“I can help. What’s your name?” I never took my eyes off her.
If she rushed me, I was going to scream bloody murder.
She didn’t speak, much to no one’s surprise. I continued approaching. Closer, I saw the tears in her clothes. There was blood all across her body.
Above, Ness whimpered. I spared a glance up the cliff to see what was the matter. Ness’s attention was firmly on the ghost. I noticed that, as I got closer to her, the ghost’s body became more and more opaque. The power emanating from me gave the woman the ability to fully materialize.
If I wanted to gather more clues, I would have to get face-to-face with her. I cringed and took another step forward. The ghost remained perfectly still as I approached. Ghosts were never this creepy. Sure, they were dead, but they still had a touch of life in the way they carried themselves and the way they spoke.
This one was dead, through and through. No amount of my power would bring her back to her normal self. It was as if someone had devoured what’d made her human in the first place, leaving behind nothing more than a kind of snakeskin. It looked like a human from the outside, but there was nothing on the inside.
“Do you remember your name?” I asked.
Her lips parted. A sound like wind whistling in the night came out of her. I had no idea how I would spell that in a search engine. Obviously, it wasn’t her name.
Still, I committed her image to memory so I could look through the missing persons files when Maddox finally returned. I hoped he would be proud of me. I was doing my damnedest to help, like that might make up for everything that’d happened lately.
“You good down there?” Vi called out. “We might not be alone for too much longer.”
Ness pranced nervously beside her.
My heart flipped in my chest. So, I wasn’t going to get any direct answers from this ghost, but I had one more question for her.
Hope filling my throat, I asked, “Did anyone else die here?”
She raised her hand and pointed away from us. My hands trembled at my sides. Vi wanted me to climb back up. She hissed at me when my head turned to the left, following the ghost’s outstretched hand.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Vi stage whispered down the short cliff. “Get your ass back up here. Ness can hear someone coming.”
“Give me a minute!” I darted to the left.
This ghost wasn’t the only person who’d died here. Another short cliff sat ahead, leading deeper into the quarry. I came to an abrupt halt at the edge. A part of me expected a bloodbath, but that didn’t make sense. The police had been through here recently. They would have found the crime scene if that was the case.
At first glance, there was nothing below. I studied the shadowed rocks in search of anything that might have been alive once. Though I knew it would be useless, I shoved my power out in a wide net. It caught on nothing, but that told me the man had been here. His ability to sever the threads of fate left this place a giant void.
It was so empty that I realized that this had to be his lair. My blood turned to ice. I was standing in the middle of the man’s hunting ground. Behind me, Ness whined. She let out a low bark to call me back.
Every hair on my body stood on end. My scalp prickled as I slowly turned. I expected the man to be standing right behind me. But we’d left him back in Syracuse.
Right?