The phone eventually woke him up, but as he groped for it he was dimly aware this was ring five or six. Using all that psychokinetic energy really wiped him out. “ ‘lo?” he mumbled into the receiver, eyes still firmly closed.

“Wow Gryphon, you’re still sleeping?” Varner said. “Late night last night?”

He rolled over and opened his eyes, looking at the clock. Was it really one in the afternoon? Well, it wasn’t one in the morning. “Sort of. Didn’t really sleep well.”

“Ah.” Varner said it in a strangely suspicious way. Amazing how much suspicion you could pack in one syllable. “We found our guy.”

“The killer? Who is it?”

“His name was Harold Cook. He was a real estate agent, which explains his access to the building. Also he used to work in his Uncle’s butcher shop as a teenager, which would explain his proficiency at cutting up bodies.”

“You keep using the word was. Has he skipped town or something?”

There was a long silence, during which Mr. Aronofsky said, You’ve gotten way too adept at lying.

Varner sighed before saying, “He’s dead. Apparently he killed himself at the crime scene.”

“Wow. That’s weird. I didn’t think serial killers were the type who committed suicide.”

“Generally they’re not. They have no qualms about hurting others but want to preserve themselves at all costs. There’s another oddity as well.”

“Oh?”

“We only found his prints at the scene, on the gun, but there was no powder residue on his hands.”

Damn, he forgot about that. “Huh. That is weird.”

“Isn’t it?” he paused again, as if waiting for Gryphon to fill the void. But he didn’t, so he was forced to pick up the slack. “Look, Gryph, you had nothing to do with this, right? You or your … passengers.”

He snorted in disbelief. “My passengers aren’t known for using guns, and neither am I.” It wasn’t a lie – they weren’t known for it. Didn’t mean they hadn’t done it in this instance, though.

You’re more like a lawyer every day, Mr. Aronofsky complained.

Ouch, Hugh said. That’s a bit harsh, isn’t it?

Varner seemed to concede that with a noise that was half-grunt, half-sigh. “Don’t blame me for grasping at straws. This case just wrapped up really neatly, and cases never wrap up neatly, not when they involve so many deaths.”

“I can imagine.”

“Speaking of which, I guess you’re responsible for my interesting visitor this morning.”

He sat up, rubbing his eyes, wondering if he could put him on hold and go pee. Did this phone even have a hold function? “Oh? You’re not seeing dead people, are you?”

“Only in a manner of speaking. O’Leary came into my office this morning and told me what really happened during the raid. I should reopen the case, but I don’t know if I will. It will be ugly, and nothing will be achieved. It was an accident, and Cal’s already retired out of the force. But goddamn it, all those men on the task force deliberately lied and obstructed the investigation.”

“Jeff just wanted the truth known. What you do with it is ultimately up to you.”

“Not all the angry dead want revenge, huh?”

“Not really. It depends on the person.” Was he fishing, trying to pick up a hint, a clue to his involvement with Cook? Gryphon wasn’t about to give it to him.

After a moment, he heard the creak of a chair, and the sound of papers being shuffled on a desk. “I should say I got an okay for you to work as a consultant for us on a provisional basis.”

“Great. I guess I can get started after we get back from California.”

“Oh, you doing that murder house thing?”

“Yeah. It’s a good chunk of change, and it’ll get the guys some publicity, which ultimately pays the bills.” He figured he’d massively dose himself with Nyquil before getting on the plane. It would damp down the electrical activity and his passengers, although he told Clay to wake him if the plane got in serious trouble or a drunken businessman started to go Al Qaeda on everyone. Maybe he couldn’t help, but he sure couldn’t hurt at that point.

“But you don’t want it for yourself?”

“Fuck no. I deal with enough fucknuts already.”

Gee, thanks, Hugh said.

“Good luck with that.”

“Thanks. You too.” He hung up and shuffled off to the bathroom, still yawning.

He really didn’t like anyone talking to him when he peed, but since when did Ruby give a damn about propriety? It wasn’t her forte. Kid, he’s suspicious. You know he is.

“Yeah, well, suspicion and a quarter leaves him with a quarter. He can’t prove shit.”

Not this time. But if you work with the cops he’s gonna be constantly hangin’ over your shoulder, whether you realize it or not. We won’t be able to do what we usually do what we do.

He washed his hands in the sink, and didn’t risk a look at himself in the mirror. He wasn’t sure he wanted to look at himself right now. “That depends on what we tell him, doesn’t it?”

This is all so very disturbing, Mr. Aronofsky complained.

Maybe it was, but Gryphon figured if he was going to do this, he was going to do this his way. And having the cops in his line of sight was preferable to looking over his shoulder for them.

He dried his hands and went downstairs to find the house empty. Clay was probably back at work today, putting in some time before they had to take off for Los Angeles. Gryphon was too tired to throw something together, so he found a microwavable dinner in the freezer and nuked it, nursing a soda instead of making coffee. It was all caffeine.

He ate mechanically while rain pattered against the kitchen window like skeletal fingers tapping to be let in, and in the near perfect quiet, he realized he felt perfectly hollow, a Trojan horse of a human being. What was going to happen when he died? He assumed at some point the would have to die, but when? And what happened then? Although he occasionally tried, he still didn’t believe in an afterlife. Maybe, in his case, that was better.

He’d finished eating the frozen dinner that was somewhat bizarrely almost unidentifiable by taste, and found himself fighting back heavy yawns. He’d decided to go back to bed and just sleep until he was forced to get up for fear of bed sores when the phone in the front room rang. He wasn’t going to answer it, as he’d felt he’d talked to enough people today, but he had a nagging feeling he should pick it up. So he did, bracing for the worst.

“Oh, hey Gryphon, I didn’t realize you were there.” It was Kevin Holloway, one half of the lawyer couple that had owned the property where most of the Stanhope family was buried. The pair had actually kept in touch, why he wasn’t sure, except they knew something inexplicable when they saw it, and decided to keep it in reserve, in case they ever needed it again. Kevin was the one who hired Spirit Guides in the first place, as he believed their house was haunted more than his wife, who thought he was an idiot. He turned out to be right, but Gryphon wasn’t under the impression that the hard charging Rachel Davies ever conceded the point.

“Yeah. Clay isn’t, though. Can I take a message?”

“Actually, you’re the one I wanted to talk to. Do you remember that I was having one of the P.I.s contracted by the firm looking into finding Beatrice Broslowski Aronofsky for you?”

“Oh right.” Beatrice was Mr. Aronofsky’s wife, who seemed to slip off the edge of the world after her unmarried sister Edith won the lottery and moved to Florida. Bea was presumably with her, but they’d been unable to find either. “They found her?”

“Yes, she did.” Kevin paused awkwardly, cleared his throat. “There’s no good way to say this, so I‘m just going to say it. I’m sorry, but she died two years ago. She passed away in a care center in Ocala, heart failure. She’s buried in a Jewish cemetery outside Miami. I’m so sorry.”

“Oh shit.” He sat down heavily on the arm of the couch, as it was closest.

Poor Bea, Mr. Aronofsky said sadly. I was afraid of that, you know.

“Would you like the name and address of the cemetery?”

He rubbed his eyes, which felt like they were filled with sand. “Can you email me?”

“Sure. You gonna be okay?”

“Oh yeah, I’m fine. It’s Mr. Aronofsky I’m worried about.”

I’m fine, he protested weakly.

As soon as he got off the phone with Kevin, he sunk down on the sofa and asked, “What do you want to do?” Gryphon was basically asking if he wanted to leave or not. After all, all Mr. Aronofsky wanted was to find his wife. Now he had.

Gryphon didn’t want him to go. He was like the grandfather he never had, and was a rare voice of moderation, although his was the path very rarely taken. Yet it wasn’t fair to ask him to stay if he was done and wanted to go.

I don’t know, he admitted.

So Gryphon just sat there, watching the rain sluice down the window, and waited for him to make up his mind.

They were so energetic now that there was no way Gryphon could even get near a car, not to mention get in one. The wiring wouldn’t so much melt as totally vaporize, and he’d probably cause the windshield to explode. But he’d been hoping to take Harold back to the river, to where he’d dumped his victims, but it was too far to walk. Was it too far to walk to the store? He didn’t think so.

So he ended up walking the street with the stiff, seething Harold, who wanted to break away but hadn’t a hope in hell. Ruby had a death grip on him – no pun intended – but Gryphon hadn’t totally ceded control of his own body to her. Gryphon wanted a say in this, although he wasn’t completely sure why. For Anna, perhaps. Or maybe just because he wanted the nightmares to stop.

Luckily they were in a neighborhood where somebody walking somewhat zombie like didn’t attract attention, and by the time they reached the block where the closed down store was, no one seemed to be out on the street save for those passed out in shuttered doorways. As they walked across the parking lot, past and through yellow crime scene tape, he asked, “Getting déjà vu, Harry? You left a partial print, you know, as well as bits of victims. You just can’t get rid of all the evidence no matter how hard you try … at least not when you chop your victims up like cows in a slaughterhouse.”

“Who the fuck are you?” he grated through gritted teeth, barely able to talk. His voice was like a far away rumble, a garbage truck with a bad engine on the next block.

Gryphon sighed dramatically. “We’ve been over that. Consider me the agent of all your victims, because I am. And they won’t rest until you’ve joined them. You never did tell me how you thought you were gonna die.”

Harold was silent, deliberately this time, grinding his teeth like he was preparing to bite his throat out. He didn’t believe it, or at least refused to believe that something else was controlling him, and that he was completely fucking doomed. People’s powers of denial was astonishing. They honestly refused to believe this was somehow supernatural and beyond belief, yet very much happening. Gryphon supposed he used to be the same way, before the supernatural barged its way into his life and gave him no choice at all.

They marched across the lot in silence, the sound of sirens and car engines and stereos so distant it was like eavesdropping on another world. They were as grim as a funeral procession, but that was only correct. No, it wasn’t – execution was probably the correct term.

They didn’t have to, but they led him around to the back, even though they could have went in the front. It seemed to speak to symmetry. There was a new padlock on the door, but Ruby snapped it like it was made of balsa wood, and flung the door open, even though it was so warped in the frame it scraped on the floor with a noise so loud it was almost a screech.

But if they didn’t hear gunshots and bone saws out here, no one was going to hear that either.

Once inside the dark, empty store, it seemed wrong somehow. The forensic teams had cleared out a lot of stuff and moved other things around, and now there was a strange chemical scent lost amongst the old blood, the dust, and the mouse shit. Was that lumisol, the stuff they sprayed for bloodstains? Probably. Might have been something else too.

They weren’t alone, although Harold probably didn’t know that. The ghosts of his victims were all waiting here, fanned around him like they’d capture him if he tried to escape. Conspicuously missing was confused Rita, and Anna remained standing off to one side, as if still refusing to join the group she was tragically apart of anyways.

“So do you want to tell me what your major malfunction is?” Gryphon wondered. “What made you such a monster? Was it a bugfuck ultra-religious mother, like Ted Bundy? Or did you have a normal upbringing with two parents who never seemed to notice you were bringing strangers home and burying them in the backyard, like Jeffrey Dahmer? Please tell me you have a new story – you were abducted by circus people and fired out of a cannon against your will for the first ten years of your life? You saw your mother eaten by crocodiles? You’re your own Uncle? Give me something here.”

Ruby eased up her control on Harold, only so he could talk, not move. But he was still glaring at him hatefully, and seemed like he was trying to make his head go Scanners and explode. Sadly for Harold, only Gryphon’s passengers seemed to have that kind of power. “You don’t scare me.”

“Which proves you’re a moron. As well as impotent. Actually I was wondering about that, since you have kids. Did you fantasize about killing someone while having sex with your wife? ‘Cause you guys usually can’t get it up unless you’re hurting someone else -”

That did it; Gryphon and Ruby knew attacking his ability to get it up would get under his skin. It was true, though, that most serial killers were impotent, and couldn’t get a hard on unless they were hurting or dominating someone. It was a sensitive issue for these guys. “Don’t you talk to me like that! You don’t know me!”

“I do. I know all about you and all other men like you. I’ve stood with you in dark rooms one thousand times, you have killed me one thousand times, and only the faces and the weapons change. Most serials use intimate weapons – knives, bare hands, ropes – as a continuation of the sexual nature of their crimes. Death is the only true intimacy they experience with another person, because they can’t feel much of anything otherwise. But you use a gun, which tells me a couple of things about you. It’s phallic of course – that’s a given – and suggests you feel impotent in your daily life too. Constrained. You’re a powerful man, or at least you feel you should be, and you want everyone to know it. You’re no pussy, you’re no fag, you’re no peon – you’re a man, goddamn it, and you prove it by putting a gun to a woman’s head while she’s giving you a blow job and pulling the trigger. Damn, you’re such a man you‘re just oozing testosterone. Precisely who are you trying to convince?”

He was so angry, Gryphon expected to see cartoon fume lines coming off the top of his head. His face was berry red, and veins were throbbing in both temples. He looked like a boil about to burst. “Fuck you!”

“Is your wife a shrew? Was your mother? Why do you hate women so much?”

“I take out the trash!” he spat back. “They were parasites on society! I did the world a fucking favor!”

“Oh, you’re an altruist! I’m sorry I didn’t recognize that. You must be the next Mother Theresa.”

“I don’t give a shit what a fucking freak like you thinks. I know I’m right.”

“Of course you do. Much like crazy people never think they are, desperately wrong people never think they’re wrong. It’s like deliberate self-blindness.”

“You’re dead, freak,” he snarled, spittle flying from his bloody lips.

Gryphon gave him an icy smile so devoid of warmth it seemed to suck the air straight out of the room. “You first.”

Let me take over, kid, Ruby insisted.

“No, he’s mine,” Gryphon told her.

Confusion frosted the rage in his eyes. “Who the fuck are you talking to?”

“The dead. Keep up, Harry – we’ve been over this already.”

“You’re insane.”

He shrugged. “At least I’m not quite as batshit as you. But then again, who is?”

Make this fucker suffer, Sheila, still spokeswoman for the river victims, said.

Gryphon scrubbed a hand through his hair, wondering if they’d understand why he had to do what he had to do. Maybe he’d just get the explaining out of the way first. “Harry, I’m sure you’re a narcissist, like just about every other serial on record. They can’t love anything but themselves, because you’re perfect. Hell, you’re god, aren’t you? What I’m gonna do is make you act Human for once in your fucking miserable life. You’re gonna do the decent thing and kill yourself.”

Harold glared at him under lowered brows, his eyes as hot as lava. “What?”

Gryphon sighed, as Ruby had said the same thing inside his own head. Hugh, for his part, chuckled, apparently enjoying the show. “You said you take out the trash, Harry. You’re the biggest piece of trash I’ve ever met. Time to do your job, Jesus of Sunshine Realty. Take you out.”

Harold snorted disdainfully. “Now who’s the moron?”

“Oh, you’re doing it.” To make that point, he asked, “Ruby, would you do me a favor and take his legs out? I want him kneeling.”

Although the crackling electricity in the air let him know she was currently pissed off at him, she did as he asked, and just as Harold opened his mouth to accuse him of being crazy again, his legs buckled and he fell heavily to his knees with a painful thud. But Harold was too shocked to complain. “This isn’t for you, Harry. You’re a piece of shit who should be drawn and quartered and then minced while still alive. But while you were pretending to be Human, you somehow acquired a wife and kids, and you’re going to spare them the agony of a trial, of newscasters who ask her how she could not know what a fucking monster you are, or your kids getting picked on at school and people audibly wondering if your illness has been passed on to them, if they’re gonna be a psycho prick like you in ten years. I think you’ve had enough victims over the years; no need to add to the list.”

Now something like fear started to creep into his eyes. “You wouldn’t dare.”

“I would. In fact, I have, several times. Haven’t you listened to a damn thing I’ve said? You’re neither my first or my last. This must be doubly horrible for you; you’ve just learned you’re nothing special after all. Since you were out hunting, you’re probably carrying your gun, aren’t you? Ruby, do you know where it is?”

“Who the fuck is -” he began, but stopped as the gun he’d been hiding beneath his shirt suddenly floated up into the air in front of him, the barrel aiming straight at his face. It looked like he wanted to lunge for it, but of course he couldn’t, as he was totally paralyzed. All he could do was stare down the barrel of his own .38 and wonder how the fuck things had come to this.

