RangerWickett
Legend
Halloween
Scarpedin feels an odd idea in his mind. Wouldn’t it be great, he thinks, if he stopped firing the gun and tried to see if he could aim the barrel at his face? He shouldn’t pull the trigger, of course, but right now it’s much more important that he tries to see if he can aim his gun at his own face. Thankfully, he won’t have to worry if anyone comes near him. They’re his friends.
Robert glances over his shoulder, wondering what the hell Scarpedin is doing, but he realizes he doesn’t have time to worry right now. “Marie,” he says, “something’s wrong with Scarpedin. Can you fix that?”
He senses Marie’s acknowledgment, but he’s busy trying to keep track of the dangers around him. The dark-skinned British telepath has just run past him and beyond the wreckage of the Cadillac toward Scarpedin. Inside the burning car, none of the Rastafarians are moving, and their leader is lying on the ground beside Robert and Dr. Gomez, weakly trying to staunch the flow of blood from his jugular. The doctor seems to be stunned by being so close to a dying man he can’t help, and Robert wishes he had time to console the man.
Just then, however, a woman walks around the back side of the smoking wreck that was the Cadillac, stopping ten feet away from Robert. Short and blonde in a sleeveless dress, she nevertheless looks physically imposing, and she holds a silvery sword pointed at them. Robert, who thinks she looks sort of like an older Renee Zellweger (but in my mind she looks like Denise Robinson, there on the left, Dextra on these boards and business manager for the ENnies), shrugs dismissively as he drops his stun gun and pulls out his pistol. He fires a shot clean into her chest.
She barely flinches, and then charges.
Meanwhile, Scarpedin keeps flinching every time he puts the barrel of the mini-gun to his face. The metal is really hot, and he’s starting to think this wasn’t such a good idea. He sees a guy approaching who looks like Denzel Washington, and is mildly curious why the guy is reaching for the trigger of the mini-gun, but just then he gets fed up with burning himself.
“Hey,” he says, tilting the gun’s barrel awkwardly toward the man’s face, “does this thing feel really hot to you?”
The man pulls away out of reach of the gun, then glares intently at Scarpedin. It’s then that Scarpedin realizes he should close his eyes and stand still. That’s probably the best thing for him to do. For reasons he can’t figure out, though, a primal part of him forces out a mutter – “f*cking, cheating elves” – while the rest of his body obeys the suggestion.
Then he hears, “Foolish man,” as Marie chides him.
His mind starts to clear as the voodoo priestess imposes herself between his mind and the telepath’s will. Scarpedin realizes just in time that the man is pointing a pistol at the back of his head, and he ducks to the side as the gun goes off next to his ear. For a moment he considers trying to use the mini-gun on the guy, but decides after nearly blowing his own head off it’s time to go back to the old stand-by. He drops the mini-gun with a heavy clatter, then draws his sword.
The British telepath pulls a silenced pistol, but as he tries to fire it, Scarpedin comes in swinging.
Thirty feet away near the morgue loading dock, Robert takes a sword to his arm as he again fires at the blonde woman, again to no effect. He bites down his pain and lashes out with his straight razor. The woman, not expecting the attack, gets slashed across her cheek. She and Robert back away, each clutching their wounds.
“Ow,” Robert says, slipping into his helpless façade. “Hey, don’t hurt me, okay? What’s going on-?”
He was hoping to get her off guard, but she isn’t waiting. She lunges at him, misses, then redoubles her lunge and makes a wide swing, slashing Robert on his thigh. He curses and tries to go for her throat, but she kicks away and parries his attack, managing to slash him across his left forearm as she retreats.
Robert is feeling desperate. He looks down at Dr. Gomez for help, but the man is insanely enough trying to stop the bleeding from the fallen Rastafarian’s neck. He looks away to Scarpedin, just in time to see him slash horizontally at the waist of the telepath. His sword goes straight through the man, but the man simply vanishes, leaving just wisps behind. Scarpedin is preoccupied poking at the ground with his sword.
