Cold Blood, page 9
“What? Why?”
“She’s gone.”
Morgan turned around, their back stiffening when they realized what Harlan had already seen. “She’s gone,” they repeated, rubbing their arms.
Suddenly exhausted, Harlan rested his elbows on his thighs and buried his face in his hands, kneading his eyes and forehead as he tried to think. “I’m not…” Okay. One thing at a time. “My apartment is ghost-warded. Heavily,” he explained to Morgan.
“There’s no fucking way she should’ve been able to get in here if she really is…” Hamilton agreed. He stood up, tense and alert, ready to defend against a danger that was already gone.
“She was,” Harlan assured him. “I just don’t know how.”
“Do you need me to call the…ward…guy?” Hamilton asked.
“No. Not yet. I… We have to figure this out.” He motioned for Hamilton to sit on one of the armchairs opposite the couch. His restless pacing was starting to make Harlan nervous.
Where to start?
The wards. Had they been broken, like the ones at the Centre, or was something even worse, even stranger, going on?
He did his special blink and the wards snapped into sight. They were solid and whole and bright as the day they’d been painted. It didn’t make sense. None of what had just happened made sense.
He blinked again. “It’s not the wards. They’re fine.”
Hamilton raised an eyebrow. “It’s not like…?”
“No.”
If it wasn’t the wards, what was the next step?
He turned to Morgan. “Okay. You were in Monica’s form.”
They nodded.
He shook his head slowly as he thought it through. “Then you weren’t, and she was. Here, I mean.”
“Should I try it again?” Morgan asked. “To make sure it wasn’t a fluke or something?” They frowned. “She was gone so quickly, but I had this feeling… Like she wanted to tell me something.”
Harlan shivered, swallowing hard. “I felt it too,” he admitted reluctantly.
Hamilton was looking back and forth between the two of them like he was watching a tennis game he didn’t understand—but he didn’t interrupt.
When no one else spoke up or offered any suggestions, Harlan sighed. “All right. Let’s try it again.”
They stood in front of each other beside the coffee table. Harlan wondered if they felt as awkward and uncertain as he did.
He could see Morgan concentrating—Harlan imagined he looked similar when he blinked—and they turned into Monica.
Just Monica. Harlan reached out with his psychic senses—no ghost, just Morgan in a different form. “It didn’t work.”
Morgan groaned. “What else was…? Oh!” They reached out and touched Harlan’s hand.
Morgan snapped back to their own form, and once again Monica—spectral Monica—was beside them. The feeling of force, of energy, wasn’t as strong this time—or maybe Harlan was just expecting it and had braced himself. He held on grimly to Morgan’s hand. Their copper nails dug into his skin.
Again, he sensed that the girl’s spirit was trying to communicate, even though she stayed still and quiet. Just as he was thinking about speaking to her, Morgan let go of his hand and the girl flashed out of existence.
He hadn’t seen a sign on her ‘body’ of what had killed her, but that wasn’t unusual. For every ghost that appeared in full bloody, bloated horror, there was another that looked completely untouched.
“Whoa.” Morgan laughed, a little too high-pitched. “That was… Whoa.”
Harlan nodded slowly in agreement, hoping they didn’t notice him rubbing the half-moon marks they’d left on the back of his hand.
“Maybe I don’t even need to take her form first. Maybe I can just…” They grabbed Harlan’s hand again without warning.
He winced at the sudden spark of power that flew between them like a static shock, but he was distracted from the unexpected pain by Monica’s reappearance.
She looked more irritated than sad this time, and he wondered if it was as unnerving for her as it was for them, being called from…wherever she was…to a strange place with strange people.
She clasped her hands together, looking at Morgan and Harlan pointedly.
Morgan dug her nails in again, and Harlan thought he understood what Monica wanted. This time, they wouldn’t let go until she’d given them her message.
She opened her mouth.
As Harlan had expected, no sound came out.
