The Edge Of The Cemetery (3 page)

I woke up sometime later on a couch in one of the hotel suites. Every single inch of my body hurt, and as dramatic as it sounds, I was sure I was dying. Someone had kindly cleaned and bandaged my hands and covered me with a blanket…I guess they were hoping I was going to live. I glanced around the room. It was empty, but I could hear voices on the other side of a door in the far corner. On the coffee table, sitting in a puddle of condensation, was a crystal glass filled with amber liquid and the remnants of melting ice-cubes. The smell of the sweet Irish whiskey from two feet away gave me hope…if I could smell the whiskey, my nose probably wasn't broken or too badly damaged. I sat up painfully and noticed the aspirin bottle next to the glass, and attempted to smile through my cut lips. Billy might be the most obnoxious woman I knew, but deep down inside she must love me a little to leave these much needed medicinal miracles.

I swallowed two aspirin, drank the whiskey in one long gulp, and leaned back against the couch, closing my eyes. We were at a small resort hotel on the picturesque Marin Coast just north of San Francisco. Aris had received a distressing call from an associate, Robert Grant, who was attending a weekend wedding at the resort. Some of the guests had begun to feel viciously ill, and like most of us in that situation, they sequestered themselves in their rooms in the hopes of feeling better soon. Robert was a retired ghost killer, and one of his friends was among the infirm. When he decided to check on his companion, he was greeted by his deathly ill friend and a nasty demon, which Robert, although in his seventies, vanquished post-haste. Robert was aware of our more recent troubles and became suspicious that the other guests were being haunted as well. Of course, it would have been quite inappropriate to go barging into strangers' rooms to confirm they had unwanted ghosts with them, so he called us.

By the time Billy and I arrived, there was no doubt about the other guests; they were being haunted too, and possessed. In their altered states, they'd garnered their evening wear and come downstairs to the main lounge to join the wedding party, where these unfortunate possessed souls began to torment the other guests, starting both verbal and physical fights. Robert tried his best to get at their demons, but they were faster and very powerful.

As Billy and I began to go after the ghouls—there were probably ten or twelve total—the teenager had grabbed a petite woman by her hair and shoved her to her knees. At that point the musketeer demon appeared and reached out to him, as if to hold hands—not literally of course…ghosts aren't solid, but they did somehow connect—and all at once I could almost see the electroplasmic electricity arc from the demon, through the boy, and into the woman. Billy, realizing what was happening, charged the trio and separated him and his demon from the woman, who fell to the floor in a pile of evening clothes, but she was alive. The boy ran outside through the terrace doors and the musketeer followed. Billy looked a little shell-shocked, like she'd received a jolt of the demon's juice, which she probably had, and I stopped to see if she was okay.

“Forget me! Get that kid!” she seethed. I left her and followed the boy out to the lawn, where I was attacked by the redcoat and his victim. While we fought, the boy and the evil musketeer killed two people and I got thrown off a cliff….

A few minutes later I heard the door open and Billy walked into the room. Considering her injuries were far fewer than mine, I really hoped for a little compassion and sympathy. Instead, she said, very
un
-sympathetically, “Finally, you're awake. We need to get going.”

I rubbed my head. “Wait, what happened?”

“The real fighting between the haunted guests and everyone else started a little before we got here. By the time I pulled the kid off that woman, someone had called the sheriff's office; they arrived right after you passed out. Pete got here a few minutes after we did with two of his guys and got the ghosts we left inside, and then helped me get you up here. The room isn't registered to anyone, so they don't know about us, but they will if we don't get out of here.”

“What are they going to say happened?”

She let out an impatient sigh. “Pete told the sheriff that he stopped to get a bite to eat at the café across the lobby from the ball room where the wedding reception was taking place. He told them he heard yelling and screaming and ran to help. A huge fight was in progress, the kid appeared out of nowhere with a stun gun or something, and went nuts and tried to kill that woman I saved, then killed those two other people and tried to zap some of the other guests. Since the ones that were actually being haunted and possessed won't remember anything, Pete persuaded them that that's what happened. All the other guests are too shaken up to give reasonable accounts, so unless we want to explain why we're here, since we're not guests and all…let's go!”

