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

distances. The closer I was to the ghost, the easier it was to make the connection, and this distance should be no trouble for me at all.
    I let my hand fall to my side and focused my thoughts. There was a moment of dizziness, startling in its intensity, and then the taste of bitter ashes flooded my mouth and I was looking out through the eyes of a dead man.
    It’s not what you’d think and certainly not what I ever expected. There’s this incredible explosion of color, ten times brighter and more vivid than anything I remember from the days before I lost my normal sight. And the things they can see! The supernatural denizens of the world are clearly visible to ghosts. They see everything, from the fallen angels that swoop over the narrow city streets on ash gray wings to the changelings that walk among us unseen, safe in their human guises. The glamourlike charms that supernatural entities use to conceal themselves from human sight are no match for the eyes of a ghost.
    But what has always struck me as the cruelest irony is that ghosts can see emotions pouring off the living as plain as day. It’s like each one has its own wavelength, its own unique color, the same way light does when seen through a prism. And if that isn’t bad enough, then there’s the fact that it isn’t just the living that give off emotions the dead can no longer feel for themselves, but average everyday objects, too. If it was important to someone for some reason, an object would soak up whatever emotions the living attached to it. A child’s teddy bear might glow with the pure white light of unconditional love, while the hairbrush used to brush a woman’s long glossy hair might reflect the scarlet eroticism felt by her husband as he wielded it night after night over twenty years of marriage. The more important the object was to its owner, the brighter the glow.
    Down here on the empty beach there weren’t any objects to focus on, and I’d long since gotten used to seeing Denise through the eyes of my sight. So I was starting to wonder what this was all about.
    Thankfully, Denise didn’t keep me in suspense. “This is a test of control,” she said. “No matter what happens, I want you to maintain the link, all right?”
    “Sure.”
    Piece of cake , I thought.
    Which just goes to show how blasé I’d been getting about my lessons lately.
    When I’d first met Denise I’d thought her talents had been restricted to simple things like fortune-telling and scrying. What I used to think of as parlor tricks. The term hedge witch just didn’t conjure up images of Gandalf the Grey, if you know what I mean. But during our confrontation with the fetch and its sorcerous master, I’d seen some of what she was really capable of and had come to understand that Denise was a force to be reckoned with, a power in her own right. An affinity with nature wasn’t just about plants and healing poultices. After all, earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes were all part of the natural world as well. I just wasn’t expecting to run into any of them on a sandy beach in New Jersey.
    After all I’d been through over the last few months, you’d think I would have taken Oscar Wilde’s famous quote, “Expect the unexpected,” to heart by now.
    Denise retreated up the beach toward the dunes, leaving me standing by the water’s edge with the ghost at my side. I could feel his interest waning now that the music had stopped, so I brought the harmonica back to my lips and played for a bit, strengthening the ties between us. Just when I was starting to wonder what Denise was up to, I caught sight of something moving down the beach toward me.
    Or should I say under it.
    Imagine a massive worm tunneling just beneath the surface, causing the ground to rise up several feet as it was displaced by the creature running beneath it, and you’d have some idea of what I was looking at. The fact that there were four of them headed in my direction didn’t help matters either.