Written by Kacie Iuvara.

At around three-fifteen, Nedjma Sanders’ window shattered.

Before that, Nedjma had been sprawled over her bed, her nose buried in a shabby textbook titled, The Dark Poet’s Toolkit. Other books filled the bed’s empty space like scholarly quilt.

Across the room, a battered old radio on her dresser had cranked out a warbly set of ads and talk show snippets.

″Try Dawood’s Fantastical Flu Fixer, created with a proprietary blend of herbs and magic ––”

″–– forget black market necromancy, the artificial heart will save millions of ––”

″–– Jayden-Lee agrees, listen to all Dark Magic decrees!”

A silvery, ethereal rat had fiddled with the dials, switching channel after channel to create a flickering white-noise effect.

“Am I being stupid?” Nedjma had muttered, flipping another page. “Nah. Probably not.”

Then the window blasted into a million pieces.

“SHOOT!” shouted a voice. “Sorry Nedjma!”

A figure stumbled in through the now-empty window square, his shoes crunching over glass dust.

Nedjma blinked.

“Jose. You have three seconds to run before I kill you with my bare hands ––”

“Wait, wait, I can fix it!” said Jose. The short, shaggy-haired young man hastily flipped open yet another book, one he’d carried in with him. Its title read, Basic Spells for Basic Wizards.

Confidently, Jose outstretched his hand and traced a symbol through the air.

″Repair!”

A single broken shard zoomed obediently back into place.

“Aw . . .” Jose frowned, turning back to Basic Spells. “That was supposed to be totally righteous. And, like, work.”

“Obviously,” said Nedjma. She pinched the bridge of her nose. “Jose, what have we talked about?”

“Windows are for emergency access only,” Jose recited, still frowning. “But this is an emergency!”

“Eat my shorts, Jose.”

“I’m serious!”

Nedjma rose an eyebrow. “It better be a mad good one.”

“The hospital,” said Jose. “My mom came back from her overnight shift and said they’re out of pain meds. Like, totally out. Again.”

Nedjma didn’t say anything for a long moment. She might have been holding her breath.

“Jose, man . . . I can’t. We said we’d stop.”

“Okay, but the hospital, Nedjma!”

Nedjma threw her hands to her face in mock-horror. “Oh, no, think of the children!”

Jose scowled. He was a head shorter than Nedjma, and most people, for that matter. Still, he marched right up to her and stood his ground.

“I’m going. With or without you.”

Nedjma bent down, bringing herself to Jose’s eye level. Choppy chunks of black hair fell across her forehead, casting jagged shadows over her coppery cheeks.

“Look, man, I’m sorry. We promised we’d stop, so I’m stopping, alright? But I can’t let you go in there alone.”

With that, she snatched Basic Spells for Basic Wizards right out of his hands and raised it high over her head.

“Nedjma!” Jose complained, jumping to try and grab it. “That’s so not cool!”

He scribbled a symbol in the air and said, ”Summon!” Nothing happened.

“Clearly, you need more practice if you’re gonna get into Faraday,” said Nedjma, smirking.

Jose quit jumping and scrawling symbols to cross his arms. “Well, not everyone’s naturally gifted, Nedj.”

Nedjma’s smirk fell away. Her shoulders tensed slightly.

“I don’t have a gift, Jose.” She dropped Basic Spells into his arms, putting on another, faker smile. “Just a whole lot of issues.”

Jose looked between the book and Nedjma, creasing his eyebrows a little. Then he sighed and plopped onto the bed.

“You’re still gonna major in Creative Writing, huh?” he said, lifting a thin black volume called, Haikus and You: Can They Get Deep? and wrinkling his nose. “Nedj, that’s like, the worst one.”

″No, Wizardry is the worst one,” Nedjma corrected, snatching the book. “Especially for a basic boy like you.” She paused, glancing down at her glass-covered carpet. “Speaking of which, fix my window, Mr. Wizard. Or Lord Kenneth the onion man will murder me in my sleep.”

Jose snorted. “Big bro’s still calling himself ‘Lord,’ huh?”

“Yep. Becoming Kitchen Lord in Faraday Castle really changes a man.” Nedjma rolled her eyes. “Seriously, I can’t wait to stop living with my brother.”

As Jose opened Basic Spells for Basic Wizards again, Nedjma carried on, “Which is why we need to get into Faraday, man. The University won’t take people from Ffestiniog unless we pass our practicals like ––” she snapped ”–– that.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Jose waved his hand airily, which caused a few books to backflip off the bed. He looked highly impressed with himself.

He spent the next few minutes shouting, ”Repair!” over and over again, willing two or three little window pieces back together at a time. About halfway through the work, when the window resembled a glossy, sideways mountain range, he asked carefully, “So . . . still not using necromancy?”

Nedjma, who’d been leaning against a corner with her arms crossed, stiffened.

“No.”

“Oh . . .” Jose glanced over his shoulder. “Hey, Ghost Rat.”

The ethereal rat on the desk perked its ears in response.

Nedjma scowled. “Okay, besides the rat. Also quit calling Chanel ‘Ghost Rat,’ it’s lame ––”

“But she is a ghost rat!” Jose protested.

″No, she is Chanel Stamp, a rat who just happens to be slightly less alive than other rats ––”

“Necromancy,” Jose interrupted, as the last glass shard snuggled into place. “Nedj, you’re really good ––”

″Zzt,” Nedjma stopped him. A wave of her hand, and with an indignant squeak, the silvery rat disappeared.

“Aww!” said Jose. “Not Ghost Rat! Er –– I mean, not Chanel Stamp!”

“You were right.” Nedjma leaned back against the wall, her bangs casting dark shadows over her face again. “If I want to stop, I’ve got to stop completely. No dead pets.”

Jose frowned deeply. He walked up to Nedjma, who turned her eyes to the newly-mended window.

“Nedj . . . the hospital. We’ve got to do something. We always do something.”

“We promised we’d stop,” Nedjma reminded him. “If Faraday Medical catches us stealing, there’s no way they’ll let us into the university. I want to go to college. I need to.”

“They’ve never caught us before!” Jose insisted. “We help people, Nedj!”

“Dark magic is illegal and wrong,” Nedjma muttered. “If someone saw me . . . forget Faraday, we’d both go to jail.”

“You always took the risk before,” said Jose. ”We took the risk.”

Nedjma avoided his earnest eyes by staring at her own hand. She flexed it once, and a couple spots of black ooze bubbled through her pores.

“They’re cracking down on my magic,” she murmured. “It’s never been this bad. The radio, the news . . . it’s . . .”

Jose’s shoulders slumped. “I know.”

They fell into silence a few moments. Jose broke it by adding, “Well, if we run into someone, you could always just spout your goth poetry. That’d get them running.”

“It’s not goth.” Nedjma jabbed Jose on the forehead. “It’s gritty. Unfiltered. Not flowery like Hermione Munoz or Dominic Madsen or any of those other poser poets . . .”

Nedjma turned away, hiding her face as she knotted her eyebrows.

“How many people in the hospital?” she asked.

“Eleven,” said Jose. “Two with broken bones. Mina Markham still waiting on that surgery.”

Nedjma licked her lips. She closed her eyes. Then, finally, she sighed.

“Alright, Jose. Alright.”

“You’ll do it?” Jose yelped.

“Don’t make me change my mind, man.”

“Right –– right, okay. Yesss. Sorry. Let’s go!”

″But,” Nedjma added sharply, “this is the last time. And I’m only going because . . . because I can feel Markham slipping closer to death. Come on.”

She jumped out open her window. Behind her, Jose shook his head and mouthed, Naturally gifted.

Nedjma lived on the first floor, which meant she did not immediately fall to her doom when stepping outside her window. She dropped out onto the scrappy grass, Jose a second later.

