But I’d be damned if I let all that agony go to waste.
“Sarah,” I snapped, “get out of him.”
And I shoved.
A wave of psychic force echoed through me. No one felt it but me—and Sarah. Her subtle bodies telescoped out from Boswell’s physical form, a dozen Sarahs. Not just an etheric body and an emotional fragment, but a bunch of other bodies that normally stacked neatly inside each other. I felt like the guy who put the slide under the first microscope and found a swarm of invisible cooties crawling around. And up until now, we didn’t have a lens powerful enough to see this stuff.
I didn’t want to be the focus. And as my perception tilted even worse, I didn’t know if I couldhandlebeing the focus.
There was one more push in me. I had to make it count. I pushed past the woozy room dipping and the acid ants, and I shoved again. Another wave washed through the room.
But all the nesting doll Sarahs were stacking themselves right back inside Boswell. And I figured it was all for nothing.
Until the luminol blood spatter behind them lit up piercingly enough to blind my nonphysical eyes.
The veil.
Fuck,no, I didn’t want to exorcise Sarah, I just wanted her back in her own damn body.
There are no takebacks in psychic attacks. Once you strike out, you can’t reel it in. The wall was pulsing now with black energy that was both too bright to look at and too dark to see. It harmonized with the hum of the SPECs and made it even louder. The burning ants died out, and the hum got louder still. Not painful. Just intense, like staggering out of a mosh pit and finding yourself right on top of the Marshall stack.
Maybe I was finally clicking into the right subtle body, because the room stopped tilting. Yeah, my feet weren’t quite on the floor and my molars held an aftertaste of burnt concrete. But it didn’t hurt anymore. And maybe now I could force Sarah into her own skin.
She reseated herself in Boswell and dodged a swing from Zach, taking it in the shoulder instead of the jaw. As she drew back to return the punch, I sucked down a quick gulp of mojo, focused on the vibe of the SPECs, and gave a final good shove….
And foundmyselfgliding toward the black veil.
While my body stayed put.
I tried to rip off the SPECS. My hands weren’t my hands, but some thin tether still held me to my body, and it swatted them askew. It disrupted the pulses enough for me to accordion back into myself, stagger, and swallow back an upchuck.
I had range, all right. But no clue how to control it. Not while Sarah’s spirit flung Boswell’s body at her ex, not caring when he used it for a punching bag. Sledge bellowed an incoherent threat at his attacker and landed a crunching right hook to the face. Possessed Boswell staggered. Spat a spray of blood. And shook it off.
Even on the ground, Jacob was still doing his best to contain the situation. He’d rolled onto the stun gun to keep it out of anyone else’s hands. And Sarah’s body was none too gentle about trying to pry him away from it. Evelyn might’ve had reservations about Jacob, but she dove back in and hauled Sarah’s body off him anyhow. Good thing Evelyn was so fit for her age. Like Boswell’s physical shell, Sarah’s body was fighting like it had nothing to lose, albeit for its own reason: zero impulse control in a confrontation with its worst enemy.
Evelyn wrenched an arm behind its back and gave Jacob the space to roll out from under it, taking the stun gun with him. Sarah’s body struggled free, but Evelyn kept on it, matching it move for move—leaving Jacob and me to deal with the men.
Our eyes locked, Jacob’s and mine, with Boswell’s big, lumbering body between us. And we shared a crystalline moment of understanding. Take down Sledge, and Sarah would use that moment to pound his head in and make a murderer out of the body she’d commandeered. So we had to double-team Boswell.
The stun gun popped and hummed as it switched on. From where I stood, I felt it in my fillings, but I trusted the unspoken plan—trusted Jacob—and sent out a surge of psychic muscle. At the same moment, Jacob lunged for Boswell’s body and pressed the stun gun to the side of his fleshy neck. A pop. A pong of roasting pork.
I fully expected to shove Sarah out from Boswell’s body as it crumpled to the floor. But at the last second, I felt the black veil throbbing like it was eager to suck her into oblivion. It was raw and ugly. As close to hell as anything I’d ever seen. And I just couldn’t bring myself to do that to Sarah.
Boswell’s body swayed. Sarah’s spirit flickered in the extremities—fingers, ears, nose—but she quickly reseated herself and locked its knees to keep it standing. Sledge’s eyes went wide. And then he wound up for a roundhouse that would bust the meat puppet’s jaw.
I did the only thing I could do and shoved myself between them.
The hit landed on my sternum and my breath punched out so hard I thought I might never breathe again. But all my focus was on clenching down on my subtle bodies to stop them from tumbling into the hungry void.
Sledge was momentarily baffled that anyone would stand up to him, capably or not. And then he figured out that that someone was me—the federal agent who’d reacted to all his posturing with a stony expression, who’d refused to give him any satisfaction.
And he smirked.
And swung again.
I almost dodged it…which didn’t do me a damn bit of good.
There was a loud crack. Not my skull, but the SPECs as they jolted off my face, banked off a wall, then hit the floor with a crunch.
