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Gee whiz.
Inside the store room, the overhead lights flickered.
“I don’t suppose that’s your doing?” I asked Henner hopefully.
“Nope,” he said, his face pale as he stared at the doors.
I sighed. “Yeah. I didn’t think so.”
Inside the storage room, a confused babble of voices picked up, and I heard the squawk of a radio.
I batted my eyes up at Henner. “Can you…?”
“On it.” He peeked through the window, and the radio went silent.
He really was just the bee’s knees.
The lights flickered again, the fluorescents overhead buzzing like someone kicked over a wasp’s nest. The voices got louder, and a bit more urgent.
Cain stuck his head through the door before turning back to me. “Should we go in? You won’t be able to hang around out here for much longer.”
I hesitated. There were still four fellas, probably armed, between me and the idol I needed to snag. And that was assuming the idol was out in the open and not packed all nice and neat in one of the crates I’d seen through the camera feed on Henner’s phone. Sure, the lights were a bit unsettling, but they were only as distracting as a short in the power lines might be.
“Thieves.Thieves. How dare you touch it? The idol isn’t for outsiders. Give it back, give it back,give it back!”
Magda Erepto’s voice drifted through the air, and I jumped. It sounded like she was hissing the words right in my ear.
Henner and I exchanged a worried glance. That didn’t sound good. That wasn’t just normal ghost talk. Oh, sure, there could be some wailing, some thumps in the night, but furious monologuing wasn’t usually our style, unless the person had done us a wrong themselves. Something had definitely shifted for Magda, motorcycle riding Magda with her skirt tucked into her waistband, to be ranting like she was.
Wood smashed against something hard, and I jumped as the men inside started shouting.
“Ah, shoot.” No chance for it. I took a deep breath and dove through the door.
The lights brightened, giving off a high-pitched whine like a turbine and cast the world into stark lines of shadows. The four guards were staring at a crate that was totally smashed, like someone had picked it up and thrown it into the wall. As all of us watched it, straw and packing materials spilled onto the floor, and I suddenly saw the bent angle of a gold painted frame. The painting inside was torn by the splintered wood, the canvas flapping like a mouth.
Magda Erepto hovered over them all, her bare feet dangling below the hem of her skirt. Her hair whipped around her head like it was caught in a gale, snapping in the air with a mind of its own. Hair wasn’t supposed to move like that. Her face was twisted into a snarl, too-sharp teeth on display.
A crate against the far wall had its lid removed, showing the top of what looked like a marble bust inside. It looked expensive, and heavy, and as I stood frozen and ducked down just inside the door, the whole massive thing wobbled, and lifted into the air.
Holy smokes, the old lady wasn’t just upset. She was going full poltergeist.
They were the most dangerous kinds of ghosts, capable of not just affecting the world around them, but causing a lot of damage in the process. Any time you hear of people getting tripped down stairs, or things floating around, or someone pounding on the walls in the night, that was a poltergeist.
Frank had been a nightmare, and he’d started off totally human. His anger and jealousy had twisted him into something terrible a long time before he ended up pushing up daisies. Death just made him worse. He’d terrorized families, caused some real injuries too. Poppy’s son, Finn, well Frank had harassed the poor kid for weeks. To that day, the now teenager was still a bit leery around ghosts, even yours truly, though we were better now that I had a body again.
It had taken Poppy three banishing potions to convince Frank to shuffle off his mortal coil. And he hadn’t started off as anything more than a mook with a temper.
Magda had been a Graeae, and a strong one, I assumed. I wasn’t sure how anyone weak could keep an entire clan of monsters in line for however many years. Sometimes supernatural power crossed over lines, sometimes it didn’t. A witch who turned into a vampire lost their magic, but a strong supernatural that came back as a vengeful ghost? Wowee, that was bad news. One that took a trip to poltergeist town, and you’d better run for cover.
The second crate lifted higher and then jolted forward to smash into the ground. Bits of wood went everywhere in a rain of splinters. The statue inside, a young woman in a diaphanous gown carrying an urn, cracked in half. Her shapely gams went sliding across the room to rest against the far wall.
The guards whirled, shouting. I wasn’t sure they could see Magda—in fact, I doubted they could, but they could see the destruction that was happening right before their eyes. There was a whole lot of chaos, and I saw at least one gun, which gave me the jitters. My last brush with one didn’t end so well for me, so you’d better believe I started crawling in my fancy duds, trying to hide behind one of the big boxes of stuff to get out of their line of sight while they panicked about crates, seemingly, bursting for no reason.
I flattened my back to a huge box of what looked like cups for soda, which was so banal after everything else that I almost laughed, and had to slap a hand over my mouth to smother the snort before it gave me away.
Magda was almost to the ceiling, her hair a terrible corona around her head, writhing and twisting back on itself, moving like… well, like snakes.
“Thieves!” She howled to the ceiling, a strange, animalistic sound, and oh boy were we all in trouble.
