“Green-levels?” I asked.
She just gave me a knowing smile. No more info, not until I agreed to help. Got it.
“So…you want my help to get Mrs. Ruiz in the box, whatever that means, and you’ll tell me about—”
“Everything,” she finished. “Or as much of it as I can. Like I said, I’m not a full member yet.”
Of what? I wanted to ask, but I knew better than to try, at least right now. “And then what?”
She frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, you get Mrs. Ruiz and I get all this information, and then what?” I couldn’t help but think of Alona’s theory that this was some kind of complicated recruiting scheme. “I meet the others or—”
“No,” she said sharply. “This has to stay between us.”
Oh. “Okay,” I said, drawing it out. What was the point, then?
She made an impatient noise and stood, shoving the chair out of the way. “Look, we can help each other here. That’s it.”
I just looked at her.
She sighed heavily. “If, in a month or two, you want to make contact, I’ll show you how to do that. But you and I have never met each other before, get it?”
I nodded.
She stepped closer, grabbing the front of my shirt in her fist. “I’m serious. I know where we keep all the green-levelsand worse. Wouldn’t keep me up at night to set a few of themloose in your living room, if you can’t keep your mouth shut.”
I nodded hastily. She was hard-core. I kind of liked that.
She shoved the chair toward me and started for the window, clearly expecting me to follow.
Not without jeans, thanks. “And…one more thing,” I said. “Your name. Your real name.”
She faced me and hesitated.
I lifted my hands. I wasn’t going anywhere without it. She already knew mine and where to find me. I wasn’t completely sure I liked that idea.
“Mina,” she said finally. “Mina Blackwell.”
I waited.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” she said in a huff. She reached into the back pocket of her pants, pulled free a battered card, and handed it to me.
It was a driver’s license with a picture that showed a slightly younger and much happier Mina Blackwell. She had braces in the photo, which made her look so much more vulnerable. According to the info, she had one blue eye and one green, just as I’d thought, and she was older than me by about six months. “St. Louis?” I asked.
She shrugged. “I go where I’m sent.”
“That’s a long drive.” I handed her back her license.
She tucked it away in her pocket again. “Not nearly as long as if I have to go back without what I came for,” she said pointedly.
Okay, got it. Down to business.
* * *
For the second time in twenty-four hours, I ended up hunched in prickly rosebushes at the Gibley Mansion. This time, though, just for a little variety, we were on the opposite side of the former garden.
Most of the cops who’d come roaring in earlier had left by now. Only a couple of squad cars remained at the front of the house. Dopey and a couple of the officers took turns patrolling the inside and the perimeter immediately around the mansion. The rest of the time they stayed out front, making sure their presence was noticeable.
Mina and I were only about five feet from where Alona and I had seen Mrs. Ruiz materialize before. Only this time, instead of facing her, we would be behind her. If she showed up. It felt as if I’d spent days waiting on this ghost already.
Mina’s mysterious boxes were back in place, surrounding the exact spot, or close, to where Mrs. Ruiz would appear, the cords trailing directly back to our hiding place and the portable generator, which Mina would leave off until the last second. We were counting on the shadows to hide them well enough until it was time for them to do whatever it was they did. Plus, none of the officers on duty seemed all that interested in the surrounding yard, just keeping people out of and away from the house.
“So, how did you even know about this? About Mrs. Ruiz, I mean?” I whispered to Mina. As long as we kept it down, the officers couldn’t hear us all the way at the front, especially over the radios and their own bored gossip. By now, we’d heard enough to learn they figured what had happened earlier was, most likely, a combination of a wild animal trapped in the house and Dopey/Ralph’s nerves.
She shrugged, her shoulder rubbing against mine with the movement, and her hair brushing the side of my face. She smelled spicy, like cinnamon and tea or something. Not a bad scent, just different. “Someone on the Decatur Governance and Development Committee called us. Wanted a sweep before the house was destroyed to prevent any future issues. Leadership thought it would be a good opportunity for me to finish up my training.” I could hear the sarcasm in her voice in that last part, but I wasn’t sure why.
According to what Mina had told me in the car on the way over here, “Leadership” was the ruling body for the Order of the Guardians, a cross between a secret society and a small business, made up entirely of people like us. I’d never even heard of them before, though, and believe me when I say I’ve done my share of Googling on this topic. In that way, they were more secret society than business, I guess. This thing with Mrs. Ruiz was part of Mina’s initiation into full membership. Or full-time work, depending on how you looked at it.
“We do this kind of thing all the time. Clean up after something bad happens in a location, sweep a house before someone new moves in.” She shrugged. “Most of the time it’s not a green-level, though.”
They ranked spirits based on an estimation of their potential to do harm to humans. Like Mrs. Ruiz’s ability to slam doors shut. If she could do that, it wouldn’t have taken much more to shove someone down the stairs. And based on the history of the house, it seemed she might well have done that, probably more than once.
I couldn’t quite resolve this new information with what I believed—to maintain a presence here, a spirit had to focus on the positive rather than the negative. But if that were true without exception, Mrs. Ruiz would have been gone years ago.
