Possession

NINETEEN

I have no idea how Carlos gets around on his own. He doesn’t seem to drive and I can’t imagine him taking public transit—unless there’s a paranormal bus system I’m not aware of. Usually he just turns up where he agrees to meet me, but this week I seemed to be playing chauffeur to the undead.

We had about an hour to kill and I thought I could skim through some of the books Phoebe had lent me while we waited at the pub. I didn’t want to get sucked into some compelling bit of research and then miss our appointment with Stymak, but since I had the opportunity to glance through the books, I figured I should grab it while I could and Stymak or Carlos would drag me out whenever one of them was ready to work.

CalAska was one of the early self-contained boutique brew pubs in Seattle. It’s small and has changed names and owners several times, but continues to serve decent house-brewed beer and pub food that’s a cut above the usual commercial-grade sandwiches and greasy fish-and-chips. I pored over a book about Linda Hazzard’s career as Washington’s first serial killer with a glass of root beer at my elbow. Carlos had a pint of stout in front of him, but he wasn’t drinking it. Not that vampires can’t drink alcohol, they just . . . don’t. Why bother with something that doesn’t affect you? To be intoxicated you’d have to have blood flow to the brain to begin with and they don’t. I figured the token beer was like the smoked sturgeon: a polite deception and a sort of payment for taking up space. Personally, I’d have liked to have a beer myself by this point, but I was having enough trouble keeping the soda down. I’d noticed the unhealthy thinness of everyone involved in the case and suspected it was now affecting me, too—the connection Carlos had mentioned in passing the night before might have had something to do with it, but I wasn’t certain.

My reading material wasn’t really helping on the digestion score, either. The more I read about her, the less I liked Linda Hazzard—and I hadn’t had a soft spot for her at the beginning. The author wasn’t sure how many people she’d killed in two U.S. states and New Zealand, but estimates ranged from a dozen to forty. Hazzard had believed fervently that fasting would “purify the blood,” improve health, and cure anything from shingles to cancer—and, of course, obesity. She’d left her home state of Minnesota for Washington in 1906. At least one victim of her fasting regimen was already in the ground by then. She hadn’t been prosecuted for that one, since as an unlicensed practitioner, she couldn’t be tried for malpractice under Minnesota law at the time. Apparently, killing a patient you had no right to treat wasn’t malpractice or murder.

Ironically, the opposite was true in Washington. She’d had no advanced medical training, but due to a quirk of state law, she was licensed as a doctor in Washington in 1907—where she was also immune from prosecution for the death of patients so long as they had been undergoing her “therapy” willingly. She wrote a book about her curative process and published it in 1908. She killed her first Seattle patients the same year—among them the mother of Ivar Haglund, the founder of Ivar’s Acres of Clams and the Salmon House in Northlake. Most of those who died under Linda Burfield Hazzard’s care had never had a chance to protest that they wished to quit the regimen of watered-down tomato broth, daily enemas, and violent “massage” that left fist-shaped bruises on their backs and foreheads, since she kept their friends and families at bay by locking the patients up in hotel rooms in Seattle or in cabins on her property in Olalla. When the patients died, their relatives rarely saw the bodies, and all valuables they’d owned vanished into Hazzard’s coffers. Sometimes she even billed the family for her services.

Enough patients simply lost weight, felt better, and left her care that she continued to attract more, even when her failure rate was suspicious—the richest patients tended to go home in urns. One went home with a bullet in his head. Whether he’d been killed by someone on the Hazzard property or shot himself to escape the treatment, no one knew, but it was interesting that though he was technically an English peer, his family was broke. Before she was finally caught and tried, Hazzard had managed to bury at least one Englishman who actually was wealthy, a lawyer, several socialites, a publisher, a civil engineer, and a retired U.S. congressman, among sundry others who were merely well-to-do and foolish.

She was brought to trial in 1912 over the death of an Englishwoman and the near-starvation and imprisonment of the woman’s sister. She had a studio photo taken of herself for the papers in which she wore a dress she had “inherited” from the dead sister. The author speculated that the photo was carefully engineered to create a sympathetic image of Hazzard as a beautiful woman who couldn’t possibly be a killer, thus softening up the jury to rule in her favor. It must have worked, because while it had taken a nurse and the British vice consul to bring her down, Hazzard had still skipped away to New Zealand with a revoked medical license after serving only two years for manslaughter—because her patients had “taken the cure” voluntarily, even if it killed them. No one seemed to know how many Kiwis had died under her care, only that she’d offered the same “cure” under various titles while she lived there.

