Peter and Ben headed out. On his way out, Ben took my wrist and pulled me to a private corner on the porch. It was about as domineering as he ever got with me, and I couldn’t say that I liked it.

I pulled my arm away from him and glared. “What?”

He held my face in his hands and studied me, looking into my eyes like he could see through them, see to what I was thinking.

“Ben.” He was starting to freak me out.

“I just know you’re going to do something stupid and crazy as soon as I leave.”

I smirked. “Don’t have a whole lot of faith in me, do you?”

Glancing away, he brushed his fingers along my hair, then shoved his hands in his pockets. “We joke about being a pack. Like it’s an excuse for every little neurotic twitch we have about each other. But it’s real. It’s there. It drives me crazy thinking you might be in trouble and I can’t help you.”

I knew that fear. There’d been times Ben was in trouble, when I’d believed I was too late to save him. Racing to him with a hole growing in my gut, draining everything but panic. I knew what Ben was feeling.

“Likewise,” I murmured. “But do you think we could live never letting each other out of our sight?”

He chuckled. “We’d really drive each other crazy.”

“We were both lone wolves for too long, weren’t we? Not used to all this togetherness and sharing.”

“Ah, more pop psychology.”

By this time we’d pulled each other into a hug, belying my claim. “That’s me,” I said, tipping back my head so I could nuzzle his chin. He obliged me with a kiss. And another. We sort of kept going like that until someone cleared his throat. Loudly.

“Um, yeah,” Peter said from halfway down the sidewalk, pointing a thumb over his shoulder. “Sorry, but we should get going.”

Ben and I managed to pry ourselves apart. “Grr,” I muttered.

He held my shoulders and planted one more kiss on my forehead. “Call me if something happens. Call me if you go anywhere. Okay?”

“I will, I promise.”

“Be careful,” he said. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

“I never do anything stupid,” I said.

He gave me a very unconvinced glare.

“You be careful, too,” I said.

He left with Peter and didn’t look back.

Right. Time to get to work. No sense worrying about him yet.

Chapter 16

Gary, still recovering, went to sleep. Jules had been making phone calls, about a dozen by my count, and the conversations ranged from merely odd to outright bizarre. He’d been saying things like, “Yeah, but this isn’t localized like the Enfield Poltergeist. I’m talking about free-ranging activities linked to a specific person. You’ve never seen a similar case?” and “But EMF readings aren’t a reliable indicator of psychic hostility.” Finally, he said something that made sense to me: “Professor, I’m telling you, there was a fucking humanoid shape standing in the flames and laughing at us! No, it wasn’t a guy in an asbestos suit!”

So. Jules’s contacts weren’t panning out so much.

Tina and I had been engrossed in Internet research on two different laptops. I’d been learning a lot about hauntings, demonic possession, hoaxes, and the people who talk about them. It was like a religion: No amount of proof seemed able to sway the absolute skeptics or the absolute believers.

Typing in a phrase like “demonic communication” got about a quarter of a million hits. After looking at a dozen sites, my eyes started to glaze over. The tones varied from wild belief to scientific skepticism. But a phrase kept jumping out at me, something that none of the Paradox crew had mentioned yet.

I leaned back, stared at the screen a good long time, and finally asked, “What do you guys think about trance mediums?”

Tina didn’t say anything. Jules peered over the screen of his own laptop.

“Theory or practice?” he said.

I shrugged. “Both.”

He leaned back in his chair. “The theory is that certain people have the ability to channel spirits directly. They go into a trance, and any ~in presence at a haunted location can speak through them. In practice, it tends to be bollocks. It’s too hard to verify and too easy to fake. The charlatans have built up this image of it being really dangerous, so they use it as a way to get a good scare out of people.”

“So it’s not real?” I said.

“It’s real,” Tina said. “Just very rare.”

“Do you think it’s something we could use to learn more about this thing?” I said.

“No, I don’t think so,” Tina said quickly.

Jules blinked at Tina. “Wait a minute. Tina. What do you know about trance mediums? It’s not actually something... I mean you don’t have any experience with it. Do you?”

She smiled. “It’s almost gratifying that you’re taking me seriously now.”

“Can you really do it?” Jules said.

Her hesitation, and the way her gaze darted nervously between us was enough of an answer. She couldn’t come right out and say no.

“Oh, my God, Tina, this is incredible. We’ve got to get a tape of this. If we can show what the real thing looks like and maybe find a way to demonstrate how the fakes—”

“No,” she shook her head. “I want to help, really I do, but this—the Ouija board is one thing, but actually channeling it directly... it is dangerous. I’ve never wanted to get that close. It’s better having something like the board between me and the phenomenon.”

A lead, any lead, was too good to give up. I said, “But Tina, if you could contact it directly—”

Tina said, “This thing has killed. If I let it inside me—could we even stop it?”

“Or maybe we could stop it from killing again,” I said.

“If you could talk to it, directly, through me,” Tina said. “What would you say?”

Good question. “I’d want to find out where it came from, what it wants, and what I need to do to convince it to go away. However it was sent here, there has to be a way to send it back again. If it’s sentient, I have to be able to reason with it.” That was my idealism talking again.

Tina took a deep breath. “The reason I’ve kept quiet all this time about what I can do is because in a way, even when this stuff works, it’s still all parlor tricks. The only people who are really interested are the ones who want to exploit it, or desperate people messed up with grief, like Peter. They treat it like a psychic hotline they can call up whenever they want. When really, I don’t understand what’s going on most of the time.”