Monica looked increasingly annoyed, then almost frantic, but no matter how hard she tried, they couldn’t hear her. She stomped her foot, glaring at the three of them.
She looked around the room and grinned when she spotted a pencil on the coffee table.
“That won’t—” Harlan tried to warn her, but she was already reaching for it.
Her hand passed right through the pencil—and the table beneath it. It took a lot of energy—and usually a lot of practice—before a spirit could interact with physical objects, and Monica had neither. She managed to rock the pencil slightly, and he was impressed, but she just looked even more miserable.
“What are you trying to tell us?” Harlan asked softly.
She looked around again, frowning. She closed her eyes, and he was afraid she was going to disappear, but she only spun in a slow circle with her arm out, her finger pointing. She stopped, opened her eyes, and nodded, stabbing her finger a few times in the direction she was facing.
“You want us to follow you?” Morgan guessed.
Still pointing, she looked over her shoulder and nodded enthusiastically, grinning at them.
Morgan looked a little queasy, but they asked, “Will we…find your—you—if we go in that direction?”
She nodded again, looking like she might cry with relief.
“We’ll help you if we can,” Morgan told her, and Harlan noticed that they hadn’t actually promised anything.
“We have to prepare first,” Hamilton interjected before they could say more.
Monica slowly lowered her arm to her side, nodding sadly and staring at the three adults.
Morgan glanced at Hamilton and nodded. They swallowed hard, giving Harlan’s hand another big squeeze. “We’re going to stop touching now, and you’re going to disappear,” they explained. “But we’re going to try to get you help.”
She nodded again.
“Let go,” Hamilton said.
They dropped each other’s hands at the same time, and Monica disappeared again.
“Holy shit. Did you know you could do that?” Hamilton asked.
It wasn’t clear which of them he was addressing, and they answered together, “No.”
Harlan felt cold and numb and at a distance from his body.
“What does that mean?” Morgan asked, rubbing their arms.
Hamilton glanced at Harlan, who shook his head.
“I don’t know.”
Morgan turned to Harlan, their eyes enormous. “Holy. Shit. If we’re right, if we can do this again, we can help find her and do it for other missing people. Harlan, think of all the people we can—”
“No,” Hamilton cut them off.
Harlan and Morgan stared at him.
“No!” Hamilton repeated, more forcefully. “I can’t—I won’t—stop you, but I think that’s a bad idea.”
“Why?” Morgan demanded.
Hamilton sighed. “Look,” he said, his voice softer. “I get that you both want to help people, I really do. And that’s admirable. But there’s a reason there’s a whole team of police psychics—all flavours, not just mediums. Burnout. If you two go off announcing your as-far-as-we-know-unique talent—if this is even something you can do again reliably—everyone in the city is going to be coming for you, wanting you to find Grandma’s missing pooch.”
“How would that—?” Morgan began indignantly, just as Harlan started saying, “And why shouldn’t—?”
Hamilton cut them off again. “Trust me on this. These things need to be done delicately.” He fished his phone out of its holster and turned away from them to make his call.
Morgan and Harlan exchanged grins—The Wizard of Oz had been one of the few movies in the Centre’s very small collection. Harlan couldn’t have said how many times he’d seen it.
As though sensing the amusement happening behind him, a frowning Hamilton turned, flapped a hand at them and pointedly gave them his back again.
Morgan rolled their eyes but sat on the couch.
After a moment’s hesitation—Harlan usually only sat that close to Charles—he joined them.
While Hamilton was distracted, they leaned over and whispered, “Is Captain Sourpuss saying we shouldn’t try to find old ladies’ missing dogs?” They blinked. “Not that I could,” they added.
Harlan couldn’t help snorting at the nickname. He’d come up with plenty of his own when he’d first met Hamilton. “No, of course not!” he whispered back.
Well…maybe.
“He’s just looking out for us. Burnout, like he said.”
“Uh-huh.”
