Unbound Spirits

Chapter 2-1

Chapter 2

Even though Audrey didn’t know what the hell was going on — how a dead man could have gotten into the back seat with her — she knew enough to understand that she needed to get out of the car. Her fingers scrabbled for the door handle; they were still in the parking lot and therefore not moving very quickly, so she figured it would be safe to tuck and roll if she had to, but the door remained stubbornly unresponsive under her reaching fingertips.

“Oh, the driver made sure those were locked,” Jeffrey Whitcomb said. “You had better put on your seatbelt, Ms. Barrett — it won’t do for you to get injured if we come to a sudden stop.”

Like she was going to meekly fasten her seatbelt. Instead, she grabbed her purse, thinking she maybe could use her heavy key ring as a tool to smash the back window in, but her companion tore it from her fingers and shoved it away somewhere beneath his feet.

“Now, now,” he told her. “None of that.”

Defeated, she slumped against the back of the seat and stared at him. Yes, that was the man she’d seen standing in Michael’s backyard, but he looked subtly different, the shadows gone from under his eyes, his face not quite so gaunt. Younger, too, as if at least ten years had been erased from his appearance. But then, if he was a ghost, Audrey supposed he could alter his face…couldn’t he?

“You’re…you’re dead,” she said flatly.

“Some people think so,” he responded. “Really, Ms. Barrett — I must insist that you fasten your seatbelt.”

She wrestled the shoulder harness over herself and clicked the buckle. While doing so, she realized that being thus secured made her escape from the vehicle even less likely, but then, with the child locks on the back-seat doors engaged, she probably wasn’t going anywhere anyway.

“There,” she said. “Now, do you want to tell me how you can be here, sitting in the back of a Lincoln Town Car, when you died almost a hundred years ago?”

“No, I don’t think I need to tell you that right now,” he replied, demeanor calm and unruffled. “It has no real bearing on why you’re here.”

She blinked at him. “It doesn’t?”

“No.” His expression darkened. “I suppose you think yourself very clever to have closed the portal in my basement last week.”

Arrogant of him to call it “his” basement, when he hadn’t actually owned the house since the early 1920s. But Audrey realized she had better let the comment slide. “It needed to be closed,” she said. “Terrible things were coming through it.”

“Terrible in your opinion, you mean,” he corrected her. However, he didn’t seem particularly angry, despite the way his black eyes glinted. “They were useful, and now I will have to utilize a different portal, one not as well proven, when that one was very stable and had served me well.”

Audrey’s head was swimming. Part of her really didn’t want to recognize the fact that she was sitting here in the back seat of a Town Car, talking to a dead man. Of course, he didn’t look very dead. She could see the way his chest rose and fell as he breathed, could detect a faint flush of color along his cheekbones, even though overall he was fairly pale, much paler than most men one might see in Southern California.

And really, how did she know for sure this was Jeffrey Whitcomb in the first place? She’d never seen a photo of the man in question, had only had Michael confirm the resemblance when she described the specter who’d been standing out on his backyard lawn and staring at her through the kitchen window.

Michael….

Audrey sat up as straight as the seatbelt would let her, eyes narrowing in suspicion. “Did Michael put you up to this?”

One straight black bar of an eyebrow lifted slightly. “I beg your pardon?”

Triumph surged through her. That had to be what was going on here, and she was glad she’d figured out the ruse so quickly. Maybe it was only that she would much prefer this to be a setup of some sort, a way to get a rise out of her for the cameras, than to contemplate that she might actually have a dead man as her back-seat companion. “Michael hired you to kidnap me from the parking lot so he could get some good reactions for the new episode of Project Demon Hunters.” She paused and peered up at the roof of the car, at the dome light there. “Is that where you’re hiding the camera?” she asked, pointing toward it.

Now Jeffrey — or whoever he was — actually laughed. “I had no idea you would be so amusing, Ms. Barrett. But no, I regret to inform you that the light you’re pointing at is only a light, and I most certainly was not hired by Michael Covenant — or Michael Stanek, if one wants to be precise about his actual identity.”

The flush of triumph faded as quickly as it had come. Because as much as Audrey would have liked to believe this was all some sort of elaborate charade, she knew there was no way in hell Michael would have allowed anyone to know his real name, especially not someone he’d hired for a short part-time gig like pretending to be a kidnapper.

But the real Jeffrey Whitcomb…or the ghost of Jeffrey Whitcomb, to be more precise…might have known all sorts of things, even facts Michael would have preferred to keep hidden. Her fingers began to tremble, so she laced them together and held her hands in her lap. She desperately needed to stay calm. If she allowed panic to take over, then she might not recognize an opportunity for escape if one actually presented itself to her.

“All right, then,” Audrey said. “How is it you’re still alive?”

“‘Alive’ is possibly not the most precise term,” he replied. A pause as he glanced out the window next to him; it was heavily tinted, but Audrey could still see that they were leaving the parking lot, the big Town Car easing its way out onto a wide, fairly busy street. It looked as though the car was pointed toward the mountains, which she thought meant they were headed east, although she didn’t know the area well enough to tell for sure.

