Chapter 35

Jacob was on his feet with his gun out before I even registered what he was doing.

“Stand down,” I barked. “You’re not shooting Darla.”

Besides the fact that the target was incorporeal, the stopping power was unnecessary. While Darla was channeling, it seemed, she couldn’t really move around. Just her head. Chance turned Darla’s milky eyes toward Jacob, and her wicked smile got even broader. “I wouldn’t put physical violence past Detective Marks…he’s no stranger to manhandling a woman.”

Like Jacob needed yet another reminder of how it felt to wrestle her over to the other side. Darla’s breath came out in visible puffs of vapor, but the whole room had gone so cold, and so did Jacob’s and mine. Just like the morgue. Fuck. “You’re not wanted here,” I told Chance. “Get the hell out.”

“Or what? You’ll pull the trigger? I didn’t think so. Now, take me to my tuner.”

“The one Dreyfuss had hidden? It’s gone, thanks to you. Grabbed up by FPMP National.”

“Perfect! Then show me the headlines. I need to see.”

“What headlines?”

“Don’t play dumb with me, Detective.” The words were harsh on puffs of frozen vapor. “My tuner is the biggest thing in Psych since the Ganzfeld experiments. Now show me the headlines.”

“There are none. The goons you called in confiscated your damn equipment. It’s gone, totally dismantled, or buried deep in some federal bunker. Happy?”

“Well…at least Dr. K never got the chance to take credit for—”

“Vic?”

I swung around to the flatscreen and found Patrick’s face filling the massive monitor. He squinted as if he was trying to figure out the controls. I wasn’t sure exactly how much the executive staff could see of me when they videoed in to my office, but I presumed the camera was somewhere above the monitor, like an oversized webcam. 

Instinctively, I stood and blocked his view of Darla. Nothing personal. I was just unaccustomed to letting my talent hang loose, and felt the same protective instinct for my old cohort. “Now’s not really a good time.”

“Oh…sorry…it’s just you haven’t answered my texts and my calls are going to voicemail.”

“Phone’s dead.”

“So you haven’t seen my email either?”

“Seriously, I’m right in the middle of something, I’ll catch you soon as I’m done.”

“Okay, great—but don’t forget. I dug up some special info you asked about.”

“Yep, just as soon as I finish up here.”

Patrick gave a stilted wave, and the jumbotron went blue.

“What’s Patrick Barley doing at the FPMP?” Jennifer Chance said.

I whirled around to face her and was startled anew by Darla’s white eyes. And now her lips were turning blue and her teeth were beginning to chatter. 

It took me a second to figure out how she knew him, but then I realized the two of them had worked together at The Clinic for quite a while. “It’s no big secret,” I said. “Admin is admin.”

“Well, sure. If you’re just talking about some secretary from your local temp agency. Seems a little slapdash, even for Dreyfuss, giving such high access clearance to a psychopath.”

“Who, Patrick?”

Most folks, when they call someone a psychopath, mean that person is violent and out of control. Chance was a medical doctor, though. And if she was using the word in the clinical sense, the diagnostic sense, the evidence would be a lot more subtle. True psychopaths aren’t typically axe murderers, but they do have a big bunch of nothing where their feelings are supposed to be. Yet they’re really good at mimicking human emotion.

I can’t imagine it was easy having these supposed authority figures telling you who you were.

Was Patrick a psychopath?

Or had his earliest clinicians just assumed so, if they were undiagnosed empaths who couldn’t get an emotional read on him because he was a Stiff? Maybe. Or maybe he wasn’t a Stiff at all, and Bly had just attributed his emotional blankness to a psychic cause.

I wasn’t sure if Chance could actually see me though Darla’s physical eyes, but she sure seemed to be enjoying my confusion. She smiled wider. Darla’s lower lip cracked, and a bead of blood welled up.

“Look what this is doing to Darla,” Jacob said. “Get rid of Chance. Get her out of here.”

“You can try.” Chance closed her eyes and rolled her neck, and it gave off a sound like bubble wrap. “But I’ve been in this body before. It’s a very good fit, and I’ve got urgent business. I certainly don’t trust you to have followed up on my tuner—you were always too self-involved to see the big picture.”

I cast around for something to use—salt, Florida water, even one of Richie’s blessed candles—but Darla had well and truly taken over the office, and there was nothing at hand but her crystals. I grabbed a craggy hunk of quartz and tried to suck white light into it, but I might as well have been attempting to get a cat to speak Mandarin. The rock wasn’t attuned to me. And in my hands, it was nothing more than a paperweight.