Robert yells for him to help, then backs away, trying to keep his distance from the swordswoman. She chases after him, and he runs, trying to head to the other side of the wreckage of the Cadillac. He manages to stay ahead of her, and when he’s about thirty feet ahead of her he looks back and sees that she has stopped. Back at the loading dock, the door to the morgue opens inexplicably, then shuts. The blonde woman glances at Robert, then back to the door, and then she makes a run for it.
The brief runaround, though, has given Scarpedin the time he needs to set the mini-gun back up. He pulls down on the trigger, and sprays the woman with the better part of fifty bullets. One moment she’s completely out in the open, and then she’s torn to bits.
From the other side of the ramp of the loading dock, Dr. Gomez stands up briefly, sees what’s left of the woman, then gulps.
Robert trots over, a bit incensed. “What do you think you were doing, helping that guy while I was getting hacked to pieces?”
Dr. Gomez smiles incongruously. “I thought you might want someone to interrogate after the fight was over. Since, y’know, you killed everyone else.”
He sounds like he’s joking when he says it, but Robert chalks it up to him being a mortician. Robert shakes his head, trying to get a handle on what just happened.
“Wait,” he says, “I saw someone open the door to the morgue.” He looks at Scarpedin. “Where’d the other guy go?”
Scarpedin shrugs. “I cut him in half, and he disintegrated.”
Robert cocks his head. “Is that something that normally happens?”
Scarpedin shrugs. “Eh, I’m a little rusty.”
Robert bites his lip, unsure whether it’s worth asking Scarpedin questions ever again. “Marie? Where’d the guy go? Is he invisible?”
Marie’s voice sounds woozy. “The long shadow man, he stunned me, then made your eyes not see him.”
Robert rolls his hand impatiently. “You could’ve just said ‘yes.’ Okay, Scarpedin, stay here with the doctor. I’m going in.”
Scarpedin shrugs. “Whatever man. Hope you don’t shoot yourself.”
Robert hurries inside the morgue, trying to be stealthy, but he hears someone running and sees the interior door swinging closed as if someone just headed into the main hospital. Robert is about to give chase when he reconsiders, wondering if that’s just a mental trick to make him go the wrong way.
Then he sees Terry.
Robert Black is no stranger to corpses – he’s made a few, after all – but Terry is the first person he might have called a friend who he has seen dead. There is of course the entry wound just off-center of his forehead, but that is almost clean compared to the gore on his chest. It looks like someone took a saw and tore through his ribs to his internal organs, and left a crater in the middle. For a moment, Robert feels shock, and then he realizes Terry’s heart has been cut out of his chest.
He grabs the bracelet off Terry’s wrist, tucks it into his pocket, and runs for the loading dock. He shouts as he’s pushing open the door to the back lot, “He’s on the run. We need a car!”
In the middle of the back lot, stopped between Scarpedin’s parked motorcycle and the burning wreckage of the Rastafarians’ Cadillac, is a police car. Dr. Gomez is sitting in the back seat, and Scarpedin standing next to the open driver’s door. The cop is on the ground, handcuffed and asleep.
“You have a police car,” Robert says. He somehow manages not to make it a question as he forces down the rational part of his mind and just accepts what he sees. “That’s great! How’d you get it?”
Scarpedin shrugs. “Hurry up man. I’m gonna take my bike. Let’s catch this mind-f*cking f*cker.”
Before leaving, Robert is guided by Marie to pick up an amulet that was worn by the swordswoman. It’s a bit bloody, but Robert takes it, then hops into the police car. He convinces Scarpedin not to split up, and the man takes a few seconds to dump all the weapons and ammo on his bike into the trunk of the cruiser. He also grabs the suitcase the Rastafarian leader had and puts it in the back seat, all while Robert watches him with barely-masked impatience. Only when he’s done consolidating the loot into one vehicle does Scarpedin take a seat in shotgun, and as they drive off he is trying to set up the mini-gun so he can shoot out the window. Dr. Gomez just sits in the back seat with a strange curiosity on his face, and Robert doesn’t have time to tell the man to get out.