She’d returned to Washington in the 1920s and operated her “sanitarium” in Olalla as a “School of Health,” until it burned down in 1935. No one else apparently died there except Hazzard herself, who continued to live on the property until she became ill in 1938 and, true to her beliefs to the bitter end, starved herself to death while fasting for “the cure.”

I looked up from my book, relieved that such a monster was long dead, and worried about what she might have been up to in the afterlife. I couldn’t fathom what the ghost of a fasting quack would be doing with the spirits of her victims and others like them, but it couldn’t be good.

Carlos noticed my blanched face and seemed about to speak when Stymak trotted into the pub and up to our table, wafting a hint of Washington’s finest weed in his wake.

“Hello! Ready to . . . tip some tables?” he joked.

“Yes,” I said. Carlos just looked amused as I stood up to follow Stymak to the back room.

Stymak gave Carlos a glance that turned into a scowl with a side dish of fear. “You’re . . . the psychometrist?”

Carlos nodded, but neither spoke nor offered his hand.

I recaptured Stymak’s attention as he recoiled—though I wasn’t sure if it was the vampire thing that was giving him the heebie-jeebies or the necromancer thing. He looked at me as if he would have said something, but shook it off, upset but trying to hide it.

“Let’s get started. Then we can get done faster,” I said.

Stymak nodded with the enthusiasm of a bobblehead doll in the back of a lowrider. “Yeah! I’ll go get John to unlock for us,” he added, almost sprinting to the bar to get a key from the man behind it.

I followed more sedately, keeping Carlos next to me. “He doesn’t like you,” I muttered.

“A good sign. I had half imagined he would be a charlatan. But I shouldn’t have doubted your abilities in reading . . . people,” he added, casting a glance at the book I’d stuffed back into my bag.

“I read just fine, thanks,” I replied.

“Without doubt. Let us discover what this bitch is up to.”

His use of the pejorative surprised me. “You mean Hazzard?”

“Hers is the name that all the artifacts sing. And not in praise.”

Carlos is a cruel bastard, make no mistake, but whatever he’d already gleaned from the objects I’d brought him seemed to have convinced even him that Linda Hazzard was as despicable in death as she had been in life. Without further comment I followed him into the back room that Stymak had unlocked.

Stymak had turned on the lights and was keeping busy around the wooden table and chairs in the middle of the room. The space looked as if it was usually used for storage, cleaning supplies, and occasional breaks for the staff. The lighting was harsh, but didn’t quite penetrate the corners, where shadows curdled. Stymak was nervous now, fidgeting with a messenger bag he’d unslung from his back and kept moving from chair to floor and back again.

“Um,” he started. “I’d usually lower the lights a bit. . . . I have a little electric lamp to put on the table, but if you guys don’t feel comfortable with that . . .”

It was Stymak who was uncomfortable, but even as I thought it would be better for him not to see Carlos so plainly, the vampire spoke up for me. “Neither of us is afraid of the dark. Do as you would prefer. We are in your hands.”

I wasn’t sure that made Stymak feel better, but it at least goaded him to stop fiddling and finish his preparations. He set the small lamp on the table. Then he arranged some chairs and put a few more items from his bag on the table: a pad of paper, some easy-flowing markers, and a large plate that he filled with fine white sand. He placed his digital recorder on the table also and stood back to study the setup.

Stymak looked at me. “I used to use candles—ghosts like the smoke—but I had to give that up when a few things got set on fire. And of course, you can’t smoke in bars anymore. Think it needs anything?”

I shrugged. I’d never experienced a true séance before, only fake ones, so I had no idea what might be useful.

Carlos caught my eye. “The objects you showed me. Put them on the table.”

I dug them out of my pockets once again and put the collection of odds and ends on the table near the lamp.

“Where did those come from?” Stymak asked, eyeing them with a frown.

“They came from various parts of Pike Place Market,” I said. “They seem to belong to some of the spirits who are possessing the patients.”

Stymak nodded. “Well, I think that should do it. Would you turn off the room light? Then we can get started.”

Carlos beat me to it and we sat down around the table as Stymak turned on his digital recorder and the little lamp.

It cast a dim light—just enough to see the objects on the surface in front of us, but not much beyond. The room was deep in shadow and the muted music from the taproom drifted in, giving the impression that we were far from civilization but not entirely removed.

