down the stairs.

“That’s right,” Jake encouraged, his voice sounding far creepier than anything else we’d encountered so far tonight. “You come on down here, honey, and nobody has to get hurt. I just need to talk to you, see? Then you and your pals can go.”

Pals?
Did that mean that Brandon was still alive? I sure hoped so. I hadn’t seen any blood when he went down, but it was so hard to tell in the chaos of the moment.

Hope suddenly surged up inside me at the prospect of him being okay after all.

But what emerged from the switchback on the staircase wasn’t Becky at all; it was Polly. And from the way I felt the muzzle of the gun suddenly break contact with my skin, I knew that Jake had to be able to see her too.

“What the…” The big creep was lost for words, and looking at it from his point of view, it wasn’t difficult to see why.

Polly was outlined in a blazing red and orange light that danced like the flames around the Eye of Sauron. From the way that her aura reflected on the wall and ceiling, it looked almost as if the staircase was on fire. More disturbing than that was the intense look of aggression on Polly’s face. She was pretty angry at him right now.

Yep, Jake’s first exposure to the truth of life after death was an enraged, little girl who was glaring daggers at him as she descended slowly and deliberately, getting closer and closer with every passing second. Oh, and he could see through her body, which had to be massively freaking out his tiny little brain.

Polly raised her arm and pointed straight at him. “
You
are a very, very bad man.”

Uh-oh. She was angry alright. That tone was scaring the crap out of
me,
and I hadn’t even done anything to get on her bad side.

“You need to let Danny go, bad man. You need to let him go
right now.
”

I looked up at Jake’s face, now lit up in the false firelight streaming from Polly’s spirit body. His eyes were wide and gleaming, and his mouth flapped open and shut repeatedly as he searched for the right words —
any
words. Finally, he settled upon the classic thug line: “or what?”

There were only four stairs between her and us now. Polly dropped her accusatory finger and responded simply, “Or you’ll get hurt. Badly.”

Jake’s manic laugh echoed hollowly up and down the enclosed stairwell. It sounded much more hysterical than amused.

“Listen to the little ghost girl threaten me!” he cackled, bringing the gun up to point towards her. “Who’s going to hurt me, kid —
you?”

Polly took another step down towards him, and suddenly the pistol cracked twice in quick succession. I slapped my hands up to my ears, practically deafened in the confined space.

The bullets passed straight through Polly’s body and plunged into the wooden stairs behind her.

“No, not me,” she said quietly, not in the least bit flustered by the noise and flash of the gunfire. “I won’t hurt you. It’s not nice to hurt people. But Mister Long Brook will.”

“Oh man, you are
so
screwed.”

I couldn’t help it. It just popped right out of my mouth. And there he was, standing at the top of the staircase, outlined in the same angry red-and-orange firelight that surrounded Polly;
his
was both brighter and much more intense, though, a raging inferno when compared to her tiny campfire aura.

Jake’s grip on me was all but forgotten, and luckily I had the presence of mind to take full advantage of his distraction. I had never been very strong and I had lost all three of the fights I had ever gotten into with bullies, but it’s amazing what fear and adrenaline can do to motivate you.

I balled up my right hand into a fist and drove it straight into Jake’s crotch. As hard as I possibly could.

To his credit, he didn’t drop the gun, but the douchebag folded in half, his left hand dropping to protect his injured, extremely sensitive parts. Throwing the rickety old door open on rusted hinges, I bolted out onto the balcony, determined to put some distance between us.

Becky was peeking out from around the doorframe of the third patient room along, and she beckoned frantically towards me with one hand, the other holding a warning finger up to her lips in a shushing sort of way.

After hastily joining Becky in the empty patient room, I turned and could hear Mister Long Brook bounding down the stairs, probably taking them three at a time, and passing through Polly on the way down. Jake barely had time to squeeze off two more shots, both of which must have passed harmlessly through the two angry spirits, before the huge creature slammed into him and knocked him off his feet, sending him sprawling onto the balcony in front of us.

Mister Long Brook opened what must have been a mouth (though I couldn’t see any teeth or a tongue in there, just more blackness) and bellowed. I couldn’t help flinching.

Peeking out from behind one of his massive legs, Polly watched with a weird, mischievous little smile as Jake hit the ground hard and slid maybe ten or fifteen feet, cracking his head against the brick parapet along the way.

