King of the Dead (Jeremiah Hunt Chronicle) Read Online Free PDF

telling me there was no way we were going to miss our session, Denise led me back down to the beach. While we’d huddled about our trip, the good weather had slowly slipped away, leaving a gray sky and a chill wind that blew off the ocean with a vengeance. The smell of the mud flats on the wind told me the tide was out.
    Denise brought me to the water’s edge and then stepped back, saying, “Tell me what you see.”
    Cloud cover or not, I couldn’t see a thing; I never could, not in broad daylight. Denise knew that and I knew she knew, so she must have been asking me to look at the world around me in a different fashion.
    Confident that I’d solved the first of the lesson’s challenges, I triggered my ghostsight.
    The snow white blindness faded, leaving me looking out into a hazy world of gray. I could just make out the suggestion of the things around me, like faint sketches only half-drawn; the long rise of the beach to my left, the roll of the waves off to the right, and the blurry outline of Denise standing several yards away.
    “What do you see?” she asked again.
    This time, I answered her.
    “Ghosts,” I said.
    And I did. About half a dozen of them stood a few feet away, watching us with the unblinking stares of the dead. They were surrounded by a faintly luminous silver white glow that made them seem to pop out against the gray haze of their surroundings, clear and distinct to my eyes, though whether the glow was something that they projected themselves or simply an aftereffect of the use of my special sight, I didn’t know.
    “Call one of them over to you,” Denise instructed.
    Since most of my work lately had been targeted at increasing my control and connection to the spirits around me, I wasn’t surprised by her request, though I did wonder why we were doing this down on the beach. The dead followed me wherever I went. We could have done this just as easily from the warmth and privacy of the beach house’s kitchen.
    Yours is not to question why , I thought to myself, as I pulled my harmonica out of my pocket.
    There is a theory in certain circles that ghosts feed off the emotions of the living, that by doing so they can regain, at least for a little while, some of what they have left behind. I don’t know if that’s true or not. What I do know is that they react to my music like it’s a drug of some kind, a balm to the soul that helps them ease the pain they’re feeling at being stranded between this world and the next. Like a junkie who refuses to give up his fix, some ghosts will sit there for hours listening to me play, until they have exhausted all of the energy it takes for them to manifest and they fade away into nothingness.
    I spent a moment listening to the sounds of the world around me, the crash of the waves, the low murmur of the wind, trying to get a feel for the place, to sink into the here and now. That was one of the tricks Denise had taught me, and it had made this process a whole lot easier than it had been before. When I thought I was ready, I brought the harmonica to my mouth and began to play.
    I’m not sure how it is that I know just what to play in times like this. I just do; the music just comes to me, like it’s been sitting down there deep in my soul, just waiting for the right moment to come out, and this time was no exception. A low mournful tune filled the air, and as I watched, one of the ghosts, a tall, thin man with thinning hair, dressed in a cheap suit and carrying a battered briefcase, stirred and began walking in our direction, following the sound of my music.
    I kept playing until he stood within arm’s reach.
    “Now borrow his sight, Jeremiah.”
    That, too, had become old hat. I reached out to put my hand on his shoulder, but Denise stopped me.
    “You don’t need that anymore, do you?”
    She was right; I didn’t. Where once I’d had to touch my target in order to borrow its sight, the weeks of practice had shown me how to do it from across short