The Impossible Coin (The Downwinders Book 2) (15 page)

“What’s it worth to you?” Ida
asked.

“Seriously, Ida?” Marty said.
“After everything I did for you?”

“Broke up with me and left me
sitting at Balducci’s with a half a glass of wine and an uneaten plate of
antipasti?” Her nose was continuing to inflate. Winn thought it almost looked
like the red foam nose of a clown.

“Bitterness doesn’t become you,”
Marty replied.

She turned to Winn. “Have you ever
abandoned someone? Left them vulnerable, wounded and bleeding?”

Winn was unprepared for the
question, and even though he knew she was talking about an event between
herself and Marty, her words cut into him, and he felt suddenly small and weak.

“Of course you haven’t, you’re too
young to have done such a thing,” she said spitefully, turning back to Marty. “Make
sure you teach him the things you’re really good at. How to hurt people!”

Winn felt himself tearing up, and
he turned away from the other two to wipe his eyes. He didn’t want them to see
him do it, but Marty noticed.

“Winn’s friend bled to death six
years ago, when they were both ten years old,” Marty told her. “Winn left him
in the desert to go for help. When we returned, he had died.”

“Oh,” Ida said, all of the wind
gone from her sails. “Oh, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said those things.
Really, Winn, I do apologize. I
am
a bitch, plain and simple. If he
didn’t tell you I was, I’m telling you. I can get very nasty sometimes and he’s
absolutely right, it doesn’t become me.”

Winn turned back to face her, and
was surprised to see that her nose had returned to normal. “That’s OK,” he
said. “You didn’t know.”

“Let me guess…” she said. “He’s
the one who’s bothering you. Your friend who died.”

“Yes,” Marty said. “He died
holding a powerful object. He was angry with Winn for leaving him to go get
help, and that object seems to have amplified the anger.”

“What does he do to you?” Ida
asked.

“Blood in my shoes,” Winn said.
“My socks will be soaked with blood. Not my blood.”

“Eew!” Ida said, scrunching up her
face. “That’s a new one!”

“His friend died with wounds to
his feet and legs,” Marty said.

“Oh!” Ida replied. “What else?”

“Nightmares,” Winn said. “My legs
attacked by Z-flies.”

“Z-flies?” Ida said. “That’s
pretty unusual too. Was your friend gifted? How did he know about Z-flies?”

“No, he wasn’t gifted,” Winn said.

“I think he uses Winn’s fear of
Z-flies against him,” Marty interjected. “I’m afraid that’s my fault. I told
Winn about them years ago.”

“The worst is my friends,” Winn
said. “He hurts them.”

“Hurts them?” Ida asked.

“Yeah,” Winn replied. “Broken
bones, amputations, that kind of thing.”

“To their legs?” Ida asked. “Like
what happened to him?”

“Exactly,” Winn answered.

“Oh, he is angry!” Ida said. “How
long has this been going on?”

“It started up a couple of years
ago, when I stopped visiting the spot where he died,” Winn said. “It’s been
getting a lot worse lately. I barely sleep.”

“Could you resume…” Ida started,
but Marty cut her off.

“Already tried that,” Marty said.
“He’s so vengeful, I don’t think he’ll stop even if Winn did start visiting him
again. You remember that ghost in Silver City? The old woman who hated her
neighbors?”

“Oh, her!” Ida said. “She was so
unhinged!”

“Brent, his dead friend, is like
that,” Marty said. “The anger has completely taken him over. There’s no
capacity there anymore for mercy. He’ll never stop.”

Winn’s sadness deepened a little.
He remembered how upset Brent would become when he felt Winn had slighted him
in any way. He always thought Brent was too sensitive, and always brushed it
off, but he never dreamed it would turn into this – an out of control anger,
snowballing. He still had a memory of Brent as a friend, someone who had been
loyal to him and someone he could depend on for friendship in what had been an
otherwise lonely trailer park. He remembered Brent bruised and aching from his
father’s beating, and holding his hand as he drifted off to sleep on the tree
platform. He could still picture the leaves of the tree rustling slightly in
the breeze above him. How did that kid, the one he’d comforted, the one he
thought was his friend, turn into this? Into something so evil?