They scaled the warped, wiry fence that surrounded Nedjma and her brother’s house, Jose struggling a little, and stepped into Ffestiniog.

The roads mimicked the mountain they sat on –– slanted and unsteady. Years of disrepair had left them crumbling and potholed. A hodgepodge of stumpy structures made up the town, each looking more shambling and homemade than the next.

“Did you bring the number?” Nedjma asked.

Jose opened Basic Spells to its last page, where a chipped metal “4” sat tucked between the paper and the back title. “Got it.”

Nedjma nodded, then motioned for Jose to follow.

They spanned Ffestiniog in a matter of minutes, not an impressive feat when the town only held about a hundred struggling residents. Then they hit a patchy woods, cluttered with wrappers and other Ffestiniog trash, and started to climb.

“Mountains –– should not –– have forests,” Jose puffed after several minutes of uphill hiking.

“Dude, you say that every time,” said Nedjma, rolling her eyes. “And, like I always say, these trees are the only reason we can do this.”

“Correction,” said Jose between heavy breaths. “Mountains –– should not –– exist.”

Nearly an hour later, a new collection of structures cut the horizon. The opposite of Ffestiniog, this city sparkled with silvery turrets and skyscrapers, wreathed in clouds like a heavenly kingdom.

“Hello, Tunstead,” muttered Jose, clutching Basic Spells a little closer.

Nedjma adjusted her black-and-purple windbreaker. She ran a hand through her choppy hair, which didn’t match the teased look sweeping Tunstead’s big city headlines.

“Alright, quit gawking. Let’s bounce.”

They crept through the trees, spanning the left side of Tunstead’s borders. Building backs appeared through the trunks, complete with shiny green dumpsters and a few broken bottles.

Eventually, Nedjma and Jose slowed. In front of them sat a silvery stone building. On its face, a heavy-looking door sported the inscription:

Faraday Medical Center

Hospital and University

AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY

“Letter,” said Nedjma. Jose slipped the battered metal four into his hands.

“My time to shine,” he said quietly, tossing up the number and catching it by its top. The bottom had been warped and sharpened into a dented little point. He stuck it into the door handle and set to work.

Before long, a prominent click issued from the lock.

“Gnarly,” said Jose, pushing open the door with a self-satisfied smile.

Nedjma elbowed him as she passed, cracking the smallest grin. “Not even. Now shh.”

“Even!” Jose whispered, following her in and sliding the door closed.

The room slipped into total darkness.

“On it!” said Jose. ”Light!”

A few more tries, and a single yellow orb appeared, hovering between them like a glowing balloon.

Stacked hospital beds filled the room. Nedjma and Jose spanned the space silently, navigating the wires and IV racks with as much ease and familiarity as Nedjma’s bedroom.

“It’s time,” said Jose, glancing up at Nedjma. In the yellow glow, he looked almost sickly.

Nedjma’s expression didn’t change. She only nodded and said, “Catch me.”

Then she promptly collapsed into Jose’s free arm.

Jose grunted under her weight, shifting so that Nedjma stood propped and unconscious against his shoulder.

“Go, Nedj!” he hissed into the darkness.

What Jose couldn’t see was Nedjma’s silvery outline stepping from her body, and entering the Kingdom of Verithiel –– the land between life and death.

For Nedjma, a ghostly screen now covered her surroundings like a second skin. The hospital beds and IV racks remained, only now they glowed colorlessly like images from an X-Ray.

She felt a light presence crawl over her shoulder.

“Hey, Chanel,” said Nedjma. The little ghost rat nibbled affectionately on Nedjma’s ethereal ear in response.

There was another presence in the room, one Nedjma sensed almost immediately.

“Hey! Get lost!” she snapped, scowling at a bloodred spectre standing not two feet from Jose.

″Buuuut . . . possession,” the spectre complained.

“You wouldn’t want him, just look at that bod,” said Nedjma. “Hasn’t worked out in –– well, forever.”

″Good soooouuuul,” the spectre pointed out.

“You’re gonna get a good sock unless you boot on out of here,” Nedjma threatened, holding up a shimmering palm. Black goop began leaching from between her fingers.

″Fiiiiiiiiine,” the spectre groaned, and sank through the floor.

Nedjma shook her head.

“That’s the problem with hospitals, Chanel,” she said. “All these ghosts thinking they can snatch a dead body just in time. That’s why necromancers get a bad rap.”

A second later, Nedjma’s lips twisted. She shook her head, then stuck it right through the wall.

The laws of physics did not apply in the Kingdom of Verithiel. Nedjma’s head and shoulders passed easily through the wall and she found herself in a long, white hallway. Doors patterned the walls. Clean-looking people in scrubs flitted between them, muttering things like, “Bandages, bandages, where are those bandages?” and “Ugh, did Asif move the needles again?”

Nedjma’s ghostly form stiffened, but she kept her eyes off the nurses’ and doctors’ faces. Instead, she scanned their scrubs, their pockets, until ––

“Aha!” she said. Chanel Stamp squeaked.

Nedjma stepped through the wall.

“Distraction time, Chanel. You get the keys, I’ll do the rest.”

Nedjma approached the nearest doctor. The woman didn’t resemble a Ffestiniog villager at all: Her hair fell in silky braids, and her ebony cheeks were brushed lightly with warm makeup. There was something else, too, something that ran deeper than the sterility of a hospital worker. This woman looked clean. Whole. Well taken care of.

Whether human or ghost, the difference between Nedjma and the doctor was glaring.

In a flash of motion, Nedjma slid across the floor on her knees, grabbing the doctor’s ankle and yanking hard.

″Ack!” the doctor yelped, smacking into the linoleum.

She stood, straightening her scrubs and spitting braids from her mouth. Nedjma raised one hand, now oozing black liquid, and moved it slowly towards the doctor’s chest . . .

She froze.

From below, Chanel squeaked indignantly. During Nedjma’s attack, the rat had scampered down Nedjma’s arm and onto the doctor’s shoe.

“I know, Chanel . . .” Nedjma whispered. She licked her lips. “Just one more time, and I’ll be done . . .”

She tapped her pointer finger to the doctor’s chest.

Immediately, the doctor keeled over, dead.

A nurse sprinted over, blinking and dropping to her knees. “Dr. House? Dr. House, can you hear me?”

Nedjma bent down, tapping Dr. House on her sternum one more time. The woman stirred, already back to life.

“Ugh . . . did I burn out again?” she groaned, rubbing her head. In the Kingdom of Verithiel, black gunk bubbled and dripped down her chest.

As Dr. House and the nurse discussed symptoms (Dr. House occasionally rubbing her heart and wincing), Chanel Stamp snuck out from between them. Like Nedjma’s hands, the rat trailed black slime as she interacted with the corporeal world, dragging a single silver key across the floor.

“Thanks, Miss Stamp,” said Nedjma, allowing Chanel to clamber back up to her shoulder and giving the rat a scratch between the ears.

As she drifted towards back towards the door, Nedjma sent one last look at the doctor and nurse. Two scarlet spectres had already appeared, enticed by the aura of fresh death.

“Shoo!” Nedjma shouted at them. “Get lost!”

″Possessioooooon,” pointed out the spectre on the left.

The other spectre pointed a hazy hand and nodded, as if to say, That.

Nedjma willed another glop of black goo into her palm. “Counter argument,” she said. “You go back where you belong, barf bag.”

The spectres sank through the floor, the one on the right shooting her one last crude hand gesture.

“What a bunch of narbos,” Nedjma muttered, lifting the key. She faced the door to the hospital bed storage, and stuck the key into the lock.

Or tried to.

“What the heck?” Nedjma muttered, jiggling the key. She glanced back again, as though hoping passing hospital personal wouldn’t notice the disembodied key starting to get angry.

