“Holy shit!”
I’ll give you three guesses who said that. Wol, Hwari, or me.
Ghosts are the most common of the supernatural phenomena. Walking down the street, taking the ride on a bus, even underground by the subway tracks—especially the subway tracks—they were everywhere. And as such, they varied in power. Some of them were weak; too much sunlight exposure, too much time between now and their deaths without any chance for them to feed in between. One could tell by how bold they were. The weaker ones were faded; their features mostly blurred and nearly translucent in the backdrop of whatever setting they were in. The stronger ones were thicker, more real, and more substantial.
This one was so full of color, I nearly mistook her for a human.
First of all, she wore glasses. Ghosts lose a lot of themselves when they die, usually in the order of least important to most important. It’s when they start losing clothing that you have to worry about them turning into other things, because clothes are a big part of what makes people human. At least in New York, it is. Speaking of which, it wasn’t just the glasses. Her dark skin, dark eyes, the fitted button-down shirt, the indigo skinny jeans: the ghost’s sense of self was strong.
It was even more prominent when she began to talk.
“You!” She whirled around, her attention locking onto me. “You can see me?”
“Uh, what?” I looked to Wol for help.
But my feline familiar had his eyes squinted, studying the ghost. In fact, Hwari’s head was pointed towards the ghost too. They weren’t on guard as much as they seemed to be wary.
The ghost did a double-take. “Oh, my god. Are those, are they… familiars? Y-you’re one of those guys. A Practitioner.”
“Huh?” My brain wasn’t working fast enough.
She pushed off the ground, gliding over to me. “You have to help me. Please! They’re going to get me and I can’t—” She stopped. “Wait, I know you. You’re—”
The door to the building she just came out of slammed open, and two guys came out.
“Over there! Bro, by that guy!” the bigger of the two said. He wore a beanie and flannel, his face covered by the huge camera he held up to one eye.
“Bitch!” his buddy said. He was leaner, but not scrawny. The guy wore nothing but a hoodie, but it failed to hide the time he spent in the gym. Or horse growth hormones.
They couldn’t have been much older than I was. College students, maybe. But they were both taller, bigger, and definitely gave me the sense that they knew exactly what they were doing in a place where they were supposed to be. Conversely, I had no idea what the hell was going on. The hoodie-wearing gym rat brandished a wooden stick, the handle wrapped in white bandages.
The hoodie guy fixed the sunglasses on his face. “Hey kid, move.”
And without warning, he wound up and swung the stick like a baseball bat.
“Gahk!” I ducked out of the way, backpedaling on my hands and feet.
The ghost girl tried to jump out of the way, but her body froze mid-hop. At the same time, I felt a freaking arcane working come to life from the stick. The handle seemed to glow, lighting up the bandages, and it was like the ghost girl was sucked into the space where the stick was going to be. Her scream died in her throat as the stick pounded into her stomach, knocking the air out of her.
“Got her!” the guy yelled. But he didn’t stop there. He took the stick and swung it down at her. The ghost girl curled up into a ball, receiving the blows on her back, legs, and everywhere else.
Finally recovering my wits, I pushed the guy away.
If I had any suspicions about the guy lifting iron and eating wheaties for breakfast, that doubt was gone the instant my hands made contact with his pecs and stomach. Rock hard. I’d been beat up by kids who weighed less than this guy’s freaking bicep curl warm-up reps.
He punched me in the face.
The good news? He missed my chin and punched my eye. Meaning that I was conscious. The bad news was that I was conscious, which meant that I was in pain.
“WHAT THE FUCK?!”
I stumbled back, clutching at my eyes, still trying to make sense of just what the fuck was going on. But the pain brought back memories. Bad ones. The last time I’d been in physical pain like this was a month ago. And things began to surface in my mind; things that had inflicted that pain on me and what the stakes had been back then. The buried instincts had been dormant, but they burst forth at the very sign of violence.
I brought out my knife and pointed it at them.
The man froze, his eye on the knife.
“You fucking serious with this shit?” He had a vague Italian-ish accent.
