After Moonrise: Possessed\Haunted (10 page)

CHAPTER TWELVE

“Fuck! I’m a moron!” He closed his eyes against the
pounding in his head. “Okay, yeah, I can do this. I Track murderers. Just
because the asshole’s dead doesn’t mean I can’t Track him.” Raef drew a deep
breath and reached out with his Gift.

Nothing.

The only negative emotions left in the room were his own. There
was no murder trail. The murderer was dead.

“Save us, Kent…”
seemed to hover in
the blood-scented air around him.

“How?” Raef shouted. “How the hell do I save you? I can’t Track
a dead guy!”

The realization hit him and Kent’s eyes opened. “I can’t Track
a dead guy, but I have Tracked a dead girl. I found Aubrey before—I can find her
again. And when I find her, I find the bastard that killed her.”

Raef only had a moment to feel the relief of his discovery when
the world pitched and rolled, and suddenly he was on his back lying beside
Lauren’s motionless body.

“Hang on, Lauren! I’m not going to die on you!” he tried to
shout, but the words came out as barely a whisper. He was losing strength
fast…fading fast....

Lauren was going to die. He was going to die. Aubrey was going
to cease to exist—they all would. He was going to fail. He was going to
die....

So this was it? Time to quit—to give up? He tried to sit, to do
something, anything, but his body wasn’t obeying him, wasn’t working. He knew it
because his fucking mind wasn’t just working—it was working with bizarre
clarity.

Raef might have smiled, but he couldn’t be sure because his
face had gone numb.

To hell with this Negative Nancy
bullshit,
Raef growled silently to himself.
If I
have to go to the Land of the Dead, being almost dead has gotta be a plus.
So all right. Let’s really get this thing done.

Raef closed his eyes and focused on his breathing while he
tried to recall what he’d done the night he’d Tracked Aubrey—the night she’d
materialized and
felt
with him. What had that damn
book said about soul retrieval and the Land of the Dead?

As his body continued to get weaker, Raef’s mind became sharper
and sharper. Snippets of the book he’d breezed through that night came back to
him.

…enter the Land of the Dead without protection and experience,
and you risk becoming lost, too…

“Too late,” Raef mumbled, and then he continued to recall.

Begin by lighting a candle.

Well, he didn’t have a candle, but he did have the memory of a
light that he’d never forget—Aubrey’s shimmering thread of joy. What was next?
What were the rest of those damn directions?

They came to him along with another surge of dizziness.

Once you have Tracked the soul to the Land of the Dead, your
psychic Gift will cease to work. You must use mortal guile and your own wisdom
to retrieve the lost one.

“That’s right. That part seemed like good news then. Now I’m
not so sure about my level of guile, let alone wisdom.” Raef’s voice sounded
weird, like it wasn’t really attached to his body. Hell, he felt weird, like
he
wasn’t really attached to his body.

“Probably more good news for where I’m going.” Then Raef shut
his mouth and, after one last look at Lauren, closed his eyes.

He thought of Aubrey. Her laughter and her joy. The way she
made him feel. No, not just hot and hard and sexy. Aubrey made him
feel
. Ironically, a dead girl had breathed life into a
whole world of emotions he’d believed had been irrevocably lost to him because
he’d spent most of a lifetime dealing with death and destruction.

And she called him Kent. No one but Aubrey had called him Kent
since his Gift had been discovered.

Raef held the light of Aubrey in his mind and in his heart, and
with every bit of his skill as a psychic, he reached with his Gift, seeking,
searching....

He found her more easily than he’d expected to, even though
Aubrey’s light wasn’t a glowing, ribbonlike trail anymore. All that was left of
the shimmering thread of joy he’d glimpsed before was a single, thin beam of
light the color of champagne gone flat. The dimness of Aubrey’s light scared him
so deeply that it severed the tie that remained with his body, and Raef felt his
spirit shoot away from the cold classroom. He didn’t waste time worrying about
how the hell he was going to get back. He didn’t hesitate. Instead, he rushed
after Aubrey’s fading light, Tracking her with a speed and ease he’d never
before experienced, which was good and bad. It was good because it was like he’d
been fired from a cannon straight and sure into the Land of the Dead. It was bad
because it was like he’d been fired from a cannon straight and sure into the
Land of the Dead—and had less than a heartbeat to prepare himself for the
experience.