“Chanel, this is the key,” Nedjma said, examining it closely. “This is always the key.”

Chanel squeaked indignantly, like, Well, I know that!

“Why the . . . ? What the . . . ? When . . . ?”

Nedjma jammed the key in again, wincing as it clanged audibly against the metal door handle.

“Yeaaaaah,” said a voice from behind, causing Nedjma’s ghostly form to jump into the air. “We changed the locks.”

*Listen to the audio version on “Buddies Grim,” the podcast, available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and more!

#paranormal #fiction #sciencefiction #scifi #fantasy #podcast

Written by Luna B.

Nedjma froze and her grip on the key slackened, falling into the lock with a quiet clang of metal. Turning sharply, she could see a taller, stern looking man, eyebrows knitted together as they stared with contempt at the key that seemed to move of its own accord.

“Asif?” Dr. House paused her conversation with the nurse at his announcement. Her hand went to slap her hip, no doubt finding her labcoat key-less, and her eyes widened. “It’s the thief!”

“Yes, we’re past that, Doctor,” Asif said snidely, to which the doctor gave an indignant huff. “I’ll have to get my money from Jeff later, I knew it was a wizard...” Making sure to say the last part loudly, Asif turned to scan the room slowly and Nedjma gave a sigh of relief, then rolled her eyes.

“If I wasn’t technically nearly dead right now, that would have done it for sure,” she said to the rat now skittering up her clothes to sit on her shoulder. Chanel seemed unfazed and Nedjma agreed. “You’re right. Just gotta get these stupid meds while that airhead keeps them looking elsewhere for some...”

She cringed, letting her head fall forward to hit the door. There is a wizard nearby and he’s toting my soulless body! The thought of him getting caught and her body getting sent to the morgue sent her pulse racing again.

“Screw it!” She phased through the door to the supply room with a grunt, pulling down meds she only knew by the color of the labels slapped over the little glass bottles. She tugged a set of folded spare sheets from a drawer and wrapped the bottles up haphazardly, shoving them in a bag and grimacing at how much black goo they had gotten covered in. “That’s not gonna wash out.”

She sighed and reluctantly turned to the only window in the room, not even big enough for her head to fit out of normally. “Time to try out that idiot’s stupid suggestion, finally,” she said more to herself than Chanel, who sniffled at her ear inquisitively. She hadn’t admitted it the first time they had attempted this kind of theft, but she didn’t have confidence that she could pull this kind of stunt, and she still didn’t, but now she had no choice.

Maneuvering the bag through the crank-open window to hold it outside was the easy part- next was her. Wall physics in the Kingdom of Virithiel were like nothing. Falling into a body of water was effortless, and so was coming out. But outside walls were more like barriers, not as easily passed without some kind of opening to squeeze through.

She braced herself and hesitated there, staring at the window with several breaths of confidence before she finally broke. She hopped on the spot and whined, dreading what she knew was the most uncomfortable feeling in the netherworld, or the real one for that matter. What Jose wouldn’t give to see her like that- nonstop teasing ammo for the rest of her life.

“I’m not sneaking away from the coroner’s office again! One time was enough!” Nedjma flung herself to the window before she could let herself think about it any more. As her malleable astral form squeezed through the opening, it didn’t hurt, but it felt so weird and gross, her not-entirely-present stomach churned. It was like constantly hitting your ‘funny bone’ nerve on an electric fence.

When her legs were finally pulled through, Nedjma started her ghostly descent with a dramatic shudder, rubbing her arms in a futile attempt to get rid of the lingering feeling. Floating down at a leisurely pace was all she could do, but the panicked squeaks of Chanel Stamp mirrored her own worry. The bag of medicine was now nearly covered in black gunk from touching it too long and was beginning to get too heavy and slippery for someone without a body to hold.

“I don’t suppose you could help?” Nedjma said to the shaking tail hanging in front of her face as Chanel sat atop her head, peering down at the 4-floor drop. “Three floors left to go and if gravity weren’t so...” Her complaints were cut short when she tried to readjust her grip and it started to slip, but the multiple swipes at it only succeeded in knocking it spinning as it fell.

Nedjma wished she hadn’t just heard the sound of the bag crashing into the shrubs below. It barely covered clinking of glass that probably sat in a broken mess in those sheets now. She also wished she didn’t just see Jose run around the corner at the noise. Without her body.

“Nedj! Is that you?!” he yelled in a whisper, that was probably just as loud as his normal speaking voice. She watched helplessly from now two stories up as he crept over to inspect the bag, then peering up to the tiny open window on the fourth floor. He had the audacity to smirk. “I knew it wasn’t such a dumb idea.”

He quickly wrapped the bag closed and shoved it in his rucksack, not even noticing the goo that was all over his hands and bag now. “Nedj, wherever you are, I got the stuff! Let’s grab some grindage at the diner on the way home!”

Finally landing her feet on the ground and regaining her movement, she circled the unknowing boy as he crept back around the corner. “I am so gonna give you a fresh one when I get back in my body for making me do all this again!” She flung a fist at the grinning boy for emphasis, stopping short of actually making contact. “Just you wait, narbo-”

″Cruuuuuuuud!” Jose whispered, hopping behind a grimy dumpster and peeking around the corner. Nedjma looked straight ahead, finding the nurse that Dr. House was talking to earlier outside. She was kneeling over the body leaning up against the building wall right next to the door. Another nurse she’d only seen in passing before came over at the first’s call, and Nedjma could hear something about “an OD, probably,” and that it “looked like a high schooler, what a shame,” but that it still had a pulse.

“Nedjma’s gonna kill me,” he whispered. Both of them watched the two nurses cart the body inside on a small stretcher. Jose got a hard punch to his arm and he bit his lip, knowing her answer was a definite, and angry, “no doy.”

*Listen to the audio version on “Buddies Grim,” the podcast, available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and more!

#paranormal #fiction #sciencefiction #scifi #fantasy #podcast

Written by Kacie Iuvara.

Nedjma made it to the morgue. Jose didn’t.

Instead, he trembled and rifled feverishly through Basic Spells for Basic Wizards.

“Summoning spells, summoning spells . . . aha!”

He thrust his hand into the air and yelped, ”Summon Nedjma Sanders!”

Nothing happened.

“Come on,” Jose begged. ”Summon Nedjma! Summon! SUMMON . . . please?”

In the Kingdom of Verithiel, Nedjma punched him again.

“You can barely fix a window, narbo!” she said sharply. “And how would it look if my dead body started flying through the fricking hospital, bouncing off the walls like – gah!”

Her ghostly form tensing, Nedjma darted back towards the hospital, leaving Jose rubbing his twice-punched arm and scouring Basic Spells for another emergency incantation.

Nedjma followed her corpse as the nurses shunted it through the door.

“Gurney,” one nurse grunted to the other. “Hurry, Samson.”

Nurse Samson squeezed between hospital beds, unearthed a gurney, and unfolded it. Then the nurses plopped Nedjma’s body down and wheeled the stretcher into the hall.

“Not this again,” Nedjma growled to Chanel Stamp, who had been watching and waiting in uncharacteristic silence. “The last time they caught us, I made it to the Coroner’s Office. The Coroner’s Office! Do you know how hard it is to sneak out of a freezer? And cold?”

She said this all while striding beside the rapidly-rolling stretcher, rubbing her hands like she was warming up for strangling. Jose. Or the hospital staff. Or both.

Meanwhile, more doctors and nurses flocked around her, all practically running to keep up.

“Status?”

“Heart’s stopped – get me a defibrillator! Stat!”

“Okay, take a red,” Nedjma grunted. She leaned over her own body, as though about to launch her spirit back inside and yell “I LIVE!”

She hesitated.

“But they think I OD’d,” she muttered, maybe to Chanel, maybe to herself. “They’d never let a burn-out druggie into Faraday U. I’d never go to college. This sucks!”

