Kat Richardson - Possession

“You said you’d like a drink.”

I opened my eyes, finding that the lids seemed heavier than usual, and glanced first up at him, then down to the glass he was holding next to my hand. The small glass had half an inch of amber-gold liquid at the bottom. “Whiskey?”

“It didn’t sound like a mystery beer sort of day,” he replied, alluding to his habit of accepting payment in beer for odd jobs done for various street people we knew around Pioneer Square.

I took the glass. “Definitely not.” While the drink was welcome, I would rather have had the energy to ravish him. A warm sensation in my chest and a wicked glint in his eye gave me the impression he was thinking the same thing. Oh well . . .

He sat next to me as I sipped and covered my free hand with his. “So, what about this day of yours?”

“Well, a client’s sister flipped a blob of paint into my eye. Turns out oil paint has quite a few nasty things in it—before you start: I already saw the doctor—and I need to give the eye a little rest. But I also need to figure out what’s going on with the sister.”

“In what way? She has a habit of flipping paint at people?”

“No. This is kind of delicate ground since I’m breaking confidentiality to discuss it, but I don’t know how else I’m going to get to the bottom of this if I can’t talk to a few people about the case—or cases—but I’ll get to that bit in a minute.”

“I won’t discuss it with anyone.”

I nodded before going on. “OK. The sister is in some kind of vegetative state—kind of like a coma but not. Anyhow, she shouldn’t be doing much of anything beyond lying still, but in the past few months, she’s started sitting up and painting. Even more recently she started babbling. She doesn’t appear to be doing this on her own but rather seems to be either under someone else’s control or channeling a ghost or something that’s using her body for a few minutes at a time before it drops out or gets pushed out. I don’t know anything else yet, but the home care nurse let slip that there are two other cases like this—vegetative patients doing strange things—and Skelly was surprised to hear there were any vegetative patients at all in the area, since it’s very rare, much less that they were doing impossible things.” I paused to sip my drink, appreciating the warm sensation of the liquor making its way down and expanding the calm and security that spread from Quinton’s touch on my hand.

“Now,” I continued, “you know me. I can’t swallow that all of the rare cases in the area are exhibiting the same strange behaviors for unrelated reasons.”

“Mathematically unlikely,” Quinton agreed.

“So there has to be either a link or a related cause. And before I got paint in my eye, I could see that the room was pretty heavily haunted. Most of the ghosts weren’t of the willful variety—there were a lot of displaced repeaters there. I’d like to get in contact with the families of the other PVS patients and find out what’s been happening to them, maybe get to see them and evaluate the ghost situation. The client initially broached the subject as a possible spirit or demonic possession. She’s religious and apparently this is causing her more than the usual crisis experienced by the haunted. Her priest isn’t being very helpful—something about the limits of his role, which is frankly beyond my knowledge and probably not germane.”

Quinton made a disgusted face. “Is he blaming her in some way? Making the situation out to be some kind of punishment for sin?”

“I don’t get that sense, but apparently he, or the church in question, doesn’t support the Catholic idea of demonic possession and exorcism, so she’s mostly been told to sit tight and pray. Which hasn’t been helping, that the client can see. So she’s desperate and very upset and she’s hoping I can figure out what’s going on. What she expects to happen after that is anyone’s guess. I suppose she’ll want to get rid of the unwanted visitors, but she hasn’t said that or how she’d prefer to see it done. She has hired a medium to sit with her sister and try to converse with whoever or whatever is coming around, but the medium hasn’t had a lot of luck. The babbling appears to be the only communication they’re receiving and that seems to be in a foreign language.”

“Wow. Does the sister know any foreign languages?”

“I don’t know, but if so, I’m guessing either it’s not one her sister also knows or it’s not a language at all.” I took another sip of whiskey and sighed, closing my burning eyes again and tilting my head back against the sofa cushions. “The medium took a digital recording of today’s outburst and said he’d send it to me—”

“Wait,” Quinton interrupted me. “A male medium? Isn’t that a bit unusual?”

“I don’t know. As far as I’ve ever seen, mediums are universally charlatans, regardless of gender.”

“Do you really have room to make that accusation, Harper?”

I pressed my lips hard together and didn’t say anything until I’d thought about it first. “I’m not a medium. I don’t act as an intermediary to spirits or wandering souls—which is what a medium supposedly does. I don’t act as a conduit for their voices or actions, either. I don’t even talk to them in that context. So, no. I’m not a medium. But you’re right. My experience isn’t everyone’s and it’s unfair of me to assume that there aren’t people with other skills related to the Grey. I know witches, shape-shifters, necromancers, sorcerers, vampires, shamans, and plenty of others who have some touch with the Grey that is unlike mine. So I should keep an open mind about whether there might be such a thing as a legitimate medium or channeler.” I opened one eye and peered at him. “And that being the case, you should be equally open-minded about the gender of any mediums that might be running around this case. This one is male and blond and a bit on the pudgy side, none of which is part of the stereotype, anyhow.” I closed my eye again.

“And he uses a digital recorder?”

“Even TV ghost hunters have moved on to high technology.”

“Yeah, but they aren’t likely to be hanging around you while I’m distracted by ruining my dad’s career.”

“Is that your latest project?” I asked.

“It’s a frequent enough accusation that I’ve decided to make it my life’s work, if I have to.” He didn’t sound at all jocular about it. Quinton’s relationship with his father was even uglier than mine had been with my mother until a couple of years ago. James Purlis was an unrepentant manipulator and a professional liar—he was a spy, after all. He worked for some covert branch of the government, running the sort of bizarre and creepy projects featuring alien autopsies or psychics attempting to kill goats with the power of their minds that you usually see only on cheesy documentaries running on late-night TV. Except, in his case, the “Ghost Division” wasn’t a scam or a joke and he was deadly serious about it—whatever it was. He had also seemed set on sucking Quinton back into the espionage business ever since he had confirmed that his son wasn’t dead.

That was my fault. If I hadn’t gone off to get myself killed, Quinton wouldn’t have broken his cover and ended up asking his father for help. I tried not to feel bad about it, not because I wasn’t guilty but because Quinton didn’t like it and tended to tell me off. Aren’t we a fun couple? Though I will admit to a certain degree of sinful glee anytime a wrench was thrown into the elder Purlis’s works—more so if I got to throw the wrench, since I’d disliked him from the first moment we met and he knocked me down.

“Your dad’s a jerk,” I said. “And I promise not to fall in love with any pudgy blond mediums or their digital recorders while you’re busy reminding him of that.”