“Would you put the gun in your mouth,” Gryphon wondered. “Or under your chin?”

His mouth opened soundlessly, and then closed with a dry click. He swallowed hard, and tried again. “No one will believe I committed suicide.”

“Yes they will. The police are closing in on you. Your crimes are about to be splashed all over the internet in lurid detail; you’re jail bound and we all know it. And while it would be fun to see how long you could last in Oz amongst men who may be related to the women you killed – oh boy, wouldn’t that be fun? – I just don’t have the patience for that. Nobody wants to see your smug face on the nightly news, least of all me. Center of the forehead? A clumsy shot, but that mimics the placement of some of the bullet wounds in your victims. Perfect.”

The gun shifted slightly, moving up so the barrel was at the same level as his big, broad forehead. Harold’s eyes followed it with an almost incomprehensible blankness. He still had shark eyes, but the empty rage had been subsumed by a sort of cautious fear. He was finally beginning to grok that he was fucked. “You won’t get away with this.”

“Yes, I will. I always have.” He crouched down, so Harold didn’t have to look past the gun to look at him. “If you believe in reincarnation, hope that you come back a Human next time. If you believe in heaven and hell, pack some sunscreen. And if you believe in nothing at all, good, because you won’t be disappointed. Oh, and just for the record, you’re an incredible pussy, and you’ll always be remembered as such. Do it, Ruby.”

She pulled the trigger, and the sharp, loud blast seemed to fill the entirety of the empty store as the bullet slammed into his forehead and blew out the back of his head in a small fountain of crimson gore as his body jerked back and hit the floor, legs still bent under him at an awkward angle. It would have been painful if he’d still been alive.

I was kinda hopin’ for somethin’ more brutal, Sheila said.

“I’m sure the rats will gnaw at him a bit before the cops find him,” he told her, as Ruby let the gun drop to the floor. “Maybe they’ll take off something important.”

Well, formerly important. When you were a corpse, your body ceased to be important. Which was a good thing for Harold, because considering the condition of his skull, he was never going to look presentable again.

But Gryphon was allowed one of those moments that he’d come to cherish, a moment when his Greek chorus of the damned fell mercifully silent. He got to hear the white noise hum inside his head, the emptiness where thoughts should be. Of course he had none; he felt hollowed out, flushed, wiped clean. The crowds of people who had shared space inside him had carved away pieces of himself until he had nothing stored up anymore. But again, that was okay. He found he preferred the silent nothingness, as he so very rarely had it.

Once he got home, he went straight to his room for a nap, and promptly had a dream.

He was sitting in a chair outside a changing room in a small clothing boutique that looked kind of familiar, although he couldn’t remember the last time he shopped for couture dresses. Soft music played in the background, and the air smelled vaguely of vanilla and linen. As he sat, waiting to see what happened, a kind of dowdy salesclerk walked by, hanging up dresses and slacks that women had decided not to purchase. He recognized her as Julie, and realized what was going on. “Something bothering you, Julie?” he wondered.

Again, this was not like her. She didn’t talk much; she kept to herself. She was the perfect backseat driver in that you often forgot she was there. She paused by the racks and seemed to look at him reluctantly, as if he was invading her sanctuary. “Why do people do this?” she asked.

What the hell ..? “Do what?”

She made vague gestures that meant absolutely nothing, then gave up with a sigh and let her arms collapse to her sides. “Hurt each other. All we seem to do is find people that hurt each other.” She paused briefly. “Men. Men who hurt women.”

“Sometimes they hurt other men too. And kids. And sometimes pets.” Her facial expression grew increasingly stark, suggesting this was the wrong tack to take. “Look, I don’t know what to tell you. Except occasionally we run into a woman who’s done something awful. They just have a tendency not to be serial killers – that’s more of a man hobby.”

Her eyes flashed briefly with pent up aggression. “Why?” This is what bothered him about Julie: he always got the sense she was a time bomb, an accident waiting to happen. And who would blame her? Beaten to death by a husband she had grown to hate. She was one of those people you could describe as “She was always so quiet” when the news crews came around to ask you if you knew your neighbor was going to go off and shoot up a mall. She was the perfect picture of a person pre psychotic break.

“I don’t know. One almost killed me too, you know. It’s just … there’s a lot of sick people in this world. I don’t need to tell you that.”

Julie turned away in disgust, fussing pointlessly with a rack of dresses. “But why?”

“I don’t know. If I knew, maybe I could prevent it somehow. As it is, all I can do is clean up the mess that they are. And, you know, if given a choice, I wouldn’t even do that. I always wanted to be a slacker.”

She didn’t appreciate his attempt at humor (or was it honesty? Being a slacker sounded great) as she turned away even more and went off to find something else to do. “I just want it to stop,” she said so quietly he could barely hear her. “I don’t know why I’m still here.”

Before he could answer her – well, no, before he could think of an answer for her – a phone rang, drawing his attention away. As soon as he realized there was no obvious phone within the boutique, the dream tore around him, fractioning like a pane of glass, and he woke up blinking into his pillow. The phone kept ringing, and cursing at it didn’t make it stop.

Finally he crawled out of bed and found the phone, and made a gravelly noise that could have been interpreted as “Hello”. “Are you okay?” Varner asked.

“Fine. I’m just tired,” he muttered, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

“I bet.” He said it in such a way that he implied he wasn’t sure how he ever got up. Or maybe he was reading too much into it.

“Look, I only called to let you know that you’re off the hook for today; I don’t think I’m going to need you. We’re still running the partial print, and we’re getting stick from the real estate place in charge of the store’s lot.”

“Stick? Why?” Gryphon remembered he went to sleep damp, which might explain why the sheets were clinging to him like cellophane. It felt like they were trying to hold him down, and he could barely move.

“Supposedly the boss of Sunshine Realty is away on vacation, and the sycophant who’s filling in for him isn’t sure he can release the records of everyone who might have had access to the property without his blessing. Can you believe that? People have been killed and chopped up on the property, and this fuck’s worried his boss’ll be mad if he gives us the information.” Varner snorted derisively, and he heard a faint thunk, like he’d just slammed something down on his desk. He imagined it was a coffee mug. “I told him this guy could kill in the meantime, he could flee the state, and this moron tells me it’s all “hypothetical”, and his job isn’t. I’m runnin’ this guy’s record – he’s gotta have a parking ticket or something I can harass him about.”

“Death is an abstract thing when it happens to strangers.”

Varner paused for a moment. “I don’t know if that’s philosophical or monstrously depressing.”

“Probably both.”

Varner grunted. “Probably.”

There wasn’t much else to their conversation, although Gryphon offered to pay him a visit and scare the shit out of him. Jason thanked him and turned him down … for the moment. He said he’d get back to him.

Gryphon didn’t feel like sleeping anymore, so he peeled himself out of the blankets and went to take a hot bath. He sat in the tub until he could feel the warmth in his bones, and then he dried off and found some warm clothes to wear. Since his chorus remained blissfully silent – maybe they were tired too – he decided to go downstairs and try the computer.

He didn’t do it a lot for obvious reasons, but when he got to, it was a fun time waster. Thanks to his passengers he knew of a lot of porn sites, but there was no way he could visit them with a crowd looking over his shoulder and commenting. It was just too weird.

Spirit Guides did have an email address accessible to them all, but Gryphon never liked to check it. After all, now that they were starting to get well known, people were starting to email him, wanting him to make contact with their dead son or grandmother, not understanding that wasn’t how his abilities worked at all, and he was not some comforting con man who asked a handful of leading questions and then told them what they wanted to hear. He was rarely the harbinger of good news. How could an angel of death ever be good news?

Tad dramatic there, sport, Hugh said.

Perhaps. But if he wasn’t an angel of death, what was he?

Out of curiosity, he entered Sunshine Realty into a search engine, and finally narrowed down the categories to Oregon (he hadn’t expected so many Sunshine Realties). He checked out the website of two that were closest in the area to the store, and they were very basic, unimpressive things. There were small pictures and descriptions of homes and apartments and other properties available in the area, from run down trailers to million dollar condos. (The latter of which always baffled him. If you had a million bucks to drop on a home, why the fuck would you do it on a condo?)

Eventually he skipped over to the realtors page, and saw that the Sunshine people wore ugly mustard yellow jackets and similar empty smiles, making them look like Stepford real estate agents. You might by a home from them, but only out of fear that they’d lay an egg in your chest if you didn’t.

His eyes glided over the eerie, insincere smiles (although the vaguely sincere smiles were honestly creepier), and then something made him stop scrolling down the page. It was a thumbnail sized photo of an agent named Harold Cook, who had an almost perfectly capsule shaped head, highlighted by the fact that he was one of those bald guys who shaved their wispy strands off in the hopes that people would think they were trying to be cool, not trying to hide a lack of follicles. He had a long chin, pointed, which added to the capsule look, and his eyes were almost lost beneath beetled brows that suggested his hair, when it existed, was a sort of blondish-brown.

He looked so bland, so ordinary, he blended in well with the page. Gryphon wasn’t sure why he’d stopped here, and then he realized it was the eyes. He’d seen those eyes looking at him through a visor worn over his face to protect him from the blood splatter. This was him; this was the river killer.

The screen fuzzed and jumped like a t.v. with poor reception, and Gryphon pushed himself away from Clay’s desk, the wheeled chair carrying him across the room until he slammed into the far wall. The computer looked okay, but who knew for how long?

Call Varner, Mr. Aronofsky insisted. Let him bring him in.

“That isn’t what they want,” Gryphon told him, returning to his room to grab his coat and car keys, and put some dry shoes on. “Besides, I found him first.”

He was in the phone book, and why not? It wasn’t like serial killers would get special private numbers. They were psychopaths with some concept of normalcy – they didn’t like it, but they knew they had to pretend to be like everyone else, to be anonymous, to hide their fixations to get away with it. If they blatantly flaunted their preoccupations, they’d be caught quickly. To keep killing, they had to pretend they were so average you’d never notice them. How awful that must have been for them, to hide in the closet like boogeymen, and pretend to feel things like everyone else. They probably would have made fabulous actors if killing people didn’t give them such a hard on.

He almost called his number, but when he picked up the handset, he heard static crackle like tin foil, and knew his power was building up. It was mainly Ruby, of course, seething just below the surface, but no one was too thrilled with the idea of a serial killer. They and the pedophiles just didn’t have a huge fan club.

Gryphon drove out to the address listed with his phone number in the book, as it was only a few miles away. He lived in a leafy suburb known as Deer Point, in a two story pre-fab house painted a delicate blue-grey, with a neatly trimmed lawn and sparkling clean driveway. Children’s toys were scattered about the lawn, and Gryphon stood in the driveway before becoming aware of the voices of children and a woman inside the house, along with the sound of a television.

He didn’t need to go up and knock on the door to know Harold wasn’t here. Somehow he sensed his target, the man he wanted, wasn’t within his range. He didn’t know how he knew this, except death recognized death; his ghosts would let him know where there were others. And Harold probably didn’t know it, but he was leading a ghost parade.

Gryphon drove out to the Sunshine Realty office that employed Harold, but he wasn’t there either. He sat in his car, frustrated, wondering where this fuck could be, when Ruby said, He’s hunting. You know where he likes to hunt. Go meet him there.

Of course. In retrospect, it was totally obvious.

He drove back to the bad side of town, where the store was, and even though the parking lot was still cordoned off with crime scene tape, he idled in the lot for a moment, until Anna appeared in the passenger seat, blood still running down the center of her face, dripping off her chin. “What’s up, chico?”

“Show me where he picked you up.”

She shrugged, looking out the passenger window before pointing down the street. “Go that way.”

He did. He followed her instructions, driving deeper into the sad part of town, the place where nobody came unless they absolutely had to, or was a psychopath hunting for an easy kill. Just beyond the corner where he picked up Anna was a very seedy looking bar, small and dark, set squat in a building that used to be a hotel and was now … well, who the hell knew, the signs were contradictory and unilluminating. The windows were dirty, beer bottle brown, and a lower pane in the chocolate bar shaped window had been smashed and “replaced” with plastic wrap taped in a thick layer on the inside.

Gryphon felt drawn to it, and knew what was waiting for him inside. “I see somethin’ funny,” Anna told him as he got out of the car. He never saw her get in, and he never saw her get out either; she was simply there once he was outside the car.

“What?”

“It’s … I dunno. Like a dark line.”

“It’s him,” he said, although he wasn’t sure how he knew that. “You can almost always find your killer. In a strange way, you’re bonded.”

“Ick.”

That summed it up pretty well.

Smoking had been banned from all bars, and yet as soon as he walked in, he was greeted by a smoky room, a layer of grey smoke curling around the dim yellowed lights like flocks of moths. Country music played somewhere, and the wood was so dark Gryphon felt like he was walking into a void.

Harold was easy to spot. He sat in the darkest corner, an untouched glass of beer in front of him, studying the hookers who were attempting to ply their trade with the sad sacks at the bar. As soon as Gryphon approached his table, he saw all the river ghosts – save for the deeply confused Rita – standing behind Harold. Anna remained beside him, though, as if afraid to join the entourage.

He pulled out an empty chair and sat down, staring across the cigarette burned table at Harold. “Hello. Remember me?”

Harold stared at him blankly, as if he was a hallucination from eating bad clams. “Who the fuck are you?”

“The end. Are you aware that the police are right now trying to get a list of people who have access to the store property? You must be on the list, Harry.”

He had a dead eyed stare, like a shark. “My name isn’t Harry.”

“It is whatever I say it is,” he told him. “I’m the last living person you’re ever going to talk to.”

He scowled at him, brow furrowing as his thick eyebrows dipped down towards his eyes. He was probably in his forties, a bit older than your usual serial killers. “You don’t wanna fuck with me, kid.”

“Oh, I know, you’re the big bad river killer. But I’m not a hooker or a junkie or a runaway, so I kinda fall outside the bounds of your usual victims.”

Now Harold had stopped looking through him and just glared at him hatefully. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. But you better get up and leave me the fuck alone, or you will end up dead.”

Gryphon smirked, as Anna said, “He really is a dick, isn’t he?”

“You can’t kill me, Harry. You can’t even touch me. You have no control here.” To prove his point, Ruby went to work. Harold’s hand raised of its own volition, and he looked at it, startled, before he slapped himself hard across the face, the noise of flesh striking flesh filling the bar. He did it so hard he almost knocked himself off his chair.

“What the fuck -” he began, but then he slapped himself again, his wedding ring catching on his bottom lip and ripping it open. The beer in his glass was sloshing, and the lights overhead were flickering.

“You really should stop hitting yourself. You’re causing a scene.” Anna and the other ghosts were laughing themselves sick over this. But people were starting to look over at the crazy man hitting himself with such violence.

Harold now stared at him in open disbelief, all attempts at his tough guy façade – which was probably real, a hint of the true monster peeking through his thin veneer of normalcy -disappeared in the face of his complete shock. “What the fuck are you doing to me?” he demanded, although his voice had lowered to a hiss.

“Introducing you to victimhood. Not fun, is it?” Ruby slid his beer glass across the table, and let it crash to the floor, splattering more cheap beer on a surface that was pretty much warped from the constant spills.

He was trying to move his hands, his body, get up from the table, but Ruby held him where he was. Beads of sweat popped on his forehead, and veins started to bulge at his temples. He was fighting it, but it didn’t matter. Hugh had already proven that the dead could pretty much be as strong as they wanted to be, and against the indignant hatred of Ruby, he wouldn’t have had a chance even if he was strapped to a Sidewinder missile in the midst of launching.

The bartender came over. Here, he had to double as the bouncer, a thankless job, and he was a large dark skinned man with the build of a high school linebacker who was about four years past his glory days. His head was shaved bald too, but it looked better on him, and when he crossed his arms over his broad chest, his biceps bulged like rising dough. “What’s goin’ on here?” he asked. He had the faintest hint of a Southern accent.

“This … asshole’s … crazy,” Harold said, spitting out each word through clenched teeth, like he could barely speak the language. His throat muscles were starting to cord; it looked painful.

Gryphon looked up at the bartender and shrugged, twirling his finger beside his head in the universal gesture for “bugfuck”. “Harry didn’t take his medication today. I’m supposed to bring him home.”

“Bull … shit,” Harold hissed.