“We should take hands with the people on each side,” Stymak said, but as soon as he touched Carlos, he jerked his hand back, taking a hard breath through his nose. “Ugh! Uh . . . maybe we should just put them on the tabletop . . . unless you guys think I’m cheating. . . .”

“We would know,” Carlos said.

“Oh. Well. Good. We can trust each other, then.”

I saw the energy around Carlos flicker slightly brighter than usual—I took that as amusement.

“We’ll trust each other,” I reiterated and put my own hands on the tabletop.

Carlos chuckled but did the same, and Stymak, looking spooked in the dim light, followed suit. His aura had gone a bit green ever since touching Carlos and it was clear that he was very uncomfortable with the vampire. I wondered if he knew what Carlos was. He hadn’t said anything. I would have to wait to find out.

Stymak closed his eyes and started off with a nondenominational prayer for assistance and protection. It reminded me of magical ceremonies that called on the four directions—the magical equivalent of a politically correct hedge on religion while at the same time getting the attention of whatever magical thing might be around to do the work required.

In the near dark, I let my Grey vision open as wide as possible without my slipping away. The energy around Stymak had begun expanding, brightening and spreading in all directions. The light it shed into the Grey was white, just like my own had appeared when I sank away from my body. But he wasn’t just bright; he was reaching out mentally, concentrating and casting his net outward, trolling for spirits.

Stymak spoke in the same quiet but bell-like voice I’d heard him use at the Goss house as his consciousness ranged outward. “We ask for the attendance of those spirits who have been drawn to Julianne Goss and others like her. Those spirits who have spoken through our friends. Come to us and speak. We are ready to hear you.”

He was unnaturally still and very quiet as his energy continued to expand and seek, growing brighter until, to my eyes, the room was awash in white light. He waited for a while, and then repeated his invitation. “Come to us and speak. We are waiting to hear you.”

The sand in the dish stirred and a few particles rose into the air, then more, making a small cloud that spread upward in a thin column. I heard a distant rattling and a roar that grew closer, like a train hurtling toward us. The sound reminded me of the rattle and roar the Guardian Beast made when it was bearing down, but here there was an added element: a howling keen that cut me through with dread and raised a churning in my gut that was more nauseating than Carlos’s presence nearby.

The cloud of sand hovering over the dish began to spread sideways, growing thicker in some places, thinner in others, taking on form and shadow in the pale light of the electric lamp. The cloud began to resemble a face. The face opened its sand-pale eyelids, the grains rolling away to reveal dark pits containing distant points of fire that dwindled toward more distant stars. It split into several faces, each turned in a different direction, the mouths moving out of sync.

“We come . . .” the faces whispered. “We are gathered.”

Something swooped in, screaming and clattering, and dragging a tail of the floating sand across the table to swirl around the edges of the room. The remaining sand billowed upward, coming back together into one large face that glared at us.

“Why do you trouble me?”

Even with his eyes closed, Stymak was frowning and looking slightly ill. Carlos glared at the apparition, his hands rigid and digging into the tabletop, but he didn’t move or speak. The sand outside our circle continued whirling around the room, drawing into the shape of a skeletal wolf that stalked the table, watching us.

“We wish to speak to those who are crying out for help. You aren’t one of them. Who are you? What is your name?” Stymak said, his voice now choked and rasping as the white energy in his corona faltered and flickered. He’d begun sweating and I saw a slight tremor in his hands on the table.

“Why should I tell you?” the ghost demanded, firming within her shell of sand and rising higher above the table. She was tall, almost stately, and angry, her scowl reddening the hazy world of the Grey.

Stymak was struggling, having difficulty speaking, the far-reaching clouds of his aura diminishing and pulling inward. I didn’t think this was how he’d intended the séance to go, but I wasn’t sure what to do aside from distracting the ghost’s attention from him.

“I know who you are,” I said, recognizing her now. “You’re Linda Burfield Hazzard. We don’t want to talk to you, Mrs. Hazzard. We want to talk to the others—”

“Doctor Hazzard!” she roared.

The skeletal wolf howled in chorus, stalking around us faster, hunching closer to the ground.

“Doctor. As you like,” I said, letting my disdain for her unwarranted title color my voice.

She turned all of her attention on me. Stymak remained as he was and the circling wolf-thing nipped at him as it passed. He shuddered and made a gagging sound, but nothing more.