I lunged for the supply cabinet beside Carl’s desk—I’d catch hell for that come Monday—and yanked open the doors one after the other. File folders, scotch tape…and holy water. I yanked out the bottle, threw the cap on the floor, and flung the water at Darla. Belatedly, I hoped it didn’t scald her like battery acid. But all it did was wet her blouse.

Darla ignored it. Her eyes closed and her brows drew down in concentration.

Her fingers twitched. Chance’s physical control was spreading.

“Do something,” Jacob begged. But this was so far out of my league, I had no idea what else to try.

I reached into my pocket, which held nothing more than a dead cell phone, and came up with a handful of invisible fairy dust. With panic heightening my emotions, the mojo was strong. To my inner eye, it glowed. “You’re dead,” I shouted at Jennifer Chance as I flung the psychic dust. “Stay that way.”

Darla’s eyes shot open. Milky clouds roiled around inside the iris for a moment. They cleared—but only briefly. And then solidified into that hideous, blank white. “Nice try, Detective. But I’m vibrating on an entirely different frequency. Neither your psychic talent nor the hunk of metal in your holster can stop me.”

Darla’s eyelashes were white with rime now, and her teeth chattered continuously. The skin on her lips furled as it started to peel off, and the snot that ran from her nose solidified and frosted over. Her fingers flexed, stronger, more sure. Not by her own volition.

Jacob might have been haunted by memories of Chance’s half-frozen corpse thrashing under the plastic, but he wasn’t about to leave Darla to the same fate. He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her, and each shake was punctuated by a word. “Get—out—now!”

Darla’s body slackened, briefly. Went limp. 

And then her milky eyes found Jacob’s, and she laughed. 

He dropped her into the chair and backed away to regroup. Which left the next move up to me.

Vibration—that was key. Chance wasn’t inside Darla with an etheric ghost body, not like she had been with all the other mediums on the physical plane. Chance’s spirit was beyond the veil, and the connection was broadcasting on some other station, a wavelength that Darla had been tapping into for years, but one that was entirely foreign to both Jacob and me.

“I wish this was the medium I’d tested my tuners on, not you. I would have given her the star treatment she deserved. Oh, the grand things we could have accomplished together!”

“You won’t accomplish squat by killing Darla now,” I said. “Let her go.”

She flexed Darla’s fingers once more, then very deliberately, made a fist. She smiled wider. Blood oozed from Darla’s shredded lips and froze on her chin. “Or what, Detective?”

“Or I’ll…take the final GhosTV, and I’ll….”

Darla’s frosted eyebrows screwed up quizzically.

“I’ll give it to Dr. K. All your research, all your hard work, I’ll make sure he takes sole credit for it. Every last bit.”

“You’re bluffing.”

“The hell I am. Dreyfuss left a tuner with me. I’m more than happy to ditch that creepy hunk of junk, and if I screw over your dead ass in the process, all the better.”

Her bloodied mouth worked as she struggled to convince herself I was making it all up.

“Big wooden console, heavier than a weight bench, and duct tape holding the special guts inside. I’ve got it, all right. And I’ve been waiting for a good excuse to get rid of it.”

Chance huffed out a breath. It was expelled from Darla in a billow of frost. “You are your own worst enemy. You’d do something so stupid out of petulant spite? If you actually harnessed the power of my tuner, you could have the world at your feet. Money and power—yes, of course—but even more important, knowledge. A smart man would leverage those secrets to ensure his continued success. You, though? Even you should be tempted by an unlimited stream of information…something so detailed, you could mete out all the punishment you could hope for, enough to satisfy even your overdeveloped sense of justice.”

“All the evidence in the world wouldn’t stop my perps from walking. The problem’s not lack of evidence—it’s the public’s suspicion of Psych. Leave Darla now, or I’m calling Dr. K.” I slimed the handset on my desk with my ectoplasm hand, and hoped Chance didn’t realize I had no idea whatsoever how the FPMP phone system worked. One thing I knew about lying—you can’t oversell it. I could have counted down, given her one last chance to relent, but instead I calmly hit the 0-key and hoped it pulled up a staff directory.

Because I realized I wasn’t bluffing. I could dump that damn GhosTV on Dr. K without a backward glance. Part of me might always wonder what it would be like to wield Marie St. Savon-level talent. But mostly, I’d be thrilled to bid that monstrosity adieu.

If you know your party’s extension, please dial it now, the phone told me, and I inwardly cursed the fact that I’d grown so accustomed to letting Laura do everything for me, back when she was the Operations Coordinator and I was a lowly contractor. 