So she watched and followed as the debrilliated her (without success, other than a few involuntary twitches from Nedjma’s spirit), pronounced her dead, and wheeled her to the morgue, murmuring things like, “Such a waste . . .”

When the doctors finally departed, Nedjma still couldn’t relax.

“Everybody, CLEAR OUT!” she bellowed.

There were only two corpses in the morgue, Nedjma’s and an elderly man’s. And yet, the room was packed – packed with those same red spectres. They looked like poorly made video game characters, red and staticky.

At the sound of Nedjma’s shout, their eyeless faces rose to survey her. The morgue (in the Kingdom of Verithiel) quickly filled with protests of, ”Possession!” ”Must possess!” ”Old soul tastes like mothballs!”

A few spectres shot that last speaker sour looks.

“BUZZ OFF!” Nedjma thundered again.

The spectres had always listened to Nedjma. They had grumbled and complained, but they listened.

This time, though, there were more spectres than Nedjma had ever dealt with at once. And this time, they didn’t listen.

Instead, the three closest spectres latched their fingers into the old man’s neck. Immediately, his skin bubbled – not with black ooze, but with a red, viscous liquid resembling candle wax.

“Stop it!” Nedjma yelped. “That’s not – you’d better –”

But it was too late. The man’s whole body began deflating like an old balloon. Red gunk spilled from his chest and trailed up the spectres’ arms like spilled blood returning to their veins. Their crimson auras glowed clearer.

″No fair!” protested another spectre, one of the ten or eleven shuffling through the morgue.

And then, with a tiny slurp! sound, the old man completely dissolved.

“What . . . just . . . happened?” Nedjma choked. On her shoulder, Chanel Stamp squeaked in terror, as if to say, No idea, but it was totally terrifying!

All at once, the roomful of spectres turned their eyeless faces onto Nedjma’s dead body.

“Ooooh no you don’t,” said a voice.

At this, Nedjma flung herself into the wall.

Luckily, as a ghost, the impact didn’t hurt. Even so, Nedjma didn’t summon black goop or vault back into her body to fend off the spectres. She whipped around, flattening herself against the wall. Her eyes were as round as compact discs.

A second silvery figure had entered the morgue – another ghost.

Pale mist rolled from her translucent body, forming a faint, misty aura overtop her head and shoulders. The sight reminded Nedjma of the clouds swathing Tunstead’s skyscrapers and sparkling turrets. The spirit looked tall and willowy, the way little kids imagined ghosts in Ffestiniog bedtime stories. Her silky brown hair formed an elegant curly bob. Her eyes practically glowed blue.

If Nedjma had been inside her own body, she might have blushed.

The woman ignored Nedjma, studying the spectres with obvious distaste.

Then she screeched. Worse than a scream, it sounded like a million ghostly chainsaws. The sound flooded the Kingdom of Verithiel, and leached into the corporeal world – the morgue beds rattled, oozing – the spectres hunched over and wailed –

Chanel Stamp squeaked in pain.

″Agh,” groaned Nedjma, pressing her fingers over Chanel’s little ears. She squeezed her eyes shut – her shoulders turned rigid –

Finally, the sound ended.

Slowly, Nedjma opened her eyes. The spectres had all gone, and the woman was patting her hands together.

“I absolutely despise those creatures, don’t you?”

She flashed Nedjma a winning smile. Nedjma answered with a spluttering yelp.

“You – ghost – but – here?”

The woman laughed, a fluttery and high-pitched sound. Nedjma cleared her throat and licked her lips. Her face flickered, as though she was trying to pull back on her usual hard expression.

“Sorry about the Death Rattle,” the woman said. “D’you like that? I coined the term. It’s more of a shriek, but it does rattle the physical world, if you’re loud enough.”

“You’re a necromancer,” Nedjma managed, finally finding her voice. “Using necromancy. Don’t you know how illegal that is?”

“I hope you’re not missing the irony here.” The woman pursed her lips, surveying Nedjma with something like pity. “I know exactly how illegal it is, my undead friend. But I should correct you: I was a necromancer, back when I lived.”

“Back when you – w-what?” Nedjma stammered.

The woman floated towards Nedjma – not walked, like Nedjma did. She extended a hand.

“My name is Dr. Louis Saltsman. I used to work in this very hospital. And I’ve been waiting for someone like you.”

Nedjma didn’t answer for a very long moment, staring at Lulu’s hand as though running calculations on its length and width.

“Nedjma,” she said at last. “Nedjma Sanders. And I need . . . a lot of explanation.”

Dr. Saltsman nodded, her silvery face going grim. “I’ll explain. Quickly.”

She settled her vibrant blue gaze on Nedjma.

“When I lived, necromancy was not illegal. It was life-saving. To know when patients slipped closer to death, and to coax their spirits to stay, or release them in peace . . . Back then, only twenty odd years ago, necromancers were invaluable.”

“But – but it’s dark magic,” Nedjma protested, blinking several times. “It’s wrong –”

“And who decided that?” Dr. Saltsman sniffed. Then her expression darkened again. “When I was alive, spectres did not exist. Have you ever seen a ghost like me?”

Nedjma opened her mouth three times before answering. “Ah . . . no. I just thought it was only animals. And, uh . . . I thought spectres were ghosts. Like, dead necromancer ghosts.”

Dr. Saltsman studied Nedjma closely. “You’ve never had a teacher of necromancy, have you?”

Nedjma bristled. “What, and get arrested? Get real. I learned what they taught us in school – which is that necromancy can twist and darken a person’s soul, and that it defies the laws of nature. That’s it.”

“Unreal,” Dr. Saltsman muttered. “And you thought using necromancy would turn you into one of those – those flakes?”

A little defensively, Nedjma nodded. “Well, what else could spectres be?”

“Oh, that I know,” said Dr. Saltsman. “But, ah, you should really bug out and get back in your body.”

“Wha– dag!”

Black goop poured from the pores of Nedjma’s corpse, dotting her face and arms like inky freckles. The same black splotches were building on her spectral form.

“Hurry, before you die!” Dr. Saltsman insisted. “Summon me, and I can get you out of here!”

Nedjma didn’t answer. She threw herself into her body, which jolted worse than it had under the defibrillator, then sat bolt upright.

“That was . . . way too close,” she said, wide-eyed.

Grimacing, Nedjma rubbed the slime from her hands and face. She considered the morgue – which no longer carried the white gossamer sheen of the Kingdom of Verithiel. Chanel Stamp and Dr. Saltsman had also disappeared from sight.

“No more,” Nedjma muttered to herself. She walked towards the door, hesitating a few times. “Walk out, say I got lost, say I’m a visitor, say . . .”

When her hand hit the smooth door handle, Nedjma paused. She studied her empty shoulder a long minute.

“Oh, fine.”

She closed her eyes, reaching her presence back into the Kingdom of Verithiel. Immediately, her senses located two cold spots, one smaller and one larger. She willed them into the land of the living.

“Thank goodness,” said Dr. Saltsman, who had just appeared as an ethereal, luminous apparition. “I thought I was going to have to haunt you.”

On Nedjma’s shoulder, Chanel squeaked indignantly, like, You were gonna leave me with the newbie?

“You’re quite good,” Dr. Saltsman noted. “I couldn’t imagine being able to conjure spirits without any teaching –”

“Stop,” said Nedjma. “It doesn’t matter how I am at necromancy. After today, I’m done with it. I’m done with all this. Okay?” She hesitated a moody second. “But also, I can’t get caught sneaking out of here. You said you can get me outside?”

“Oh, easily.” Dr. Saltsman flashed a winning smile, then swooped at Nedjma like a gust of glowing wind and lifted her into the air.

“AHHHAHAH!” A wild panic-laugh escaped Nedjma before she could clamp it down.