“I thought you would be useful,” Hazzard said, looking me over. “So thin, so pretty . . . You should be mine, for all I’ve done.” She put out a hand to touch my face and I saw a thin streamer of ghost-stuff rise off my chest and yearn toward her—this must be the tie Carlos had seen. The skeletal wolf rushed toward me from behind her. I ducked aside and felt the strand between Hazzard and me pull uncomfortably tight.

The two forms clashed in a spray of white grit and a crash of bones. The tugging sensation in my chest broke off. Stymak and the sand collapsed to the table, leaving the ghost behind. Hazzard’s face deformed, twisting and tumbling, then re-formed as a skull more like the wolf’s than the woman’s, the illusion of flesh clinging in melting strands over it. The terrifying creature spun and scattered the items remaining on the table, then turned back to me, snarling.

“You disturbed the tribute. Had I known you before, you would have been mine,” the monstrous thing said. This was no ghost. It was something else—something much more dangerous. “Perhaps you still shall be, when the wheel turns, when the hunger of the damned is sated.”

The creature took another bite at Stymak, who twitched and jerked away, eyes still closed, uttering a small cry of distress. His energy collapsed toward him and he writhed as if it were crushing him, forcing a word out on his expelled breath. “Who . . . ?”

“I am Limos, the Insatiable! You shouldn’t meddle in my affairs!” the creature spat, biting at me, now, too.

I ducked again, but not fast enough and the ghostly teeth ripped loose a shred of light from my shoulder. I cried out from the rending pain that seemed to tear deep into my gut.

Carlos pushed hard against the table and stood up, knocking the furniture over. Notebooks, pens, and the recorder scattered around the room and the dish of sand shattered on the floor. “Enough!” he roared. “It is time for you to go back where you came from.” He put one hand out toward me as he kept his eyes on the dreadful thing between us. “Give me your hand,” he ordered.

I didn’t want to touch him, but if I didn’t do something the monstrous, incorporeal thing would tear more pieces out of me or Stymak, and I could see Stymak’s light dimming with every nip the creature took. I grabbed Carlos’s hand, shuddering at the touch.

“Push!” he commanded. “We cannot tear it apart, but we can force it back. Push!”

I felt rocky and sick, my feet unstable on the shifting sand that covered the floor, but I reached down toward the grid, trying to anchor myself to the energy of the Grey and draw it up through me like I had before. I pulled with mind and will and thrust the rising energy toward the horrifying thing. I could hear Carlos, dimly through the ringing in my ears, muttering words that bled and sparked in the Grey, sending growing ripples outward that tore through the phantasm before us. The power I shoved upward became a tsunami carrying the barbed, coruscating words into the creature, tearing it in two and tumbling the parts away into the blackness between the hot lines of the grid.

The world collapsed on us, bearing me to the floor. Carlos knelt beside me, peering into my face. His touch made me cold and I imagined black coils of stinging vines curling up my arm and digging at the torn part of my shoulder.

I stifled a sob of pain and tried to pull away from him. He stared at me a moment longer, then let go. Heat flooded back into my body as soon as his hand left mine. I gasped in air that tasted of dust and spilled beer as the normal world came back into focus.

“Stymak,” I murmured, turning toward him.

Carlos had moved over beside him, his hands hovering a scant half inch above the medium’s shoulders. A dim blue glow lay in the thin gap between them as Carlos bent his head and concentrated. The glow sank into Stymak and Carlos moved back, keeping a wary eye on him.

The necromancer turned his head and caught my attention. “Better it be you nearby when he wakes,” he said.

I scrambled across the floor to Stymak’s side as Carlos backed farther away. I felt like death warmed over and mashed flat, but took the man’s hand and felt for a pulse. I sighed in relief when he had one.

“Stymak? Stymak?” I said, patting his hand and bending close to keep my voice low. The sound of music and conversation from the taproom beyond was unchanged, and I hoped no one had noticed any disturbance.

The overhead light came on and I jerked my attention to the doorway. Just Carlos, standing next to the switch and guarding the door.

Stymak moved and groaned, then lifted his eyelids. His eyes were bloodshot and his face was wan. “I think . . . I’m going to be sick.”

I grabbed a box of trash bags off the floor nearby and yanked one off the roll. Stymak turned white and barely snatched the bag quickly enough to save his friend’s floor. He was spectacularly and noisily ill.

When he was done, he looked at me and asked, “What the hell happened?”

“I’m not sure. I think we got an unexpected visitor.”

“God, I feel like I’ve been hit by a combine harvester.”

“I think you’re still intact,” I said. “It’s a bit of a mess here, however.”

Stymak looked around and sighed. “Could be worse. I hope my recorder’s all right. . . .”