The bartender’s almond eyes darted over to Harold, appraised him, and instantly dismissed him, looking back at Gryphon with the smallest wince of sympathy. “You need help getting him outta here?”

“No,” Harold gasped. He was ignored, like most of the genuinely mentally ill were.

“No, I got it. He’s usually a good boy for me.” Gryphon looked across the table at the straining, failing, battling Harold, and said, with truly irritating condescension, “Aren’t you, Harry?”

“Fuck you!” Harold snapped, a single pearl of blood tinged spit flying from his lip to the center of the table.

The bartender dropped a big, meaty hand on Harold’s shoulder, and said, “Let’s get you home, buddy.”

He was trying to be kind, and Gryphon was honestly touched to find someone who wasn’t completely burned out by people in such a place. He supposed he should have left him a big tip, but he hadn’t brought any cash with him; he’d have to come back and give him some another time.

The bartender hauled Harold to his feet, and he seemed stiff, like his joints had frozen. He probably thought that Harold really was suffering some side effect from forgotten medication, that he was a deeply fucked up individual, when really he was just trying to escape from an invisible straight jacket. When Gryphon moved beside Harold and grabbed his arm, Harold seemed to shiver, an attempt to pull his arm away from him that had no hope of working. But he was trapped and he knew it. Harold was trying to send a request for help with his eyes, but it honestly just made him look crazier, and the way the bartender gave Gryphon a pat on the back, he knew that no one saw anything but a crazy man being helped out of a bar before he started hurting himself even worse. It was probably driving Harold apeshit.

Good.

Gryphon “helped” Harold outside, really just hauling him out, while Harold’s struggle to escape remained mainly internal. As soon as they were outside in the cold, damp air, which smelled of mildew and exhaust, Gryphon sighed, and said, “You ready to have some fun, Harry?”

“What the fuck are you?” Harold demanded, his voice still strained.

Gryphon eyed him coldly, and gave him a smile that felt like a snarl, and probably looked like it too. “I already told you – the last living person you’ll ever talk to. So tell me, Harry, how did you think you were gonna die?”

He glared at him sidelong, his eyes white and wild. “You don’t scare me.”

O’Leary continued to do so, although he was struggling to get a hold of himself. He sobbed in a strangled sort of way, like he was trying to physically hold back the tears and failing miserably. He still was refusing to look at him.

Maybe a minute passed, the plopping sound of the rain in puddles an oddly appropriate counterpoint to his strange, squished sobs. “I didn’t mean … I panicked …”

“I was black, so you fucking shot me!” Jeff snapped, and Gryphon was pretty sure he saw the puddles around them waver in response. He was only a ghost, but that didn’t mean his anger lacked power.

“… shots were being fired, Jones went down … I shot the first person I saw …”

“First black person you saw,” Jeff insisted.

“ … I fucked up, okay? I know I did. I’m not proud of it.”

“Jeff seems to think there’s more to it,” Gryphon prompted.

“Fucking yeah there’s more to it,” Jeff said.

O’Leary looked up at him, tears streaking his broad cheeks, his entire face ruddy in a way that seemed unhealthy, although Hugh volunteered it was an “Irish thing”. (Of course Gryphon really didn’t want to know why he thought that or how he knew that – he knew enough about Hugh to fear information of this sort.) “What? I made a stupid fucking mistake. What more could there be?”

“He seems to think there’s a racial element.”

He looked genuinely puzzled. “What?”

Tell him you know he’s a fucking racist cracker asshole, Taneesha said.

You don’t know that, Mr. Aronofsky said. We have no idea what happened that night.

My gut instinct is to go with the dead guy, Taneesha replied.

O’Leary shook his head, but it seemed more mournful than anything. “I’d have shot the first thing I saw no matter what it was. Black, white, Mexican … house cat, probably. It was so fucking stupid … I just panicked. I’m a cop; we don’t panic.”

He’s apparently never been at a four alarm blaze when a cop thinks his partner’s still inside, Hugh said.

“Everybody panics at some time,” Gryphon said comfortingly, although he wasn’t sure that was true or not. Hugh and Ruby both seemed immune to panic; Ray would claim he was, but Gryphon knew that was simply self-delusion. Hugh had spent his life semi-detached from humanity and himself; panic was just too strong an emotion for him to muster up. Ruby had no time for panic, as that was a softer emotion for weaker people. “But you made things worse. You lied about it.”

He sighed like he’d just been hit in the stomach. “My job is my life. What else did I have?”

“So it was worth my life, is that it?” Jeff replied.

“It was wrong and you know it. Not just the lying, but letting his death be blamed on someone else. Sure, they were bad guys, but they didn’t kill him.”

O’Leary sniffed and wiped his eyes and nose with the back of his arm. “They killed others.”

“Maybe, but not him. Just like this was a witch hunt without a witch. There’s a serial killer out there right now preying on women, and I’m probably the only one who can stop him, so why don’t you admit your guilt and stop fucking bothering me?”

O’Leary looked at him in surprise, red and puffy eyes looking half shut. “What d’ya mean admit my guilt?”

“Apologize to Jeff. He’s right here.”

He looked around as if he actually expected to see him. Jeff waved his hand, and said, “Right here, fucko.” Not that that was any help to O’Leary.

“Why is he here?”

Gryphon sighed wearily. “Haven’t we been over this? He’s following you around. Ghosts sometimes do that.”

“You fucking killed me,” Jeff snarled.

“He’s really not letting this “you killed me” thing go,” Gryphon told O’Leary, since he couldn’t hear him.

O’Leary closed his eyes, and seemed to mentally count to ten. Gryphon just shivered, and wondered if he should wring his clothes out before tossing them in the dryer. At least he probably wasn’t dehydrated anymore. “Jeff, I’m sorry,” O’Leary said, almost hissing the words through his teeth. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone. I didn’t become a cop to hurt people.” He wiped the rain off his face, or maybe it was tears; it was hard to say now. “If I could do that night over again, I would. I’ve lived with it all these years, and I’m tired of it. I wish I could take it back.”

Jeff was quiet for several seconds. “Can I kill him?”

“Would it change anything?” Gryphon asked.

O’Leary gave him a funny look, thinking he was talking to him. “Huh?”

He waved a hand dismissively. “Talking to Jeff.”

Jeff sighed and crossed his arms over his chest. “Guess not. Might make me feel better, though.”

Gryphon shrugged. “It might. But we’d have to do it, and I’m too tired right now.”

He huffed a noise of disappointment, and grumbled, “I’ll hafta think about it.”

“Good, he’s thinking about it. Let’s go.”

Gryphon didn’t wait for O’Leary’s reply, he simply sloshed over to the SUV, and walked around to the passenger side. He was inside the behemoth when O’Leary said something, and he had to scramble over to the vehicle to talk to him. He opened the driver’s side door and looked up at him, face dripping like it was melting. “What the fuck d’ya mean he’s thinking about it? Thinking about what?”

“You really don’t want to know. Just consider it good news.” He pulled a wet hank of hair up from his scalp and wrung it out, sending water dribbling down to O’Leary’s leather seats. “Can we go now?”

Gryphon knew that getting water all over his upholstery would upset him and make him move, and it did. He got in the SUV, reluctant macho sorrow turned to comfortable annoyance, and maybe he was worried just a little bit about what he refused to say.

The silence between them was tense and uncomfortable, and the SUV ran a bit rough, but it was probably lucky to run at all. When he dropped him off at Clay’s house, he said, “You know, you’re really freaky.”

Gryphon could only shrug. Thanks for the news flash, asshat, Ruby replied.

He went up to his room to dry off and get some dry clothes, and he asked Clay if he’d do a Google search for him. There were times when he could actually use a computer, and there were times when he could erase the hard drive just by being in close proximity. He felt he was more likely in the latter than the former, so he let Clay do the work for him. He told him one of the river ghosts he’d encountered had wanted him to give a message to someone, and that’s why he had to find him.

Once Clay tracked down the info he wanted, he offered to drive him, but Gryphon turned him down and pulled the tarp off his car, where it sat at the side of the driveway. He may have moved into a new home, but it was hard to let the old one go.

He drove out to Axel Beech’s place, blasting the heater to keep the chill away.

Axel lived in a trailer on a good sized piece of land, but the lawn didn’t exist; the ground all around was mostly mud, with small tufts of yellow grass here and there among the mud pits. There were trees, but so far away they could have been in another county – they certainly didn’t belong to his property. If a caption appeared in the bottom of his vision reading “After the apocalypse”, he wouldn’t have been surprised.

He slogged up the three little steps that made up the front porch, noting the silver glimmer of an old pony keg under the gap between the trailer and the ground, and as he knocked on the flimsy door, he marveled at how he alone could have ripped this thing off the hinges. Usually he needed his people and their awesome dead people power to help him, since he was as muscular as a ninety eight year old retired spinster with osteoporosis, but this door made him feel like the Hulk. He could rip it off and pound his chest with his fists, bellowing in triumph.

After a moment, the door rattled open, and he was face to face with a man in his early thirties, with a wispy thin mustache and thinning brown hair the color of faux wood paneling, wearing an old Lynyrd Skynyrd t-shirt and tighty whiteys. He was neither thin nor fat, but he had the soft build of someone who drank more than was medically wise, and offset any physical gains manual labor normally would have given him. (Was his underwear stained? Oh god, he wasn’t going to look …) The guy looked at him blearily, like he just got up, his eyes glazed and bloodshot in such a way that he was obviously hung over. “Who the fuck’re you?” he slurred.

“Karma.”

He just eyed him like he was trying to focus. “Weird name for a dude.”

Wow, Hugh said. He’s a rocket scientist.

Maybe he was a bit sharper when he wasn’t hung over, but he wouldn’t have bet money on it. “I’m here to talk to you about Clifford Wax.”

It seemed to take a moment for the name to sink in, penetrate the fog of the lingering alcoholic haze, and then he didn’t respond, just tried to close the door on him. This one was easy to stop and shove back open – he didn’t even need to ask Hugh for help.

Axel stumbled back into his kitchenette – slash – living room as Gryphon came in the door, slamming it behind him. Which didn’t have the scary impact he’d hoped since it was like slamming a pet door shut, but he never claimed to be Mr. Butch ‘99. “You really should consider yourself lucky, Axel. That I’m not a cop; that you have received a hung jury.”

His thick dark eyebrows, messed up from sleeping on his face, drew down in obvious confusion. It seemed there was a four second delay between what was said to him and when he processed it. “I don’t know who the fuck you’re talking about. Get out of my house. I’ll call the cops.”

“Will you? Go ahead. I can’t wait to tell them how you killed Cliff and left his body at the bottom of the well he hired you to fill in. What was Sean’s last name? Cliff didn’t know.”

Axel stared at him like he could make him go away if he just stopped blinking. “What’re you, one of his butt buddies?”

“Butt buddies? Oh yes, all child molesters are gay in your world, huh? Trust me, they’re not – I’ve encountered loads of them, most even alive. Cliff was a damaged human being who liked little girls, which should have been clear on the website. Seriously, you kill a guy for being a pervert, and you don’t know what his perversion is? That’s just sloppy.”

Axel found his anger and launched towards him, fist raised to strike, but he’d barely covered half of the meager distance between them when someone – Ruby or Hugh; he didn’t know, didn’t much care either – threw him back hard against the kitchen counter, making the dirty dishes in the sink behind him clatter like skeleton teeth on stainless steel. The empties lined up on the other side of the counter started rattling like they were having a small earthquake, and the beer and whiskey bottles on his coffee table soon joined in as the energy started building in such an enclosed space. But it was hard to hear over the sound of raindrops reverberating through the tin can trailer.

Axel looked at him through wounded eyes, not comprehending what was happening here. “How’d you do that?”

“Do what? I did nothing. I’m just standing here.” The best part? That wasn’t even a lie.

He glanced at the rattling bottles, still not getting any of this. “Who the fuck are you?”

“I’m the speaker for the dead, and I’ve got to say, you’ve put them in a bad position. They don’t like murderers as a rule, but it was better than likely they would have killed Cliff themselves, so there’s some debate on whether you should die or not. That’s the hung jury I was referring to earlier.”

Axel didn’t look impressed. “You’re fucking nuts.”

“What you have to understand is that you can never do this again. You got lucky, Axel – the man you killed was honestly guilty of the crimes he’d been accused of. But that’s not always the case. Justice is blind, deaf, dumb, and as far as I can tell, limbless. Innocent people get sent away, and guilty people walk clean. It happens more than anyone actually knows. The only reason I know is because I encounter the victims, I share their lives, and I don’t have an evidence chain to follow or require a lawyer to save my ass. Did you know a third of murders are never solved? I think that’s the general number – it varies among racial and economic divides, as well as from state to state. That’s a no brainer, isn’t it? Either way, it’s more than most people know outside a cop shop. Forensic evidence is great, but it is not the miracle worker television would have you believe. Sometimes the only people who know who killed them is the victim, but not everybody can hear them. Or anybody.”

I don’t know who killed me, Taneesha said. Since she was the victim of what seemed to be a drive by shooting gone awry, she didn’t even see who shot her, and as far as he could tell from what he could dig up online, her case remained unsolved. It was gang territory, and witnesses willing to risk their lives and come forward were thin on the ground. Random murders, where there was no connection between the victim and the killer, were the hardest cases to solve.

Axel looked like he still wasn’t processing any of this. He grabbed one of the rattling bottles and made to either throw it or hit him with it, but it exploded in his hand, sending some fragments of alcohol tainted glass straight into his face. He yelped in pain and grabbed his face, dropping to his knees on the thin strip of peeling, yellowed linoleum that made up the kitchen floor.

“Attack me with glass?” Gryphon asked, shaking his head in disbelief. “Wow, that was so idiotic I’m just stunned. Why not try and use a taser on me? Now that’d be funny.”

Gryphon saw a bit of blood oozing out under his hands, down his cheek, but they must have been superficial cuts, because head and face wounds usually bled like a motherfucker even when they didn’t hit anything major. “What the fuck d’ya want from me?” Axel cried, anguished, but it seemed more from confusion than genuine pain. The yeasty smell of beer mixed with the scent of fresh blood in a way that was truly nauseating, although it was slightly better than the old beer and sweat sock smell that seemed to permeate the trailer. You couldn’t tell he was an alcoholic bachelor with sporadic hygiene, could you?

“Your word that you will never, ever kill anyone again. If you do, I will find out, and you won’t get off as lightly as you are now. In fact, if you ever see me again, you’re a dead man. One way or another.” He crouched down to be at his eye level, but since Axel wasn’t looking at him, it was a spectacularly wasted gesture. “In fact, one of my passengers brought up a good point on the way over. You know people who bash gays? They’re usually acting out in fear of themselves; they’re afraid there’s something gay in them and they just can’t stand it, but rather than take the violence out on themselves, they take it out on a complete stranger. It’s basic psychology. So what does that make a person who gets so riled up he kills a child molester he’s never seen before? A man who’s obviously single, has no children, lives far from the victim, and yet checks sex offender websites. Maybe runs one? A man obsessed with sex offenders? What does that say?” Axel started crying pathetically, still not looking at him, bringing his knees up to his chest and curling into a ball against the base of the counter. “There’s a couple different choices here really, Axel. You could be a former abuse victim, once upon a time, or you could know one. Or maybe there’s something in you that you recognized in Cliff or his crimes, and you couldn’t stand it.”

He hit close to the bone. Axel shouted, pained and panicked, “Get out of my fucking house!”

Gryphon grabbed him by the chin and forced him to look at him, through tears and snot and blood. Brown glass glistened in cuts above his eyebrow, underneath his eyelid, half way between his eye socket and ear. “Some friendly advice: get therapy. Don’t make me come back here and kill you too.”

He hiccupped a sob, and Gryphon knew he wanted to bluster, take up some macho posturing to prove he wasn’t scared of him, but he was and he couldn’t hide it. All he did was sniff and whimper and nod very faintly.

Gryphon let him go, and stood, someone opening the door for him. (Yeah, it did smell pretty ripe in here, and if you had a smell that could bother the dead, well then brother, you stank.) He almost expected Axel to get up and try and attack him while his back was turned, but he was too scared now to bother. It wasn’t the fact that he could attack him without moving; what scared him was he got under his skin somehow. He almost felt sorry for the pathetic sack of shit.

Maybe we should have killed him, Ruby said, once he got in the car.