“Shh!” said Dr. Saltsman, clearly biting back a laugh herself. “The hospital staff might hear. Now keep calm. This might feel a bit strange in the physical world.”

Dr. Saltsman flew for the wall, holding Nedjma as if she weighed nothing. Nedjma tried to keep calm . . . and failed, when Dr. Saltsman pulled her through the wall.

Nedjma had performed a similar move countless times. She’d squeezed through nooks and crannies, grumbling about the uncomfortable sensation of her spectral form squashing to fit.

She had never gone straight through, effortlessly. And of course, she had never gone through in a living body.

″Gah!” Nedjma gasped.

“It’s quite a sensation,” Dr. Saltsman agreed. She was now holding Nedjma (who had started flailing and sucking in deep breaths) three stories in the air.

“Jose,” Nedjma managed. “My friend – take me to him – set me down!”

“Hmmm . . .” Dr. Saltsman scrunched up her nose, then nodded. “A wizard?”

″Yes,” said Nedjma with desperate impatience, as if each second she spent hovering was her new worst memory. “Probably pacing and crying and shouting spells!”

“Ah, yes, I see him.” Dr. Saltsman laughed her tinkling laugh, then plunged towards the earth, Nedjma in tow.

“Mmmmmmm!” This time, Nedjma muffled a scream by clenching her jaw. Her coppery skin flushed green.

A figure appeared below: Jose, spellbook open. As Nedjma had predicted, he was pacing, crying, and shouting spells.

″Locate! Help! Hide! Seek!”

“Jose!” Nedjma called.

Jose jumped about a foot in the air, then looked up in wonder. “Nedj . . . ?” In amazement, he started to say, “The spells worked!”

Then Nedjma and Dr. Saltsman touched down onto the grass.

“GHOST HUMAN!” Jose exclaimed.

“Shh!” said Nedjma and Dr. Saltsman at once. They glanced at each other in surprise.

Jose blinked rapidly between them. “Am I wigging out? What’s going on? How did . . . ?”

“We have to get out of here,” Nedjma and Dr. Saltsman insisted in unison. They exchanged another bewildered look.

“I’ll explain everything, but we really should move somewhere safer,” said Dr. Saltsman. She introduced herself, but Jose seemed more interested in gaping at her than actual conversation. Nedjma rolled her eyes, though she’d been in the same boat only minutes earlier.

“Come on,” she said, grabbing Jose’s and Dr. Saltsman’s hands in either of her own and dragging them deeper into the mountain forest.

Once Tunstead’s gleaming buildings had vanished from sight, Nedjma dropped them both and spun around. On her shoulder, Chanel sniffed her cheek inquisitively.

“Okay, what are the spectres?”

Nedjma’s sharp brown eyes bored into Dr. Saltsman’s ethereal blue ones.

“It . . . is difficult to explain,” Dr. Saltsman admitted. “You may not believe me.” She took a deep breath. “There is something dangerous hidden inside this mountain. Something catching ghosts like me and turning them into spectres. Something . . . something creating a veritable army of the undead.”

Nedjma and Jose shared a look, seeming to come to a common consensus: Okay, the ghost lady’s crazy. How ’bout that grindage at the diner now?

“I know it sounds bent,” Dr. Saltsman said quickly, interpreting their expressions. “Hear me out. Necromancers have the ability to linger in the Kingdom of Verithiel when they die, if they have unfinished business. For me . . . well, my unfinished business has lasted twenty years.

“The first time I saw a spectre, it killed me.”

″What?” yelped Jose. “But – but those red dudes don’t hurt anybody. Right?”

He looked imploringly at Nedjma, who was his main source of Verithiel-based information.

“They . . . may mention possession, sometimes,” Nedjma admitted.

“They do indeed,” said Dr. Saltsman. “And, as Nedjma has just witnessed, they also feed on corpses. I was out of my body when they consumed it.”

“Yikes,” Nedjma muttered. Jose looked sick.

“You were halfway correct before, Nedjma,” said Dr. Saltsman. “The spectres were once necromancers. But this has nothing to do with their powers or choices. At one point, they were nothing but friendly ghosts. Now . . . well, they’ve been poisoned.”

“But . . . why?” Nedjma asked. “And how? And how could you not see them until you died? They’re everywhere.”

Despite her glowing sheen, Dr. Saltsman’s expression looked dark as night.

“They’re multiplying. Something is creating them. Something inside this mountain.”

Nedjma and Jose didn’t answer for a long minute.

“Well, thanks for the nightmares, but we’d really better jet,” said Nedjma. She waved a hand as though breaking apart a frightening mental image, then grabbed Jose’s arm and started dragging him through the trees.

“Wait!” Dr. Saltsman floated beside them, keeping pace easily, though looking a little miffed. “You can’t go! I need you!”

“That’s nice, but it’s really late, and we should be getting back to Ffestiniog . . .”

“You’re village people?” Dr. Saltsman asked, some not-totally-concealed disbelief in her tone.

Nedjma’s face flattened. Now that she’d finally recovered from her shock, her expression had hardened back to the same one as before, when Jose had begged her to make this whole dangerous excursion in the first place.

“Yes, we’re village people. Nice to meet you, Lulu. Goodbye forever.”

“Lulu,” Dr. Saltsman mused. “The nurses used to call me that. . . Anyway, I can’t let you go.”

“Kick rocks,” said Nedjma, quickening her pace.

“What do you need Nedj for?” Jose wondered.

“Well I’d like you too, Jose, if you’re willing,” said Dr. Saltsman. “Don’t you want to know why I want you? What the spectres’ goals is? Why they’re multiplying? How I know all this?”

“Nope,” said Nedjma.

“I’ll go in reverse order,” Dr. Saltsman decided. “I’ve traveled to the bottom of the mountain three times, to spy. The journeys almost destroyed me . . . I could never get inside, but I saw enough.

“As to why they’re multiplying, well . . . it’s complicated. From what information I’ve been able to gather, their numbers will continue to increase until they match the number of living souls on this mountain. Then they will possess all the bodies and form an unstoppable zombie army.”

Nedjma skidded to a stop so fast that Jose slipped into the dirt.

“Oh, good, you’re listening,” said Dr. Saltsman.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Nedjma rounded on the ghost. “You can’t just say something like that!”

“It’s true,” said Dr. Saltsman simply.

“It – it – it can’t be.” Nedjma shook her head. “Those spectres can’t even touch living souls. They’re terrified of necromantic residue.” She held up her hand and conjured a black bubble of ooze to demonstrate. “So maybe they talk a big talk, but if somebody’s still inside of a body –”

“Then the spectres will need lots of power,” said Dr. Saltsman, “which they garner from eating corpses, as you’ve seen. And where do we put our corpses? We bury them. Inside the mountain. Easy access for when the day comes.”

Nedjma backed up, horror creeping across her face. Jose stood and brushed off his pant legs, then considered Dr. Saltsman.

“That’s your unfinished business, isn’t it?” he guessed in a small voice.“Put a stop to the spectres, before they . . .”

“Before they turn everyone on this mountain into a mindless zombie, yes,” said Dr. Saltsman. “Which is an excellent segue into my hypothesis for their end goal –”

“Nope,” said Nedjma abruptly, and she snatched Jose and started marching down through the forest once more.

“Oh, not this again,” sniffed Dr. Saltsman. She hovered at their side. “The end goal – is world domination! Probably! Why else would someone need an army so massive?”

Nedjma didn’t answer, dragging Jose around a few trees that Dr. Saltsman ghosted easily through. Both of the living humans started huffing and puffing.