Carlos and I started putting the room to rights while Stymak staggered around, looking for his digital recorder. He found it wedged between two boxes of cocktail napkins and brought it back to the table we had just set back on its feet. Carlos shoved a chair toward him, carefully not touching the medium or looking directly at him. I was too tired to be openly amused at the powerful and terrifying necromancer doing housework. I kept my mouth shut and continued cleaning up.

Carlos slipped out into the bar as I dumped the spilled sand into the trash can by the door and went to sit with Stymak.

“How does it look?” I asked.

“Seems OK.” He pressed the Replay button.

A whispering chorus muttered from the device. “Run. Flee. . . . They come. . . .”

Stymak paused the playback. “They? Uh-huh.” He nodded to himself. “I thought there was something else along for the ride.” He looked up at me. “What happened? I saw the beginning of a manifestation—a face formed in the sand—but things got a bit hazy after that. I had the impression of something . . . foreign, something . . . hungry, grasping. I thought it bit me. . . .”

“It was Hunger Incarnate,” Carlos said, a slight frown creasing his brow. “It called itself Limos.”

He had reentered the room silently, carrying a pitcher of beer and three glasses. I tried not to laugh at the sight of the vampire as cocktail waitress, but a snort escaped me anyhow. Carlos set down his burdens on the table and reclaimed a chair, arching an eyebrow at me in challenge. I chose not to accept and ducked my head.

Stymak seemed a bit stunned by what Carlos had said, but he was nodding as if taking the idea in while he poured beer into the glasses. He guzzled a mouthful, making a face before he washed the first taste away with another.

I added my ideas of what had happened. “I think those voices on the recording are the ghosts themselves—the ones that have been attempting to manifest through Julianne and the other patients. I don’t think they ever really got to us—they never spoke up, even after you’d asked several times.”

“They remained at bay,” Carlos said. “I felt them outside, but they didn’t enter the circle—they were restrained.”

“Uh-huh,” Stymak grunted, pushing the other glasses over to us. “I had that feeling, too.” He tapped his recorder. “This sounds like a lot of the other recordings. Some garbled talk, warnings about something coming . . . but this time something came and it didn’t come by itself.”

“It came with Linda Hazzard. I thought they were the same thing at first,” I said, “but I’m pretty sure it’s two separate entities. Hazzard starved her patients, so maybe the sensation of hunger was connected to her. . . .”

Carlos shook his head. “No. Quite separate. Hunger may be what drew one to the other, but the sensation of starving was animate and separate from the ghost of the woman, Hazzard, who killed the voices.”

Stymak and I both stared at Carlos.

“Can you not hear the thread that binds them together? Not all were her victims in life, but they are all in her power now.”

“That’s not what’s giving us the creeps, Carlos,” I said. “It’s the idea of animate hunger.”

“You saw it for yourself.” He glanced at Stymak, but didn’t lock his gaze with the pudgy medium’s. “You felt it tear into you. Did it not seem the embodiment of hunger, feeding on your soul?”

Stymak shuddered and turned his face aside. “Ugh . . . I’d like to forget that feeling.”

“You would do well to remember it,” Carlos suggested, his voice resonating through me. Judging from Stymak’s wince it had the same effect on him. “That way you will not fall victim to other hungers, to temptations that consume you in the same unremitting need that burns you to a shell but never lets you go.”

Stymak, wide-eyed, gulped beer too fast and coughed, doubling over until the fit passed. “I . . . hope I never go wherever you’ve been, man.”

Carlos inclined his head, but said nothing.

“What did the ghost . . . thing say while I was . . . out of it?” Stymak asked, looking at me and very much not at Carlos.

I thought back before I spoke. “She . . . or it . . . said something about tribute—that I had disturbed the tribute. And something about the wheel turning to feed the damned.”

“‘When the wheel turns, when the hunger of the damned is sated.’ That is what the creature said,” Carlos quoted. Leave it to a necromancer to have a perfect memory for the horrible.

“There’s some connection to the Great Wheel,” I said. “It’s come up before. It appeared as dermographia on my skin and other spirits have mentioned the Wheel. Though I’m not sure how turning a Ferris wheel sates the damned. Or what this business about tribute means.”

“The souls that are bound together would be the tribute,” Carlos said. “They were gathered by Hazzard, but for what purpose?”

“Given to Limos,” muttered the voices from the recorder. Stymak self-consciously pushed the button and turned it off. “I didn’t do that,” he said. “It just came on.”