Gryphon looked back to see Wax just standing there between the raindrops, like he was waiting for a bus. It made him briefly wonder if a bus of the dead would be any worse than a standard transit bus during rush hour. Probably not. It might actually be more peaceful and smell better. “He’s dead, Cal.”

O’Leary glared at him, like he thought he was just saying that to piss him off. “What? No he isn’t.”

“I assure you, he is.” Gryphon didn’t stick around to argue with him – he simply got out of the big, giant vehicle, vertigo briefly hitting him in his climb down to the ground, and walked over to the ghostly Wax, rain instantly drenching him like he’d just stepped under a cold shower. “What happened to you, Clifford?”

The ghost finally moved, as if seeing him for the first time. That was probably true. “Who are you?”

“Gryphon. I seem to speak for you people.”

“You people?”

“The dead.”

He blinked his eyes owlishly, as if the term “dead” was still new to him. He still seemed to exist between the raindrops in spite of his paunch. “It wasn’t fair.”

“It never is.”

“He was … I haven’t done anything wrong. Lately.” He gestured in a vague way, like he was scrabbling for a fingerhold on an invisible rock face. “I’ve been alone. I haven’t -”

“Excuses are for the living, Cliff,” Gryphon sighed irritably. He knew simply from being this close to him that he wasn’t nearly a good man; he’d led a pretty selfish and mean life. Of course he did, if he liked molesting little girls. Gryphon just wanted to get this over with so he could move on to something more productive. “What happened?”

Wax gave him a wounded look, but Gryphon ignored it in an almost hostile way, enough so Wax could see it through the prism of his own narcissism. “I hired this guy to come in and fill this old well on the property. It dried up a long time ago; it’s just a big hole going twenty feet down. I found a raccoon in it once. It was just a safety hazard, and I knew if some dumb shit trespassed and fell into it I could be sued. So I hired this guy to fill it in.”

“And?”

“And … I guess he recognized me? Said he saw me on a web site. Did you know some fuckhead out there has a web site full of so called sex offenders? I mean, Jesus Christ, I’m not a sex offender. These idiots act like younger girls can’t be sexual, like they don’t -”

“Shut the fuck up and tell me what happened to you,” Gryphon snapped, feeling the pressure of Ruby inside his head. She wanted to kill him. She didn’t know if she could actually kill a fellow ghost, but she desperately wanted to try.

Wax gave him that wounded look again, but now it had a hard edge. Gryphon was pretty sure he didn’t feel things like “normal” people – he probably didn’t feel at all. He was one of those emotionally empty people that you seemed to see around more and more these days. He had no idea why, but Gryphon knew it was true. Emotional death was growing frighteningly common. “Fine. That fucking asshole came over one day with a buddy to help him with the backhoe, and while he was in my kitchen, getting payment for the job from me, the fucker hit me over the head with something. It didn’t knock me out, just stunned me. Then they used plastic ties to bind my hands, and shoved a dirty bandana in my mouth to keep me from screaming. Then they dragged me out, dropped me in the well … and filled it in.”

“Buried you alive.” That was pretty horrible, he shuddered at the thought, but Ruby seemed to think it was only what he deserved.

“Do you know what it’s like to breathe in dirt?”

“Actually, yes.” Thanks to all his passengers and the various ghosts he encountered over the years, he knew second hand – although it felt like first hand – of all the grotesque ways to die. “How long have you been dead?”

He stared at him like he was the biggest idiot he had ever encountered. “How the fuck am I supposed to know?”

Good point. Gryphon decided randomly on the figure of three weeks, although he had no idea why. He decided that he should get to what he was here for. “Do you know what happened to Juliet Saltzman?”

He snorted in disbelief and shook his head. “That bitch again. God, she was too fucking old for me.”

“I notice that wasn’t an answer.”

“I don’t know where the fuck she is. But I think I’ve seen her on Lonely Girls, under the alias Caramel. She just ditched, y’know? Got outta this fuckin’ town. She was smart.”

“Lonely Girls?”

It’s a website, Sylvio said.

Is there something you’d like to share with us? Hugh wondered.

Fuck off, Sylvio said defensively. My roommate was the king of porn and wannabe porn. I don’t know how he paid for it all.

Gryphon distantly heard a sharp whistle behind him, surely O’Leary in the other world, but it wasn’t quite enough to break the connection. “Nobody knows I’m dead?” Wax asked, looking vaguely distraught. “Nobody even noticed that I was missing?”

“Apparently not. Not even the cop who wants you behind bars worse than anything.”

“That son of a bitch. Tell him he can go fuck hims-”

O’Leary shook his shoulder, and Gryphon jolted as the connection snapped, and he shrugged him off reflexively, taking a couple of steps away into the weed choked lawn, which was now starting to flood due to the intensity of the rain. The ground was completely saturated and could hold no more water. “Would you stop doing that?” Gryphon snapped at him, trying to get his reeling head under control. Sometimes reality shifting was harder than at other times.

“What? You’ve been standing in the rain for five fucking minutes!”

The full sense of his body came back to him, soaked to the bone and cold, and he shuddered convulsively as the wind briefly gusted, the chill cutting into him like a razor blade. He wrapped his arms around himself to try and keep warm, but all he did was squish water out of his sleeves. “Wax was killed by two men, a handyman he hired, Axel Beech, and a friend of his he only introduced as Sean. They dumped him in the old well he hired them to fill in, and only then did they fill it in. He’s buried in the back acre of the property. I can find his body if you want to call it in.”

O’Leary studied him, raindrops suspended in his eyelashes, and it seemed to take him a full minute to process the information. “You’re not shitting me? He’s dead? Why the fuck these guys kill him?”

“They saw him on a website of registered sex offenders. I guess they decided to play vigilante.”

O’Leary shrugged. “Can’t blame ‘em, I guess. A pervert piece of shit like Wax. Did you ask him what he did with Juliet’s body?”

“He had nothing to do with her disappearance.”

“Bullshit.”

“He couldn’t lie to me. I’d know if he was, and I’d know if he had the death surrounding him. He didn’t. He said he thought he saw her recently on a website called Lonely Girls, using the alias Caramel.”

The ex-cop scoffed. “So now he’s maligning her name? That sick fucker.”

“He had nothing to do with her.”

O’Leary turned and started slogging back towards his SUV. “Now that he’s dead, I guess we can tear this place up looking for corpses. Ain’t like he can complain.”

Gryphon felt soppy and miserable. He had about an inch of water in his boots and his teeth were starting to chatter; his skin felt clammy and his chest was starting to ache, while his breathing suddenly felt strained. He had a sudden panicky flash to what it must have been like to drown, which was his most feared way to die: to drown. He’d always been terrified of drowning – he never learned how to swim because that much water just terrified him. He had no idea why then or now that that had to be his worse fear, and now it seemed extra funny since he’d died a thousand ways, many probably more horrible than drowning, and yet the fear remained, a rock solid reminder of his own sense of self. He was always a quiet geek, afraid of his own shadow, and now he dealt in nothing but death. Was that karma, or just the universe’s idea of a big fat joke?

O’Leary opened the driver’s side door, and Gryphon said, “Hugh, help me.”

The door ripped itself out of O’Leary’s hand and slammed shut, so hard that the monster vehicle rocked on its shocks and he swore he heard the driver’s side window crack. O’Leary turned back to him, bug eyed, as the SUV’s windows rippled like the water running down them. “What the fuck ..? Did you do that?”

“Who else could?” Gryphon wondered. The energy crackling around him made him feel a bit warmer. “I will not be dismissed. Helping you was my mistake, but I will not be ignored the moment I give you news you don’t want. I’m in charge here, not you. Do you understand me?”

O’Leary stared at him, goggle eyed, and his right hand was clenching and unclenching beside his hip. “Do you still carry a piece?” Gryphon asked. “I wouldn’t go for it. You’ll just make them mad.”

That made him freeze, stop his unconscious grab for a weapon. “Who?”

“My passengers. Do we have to go over this again? I’m not alone; I’m never alone. And you will never get all of us.”

Dial this back, Mr. Aronofsky warned. He’s not our enemy.

Sure he is, Ruby said casually.

Scaring cops is so much fucking fun, Hugh said, sounding almost giddy.

The SUV was now making an odd creaking noise, loud enough that even O’Leary broke his paralysis long enough to look back. “What the fuck are you doing to my car?”

“It’s not a car, it’s a monstrosity,” he said, although he muttered under his breath, “Enough, Hugh, I’m sure he’s got the point.”

Just let me see if I can lift it.

Didn’t you hear him? Mr. Aronofsky barked. He so rarely raised his voice it was still startling to all of them. Stop it now.

Jeeze, all right. No need to get so pissy.

The car settled and stopped making that noise, but there was another sound soon after, like ice cracking during a spring thaw, and Gryphon saw little furrows in the glass on the passenger side. One good push and it would probably shatter all over the seat. If that was the worst the SUV got out of this, it was very lucky. “Jesus fuck,” O’Leary sighed, running a hand through his wet hair, knocking his own hood back. He probably didn’t give a shit at the moment.

“You knew I was a freak when you heard about what happened in the interrogation room,” Gryphon said. “You can’t pretend to be shocked now.”

“Why do you keep hurting my fucking cars? What did they ever do to you?”

“They have electronics and glass. Both of them are rather fragile around me.”

He scoffed, putting his hood back up, but otherwise looking everywhere but at him. “You? Don’t you mean us?”

“Do you really want to start this, Cal?”

“Since when did I give you permission to call me Cal?”

“The moment you called me Gryph.”

He grunted, annoyed, and turned back to the SUV. “Can I check and see if this still runs or not?”

“Be my guest.”

As soon as he opened the door and started checking to see if anything worked, Gryphon was aware of Jeff McCandless standing beside him. “Aren’t you going to ask him?” he wondered. It was slightly bitter, but mostly weary.

He kind of didn’t want to, mainly because he could imagine the fallout, but he supposed now was the time. O’Leary was probably as scared of him as he was ever going to get. Gryphon waited until he pulled himself out of the cockpit, frowning. “I smell burned insulation in there.”

“You’re lucky Hugh didn’t pick it up and throw it.” He paused briefly, but only long enough for him to realize he was changing the subject. “Are you going to tell me the truth about Jeff McCandless now?”

O’Leary turned back suddenly, like he’d just jabbed him in the ass with a taser, and he paled so dramatically he was afraid he might barf. “Wh – why do you bring that up?”

“I know what you did, Cal, I think it would be best if you said it, for your conscience if nothing else.”

He started shaking his head, but after a moment looked at the weedy, wet lawn, the water starting to puddle and pool around their feet. The way the grass was weighed down and swirled with the water, it almost looked like they were standing in a shallow pond. “It wasn’t … there’s no need to -”

“Jeff seems to think there is a need. He won’t stop haunting you until you tell the truth.”

O’Leary’s eyes had an odd paleness to them, like he was looking into the future at his own hideous demise. He was still shaking his head, but faintly; you could basically only see it in the minor wiggle of his nascent jowls. “I can’t. It’s not …”

“You have to, or we don’t leave.”

He still didn’t want to look at him. He looked around him, at the slowly collapsing house which seemed to radiate the emptiness of death, and O’Leary decided looking down at the lawn pond they were standing in was the best option. Gryphon found himself looking at his bright yellow hood, where the raindrops beaded and ran down its shiny surface like it was coated with wax.

“I – I was a replacement, last minute, for another officer who was hurt in a car accident. I didn’t know. I didn’t -” his voice choked on a syllable, and only then did Gryphon realize he was actually struggling not to cry. “It wasn’t supposed to happen like that. It should have been better contained.”

Jeff grunted. “This is pathetic.”

“I’ve heard enough excuses today,” Gryphon said sharply. “Get to the point, Cal.”

“Yes,” Gryphon replied, not even bothering to be defensive. Either way they thought he was nuts: either he was talking to himself or talking to a ghost, or thinking he was talking to a ghost while talking to himself. There was no way to win.

She gave him a funny look, but eventually turned away and got on the radio, which she originally intended to do, ignoring him completely. He liked it that way.

He slept again, until Varner shook him awake. “Gryph, you wanna go home?”

“That’d be nice,” he admitted, still not fully awake yet. He got out of the car, and the cold, damp night air woke him up a little, at least enough to make him stop yawning. But Varner’s car was more comfortable than the squad car, which was a problem.

Still, on the way back, Varner told him that they found lots of evidence that they were sure would help identify victims and just maybe the killer. They were looking into who might have a key to the padlock on the back door, but since making a “dupe” (duplicate key) wasn’t that difficult, they didn’t think that would get anywhere. He asked if they found a finger, and told him it belonged to Anna Alvarez. Varner gave him a new species of funny look, and gave it to him for a long time, but eventually looked away and went back to chattering hyperactively. Had he been gulping coffee? He must have been. They probably didn’t allow Red Bull at crime scenes.

The lights were off in the house, save for the solar lights lining the drive and the porch light, so he tried to quietly sneak in and didn’t know how successful he was. But he didn’t hear anything as he got undressed and collapsed into bed, exhausted from speaking to the dead for too long. Who knew that would take it out of you?

Inevitably he found himself back inside the store, lit only be a Coleman lantern, as the killer butchered someone, cutting them up into component parts. But as Gryphon stood there, watching him perform his grisly task, he suddenly stopped, his shoulders tensing. He turned his head slowly, looking over his shoulder, his face hidden behind a mask that kept the blood off of him. Gryphon could see nothing of him but his blue eyes, regarding him like some kind of ghost, which was ironically appropriate.

This must have been a dream – there’s no way this could have been happening. And yet, he got the curious sensation of being in a room with another person. He wasn’t alone, and it wasn’t just his passengers keeping him company. This was weird, and it made his skin crawl a bit … but on the other hand, he got a sense that the man looking at him was just as freaked out, maybe even a little more.

“You better hope the cops find you first,” he said, hoping that he was somehow sharing space with the man. Although there was no way he could be. (Right?) The man just stared at him, his eyes cloudy behind the mask, but Gryphon sensed the turn of his anxiety, the clenching of his stomach. Somebody was talking to him; somebody was threatening him. A ghost.

He was being threatened by a ghost.

Gryphon was woken up by the pervasive smell of strong coffee and a rhythmic pounding over his head and against the glass. It wasn’t raining; it was pissing down with a drunkard’s intensity. It was a true Oregon rain, something violent and nasty and undoubtedly cold. The light was grey, like it was being filtered through dirty cotton, and it struck him as a tremendous day to sleep in.

Get up you lazy ass, Taneesha cracked.

Okay, so, maybe not.

He eventually stumbled downstairs to find Clay sitting at the rustic kitchen table, holding a coffee mug with autumn leaves stenciled on the side, staring off into space. Gryphon checked the clock on the microwave, and just as he thought, it was pretty late. Clay should have been at work at his day job by now.

“Something wrong?” he wondered, grabbing a cup off the mug tree beside the sink and gravitating towards the coffee maker.

It took him a moment to respond, his tired eyes sliding towards him. “Oh, yeah. My back was acting up again this morning, so I decided to take the day off.” Clay had hurt his back installing an air conditioning duct a week or so ago. Just a pulled muscle, but those hurt, especially when you did a lot of bending and lifting. His doctor had given him heavy duty painkillers, but he didn’t like to take them – which baffled Gryphon, as he’d happily take them now, and he didn’t have a bad back.

“Oh. If there’s anything I can do to help -”

Clay snickered, which made Gryphon give him a funny look. “What’s so funny?” He found the sugar and started dumping teaspoons full of it into the strong black coffee Clay usually made.

You ever heard of diabetes? Mr. Aronofsky said. You’re not indestructible.

Actually we don’t know that, Hugh said. He could be.

Don’t encourage him, Mr. Aronofsky scolded.

“You’ve done enough for us, Gryph,” Clay said, after taking a sip of his coffee. From the way he winced and set it down, it was still too hot to drink.

That gave him a suddenly bad feeling. “Did I get you guys in trouble?”

Now his snicker from before became a chortle, and he wasn’t sure how to take that, so instead of sitting at the kitchen table he leaned against the counter, out of hitting distance. “Far from it. We heard from Mrs. Bledsoe, the woman who hired us to exorcize Phillip Chapman from the house in Salem. She’s giving us a five hundred dollar bonus. She said you could feel the difference just walking in the house. There was no sense you were being watched, no slamming doors, no inexplicable cold breezes. She seemed stunned, like she expected us to be frauds.”

