7

IT’S SO HARD TO MAKE A CONNECTION THESE DAYS

Cahill and Kevin both froze, dramatically so. Cahill’s body was leaning forward at an angle that should have been uncomfortable. Kevin was caught in a position that had been moving to back away slightly. It wasn’t as if time stopped—it was more as if their muscles were locked and contracted in some painfully unnatural fashion, their bodies straining but going nowhere.

Then… have you ever stood next to an active power line? There’s this invisible pressure against your skin, a vibration. Whatever began emanating from Cahill and Kevin was like that, except it wasn’t moving on air currents. The wave went straight past the one-way glass and through my nervous system; it sent me running out the door.

There was no one in the short hallway between the observation area and the interrogation room, and the latter wasn’t locked. I flung the door open and saw the forms attached to Cahill’s clipboard tearing loose and shooting up into the air as if sucked into some kind of vacuum. The power in the building went out, then came on again as emergency generators kicked in, hesitated, went out, and sputtered back on, so that there was a kind of retarded strobe light effect. I caught scattershot glimpses of a dozen sheets of paper floating above Kevin and Cahill, contorting and folding in on themselves until they looked like origami bats. As soon as their metamorphosis was complete, the paper bats began flapping their wings and flying around Kevin and Cahill hurricane-style, rustling frantically.

“What the hell?” Choo was frozen in the doorway behind me. As I moved closer, the paper bats began circling me, not gliding like paper airplanes but flapping like panicked animals while light and darkness struggled for control of the room. The paper edges of the artificial bats’ wings began making cuts in my skin as they brushed against my face and hands, trying to drive me back. Sig’s skin was harder than mine… Where was she? The clipboard came hurtling toward my face and I smacked it away with a forearm only to have it come back painfully against the side of my head. I caught a flash of the pen Kevin had given Cahill darting toward my left eye while the room was light, and I grabbed it out of the air as the room turned dark again.

Screw this. Cahill and Kevin still hadn’t moved, and I launched a round kick that cleared the edge of the table. It wasn’t textbook perfect, but I caught Cahill in the forehead and threw him backward violently. His chair tipped and he landed on the floor, hard. Pure instinct or not, the move severed the connection between Cahill and Kevin. The lights came back on with an audible clunk, and the clipboard dropped to the ground with a loud crack. The paper bats fluttered down after it.

Kevin slid down against his chair, boneless, and I caught him before he fell. He was unconscious, but his eyes were wide open and only showing the whites. Thin trails of saliva were visibly glistening below the corners of his mouth.

Cahill groaned.

“What happened?” Choo was reluctant to enter the room; he had only become a monster hunter after being briefly possessed by a geist, and he was in no hurry to repeat the experience.

I didn’t answer because I didn’t know. Kevin’s pulse was too fast, but I could also tell that it was slowing down. Then I set him down on the floor because Cahill was awake and coming to his feet. His fangs were bared and his eyes were wild and he was snarling. Ted’s not home right now. Leave a message and maybe he’ll call back later.

Cahill sprang forward, completely focused on Kevin. His jaw was pulled back so that his upper fangs were poised to tear flesh. His fingernails weren’t clawed, but his hands were extended as if they were. Cahill was stronger than me, so I stepped inside his reach and turned my block into a grab for Cahill’s lead wrist, moving in a waterwheel motion that was pulling the top part of his body instead of pushing against it, shifting my body weight into my hips, my hips into Cahill’s lower half, bending so that I was pulling him over the curve of my descending shoulder in a natural progression as his body pushed forward. At his speed, with his power, he went feet over head and landed flat on his back, hard.

Cahill tried to scrabble upright by putting his arms behind him, but I kicked a wrist out from under him and he fell onto his right side. Cahill went with it, turned all the way onto his right shoulder and swiveled so that he could grab my ankle with his left hand, but I yanked my ankle out of the way by knee-dropping onto his extended wrist. There were cracking sounds. He howled and shifted his weight from his side onto his stomach so that he could push off the ground. His mouth was open, his fangs still bared, and I brought both my hands and all of my weight onto the back of his head and slammed down hard.

Cahill’s fangs anchored in the floor. He tried to pull his face loose with just his neck muscles and couldn’t, then braced his right hand against the floor. That’s when the tiny part of Cahill’s brain that was still a detective heard a sound that it had heard many times before… the sound of the fire selector switch on Cahill’s own Glock 18.

The Glock I had just lifted from his side holster.

The Glock I was holding pointed at the side of his head.

