Half an hour later, I called Sylvia. I sat in the back of the SUV with its doors open and my legs dangling to touch the ground. I had my phone in one hand, using the other to hold a cold water bottle to the back of my neck because I was both hot and wanting a nap.
She answered with her usual “Speak.”
“Boss. The fuckening has arrived.”
“I need you to understand I spilled coffee all over myself on the way to work this morning, that’s how well today’s going, so you can tell me the problem but there better be a solution.”
“I hope the solution’s viable, anyway. Here’s the problem. No, better, I’m going to let Beau explain.”
My mentor jogged over to me, and he kept Gwyn close. She clutched her tablet to her chest, looking about warily. Beau didn’t trust this area any more than she did.
Beau pointed to the phone, brow cocked in question.
I nodded. “You’re on speaker.”
“Sylvia, it’s Beau.”
“Hi there. Tell me something good, Beau.”
“This area’s beyond fucked, energetically and spiritually speaking.”
“I said something good, not something migraine inducing.”
“You’re familiar with residual hauntings, of course.”
“Obviously.”
I murmured an explanation to Gwyn, who braced her foot against the bumper so she could frantically write on her propped-up tablet.
Beau’s wrinkles grew proportionally deeper with his scowl as he spoke. “This is something like a residual haunting, only it’s much, much worse. The area has become a time capsule, in a sense. It’s frozen in time, collecting the dead but not releasing them. I’d bet if anyone died here now, they’d be just as trapped. It only looks like an old-timey ghost town on the surface because no one’s lived here in a hundred years.”
Hence my headache and strong desire for a nap.
I took over. “We can interact with the ghosts, but we have to physically touch them before they can even see us. This is an entirely different issue from Black Rock’s ghosts, who are mean spirited and like to charge people. These guys can’t see me at all until I’m physically in contact, and if I let go, I become invisible again. We’re having to stop, talk to a ghost, convince them across the street, and then hand them immediately over to Beau to pass them on. It’s taking a good twenty or thirty minutes per ghost.”
Sylvia groaned. “That’s three times as long as it normally takes you. I expected this to go much faster. Shit. Beau, you’ve seen this before?”
“Years and years ago now. I was brand new to the FBI, maybe been in the force two years. Strangely enough, it was also in the desert, with a river nearby and lots of limestone and quartz in the area.”
Too much of a coincidence to dismiss.
“I’ll tell you something else. We weren’t able to do a damn thing about it until a chaos magician came in.”
The term rang a very, very faint bell. I felt like Beau had mentioned chaos magicians before, but god help me if I could recall.
Gwyn piped up. “What’s that?”
Thank everything good I had an apprentice to ask questions for me and cover my lapse in memory.
“Chaos magicians are incredibly talented people,” Beau explained. “They can see and sense the energies of the world, and they are fueled by the chaotic nature of energy fluctuations. The more disastrous the situation, the stronger they are. They’re also able to do some really neat things. If there’s, say, a vortex nearby, they can either shut it down or reverse it. They can open portals for the dead or shut them off. They can also release energy that has become shut off into an area.”
Which was precisely what we needed here. Someone to undo this locked-up time capsule so the ghosts could move and interact normally, instead of acting like they were on a different plane of time and space.
Gwyn wrote all this down, but she sounded wistful as she said, “I want to be a chaos magician.”
Beau chuckled. “Me too, me too. Anyway, Sylvia, the only person I know who can help is a chaos magician. I doubt the oneI met is available. He was nearing retirement even forty years ago.”
Yeah, man was probably dead by now.