They speed off, Marie guiding them after the SUV that the British telepath has stolen, and it’s only a few blocks out from the hospital when the police cruiser catches up with the slower SUV. The telepath must sense them coming, because he tries to get into Robert’s mind, but Marie protects them. As Robert pulls up alongside the SUV and Scarpedin lines up for a point-blank shot from his mini-gun, the SUV brakes hard and dozens of red hot bullets chew through empty space, tearing chunks out of the curbside. Thankfully they’re not near any residential areas.
Robert takes in the lay of the road, and sees there’s no easy way for the SUV to get around them without going into a ditch or a concrete median, so he turns and stops the car so it is sideways across two lanes, with Scarpedin and his mini-gun facing the oncoming vehicle. The telepath’s car slows quickly and tries to cut across the median of the road, but even and SUV can’t get over the barrier. It crashes to a stop, presenting its passenger side to Scarpedin’s aim.
Scarpedin fires, tearing the SUV to pieces. It starts to flame, and Robert tells him to stop shooting. They don’t know why the telepath stole Terry’s heart, and he doesn’t want to risk ruining everything by having Terry’s heart destroyed in an explosion.
Scarpedin gets out of the police cruiser, holding a police shotgun up as he rushes for the crashed SUV. Robert keeps his distance, covering the area with his pistol, hoping to make sure the telepath doesn’t make a run for it. Scarpedin gets to the SUV and pulls open the obliterated passenger door, seeing that the driver’s door is hanging open, and there’s no body. In the back seat he sees a bloody duffel bag, and he grabs it quickly and runs to get away from the car, which he expects to explode because that’s what always happens in the movies.
Scarpedin shouts that the telepath got away, and Robert guesses the man must have used magic to turn invisible again. He gets as close as he dares to the driver’s side of the burning car, spotted a wretched trail of bloody footprints, heading toward the nearby ditch. In the meager light of street lamps and flashlights, Robert thinks he might be able to track the telepath, but while he’s in the process of looking for blood in the grass, a car approaches and slows down as its driver sees the wreck in the middle of the road.
Both Robert and Scarpedin can see the driver dialing on a cel phone while simultaneously turning his car around and getting the hell away. They have to content themselves with having gotten Terry’s heart back and at least wounding the telepath, and they high-tail it before the cops show up. The SUV never explodes.
They’re too worried to head back to the hospital, which police will no doubt be heading to, so they have to leave Scarpedin’s bike behind. Robert picks a direction and drives.
Scarpedin is in the back seat with Dr. Gomez, a bunch of voodoo supplies, and the dufflebag that holds Terry’s heart.
“Marie?” Robert asks, “what were those guys up to? Why did they want Terry’s heart?”
The voice of Marie replies, “If I could ask their spirits, I could know better, but the tools in this case, they have been prepared for two types of rituals.”
Robert says, “Make your best guess. We’re not going back.”
“One, child,” Marie intones, “would take the boy’s heart and destroy it, and so destroy his spirit so he could not rise again. And the other, by the blessings of the loa, is the same ritual we were to perform, to bind the boy’s spirit.”
“Sh*t,” Scarpedin says. “What did they want with Terry? Terry, man, talk to me.”
“I have not yet performed the ritual,” Marie says. “Help me, foolish man.”
Robert glances back occasionally as he drives. Scarpedin is holding feathers and strange sticks in odd positions, and even Dr. Gomez gets involved, repeating a Creole prayer over the bloody heart in the dufflebag. Long minutes pass, and Robert finds himself lost in the ruined nightscape of New Orleans. It is when he is driving through a neighborhood that looks completely deserted, still with no power from the hurricane two months ago, that Marie whispers into his ear.
“Child,” she says, “hand us the bracelet, and pray.”
Robert hands Scarpedin the bracelet.
The car begins to slow, and its headlights flicker. The engine does not gutter, but it feels like the vehicle is struggling to keep moving. The air becomes thick with the smell of rot and the sea, and suddenly all the lights in the car go dead, and Robert is driving blind in an impenetrable darkness. He almost presses on the brake, but a hesitation grips him.