If I’d been in a movie, I would have screwed the gun into the side of Cahill’s ear for dramatic emphasis, but personally, I prefer not to make it easy for opponents to disarm me.

Training and conditioning warred with vampire instinct until Cahill calmed down. “Mu’er fu’er!” he drooled before pulling his fangs loose with a pop.

“Kevin Kichida is under my protection,” I informed him.

Cahill spit whatever the floor tasted like out of his mouth while he pushed himself to his knees very, very slowly. An ordinary bullet in the side of his head wouldn’t kill him, but it would briefly immobilize him and give him the mother of all migraines. “That little bastard got inside my head!”

I’d figured that out, actually. The paper bats had been some kind of psychic projection of Cahill being a vampire.

“You tried to rape his head first,” I pointed out grimly.

“Hey!” Choo yelled. In his right hand was a retractable baton made out of some kind of highly durable plastic; it was fully extended and down by his side. The end of the baton had been sharpened to a point, and it glistened with a coating of God knows what. Choo’s left hand held a glass vial that he wouldn’t have had any problems getting through a metal detector. The odds were pretty high that it was filled with something that would make a small explosion if exposed to oxygen or impact. “I said, What the hell is going on?”

“He got inside my head,” Cahill repeated. He ground the words out of his mouth like they were broken glass.

“We just got another clue about whatever the hell is going on,” I informed Choo. “Kevin Kichida is an untrained psychic. A powerful one.”

“How do you know he’s untrained?” Choo asked doubtfully.

I indicated Cahill with my chin. “Because if Kevin was trained, Mr. Mindfuck over here would be the one drooling on the floor right now.”

The hallway outside was freezing, and not just because the building’s furnace had been hiccupping. Grey tendrils of mist were gathering in sudden pockets of cold. It made it hard to see who was standing by Sig in front of the door to the detectives’ work area, and I couldn’t smell anyone.

Which meant ghost. As I got closer, I could see that the spirit was a slightly tubby young guy with blond hair and small squarish glasses, dressed in nothing but shorts and a pale blue tank top. There were purpled strangulation marks on his throat left by strong fingers.

“This is Taylor,” Sig said solemnly. “I think he wants someone to solve his murder.”

Sig said this before demanding to know why I was carrying Kevin Kichida in my arms, so it was important to acknowledge Taylor fast and first. I nodded at that empty-eyed, expressionless face and said, “Hello.” I sure as hell wasn’t going to say, Pleased to meet you.

Sig must have sensed or seen Taylor the moment she entered the police station, and by encouraging Taylor to manifest fully in a visible form, Sig had invoked the Pax Arcana, the mass enchantment that prevents mortals from paying any heed to the supernatural. Anyone who approached the door to the interrogation area would see Taylor without seeing Taylor. The Pax would make them stop blankly in front of the door and forget why they had been about to try to go through it. Eventually, something else to do would occur to them and they would wander off.

The security cameras had stopped working as soon as Taylor began to manifest too.

The truth is, Sig is better at working in a team than I am. I had reacted to the immediate threat, but she took a moment, looked at the big picture, and moved to cover our group’s collective ass.

“What happened to Kevin?” Sig demanded.

I stuck to the short version. “He’s in some kind of psychic coma. We need to get him out of here.”

Sig looked at me. Then she looked at Cahill behind me, who had torn clothing and visible injuries. The bruises would fade soon, but at the moment, they stood out dramatically from the combination of pale skin and blood that was a little darker and thicker than it should be. But Sig didn’t waste the time we didn’t have. “Follow me and Taylor.”

And Sig walked out the door. Taylor followed her without giving me a backward glance.

“Get Kevin’s personal effects and bring them to us,” I said to Cahill as I shifted Kevin’s weight in my arms.

“How was I supposed to know—” Cahill began.

“Not now.” I walked after Sig. “But if you can still say a prayer, you might want to offer one up that this kid doesn’t die.”

Sig, Taylor, and I walked through the police department, and the only person who gave us a glance was Molly, who had been making her way back from the bathroom through the dark. In fact, people actively avoided looking at us and moved out of our way, though they didn’t realize they were doing so, and no one saw us exit the building. They were too busy checking the computers and cell phones that had just gone out of commission again.

When we got outside the police station, Sig turned and looked at the ghost she had gotten to fully manifest, then looked at Kevin in my arms. Seeing that look, I wondered what I would do if Sig ever decided that she had a greater obligation to the dead than the living.

On that day at least, I didn’t find out. “I’ll come back soon, I promise,” Sig whispered to the echo of a boy named Taylor, and then she led the way to Choo’s van.