Queens? Brooklyn? Staten Island, maybe? I didn’t care.
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“I don’t know who you are, and frankly, right now, I don’t fucking care,” I snarled, anger threatening to turn the words into chants of power. “Back the fuck away from the girl. Now.”
“You don’t know who the fuck you’re dealing with, kid. I’m going to—”
“Joe, wait.”
The cameraman came rushing up to us, putting one hand in front of his friend—Joe—to stop him. He didn’t let go of the camera. In fact, it was pointed right at me.
“We need to go. Now.”
“What?” Joe’s face twisted in anger, and veins stood out against his neck. “You fucking serious? We chased this girl all the way here and—”
“JOE!”
Something in the cameraman’s voice made Joe stop. They shared a look, and Joe lowered his stick, confusion turning to understanding.
The cameraman turned around and began to slow-jog away.
Joe’s twisted expression turned dark, and he spat on the ground near my foot. “You mother fucker. I see you again, I’m going to fuck you up. You understand me? YOU FUCKING UNDERSTAND ME?!” he roared.
“JOE! FUCKING COME ON, DUDE! COME ON!”
Joe spat one more time and ran after his friend.
I frowned, lowering the knife and sharing a look with Wol.
“What the fuck?” I muttered.
“Jain, the girl.”
She was still on the floor, shivering.
“C-cold,” she muttered.
She was starting to fade away.
“Oh shit,” I knelt next to her. “Hey, c’mon. They’re gone now. Oh shit, oh shit. Hwari, I need a circle.”
“N-NO!” She regained a bit of her color, the focus returning to her eyes. “No circle. H-have to let me go.”
“Let you go? Ghosts don’t come back when they fade. They… they disappear,” I said. “Is that what you want?”
“Not… a…” she trailed off, clenching her stomach and curling up tighter. The color around her clothes was bleeding out. “O-ow. Owww, owwww. No, I’m ok. I’m talking to him right now. He’s—” Her mouth moved, but no words came out.
“Hey, focus!” I snapped my fingers and looked at Hwari.
‘Should I draw the Circle, Caller?’
I bit my lower lip, then shook my head. “No circle.” I turned back to the girl. “Hey, I need you to focus. Just what the hell were those guys? Why were they chasing after you? Were they human? Just what happened here just now?”
She shivered, opening her eyes again, then squinting, like she couldn’t see me, who was right in front of her. “Can’t explain. Not now. Not enough time.”
“Let me draw the circle then,” I growled. “I can preserve you.”
Suddenly, her whole being just blinked out. Zip. Pop. Nothing. My heart jumped for a second, and she blinked back in like it hadn’t even happened. The ghost sucked in a breath, gasping for it.
“Abandoned building, three blocks down. Near the water. Next to the pier. First floor,” she stammered out.
“What?”
“Abandoned building, dammit! I’m in the middle of—yes, I’m talking to, just let me—I got this! Ok?!”
“Uh,” I gave the side-eye to Wol. “Is this ghost having some existential crisis?” Then, almost jokingly, I said, “Holy shit, is she talking to God?”
Wol gave me a flat look.
A petty part of me wanted to threaten him somehow. Maybe by threatening to stay in bed again tomorrow, which was the furthest thing from my mind at the moment, but the girl started talking to me again.
“There’s an abandoned building near the pier. First floor. Meet us there. We can explain everything there.”
Then she popped out.
I frowned. “What the fuck was that?”
“We shouldn’t get involved in this,” Wol spat immediately. He hissed at the ground where she had been. “I’m getting a bad feeling about this.”
“I…” I trailed off, trying to think. “Kind of agree, actually.”
Wol knew me too well. “Elaborate on the kind of.”
“It smells bad. Stinks to hell. Those guys chasing her, I don’t think they were Practitioners, Wol.”
Wol tilted his head to the side.
I walked over to the wall and picked up my backpack, brushing it off. I bent down a little, and Wol hopped into it. Hwari bobbed above the shadows on the sidewalk, waiting for me to dictate which direction.
