Page 70 of Dead Vengeance

“Did you?” The question’s a challenge, and what five seconds ago was a cute pseudo-date that wasn’t a date but felt a bit like a date has just turned into the wrong sort of inquisition entirely. Something that can go one of two ways depending on what I do here.

Tell the truth or lie?

Or skip over the problem entirely…

“It showed me the same place it showed you,” I try, because that is true.

“Did it show you dead people?”

I always see dead people. All the time. I can see the ghost of a barman who hung himself on the stairs right now, swinging back and forth behind Liam. I’m trying not to make eye contact so it doesn’t realise I can see it, so it doesn’t try to strike up a conversation. “I saw exactly what you saw last night. Judging by your reaction.”

He searches me, and I almost want to avoid his gaze too. “Did you see all of them?”

“Yes. I think so. There was a group, right? At the end of the hall?” I think I’m playing dumb pretty well. Unless… Unless he couldn’t see the whole group? Maybe only I could see that. Fuck.

“And they were dead?” he pushes with a keen nod.

“Yes. Or-or at least it looked that way. But it’s a hospital. Surely it has… Surely it’s haunted. Has dead people. Has ghosts. Who are dead.”

His eyebrows draw close. Nice eyebrows, they are too. “So you think maybe those people are always there? And it wasn’t part of the hallucination?”

Did I mention, fuck? “Um. I-I don’t know. I’m just, um, throwing it out there. As an idea.”

His eyes stay locked onto mine, like he’s a human polygraph. “You think they all haunt it all the time? Because they died there?”

“M-maybe?”

“So you think they’re real and not part of the hallucination?”

Arrrrrggggghhhhhhh. “I mean… um… I don’t know?”

“Okay, but if they’re all there, at the hospital, because they all died there, and they’re stuck there, why are there so many ghosts at your house?”

Kill me now.

This drink was a bad idea.

Even if I need to gulp down more brown ale just to give myself another second before I speak, I eventually come up with the dashingly clever, “I don’t know.”

Liam leans forward, elbows on knees, fingers threaded, as if he’s a lawyer about to explain how I’ve just gone and hung myself. “You don’t know why you have Simon, and that little girl, and that little boy, and Helena, and they’re all at your house?”

I swallow. Nothing this time. Pure anxiety. “I don’t know.”

“And you don’t know where this thing came from?” he pursues.

“No, I don’t.”

“And you don’t know what it wants?”

“Liam…” I’ve said his name just to slow him. To put a pause on whatever conclusion he’s about to draw that is feeling right now like it’s going to be far too close to the truth. “I’m not sure what you’re trying to get at. I called you because I wanted help getting rid of spirits. Not…”

Not because I like them. Not because I want them around. Very obviously not because I’m actually a necromancer who routinely invites dead people home until I raised something worse than all the rest that just resulted in two people being killed.

But Liam cuts into my blathering attempt at an excuse with the surprising, “Are you sure it’s evil?”

That one throws me so completely I can’t answer straight away.

He’s seen it. It’s a bloody skeleton. A creepy skeleton who shuts down reality and throws you into the deep end of a pit of spiders. More or less. “I’m pretty sure it is evil.”