“They all treat us that way.”

“I know. But I think they must know they hafta stop now.” He shoved his mug across the tabletop with his fingertips, and then shoved it back towards him, the liquid equivalent of playing with his food. “We gotta call this morning from a guy down in Los Angeles. He offered to pay us to fly down there. There’s a mansion down there where a family was killed, and supposedly it’s a hot spot of ghost activity. And we heard from someone who works for the Fortean Times. They want to interview all of us.”

“The Fortean Times?” That sounded vaguely familiar, but not in an useful way.

“It’s a British magazine that deals with strange phenomena, but it’s not a tabloid rag. It’s actually very respected, a big deal.” His eyes darted towards him, almost bashfully. “Although the guy said he wanted to talk to us, I know he really wants to talk to you.”

“I’m horrible in interviews,” Gryphon said, shaking his head. “They want to talk about me, and I’m not about to expose what’s left of my family to this … stuff.”

You mean admit to them what you’re actually doing, Mr. Aronofsky said.

“And I can’t go into great deal about what I do. I mean, I don’t control this, I don’t understand this, I’m just a poltergeist “agent” whose best friends are all dead people.”

I ain’t your friend, Taneesha snapped.

Clay studied him for a moment, his expression unreadable, and Gryphon just knew he was going to ask him a question he had no desire to answer. Finally he did. “Why don’t you ever tell the complete story of how you became an agent? You start and then you stop.”

“Because I have to.”

“Why?”

“’Cause if I told anyone everything that happened that night, they might be legally liable, an accessory after the fact.”

Clay’s eyebrows lifted slight, and Gryphon grimaced at him. “C’mon, what do you think my passengers really want? To do things they never got a chance to do, or live one more day? They’re poltergeists, Clay – they’re dead as hell and they’re not gonna take it anymore.”

You stole that from Buffy, Taneesha accused.

Yeah, but it’s still amazingly apt, Hugh said.

Clay must have gotten his meaning, as his eyes widened slightly and he paled faintly, blood draining out of his face. “You’re – you’ve said they’re not all violent.”

“They’re not. But most of my passengers are murder victims. What do you think they want? Sending someone to rot in prison doesn’t feel like justice to most of them.”

Fuck no, Ray agreed.

I want to strangle Doherty to death with his own fucking intestines, Ruby added.

I wanna shove a sawed off shotgun up Dave’s ass and blow the top of his head off, Ray continued, as if trying to top her in a gruesome death competition. Ruby still had the edge, mainly because it was easy to imagine her plunging her hands in Doherty’s stomach and ripping out his intestines to throttle him. Ray was angry but had the unfocused nature of a follower requiring a leader – Ruby seemed more like the Terminator. She didn’t need a leader, just a target.

“Believe me, if you could hear them talk, you’d shit your pants.”

Clay looked like he wanted to say a thousand things, but had lost the ability to talk. Gryphon sipped his coffee while he waited for him to regain his speech. He felt bad for Clay and Shane, when it came down to it. They were true believers, guys who honestly hoped ghosts existed and went about trying to prove it. Now they had their proof, and it was so much more fucking scary than they ever credited it for. The dead were not a happy people – what a shock.

Finally, Clay asked, “Did Louis Stanhope really disappear?” His Adam’s apple bobbed wildly in his throat, enough so that it was almost hypnotizing to watch.

“Do you really want to know?” He sighed, and told him, “He’s missing. He will never be found. Leave it there and be glad you don’t know the details.” Actually he’d already been found, but since his body was burned beyond all recognition, it was just assumed he was a homeless man who accidentally set his squat on fire, and was dumped anonymously in a potter’s field. He would never be found, as he was already buried as a John Doe. For the purposes of the world, he was so gone he was barely even a memory.

Clay stared at him with his storm cloud eyes, wanting to ask more but not daring, and jumped about a foot when there was a knock at the door.

We didn’t do that, Hugh claimed, as others chuckled.

“That’s either Varner or O’Leary,” Gryphon guessed, wandering out of the kitchen to the living room.

Opening the door revealed O’Leary standing on the porch, looking sullen and miserable huddled beneath a yellow rain slicker that he had probably ripped from the back of the Gorton’s fisherman. He glared at him like the downpour was somehow his fault. “You ready to head out to Wax’s house?”

Wax’s house? Wasn’t that a horror movie with Vincent Price? Rather than lob out that bon mot – surely O’Leary wouldn’t appreciate it – he said, “Give me a minute to get changed.” Which probably should have been obvious since he was wearing blue velvet Old Navy “lounge” (pajama) pants with a little cloud and crescent moon pattern all over it (and they were about a size and a half too big for him, which just added to the general comedy), and a pale olive tank top that was also a size too big for him, which was doubly odd since it was a cast off from Clay, who had a similar bird like build to him.

These probably looked like a sleeping outfit to Clay and O’Leary, but it was all a ruse. He had slept in his underwear. He only put these on to go downstairs, so no one could see his ribs standing out in relief on his chest, or see the unexplained, oblong bruises that dotted his scrawny legs like the harbinger of the plague. It actually bothered him to spy himself semi or totally naked, which was probably a bad sign overall.

He left O’Leary dripping in the small foyer as he went back upstairs and changed into some more weather appropriate clothes, which was basically a heavy fisherman’s sweater that made him look like he was being swallowed by a rather large piece of a wool/acrylic polyblend, and heavy jeans that would weigh approximately a thousand pounds when they did get soaked, but would take a long time to soak through. He had a coat with a hood, but it was a dorky brown jacket with black fleece surrounding the hood – it couldn’t have made him feel sillier. But it was waterproof, so he couldn’t complain.

He went back downstairs to silent but troublesome tension, indicating that O’Leary and Clay had had a brief but awkward conversation that had left both of them feeling unsatisfied, although they weren’t about to spring the details on him. O’Leary was a big wet glowering yellow thing that he followed out into the deluge, and he had a new car today. No, not a car – a tank. Some kind of black SUV that he had to climb into carefully, lest he fall and break his neck while scaling Mount Vehicle.

Inside, the front seat – cockpit? – seemed vast, with a huge dashboard full of all sorts of displays and thingamabobs that he could only guess at, and the seats seemed to be made of black leather that squeaked under their wet asses. He began to think of A Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, but he wasn’t sure why. Rain pounded hollowly on the roof, sheeting down the enormous windshield, making him feel like he was in a deep water submersible.

O’Leary was quiet until he started the leviathan and pulled out of the gravel drive, but Gryphon got a sense that he wanted to tell him something, so he simply waited. When they were on the road, the whole SUV humming like he imagined a tank with great shock absorbers would, O’Leary finally said, “So … I heard you found that store for Varner.”

“Yeah.”

Thick, awkward pause. “Did he, uh … did he say anything about me?”

What the fuck was this? Was he a kid of divorced parents, having his dad grill him about his mom’s new boyfriend? Just when he thought his life couldn’t get more bizarre, it went ahead and did just that. “Not really, no. I figured out that he recommended me to you.”

“Yeah.” O’Leary studied him out of the corner of his eye, and did so for a long time. Gryphon tried to ignore him, figuring he wasn’t going to play this game. Did he want to know if he told him about the raid? If he told him that, in his opinion, that the entire strike team lied in their version of the story? He wasn’t about to say. Let him twist in the wind.

They drove out into the rural countryside, the green fields a pleasant contrast to the gunmetal grey sky, and Gryphon actually saw a wet, miserable looking cow. When was the last time he’d seen a cow? He suddenly felt like a kid on a driving holiday. Maybe weekend dad would take him to a petting zoo.

He turned down an unpaved, rutted road where holes had become surprisingly deep mud puddles, and slowly on the left side of the horizon a rather sad looking clapboard house started to come into view. It looked like it was starting to lean slightly to one side, and the roof seemed to stick out over the side in an ill fitting manner, like it had been removed as one whole piece and then slammed back down in disgust. It had probably once been white, but was now sort of a dirty snow color, the trim nude wood that had bled through the paint that had once been there. It was the perfect serial killer house, complete with an overgrown yard, weeds twisting around the body of an Oldsmobile that may or may not have had tires.

“This is Wax’s place?” Gryphon asked, a bit surprised. “He’s really let it go.”

“I don’t think child molesters are known for their gardening skills.”

“You’d actually be surprised,” he replied, knowing from sad experience that many were quite neat and tidy. Also religious, but that was another can of worms.

O’Leary gave him another funny look, but had to shift his focus to the dirt road as a deep pothole nearly sent them airborne.

It was then that Gryphon noticed a man standing at the edge of the yard, watching them drive up. He was deep into middle age, with a sizable paunch and a few wisps of meager hair covering a scalp with a waxy sheen. Oddly enough, he seemed untouched by the rain, and O’Leary drove so close to him he nearly hit him, but he didn’t move, and O’Leary didn’t react at all.

Didn’t he look familiar? Yes. It was Clifford Wax, with about twenty five pounds and several lines added to his mug shot. And oh yes, he was dead.

“Prepare to be disappointed,” Gryphon warned the ex-cop.

Varner gave him a suspicious look. “That’s not just a guess, is it?”

“Hey, not bad for a cop,” the ghost said. “Think he can spell his own name too?”

Good one, Ray said.

Gryphon sighed, and Varner looked over his shoulder, following his gaze, trying to see what he saw. He couldn’t, of course. “No. there’s another victim here, Anna Alvarez. She doesn’t think much of our investigational skills.”

“Hey, you’re okay,” Anna said. “It’s the fucking cops that should have found this place three victims ago. What the fuck do we pay taxes for?” She paused briefly. “Okay, not me personally, but other people.”

Varner scanned the darkness, like Anna wasn’t standing a mere three feet from him, the blood in the hole in her forehead glimmering like sunlight on the surface of a stagnant pond. But she wasn’t there, not as far as Varner was concerned. After a moment, he turned back to him, and asked, “What can she tell us about him?”

Gryphon didn’t even ask, just looked at Anna and waited. The ghost shrugged and threw her hands in the air. “Fuck if I know, I was totally wasted when he did me.”

“Can I see?” he asked, knowing he’d regret it.

Kid, no, Hugh insisted. We can find him some other way. She was shot in the head – there’s probably no memories worth anything anyways.

She looked at him like he was insane. “What d’ya mean can you see? What the fuck is that? You gonna crack open my head and look in?”

“It’s just a process,” Gryphon told her. He noticed Varner staring at him out of the corner of his eye, but he didn’t interrupt. “I don’t know how it works -”

And as if talking about it was the trigger, he suddenly got it – it flooded into his mind in a series of jagged images as sharp as glass and sensations that were so disorienting that he felt like he was suddenly on the deck of a sinking ship in a raging sea. Reality slid sideways and suddenly everything was too bright and too loud, images smeared across his retinas like the landscape flying by too fast for the eye to settle on anything, fragments of things that didn’t quite make sense. A slice of white – the van? – the beige/pink/tan of a Caucasian face, darkness, a bright flash like the light of a muzzle. A sharp pain augured through his brain like a drill bit, and nausea washed over him, dragging him back to a reality that was dark and somehow less vivid than the drug addled, damaged memories. He had a taste in his mouth of vomit, blood, and something like old pennies.

“Holy shit, are you okay?” Varner asked from somewhere over his head. Gryphon retched for a moment before realizing arms were across his chest, and slowly it dawned on him that Varner was holding him up. When had he collapsed?

When the disruption in his mind had settled and he felt the confines of his body around him again – and he got the urge to barf under control – he said, “’M fine, okay? Jus’ – fuck, I hate memories where I get shot in the head.”

“What?”

Gryphon tried to stand on his own power, failed, and then tried again, Varner still holding him the whole time. The second time he succeeded, but the cop seemed reluctant to let go. “I’m okay, I’ll be okay, I just … can someone help me sort through those images?”

“Huh?”

“I’m talking to my passengers.”

I saw shit, Ray said. What the fuck was that?

He offered her twenty five dollars for a blow job, and she figured she needed the money for a fix, Julie, of all people, said. While she was doing that in his van, he pulled out a gun and shot her, although she didn’t know he had a gun until the barrel was against her forehead.

Gryphon was honestly shocked on two fronts. Julie actually speaking, which was so rare he was always surprised she was still with him. But then there was the shocking fact that she actually saw a coherent narrative in all that mess. “You saw all that?”

It goes by fast, but it was there, she said. I don’t know why I could see it. Maybe because of how I died.

How would being beaten to death by a hammer allow her to see it better than the rest of them? Maybe it was the head injury connection, or perhaps the shocking amount of betrayal and needless brutality in the violence. “I’m okay, Jason, really,” Gryphon said, standing on his own. He wavered a moment, but he managed to stay vertical. “Holy fuck, I think we need a sketch artist. Julie, did you catch his face?”

I think so. She must have thought about it, because suddenly an image popped into his head, of a shadowy man who was so nondescript it was almost painful. Except for the look in his eye – it was remarkably cold, disdainful, and dead. It was the type of look that, if you saw it on an armed person, would make you wet your pants. You’d know you were doomed.

Varner was looking at him quizzically. “Is there another ghost here?”

“Julie’s one of my passengers. And yeah, I know what this fucker looks like. I need a sketch artist.”

His eyebrows raised slightly, concern etching lines into his otherwise smooth face. Suddenly he looked a bit closer to his genuine age. “Are you sure you don’t need a hospital? That was a quite an episode you had.”

“It wasn’t an episode,” he replied scornfully. But what the hell was it? It wasn’t like he could remember. “It was just somebody else’s memory.”

“Of getting shot in the head.”

“Yeah.”

He shook his head. “That’s some gift you’ve got.”

He wanted to point out that it was no gift at all, but he obviously knew that.

Varner wanted to get a search warrant for the Packer’s building anyways, so Gryphon rode along with him back to the station, where the cops on duty who recognized him seemed genuinely surprised to see him. As police station’s went this one was pretty modern, echoing the usual rectangular shape but with a lot more glass and exposed steel than he was used to seeing in a cop shop, the interior bright white and full of utilitarian furniture, the air heavily conditioned and redolent of coffee and copier toner. It could have been an office, only with employees wearing polyester uniforms and carrying guns. Which was a scary sounding office, come to think of it.

Varner went right on back to his office – and you knew you were important if you had your own office – but on the way there they were intercepted by the biggest damn cop Gryphon had ever seen. He was maybe six foot six and well over two hundred pounds, although actually quite lean, athletically built. He was a fairly young light skinned black man with a rather severe buzz cut, like maybe two months ago he shaved his own head and thought better of it, and it was very slowly growing back. “Jase, something up?” he asked, giving Gryphon a suspicious look.

“Yeah, I need to get a search warrant, and someone with an identikit. Is Rochelle still here?”

The cop – who seemed to be named Glass – glanced towards the back, but it may just have been something to do while he was trying to remember. “I’m not sure. I’ll go check.”

“If she’s not, just tell Dihn he’s doing it.”

He followed Varner into his tiny office, which seemed to echo the interior of the rest of the place. Only there was a very old filing cabinet tucked into the far corner, and listing piles of papers beside an older model Dell desktop, which made it seem if not exactly homey at least a bit less cold. He sat in a stiff plastic chair as Varner sat in his more cushioned office chair and picked up the phone, calling the judge – or whoever; it was a judge, right? – for a warrant.

Gryphon quietly offered to let Julie take over and describe their guy, but she didn’t want to; she was content to let him be her voice. Which was typical really – Julie preferred other people speaking for her, perhaps because if there was a beating meted out for it, it’d be that person who suffered and not her. He couldn’t blame her really.

Rochelle must not have been here, as the person who came in with the identikit was a somewhat grumpy Vietnamese cop who complained that this wasn’t really part of his job, but Varner ignored him like he was used to this kind of thing. Eventually the picture they put together was of an oval faced man with thinning light brown hair that made his forehead look broader, and a Roman nose with a bump in the bridge, suggesting it had been broken eons ago. His eyes weren’t small more than they simply lacked a certain expressiveness that made them look like they were sinking into the wide expanse of his face. He wasn’t ugly nor good looking, striking or awful – he was just ordinary. He was the poster boy for the guy you saw twenty times every day and never really noticed. As soon as they were done, Dihn clicked his tongue, and said, “This guy is gonna be impossible to single out.”