“
Damn
, but that had to hurt,” I whispered, shaking my head sympathetically. Then I remembered that this slime had just held a gun to my head and threatened to kill me. The sympathy dissolved pretty quickly after that.

Shaking his head like a disorientated drunk, Jake somehow propped himself up on his elbows. He obviously had no idea what had just hit him, his face a slack, expressionless glaze. A thin line of drool dribbled down from his lower lip. I watched in horrified fascination as the slobber settled on his chest.

It was a good thing that the glass panes were long gone from the windows of those patient rooms, because the next roar from Mister Long Brook would have been loud enough to shatter them all outright. The giant began to plod purposefully towards Jake, who retained at least enough presence of mind to recognize imminent danger when it was bearing down on him.

Clawing at the brickwork for support, Jake somehow dragged himself to his feet, then turned tail and ran as best he could, fleeing down the long balcony towards the next stairwell. After he had made it about twenty feet, he turned and risked a quick glance over his shoulder at his pursuer.

Mister Long Brook was picking up the pace as well, lumbering faster and faster along the balcony and slowly closing the gap between them both.

“He really shouldn’t have upset Mister Long Brook,” Polly said sadly, shaking her head as she watched the predator and his prey disappear into the far shadows.

Jake must have realized that he was never going to make the stairwell before Mister Long Brook caught up with him, so in a fit of desperation he cut sharply to his right, ducking into one of the patient room doorways.

Before Polly’s protector even made it to that same doorway, there came a startled, high-pitched scream from inside the room.

“Come on!” Becky urged, grabbing my sleeve and leading me along to investigate.

The big spirit form now stood motionless in the doorway, simply staring down at the luminous little circle that I quickly realized was one of the glow sticks we had planted earlier to identify the many treacherous holes that were present in the rotting floor. A cloud of dust was still rising up from this particular hole, probably kicked up when a panicky Jake had fallen through it.

“We should go and check on him,” I said, without any real enthusiasm.

“What we
should
be doing is finding Brandon,” Becky argued pointedly.

“I know, but at the very least, we need to take that pistol away from him,” I countered. Becky sighed.

“Alright, you have a point there.”

We made our way back down to the ground floor again, backtracking into the dining hall. Becky and I moved slowly in the near-darkness, keeping one eye on the ceiling until we finally found Jake’s body.

He was lying on his back, arms and legs sprawled out in all directions. It would have been easy to mistakenly think that he was just sleeping, if it weren’t for the grotesque angle that his head and neck had been twisted into when his body had landed on the hard concrete — well, that and the pool of dark blood that was spreading slowly from underneath his head.

I looked up, estimating the distance between the floor and the hole in the ceiling as being something like twenty feet.

“I’ve got my CPR card,” Becky said briskly, taking a knee and reaching out to press two fingers against the side of Jake’s neck. She kept them there for what seemed like an hour before shaking her head solemnly. “There’s no pulse. I’m afraid he’s dead.”

“Where’s the gun?” I wondered, looking around the body for it. The thing must have been dropped when he landed and skittered away somewhere. It took a few minutes of hunting, but I finally found it underneath one of the old wooden tables.

“Do you know how to use one of those things?” Becky asked doubtfully as I approached, holding the gun awkwardly in my right hand. I shrugged.

“Pointy end towards the man?” I quipped. The
Princess Bride
quote just made Becky roll her eyes. “Look, I’ve never used one before, if that’s what you’re asking. My dad was a Marine, but he didn’t teach me how to shoot. I mean, he
offered,
but I was never that interested. Kind of wish I had been, now,” I finished glumly.

“Give it to me.” Becky held out an expectant hand. I carefully handed her the gun, making very sure to keep my fingers away from the trigger. She took the weapon confidently, ejected a round from the chamber, dropped the magazine out, and squinted to check it in the darkness. Unable to figure out how many bullets were left, she went over to the large window where the ambient light was a little better. “Looks like seven rounds left,” she said to herself, putting the magazine back into place (after replacing the ejected round) and racking the slide back with a
click-clack
that sounded like ice shattering. “I’ve gone with Dad to the range a few times,” she explained, catching sight of my raised eyebrows. “He usually lets me put a few rounds down too, when he’s in a good mood.”