There's a difference between a possession and a haunting. When a ghost haunts a victim, it makes them sick or disabled; but when they possess a victim, the ghost-demon not only makes them ill, but it can control the victim, and most of those times the demon will cause its victim to kill themselves. When a ghost or demon is killed and its victim is cured, the victim doesn't have any memory of being sick, and no one else would remember they'd been sick either. This is just the way it is…we don't know why, we just know that once we kill the ghost that's haunting them, they're cured, like nothing ever happened. Billy explained it to me like this: “
You know when a friend or acquaintance shows up with a new haircut and you're not sure why, but you know there's something different about them, you just can't pinpoint it? It's kind of like that. Their friends and family know something's different, but they don't know what, they just know the person is better for it.
” However, if a person is possessed by a demon and a ghost killer is lucky enough to intervene, the person not only doesn't remember, but they're very suggestible to other explanations because their brains were temporarily scrambled by the demon's presence.

I sighed and started to get up, only to fall back on the couch as my head swam and my vision blurred. I wasn't sure I was going to be able to move as quickly as she'd like. Billy came over and held out her hand, “Come on, George, suck it up, we gotta get out of here.” I took her hand and managed to stand, but I was still wobbly.

She led me to the end of the hallway and opened the stairwell door. “Really Billy, stairs…?” I said weakly. She scowled, put her arm around my waist, and walked me one flight down. The door at the bottom opened onto another hallway. At one end was the main lobby, at the other, a side exit that would take us to the parking lot. Billy looked toward the lobby; Pete was standing in view, but away from several sheriff's deputies. He casually walked in our direction. Billy ushered me into an alcove containing an ice and soda machine, out of sight of the lobby.

A minute later, Pete ducked into the alcove, took one look at me, and blew out a long whistle. “Please tell me it was an old one that did that to you.”

I said, careful of my lacerated lips, “Redcoat.”

Pete's eyebrows shot up, “Really? Never come across one of those before.”

“How's it going out there?” Billy asked.

“Fine, I guess. So far they seem to be buying my story.” He didn't look all that convinced.

“Do we know who the kid was?” I asked. Something about him, besides his murderous actions, was bugging me. I just couldn't grasp why at the moment.

“Not a clue, but one of my guys saw him leave in a blue four-door…he thought it was a VW. He isn't a hundred-percent sure, but he did get a partial plate. Aris is trying to track it now. So don't go far, we may need you two to help catch this little shit,” Pete said viciously.

“I'm not all that sure I have it in me tonight.” I turned to Billy. “Where are we headed, back to the city?”

“There's a motel about a mile down the road…get a room. I'll call you when Aris gets back to me,” Pete said as he grabbed us by the shoulders and shoved us toward the exit.

Billy and I headed to the guest parking lot where her Mustang GT was parked. She didn't go out the main driveway though; if the sheriff saw us leaving, we'd be detained. She used the service road instead, and within thirty minutes we were huddled in a two star motel room with two double beds, the strong smell of disinfectant, and an ancient TV, tuned to the local news channel, which was already reporting
our
version of the evening's events.

Ghost killing takes copious amounts of energy, and apparently Billy had used all of hers, so she left me on one of the lumpy beds and went in search of food. I tried to follow the news, but ended up dosing off instead. I woke to the sound of Billy shaking the ice around in her soda cup and slurping loudly through the straw.

“Did you get me anything?” I said, and rolled over to face her. She was sitting Indian style on the other bed, a mostly empty take-out container in front of her and the offending soda cup still in her hand. Without a word, she pointed to a closed take-out container on the nightstand between the beds. I edged into a sitting position and put the container in my lap. She'd brought me a PB&J and french fries. I looked over at her and said, “Really, this is the best you could do?”

“Your lips are swollen and split in two places. It was thin, and the only thing I could think of besides soup that wouldn't make you reopen those wounds.” She glanced at me and grimaced. “You look like shit, by the way.”

“Thanks…on both counts.” Billy was hardly ever considerate of my injuries, but tonight was probably the worst we'd come across, and in her own little way, she was trying to be nice,
and
acknowledge I'd taken the worst beating between the two of us.

“Any word on the teenager?” I asked between bites. She shook her head. “Billy, that kid was doing what you did in Germany, right?”

Billy's mother, Julie, was raised by Justine because her own mother, Wilhelmina Wilkinson (Grandma Billy) wasn't able to handle her ghost killing abilities and for the most part, was quite insane. However, Julie was a spoiled little rich girl, who didn't even bother to attend her mother's funeral, took her inheritance, and disappeared. A few years later she showed back up, broke and with a toddler in tow. Justine agreed to help, but there were rules, which Julie followed, at least for a while. When Julie had reached the point that she no longer wanted to follow the rules, or wanted to be a mother any more, her father approached her with a monetary deal she couldn't refuse. All she had to do was turn custody of her daughter over to the man. That man was Frederick Vokkel, and he wanted his granddaughter so he could study her. He was convinced she'd be like her grandmother, who, despite her mental problems, had been one of the most powerful ghost killers alive.