Once again, panic wanted to flare. She took a deep breath, willing herself to push back the sudden flash of fear. Not that she’d felt particularly safe in the parking lot of the airport, either, but if Jeffrey Whitcomb whisked her away to some hideout of his, how in the world would Michael — or anyone else — be able to track her down?

“What is the precise term, then?” Audrey asked. Thank God her voice sounded cool and clinical, as though she was talking to one of her research subjects back at the Rhine Institute rather than to a man who should have been dead for almost a century.

His head tilted to the side. Some silver glinted at his temples, although the rest of his hair was still very dark, almost black. “‘Borrowed,’ possibly. You see, the person everyone thought was Jeffrey Whitcomb ceased to be himself long before he moved into the mansion in Glendora.”

Ice ran down her spine, a chill that had very little to do with the refrigerated air coming out of the Town Car’s A/C vents. Audrey shifted as best she could with the seatbelt holding her in place, putting a little more distance between her and the…thing…that sat less than a foot away. “If you’re not Jeffrey Whitcomb, then who are you?”

“I’ve had many names. You don’t need to know any of them.”

My name is legion. No, she didn’t think this being sitting next to her was the Devil himself, but she also was beginning to realize that he wasn’t exactly human, either. “I thought Jeffrey Whitcomb died in a sanitarium.”

“No, Whitcomb’s son Henry died in the sanitarium. A simple spell of illusion. I took on Henry’s persona for many years, but once his life had run its course, I resumed Jeffrey’s shape. It suited me better.”

Dear God. No wonder “Jeffrey” had died raving in that sanitarium — he hadn’t been Jeffrey at all, but his unfortunate son. Part of Audrey’s mind wanted to reject the story in its entirety, but after what she’d seen in the basement of the Glendora mansion, she knew there were far darker forces at work in the world than she’d previously believed.

“You’ve been living as Jeffrey Whitcomb ever since?”

“No,” the thing sitting next to her replied. “I’ve used several names during my time here, but it was easier for me to retain this form. There’s no need for you to know which name I am using now.”

No, probably not. He wore an expensive suit, and while the car could have been a rental, Audrey guessed it wasn’t. Well, if he’d taken on Henry Whitcomb’s identity for a time, then he would have inherited his share of the family fortune when Henry’s mother passed away, even if said fortune was depleted from what it must have been at its height. Careful investments of that money over the next fifty years could have amassed considerable wealth. Of course, she was getting ahead of herself. She didn’t know for certain that he…it…whatever it was…had done anything of the sort.

But she remembered how Michael had spoken briefly of Jeffrey Whitcomb’s son, how he had lived a solitary life, had never married or had children. If his identity had been taken over by this being, if he truly had been possessed all that time, she could see why he’d remained so relentlessly alone.

“What do you want with me?” she asked, the faintest tremor entering her voice. She swallowed, then made herself add, “I’m no one.”

“On your own, perhaps,” he said calmly. “In combination with Michael Covenant…you are more dangerous than you know, Audrey Barrett.”

Dangerous to demons, she guessed. She thought of how she and Michael had destroyed the spell circles in the basement of the Glendora house, how the demons had fought to keep them from taking away their portal to this plane. Could Michael have done all that by himself? Hard to say. Audrey knew she would never have attempted such a thing on her own, wouldn’t have even known where to begin.

Maybe it was crazy for her to even ask the question, but she had to know. “If I’m so dangerous, why kidnap me? Why not kill me and bury my body in the desert somewhere?”

Those questions earned her a thin smile. “Are you suggesting I should do that?”

“Well, no, but — ”

He cut her off. “Murder is messy and leads to far too many questions. It’s much easier to remove you from the equation instead. This foolish endeavor of Mr. Covenant’s will fall apart with your continued absence. There will be no Project Demon Hunters, no further threat to my existence and my work. Once I know the show has been canceled, I will let you go.”

“And you think I won’t tell him what you did?” Audrey demanded.

“Possibly you could, if you remembered anything of it,” he said, his tone careless. “I assure you that it will be very easy to ensure that all your memories of me will be gone. You will only recall that you realized you were far too angry with Michael Covenant to work with him, and so remained away until you knew the show would no longer be a viable project.”

Thus opening her up to all those lawsuits Colin Turner, the producer, had threatened her with. However, Audrey doubted the being who sat in the back of the town car with her cared much about her finances, or whether she could lose her house in a lawsuit settlement.

Then again, being homeless was better than being dead.

The car turned onto a freeway onramp. Audrey caught a glimpse of a sign as they passed by it — 10 Freeway Eastbound. That told her a little, but not enough.

“Where are you taking me?” she asked.

“A safe place.”

“Safe for you, or for me?”

He’d been wearing a faint smile this whole time, as though he was pleased with himself for pulling off her kidnapping without any complications. Now that smile broadened slightly, deepening the lines around his eyes. Looking at that smile, Audrey felt more cold inch its way down her spine. She’d seen more human expressions on a shark.