“Not necessarily,” Varner said, glancing at him in a rather knowing way. Gryphon knew he meant he could find him simply by following the ghosts.

The story Varner told was that he (Gryphon) had seen this guy in the area after hearing a noise that sounded like a gunshot – it was sort of true, and yet mostly not. Gryphon was kind of amazed that a cop was lying his ass off to other cops right in front of him, but Hugh said, They’re people like everyone else. They lie. We firefighters do that too. Everybody lies. Sometimes professionally.

I was wondering when somebody was going to bring politicians into this, Mr. Aronofsky said.

Varner got his search warrant within two hours, and as they left the police station, he told Gryphon he wanted him to be on the scene, but clearly he couldn’t be inside while they were going over the place. He asked him to remain outside and let him know if any other ghosts popped up or relayed any helpful information.

Fuck him! Ray exclaimed. We’re doin’ his work for him! Demand some scratch before you tell him one more fuckin’ thing.

But what ended up happening was Gryphon dozed in the backseat of a patrol car while the cops and the forensic teams went over the store. From the sudden flurry of activity, the uniformed people boiling out of the broken open door like ants from a disturbed hill, the killer hadn’t cleaned up as well as he thought he had. Gryphon didn’t think he’d actually sleep, but he dosed for a while, woken up once to find someone sitting in the back seat with him. It was Anna, the hole in her forehead still glistening wetly, dark blood dripping down her chin and hitting the seat with a soft plop. “You know why it took so long for anyone to notice? ‘Cause you can kill all the whores you like and no one cares.”

“They weren’t all whores,” he replied sleepily, rubbing his eyes, wondering when talking to people with grotesque head injuries had become normal.

“Naw, I guess not. Some of ‘em were just junkies, or stupid little girls who didn’t take to heart advice about taking rides with strangers. Either way, it was kinda amazing how he picked ones that he knew wouldn’t be missed very much. They were mainly white girls! Don’t missing white girls get all the media attention?”

“Being rich or at least fairly well off helps a lot. I don’t think anyone thinks much about the poor ones. If you’re poor, shit happens to you. It’s just not supposed to happen to the better off.” Wow, when had he gotten so cynical? Oh, right, when talking to dead people with head injuries became normal.

“Yeah, prob’ly.” She turned and looked out the passenger window at all the cop cars and some kind of forensics van, where the bulk of the activity was happening. “I wonder if they found my finger.”

“He chopped off your fingers?”

“No. But he was experimenting with a new chopping technique to make shorter work of the dismembering process, and he partially severed one of my fingers. While he was working on the rest of the body, a rat came along and chewed off the rest. He hates rats and he killed it, but he never noticed the missing finger.”

This may well be the most disgusting story I’ve ever heard, Sylvio said.

“Do you wanna kill him?”

Anna looked back at him, pondering her options. “I dunno. I want him to suffer. Can we nail him to a wall so it takes him three days to die?”

“That might be difficult. We’d need a really secluded place.”

Don’t even joke, Mr. Aronofsky scolded.

She sat back against the seat, and he could see a bit of the exit wound in the back of her skull. She had bloody clots of brain matter like raw meat in her blood stiffened hair, little white bits of skull sprinkled about like casually tossed confetti. “What do ya think they’ll do to him in prison?” she wondered.

Gryphon shrugged, as Ray said, I think serial killers are in one of two categories: if prisoners think they’re just mad dog crazy or bad ass, they avoid ‘em. Otherwise, they’re priority targets. Hurting or killing a serial killer will give you instant rep. That‘s why a lot of them are held in special custody.

“I’ll probably have to ask Varner, but I don’t know if he’d tell me.”

“He likes you. The cop.”

Gryphon shrugged. “I think he wishes he could see you and talk to you. It’d make his job infinitely easier.”

He looked out the windows at some of the cops talking, too far away for him to decently hear, while Anna shifted in her seat, a wet noise thanks to all the blood, and asked, “Why I haven’t I joined your crew? What’s that about?”

“I think you only wanted to impart a message. Or something. Really, I have no idea how this fucking thing works, what tips a ghost over into my realm. I’m a dumbass, I’m afraid. This gig couldn’t have gone to a worse person.”

“Maybe not. Maybe if someone knew what they were doin’, it would get … I dunno … all fucked up.”

Or you’d be a power crazed fuck like Louis Stanhope, Ruby said.

“But that works out best for all of you, not necessarily me.”

Well, there’s other benefits, right? Hugh ventured gamely. The psychokinesis is pretty neat.

“But that’s yours too. I’m always sick, always half dead.”

“At least you didn’t go all the way,” Anna said, pointing at the bullet hole in her forehead. That shut him up. It seemed petty to complain when he was still technically alive.

He looked out the window at the spinning lights of cherry and sapphire, casting lurching shadows on the scarred pavement, and suddenly felt a certain odd coldness on his leg. He looked down to see that Anna was patting his knee in a comforting manner. “What are you gonna do to him? You gonna chop him up like a deer too?”

He glanced at her sharply. “Like a deer?” It took him a moment, but he got there. “Holy shit, he’s a hunter? That makes sense. Only now he’s changed game.”

She shrugged. “’Spose so, but there’s no sport in shooting someone point blank in the head.”

“No, there’s not. But it’s probably the kill that gets his rocks off, not the hunt.”

Man where do all these warped fuckers come from? Ruby wondered irritably. Is there a place in Texas just churning these shit suckers out?

Anna quirked an eyebrow at him, a tacit prompt. “So what’re you gonna do? Turn him over to the cops? Kill him?”

He shook his head and shrugged, not sure how to answer her. “I don’t know.” And he didn’t. He hadn’t decided yet how to proceed. He just assumed that he or his passengers would know when the time came, as they always seemed to. It was as mysterious as the process that allowed people to join him and left others out.

After a minute she nodded, as if that had been a fair answer. “Be careful. This fucker’s crazy.”

Undoubtedly, but he liked to think he was crazy too, so he knew the terrain. He gave her a faint smile, sorry she was dead, as she seemed like she had probably been a cool – albeit troubled – person when she was alive. “Don’t worry. All apologies to zombie films, but you can’t kill what’s already dead.”

The first one he identified was Sheila, Shelia Colleen Maitland, who was one of the mug shot ones. She was younger, her hair was different, but it was her. Then he identified poor Rita, Margarita Helene Schillenger, caught at someone’s birthday party. The photo was a little overexposed, a little too close, but she was smiling and happy. It was heartbreaking. But then again, Sheila’s hard faced mug shot photo was heartbreaking too, simply because they were alive when these photos were taken, and now they weren’t. He also managed to identify Jessica, Jessica Lee Pothier, from a mug shot where she looked so wasted he had no idea how she was standing for the camera.

Clay had come into the kitchen to check on them at one point, and then offered them drinks, but Varner declined. Gryphon did too, but only because he thought his kidneys were about to burst from the sheer amount of tea he had in him.

As soon as he pulled out Rita’s file and handed it to Varner, he told him, “I’m not sure she’s like the other river victims. Her last recollection is driving alone in her car and being punched in the head.”

Varner raised a pale eyebrow at that. They were so perfectly arched, you’d think he had them plucked. “Punched while driving alone?”

“I know it doesn’t make sense, but sometimes victims get … scrambled. They’re not sure how they died, usually if it’s sudden or involves a head injury.”

“She’s sure there was no one in the car?”

“As she could be. She didn’t think she crashed either.”

Varner frowned and pondered that as he glanced at their files. As soon as he added Jessica to the pile – and she was the last one; he’d only identified the three of them – Varner said, “I came up from California. I used to work East L.A., and people who got shot but didn’t realize it – which was baffling to me as a rookie, but now I know better – sometimes described that they felt like they were punched or shoved. Could Rita Schillenger have been shot?”

East L.A.? Ray snorted. He don’t look like no chollo to me.

Gryphon hated to admit it, but as soon as he said that, he realized that felt right. After all, he’d been shot several times – well, okay, former passengers of his had been – and he knew how it felt. Sometimes it was a pain beyond describing, sometimes it was a numbness followed by odd type of paralysis or refusal of parts of your body to move, and sometimes it was more like a blunt pain, a punch or a kick.

Hey, I was shot in the fucking face! Ray exclaimed. I don’t remember nothin’! One second I was talkin’ to that fucker, and then – blammo! It was light, and then nada.

And sometimes it was absolutely nothing.

“Yes, I think that’s it,” he told the deputy chief. “I think she was shot in the head while driving. That would explain why she can’t remember a damn thing.” But as he shoved over the files of the women he didn’t identify, he added, “But that doesn’t fit the M.O. of the river killer. I mean, he did shoot them, but never from a distance. He shot them up close, where he could watch and control the environment.”

Varner’s hands froze on the file folders as he gathered them up. Gryphon noticed he was wearing a gold band with a small ruby on it, but it wasn’t a wedding ring, as he wasn’t wearing it on the right finger. He looked up to find Varner staring at him in a strange way. “Why do you say that, Gryphon? What do you mean he shoots them?”

“Because he does. He shoots them, and then he carves up their bodies in an abandoned store.”

That hollow eyed stare kept up for several more seconds, then he slumped in his chair with a sigh, like he was deflating. He quickly sat up straight again, though. “How much do you know? You need to tell me all of it, and you need to tell me now.”

So Gryphon told him of his “memory” (well, it wasn’t exactly a dream), of the white van and the gunshot, the shell casing rolling down the parking lot, the abandoned store where he had set up tarps to catch the blood. “He’s not a butcher – well, not right now, at any rate – but he knows how to cut up bodies. He knows what he’s doing.”

“But you don’t know what he looks like?” Varner prompted.

“Not yet. But I’d know him if I saw him. Hell, he probably has several ghosts with him that he doesn’t even know about – they’d point him out.”

Varner went into his messenger bag again, and pulled out a piece of paper. He showed it to him. “It isn’t him, is it?”

He looked at the two side by side mug shots of a rather non-descript middle aged man with a significant bald spot, his eyes looking at the viewer as though from the bottom of a well. Gryphon shook his head. “No, not him.”

“I thought not,” Varner admitted, putting the picture back in the bag. He added the files as well.

“Who is it?”

“Clifford Wax.”

“Ah, O’Leary’s obsession.” He paused a moment, and then felt like an idiot, as it all fell together in his head. “You told him about me, didn’t you? O’Leary.”

Varner grimaced as he zipped up the bag, avoiding his gaze. “Yeah, well … sorry about that. I didn’t think he’d actually seek you out.”

“So you are friends?”

“Fuck no. I mean, he’s a decent cop, an okay guy, we just don’t get along so well. Basically, he’s an old fashioned cop, and he thinks I’m too much of a new fashioned one.”

Old fashioned cop? Sylvio repeated skeptically. Is that some kind of euphemism for a cop who beats up on black guys whenever he gets the chance?

I think new fashioned cop is code for fag, Ray said.

“He doesn’t know you’re here.”

Varner snickered. “Why would he? He’s retired; we don’t work together anymore.”

“Why did he retire?”

Varner sighed explosively before he stood up, slinging his bag over his shoulder. “You should probably ask him.”

“I’d rather hear it from someone who won’t lie to me.”

That made the cop pause, hand on the back of his chair. Gryphon watched a muscle in Varner’s jaw twitch as his eyes roamed the sparse kitchen, looking for an escape. Finally, he said, “I think he was burned out. It happens a lot.”

“It had nothing to do with Jeff McCandless?”

Varner stiffened as if he’d just received a cattle prod to the ass, and he looked at him like he had done it, more surprised than wounded. “How do you – did he tell you about that?”

“Not really. He told me a story that wasn’t completely true. Jeff told me not to trust him.”

He seemed nonplussed. “You’ve talked to Jeff?”

“He appears periodically beside O’Leary. He doesn’t know, but I have a sense he wants Cal to admit something; he wants me to get him to confess.”

“To what?”

“Honestly? I don’t know. But my guess is Cal’s lying about how he died.”

Varner swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing almost spasmodically in his throat. “I … there were some questions about that raid that have never been resolved.”

“Do you think he was lying about what happened?”

For a moment, Varner avoided his gaze completely. But finally his dark eyes met his, and he nodded faintly. “I think the entire strike team was lying. They fucked up royal, but they held together so no one took a fall for it. The blue code. The inquest was a waste of time and money, but that’s okay, no one cared. A bunch of junkies get shot up – who gives a fuck? Dead cops happen.”

Bitter much? Hugh noted.

“Once I get the truth, I’ll let you know.”

He nodded, but didn’t seem completely mollified. Maybe because the truth didn’t matter anymore – there was nothing to be done. No one much cared anymore, besides the dead.

Gryphon stood, feeling like the kitchen chair had made his ass permanently numb, and asked, “Do you know of any abandoned stores around here?”

He snorted somewhat derisively. “Are you kidding? Ever since Wal-Mart moved into the state, there’s been a ton of them. Shut down, boarded up, burned down for insurance money.”

“Would you have time to take me out to some of them tonight?”

Kid, what are you doing? Ruby asked.

Varner looked just as surprised as most of his passengers felt. “Sure, yeah. Are you up for that? You look a little pale.”

“I’m fine, just tired. I just need to hit the head, then I’ll be ready to go.”

“Sure. I’ll be in my car.”

Gryphon went up to his bathroom – he could have used Clay’s downstairs one, but he felt funny about it – and after he drained his poor, taxed bladder, Hugh asked, What the fuck do you think you’re doing? And don’t you dare tell me washing your hands.

Gryphon looked at himself in the mirror over the sink. It seemed to him like his own eyes were sinking deep into the back of his head, but that could have simply been his imagination. “This guy is still out there killing. If I can find the spot where he cuts up the bodies, there might be enough forensic evidence there for the cops to find this guy and close the case. Women will stop dying, and I’ll be happy. Maybe I won’t dream of creepy things like that anymore.”

You already put an angry ghost kid to bed today, Hugh said. Not to mention found yourself in a car accident. Take a break. If you’re itching to get out of here, just call Lilly.

He dried his hands on the first towel he grabbed from the rack, and wondered if he should wash them sometime. Clay seemed to do all the laundry around here, and that was unfair. “Who’s Lilly?”

The paramedic. You know, we got her number?

Gryphon wanted to laugh, but couldn’t quite. He searched his coat pocket and found some caffeinated gum, a piece of which he popped into his mouth. Eventually the taste of peppermint would give way to the bitter, disgusting taste of caffeine, but he could use the jolt. “You got her number, Hugh. It never would have occurred to me to hit on a woman while she was doing her job.”

She was cute, Hugh said, as if that explained everything.

The Asian girls are usually cute, Ray said.

Shut up, you fucking pig, Ruby snapped.

It was probably a good thing for Ray that his passengers couldn’t vote fellow passengers out of him, or Ray would have been booted out of him a long time ago.

He told Clay he was going out with Varner to look at some abandoned stores, and Clay was giving him that look, that look that seemed to suggest he was a crazy person with a loaded semi-automatic handgun and a ticking time bomb. He told him he’d be fine, that he felt he had to do this, but he didn’t know if Clay actually believed him or not.

He went out and got into the passenger seat of Varner’s car, secretly hoping that he was a better driver than O’Leary, even though the accident really hadn’t been his fault. The car interior was neat, with almond colored leather interior and a fruit scented Yankee Candle air freshener making things smell like a farmer’s market. At least it was better than those damn pine trees; the smell of those made him sick.

Varner was happy to be silent, so Gryphon just closed his eyes and leaned back in the soft seat, resting his eyes, until they came to the first location. It was a closed down drugstore, with plywood over the windows, but it was absolutely not what he had seen.

The same was true of the next two locations, although one was a grocery store that almost looked promising in its general shape, but the parking lot was wrong. It was starting to get late, late enough that Varner had to stifle a yawn, and Gryphon was going to tell him it was okay, this could wait, until he saw the hulking shadow of a building on a run down street.

There was the dive bar, the one he’d been sitting in front of when he heard the shooting in the van. It too was shut down, but that didn’t really matter.

“This is it,” Gryphon said, pointing towards the silhouette of the store. There were streetlights in the parking lot, but all but one of them had been broken out, and the one that was working flickered constantly, like it had a short.

