He didn’t understand her, but she fascinated him.
Now that he was out on his own, Karen was the voice of his conscience. He kept her close, especially when he had to go away. It was his way of staying true. Of staying focused.
“What do I do now?” he asked her.
Patience, Karen said, just as she had the first time he’d gone with her, out into the night to hunt the dead. It was the word she whispered in his bed, inches from his lips, pressed up against him, letting anticipation build until it drove him wild. It was what she said when she made that final cut, when she told him how to carve the runes, when she made him practice, made him repeat her instructions over and over again until he stopped fumbling and knew them by heart.
Patience.
Barlow chewed on his tongue.
In the halogen-blue halo of a lonely Chevron station, Barlow parked his Jeep and pulled out his cell. Alyssa’s range of manifestation was nearly double that of any other spirit he had encountered.
6.2 miles! She was something wonderful.
He scrolled through his contacts and almost dialed, but he put the cell back in his pocket. He needed to calm down first.
Inside the cinder block convenience mart the florescent lights made everyone seem radioactive and unhealthy. Barlow’s hand shook as he poured himself a coffee, and he had to use a handful of napkins to clean up the spill. The first bitter sip scalded his tongue.
“Long night?” the middle-aged woman behind the counter asked. Purple velvet pantsuit with frizzy orange hair.
“Something like that,” Barlow said. He managed a weak smile.
“Drive safe out there.”
Outside, back behind the wheel, Barlow dialed a number on his cell. Sheehan was a professional Las Vegas middleman. He’d given Barlow a business card, and under Sheehan’s name were the words: Procurements and Acquisitions. He answered on the first ring, his voice gruff and secretive.
“Mr. Barlow?”
“Yes. I think I’ve found her.”
“Who’s her?”
“That vanishing hitchhiker we talked about.”
“Pink shirt? Cutoffs?”
“That’s her.”
In his suite in Vegas, Sheehan whooped as if he’d just hit blackjack. Then his voice dropped an octave. “You think you can get her?”
Barlow hesitated.
“Don’t dick me around here. Karen told me to trust you, so I’m trusting you, but my buyers are serious men. If you can’t—”
“I can get her,” Barlow said.
“You have a name? Any details at all?”
“Not yet,” Barlow said. The lie came easily.
“Get some. Pronto. Everyone’s nocturnal in this city, so we can do this tonight if you don’t drive like an old lady.”
“I’ll let you know.”
He almost hung up, but heard Sheehan calling his name.
“What was that? I missed it,” Barlow asked.
“If it pans out, this puts you on another level.” Sheehan chuckled. “From scavenger to hunter. You move up the food chain, man—just like Karen did.”
Barlow ended the call. “Scavenger,” he said, and his voice was gravel and rage.
Patience, he thought, and this time it was his own voice he heard, not Karen’s.
It became a mantra. A reminder.
He said it aloud. “Patience.”
The next swig of coffee burned like acid down his throat, and Barlow welcomed it.
After twenty minutes of driving—first west, then east again—Barlow pulled off the road into a dark stretch of the desert. He killed his headlights first, then the dome-light before he opened the door. The midnight wind kicked up dry grit, hints of juniper, and rancid exhaust from the interstate. The temperature had dropped, and it was colder than expected. There was a leather jacket draped across the backseat of the Jeep, and he pulled it on before running around to the trunk and disabling his brake lights. He felt anonymous, twenty-five yards from the busy road, but he was wary of eastbound authorities. He had to be careful now. Patient.
He watched for a full two minutes, headlights coming, taillights going. A steady rush of whispering tires on asphalt. Then he got back into the Jeep and threw it into four-wheel drive.
There was nothing romantic about the desert. Even at night it was a scorched wasteland—a flat-black void stretching out to a jagged horizon where it met the purple bruise of the sky. He drove cautiously between the skeletal frames of dead trees—silhouettes of agony, reaching for unseen stars. Once the constellations would’ve rotated above, but the ambient light from the nearby interstate kept them hidden. Kept them biding their time until civilization collapsed and they could return.
Barlow took it slowly, letting his eyes adjust to the dark, worried about cracking something vital in the engine by driving over a boulder. He felt a rush of warmth from the talisman around his neck—another pull—so he stopped, grabbed a black medical bag from behind his seat, and headed out on foot into the dark.
The wind picked up. It grabbed at his door. He caught it and kicked it shut. He hefted the bag, blinked away dust, and followed the pull of the talisman.
It was cold in this dead place. Skull-shaped rocks pushed up from between clutches of desperate scrub-grass. Gravel and sand crunched underfoot. His eyes couldn’t keep up and soon he felt blinded by the night. He stood alone in the darkness, frantically pawing through his bag.
“Patience,” he said again. He forced himself to slow down. Just like Karen had taught him.
He found the flashlight and clicked it on. A circle of white sand jumped in front of him. The light offered no relief from the pressure of the void, only changed it—sacrificing the anonymity of the shadows for less treacherous passage.
