HERE IS CHAPTER 4! ( sorry it's late )

Hey all!

I am so sorry, I straight up blanked on posting this last Wednesday. There is no good excuse to be had, as I've just been hard at work with my new book. Full disclosure, I also ended up missing a dental appointment as well, so I apologize again to you and my teeth.

ANYWAY, HERE SHE IS!

THERE ARE RULES TO THIS!

1. These are still drafts. No outside editing has taken place. See an error? Dope. I bet there are more.

2. I am not looking for corrections or edits from the audience. Love ya'll, but that's a waste of everyone's time. Just sit back and enjoy!

3. Want to give thoughts? Those are more than welcome! Just not technical stuff and please understand this is still VERY subject to change. There is a very good chance this story will be published some day in the future and, like all stories, revisions will happen.

Link if you'd prefer to read on google docs: https://docs.google.com/document/d/13NsIqv5XYam35v5yduT02gbmg43vBUCx44f8BrXquIg/edit?usp=sharing 

Raw text:

Chapter 4 

The right tires screamed as they tore from the pavement. We were spinning. Reality shattered into jagged pieces of chaos. The car rolled, flipping the world into a smear.

I felt my right elbow shatter against something solid, before phasing out of the physical world to escape the pain. The shock of the door passing through me was like an ice bath, the momentum from the crash propelling me into the air. The sound of metal tearing echoed below as I managed to orient myself. 

Eight feet beneath me, I could see our yellow sedan wrapped around a powerline, the passenger side of the car had violently twisted inward.

I drifted down to the wreckage, landing atop the hood. Glass from the truck still littered our spiderwebbed windshield. I couldn't see Shane clearly through the fractures, but there was no movement, and we had only seconds before the SUV would reach us.

Gritting my teeth, I returned to the physical world, bracing for the shock of pain in my right arm. Stinging numbness overwhelmed everything else as gasped. The injury was worse than I’d anticipated. I couldn’t move any of my fingers. I phased the arm beyond, willing to be off balance just to be able to think. With a curse, I jumped down from the hood and yanked at Shane's door with my good arm. It didn’t budge but I could see movement within.

Taking two sharp breaths, I stepped back and kicked the already damaged passenger window. It shattered inward, causing me to stumble back, falling onto the void of my right side. The sensation was similar to hitting your funny bone, amplified by several orders of magnitude. I hoped no one heard the whimper that escaped me. Struggling to my feet, I finally got a clear look at Shane.

The massive bruise beginning to form under his eye clearly marked the spot my elbow had struck. Thankfully, I saw no other injuries, aside from the way he was cradling his ribs. 

Leaning over, I unbuckled his seatbelt and dragged him from the car with my good arm.

His knees knocked against the open glovebox, bringing a shout of pain from him. The gray light of the morning showed he seemed to be mostly unharmed, just battered and soon to be bruised.

"It's okay!" I yelled as he slipped from my grasp. Realizing the stupidity of my words, we certainly were not, I corrected myself. "We have to run. Now!"

The SUV's headlights found us.

Still on his knees, Shane clutched his face and groaned. "Gah, shit. Run?"

Grabbing his collar, I pulled him to his feet. "Run!"

To his credit, he did.

I kept pace with Shane as the SUV engine roared behind us, trying to cut us off before we could reach a nearby fence. Fortunately, he wasn’t limping and managed to sprint in just a few steps. I silently gave a prayer of thanks for the benefits of Shane being a vampire. Even that bruise of his would heal in mere minutes and be gone before it fully formed.

I drifted through the shoulder-high fence as Shane vaulted over it. “Don’t stop no matter what happens.”

I hoped he heard me over the SUV’s tires screeching back onto the pavement as it moved to head us off.

As we reached the narrow alley between two homes, the SUV barreled through the fence behind us. Red lights throwing shadows across the yard, the D.I.E.’s reverberating lower siren filling the air.

We heard the engine slow and the sound of two doors opening, followed by voices with something….wrong to their sound. A foreign chill ran through me.

I tried to run north, but Shane hauled me south.

Realizing I would just be another form to spot if I stayed, I phased beyond and continued following his lead. I managed to keep pace with Shane at the limit of my abilities by riding the currents beyond. I realized where Shane was heading. Southern Avenue station was within sprinting distance. The kid knew his neighborhood well.