Though I don’t know how the hell anyone
could be prepared for this shit,
Raef told himself as he drifted to a
halt, watching Aubrey’s fading light disappear into the seething caldron of
misery below him.

The sound of it hit him first. Voices drifting up to him were
an awful mixture of sobs and screams and pleadings. He tried to make out single
words, but it was difficult. It was like he had landed in the middle of an
amphitheater that was hosting a chaotic symphony of hopelessness. He stared,
trying to find the source of the voices. It was tough to get a good look at what
was below him because a thick fog drifted over everything. Raef made himself
drop closer to the land, and pockets of fog parted to reveal a landscape of
utter desolation. It was like the Mojave mixed with the Arctic mixed with a
nuclear wasteland. Almost totally devoid of color, the land lacked anything that
was growing or sheltering, and all over the place was littered with what Raef at
first thought were bizarrely shaped stones, jutting up from the bleak,
drought-cracked ground. It wasn’t until one of the stones moved that he realized
they weren’t rocks at all—they were bodies that had become grotesquely fused to
the land. A shoulder jutted, an eyeless head was frozen, faceup, an arm
protruded.

And even more awful, Raef watched as one of the fused bodies
opened its mouth and shrieked.

Raef shuddered with revulsion. The bodies still had life in
them, even though they lacked color or animation or expression, and they had
actually become part of the land.

Aubrey? Oh, God, is one of them Aubrey?
And Lauren? Is that how Braggs has them trapped—not by his own force, but by
the force of this terrible place?

Almost in a panic, Raef reached out again for her slim beam of
light, but he found nothing—felt nothing. He couldn’t Track her at all.

Then he remembered—the book had said when he reached the Land
of the Dead his Gift wouldn’t work, that he’d have to use his brains and his
wits.
So think!
he ordered himself. He’d Tracked
Aubrey here—it was just when he actually arrived that his Gift had gone.

He stared around him, trying to clear his thoughts. Okay, maybe
he should just start going from body to body and calling her name.

No. That felt wrong, and he didn’t have time to waste searching
aimlessly.
Think! Use some of that fucking wisdom both
girls believe you have!
He stared around him. What a colorless,
hopeless place. There was not one green thing—not one bit of sunlight or blue
sky or even the familiar brown of a winter-nude tree.

Wait,
he thought.
I might have something. Aubrey has color! Her spirit, even
though it’s trapped here and being drained, has enough color left in it to
leave a trail for me.

He didn’t need to search the pathetic, colorless people who had
utterly given up and had no more light about them at all. He just needed to
search for light—any light.

Raef shifted his attention from the horrible, fused figures and
began drifting. As he did he searched, sweeping his gaze back and forth, peering
through fog and darkness, until off to his right a slight flicker of something
like a candle caught in a great wind pulled at the edge of his sight. Raef
redirected himself until he was hovering over the spot he was sure he’d seen the
glimmer of color.

The damned fog was everywhere and he made himself drop down,
closer to the ground itself. When he got lower the fog parted and the land
beneath him fell away, leaving Raef staring down at a huge pit that was filled
with a sewerlike, vitreous liquid that roiled and churned. With a shudder of
disgust, Raef saw that people were bobbing around in the liquid, frantically
trying to stay afloat. The people appeared to be as colorless as the bodies
fused to the land, but as he watched, light fluttered across the face of one of
the swimmers—right before she was engulfed in a wave and her head went
under—only to reappear with a gasp and a terrible scream of agony a moment
later.

It was the voice he recognized before he recognized her pale,
terrified face.

“Lauren!”
he shouted, commanding
himself to go even lower—to go down to her.

“Raef! He’s here! He—”
Lauren’s
head went under again.

“Hang on! I’m coming!”
Raef reached
into the oil-slick water, feeling through the cold, dark liquid for her, but his
search was suddenly stopped as something hard caught him in his gut and hurled
him into the air and away from the pit.