Barlow was close. He knew it. He swept the flashlight from side to side, following the psychic tug of the talisman. Then, in the flashlight’s relentless beam, abandoned in this isolated place, was a cairn of chipped rock and hastily-shoveled earth. Just a mound, easily overlooked, but unable to hold up against closer scrutiny.
Proof that some animal had tried to hide its shame.
Barlow tasted blood, again. Fresher this time. He hadn’t realized that he’d been gnawing the inside of his cheek until it tore. He approached the mound, holding his breath, swallowing copper.
There, left to the world, left to the elements, were the remains of her uncovered foot.
Alyssa was suddenly beside him. Her pixie hair blew in the breeze. Her pink shirt rippled. She didn’t feel the cold.
“I found her like this.” There was no panic in her voice now, only concern. “She’s badly hurt. She needs help. I tried to flag someone down, but nobody stopped.”
Barlow smiled at the ghost and patted his black bag.
“I’m here to help.”
Even before she gave him the talisman, Karen was worried that he wasn’t cut out for acquisitions. She encouraged his ability to communicate with ghosts, and frequently brought him to the sites of recent murders in the hopes that he’d be able to help her track down a wayward soul or two. She said that death was a force of nature, and there was so much they still didn’t know. She told him he needed to be wary, and that not all spirits would fit into narrow categories. Souls were unique.
You can’t be so vulnerable around them, she had said. You’re too open. They are beings of pure emotion, and they can haunt you. They can tear you apart. Honestly, I don’t know how you’ve survived this long.
Whether what she said was true or not, Barlow found it hard not to see most manifestations as almost painfully predictable. The ghosts were overwhelmed with contradictions. With denial. With confusion. The hell they lived in was one they created for themselves—and one that could not be derailed. They became fearful, and needed to run as fast and as far as they could, only to be snapped back in plac
e. To be returned to the place of their deaths.
To their anchors.
If he chased them back he would find them pathetic and lost and ripe for the plucking. They would look to him for help. For solace. And when he said the wrong thing or sent them into a panic, he would simply leave and return later, because every new manifestation was like a reset button. It changed them, forcing them back to the beginning of a new narrative.
It was doubtful, Barlow knew, that Alyssa remembered him, or could recall being in his Jeep at all. How many times before that had she run? How often did she flag down a car and jump in, hoping for salvation, only to return to this barren place? To this rough burial mound?
You’re close, Karen said. He could feel that playful smile she got during a collection … and that harsh edge to her voice. Don’t screw it up, love.
“Hold this for me.” Barlow gave Alyssa the flashlight. She shifted her weight and her toes waggled in the sand. He couldn’t quite make out the neon-green nail polish. “Point it right into the bag, will you?”
Barlow reached in and pulled on his leather gloves. Then he removed a small hatchet.
They walked together to the cairn. Barlow knelt and started shifting rocks. Brushing away debris. He worked quickly, and in the harsh glare of the flashlight he saw the torn pink T-shirt, filthy and faded, splattered in black blossoms of old, dried blood. She smelled of dust and time and the desert—the lost remains of a twenty-two year old girl.
Alyssa Asher. How long had she been in the news? How many times had her face been on the covers of magazines with ambiguous headlines speculating everything from cult-ritual murder to drug-induced suicide?
She was a genuine celebrity—heiress to a fortune, and ripped away from that tabloid world by unanswered questions and unfound evidence.
After so long, her decomposing body was in bad shape, and every rock he overturned resulted in a new detail of brutality. Shattered ribs. Jagged knife cuts through her clothing, into the dried jerky of her remaining musculature. Vertebrae where her head had been twisted violently around, displaying the staved-in crater of her skull.
Alyssa held the flashlight on the body. “Is she going to be okay?”
Barlow grunted, and wondered at the cosmic force that could bind a spirit to this world by its dead husk, but still establish coping mechanisms to deal with such a shock.
He found her left arm, bent out of true. He frowned, afraid of how much damage had been done. Afraid of what he’d find. “Right here,” he said, asking for light. Her left hand was undamaged, and he let out his breath in a rush.
The first few times he had needed to disassociate himself from the process, telling himself that it wasn’t meat and bone under his fingertips, only sticks he was breaking up for kindling. Karen was the one who forced him to make the connections, who told him how important it was to be aware when he did the work … no matter how distasteful.
He held her left hand, knelt on the bent arm, and brought his little hatchet down on her wrist. Four hard whacks later, he threw the hand into his black bag with the hatchet, closed it up, and took the flashlight back from Alyssa.
Go now, Karen said. Quickly.
“Oh, no,” Alyssa said. “You shouldn’t have done that.”
There were actual tears running down her cheeks again. In all his years, he had never seen such a thing. Again, he marveled that she had such a strong sense of self that she could conjure tears, clothes … a whole and undamaged body. She had so much strength.
“Why did you do that?” she asked.
Barlow started back toward the Jeep. “She’s fine, now,” he said dismissively.
“She’s not. Just look at her.”
“Don’t worry,” Barlow said. Now that he had the hand he walked a little faster. A little more confidently. “Everything’s fine.”
“Wait! Don’t go!”
Alyssa grabbed him by the shoulder, and Barlow screamed.