Apparently, the system wasn’t quite as simple as I’d always assumed it to be. The principle held true, yes, but additional factors figured in, like initial energy level, something I’d never considered. It made sense, though, or else there would be no angry and vengeful ghosts, and I’d met plenty of those over the years.
Evidently, there were also different classifications for the variety of spirits who hung around. Some had no idea that they were dead and frequently relived moments leading up to their own demise. Others, like Alona and Mrs. Ruiz, were fully aware that they were gone…and in Mrs. Ruiz’s case, less than happy about it.
I hadn’t managed to get a complete breakdown from Mina, but I knew that, on a scale, green-levels were closer to the top than the bottom. Hence why she’d been sent here to prove herself.
Knowing that now, I was maybe a little uncomfortable with my role in this test. I was, essentially, helping Mina cheat. Aside from the ethics of it, which I didn’t particularly care for, I was also kind of worried that if she “passed,” she might end up in a situation she couldn’t see well enough to handle on her own.
Trying to bring that up, though, had proven dangerous. She’d said nothing, but glared at me and refused to speak to me, other than to issue more threats if I backed out.
Okay, so I’d learned that lesson. Whatever she gained by full membership, Mina thought it was worth the risk. “How do people even know to ask you guys?” I asked now.
She shrugged. “The people who need to know know. We have a network of contacts among the clergy in all the major religions; state, local, and federal government; hospitals; funeral homes; even some police and fire departments. I think they’ve even got somebody on one of those paranormal investigation shows.”
“Really?”
She snorted. “Just in case one of the ‘investigators’ actually stumbles into something real, I t
hink.”
“And you box all of them? All the ghosts, I mean.” Boxing, as I understood it, was what she meant by containment. Another part of this I was less than comfortable with. The technology in those boxes—whatever it was, and Mina didn’t know other than to say, “Who cares? It works”—would divide up a spirit’s energy and prevent it from re-forming. She could then cart the boxes away, and no more haunting. What happened to the ghost after that, she was less clear about. Some of them were studied by the Order’s scientists, the same ones who’d created all the hardware she was hauling around. Others…she didn’t know or wouldn’t say.
She looked at me pityingly. “We’ve been over this. They’re not souls. Souls can’t be measured or captured. They’re shadows, energy echoes, imitations. Whatever.”
I wasn’t so sure. I understood her point, to an extent. Souls don’t register on an electromagnetic scale. But that didn’t mean they weren’t more than the mindless echoes she was implying.
“If they don’t bother the living, we don’t bother them,” she said. “There are too many of them anyway.”
Like they were ants or some other kind of household pest.
“But”—she elbowed me—“we serve the living, not the dead. Remember that.”
That certainly explained her attitude toward Alona. I mean, the part that went beyond the attitude almost everyone had toward Alona. She wasn’t always easy to like. But that didn’t mean I was willing to relegate her to being some kind of…nonentity.
Doubt must have shown on my face. “Let me guess. You got into this to help the poor dead people make peace with their unfinished business.” Mina sounded amused.
“You don’t do that?” I was guessing not. I’d described the white light to her, and she’d readily acknowledged it as a phenomenon she was familiar with. To her understanding, however, it was simply a side effect of an echo willingly surrendering what was left of its energy. What that might mean for Alona, someone who’d been into the light and come back, I had no idea.
“What part of Vivis servimus non mortuis do you not understand?” she asked.
“All of it?”
She shifted carefully on the ground next to me, making herself more comfortable, which reminded me viscerally of the last time I’d been in a similar situation with a girl. Suddenly I missed Alona. She would kill me if she found out I was here. And yet, I wasn’t ready to walk away. There were still too many things I didn’t know.
“Has it not occurred to you that every time you’re helping one of them, you might be hurting someone who is still alive?” Mina asked with some exasperation.
“How?” I demanded.
“Shhhh.” She elbowed me harder this time, and I grunted.
“First,” she said in a quieter voice, “because you’re taking one person’s—if you can even think of a ghost as anything fully actualized as a whole person—account as the truth.”
That danger I knew well enough. I could never know for certain that ghosts seeking closure to their unfinished business were going to be honest with me—or even them-selves—about what that business might be.
“Second, even if they are telling the truth, how does it help to let a man know that his dead wife is sorry for something she did thirty years ago that he might not even know about?”
That was, much as I hated to admit it, a good question.
Mina shrugged. “Maybe he’s been happier this wholetime thinking she’s at peace or whatever. And now you’re telling him that his wife, or some version of her energy, has been hanging around and miserable, watching him this whole time? No way.”
“So, if they’re not here because they have unfinished business, why are they here at all?” I felt like the world as I knew it was slipping away little by little.
She made an impatient noise. “You’re thinking about this way too much. Why are we here? Why is anyone here?” She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. You just have to look for the greater good.”
That, too, made sense.
“Our job is to protect the living. We’re the heroes here, not the villains,” she added.