Vokkel ended up taking Billy away to Germany where he could monitor her more closely and without interference from Justine, who was constantly suing him to regain custody of her beloved Billy. When Billy was a teenager, she knew she had more power than most ghost killers and she knew she could use that power to escape her deranged grandfather. While on a field trip to town with her bodyguard, Billy “communicated” with a demon, and when she held the hand of her bodyguard, the demon “took” Billy's hand and the same type of electroplasmic electricity the teenager had used earlier in the night shot through Billy and into the bodyguard, killing her. Billy hadn't done it again, but she knew she could and knew how dangerous it could be, as evidenced by her willingness to put herself in mortal peril to save the woman earlier in the evening.

“Yeah, that's pretty much it…,” she said quietly.

“Something wasn't right about him…I mean, aside from his demon buddy. Did you get the impression he wasn't…all there? Like he wasn't in complete control or something?” I asked.

“He was in control. I watched him kill one of those people, and he knew exactly what he was doing!” she replied fiercely.

“Okay, calm down. I was getting tossed off a cliff, and I missed that part.” I tried to sound contrite, but she didn't care. I asked, “So he has to be a ghost killer, right?”

“Yeah, and I'm guessing a pretty powerful one…a lot like I was at that age,” she said mournfully. I'd only broached the subject of the German bodyguard's death once, and it hadn't gone over well. The time she was imprisoned by Vokkel were the worst years of her life, and in my opinion, one of the main reasons she was so adversarial all the time. Well, that and what her mother did to her.

“Billy, that last guy tried to grab you, didn't he?”

She nodded. “Yeah…I guess, but I managed to kick him in the family jewels and he went down for a second.” She glanced at me…was that fear I saw?

Before I could say anything else, her cell phone rang on the nightstand and she leaned over to get it. Looking at the screen, she said, “Its Pete.” She put him on speaker. “Hey Pete.”

“Hey, how are you guys doing?”

She glanced at me and grimaced again. “I'm okay; a few cuts and bruises, but nothing to cry over. George, on the other hand—”

I said, “I'll be fine, Pete…bumps, bruises, and cuts, an ordinary day at the office.” Billy chuffed loudly at that. “So, what's the story with the kid?”

“Nothing yet. Aris is running combinations of the partial plate along with blue four-door sedans. The list is long and we need to sort through it to try and determine if a teenager is the registered owner, but it could belong to his parents or it could be stolen, so that makes it harder.” Pete sounded tired.

“Pete, we need to find this kid. If the police catch him he'll no doubt just kill whoever he comes in contact with!” Billy said angrily.

The thing that had been bothering me earlier in the night about the kid suddenly broke through. “Pete, it was the kid from the other night, the teenager we saw in the Tenderloin—remember?”

Pete asked, “Yeah? I didn't see him…I mean, not up close. Are you sure?”

“I'm sure. He had on different clothes, but I'm positive it was him. And you know what else?” I glanced at Billy. “I don't think he was in complete charge of the situation…he seemed sort of dazed.” Billy gave me a hard glare, but didn't say anything.

Pete said, “Well, he was using that demon to hurt people, so we know he's a ghost killer, but maybe he was on drugs or something. I mean, you'd have to be pretty messed up to do that on purpose, right?” I couldn't have agreed more. “Listen it's late.” And it was, almost 2 a.m. “Why don't you two get some sleep and get back to the city in the morning? Hopefully we'll have some leads at that point,” he said through a yawn. Then he asked, “Did either of you see Mark when you were leaving the parking lot?” Pete had arrived at the resort with two other ghost killers…Mark was one of them.

“No, why?” Billy asked suspiciously.

“I haven't seen him since we arrived at the hotel. Jason, the other guy I had with me, the one that saw the kid drive off, said he thought he followed you two outside, but….” Pete yawned again. “I don't know. He got there on his own…maybe he saw the kid leave and took off after him. I'll try his cell again.”

“Yeah sure,” I said. “You sound pretty tired yourself. You headed back tonight?”

Pete laughed wearily. “On the road now, my friend.”

“Good, drive safe,” Billy said, and disconnected the call.

I looked around the room. It really was a dive and it smelled funny. I wanted to go home. Now.

“I want my own bed…let's go. I'm wide-awake now; I'll drive.” I pulled myself up from the bed and headed to the bathroom. She didn't argue.

We cleaned up our dinner trash, dropped the key with the night clerk, and were on the road in less than fifteen minutes. Billy was snoring softly in twenty minutes, and remained that way until we hit the toll booth of the Golden Gate Bridge. From there it was only another ten minutes to our building in Pacific Heights.