Her fingertips were like frozen hooks in his flesh. There was so much power in her. More than in any of the other apparitions he’d ever encountered. Her desire to exist—to be—overwhelmed him.
Barlow felt afraid, and something rushed in with the fear. The wonder of a soul. A living soul. The undeniable truth of it. And layered over that, a sudden lurch in his chest. A panicking realization.
This close, with the icy knives in his shoulder, he knew Karen was right. He was unprepared for this. For the emotion of Alyssa Asher. For her strength. It frightened him, but it exhilarated him, too. This was not another depressing trinket for millionaire collectors.
Alyssa was unique.
He wanted her for his own.
Barlow wasn’t sure he could handle her.
He moaned at the pain in his shoulder. “You have to let me go.”
Through gritted teeth, she said, “She’s been here such a long time.”
There was an electric light behind her blue eyes. Something ethereal. Something wrong. A secondary stage of manifestation—one he’d only heard rumors about.
For Barlow, fear clenched into terror.
“I’ve been here such a long time,” Alyssa said.
“Yes.” Barlow nodded. Her fingers threatened to tear his arm off at the shoulder. He struggled.
Then he looked right at her and said, “You really have. Fifteen years, give or take.”
Alyssa flinched away as if he’d slapped her. The moment she released him, Barlow ran, stumbling over tombstone slabs of rock, slipping in gravel. The talisman burned against his chest and he wanted to tear it off, to scream at his wife that she should’ve been here. That she could’ve handled this one.
I couldn’t have. The girl is too powerful, Karen said.
He felt the wind change. Strengthen. Behind him, in that hidden place, Alyssa started screaming at the veiled moon. She screamed as time collapsed in on her. As all of her carefully-built walls against reality began to crumble.
Fifteen years, he’d told her. Fifteen years of being unseen, ignored, and forgotten. Fifteen years, falling into place.
He heard an avalanche of thunder coming from right overhead. There were lightning flashes behind him in that same electric blue he’d seen under Alyssa’s skin. He felt the wind pressing into him, trying to pull him back. Trying to pull him toward her.
Run, Karen said.
Something shifted in his mind. It stopped him at the door to his Jeep, braced against the wind and trembling in the crash of thunder.
It was an epiphany. A sudden and horrifying realization.
He was a hunter, yes, but—but what if he could do more than just collect her?
What if he could free her?
He turned and saw a force of nature. A soul ignoring the frail reality of her afterlife, of her desert tomb. A soul bending and shaping the very weather in her anguish.
He had never wanted something so badly in all of his life. A jewel in his collection.
Or … was she something else?
Could she be his salvation?
Don’t be an idiot, Karen said.
He always tried talking to them. Always. He tried to calm them and soothe them and help them along the way, but Karen had been so focused. So brusque. So willing to bind their souls to remnants of bone and call it art.
Alyssa screamed at the sky, and the stars appeared, pushing through the layers of night, of filth and pollution, to shine just for her.
“What if there’s a different way?” Barlow asked the world.
He suddenly knew, no matter the risk, he couldn’t leave her rotting out here in this cold, lifeless place.
You’ll kill yourself, Karen said.
“Patience,” he told his wife. “We’ll see.”
He stumbled into the Jeep and yanked open the back. There was a butcher’s block in the trunk and a tackle box filled with tools. Shaki
ng, rushing, he pulled Alyssa’s dismembered hand from his bag and slapped it down on the block. The wind whipped at his jacket, and made his Jeep rock as it had when the semi had passed them on the I-15. He held the flashlight in his teeth and went to work, scraping away the remaining meat from the bones with a fillet knife. Stripping it. Preparing it.
He clipped out the third metacarpal of her left hand—the one that continued on to the ring finger. Karen always liked that one best. She said it was symbolic, and he didn’t disagree.
The howling wind brought pressure. More grit. The overwhelming sense of failure. That he wasn’t good enough, that he could never be good enough. That he had screwed it up before and he’d do it again.
Barlow carved into the bone. Those tiny, meticulous runes that Karen had made him practice again and again—the symbols of her profession. Binding spells she had taught him, and that he’d worked so hard to get right.
He’d never been in a rush before. It had never felt so important to hurry.
So much power, swirling around him, changing the desert wind into a hurricane.
There was so much at stake.
So much he could lose—more than just another sale.
This wasn’t a ghost.
This was a life, tearing itself apart.
Barlow finished the runes and then Alyssa was right beside him, screaming, and he screamed back in fright and dropped the flashlight. He nearly dropped the bone into the dirt, too, and ran into the darkness, as far away as he could get. He held his ground against her. She was a shrieking dervish, a devil of the desert, filled with rage and fear beyond measure.
“I’m trying to save you!” he shouted.
Lightning flashed just under her skin. Her construct—the manifestation of her soul after death—deteriorated, becoming the raw emotion Karen had warned him about. Raw power, like nothing he’d ever believed. Like nothing he had known existed.
“You can’t help,” Alyssa screamed. “Nothing can!”
And in his head, just as loud, Karen echoed her words. You can’t help. Nothing can.