Chapter 36

“Seriously?” Darla rolled her eyes. “A Ouija board? You know they churn those things out of the same factories that make Battleship and Monopoly.” 

“Maybe so,” I said, “but it’s just a tool, a way to focus our talent, together. I’ve exorcised ghosts with cinnamon sugar sprinkles. Even if the Ouija board rolled off the same line as Cards Against Humanity, Andy wouldn’t be any the wiser.”

Darla gave a pish-posh flip of the hand. “What I’m saying is, we don’t need to waste time tracking down a board. We can draw our own.”

“That can’t be safe,” Jacob said.

“Not here,” Darla agreed. Sort of. While contradicting him. “We can do it at my hotel. Your stowaway won’t be looking for us there.”

Metaphysically speaking, we were so far out of my league, I couldn’t say if that made sense or not. So I filled a case with frankincense, blessed salt and candles just in case.

We piled into Jacob’s car and I plugged in my phone to charge, but on a Saturday, traffic was sparse enough to land us at Darla’s place before the screen even woke up. 

FPMP Regional had put up Darla in a hell of a hotel. No crystal chandeliers and flocked wallpaper like you’d find in the heart of the Loop. This one was all polished concrete, oversized rivets and exposed beams, with artwork that looked like the painter had wandered away before they got a chance to finish their canvas. It was the way the cannery would look, if we had the sensibility, money and desire to make our industrial-functional look industrial-chic. I was glad we didn’t. Otherwise, it would be too pretentious for me to live there.

Darla’s room was gigantic, with ceilings even higher than ours at home. The room dwarfed the furniture, which was all chrome and leather and distressed wood. Unceremoniously, she cleared a stack of books and papers off a broad wooden table made from a reclaimed industrial door. She grabbed a short tumbler from the modern kitchenette and set it face-down on the tabletop. “Now all we need is an alphabet.”

“Actually,” I said, “we could probably get away with two words: yes and no.”

 Darla pulled a glittery eyeliner from her purse and scrawled each word on the table’s surface. “Makes sense to me. We can always add more later.”

“I don’t like this,” Jacob said. “Vic, after what you just saw, how could this possibly seem like a good idea?”

“It’s different,” I said. “We’ll be doing it together. And you’re here.”

Darla quirked an eyebrow at that reasoning.

“I’m a little more than an NP,” Jacob told her. “I have a resistance. But even so, I don’t want to be rash.”

I barked out a tiny laugh. “And since when has that become a concern for you?”

“Since I realized we weren’t rid of a certain someone after all.”

I highly doubted that Jennifer Chance could hear us talking about her from beyond the veil, but I had to admit, Jacob wasn’t the only one who was concerned. I’d hate to draw her back into my life just because I was looking for Andy. Darla was fine with it, though. Considering that she’d been the one on the receiving end of a spectral chemical peel, she was taking it all in stride. “Look, don’t believe everything you see about Ouija boards in the movies. If demons really used them to possess little kids, in our line of work, we’d hear about it. Vic and I will stay in waking consciousness the entire time. And if it gets weird, we stop. Easy as that.”

Jacob locked eyes with me, then looked at Darla. I surreptitiously chafed some goosebumps off my forearm and said, “So…just to make sure everyone’s who they say they are, can you tell me something that only Darla would know?”

“Seriously?” She rolled her eyes dramatically. “Fine. You used to think hamburgers were made of ham—and Richie was the one who corrected you. Happy now?”

“You could’ve picked something a little less embarrassing.” Then again, the fact that she hadn’t was probably an even better indication that we were really dealing with Darla and not Jennifer Chance.

Jacob didn’t find it funny. In fact, he had that look about him I knew all too well. “Think for a second, Vic. The potential benefits can’t possibly outweigh the risks. You’re both opening yourselves up to God-knows-what, not just to earthbound spirits, but anything dead or undead. And for what? I’d sleep a lot better at night knowing who killed our agents and why—but not if it meant I gave up you to do it.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I know my limits, and you know me. I’m hardly the overachiever of the year. If I feel it going south, I’ll pull out. I promise.”

“But the risk—”

“It’s just a matter of me letting go of the glass.” His worrying made me uncomfortable. Not because I thought it was unreasonable, but because I hated the idea of what would become of him if anything ever did happen to me. I was used to him being blasé—and I could just be annoyed with him about it and move on. But this new, post-morgue, zombie-tackling Jacob who actually realized exactly how vulnerable we were made it hard to be cavalier. “Look, we need your head in the game. So set aside what you saw in the office and start filling up with white light. And whatever you do, make sure you don’t steal either of ours.”