And then, just as suddenly, the lights are back on, and the car seems to surge with speed. All down the road, street lights burst on, stretching away, pointing out the path to take, and in the corner of Robert’s eye he thinks he can see short people watching from inside the ruined houses along the road. Robert presses on the gas, nervous regardless of if they’re ghosts, fey, or just squatters.
“Um, Terry?” he asks.
There’s nothing.
He looks back. Scarpedin has a smug smile on his face.
“How’s it feel to be dead?” Scarpedin asks.
Robert frowns and grabs the bracelet out of Scarpedin’s hand, and the moment he touches the bracelet he can see Terry sitting in the passenger seat next to him, casually spectral, his arm hanging around the head rest as he turns to reply to Scarpedin. Terry looks at Robert and smiles.
“Holy-,” Terry starts. “Robert, god damn man, you guys did it. I mean, I’m dead, but I can see you again. This is amazing.”
Robert gives Terry a hint of a smile. “Good to have you back. We’ll have time to rave about how cool we are that we brought you back from the brink of the beyond later. Right now, Terry, let me know: can you do the whole planeshift thing to Gaia?”
“Yeah, pretty sure,” Terry says. “Why is that so important?”
Robert glances at Dr. Gomez in the back seat. “Oh, no reason. I just wanted to make sure you still had your magic. Scarpedin, talk to Terry for a bit.”
Robert hands the bracelet back to Scarpedin – he can no longer see or hear Terry – and then he turns his attention to Dr. Gomez. While Scarpedin barrages Terry’s ghost with questions about the afterlife, Robert drives and talks to Dr. Gomez, thanking him for helping them stop the criminals and convincing the man it’d be a good idea to keep helping them, especially since Robert’s bleeding pretty badly from multiple sword wounds. Dr. Gomez agrees, and he tells them they can come to his house for the evening.
Robert listens to Scarpedin interrogate Terry as he drives to Dr. Gomez’s house, but his mind is busy planning how best to take revenge on Adrien Lee.
It’s nearly 3 a.m. The streets are nearly empty, but nevertheless, it’s odd that every stop light they come to is green.
Scarpedin feels an odd idea in his mind. Wouldn’t it be great, he thinks, if he stopped firing the gun and tried to see if he could aim the barrel at his face? He shouldn’t pull the trigger, of course, but right now it’s much more important that he tries to see if he can aim his gun at his own face. Thankfully, he won’t have to worry if anyone comes near him. They’re his friends.
Robert glances over his shoulder, wondering what the hell Scarpedin is doing, but he realizes he doesn’t have time to worry right now. “Marie,” he says, “something’s wrong with Scarpedin. Can you fix that?”
He senses Marie’s acknowledgment, but he’s busy trying to keep track of the dangers around him. The dark-skinned British telepath has just run past him and beyond the wreckage of the Cadillac toward Scarpedin. Inside the burning car, none of the Rastafarians are moving, and their leader is lying on the ground beside Robert and Dr. Gomez, weakly trying to staunch the flow of blood from his jugular. The doctor seems to be stunned by being so close to a dying man he can’t help, and Robert wishes he had time to console the man.
Just then, however, a woman walks around the back side of the smoking wreck that was the Cadillac, stopping ten feet away from Robert. Short and blonde in a sleeveless dress, she nevertheless looks physically imposing, and she holds a silvery sword pointed at them. Robert, who thinks she looks sort of like an older Renee Zellweger (but in my mind she looks like Denise Robinson, there on the left, Dextra on these boards and business manager for the ENnies), shrugs dismissively as he drops his stun gun and pulls out his pistol. He fires a shot clean into her chest.
She barely flinches, and then charges.
Meanwhile, Scarpedin keeps flinching every time he puts the barrel of the mini-gun to his face. The metal is really hot, and he’s starting to think this wasn’t such a good idea. He sees a guy approaching who looks like Denzel Washington, and is mildly curious why the guy is reaching for the trigger of the mini-gun, but just then he gets fed up with burning himself.
“Hey,” he says, tilting the gun’s barrel awkwardly toward the man’s face, “does this thing feel really hot to you?”