The villains in her mind were the Casper lovers. They weren’t an organization, at least not like the Order. They were the paranormal equivalent of rabid environmentalists, apparently—people who elevated spirits above the living, almost to the point of worshiping them as deities or emissaries of such, and refused to consider a spirit’s departure from this existence a good thing under any circumstances.
I wasn’t completely on that side either, obviously. Technically, the Order and I did the same work. I just did it by finding out what was keeping the spirit here and helping him or her move on.
“Speaking of which”—she grinned at me—“I think we have company.”
I looked through the tangle of branches and leaves in front of us at the configuration of boxes. I could barely see them in the dark. The moonlight was fading, and the sun would start coming up soon.
A faint glow had started to appear in the open space amid the five boxes, almost directly on top of the dirty pillowcase filled with most of the silverware. Mina had spread the rest of the spoons around inside the circle made by the boxes in an effort to distract Mrs. Ruiz. We were counting on Mrs. Ruiz’s obsession with her treasure—no way would she want to lose even one of those spoons—to keep her distracted. Hopefully, trying to pick them up again—for all I knew she might succeed, she was really strong—would keep her so occupied she didn’t notice the trap closing around her until it was too late.
This had apparently been Mina’s plan before. Lure Mrs. Ruiz into the living room—a location with multiple exits, unlike the bedroom where the silverware had been hidden—and contain her there. Except I’d needed saving first andshe’d stepped in. I owed her for that, at least.
Mina tensed next to me. “Ready?” she asked.
My role was simple. Flip the switch on the generator, guide Mina if Mrs. Ruiz tried to move outside the boxes, and then run like hell when it was all done because apparently there was no way the cops would miss seeing the light show that ensued.
No. “Yes,” I said.
She nodded, a motion I sensed more than saw in the dark. She rose into a crouching position. Though I couldn’t see it, I knew she’d have the control box in her hand. She’d showed it to me when we unloaded everything from her car. It was a simple device that would trigger the boxes on the ground to open and divide up the energy that was Mrs. Ruiz into five equal parts.
She couldn’t do it too soon, before Mrs. Ruiz had fully materialized, or it wouldn’t take.
I watched intently, feeling the intensity thrumming through Mina next to me. She was determined to make this work.
The pattern of Mrs. Ruiz’s housedress solidified into something resembling real fabric rather than a projection of the same, at about the same time she noticed the spoons on the ground. Or so I assumed. She bent down to try to pick them up, and Mina nudged me.
I snapped the switch on the generator, which started up with what felt like a deafening roar, though that was probably more because it was so close to us and I was dreading getting caught.
Mrs. Ruiz looked up sharply and spun around to face us and the source of the noise, moving quickly for a woman of her size.
“Now,” I said to Mina.
She didn’t react for a second, and I realized even in the slight movement of Mrs. Ruiz turning around, Mina had lostsight of her. Damn. She really couldn’t see them very well.
“Mina…”
She pressed the button, and the split tops on the boxes cracked open, sending bolts of yellowish-white light toward the sky.
Oh, hell. There was no way we were getting out of here undetected.
As I watched, the five separate beams converged on Mrs. Ruiz, splitting her into pieces, like a photograph broken apart into sections. Her face was still frozen in that expression of fury.
Then the beams began to retract slowly, each pulling with it the blur of colors that had on
ce been a part of Mrs. Ruiz.
Loud voices came from the front of the house, followed immediately by the sound of car doors opening and running steps.
“Mina,” I whispered urgently.
“Wait,” she said, her face aglow in the fading beams, intensity and concentration wrinkling her brow.
“Mina!”
She fumbled in her bag and came out with a handful of something. She snapped the something open, and our hiding place glowed green. Glow sticks, but the big professional kind, like for spelunking or whatever. Then she stood and chucked them as hard as she could away from us and our escape path. They spun and arced away from us like mini-UFOs. A couple of them smacked into the side of the house with a loud thwack.
The running footsteps slowed and then stopped. A flashlight passed over the bushes that hid us and then moved in the direction of the glow sticks.
“Now,” she whispered. She pressed another button, and the top of the boxes snapped shut, eliminating the last of glow of the beams.
I snapped off the generator and abandoned it, per plan, and she snagged the cords of the boxes, hauling them over her shoulder.
We bolted through the yard, heading for the street behind the house and the block beyond it, where we’d parked her car, a beat-up Malibu that could have been a twin to my Dodge in all its signs of having lived a rough life.
“Hey!” The first shout came from behind us, and I put on a burst of speed. I did not want to explain this to my mother.
I looked back to see how Mina was doing with the additional burden of her equipment and found her veering away from me.
What the hell?
She must have felt my gaze on her because she paused just long enough to look over her shoulder and give a jaunty salute that I could barely see in the faint light. I started to turn, to go after her, but doubling back would have put me on a direct collision course with all the nice officers chasing us with their flashlights and, likely, guns.
No, thanks.
Damn it. I knew I should have driven myself.
I stuck to the shadows, and instead of heading for the street, as we’d planned, I moved through side yards and backyards of the homes surrounding the Gibley Mansion. Mina, after all, had the keys to her car. Getting to the Malibuwould do me no good without those.