“Should I even ask?” Darla said. “Anyway, like I said. It’s no big deal. We’ll each do our own ritual, and calm ourselves down into an alpha state. It’s no worse than watching TV.”

She paused. Wondering if maybe Richie’s origin story actually did contain a grain of truth? Maybe. I know I was.

While she stared into one of her crystals, I sucked down white light. My hand still felt clammy from the invisible salt I’d conjured back in the office, but a body’s only capable of so much high alert, and my state of heightened reaction had faded to a queasy nervousness. Holding onto the light feels precarious, like walking up the stairs with a too-full cup of coffee you’re trying really hard not to spill. But it’s a good feeling too. Centered. Powerful.

We lit a few candles and seated ourselves at the table, with Jacob off to one side holding a pen and notepad at the ready. I positioned myself so that I couldn’t see him scowling his disapproval at me and focused on Darla instead.

“We got this,” Darla told me. She placed her fingertips on the base of the upturned glass. “No problem.”

I almost asked her which hand I should use, but then realized how silly that would’ve been. The clammy one, obviously. I mirrored her gesture, and we looked at each other, and waited. And within seconds, I felt profoundly silly. Because nothing happened.

“I think you’ve gotta ask something.” Darla shut her eyes. “Jacob? Whenever you’re ready.”

Solemnly, he said, “We need to speak to Andy Parsons. Andy, can you hear us?”

The situation was serious. There was a lot on the line. Jacob was sick with worry over me and I’d just had a chat with Jennifer Chance. There was absolutely nothing funny about what we were doing.

Except the fact that the whole situation was completely absurd.

I swallowed down a laugh. Rocked with the effort to keep it in. And felt like I was a knuckleheaded twenty-something in the chapel with Darla again. My face twisted with the effort to keep that laughter from escaping—because Jacob might forgive plenty of trespasses, but humiliating him would not be one of them.

“Andy,” he said, “if you’re here, give us a sign.”

Damn it, did he have to sound so ridiculous? I screwed up my whole, entire face and squinched up my eyes. And just when I thought, forget it, there’s no way I can possibly take this thing seriously….

The glass slid toward me.

My eyes shot open.

The glass stopped. I pulled my hand away and said to Darla, “You pushed it.”

“We both did. It’s the ideomotor response I told you about, remember? But you need to chill out and let it happen.”

Creepy—but at least it quelled that annoying urge to laugh. I sighed and re-settled myself in my chair, put my fingers on the glass, and said, “Okay, take two. Calling Andy Parsons.”

White light. White light. White light. I did my best to hold an image of Andy’s annoying face in my mind’s eye while picturing the light pouring in through my crown chakra, and my subtle bodies getting all charged up and glowy. And when the glass moved again, I did my best not to guide it, to just let the gentle weight of my fingertips go along for the ride. It moved toward me, arced, and traveled back toward Darla. Looping and returning.

“Andy,” Jacob said. “Are you here?”

The glass finished the arc it was tracing, and stopped beside the word YES.

“Do you promise on your immortal soul that you are Andy Parsons?”

The glass jerked a few inches, then picked up another one of those loopy, swirly paths. Back, forth, around…and settled again on the YES.

“Andy, we need to find out where you were killed. Was it nearby?”

The drinking glass started looping again. It was a weird sensation, the feeling of it tracing these gentle curves. My arm felt slightly numb while it was happening. Not like anything paranormal was going on. More like trying to grab something under the table and realizing you have no real sense of where your body is in space. It looped, circled, and settled on the YES.

“Were you killed inside FPMP headquarters?”

The glass moved again, faster this time. Looping. Looping. It skidded to a stop on NO.

Did it feel the same to Darla, I wondered—a weird arm, a movement that was obviously ours, yet vaguely involuntary? I’d had non-corporeal entities inside me before, and I knew damn well what it felt like: nothing. When Lisa reached out from the astral and wrote on the wall in my blood, I’d stood there having an entirely different conversation while it happened, none the wiser. And when the Criss Cross Killer gouged up Jacob with my hands, I had no idea. 

Jacob named all the nearby landmarks he could think of, and each one was a NO. I strained with the effort to relax and go with the flow, but part of me wondered if maybe my ideomotor was stalled, and I kept pulling the glass toward the NO because I was scared to find out what had really happened to Andy, in case Laura was somehow behind it all. Laura had no reason to want Andy dead, right? There were other ways to shut him up. I couldn’t think of any that were quite as foolproof, but Laura was a lot better at fixing things than me.