Varner swung the car into the cracked, sloping lot, and drove very carefully, as there was a lot of trash and various detritus scattered about the lot. Broken glass glittered like diamonds, and char marks from fireworks and impromptu bonfires made the asphalt look diseased. “This is the old Packer’s,” he said. “It’s been closed down since the parent company went bankrupt three years ago. I was always kinda surprised it didn’t get accidentally burned down.”

“They can’t sell the land?”

He grunted in a smothered, sarcastic laugh. “They can’t sell shit down here besides eight balls and ass. Everything from West 224th to Aspen Boulevard has been bled pretty much dry. It’s not so much a depressed area as a bludgeoned one.”

“So there wouldn’t be any witnesses willing to report anything suspicious,” Gryphon said, thinking aloud.

“Oh sure, the guy buying a vial of crack is gonna report a gunshot,” Varner agreed bleakly. He reached across to the glove compartment, where he took out a heavy LED flashlight, and a smaller MagLite, which he offered to him. Gryphon initially shook his head, but Varner continued holding it out, so he reluctantly took it. As soon as he got out of the car, he spit out his gum on the blacktop, because it was starting to taste disgusting and it wasn’t going to dirty up the parking lot much more than it already was.

Varner turned on his flashlight and started to sweep the surprisingly bright blue-white beam along the ground. “You said in your vision you saw a shell casing roll down?”

“It wasn’t a vision,” he argued, but in all honesty he had no idea what the fuck it had been; vision was as good a word for it as any. “But yeah.”

He joined Varner at the bottom of the sloped parking lot, where litter had gathered in rather large amounts. There were lots of fast food detritus, mostly from McDonalds, and roaches scurried as they kicked the trash and shone lights on it. There were the shattered remains of beer bottles and crushed cans, giving the trash a yeasty scent, shattered crack vials and pipes, used condoms, used syringes tinged with blood, even the remains of an exploded sports drink bottle. But after a minute, Varner muttered, “Son of a bitch.”

Gryphon joined him as he crouched down and pulled a pen out of his pocket, sifting through litter until Gryphon saw the glint of metal. Using the pen, Varner expertly picked up a hollow shell casing. They exchanged a look of surprise, as Gryphon didn’t honestly think the casing would still be at the scene. Of course it could be a different casing entirely, but that would be for the cops to figure out.

Varner gently put the casing back down and once he stood up, kicked a Big Mac wrapper over it to hide it. “You definitely need to work for us,” he said, turning towards the store.

“Somehow I don’t see any police department wanting to justify the expense of me,” Gryphon replied, following him up the lot towards the abandoned store.

“Yeah, well, maybe I can find a way to sneak you on the payroll. I honestly think you’ve just broken this case, Gryph.”

“Don’t count your eggs yet, or whatever the fuck that expression is. That could be anybody’s shell casing.”

“But this is the store, right?”

‘Yes, it is.” Even the bloated letters from the gang tag graffiti on the plywood nailed over the broken main window was precisely the same as he saw it in his “vision“. They approached a front entrance that was not only chained with heavy cables but boarded up, and Gryphon surprised himself by blurting out, “He goes in a back way, so nobody driving by on the street can see him.” Since when did he know that?

But Varner just nodded and started around the side, Gryphon following him like an obedient dog. Somewhere in the middle distance, a car alarm was whooping and hollering into an indifferent night, and Gryphon couldn’t quite shake the scent of stale beer out of his nose.

The back lit up in trails, caused by Varner’s super bright flashlight beam. It struck him that he would have known he was a cop simply by that flashlight – cops always wanted to see what was going on, and it was a weapon as much as it was a tool of illumination. He could blind someone with the light, or simply clip them on the head with the butt end, but either way it gave him an immediate advantage.

There was a loading access door, wide enough to unload palettes of goods into, but because it was a metal door it wasn’t boarded up; there was simply a very heavy industrial padlock and chain on the door. But oddly enough, the chain and lock looked newer than anything else here.

Varner grabbed the chain and tested it by pulling, but it was solid. “Think he picks the lock?”

“He has a key,” a woman’s voice said, and Gryphon turned to see a young Hispanic woman standing on the loading riser with them. She was wearing a half shirt and miniskirt, inappropriate for this time of night, but then Gryphon noticed the neat hole in the middle of her forehead and the blood trickling down to bifurcate her face. Her ink black eyes settled on him, and told him crossly, “It was about time you pendejos got here.”

Of course the room was an illusion. In the real world it was as old and desolate as the rest of the house, but as he crossed the threshold, he crossed into someone else’s world. Miraculously, sunlight was pouring through the window, revealing a tidy room with a small, narrow bed in a black metal frame, the covers pulled so tightly across the mattress they looked stapled on. The walls were covered with oatmeal colored wallpaper with a tiny pattern that turned out to be dainty sprigs of violets between thin, pale ribbons that looked like faded stripes from a few feet back. There was a cedar chest at the foot of the bed with several metal toy soldiers lined up across the top, as shiny and clean as if they were new, and a small desk and shelf combination on the far side of the room that also looked new, but whose style betrayed it as astonishingly old. Gryphon got a sense that his target was here, but still hiding from him.

“I don’t want to fight with you, I’m here to help you,” he said, looking around. Under the bed? No, it was too easy to see. There was a wardrobe on the other side of the door, and he figured they were hiding in there.

Please don’t open the closet door, Ray said. That’s when the killer jumps out and puts an axe through your forehead.

There ain’t no killer I can’t kill first, Ruby snapped.

“There’s no killer,” Gryphon replied, exasperated. “Just an angry poltergeist. What the fuck do you think you guys are?”

I wasn’t angry, Mr. Aronofsky protested.

Gryphon opened the door to the wardrobe, which was full of coats and suits, all old yet new, and remarkably small. He was pretty sure he saw someone hiding in the far corner. “Please come out so we can talk like civilized people.”

“This is my house,” a small, angry voice said. “Get out.”

It’s a kid?! Ray exclaimed. How can a fucking kid do so much damage?

I take it you’ve never had children, Mr. Aronofsky noted wryly.

“Son, it’s not your house anymore,” Gryphon told him, not unkindly. “It hasn’t been your house for a very long time. Please come out and I’ll explain it to you.”

“You’re a liar! It is my house! Mummy and Daddy will be back soon!”

“No they won’t. They’re dead – just like you.”

Finally the boy climbed out of the wardrobe. He was wearing long sleeved pajamas, so pale blue they were technically white. He had short brown hair and a round, wan face, with small blue eyes radiating nothing but the type of unbridled fury that kids actually were very good at. “They are not dead! You’re a liar! I’m not dead, I’m here! Where’s Mummy?!”

Gryphon crouched down to be more at eye level with the ghost. How old was it when he died, eight? He knew just by looking at him that his name was Phillip Chapman, and his death was due to prolonged illness, which might explain why his pajamas looked so baggy and he seemed so ashen. Ghosts weren’t really white, not unless their deaths involved it somehow (illness, wasting, blood loss). “Phillip, what’s the last thing you remember? When your Mummy and Daddy were here? Think hard.”

He pouted, his bottom lip jutting out, but he did comply with his request. His brow scrunched in thought, and he looked away, at his neatly lined up toy soldiers. “I was sick. I couldn’t get up and play.”

“And then what happened?”

His scowled deepened. “I … I woke up and I was … fine. But I was alone.”

“You woke up dead.”

His look was both evil and confused. “You can’t wake up dead. When you’re dead you can’t wake up at all.”

“Normally, yes. But sometimes, for reasons I can’t even begin to fathom, people who honestly can’t conceive of their own death remain here. Do you wonder why your parents are gone? Do you wonder why there’s strangers constantly coming in and out of your home? It’s because time has moved on even though you haven’t. Your parents are gone and they’re not coming back, because they can’t. It’s time for you to go too, Phillip.”

Phillip squinted his eyes angrily, but they were starting to water. “You’re lying!”

He sighed. “Why do you think I can see you and talk to you? Why do you think others couldn’t?”

He bit his lower lip and looked around the room as if appealing for help. “You’re saying you’re dead?”

“No, not quite, but all my friends are.” He reached out to touch Phillip on an impulse, belatedly remembering he was dead and he couldn’t, but as he touched his shoulder he did feel … something. Not quite a physical body, but something cold and semi-solid that didn’t give at slight pressure, but felt like it would if he pressed. “I’m sorry, I really am, but you can’t stay here anymore.”

Gryphon had no idea why Phillip believed him, but he did, and tears started streaming down his cheeks. It was that weird kind of understanding that existed between two things that equally shouldn’t have existed but did anyways. Somehow they lived in the world with others but still lived apart – they were monsters who hid in plain sight, mainly because no one wanted to see them. But they could still make their presence known; they could destroy and disrupt and turn their little pocket of reality upside down.

“Where will I go?” he sobbed, his voice breaking.

“I don’t know.”

“Will my parents be there?”

“I don’t know.”

He found the time to be pissed off in spite of still crying, and Gryphon felt that was fair enough. “What do you know?”

“You won’t be lonely anymore.” It was really the only thing he could offer him. He could have made up stories about heaven or even reincarnation, but at the end of the day, he didn’t know anything. Heaven just felt wrong, and while reincarnation made more sense – energy not being destroyed and whatnot, and what were ghosts but energy, as his interruptions of electronic equipment proved – it didn’t feel any more right. The only thing that felt right was an ending, a peacefulness where you simply stopped. Stopping wasn’t so bad, especially if you’d gone on too long.

“How do we go?”

Gryphon slid his hand down the boy’s tiny, semi-corporeal arm. “Just take my hand, and we’ll walk out the door.”

The boy seemed doubtful, but Gryphon could sense his exhaustion. He’d been haunting this place for what, seventy years? More? And with such constant rage. Probably only the young could keep up with that kind of energy output.

Phillip took his hand, though, a semi-solid, cold feeling, but there was no need to even make an attempt to walk out the door, as quite suddenly Phillip disappeared and Gryphon felt something like a cold wind pass through him, making him drop to all fours on the floor. It wasn’t like one of his passengers leaving him, but he felt a minor variation of it, a sense of leaving.

He wasn’t in the daylight room anymore, with its toy soldiers and fancy wallpaper, but a bare, dusty room with black specks of mouse droppings scattered about like fallen commas. He was alone in the house, and the window let in only early evening gloom. That went much easier than I thought, Hugh said.

“He’s a kid who must have seen nearly a century of disjointed weirdness pass him by. No matter how much he denied it, I think he suspected he was dead. He just needed someone to tell him.” He stood up, feeling momentarily woozy, and then left the bedroom, sneezing the inhaled dust.

By the time he was downstairs, Clay and Shane were in the front doorway, just shutting down their ghost hunting equipment. “Who was it?” Shane asked first.

“An eight year old boy named Phillip Chapman. He died of either flu or maybe tuberculosis, some illness that made him malinger, sapped his strength and made it progressively harder to breathe. I have a feeling he died approximately around 1935 – ish.”

They both just stared at him in that mock deadpan way they always did when he surprised them. They’d been at this long enough that they had all developed visual cues. Clay and Shane exchanged a look, then Clay admitted, “He wasn’t on our shortlist. Or long list. He wasn’t on the list at all.”

He shrugged as he reached the bottom of the stairs, almost knocking over the bell jar on the last step. “I wasn’t expecting a kid either. But we never do.”

“It didn’t take you too long,” Shane prompted, clearly wanting to hear a gory story.

Gryphon couldn’t indulge him, even if he wanted to. “He was ready to go. He just didn’t know how.”

They headed back out to the van, Shane and Clay discussing the buttload of money they’d get for “cleaning” this place up, and to celebrate they all stopped at this Vietnamese restaurant they all liked for dinner. Gryphon was starving, probably because he’d used – well, his passengers used – a lot of psychokinesis today, and while Clay and Shane were happy he was eating (they both thought he was too skinny), even they looked at him funny when he ordered a second dish of green curry and a third bubble tea.

By the time Shane drove him and Clay back home, it was full on night, stars in the sky fighting to be seen through an uneven layer of wispy clouds, but as they drove up, they saw a red sedan parked in the driveway. “Someone you know?” Shane asked, as a man got of the car and gave them a friendly wave.

“No,” Clay replied, sounding confused. “Gryph, you know this guy?”

Gryphon looked over the back of the seat, and saw the guy wasn’t very tall – five eight, tops – and fairly lean, with a boyish face and a neatly trimmed head of dirty blond hair. He was wearing dark jeans, a Henley style olive green top, and a brown J. Crew jacket, average clothes, but Ruby said, Oink oink, I smell bacon.

I swear to god you say that about every other guy, Ray complained.

I do not – I only say it about the cops. And this guy’s one.

“No, I can’t say I do,” Gryphon told them, as Shane brought the van to a stop. Clay got out, and asked, “Can I help you?”

“Yes, you surely can,” the man said, in a friendly, laid back drawl. “I’m Deputy Police Chief Jason Varner, and I’m looking for Gryphon Ashmore.”

“Oh shit,” Gryphon muttered, crawling to the van’s back door.

Told ya, Ruby said.

How the hell do you develop a sixth sense about cops? Sylvio asked.

Be a hooker long enough, and you can tell just by the way they carry themselves, she replied.

“What for?” Clay asked defensively.

“It’s about the bodies he found near the river.”

Gryphon peered around the back of the van. “You a friend of O’Leary’s?”

The cop grimaced in a way that suggested he was trying to hide an eviler expression. “We’re acquaintances.” Only now did Gryphon see that the black shadow on the hood of his car was a soft sided messenger bag.

“Should we call our lawyer?” Clay asked, continuing to be vaguely hostile.

Varner shook his head, and gestured at his wardrobe. “I’m here unofficially. Gryphon is not in trouble. I just want to talk.”

Both Shane and Clay looked at him, awaiting either confirmation or the order to send him away. In the odd dynamic of their business relationship, both of the guys were very protective of him. Maybe because he was the cornerstone of their entire business, or maybe because he was younger than the both of them and possibly unstable, maybe all of the above. I can fuck this guy up. Ruby said.

He’s kinda cute, Hugh said.

Oh for fuck’s sake, you’d find a hole in the wall cute! Taneesha snapped.

“Fine, we can talk,” Gryphon finally said. “Clay, can we use your kitchen?”

Clay gave him a look that clearly communicated his displeasure with all of this, but after a frown he said, “Yeah, sure.”

Varner gave them a tight, professional smile, and grabbed the messenger bag off his car. Gryphon led the way inside, followed by the Deputy Chief, who looked no older up close, and had a faint whiff of cologne about him. It wasn’t obnoxious, though, which was a point in his favor. “Aren’t you a bit young to be the Deputy Chief of anything?”

He smirked painfully. “You know how many times I’ve been asked that? Even by other cops. It’s sad.”

They took seats at the small kitchen table, and Varner zipped open his messenger bag. “I know you’re dying to know why I’m here, so I’ll just get right to it, shall I? I know O’Leary said you spotted body parts by the river, but I also know that’s complete bullshit. Those teeth that were initially turned up were only found by a dog; they weren’t visually apparent to anyone. They were buried in mud.”

“I thought you weren’t here to arrest me.”

“I’m not. I’m here to ask for your help.” He pulled a thick sheaf of files out of the bag and plopped them on the table.

What the fuck is this? Ruby asked.

“I don’t understand.”

He sighed wearily, sorting through the files. “I know about you, Gryphon. May I call you Gryphon? I’ve read up on the Stanhope incident, and I know there’s more than you simply trashing an interrogation room without lifting a finger. You identified a cause of death for all of the children with more accuracy and detail than the coroner was able to, since the bodies were so badly decomposed. You even knew the family had a black cat, which Louis Stanhope also killed. There’s no way you could have known any of these things.”

“I was too young to have killed the family myself.”

He gazed at him wearily. He had dark brown eyes the color of mud. “I know. Louis Stanhope is the only suspect in the slaughter. Quizzing O’Leary, he told me you claimed to know the names of the victims whose parts we‘ve been pulling out of the river, that you saw them and talked to them. True?”

Gryphon scowled at him. “Of course it’s true. Sheila, Rita, Amber, Jessica, Vanessa.”

He rifled through the files with his thumb. “There might be women with those names in here, I’m not sure. “ He shoved them towards him.

Gryphon looked down at them, confused, but didn’t touch them. “What are these?”

“Missing persons reports from Portland and the general vicinity over the last ten years, involving Caucasian women running the gamut from seventeen to thirty five. That is essentially the victims profiles, yes?