Hamilton slammed his phone back into its case. “I got us a meeting to share your theory. If we”—Harlan found it incredibly touching that Hamilton included himself—“can convince them you’re on to something, we’ll be authorized to search for the body.”
“What?” Morgan stood up. At Hamilton’s expression, even though they were taller than him, they took a step back and sat down again.
“What?” Harlan echoed. “I thought we’d be going right now!”
Hamilton shrugged, but he seemed disappointed too. “Sorry. If it was up to me, we’d be in the cruiser already with the lights and siren going. But it’s not up to me.” He looked between them, then grinned. “What? Do they teach you Advanced Pouting at the Centre, along with all the freaky shit? You’re making the exact same face.”
He held up his hands, addressing Harlan first. “Look. This isn’t going to be like last time. I’m not going to let it be like last time.” He turned to Morgan. “I get the feeling you’ve been let down—or worse—by the cops before, and I don’t want to be another disappointment. I’m going to keep pushing on this, but it’ll take time. There are official channels we have to go through. Besides, if she’s really—” He shook his head, seeming to decide against continuing that thought out loud. “Besides…there’s something else.”
Morgan groaned, throwing a hand over their eyes.
“And this one I kinda agree with.”
He was met only by silence.
“This is, as far as we know—and you can fucking bet we’ve got people looking into this right now while we’re talking—the first time psychics have used…combined, whatever, their power in this way. We have no idea if what we saw was real—”
“What? Mass hysteria? Please.” Morgan snorted.
“No, no, nothing like that. I just mean… We all saw the same thing, we did, but we don’t know if it was really her. If she’s really—”
“It was her ghost,” Harlan said firmly.
Hamilton sighed but nodded. “Look. You’re both too young to remember this—so am I, but on days like today it sure as fuck doesn’t feel like it—but it wasn’t that long ago that psychic cops had to act like they just got really good hunches, and everyone pretended to believe them. Open psychics got shitty assignments, passed over for promotion or just…not hired. The Centre was where people sent their—well, it’s only in the last twenty years or so that police forces started accepting that psychics are a good forensic tool. Sorry, Brand, Morgan.
“But this psychic…stuff…still makes a lot of people nervous. And that’s stuff they’ve studied, that they’ve seen work over and over, the same-ish way time after time. Something completely new, like this? I’d consider ourselves lucky that we got a meeting.” He laughed. “I’m honestly not sure if having Brand involved will help us or hurt us.”
“Why?” Morgan asked, before Harlan could.
“He made some…pretty big impressions with that whole Harkness thing—not all of them good,” Hamilton replied, the most diplomatic response Harlan had ever heard from him.
Chapter Eight
Harlan almost never went to the police station. He’d found out—probably much later than he should have—that Hamilton took care of and shielded him from paperwork and other parts of the job that didn’t directly involve ghosts.
He and Morgan fell back a step, letting Hamilton take the lead. Harlan tried to keep his gaze down and ignore the heads that raised as he walked by and the whispers that cut off abruptly as he passed. He knew, from the other police mediums, that some of the regular police officers were unhappy that a complete newbie medium had discovered and stopped a serial killer that no one else had even been aware of.
As far as Harlan was concerned, it didn’t matter who discovered a problem as long as it got solved. He hadn’t kept his theory a secret. Hamilton had told him that he’d informed his superiors of Harlan’s hunch, and they’d told him to drop it.
None of the mediums seemed to hold it against him, at least not openly.
He was beginning to regret offering to go to the station with Morgan—like Hamilton had said, it might have been easier without him—but the way he kept catching Morgan shooting him nervous little sidelong glances made him glad he’d come along.
Hamilton led them into an office and shut the door behind them.
Sitting behind it was a Black woman whose short hair was almost completely grey. A nameplate on her desk read Captain Sullivan. Her neutral expression didn’t change when she saw Harlan, and he couldn’t decide if that was good or bad.
