The Voodoo Killings Read Online Free PDF Page B

for space.
    Help
    Please
    Stay
    Is anyone there?
    Call my girlfriend—please?
    I suppressed a shiver. The Renaissance man hadn’t been trapped at all; he’d been holding back the flood of ghosts. I shook my head. Ghosts aren’t exactly an altruistic bunch.
    The messages kept unfurling over each other until I couldn’t make sense out of any of them. Like I said, moths to a flame.
    “What is all that?” Cameron said.
    “Hold on, Cameron, I’m going to fix it.”
    Time to add some parameters. No red lipliner, though. Nate might see it and walk straight into the trap.
    I placed both hands on the glass and swallowed the bile that rushed up as more Otherside reached through the mirror into my hands, attracted to the energy I already held. The cold hit me full force. I’d never actually tried to reset a mirror this way before, but I figured the principle had to be the same as setting an unset one. I breathed on the mirror until it fogged up and then began tracing the most common voodoo filter symbol I knew: This is a mirror .
    Otherside arced at my fingertips as I etched the image into the fogged glass. For a moment I worried the mirror would resist the simple filter, but it absorbed the symbol like a sponge. I frowned. Huh. Whoever set the mirror in the first place hadn’t known what they were doing, otherwise they’d have made it a lot harder to resetthan that. I traced a second message into the fogged glass, just underneath the first: Beware. Carnival trick. Don’t get caught .
    I stood back to admire my handiwork and couldn’t help smiling. Whoever set up this mirror in the first place was going to be pissed when they tried to show it off. Fifty to one they’d have no idea how the hell to undo it.
    Just to be sure the ghosts in the mirror got the picture, I closed my eyes and felt around with my globe. There was still a captive crowd reaching out to me, curious, and I picked up the odd angry curse, but mostly just cold apathy and disappointment. The frantic crowd was gone.
    Apathy and disappointment are something ghosts are well equipped to deal with. That I could live with. I dropped my globe and sighed with relief as the nausea dissipated.
    “All right, Cameron, time to get out of here.” But before we could move, one last message scrawled across the glass.
    Good deed for the day?
    I took a closer look. No ghost should be able to do that after what I’d just done, but the fact that a flood of messages weren’t coming through meant my set had to be working. I thought I saw the Renaissance man’s face pass in front of me, but it vanished in the fog before I could be sure.
    “Kincaid?” Cameron said.
    The last thing I needed was to pull another globe. I’d check later.
    I touched Cameron’s arm and steered him towards the back door. The drizzle was still going strong but hadn’t morphed into rain yet, so I left my hood down. As soon as we were past my building’s floodlights, I let out a breath and tried to relax. I couldn’t. I’d dealt with hundreds of ghosts, dozens of zombies, and I’d never seen something as ugly as that ghost trap—or a ghost that could bypass my filter.
    I checked the time on the disposable cell: 11.
    I tightened my grip on Cameron’s arm and picked up my pace. I still had one hell of a night ahead of me.

CHAPTER 3
    UNDERGROUND
    The alley out back of my apartment building ran towards First Avenue and up into Pioneer Square. For an alley, it was well lit; people didn’t want their businesses and apartment buildings getting broken into. Thieves tend not to like lights, or so Aaron and Sarah once told me: more chance of getting caught on someone’s security camera.
    Tonight the alley was filled with the scent of stagnant water and wet cobblestones. Like everywhere in Seattle, it had a permanent accumulation of puddles. Even more so here, because we were in one of the older sections of the city, and the drainage was lousy. The only time the puddles dried up was during the