“Um, yeah … you’re saying you believe me?”

He met his eyes fearlessly, and nodded. “Yes, I do. I realize this has earned me the nickname “Mulder”, but I honestly believe that there are some odd things in the world. I mean, I know most psychics are con artists or delusional people seeking publicity or better medication, but every now and then there’s a person with a genuine gift. I think you’re the most genuinely gifted person we’ve ever encountered.”

Gryphon studied him for a minute, then glanced around the kitchen. “I’ve passed out, haven’t I? I’m asleep in the back of the van.”

“No, you’re not. I’ve checked up on the work you’re doing with these ghost hunter guys, and everyone seems to be of the opinion that you guys are the real deal. The Oregon Historical Society was really pleased with your work.”

This was all incredibly weird, and he felt that he wasn’t quite up to this today. “I’m not a psychic, you know that, right?”

“Yes. You talk to dead people, right?”

“No, they talk to me. Some, not all. I’m … I’m like a bridge, in a way. I’m half in the world of the dead and half in the world of the living. I don’t know the mechanics of it, I can’t explain it in a way that sounds remotely sane, but it’s not really in my control. I don’t want to do this – if I could make it go away, I would. It’s not a gift; it’s a nightmare.”

Gee, thanks, Hugh said sarcastically.

“Not for the families of the missing it isn’t.”

Is this some weird variation of good cop/bad cop? Ray wondered.

Gryphon dry washed his face, and decided to give this another shot. “Let me get this straight. You want me to look through these and see if I can identify the river victims?”

“Yes.”

“What if they’re not all here?”

“I’ll find them,” he said simply. “Give me all the information you have on them. I’ll bring in a sketch artist.”

“And you don’t think your boss is gonna find this odd?”

He settled back in his chair, slumping slightly. He looked tired. “He might, but if I bring you in as a special consultant, there shouldn’t be a problem.”

“A special consultant? Are you saying you want to hire me?”

“If you’re the real deal, you’d be worth the money. And I think you are.”

Holy shit, kid, Hugh said. He wants you to go legit.

Right. He looked over at O’Leary to find him slumped over the steering wheel. “Cal?” he asked. There was no response.

Check his pulse, Hugh instructed.

Gryphon rolled his eyes. “I can never find a pulse and you know it.”

Fine. Let me take over.

That idea was a relief, and he wasn’t sure why. No, scratch that – he knew exactly why. Even he was tired of being in his own skin. “Yeah, fine.”

The process of letting the others take over had become easier. It was just like letting go, although of what he wasn’t sure. He just felt like he was momentarily falling, and then he was in the back seat, a passenger behind his own eyes. It didn’t get any less disorienting with time, though.

Hugh looked at his arms and patted his chest before undoing his seat belt and reaching across to check O’Leary’s pulse. What the hell was that about? Gryphon asked.

“Trying to figure out if you were hurt,” Hugh said. “Your chest hurts a little.”

It does? He didn’t remember that.

“Yeah. It’s not a sharp pain, though, so maybe it’s just a bruise from the belt.” Hugh put a couple of his fingers on the side of O’Leary’s neck, and he found a pulse right away. How did he manage to do that? “He’s alive. His heartbeat’s a little rapid, but a guy his age and girth probably has hypertension.”

And now you’re the medical expert, Ray carped.

“Trust me, I know bodies,” Hugh said, opening the cab door and getting out. The big thing that hit them was slammed up against the guard rail, steam hissing out from beneath the crumpled hood. As Hugh crossed the street to the wreck, a young Indian guy driving a Volkswagen pulled over and shouted out his driver’s side window, “Need help?”

“Not me, but this guy might,” Hugh replied, approaching the wrecked SUV. He was about within a dozen feet of it when he saw a colorful display on the pavement, blue and red and yellow, and saw that a body was laying splayed out on the shoulder, half in some brush, about fifteen feet from the vehicle itself. Shattered safety glass sparkled like blue and white diamonds strewn at his feet. One of his arms was splayed out, and the other was bent under him in what would have been a painful manner had he been conscious.

It was a man, although he was laying face down on the ground, which added a bit of doubt. But women just didn’t have that type of pipe cleaner body shape, except in odd occurrences. He had short brown hair that sparkled with shattered glass. Hugh knelt beside him, and getting a good look at his bloody face, groaned audibly. “Kid, he’s about your age.” Hugh was right; beneath the hair and the blood, he looked about twenty or so.

Hugh found his pulse in his neck, but it was a lot more erratic than O’Leary’s. It was like a little hummingbird frantically beating its wings against the inner skin of his throat. He’s dying, isn’t he? Gryphon guessed. He supposed if he was in the driver’s seat, he’d be able to sense it, but he wasn’t quite connected to himself right now.

“Possibly,” Hugh reluctantly replied. “He did a header through the windshield, and that ain’t great for your longevity.” He leaned down, and whispered, “Don’t die, kid. I think Gryph’s at full capacity.”

The Indian guy came over, looking nervous enough to jump out of his skin. “I called 911,” he said, looking down at the guy splashed on the road. A brief wave of nausea turned his face pale. He was wearing the dark slacks, white shirt, and bright tie of someone in middle management, but everyone tried not to hold that against him. “Should we, uh, move him off the road ..?”

“No. He could have neck or head injuries that we’d just make worse, so leave him for the paramedics.”

The guy looked down nervously at the accident victim and nodded like his head was on a spring. He seemed relieved that someone else was taking charge. But he stopped his odd loose necked nod to stare at him wonderingly. “You’re bleeding.”

Hugh wiped his face, and saw small smears of blood on his palm. “Just glass cuts. We – I’m fine.”

Nice save, Ruby said.

“Fuck,” O’Leary snapped, getting out of the truck and slamming the door. He looked at the front of the truck, grimacing at the smashed headlight and crumpled front bumper, and grabbing his side as if he were in pain. “Son of a bitch.” He turned towards them, and fixed a laser gaze on the Indian man. “Did you do this? Did you hit me?”

“No, he’s a good Samaritan,” Hugh told him, and then pointed beyond the SUV. “The guy who hit you is over there.”

“Oh.” He saw the man’s body partly on the road and scowled. “Shit. My insurance rates are gonna skyrocket.”

“Wow, and they called me cold,” Hugh said.

O’Leary swiveled the scowl over to him. “I didn’t mean ‘cause of him, I meant … oh forget it.” He sighed and rubbed his broad forehead. “Is he dying?”

“He’s working on it.”

O’Leary gave him a look like he thought he was shitting him and he didn’t find it particularly funny. But then a new expression crossed his face, something akin to understanding, and he asked, “You ain’t Ashmore, are you?”

“Nope. Hugh D’Ancanto, dead guy, at your service.” Hugh added a small, sarcastic, two fingered salute to this. “What gave it away?”

“You’re smiling. Ashmore doesn’t smile.”

“Oh, I know. He’s a gloomy gus. Totally Goth.”

I am not, Gryphon protested.

You so totally are, Taneesha countered.

The Indian guy was looking between him and O’Leary nervously. “What are you guys talking about?”

Hugh opened his mouth to say something, and Gryphon was genuinely curious what he would say, but he never got a chance to find out, as a truck barreled around the corner at an incredible speed. It was newer and wider than O’Leary’s sad excuse for a truck, and painted an ominous shade of black. They were all standing in the road too, so O’Leary had time to curse, but Hugh remained where he was, and simply focused his will as he shouted , “Stop!”

The truck stopped all right. It hit an invisible wall about ten feet in front of him, coming to a dead stop as the front bumper curved like tusks and the headlights shattered into a gentle shower of glass dust, the body of the truck creaking and straining violently under the inertia of the sudden stop. The airbag deployed with a muffled “pop”, hiding the driver, and probably preventing them from seeing the hood of the truck crumple ever so slightly at the front. Smoke was starting to waft from under the hood in faint gray tendrils. “Hot damn,” Hugh said. “That’s fucking cool. I feel totally like Jean Grey.”

O’Leary was glaring at him in a complex mix of fear and disbelief. “Who?”

“Jean Grey. You know, X-Men.” O’Leary continued to stare at him blankly. “You never even saw the movie?”

“No.”

“I, um, I have,” the Indian guy said nervously. “What did, uh, what did you do to that truck?”

“Absolutely nothing,” Hugh lied, with a big shit-eating grin on his face. He then turned to O’Leary and asked, “Do you have a fire extinguisher?”

It took him a moment to focus on his question, but he finally said, “Yeah, a vehicle one, under the front passenger seat.”

“Good enough.” He went to get it as smoke started pluming out from under the hood of the black truck far more seriously. As Hugh reached under the passenger seat, he muttered, “I probably fried the wiring. But that was cool. Damn kid, you could have so much fun with these powers if you let yourself.”

They’re not my powers, they’re yours. You’re the dead ones, not me.

“But we’re all in you,” Hugh replied, finding the tiny canister and pulling it out. It was as red as your typical fire extinguisher, but was roughly the size of a summer sausage; it looked like a joke fire extinguisher. “There’s gotta be some benefit in that.”

Besides all our voluminous wisdom, Mr. Aronofsky joked.

As Hugh went to the black truck and opened the hood, spraying the contents of the fire extinguisher over a smoking, crackling nest of frying wires near the engine block, the driver of the truck was out and ranting at him. It was a middle aged woman with a strangely round figure and a rat’s nest of bottle blonde hair that made it look like she was wearing a poodle pelt on her head. “What the fuck didja do to my truck?” she ranted, growing angrier and more agitated by the second.

“Hey, lady, back off,” O’Leary snapped.

She ignored him, and got in Hugh’s face as he closed the hood. “This truck is new! What the fuck did you -”

“Back off!” O’Leary demanded angrily. “I’m a cop and this is an accident scene! Don’t make me arrest you for obstruction.” Funny how he didn’t mention he was a retired cop, and couldn’t actually arrest her for anything.

The woman frowned at him, giving him a death look, but backed off. By then, the scream of sirens was audible and approaching fast.

Gryphon let Hugh continue to be in control as the police and ambulance arrived, and Hugh chatted with the ambulance driver, a petite Asian woman, while the others worked on the driver of the SUV. Hugh was flirting with her, successfully it seemed, while she put bandages on his glass cuts and checked his ribcage for possible fractures. He did have a rather nasty looking bruise, but after listening to him breathe through a stethoscope, she winced and said, “Sounds like you have fluid in your lungs. It’s probably not worth bringing you in about, but you might want to go to the doctor as soon as you can.”

“Will do,” Hugh agreed cheerfully.

Not on your life, Gryphon snapped.

Once O’Leary was ready to go, he approached the truck, only to find the Indian guy waiting there, nervously wringing his hands. “What -” he began haltingly, so scared by his own questions he looked nauseous. “ – how did you stop the truck? Are you really … are you actually telekinetic?”

Hugh grinned at him, flashing him the winning smile that got him on the cover of a couple of firefighters charity calendars. “Come on man. That shit doesn’t exist outside of comic books.”

You are a cruel man, Sylvio said.

The car accident fucked up their day, so O’Leary just drove him back to Clay’s house, where Shane was. They’d responded positively to the home exorcism request, although Clay was still wary about it. Shane wanted to know if he was up to doing it tonight, and Hugh was going to say no, but Gryphon insisted on a yes. He just took the time to clean up and take back control of his body before they left, changing his shirt since his shirt was speckled with blood. It was only after he’d done that that he discovered Hugh had gotten the phone number of the paramedic. When had he done that?

I work fast, Hugh admitted.

Supersonic speed fast. Damn, he was dangerous.

Gryphon was surprised to find himself starving, probably because ceding control and the use of psychokinesis seemed to burn through his energy reserves. He grabbed some kind of granola snack bar from Clay’s kitchen (it wasn’t very good, but it was food), and then went out to join them in the Spirit Guide’s van. Shane had painted that on the sides of the blue van and everything – it looked very professional.

He got in the back and laid down amidst the inactive equipment as Shane and Clay sat up front, and Shane told him a bit more about the couple who now owned the house, the Jones’s, and the known history of the house. The most interesting bit brought up by Shane was that there were several deaths at the house over its history, although none were murders – there were three suicides, though, one in 1939, another in 1956, and the last in ‘72. (Hanging, slashed wrists, and drug overdose, respectively). Shane was of the opinion that the suicide in ‘72 was most likely the source of the poltergeist, which was a possibility, but Clay said that wasn’t a sure thing, as perhaps the poltergeist shoved the other people into committing suicide. It was possible, but Gryphon tagged it as unlikely.

He napped until they got to the house, and he woke up the second Shane and Clay opened the back door to retrieve some equipment. Clay studied him skeptically and asked if something had happened while he was out with O’Leary, and he lied and said no, as he saw no reason to mention the car accident. It didn’t matter right now. (He’d already lied and said the scratches were from stumbling into a bramble bush. Very lame as lies went, but explained the uncovered, tiny scratches on his face.)

The house looked old and kind of imposing, a converted farmhouse that still had the vague shape of a barn, with a high ceiling and squared off walls, with wild roses creating a serpentine nest of high shadows against the walls, creeping under the window frames like they were trying to break in.

But he barely noticed the exterior. As soon as he was on the cracked stepping stones that made up the front walk, he felt it. The house – no, something in the house – was just seething with reflexive hate. It wanted everyone to go away and leave it alone; it wanted to be all by itself. There was fear under the anger, but it was mostly aimless rage.

Gryphon didn’t think he reacted to it, but he must have, as Shane and Clay, who were bracketing him on either side, asked, almost in unison, “Got something?” They then shared the embarrassed glance of actors who had stepped on each other’s line.

“Stay here,” he told them. “Somebody really doesn’t want visitors.”

“You see them?” Shane wondered.

“Not yet; they’re hiding in the house. But they know we’re here.” As if to emphasize that fact, Gryphon walked through a cold spot on his way to the front door, a patch like the arctic in the dead of winter. But although he convulsively shuddered, he continued on through it, unimpressed.

“Is it safe for you to go in alone?” Clay wondered, although both remained at the head of the walk. They both knew by now when he told them to stay put, he meant it, and they had to listen.

Gryphon scoffed before looking back at the pair of ghostbusters with a rueful smile. “I’m never alone.”

As soon as he got up to the door, he tried the knob – which was, of course, ice cold – and found the door wouldn’t open. “They give you the house key?”

“They said the house key doesn’t work,” Shane reported. “They had three different locksmiths over here, who claimed the key should work, but none of ‘em could do it.”

“I see. Holding the door shut.“ He turned back to the whitewashed door. “Not very creative, is it Mr. Poltergeist? Guys, open it up.”

They hardly needed any prompting – Ruby was right there on the edge of his consciousness, ready to take over and kick some ass. He’d told her to wait for it, but he didn’t know if she would. He could feel the surge of energy leave him as the door suddenly slammed open, thudding against a wall and shaking the pane in the nearest window.

As soon as he was inside the foyer, which was naked of everything save for a coat tree that looked like it had been there since the beginning of time, he could see his breath coming out in plumes, the air so cold it was almost crystalline. The door slammed behind him with a loud, tooth rattling bang, but Gryphon hardly glanced at it. “You have parlor tricks? So do we. Guys?”

All the doors inside the house slammed. Every door, from kitchen cabinet to master bedroom, slammed shut as if on cue, the closed ones throwing themselves open and banging off walls. Gryphon got a sense that the angry ghost was upstairs. “See? We could do this all day. You’re outnumbered, friend. There’s one of you, and over a half dozen of us. Why don’t you talk to me, instead of hiding?”

He headed for a wooden staircase that looked dusty and positively ancient, and as he stepped on the first stair, an old Bell canning jar came straight out of nowhere, flying towards his face. Oh no you don’t, prick, Ruby said in his mind, as the jar froze in midair, inches from his face. As Gryphon reached out and took the jar, which fell easily into his hand, Hugh said, See? Isn’t this psychokinetic shit cool?

Gryphon put the jar down on the step, and continued up the stairs. “Nice try, but let me remind you once again, I look like one person, but I’m actually a torch wielding mob in a handy economic package. So stop the bullshit and reveal yourself. You’ll have to anyways.”

But did he? As he came to the top of the stairs and saw that the whole upstairs hallways was covered with a glossy white coating of ice, as unnaturally smooth and even as if an artist had been up here trying to paint a snowscape, he wondered if a poltergeist could actually resist his pull. And what would happen if it did.