But I must have hidden my chagrin well. Chance said, “All right, I’ll go,” through Darla’s chattering teeth. “But this interaction has given me plenty of food for thought. I hadn’t realized it was possible to come back…until today.”

The vibrational field might not have been the same one I was used to working with, but even so, I felt Jennifer Chance leave the room, like a change in pressure and an unpleasant wave of static. Darla’s back arched as if she’d been zapped by an electrical current. And just as suddenly, she slumped. Jacob caught her before she spilled onto the floor. Her blood smeared his collar, and her face left a trail of snot and deadfrost across the front of his jacket.

“Is Chance gone?” Jacob asked.

“Yeah. And as long as Darla doesn’t go looking for her, hopefully she’ll stay gone.”

At the sound of her name, Darla came around, pushed herself off Jacob and gave a long, wet snuffle. “What the hell?” she said woozily. “What happened?”

“You’re okay,” Jacob said in his best control-the-situation cop-voice. “Everything’s okay—”

“Bullshit it’s okay…is this blood? Damn it!” She shoved out of her chair, smeared the thawing goo off her face with the back of her hand, and staggered toward the door.

“Darla,” I said, “wait.”

She shrugged me off as she gained momentum. “Chill out, Vic, I’m just going to the bathroom.”

The general-use unisex FPMP restrooms are nowhere near as fancy as the john in Dreyfuss’ old office, but they’re reasonably nice. I’d like them even better if there was less wood and more clean, white tile, but they looked more like domestic powder rooms than institutional public toilets. Jacob hung back in the hall, but I crowded in with Darla while she got a look at herself. She was no longer turning blue, but the shredded skin hanging from her lips was enough to shock anyone.

Darla leaned across the sink, peered at her reflection, and said, “Well, that’s scary. How did it look—full-on Linda Blair?”

“Everything but the pea soup.” Though between the snot and the ectoplasm, the two of us gave The Exorist’s effects crew a run for its money. 

“I hardly ever go that deep.” Darla ran a paper towel under cool water, wrung it out, and began carefully blotting her mouth. It looked swollen and tender, but now that she’d stopped breathing out ice crystals, not too much worse than a really fierce case of chapped lips. “Did your guy at least give you something useful?” 

“Unfortunately, an old nemesis of mine butted in before you found him. She died in the building—hell, the lab might even have tissue samples squirreled away—so I’m declaring the FPMP headquarters a no-channel zone from here on out.”

If I were Darla, I would’ve been majorly freaking out. But I guess she didn’t find the thought of a ghost using her as a mouthpiece as disturbing as I did. “Sucks to be us. What now?”

“I think you should see a doctor.”

While Darla started to insist that she’d be fine, Jacob shouldered in and said to me, “Can I talk to you in the hall?”

Darla made a shooing motion. “Go. I don’t need you to help me blow my nose.”

I stepped into the hall, and Jacob took me by the arm and said low in my ear, “How is it possible for Chance to do that?”

“Guess Darla’s reception is different from mine.” 

Understatement of the year.

Jacob paused with his hand on my forearm, then instead of releasing it, pulled me into a fierce and impulsive kiss, right there in the hallway of the FPMP. Yeah, it was Saturday…but still. He followed up the lip-lock by gliding his forefinger across my lower lip. “Promise me you’ll never do that. I couldn’t deal with knowing something dead was speaking through this mouth.”

“You and me both, Mister. You and me both.”

Darla came out of the bathroom with her makeup scrubbed off, carefully dabbing lip balm on her peeling lips. She said, “The more convoluted this gets, and the worse I strike out, the more I feel the need to prove myself. But I’m gonna have to call it a day. I’m wiped out.”

But who knew when FPMP National would show up? I might be on Laura’s shit list, but frankly, I was scared for her. “Are you sure there’s no way we can pool our resources?” I asked.

Darla said, “Isn’t that what we’re already doing?”

I turned back toward the office and motioned for her and Jacob to follow as an idea formed in my mind. We might not have solved the whole medium problem yet, but those interviews I’d done gave me an idea. “Maybe, between the two of us, there’s a way to reach Andy without letting him take over your whole consciousness.” I opened Carl’s supply cabinet, moved a few liturgical candles out of the way, then started shoving things around in earnest. 

“What?” Darla said. “Like a psychic splicer cable?”

“Kind of.” Censer, charcoal, prayer mat. Damn it. “But I doubt I’ll find what I’m looking for in Carl’s box of tricks.” I turned to Jacob and said, “Where can we get a Ouija board?”