Roaring as it approached, the SUV found the alley at the end of the row of houses. Shane hesitated as someone in a dark suit stepped out of the passenger side door, weapon in hand.

Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a shadow just in time. An arm was raised, gripping a gun, within the alley where Shane had stopped.

I snapped back to reality with unprecedented speed, belting a primal scream falling toward the Earth for the briefest flicker.

Shane, without hesitation, bolted down the opposite alley toward another row of homes, not even glancing back to identify the source of the shriek.

Before I fell to the dirt from my drift, I was back in safety, watching with a smile as the agent hesitated in his pursuit of Shane, possibly too afraid to continue on his own. My bellow had faded into the beyond with me, hanging in the air after I left.

With the adrenaline fading, I assessed the situation. The SUV could only turn left, while Shane veered right into the shadows toward the train station, far behind where the vehicle would be by the time he got there.

The stocky tan suited man at the end of the alley jogged toward the frozen agent, catching up from where they’d started by the fence. My eyes latched onto the weapons in their grips.

Threads of the beyond seemed to sink into the pistols, torn from everything surrounding the guns except for their wielders. They walked, immune from the spiritual drag. No law I knew of, magical or otherwise, could explain what I was seeing. It was a man made object, in the hands of government agents, pulling at a world humanity wasn’t supposed to enter until they joined the ranks of the dead, yet it ignored the souls closest to it.

What was off about the souls sharing the alley with me finally registered, they had no swirl. As the agents moved through the physical world, their spirits followed without reaction, severed from the experience of the body they reflected. Something had been done to these people, tearing their ability to connect with their soul.

I drifted closer, trying to find something to help this make sense. 

Then I felt the weapon’s drag touch me. As the agents approached, a piece of my own threads split, invisibly pulled toward the cursed objects.

I wanted to get closer, not just to study but to touch the source of what drew me in; to feed it. There was power contained within. Stolen power desperate to get out. To be used and wielded. It called to me because it was a part of me. What my very existence fed on. It was a weapon designed to kill beings connected to the very energy it utilized. The same energy I was more a part of than any other, yet was crucial to us all.

I needed to see Jon. She was the only one with the connections to sound the alarm faster than the panic spreading by word of mouth.

Without thinking, I drifted closer—too close. The weapon now greedily siphoned my energy, and I felt something vital being stolen. It was like what I imagined vampire victims experienced—a relentless drain on reserves I didn't know I had. My mind sluggish, I could focus only on this mesmerizing technology.

Blinking, I realized the male agent I stood next to was looking at an impossibly thin screen connected to his weapon by a wire. With a shock, I realized his face shared an eerie similarity to the blank, square-jawed, brown-haired man standing across from him. The female agent bore the same stony appearance. They all mirrored the same muted, smooth faces, perfect posture, fitted suits, and sunglasses.

Why are they wearing—

The agent nearest to me spoke, his voice crackling with static like a transmission from a shortwave radio. “It’s still feeding.” 

Raising a hand to his glasses, a dim red glow emerged from behind the lenses. The light cut through the spirit world like a beacon, revealing bright eyes behind the lenses as they locked onto mine.

Instinct saved my life. I sank, not bothering to twist or dodge. I dropped straight into the earth beneath my feet, feeling a surge of power discharge directly where my head had been. Energy rippled through the dirt around me, cushioning me from the worst of the blast. The intensity of it was so great, it wasn’t until I began slipping away beneath the surface that I realized the shot had been silent.

The agent hadn’t been scared. He’d been curious, wanting to figure out what had disappeared before him.

And I’d stuck around to show him.

I made sure I was several blocks away before resurfacing, rising above the nearby houses until I spotted the train station a couple of hundred yards away.

When I arrived, I found a frightened Shane hiding among a small crowd of commuters. They instinctively kept their distance from the sweat-drenched teen pacing and cursing under his breath. He kept casting nervous glances up the escalator toward the station's parking lot.

Making sure to materialize behind a pillar from the crowd, I quickly walked toward Shane.

A look of relief flooded over him as he saw me, jogging over immediately. For some reason, he tried to get under my left arm and take my weight, forcing me to push him off with my good arm.

“Stop drawing attention,” I hissed as softly as I could in the amount of pain I was in. 

He walked me toward an unoccupied bench. We both sat, chests still heaving from the adrenaline of the crash.