The man pulls away out of reach of the gun, then glares intently at Scarpedin. It’s then that Scarpedin realizes he should close his eyes and stand still. That’s probably the best thing for him to do. For reasons he can’t figure out, though, a primal part of him forces out a mutter – “f*cking, cheating elves” – while the rest of his body obeys the suggestion.
Then he hears, “Foolish man,” as Marie chides him.
His mind starts to clear as the voodoo priestess imposes herself between his mind and the telepath’s will. Scarpedin realizes just in time that the man is pointing a pistol at the back of his head, and he ducks to the side as the gun goes off next to his ear. For a moment he considers trying to use the mini-gun on the guy, but decides after nearly blowing his own head off it’s time to go back to the old stand-by. He drops the mini-gun with a heavy clatter, then draws his sword.
The British telepath pulls a silenced pistol, but as he tries to fire it, Scarpedin comes in swinging.
Thirty feet away near the morgue loading dock, Robert takes a sword to his arm as he again fires at the blonde woman, again to no effect. He bites down his pain and lashes out with his straight razor. The woman, not expecting the attack, gets slashed across her cheek. She and Robert back away, each clutching their wounds.
“Ow,” Robert says, slipping into his helpless façade. “Hey, don’t hurt me, okay? What’s going on-?”
He was hoping to get her off guard, but she isn’t waiting. She lunges at him, misses, then redoubles her lunge and makes a wide swing, slashing Robert on his thigh. He curses and tries to go for her throat, but she kicks away and parries his attack, managing to slash him across his left forearm as she retreats.
Robert is feeling desperate. He looks down at Dr. Gomez for help, but the man is insanely enough trying to stop the bleeding from the fallen Rastafarian’s neck. He looks away to Scarpedin, just in time to see him slash horizontally at the waist of the telepath. His sword goes straight through the man, but the man simply vanishes, leaving just wisps behind. Scarpedin is preoccupied poking at the ground with his sword.
Robert yells for him to help, then backs away, trying to keep his distance from the swordswoman. She chases after him, and he runs, trying to head to the other side of the wreckage of the Cadillac. He manages to stay ahead of her, and when he’s about thirty feet ahead of her he looks back and sees that she has stopped. Back at the loading dock, the door to the morgue opens inexplicably, then shuts. The blonde woman glances at Robert, then back to the door, and then she makes a run for it.
The brief runaround, though, has given Scarpedin the time he needs to set the mini-gun back up. He pulls down on the trigger, and sprays the woman with the better part of fifty bullets. One moment she’s completely out in the open, and then she’s torn to bits.
From the other side of the ramp of the loading dock, Dr. Gomez stands up briefly, sees what’s left of the woman, then gulps.
Robert trots over, a bit incensed. “What do you think you were doing, helping that guy while I was getting hacked to pieces?”
Dr. Gomez smiles incongruously. “I thought you might want someone to interrogate after the fight was over. Since, y’know, you killed everyone else.”
He sounds like he’s joking when he says it, but Robert chalks it up to him being a mortician. Robert shakes his head, trying to get a handle on what just happened.
“Wait,” he says, “I saw someone open the door to the morgue.” He looks at Scarpedin. “Where’d the other guy go?”
Scarpedin shrugs. “I cut him in half, and he disintegrated.”
Robert cocks his head. “Is that something that normally happens?”
Scarpedin shrugs. “Eh, I’m a little rusty.”
Robert bites his lip, unsure whether it’s worth asking Scarpedin questions ever again. “Marie? Where’d the guy go? Is he invisible?”
Marie’s voice sounds woozy. “The long shadow man, he stunned me, then made your eyes not see him.”
Robert rolls his hand impatiently. “You could’ve just said ‘yes.’ Okay, Scarpedin, stay here with the doctor. I’m going in.”
Scarpedin shrugs. “Whatever man. Hope you don’t shoot yourself.”
Robert hurries inside the morgue, trying to be stealthy, but he hears someone running and sees the interior door swinging closed as if someone just headed into the main hospital. Robert is about to give chase when he reconsiders, wondering if that’s just a mental trick to make him go the wrong way.