He gasped with shock as pain lashed through him, blurring his
vision. Raef blinked hard. When his focus finally came back he was looking down
at a creature that was circling the top lip of the pit. Lizardlike, its body
stretched all the way around the circumference of the pit. It had multiple tails
that whipped in agitation at Raef. It opened its fang-lined maw to hiss at him—a
sound that made the fluid in the pit churn even more crazily and had the
swimmers, whose lights were now barely visible, crying out and struggling even
harder to stay afloat.

“Stop!”
Raef shouted at the
creature.
“You’ll drown them all!”

The lizard thing opened its horrible mouth again and familiar
laughter drifted across the liquid pit and up to Raef.
“Yessss,”
it hissed.
“I will drown them, but
slowly, after I have bled everything I can from them. Are you here to join
them? Your scarlet light will make a nice addition to my
collection.”

Raef met the creature’s dark eyes—eyes Raef recognized as
easily as he had the laughter and the voice.

Raef looked from the Braggs creature to the pit, and saw
Lauren’s head go under again. The sight worked like a goad on him and his answer
rang clear and strong through the sounds of misery around him.
“I didn’t come to join them, but I’ll take their place. You
can have me and my light, just let the twins go.”

“No, Raef!”
Lauren shouted. The
Braggs creature reached into the pit and swirled the liquid with a claw, and
Lauren’s head was engulfed in another oily wave.

“Look!”
Raef felt foolish, but he
waved his arms like he was trying to flag the attention of a charging bull.
“You don’t want her. She’s almost used up. I’m
not.”

The Braggs creature paused, drawing his claw from the liquid.
His dark eyes met Raef’s gaze.
Hatred,
Raef thought.
I don’t need my Gift to know that Braggs is hatred
become tangible.

Braggs’s soulless laughter drifted around him again.
“No,”
he said.
“I will not trade
with you. Between us there is that little matter of the fact that you killed
my body. That will be inconvenient for me until I can find another to take
its place.”

I need my fucking Glock right now,
Raef thought.

“And if I remember correctly, back in the
mortal realm your body is very busy dying. Soon you will be just another
lost soul here. Who knows, you might accidentally stumble into my
pit.”

“Hey, it doesn’t have to be like this.
Maybe we can make a deal.”
Even though he felt like he was grasping
at straws, Raef spoke quickly. At least while he talked Braggs was more focused
on him than on pushing under the heads in the pit and slowly, slowly, while he
spoke, Raef drifted closer and closer to Lauren.
“You say
you need a new body. Take mine. I’ll trade it for the twins.”

Braggs’s laughter was a hiss.
“No, your
body is dying.”

“I’m tougher than you think. Afghanistan
couldn’t kill me. I’ll bet you didn’t, either. That Glock makes one hell of
a roar. Paramedics are probably on their way to TU right now.”

“Perhaps. We could wait and see. If you
drop to the land—you have died. If not—maybe you’ll live. Maybe we’ll trade
then.”

“No, Kent!”
Aubrey’s voice was
weak. He could see that her mouth was barely above the churning liquid.
“You can’t trade with him! He’ll cheat you. You have to beat
him. Remember what I taught you! That’s all you need to
—
”

Braggs snarled, and one of his tails snaked out and forced
Aubrey’s head under the liquid. Raef wanted to go to her—wanted to kick Braggs’s
ass and pull her and Lauren out of there—but Braggs was so fucking big that he
covered the entire lip of the pit. Raef glanced down at himself, hoping for just
an instant that he might have materialized in this realm as something other than
his all too human, and all too vulnerable, body.

Sadly, he had not been turned into a knight in shining armor.
He was just himself, albeit a less substantial version of himself.

The creature of hatred continued to circle the pit, watching
him warily, tails writhing, jaws snapping.
“Why not come
even closer? Let’s fight for the twins.”

Raef wanted to—he wanted to so damn bad! But he wasn’t an utter
moron. Until he’d brought out the Glock, Braggs had been beating him. Actually,
Braggs had probably killed him.