“You said you had information about a missing child?” she prompted Hamilton.
“Yes, ma’am. I think so.”
This was the closest to flustered Harlan had ever seen him, and he began to suspect that Hamilton was putting himself on the line for him and Morgan. Now he could only hope their theory was correct.
“Brand and Mx. Vermeer believe she is dead. And they’re hoping that they can locate her remains. Through…unconventional means.”
“I see.” She steepled her fingers on her blotter. “Does Mx. Vermeer have any qualifications I should know about?”
Hamilton swallowed hard, and Harlan could almost see him edging out on a limb he wasn’t convinced would take his weight. “No, ma’am. Other than being a psychic, trained at the Centre.”
“I don’t suppose I could get a demonstration of this ‘unconventional method’ before I make my decision?” she asked.
Morgan nodded, rolling up onto their toes and back like they were stretching or warming up.
Harlan was far less enthusiastic. He didn’t like dragging a ghost to him, away from wherever she was supposed to be, over and over again. He’d been relieved when they’d broken contact and released her.
Still… If there was any chance they could bring closure to Monica’s family, they owed it to her and to them to try.
He nodded.
Hamilton looked him directly in the eyes, then nodded. He brushed past them and closed the blinds over the windows facing the bullpen.
Harlan immediately began feeling something akin to claustrophobia, which wasn’t normally a problem for him. He realized it was more a sense of finality. What if they couldn’t make her appear again?
Morgan took his hand, and this time it came even more quickly—that sense of being drawn tight, stretched until some force slammed into him, through him, then there she was. Morgan gave his hand an extra squeeze, their nails digging in a little. He didn’t pull away, concentrating on the translucent girl in front of them, afraid she’d vanish if he stopped paying attention.
He heard a soft gasp from Captain Sullivan.
Just like before, the girl showed no visual signs of injury or whatever might have caused her death.
She looked around slowly, as though getting her bearings, then pointed to the rear wall of the office, looking in that direction as well.
Harlan tried to do a quick mental visualization. He got turned around inside buildings, especially ones as large as the police station, but he thought it was the same way she’d pointed in his apartment.
“Well.” Captain Sullivan’s voice, sounding a little unsteady, broke the heavy silence filling the room. “And you believe you can follow this…apparition…to the girl’s remains?” Her eyes widened and she shot an almost-guilty look at Monica.
Monica didn’t move or react to her words. She just kept pointing.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Hamilton sounded so certain. It sent a hot rush of emotion through Harlan—pride that Hamilton had such faith in him, equally matched with the terror of disappointing him and losing that faith forever.
The captain came out from behind her desk and cautiously approached the girl, who still didn’t move. “What do you need?” she asked Hamilton, softly.
“I want to keep this small to begin with—just me, Brand and Mx. Vermeer. We’ll follow the ghost and see what, if anything, she leads us to. If it’s nothing, no one outside this room has to know.”
It was almost a question, and the captain nodded in response.
“If we do find her body, we’ll proceed from there.”
“Do it.” They’d clearly been dismissed.
Morgan released Harlan’s hand and the ghost immediately vanished. The room seemed to fill up with air again. They took deep, simultaneous breaths.
Hamilton opened the blinds, and the office felt even less oppressive. He nodded to the captain, turned on his heel and left. Harlan and Morgan fell into step behind him as he led them back to the cruiser.
Hamilton leaned on the car and tapped a finger impatiently on its roof for the few seconds it took them to catch up. “How are we gonna do this?” he asked. “You two have to keep holding hands or at least be touching, right?”
Harlan hadn’t really thought, in detail, about how they’d follow Monica’s ghost. He’d sort of imagined them holding hands and walking.
Morgan opened their mouth, then closed it again.
“Yeah, that’s about what I thought.” Hamilton sighed. “All right, how about this… You two sit in the back of the cruiser. Will she be able to keep up with the car, or will she…lag?”