Then he sees Terry.
Robert Black is no stranger to corpses – he’s made a few, after all – but Terry is the first person he might have called a friend who he has seen dead. There is of course the entry wound just off-center of his forehead, but that is almost clean compared to the gore on his chest. It looks like someone took a saw and tore through his ribs to his internal organs, and left a crater in the middle. For a moment, Robert feels shock, and then he realizes Terry’s heart has been cut out of his chest.
He grabs the bracelet off Terry’s wrist, tucks it into his pocket, and runs for the loading dock. He shouts as he’s pushing open the door to the back lot, “He’s on the run. We need a car!”
In the middle of the back lot, stopped between Scarpedin’s parked motorcycle and the burning wreckage of the Rastafarians’ Cadillac, is a police car. Dr. Gomez is sitting in the back seat, and Scarpedin standing next to the open driver’s door. The cop is on the ground, handcuffed and asleep.
“You have a police car,” Robert says. He somehow manages not to make it a question as he forces down the rational part of his mind and just accepts what he sees. “That’s great! How’d you get it?”
Scarpedin shrugs. “Hurry up man. I’m gonna take my bike. Let’s catch this mind-f*cking f*cker.”
* * *
Before leaving, Robert is guided by Marie to pick up an amulet that was worn by the swordswoman. It’s a bit bloody, but Robert takes it, then hops into the police car. He convinces Scarpedin not to split up, and the man takes a few seconds to dump all the weapons and ammo on his bike into the trunk of the cruiser. He also grabs the suitcase the Rastafarian leader had and puts it in the back seat, all while Robert watches him with barely-masked impatience. Only when he’s done consolidating the loot into one vehicle does Scarpedin take a seat in shotgun, and as they drive off he is trying to set up the mini-gun so he can shoot out the window. Dr. Gomez just sits in the back seat with a strange curiosity on his face, and Robert doesn’t have time to tell the man to get out.
They speed off, Marie guiding them after the SUV that the British telepath has stolen, and it’s only a few blocks out from the hospital when the police cruiser catches up with the slower SUV. The telepath must sense them coming, because he tries to get into Robert’s mind, but Marie protects them. As Robert pulls up alongside the SUV and Scarpedin lines up for a point-blank shot from his mini-gun, the SUV brakes hard and dozens of red hot bullets chew through empty space, tearing chunks out of the curbside. Thankfully they’re not near any residential areas.
Robert takes in the lay of the road, and sees there’s no easy way for the SUV to get around them without going into a ditch or a concrete median, so he turns and stops the car so it is sideways across two lanes, with Scarpedin and his mini-gun facing the oncoming vehicle. The telepath’s car slows quickly and tries to cut across the median of the road, but even and SUV can’t get over the barrier. It crashes to a stop, presenting its passenger side to Scarpedin’s aim.
Scarpedin fires, tearing the SUV to pieces. It starts to flame, and Robert tells him to stop shooting. They don’t know why the telepath stole Terry’s heart, and he doesn’t want to risk ruining everything by having Terry’s heart destroyed in an explosion.
Scarpedin gets out of the police cruiser, holding a police shotgun up as he rushes for the crashed SUV. Robert keeps his distance, covering the area with his pistol, hoping to make sure the telepath doesn’t make a run for it. Scarpedin gets to the SUV and pulls open the obliterated passenger door, seeing that the driver’s door is hanging open, and there’s no body. In the back seat he sees a bloody duffel bag, and he grabs it quickly and runs to get away from the car, which he expects to explode because that’s what always happens in the movies.
Scarpedin shouts that the telepath got away, and Robert guesses the man must have used magic to turn invisible again. He gets as close as he dares to the driver’s side of the burning car, spotted a wretched trail of bloody footprints, heading toward the nearby ditch. In the meager light of street lamps and flashlights, Robert thinks he might be able to track the telepath, but while he’s in the process of looking for blood in the grass, a car approaches and slows down as its driver sees the wreck in the middle of the road.