Carlos and I both nodded.

“Typical ghost crap,” Stymak continued, glaring at the recorder as if it understood his discomfort.

I tried to think aloud. “No. No, it’s not. The ghosts were all people who died of starvation. They were gathered by Hazzard, who starved her victims to death, so she has an affinity for them, even in the afterlife. Gathered as tribute for Limos—some kind of otherworldly manifestation of hunger. And in return for tribute, this . . . thing is going to turn the Great Wheel and sate the hunger of the damned. Does that sound as totally loony as I think it does?”

Stymak nodded vigorously, but Carlos grinned. I glared at him. “What?”

“It’s no wonder she likes you.”

“Who? What?” I demanded.

“Hazzard. She said she wants you for her own.” His wolf grin struck me cold. “Because you are thin. She believed, did she not, that fasting was healthful? She would find a thin but healthy woman like you to be very attractive. Ideal, even. A paragon. She touched you, marked you. And then the messages began, because you were tied to her just like the starved ghosts she had gathered for Limos.”

“Hang on . . .” I said. “If I’m tied to Hazzard and therefore to the ghosts she gathered, why are her messages appearing on my skin? Shouldn’t I be just like another of the ghosts?”

Carlos shook his head. “You can’t be like them—you’re alive. Hazzard said, ‘You should be mine for all I’ve done.’ She thinks you should be her prize once their plan is successful. A victim to torment and starve forever.”

I shivered. “I really don’t like that idea, but it implies that there’s some plan between Hazzard and this Limos to ‘sate the damned,’” I said.

Carlos nodded.

Stymak watched our conversation with horror clearly writ on his face. “Who or what is ‘the damned’?”

“It must be Hazzard herself,” Carlos said, looking not quite convinced of his own argument. “The ghosts are not damned, merely unable to leave this place. The other entity is not human—it cannot be damned, but it can be fed.”

“Damned or not, it can’t—” Carlos shot me the coldest glare I’d ever seen, cutting me short. He gave the tiniest shake of his head, warning me off what I’d been about to say. I reformed my idea before I spoke again. “Tribute cannot feed the hungry. . . .” I said, thinking aloud. “Hazzard already brought souls as tribute to Limos. So Limos owes her something in return that they plan to get by turning the Wheel . . . ?”

“The fat ones!” the recorder blared.

Stymak hit it on the tabletop. “Stop that! I know you’re only trying to help, but this is just not the time.”

“The disturbed spirits—that’s the extra energy in the system,” I said.

Carlos got it, but Stymak was lost. “What are you talking about?”

“Never mind, Stymak, just a tangent. Don’t worry about it. Just hold on to the idea that ghosts or death represents energy.”

“I know that.”

“Someone wants more energy, more food, more tribute. They plan to get it from ghosts, and if you don’t have enough ghosts to go around, you make them.”

Stymak was shaken. “Jesus!”

“Exactly. There’s another phrase that keeps coming up in the transcripts—‘beach to bluff and back’—and Julianne keeps painting pictures of the bluffs and the beach in the area that’s now the waterfront and Pike Place Market. It’s all along the State Route Ninety-nine tunnel route, and the Great Wheel makes a very convenient central point to push energy from once it’s been gathered there. All the patients had contact with the tunnel and that contact made them ideal conduits for the ghosts once the patients were injured enough to become comatose.”

“So . . . Julianne’s persistent vegetative state isn’t natural?” Stymak asked.

“I don’t think so. I never did—did you?”

He shook his head, but it was a weak movement.

I went on. “The ghosts are forcing it to linger so they can scream for help, not just for themselves but for the people who’ll be riding the Great Wheel when Hazzard and Limos put their plan into motion. Hazzard doesn’t have any corporeal power to do anything to the Great Wheel, so she has to get someone to help her topple the Wheel and take the lives of the tourists on it.”

“Limos,” Carlos supplied. “It is no ghost. It has power of its own as well as that of the ghosts gathered by Hazzard.”

I felt sick and put my hand over my mouth. Stymak had turned the color of parchment, appalled by only half the knowledge Carlos and I had.

Carlos gazed at me with eyes that smoldered with pain and death. “Very clever, isn’t it? Hazzard and Limos will upset the Wheel and dine on their share of the souls drowned in the ever-hungry sea.”

“We have to figure out what they’re going to do and when,” I said. “It must be soon, because once the patients’ souls have faded out, I suspect their bodies will die too and we can’t let that happen.”