“Who are you?” Gwen’s voice came through clearly on the device, and then…nothing. The other questions were there too, but no answers that any of them could hear.
“Well, that’s disappointing,” Sapph said, and Gwen shrugged.
“Hazards of the trade,” she said. “It’s not like we can command them to talk to us, no matter what the shows say.”
Sapph looked around again, wishing (not for the first time) that she could borrow Scottie’s talents to see what lurked in the realm that lay just beyond her mortal eyes. For all she knew, there were answers all around them. Bear’s growl was still rumbling in his throat, which meant something was there.
Scottie, where are you? She wasn’t sure what his plans had been.
I’m trying to keep Lance and Pat from breaking their necks, why? His mental voice had that long-suffering note of being the only adult in the room.
Because we just had some active phenomena in the records room. She sent him a brief mental movie of what had happened.
You didn’t switch, did you?
Sapph rolled her eyes, even though she knew he couldn’t see her. No, because no one here with me can communicate with me in the Ghostlands. But that’s why I wanted to see where you were.
We’re over by the cottages. Hold on.
“So what does Scottie say?” Amari said. When Gwen glanced sharply at her, Amari grinned “She’s got that look on her face when they talk. And I’ll bet he just told her to sit tight until he could get here.”
“She’s not wrong,” Sapph admitted, grinning too. “Apparently he’s trying to keep Lance and Pat from killing themselves as they investigate around the cottages.”
“Good luck,” Gwen said. “Speaking from personal experience, it’s a losing battle.”
“He’s a professional,” Sapph said. “Lots of experience in keeping Pendragons from doing stupid things.”
You say the nicest things, Scottie said dryly. We’re on our way over now.
“They’re on their way,” she repeated out loud.
“Probably running like banshees were on their asses,” Gwen said. “Nothing gets those two more motivated than ghosts.” She looked around her. “Shall we keep looking in the meantime?”
Sapph and Amari nodded, and they spent the next ten minutes looking around the records room, Bear’s throaty growl a low soundtrack to the rustle of papers. Sapph wandered the room, wanting to make sure she knew what the actual layout was before she stepped into the Ghostlands. The room was long, nearly twice the size she’d thought, and the shelves reached up to brush the edges of the lights. Several times, she thought she saw movement out of the corner of her eyes, but by the time she swung her flashlight around, there was nothing but dust floating on the still air.
“Hey, I found where the computers must have been!” Amari’s voice echoed through the stacks. Sapph and Gwen joined her on the far side of the room from where the books were. Amari had found a desk, nearly hidden beneath banker’s boxes. There was no chair, but once the boxes had been shifted, she’d found an old CRT monitor, cables dangling limply. “I think this means you were right,” Amari said to Gwen. “They took the tower, but left this.”
“One computer? One computer for an entire hospital?” Sapph couldn’t help the doubt creeping into her voice. “I mean, even if they only had 20-30 patients, wouldn’t they need more than that?”
“In the records room?” Gwen countered. “I mean, we haven’t gone through the offices yet. Those are on the second floor.”
“True.” Sapph reached out with a fingertip to touch the monitor. Nothing happened, except for her finger coming away black with the grime of ages. “Ugh.”
Gwen handed her a handkerchief from her back pocket. “Moms are always prepared for messes,” she said. “Especially with twins.”
There was a crash behind them, and they all turned. Instead of the three men they were expecting, there was a single figure standing in the doorway, shadowy in the wan light coming from the hall. He (and Sapph wasn’t sure why, but she knew it was a man) wore something that might have been a lab coat, but the details were hard to make out. It was like seeing someone through rain-soaked glass. He was there, but hazy. He looked at them, nodded, and then turned and left, fading into the darkness.
“What. The. Fuck.”
Sapph looked at Gwen. “What?”
“I have never seen an apparition like that before,” Gwen said. “Like, ever. Not even…” And then she broke off and shook her head. “Never.”
“Me either,” Amani said. “Have you, Sapph?”
“In the real world? Or the Ghostlands? In the Ghostlands, they just look like normal people, for the most part.” Sapph thought about that. “I’ve never really seen a ghost outside of the Ghostlands, now that I think about it. They only came into the lab when I was already in the Ghostlands.”
“How did you get ghosts into a lab?” Gwen asked her.
“Malcolm - Dr. Robinette - bought a haunted house and set it up. With my mother’s help, I think. I know she introduced me to him when I first started to flicker, as she called it.”
“Flicker.” Gwen looked at her. “As in, you’d just fade in and out?”
“Yeah, it worried her a bit, especially since I didn’t have the vocabulary at that point to explain what was going on. The first time it happened, she thought I was dreaming, or she had been drunk. There was a lot of drinking in the house at that time.” Sapph shoved those memories aside ruthlessly. “Once I did it and was gone for 10 minutes, she realized something was going on and called Malcolm. He’s the one who helped me control it, and who got me hooked up with my first bodyguard who was a telepath. He trained Bear too.”
“You were lucky your mom knew him,” Gwen said. “I don’t know what I’d do if one of the twins vanished in front of me.”
“True.” Sapph didn’t know what she’d have done in her mother’s place. “I guess if you live in Hollywood enough, and do enough movies, nothing really startles you much anymore.” Or if you knew that your daughter would have something like that.
Her mother had really never talked about her father’s gifts, but Malcolm had given Sapph a few details. Her father had served in the military, although she didn’t know what branch, and that’s how Malcolm had met Marlo Pendragon. Her father had been helping Malcolm with certain projects that he couldn’t talk about, so when her daughter started displaying odd paranormal gifts, it was to Malcolm she had turned.
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