“Well, it does sound like you need
some help,” Ida said. “Marty’s right, Winn, I had a similar problem, years ago.
I tolerated it as long as I could, but in the end I had to do something about
it. Seems like you might be at that point?”

“Yeah,” Winn said. “I guess I am.”

“Be sure,” Ida said. “The solution
I can suggest comes at a price, and you don’t want to do it if you think you
can handle this in some other way.”

“Like what?” Winn asked.

“Well, Marty seems to think
there’s no point in trying to talk to him,” Ida said. “Do you agree?”

“I think so,” Winn said. “I mean,
we tried to talk to him. He just seemed more pissed.”

“I’ve seen it before, Winn,” Marty
said. “That’s why I wanted to go out to the tree with you this morning. I had
to see for myself how bad it was. He’s turned. The anger is the connection now,
not any kind of pleasant memory he might have of you or the time you two spent
together. It won’t get better. It’s a one-way street for him. The anger will
continue to build, and he’ll continue to lash out at you in more and more
destructive ways.”

“Is that what happened to you?”
Winn asked Ida.

“I had nearly gone blind before I
did something about it,” Ida said. “Once they latch onto you like that, it’s
incredibly hard to stop them. Takes something very powerful.”

“What?” Winn asked.

“Well,” Ida said, shifting her
gaze to Marty and then back to Winn, “like I said, you need to be positive
about the decision to do it. It can be dangerous. It did work for me. But you
need to be sure.”

“He doesn’t have enough experience
to be sure,” Marty said to Ida, his frustration with her hesitancy showing.
“He’s too young. I’m telling you, I saw it, and the ghost isn’t going to stop,
so why don’t you just tell him what he has to do?”

“Because it won’t be
you
paying the price for it!” she snapped back at Marty. “It’ll be
him
.”

“Paying the price?” Winn asked,
suddenly scared. He felt an urge to bolt from his chair and leave Marty and Ida
alone, just run out the door and try to pretend that the things that were
happening to him simply weren’t real, and that if he just disbelieved them
enough, they’d go away.

Ida saw his concern, and she
sighed. “There is a house up north, on the outskirts of Flagstaff. It’s
abandoned. There’s something inside it that can fix this for you, make it so
your friend can never bother you again. I don’t know if it works by forcing the
soul to the other side so that it permanently moves on, or if it somehow destroys
the soul completely. But I know that the problem gets solved, however it
works.”

“What is it?” Marty asked. “In the
house?”

“I didn’t know when I went there,”
Ida said, “I was in such a rush to solve my problem. But I’ve since learned
more about it. I was frustrated with what happened, so I did some research
after the fact. I wish I’d done it before!”

“What?” Marty asked impatiently.

“I knew I’d have to pay it
something, I just didn’t know what,” Ida said. “That’s the problem. You don’t
know what it’s going to take. It’ll get rid of it, but you won’t know the price
you paid until after it’s done.”

“What is ‘it’?” Marty asked,
nearly ready to come off his seat and strangle the information out of her.

“Well, I’ll tell you what happened
to me,” Ida said, looking at Winn. “I told you already the ghost that was on me
had nearly made me blind. It was because of what happened to its eyes, which it
blamed me for, but that’s a whole different story. Anyway, I learned of this
place in Flagstaff, and I went there. Talked to the entity there. Solved the
problem. But later I learned that when I become upset, I lose control of
myself, in a bad way. It’s something about my personality that I’ve always
hated, something that drives people away from me, I’m afraid.” She glanced over
at Marty, then back to Winn. “It’s like that entity looked inside me and took
part of me for itself, took away my self-control, to make itself stronger. I
didn’t know it was going to do that. I knew it wanted some kind of payment, but
I didn’t know that was what it would be. You won’t know, either, if you go
there. If you agree to its terms, it’ll take something of you, and you won’t
have any control over what it is.”

“Jesus, Ida,” Marty said, wiping
his forehead. “I wish you had told me about this.”

“When you’re desperate, you do
desperate things,” she said. “I can’t say I wish I hadn’t, because at least
I’ve got my eyesight! So I did what I had to do. When I found out what had
happened to me, I did a little more research into it, the research I should
have done before I went in the first place. There’s a man who lives in Toquerville.
He knows all about the entities, he’s sort of an expert. I went to see him, and
he explained a lot of it to me.”

