Marcus Pelegrimas - Teeth of Beasts

“To what?” she snapped. “Live for three hundred years?”

“Yeah, or drop a Full Blood. Tricks like that would be good to know.”

“What have you found?”

Reluctantly, Rico let a metal tray fall from his grasp and said, “A whole lotta nothin’.”

“What about you, Cole?”

“I’m trying to get a copy of everything on this computer and send it to my laptop.”

“How long will that take?”

“Too damn long,” he replied. “I’ll get as much as I can, but he may be able to trace it to where I mailed it, so we need to let it run as long as possible and then destroy this computer. I mean really destroy it. No pieces intact.”

“That’s some tech talk I can get behind,” Rico said through a wide grin.

“I just found the Pestilence files!” Cole said. “At least it sure looks like them.”

“Can you send ’em somewhere else besides your own e-mail?” Rico asked. “Just in case somethin’ happens to us?”

Trying not to think about what that implied, Cole nodded. “Yeah. Like where?”

“One of Ned’s hospital contacts back in St. Louis, Dr. Oehler.”

Once he’d been given the doctor’s e-mail address, Cole made the necessary adjustments and paused before making them final. “You sure about this? There’s a lot of stuff in here that we wouldn’t want in the wrong hands.”

“We can trust the doc,” Rico said. “She’s one of ours.”

After a few more frenzied taps on the keyboard, Cole switched the monitor off and backed away from the computer. The processor was still blinking and whirring, but at least the terminal looked idle from a distance. He then skirted the table without touching the limbs hanging off its edge and dug into his pocket for his cell phone.

“What are you doing?” Paige asked as she checked the temple. Jordan swayed to a song only she could hear, and Elsie locked eyes with her sister as she stepped back through the glowing beads.

Having already speed-dialed, Cole put the phone to his ear and said, “I’m calling MEG.”

“Hang that damn thing up and get ready for whatever comes through this freaking curtain!” Paige said with a fury that was equal parts impatience and frustration.

“Henry’s body may be dead on that table, but he’s still out there!” Cole said over the growing thrum filling the next room. “That means he’s a ghost, and ghosts are MEG’s territory.”

“How much time until our guest arrives, Jordan?”

When the Dryad stopped singing so she could respond, all of the glowing symbols dimmed. “He’s trying right now, and if I hold off much longer, he’ll know something is wrong.”

“Hang up the phone,” Paige ordered.

Cole slid his thumb along the side of his phone’s case to pop the earpiece from its resting place. “Am I the only Skinner who uses technology from this century?” he grumbled while putting the headset in his ear and the phone into his pocket. The next dial tone was washed out by a rush of sound that originated from one side of the basement, charged through the room, and rumbled several yards beyond the opposite wall. The beads were left crackling and swaying, but Elsie was gone.

“—ranch 40, can anyone hear me?” someone shouted through Cole’s earpiece.

“Yeah, is Stu there?”

“I can help you. Do you have a disturbance to report?”

“I don’t have time for this. Put Stu on the phone. Tell him it’s Cole.”

“Cole? Damn it, I told you—” Although Paige stopped scolding him when Cole waved at her to shut up, she most definitely wasn’t happy about it.

“Oh,” the person answering MEG’s phones said. “I’ve heard him mention you before. Don’t you have a verification number or something?”

Cole recited the number from memory while Paige and Rico took defensive positions in front of the beaded curtain. Another wave of energy rushed through the room, this time in the opposite direction than the previous one.

“What happened?” Paige asked.

Jordan was no longer swaying or making any noise. At the end of a long inhalation, she snapped her eyes open and said, “It was a skip. Lancroft used this temple to propel him to another one.”

“Could it have been anyone other than Lancroft?”

“Nobody else knows about this temple. My sisters could sense Elsie and me well enough to get you to this house, but if they knew more, they would have sent you straight to this room.”

“Did Elsie get out safely?”

Jordan closed her eyes and thought about it. “I suppose I could contact her to find out.”

“Do you need to meditate or something?”

“No,” the Dryad replied. “I need a phone.”

As Paige tossed her cell to the Dryad, a trembling voice came from the workshop.

“Umm, guys?”

It seemed like so long ago since they’d spoken to Daniels that the Nymar’s appearance surprised everyone in the basement. Rico was closest to the door, so he headed into the workshop to see what Daniels wanted.

“Cole?” Stu asked breathlessly through the earpiece. “What’s the emergency?”

Pressing the earpiece so he could distinguish one conversation from all the others, Cole said, “I need to know how to get rid of a ghost.”

“You found a ghost? Sweet! Where? Let me send a team to wherever you are so we can get some recordings first. Maybe some video.”

“No time,” Cole snapped. “I just need to know how to get rid of it.”

For a change Stu didn’t need to flip through any papers or tap the keyboard in front of him. Once he’d taken a steadying breath, he slipped right into business mode. “Okay. What sort of ghost is it? Can you see it? Hear it? Does it interact with you or is it more like a recording that just repeats itself?”

“Yes it interacts with us. That’s the main problem.”

“I can’t hold on much longer,” Jordan said.

Paige looked at him impatiently, so Cole held up a hand and said, “Quick, Stu. You’re the guys who go after these things. What do you do when you need to get rid of one?”

“We don’t really run into that sort of thing too often. Mostly just finding them is the tough part. Let’s see, you could do an exorcism. I could walk you through it.”

“An exorcism?”

“Oh for crap’s sake, hang up that damn phone!” Paige growled.

“No exorcism,” Cole said. “We’re short on priests around here. What else have you got?”

“Is this thing demonic or was it human? Do you know its history?” Stu asked. “From our experience—”

“That’s it!” Jordan said as tears rolled down her reddening cheeks. “I can’t hold him back!”

Steeling himself for the imminent arrival, Cole turned up the volume of his earpiece. “—problem is that an entity is confused,” Stu continued. “The tricky part is communicating with it.”

“Just tell me what to do before I hang up and figure something out on my own,” Cole urged.

Having organized a small convention on his end of the phone, Stu grunted and wheezed as if about to blow a fuse. A series of loud bumps and cracks were followed by the voice of someone who must have wrestled the headset completely off of him. “Does this entity know it’s dead?” the new person asked.

“Abby? Is that you?”

“Yes, Cole. I’ve got more field experience. Does this entity know it’s dead?”

As Jordon fell to her knees and then drooped forward to prop herself up with one hand, a ripple of energy flickered through the beads.

“I don’t think so,” Cole said as he held onto his spear with both hands and stood between Paige and Rico.

“Then the best thing to do is educate it. After that, it’ll probably move on.”

“Probably?”

“Either that,” Abby said tensely, “or it might really spin out of control.”