“Well.” He seemed pleased, for once. “Good. I’d been hoping you’d make it worth my while to get out of bed at this ridiculous hour.”
Then he was in luck. I added a bag of sacred salt to the order—I’m not sure if it did much more than the table salt from the supermarket aisle, but I wanted every advantage I could get. White candles, dressed in essential oils. A big hunk of amethyst I’d put in my pocket and forget until I went fishing for change. And a bundle of smudge sticks.
“Anything else?” he said expectantly…then dropped his voice and added, “Because I’m starting to worry.”
Crash might be an empath, but he and I didn’t explore our emotions together—especially not with Jacob standing vigil by the door, looking uncomfortable and stern. “I’ll be fine,” I said. “It’s not really a ghost.”
“How convincing.”
“It’s no threat to me. At least…it shouldn’t be.” Unless it decided it needed a host—and I was the most appealing one in the room. No, the fragment had co-existed for over a month with Boswell, and he was none the worse for wear.
Unless that was the reason his paranoia had spiraled out of control.
“Is there such a thing as protection from negative emotions?”
“Is Mercury Retrograde a royal pain in the ass? Pick your poison. I’ve got incense, hand wash, and even a St. Michael medallion, if you swing that way.”
I’d never been religious. But I bought it anyhow and tucked it into my breast pocket.
Laden with enough paraphernalia to open my own pop-up shop, I headed to the apartment. Sarah rode with Jacob and me, and Boswell followed in the peemobile. I didn’t worry about him scurrying back under the baseboards anymore—not now that we had something he wanted, namely, a living exorcism. “I think the office is expecting us,” I told Jacob. “Pretty soon Laura will start to wonder.”
“I’ll handle Laura,” Jacob said. He seemed awfully confident about it, given the “satisfactory” business. Better him than me, though. I’m usually a passable liar—until you know me. And then I’m riddled with guilt.
But it really was in his best interest to refrain from touching those SPECs.
As we pulled up in front of the haunted apartment, I spotted a scrupulously clean black sedan parked near the courtyard. Shit. “I had HQ put eyes on Haskel so he didn’t get any ‘special deliveries.’ We’d better go around back.”
Jacob turned down the alley, and Boswell followed. And he was beyond pleased with himself to show us how he’d jimmied the back window to crawl in from the porch.
“What’s the plan?” Jacob asked, and suddenly everything seemed to click into place. One Psych, one Stiff. The power-couple we were always meant to be.
“We’ll set up our perimeter around the repeater like a standard exorcism. But instead of the veil, we nudge it toward Sarah.”
With a single nod, Jacob got to work. He might not be as methodical as Carl, but I had to admit, I felt a lot better knowing that when push came to shove, he’d be able to do some actual shoving. We set candles at the cardinal points, sifted out a careful ring of salt, droppered a tincture of mugwort under our tongues, and grounded ourselves in our own particular ways. Jacob did a red-energy visualization—though he claimed he could never tell if it did much of anything—and I called down my white light. And then I reached for my earbuds…and remembered Mood Blaster was ruined, and I had no binaurals to help me.
Damn it, I hate technology.
“Feel anything?” I asked Jacob.
He scowled hard at the spot where the luminol had lit up the wall, gave it a good stare, then shook his head. “Nothing.”
I followed his gaze and squinted. Yeah, me neither.
Jacob said, “Maybe once we get Sarah in place, the fragment will put out a stronger signal.”
It was worth a shot, since all we were currently accomplishing was pooling wax on the floor.
“Stay in the hall,” I told Boswell. I could tell he had no intention of doing any such thing, so I brought out the big guns. “There’ll be a lot of stray etheric energy floating around and you don’t want to get contaminated.”
Thankfully, his training hadn’t yet started, so he didn’t know I was improvising. He blanched and backed up a few steps.
Sarah was frowning at the salt circle as she ignored Jacob’s efforts to direct her to her mark. “Is this gonna hurt?” she asked.
“I don’t think you’ll feel any physical difference,” I said. Though emotionally, I suspected she’d be in for a major hit.
“You don’t seem to know much about this.”
“No one does.” And that was the truth. “Most repeaters don’t have awareness. They don’t have feelings. This one is nothingbutfeelings. Do you really want to leave part of yourself trapped in that night, endlessly repeating the worst moment of her life?”