Both Robert and Scarpedin can see the driver dialing on a cel phone while simultaneously turning his car around and getting the hell away. They have to content themselves with having gotten Terry’s heart back and at least wounding the telepath, and they high-tail it before the cops show up. The SUV never explodes.
They’re too worried to head back to the hospital, which police will no doubt be heading to, so they have to leave Scarpedin’s bike behind. Robert picks a direction and drives.
Scarpedin is in the back seat with Dr. Gomez, a bunch of voodoo supplies, and the dufflebag that holds Terry’s heart.
“Marie?” Robert asks, “what were those guys up to? Why did they want Terry’s heart?”
The voice of Marie replies, “If I could ask their spirits, I could know better, but the tools in this case, they have been prepared for two types of rituals.”
Robert says, “Make your best guess. We’re not going back.”
“One, child,” Marie intones, “would take the boy’s heart and destroy it, and so destroy his spirit so he could not rise again. And the other, by the blessings of the loa, is the same ritual we were to perform, to bind the boy’s spirit.”
“Sh*t,” Scarpedin says. “What did they want with Terry? Terry, man, talk to me.”
“I have not yet performed the ritual,” Marie says. “Help me, foolish man.”
Robert glances back occasionally as he drives. Scarpedin is holding feathers and strange sticks in odd positions, and even Dr. Gomez gets involved, repeating a Creole prayer over the bloody heart in the dufflebag. Long minutes pass, and Robert finds himself lost in the ruined nightscape of New Orleans. It is when he is driving through a neighborhood that looks completely deserted, still with no power from the hurricane two months ago, that Marie whispers into his ear.
“Child,” she says, “hand us the bracelet, and pray.”
Robert hands Scarpedin the bracelet.
The car begins to slow, and its headlights flicker. The engine does not gutter, but it feels like the vehicle is struggling to keep moving. The air becomes thick with the smell of rot and the sea, and suddenly all the lights in the car go dead, and Robert is driving blind in an impenetrable darkness. He almost presses on the brake, but a hesitation grips him.
And then, just as suddenly, the lights are back on, and the car seems to surge with speed. All down the road, street lights burst on, stretching away, pointing out the path to take, and in the corner of Robert’s eye he thinks he can see short people watching from inside the ruined houses along the road. Robert presses on the gas, nervous regardless of if they’re ghosts, fey, or just squatters.
“Um, Terry?” he asks.
There’s nothing.
He looks back. Scarpedin has a smug smile on his face.
“How’s it feel to be dead?” Scarpedin asks.
Robert frowns and grabs the bracelet out of Scarpedin’s hand, and the moment he touches the bracelet he can see Terry sitting in the passenger seat next to him, casually spectral, his arm hanging around the head rest as he turns to reply to Scarpedin. Terry looks at Robert and smiles.
“Holy-,” Terry starts. “Robert, god damn man, you guys did it. I mean, I’m dead, but I can see you again. This is amazing.”
Robert gives Terry a hint of a smile. “Good to have you back. We’ll have time to rave about how cool we are that we brought you back from the brink of the beyond later. Right now, Terry, let me know: can you do the whole planeshift thing to Gaia?”
“Yeah, pretty sure,” Terry says. “Why is that so important?”
Robert glances at Dr. Gomez in the back seat. “Oh, no reason. I just wanted to make sure you still had your magic. Scarpedin, talk to Terry for a bit.”
Robert hands the bracelet back to Scarpedin – he can no longer see or hear Terry – and then he turns his attention to Dr. Gomez. While Scarpedin barrages Terry’s ghost with questions about the afterlife, Robert drives and talks to Dr. Gomez, thanking him for helping them stop the criminals and convincing the man it’d be a good idea to keep helping them, especially since Robert’s bleeding pretty badly from multiple sword wounds. Dr. Gomez agrees, and he tells them they can come to his house for the evening.
Robert listens to Scarpedin interrogate Terry as he drives to Dr. Gomez’s house, but his mind is busy planning how best to take revenge on Adrien Lee.
It’s nearly 3 a.m. The streets are nearly empty, but nevertheless, it’s odd that every stop light they come to is green.
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