“Nedjma, please listen,” Dr. Saltsman pressed, “I said I couldn’t get into the mountain before, and that’s because I was alone. I’ve spent ten whole years searching for a necromancer, but as dark magic is now illegal on the whole mountain, I’ve had a bummer of a time –”

“Well, sorry to burst your bubble,” said Nedjma, “but like I said, I’m giving necromancy up. Starting now.”

Jose looked up at Nedjma, stumbling a little. “Maybe we should hear her out, Nedj.”

“He’s right,” said Dr. Saltsman. “And – and I could teach you, too! You could become as excellent of a necromancer I am – or, was –”

“I’m NOT a necromancer!”

Nedjma dropped Jose and rounded on Dr. Saltsman, who was so startled she froze halfway through a sapling tree.

“Yeah, so I’ve got some natural ability,” Nedjma said. “So I’ve used dark magic in the past. And today. But I – we – want to go to college at Faraday University, and I can’t do that if I’m arrested. Or traveling down this mountain with a crazy ghost,” she added sharply.

Dr. Saltsman knitted her brow. “You worry about college, and your future. But don’t you see? Neither of these will exist if you don’t help me. By my calculations . . .”

She drew a deep breath, then released it slowly.

“By my calculations, the spectres will take over in two weeks.”

“Two weeks?” said Jose in horror.

“Maybe less,” said Dr. Saltsman. “With a living necromancer and a wizard on my side, we can put a stop to this. We can figure out who’s doing it, and why, and end it before it begins.”

For a long stretch, silence fell between the three of them.

“How?” Nedjma asked. Her voice was hoarse, quiet, and full of resignation, as if she’d just been asked to sign her own death warrant. “What exactly do you need us to do?”

Dr. Saltsman studied Nedjma and Jose. Her expression was more serious than the grave.

“I need you to journey with me to the mouth of the mountain.”

*Listen to the audio version on “Buddies Grim,” the podcast, available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and more!

#paranormal #fiction #sciencefiction #scifi #fantasy #podcast

Written by Luna B.

“Can I get a coffee for the road home?”

“Sure thing, hun.”

The smell of bacon filtered from the kitchen window despite being past sunset and the High Council was having a press conference on the muted TV overhead, having been a less boring game of basketball seconds before. The air conditioner whirred cooler air at them but the always present humidity made it sticky, and the jukebox just started playing Country Roads for the fourth time. None of this would have been uncomfortable if their group hadn’t been too uncomfortable not to notice.

The waitress walked past their table with a to-go cup of coffee in hand, eyeing the two kids silently picking at their food with slight suspicion. Jose supposed it wasn’t her fault, they do always come here after stealing from the hospital. It was a wonder they hadn’t been turned in yet, but the slouch in her posture, the messy bun, and the stains in her uniform told him she probably didn’t care that much.

Jose spun the nearly empty cup of cocoa in a slow circle on the table, twirling it by the handle with his finger. He glanced up at Nedjma again. Nope, fingers at her temple and staring at her food meant not yet. Now? No, that was an angry bite just now, basically tearing the sausage off of that fork. Jose rubbed his slightly bruised arm.

He could understand being stumped by all this new stuff so suddenly, but just being quiet and thinking about it had always been Nejma’s jam more than his. Made him want to run laps around the diner screaming until he collapsed on the ground, probably after the second lap. But he held it in, like always.

“Look, I understand you have a lot on your plate now,” the spectral face peeking out of the back of the booth seat said in a quieter voice. Jose looked at Nedjma’s nearly gone french toast with furrowed brows.

″...Figuratively speaking,” she said, with an obvious look at him. “But I don’t think you should just be sitting around here acting like you just came from a funeral.”

“I’m thinking, okay?!” Nedjma burst out in frustration and Louis hid, the diner quieting and glancing in their direction before slowly returning to its normal volume.

“You can think with me?” Jose offered meekly. Nedjma looked up at him with a sigh before losing her hunch and leaning back in her seat.

“You know why we can’t go down the mountain. It’s the same reason no one can go down the mountain. We will get sick. And die. There’s a reason Faraday is a the peak and our poor town isn’t, remember?”

“Yeah but we’re probably gonna die if we get possessed by those red guys anyway, right?”

Jose looked to Dr. Louis for answers, but she only scrunched her face up in thought before saying, “It’s entirely possible, but I haven’t seen it tried yet.”

“Can’t we just get your brother to... borrow one of the suits from the castle? We put those on and we could even take a walk to Marranon Mountain afterwards, you’ve always wanted to go there.” Jose was coaxing, but it only seemed to exacerbate the situation.

“Those aren’t real! That was from a story you read in fourth grade. I know because I lent you the book. And we can go to Marranon Mountain, or any other mountain in the Allied Peaks once we have degrees from Faraday U and can afford the airfare.”

Jose slumped further in his seat. He hadn’t seen her this stressed since she’d gotten to the last round of that state writing contest in middle school.

“Out of curiosity, how close is the mouth of the mountain to the ground then? Is it above the meesma?”

″Miasma, and hard to say exactly, but it’s not ground level,” the doctor stated, sticking a silvery hand from the seat to point her finger, then waving to Nedjma. “But that can all be alleviated by your friend here, if she can handle focusing that long. Not being alive, I don’t really have the strength to do it anymore.”

“What? You’re saying I can-” and left anyway.

Dr. Louis phased back into the seat just before the clanking of the waitress collecting their plates made Nedjma jump. She gave them an even more suspicious look now that they suddenly stopped talking, but slid them their bill.

“And that’s why I suggested you not stop here to talk. Basically the watering hole of, as you say ‘spilling the beans’, you know.”

“But I was hungry,” Jose whined, more to himself, as he and Nedjma dropped their coins in the little tray.

“We can talk more on the way home.” Nedj got up and pulled her windbreaker back on, maybe a little too hard, and walked out of the diner before he could argue to get a cocoa to go, too. He whined again, following her out.

Dr. Louis walked from the diner wall to the empty lot as naturally and gracefully as if she were walking down the stairs in some flowy gown like those old-timey movies his dad watched. He was the only person he knew of that still watched those centuries old things.

“So... option one,” Jose started as they set to climbing back down the mountain, using the thin trees as handholds on the steep slope. “We give the medicine we worked real hard to get to the clinic and go on about our lives, forgetting this all happened. Study for our final exams. Also potentially getting possessed in a few weeks. Aw, sick!”

Jose bent and pulled a fat and stubby mushroom from a fallen tree and shoved it in his pocket. “We should go mushroom hunting again soon. Anyway, option two. We go down the mountain immediately and maybe get sick and die, maybe get murdered by some zombie overlord, or maybe kill this zombie overlord and become heroes and get full ride scholarships to the university.”

He skids down the slope to the dirt road, obviously having much more fun than when they were going up the mountain.

“Neither sound like good options to me,” Nedjma yelled ahead to him.

“But option two does have the better positive outcome.” Jose her gave her a hand down and they walked the short road to their neighborhood.

“And the worse negative one. I don’t see how you can be so calm about this.”

“Oh, you know me,” he said with a sigh. “All my bad thoughts and worries go in a bottle ’cuz I don’t know how to deal with them,” he said a quick and joking manner, his face neutral.

“You gotta go see Dr. Sonora again sometime,” Nedjma said in a softer voice with a quick pat on his arm.

“No insurance!” he answered quickly. “Either way, I say we pack up and check it out. We’re on school break anyway, we have time.”

“I like his idea,” Dr. Louis piped up, and Nedjma lost any relief Jose managed to coax her into.

“Of course you do,” she said with an eye roll.

Jose flashed his usual dimpled smile, walking up to Nedjma’s newly fixed window and smirking at his work before ducking inside. Not even a minute passed before footsteps rumbled from the hallway and Lord Kenneth barged in without knocking, as usual.

“Nedj, I know you didn’t sneak out to the diner again when I told you I was bringing home beef stew- and of course Jose’s here too.”