Desperately, I wanted to sink into the spirit world for an hour or two, speeding the recovery of my arm, but judging by the strain in Shane’s eyes and shallow breaths he kept taking, it wasn’t safe for him to be alone right now.

“Did you take care of them?” Shane asked.

I shook my head, regretting trying to rub my arm. “I don’t kill people anymore.”

Shane’s knee started tapping again. “Good. That’s good, but are they still coming?”

“Probably,” I admitted. “But they won’t get here before the next train. Someone will radio them to come over here, but it will take a few minutes. Wait, plan, and hope.”

Shane’s heels tapped as we waited, the seconds crawling by. A few commuters spared a second glance at our disheveled appearance, but none looked close enough to be of any concern. I wondered what the pair of us must have looked like to them, and whether they were wondering if we’d been jumped or mugged. 

While we sat, I noticed a few tears in my coat, remnants of my chaotic struggle during the crash. A crash that had put me in direct opposition to the D.I.E.. I was officially on the radar. This was going to cost me. And Shane.

“It’s six hundred now.” I said.

Shane didn’t seem to hear me.

“Final straw, Shane.” I checked more of my clothes, finding more small tears and snags. “I thought you said you were going to tell me everything? Huh? Jesus…”

His head hung low, but I was too angry to feel pity.

“A senator’s kid? You neglected to tell me I just buried a fucking congressman’s kid?” I nearly lost the whisper in my anger. “What do you not get? I am here to help you. Help me fucking help you, Shane!”

I took several deep breaths, trying to loosen the tension in my chest.

“They saw me.” I rounded on him. “One of them looked me right in the eye.”

The last bit was loud enough to draw a few glances.

Taking a deep breath before continuing, I said, “It’s definitely six hundred now.” It should be more. “This was you getting in the way of me doing my job.”

“I mean...” Shane dared a glance at me. “You ran the red–no, you’re right. Yeah. That’s fair. Sorry. So sorry.”

“Here.”

I looked down to see what Shane was offering. A vial of nail polish rested in his pale palm.

“You grabbed me before I could find the others.” He continued. “I know you’re mad. And I get it. But, umm… can  I tell you what I was going to say?” 

It was the youngest I'd ever heard him sound, meek and completely unsure of himself.

“Yeah.”

He swallowed. “I lied this morning, when you asked me if I’d called anyone else. I called Kim and told her what I did. She told me to stay put, but I–uh–didn’t want her to see what I’d done. So I called you.”

A siren began to wail, cutting off my question. Neither of us dared to move, hoping the distant sound of the train would outpace our pursuers.

Shane tried to help me stand as the train screeched into the station, but I pushed him away again. The rush hour crowd matched our urgency, propelling us forward just as the red lights illuminated the station's parking lot above. The train lurched forward just as the same badges we encountered earlier sprinted into view.

"Too late," Shane and I said in unison. He gave me a weak smile, unsure of my current mood.

Shane dutifully followed as I found two empty seats at the back of the train. Even sitting turned out to be painful as several more bruises decided to make themselves known.

"I'm sorry. I don’t know what to do, okay? How was I supposed to know whether or not to trust you?" Shane fidgeted, waiting for my response. "You were just a phone number."

There were a few rules I tried never to break. One was never asking how someone got my number. I knew it was passed along through whispers, many seeking it without ever finding access to my help. Fortunately, most who knew how to call me were decent judges of character—a skill required to function for eternity. 

My final instructions at the end of each job helped my legend grow beyond the reality of my existence. This was the capital of bluffing, after all, and my theatrics paled in comparison to the city's best.

Amazingly, this dumb kid had managed to put me in greater danger than anyone who’d come before him. So I had to ask, "Who gave you my number?"

I don’t know what it was about the question that made him answer so clearly and quickly. Maybe Shane was growing to trust me, or it was my don’t-answer-me-and-I-will-tear-your-fucking-heart-out tone..

"I found it at Syd’s. Her dad was gone, and Syd fell asleep.” Shane nearly swallowed his tongue at the look I was giving him. “Checking out a senator’s office seemed cool, and I found this file in an open safe."

It was my turn to panic. "You found my number on a senator’s desk?"

He tried to avoid my stare. "Yeah, man. Total report top to bottom. All about how you were someone who helped clean up bad shit. Nothing about you being dead though."

I was careful to keep my voice low. "Shane, you’re going to tell me everything in that file."