“But you are going to listen to the ghost despite it being a trick,” Wol said dryly.
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
I sucked in a breath. “Because as shitty as it sounds, something was off about her. And I think she knew us. And those guys? Mortals. Not dabblers. Not anything else. Mortals.”
“That does not make sense, Jain,” Wo lsaid.
“They saw the girl and you. Well, one of them could see you. The other? The guy with the camera?” I began walking.
Hwari followed. ‘The one with the black box on his eye?’
“That one,” I confirmed. “I don’t think he was seeing you two at all. I think he was looking at you guys through the camera. In fact… I don’t think the other guy could see you two on his own either.”
“That is… mortal technomancy can’t… it is incompatible,” Wol managed.
“Look, I don’t have any better idea than you. I’m just shooting darts at the wall. Random darts.” I turned the corner and felt the cool breeze of the Hudson River from blocks away. I continued walking. “Let’s organize this then. A ghost girl comes running through the wall, asking for help. Two guys come. One of them is either A. Trying to record a ghost with a camera which is impossible to my knowledge, or B. Using it to see her. Which one is more likely?”
“…There have been cases of mortal technology being imbued with workings, either with purpose or without. Either way, a tool originally used to observe being imbued so that it could observe what mortals could not…” Wol sighed. “It is not outside the realm of possibility, Practitioner.”
“And the other guy had sunglasses on. In the middle of the night. What does that tell you?” We turned another corner. I spotted the abandoned building in the distance and began to make a beeline for it.
“What are you trying to say, Jain?” Wol said, tugging on our connection to signal me to slow down.
I slowed down my steps. “I’m not done making my points yet. The buff guy? That stick was imbued. You felt that right?”
“It was enchanted with a working.”
“Mortals running around with enchanted tools, hunting ghosts. That doesn’t strike you as fishy?”
“It’s more fishy that a few hours ago, you wanted nothing more than to stay in bed.”
I swallowed. “Yeah… well… I can’t tell you that this new burst of energy will last. But for now…” I looked at the fence, looking for an opening. I found one, and barely squeezed through it. Taking out my flashlight, I lit my way, looking for glass shards or sharp metal sticks that I might step on. “That wasn’t a ghost they were hunting, was it?”
“Ghosts do not breathe,” Wol confirmed.
“And most ghosts wouldn’t curl up into a ball and yell out ‘ow’ for that long,” I panted.
All of a sudden, we were in front of the abandoned building.
It had big metal doors and half-finished walls. Most of the broken-down sections that had been abandoned in the building process had wooden boards with tarps plastered over them. Most likely a luxury apartment-to-be, except maybe they ran into a block with the city permits. Or ran out of funding. Either way, construction was on hold for now.
There was no one else here.
“Those are not good reasons to help,” Wol stated.
“I know, I have another.”
“Which is?”
Hwari perked up from the ground to my eye level to listen.
I swallowed. My mouth was dry, so there was nothing. It was just from nervousness.
“She asked for help,” I said. “And I want to.”
Wol didn’t say anything to that.
And being depended on made me feel something again.
That I mattered.
I shoved open the metal doors and walked in on two kids my age sitting on the floor. They had multiple flashlights crowded around the place. There were dozens of things on the floor, and I recognized the signs of a working. Chalk, circles, drawings, symbols, granola bar wrappers, and wet sandwich baggies.
The bigger of the two—a guy—jumped to his feet, putting his hands up like he was ready to fight. I recognized the smaller of the two. She sat with her back leaning against a pillar, sipping from those huge tumblers with the winged-bear-king logo on it.
“You came,” she said, her voice more real than the last time I heard it. “Thank you.” Her hands were placed over her stomach, and she winced as she said it.
“Well, it was right around the corner,” I made eye contact with the guy.
I froze, recognizing him.
I peered at the girl, pointing my flashlight at her. With real colors on her, I recognized her too.
“Kevin Sloan,” I whispered.
“Hey,” he said gruffly.
“Jain,” The girl—the same freaking girl I saved (along with Kevin Sloan, of course) from the fire at school—said. “We need your help.”