Jose smiled meekly and waved.

“And-” he stopped abruptly, running to open the closet, finding Dr. Louis, who had just phased inside.

“Nedj, this is-”

“I know I know I know, I said I was stopping the necromancy but something happened and-” She ran to pull him away by his arm but stopped at the sight of the expression on his face.

“No Nedj, this is... ” His voice was barely there and he took a step back. Dr. Louis’s expression grew hard, completely unlike the glowing kindness she had before.

“Time to go, kids.” Her voice was more of a command, and the next Jose saw, Kenneth was on the ground at a touch of her finger, the light in his eyes gone out.

*Listen to the audio version on “Buddies Grim,” the podcast, available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and more!

#paranormal #fiction #sciencefiction #scifi #fantasy #podcast

Written by Kacie Iuvara.

“YOU AIRHEADED SCUMBAG DOCTOR!”

“I have never heard those insults in my existence, but I assume they’re quite rude,” said Dr. Saltzman flatly. “We need to go. You’re packed?”

″No, I’m not – REVIVE MY BROTHER!” Nedjma bellowed.

Jose stood between the ghost and his best friend, wide-eyed. Kenneth laid sprawled at their feet. His bronze skin had drained to a waxy tan color.

Dr. Saltzman huffed impatiently. “I can’t do that, Nedjma, because that is not your brother.”

Nedjma opened her mouth, but only sputtering sounds came out.

“Oh no,” Jose gasped suddenly, throwing his hands over his mouth. “Oh no, I get it . . . a specter took over Kenneth’s body?”

″Finally, someone with some sense,” Dr. Saltzman sighed.

Nedjma stuttered some more, until finally bursting out, “That – he – he was talking like Kenneth!”

She released a long, hissing breath through her teeth, as though to calm herself down. It didn’t work. Her eyes still flashed dangerously.

“I know how my brother sounds,” she said, speaking each word slowly and darkly, like lines of her goth poetry. “That was my brother.”

Dr. Saltzman tapped her chin in thought. “You know, I was surprised how eloquent he sounded for a specter. But no, he was definitely a specter. And still is.”

Nedjma growled, her shoulders shaking with fury. Jose piped up quickly, “But, ah, um – how do you know? Like, if Nedj doesn’t sense it, how can you?”

“I’m dead, Jose,” said Dr. Saltzman bluntly. “And a better necromancer. And I happen to have been studying specters for over twenty years. Look, I can prove it –”

She rose her misty hand over Kenneth’s body, releasing a few drops of black gunk. As they dripped onto his chest, redness bubbled up to the surface, a goo resembling candle wax . . . and the remains of the old man in the morgue.

“I don’t care,” Nedjma growled. She was blinking very fast. “I don’t care if he’s a specter or not, just wake him up. Wake him up.”

Dr. Saltzman opened her mouth, then closed it with a sigh. When she stayed silent, Nedjma released a wordless, strangled sound, then dropped to her knees. She ran her shaking hands over Kenneth’s body, spilling black goop from her palms as she tried desperately to make her dead brother wake up.

Jose wiped a tear from his eye and looked up at Dr. Saltzman.

“Please, bring him back,” he said. “He’s all the family Nedj has left.”

Dr. Saltzman’s face, which had been hard and cold since Kenneth entered the room, softened.

“Nedjma,” she said quietly. Nedjma didn’t respond, too busy fumbling over Kenneth’s corpse. ”Nedjma. I’ll wake him.”

Jose breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank goodness.”

“About time!” Nedjma glared up at Dr. Saltzman. “Do it then!”

Still, Dr. Saltzman didn’t move. She looked at Jose. “Would you deliver that medicine to Ffestiniog’s doctor?”

“Oh – sure,” said Jose, looking between Nedjma and Dr. Saltzman. “That’s my mom, so I can also say . . .” He swallowed hard. “Say bye, I guess. Just in case we decide to . . . you know. Yeah. I should see her.”

He glanced between the ghost and his best friend one last time, before hefting the medicine over his shoulder and slipping out of Nedjma’s bedroom.

“Your brother has plenty of time,” Dr. Saltzman said gently. “It takes a full thirty minutes before a spirit moves past the point of return. Now listen to me –” her voice turned stern here, because Nedjma had just opened her mouth to interrupt. “I have never encountered a specter inside a human body before, not anywhere but – but the mountain’s mouth. And I’ve definitely never heard a specter using full sentences. I can only hypothesize that, for some reason, this specter has been living dormant inside your brother.”

Nedjma’s face contorted in disgust. “Like – like a parasite?”

“Perhaps,” said Dr. Saltzman. “Something I didn’t think possible. What this means is . . . well, they could be anyone. And they could be everywhere.”

“Oh, perfect,” said Nedjma. She looked a little green.

“Quite the opposite,” said Dr. Saltzman, confused. She shrugged it off. “So our two-week deadline may be a little closer to one week.”

“You’re just a bucket of good news, aren’t you?” Nedjma muttered. “Probably super fun at parties.”

“Says the angst-riddled necromancer poet,” Dr. Saltzman sniffed. “Perhaps you should summon your rat back. She seems to calm you down.”

Nedjma had released Chanel Stamp into the Kingdom of Verithiel an hour earlier, before they entered the diner. But Nedjma only shook her head.

“She doesn’t like it when I’m upset,” Nedjma grunted. “Ghosts are too observant.”

Dr. Saltzman’s glow flickered. Nedjma’s face twitched, as if she suddenly realized who else her words applied to.

“There’s something else, as well,” said Dr. Saltzman, moving past the uncomfortable moment. “Your brother is not – well, to be frank, not an obvious candidate for hosting a specter. Not important or powerful or connected, right?”

“Harsh,” said Nedjma, “but true.”

Dr. Saltzman nodded, sighing. “So I would have to assume that someone – whoever is behind this whole thing – already knows you are a powerful necromancer.”

Nedjma’s eyes popped open, then narrowed to slits. “How?”

“Well, you haven’t exactly been hiding it, robbing Faraday U and all that,” Dr. Saltzman pointed out, with a single, musical laugh.

“I have been hiding it!” Nedjma protested. “I’ve never been caught! I mean . . . besides today . . . and one other time!”

Shockingly, Dr. Saltzman didn’t look impressed.

“Faraday U is one of the top schools in the Allied Peaks. You think they’re not monitored by the High Council?”

Nedjma blinked. “And you think the High Council is behind this?”

“Either that, or the enemy keeps very good spies,” Dr. Saltzman said solemnly. Her glowing blue eyes dropped down to Kenneth, then met Nedjma’s brown ones. “So, what do we do?”

It was the first time Dr. Saltzman had ever offered Nedjma the lead. Nedjma stared at her a long moment, a bit of blood rising in her face.

“He comes with us,” she said at last. “He can’t tell anyone what we’re doing if we’ve got him under surveillance. And maybe you can, um . . . do some science or whatever, and help us prepare for . . . for the mouth of the mountain, and what we’ll find there.”

Dr. Saltzman’s face lit up. In fact, her whole body lit up, glowing brighter with excitement. “You’ve decided? You’ll help me?”

“They put a specter in my brother,” said Nedjma. “Now it’s personal.”

“Excellent. Thank you, Nedjma.” Louis beamed, sparkling a little, before her ethereal body dimmed back to its normal luminance. “So we wake him, and take him,” she summed up. “Oh, look, I rhymed.”

“We tell him the truth, and make him tell us everything he knows,” said Nedjma. “If he knows anything.”

″Some of the truth,” Dr. Saltzman corrected. “We don’t know how well they can communicate with their mystery leader.”

“Right.” Nedjma released a long, deep sigh. “And then I get to spend some quality time with the Onion Lord.”

Dr. Saltman blinked, then broke out into a high pitched giggle. “What a title!” She swooped low over Kenneth’s body, outstretching her hand.