“And?” Marty asked.

“And, well, he told me what it was,
in that house. It’s called a vorghost. Very powerful.”

“A vorghost?” Winn asked.

“When a gifted person dies, such
as you or me, most of us go on to the other side, just like normal people,” Ida
said. “But sometimes one of us sticks around, like a ghost – just like if a
normal person didn’t pass over, and stuck around. But – if it’s someone who’s
gifted, and they made plans for the afterlife, they know how to do things.
They’re not stupid, like most ghosts. There’s things you can do, if you’re
gifted and you’re in that state – things we can’t do while we’re alive, as
humans.”

“This is what the man in Toquerville
told you?” Marty asked skeptically.

“Yes, and I’m giving you the
benefit of what I learned, so don’t start with the attitude,” she snapped at
Marty. She turned back to Winn.

“So – it’s the ghost of a gifted
person. And they prepared, they selected a place to haunt before they died.
It’s a purposeful thing, by intention and design – they’re not just haunting a
place because they died there, that kind of thing. They selected a place in
advance, and they prepared to haunt it before they died. And once they actually
die, they reside in that place, and they protect it by creating a vortex within
it – something normal ghosts are too stupid to construct, or have no idea they
could construct.”

“A vorghost?” Marty asked.

“That’s what he called it,” Ida
replied. “Anyway, they’re all about power, and they use the vortex to
concentrate power to keep them going. They operate at a much higher level of
energy than a regular ghost, and it’s draining – it takes a lot to maintain.
They have abilities that most of us don’t have, and it’s different for every
vorghost – depends on what they specialized in during their life, and what they
devote their accumulated power toward. But to keep going, they have to create
and inhabit a vortex. It’s what keeps them alive. Well, alive in their state.
They’re really dead, of course.”

“You think this vorghost could get
Brent to leave me alone?” Winn asked.

“Well, it did the same for me,”
Ida said, “got the one off my back. So it has that skill. And it’s willing to
work with gifted people. I think if you were just some Tom, Dick, or Harry
walking into the house, it would scare you away and not give you the time of
day. Not that there’s likely to be any normal people there, anyway – the vortex
creeps them out, gives them the willies, so they naturally stay away. But it’ll
talk to you if you’re gifted, provided you do it right. And it can get rid of
your friend for you. For a price, like I said.”

“And I wouldn’t know what the
price is?” Winn asked.

“Not according to the man in Toquerville,”
Ida said. “You’ll agree that it can take what it wants, you don’t get a say in
the matter. It’ll look into you, and take something you value, something that
has power, so it can add to its own. If you agree to the terms, it’ll get rid
of the ghost. It’s a little frightening, so don’t freak out when it happens.
And it’s not an even trade. The energy it expends to get rid of the ghost
that’s bothering you is only a fraction of the power it will take from you, but
that’s its profit margin, I guess. It’s not like
we
know how to do it,
or we’d just do it ourselves, right?”

“And it took something from you?”
Winn asked. “Do you regret it?”

“I might be dead if I hadn’t done
it,” Ida said. “Dead or blind! No, I don’t regret it. But I’ve been dealing
with the loss of what it took from me ever since. It’s made some things
difficult.”

“Can you tell me where the house
is?” Marty asked. “In case Winn decides to use it.”

“Sure, but you can’t just go
barging in there,” she replied. “You have to do it right.”

“And how is that?” Marty asked.

“First of all, the vortex itself will
creep you out, just like it impacts normal people, so you have to be ready for
that. Load up on protection. The house looks dilapidated, but it isn’t some
dump like a lot of ghosts haunt. The vorghost has it sealed up tight. The only
way in is through a basement window in the back. You start there, and work your
way up to the attic, where the vorghost lives – the highest point in the
vortex. Once you get there, you can talk to the entity.”

“Does it have a name?” Marty
asked.

“Not that I know of,” Ida said.
“Oh, and, if you see anything floating off the ground, don’t go near it or
touch it. I never saw anything floating myself, but the man in Toquerville warned
me to avoid them. He seemed very concerned about it. If you touch the floating
things, you’re screwed.”