“Grand Avenue?” NO. “Halsted?” NO.

No, I couldn’t see any reason Laura would want to protect anyone outside the official FPMP. But if it wasn’t her, then who was it?

“Canal Street?”

The glass skidded to a halt in the center of the table. I met Darla’s eyes and raised my eyebrows. She did the same and shrugged.

“Canal Street,” Jacob repeated. The glass swept through a figure eight and parked itself in the center of the table.

“Is it in a building?” he asked. NO. “Is it in an alley?” NO. “Is it in a vehicle?” NO. “But it is on Canal Street.” The glass swept across the table and parked itself in the center.

“Still thinking you don’t need an alphabet?” Darla said.

“Okay,” Jacob told her. “Go ahead.”

Darla penned the letters, large and clear, in her silver eyeliner. As she paused to re-sharpen, I thought about Andy. Interested enough in me to do extra research—digging around in something that ended up getting him killed. Maybe the information wasn’t inherently dangerous. If he’d just left everything alone like Dreyfuss said instead of running to the press, he wouldn’t have been mulched.

Or maybe that’s just what I was telling myself. Because whatever it is he’d seen in my records, I couldn’t rest without knowing.

While I chewed on the implications of Andy’s death, Darla finished off the alphabet and capped her eyeliner. “Okay, Hardcore Vic. Let’s do this.”

I centered myself, did my best to push my worries about my own issues aside, and focused on Andy.

“Andy Parsons,” Jacob said, “are you still here?”

The glass began its slow, lazy loop, and settled on the YES.

“Tell us where you were shot.”

Circles. And more circles. Occasionally veering into S-curves and strange loops. “Is he trying to write with it?” I asked—which didn’t seem to cause the glass to slow down in the slightest. “Andy, spell with the letters. We don’t know what you mean.”

My shoulder felt stiff and my fingertips were numb. A new pattern emerged. Jerky. Like someone trying to draw a starburst. Careful not to touch us, Jacob hovered over and began recording letters. But I could tell by his scowl it was a no-go. That, and the fact that the glass landed on the Z more than once…and I doubted anyone was trying to spell pizazz.

“Focus,” Jacob told me. The contrarian in me wanted to say, Maybe you should focus. But I couldn’t deny that I’d been thinking about Laura and my permanent record and the word pizazz. I visualized white light streaming down through the high ceiling, past the exposed ductwork and faux-industrial lights, and streaming through my thick skull via my forehead. I rallied myself with the directive, We need to figure this out before it all goes to shit. And I rested my fingertips on the glass.

Darla shook out her hands, skimmed her fingers over her quartz necklace, took a deep, centering breath, and placed her fingers beside mine.

The glass did a slow loop, then settled on NO.

“Maybe he can’t spell,” Darla said. The glass zipped over to YES. “I wasn’t being serious.”

“Even so,” I said, “the alphabet looks all messed up when you’re astral projecting. Letters and numbers are just a bunch of weird squiggles. The concepts of yes and no are pretty tangible, but the alphabet? Maybe Faun Windsong’s Ouija spirit was still on this plane. But Andy? Think how far his signal has to carry. Through the veil, through us…and maybe the act of spelling is just one filter too many.”

The glass circled, then stopped beside YES.

“The murder took place on multiple streets?” Jacob guessed. “In a parking lot? At a crossroad?”

His guesses were all met with NO, and I wondered how long we could keep going. My neck was stiff and my head was starting to hurt. And after her encounter with Dr. Chance, Darla had to be in worse shape than me. “Hold on,” I told Jacob. “Let’s regroup, top ourselves off, and give this thing one final big push.”

White, white light. I looked into the flame of the blessed candle and thought hard about how much power flowed through me. A lot. I knew it did. Enough to see and hear ghosts. Enough to sense repeaters. Enough to summon those weird invisible granules and a handful of slime. Was that enough, or did I need more? Maybe we should have taken Darla back to our place and hauled out the GhosTV. But we were so confident of our own abilities, we’d ended up here. And if we blew it now, we’d be too fatigued to try again, at which point it might be entirely too late….

“Vic.” Darla clasped my hand. I flinched, thinking all that light I was trying to gather would jump to her like it always tried to with Jacob. But it didn’t. Because Darla and me—we were the same. Both our psychic reservoirs were full, and both of our left hands were icy cold. And the mojo had no reason to try to level out between us. She gave my hand a squeeze. “We got this.”

“Then…let’s do it.”