Then she paused.

“I’m sorry for killing him, Nedjma,” she said quietly. “I only wanted to protect you and Jose. Being dead this long, I’ve forgotten what it feels like . . . having family.”

Louis tapped Kenneth’s chest, releasing several bubbles of necromantic residue. He stirred.

“Kenneth!”

Nedjma breathed his name like a broken sigh, dropping down and shaking his shoulder. “Come on, idiot, get up!”

Then Kenneth opened his eyes, and Nedjma’s whole body froze.

His eyes were totally bloodred.

“Good soooouul,” he rasped.

“You . . . DITZ-BRAINED, DIPSTICK BARF-BAG OF A GHOST!”

“Oh no, we’re back to insults,” said Dr. Saltzman.

“What–? What’s going–? EYES!” Nedjma spluttered.

“Yes, I see . . .” Dr. Saltzman hovered over Kenneth, grabbing his chin and inspecting his face. “Hmm. Yes.”

She dropped his face and announced, “I have no idea what is happening right now.”

“Oh, TOTALLY AWESOME!” Nedjma exploded. She jumped to her feet, hurling out a very un-poetic series of curses.

Meanwhile, the specter clamored up as well. He raised his hands, flexing and sniffing them, then started clumsily inspecting the room.

“Nedjma – Nedjma – NEDJMA!” Dr. Saltzman shouted over her. “You can continue to insult me, but please do it as you pack!”

Nedjma went absolutely still a second, murder in her eyes, before doing just that: She whirled around the room, throwing books and clothes into a backpack.

“AND ANOTHER THING –” She cut off, scanning her bedroom, then grunted: “Kitchen.”

She snatched The Dark Poet’s Toolkit out of the specter’s mouth (he’d been gnawing on its corner), shoved it into her backpack, then grabbed his hand and dragged him into the hallway. Dr. Saltzman followed after, just in time to receive another barrage of top-volume complaints.

“What do we even call him? It? Him? GAH!” Nedjma said, while angrily stuffing Fruit Roll-Ems into her bag. “I’m not calling that thing Kenneth.”

“Not-Kenneth?” Dr. Saltzman suggested. “Ex-Kenneth? Oh! I particularly like Anti-Kenneth.”

Anti-Kenneth didn’t acknowledge either of them, rifling through the fridge and murmuring, “Bad foooooood . . . no souuuuls . . .”

“It’s not a joke, Saltzman!” Nedjma growled. She rounded on the ghost, as though something had just occurred to her. “Where did my brother go? Where is my brother?”

“He’s in there, he’s in there!” Dr. Saltzman promised swiftly. “Can’t you sense him?”

“I can’t ‘sense’ anything, that’s not how it works,” Nedjma snapped. “I feel cold spots where dead things are, that’s it.”

“Unreal,” said Dr. Saltzman, shaking her head. “You may be gifted, but you’re still in desperate need of a teacher.”

A soda can flew through the air – and Dr. Saltzman’s head – then exploded against the kitchen wall. Anti-Kenneth looked up in mild surprise.

“Well, that was just rude,” said Dr. Saltzman.

“HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO SAY IT?” Nedjma bellowed. “I – DON’T – WANT – TO – BE – A – NECROMANCER!”

Her voice cracked several times, as though she hadn’t screamed this loud in years. Given Nedjma’s distrustful personality and her habit of grumbling, this very well may have been true.

Dr. Saltzman looked on the verge of arguing, but seemed to think better of it. “Well, regardless, your brother is alive in there. Just not in the driver’s seat, it would seem.”

“And you really can’t put him back?” Nedjma asked through gritted teeth.

“I really can’t. I have no idea what’s happening inside Kenneth’s body, but for now, we should just treat the whole situation as if Kenneth no longer exists.”

A long, still silence followed . . . and then . . .

“IF YOU WEREN’T A GHOST, I WOULD KILL YOU RIGHT NOW!”

Flying into a rage, Nedja started lobbing bottles of sauces, pickle jars, and soup cans right through Dr. Saltzman – which made Anti-Kenneth groan loudly. Then he opened the fridge and ripped into a box of Warm Pockets.

“ALL – THAT – FAMILY – GARBAGE –” with each word, Nedjma lobbed a new food product, not even flinching as they exploded against the wall ”– AND – THEN – YOU – SAY – THAT?”

The kitchen’s only door swung open, and Jose stepped into the room, grinning. “Hey guys! I’ve got –”

He cut off, staring at the scene: Nedjma breathless and brandishing a box of Pac-Mac cereal; foods and sodas splattered across the far wall; and a blank-faced, red-eyed Anti-Kenneth shoving four half-frozen Warm Pockets into his mouth.

“Oh . . .” Jose said weakly.

“Good news,” said Dr. Saltzman, looking (if possible) more dead-inside than usual. “Nedjma has agreed to accompany me to the mountain’s mouth – which, I assume, means you’ll also be joining us.”

Jose’s mouth fell open. He looked at Nedjma with wide-eyes, as though waiting for her to burst out, “PSYCH!”

When she didn’t, he said faintly, “Gnarly.”

“Good addition,” growled Nedjma, before rounding on Dr. Saltzman and chucking the Pac-Mac cereal. “And as for you –”

“Nedjma, if we’re going to work together, you really shouldn’t be –”

“YOU shouldn’t kill people’s BROTHERS, you ditz-faced, bimbette-brained –”

The two kept on going. Jose blinked a few times, shook his head, then approached Anti-Kenneth. The twenty-six-year-old had started gagging on the Warm Pockets.

“Uh . . . hey buddy,” said Jose timidly. “Remember me? Er, do you need . . . ?”

Anti-Kenneth interrupted him by letting the slobbery Warm Pockets slide from his mouth. They hit the floor with a wet shh-thunk.

“Good sooooul,” he wheezed, leaning so close into Jose that their noses nearly touched. Though his flat red eyes could have been looking anywhere, all his focus was, clearly, directed onto the small teenager . . .

“NEDJMA SANDERS!” Dr. Saltzman bellowed, raising her voice for the first time. She and Nedjma hadn’t noticed Jose and Anti-Kenneth, too busy locked in their own personal combat.

“Guys?” squeaked Jose.

The two ignored him. “I understand you’re angry. I’ve made a social faux-paus.” Louis hesitated. “I’m . . . I haven’t always . . . social interactions were not my strongpoint when I was alive, either.”

Nedjma scoffed. “Oh really?” she said, dripping with venom and sarcasm. “Could’ve fooled me.”

″But this is not my fault,” Dr. Saltzman pressed on. “This is the fault of the enemy – whoever they are. I didn’t force a specter into Kenneth’s body.”

“But you killed him, and made this – this thing take over,” Nedjma threw back. “Somehow . . .”

“Guys?” said Jose.

“Somehow,” Dr. Saltzman agreed, not taking her eyes off Nedjma. “I never would have used necromancy if I’d known this would be the result. This anger . . . forgive me, but it’s misdirected. Save it. Use it.”

Nedjma clenched her fists, glaring at the floor. Then her expression sank.

“Save it. Use it,” she repeated under her breath. “But we still don’t even have a way down the mountain. It’s toxic. And the suits . . . forget what Jose said, they’re bogus.”

“Guys . . . ?” said Jose yet again.

“Well, there is a way necromancers can . . . well, let’s call it a last resort,” said Dr. Saltzman. “You keep mentioning suits. You mean High Council Protection Suits?”

“HCP Suits, yeah,” said Nedjma. “But they’re totally myths, right?”

Dr. Saltzman stroked her chin. “Well, I’ve never seen any on this mountain. But Demonwall Mountain is hardly a technological center. No, that would be –”

“Marannon Mountain,” Nedjma finished for her. “Yeah, that’s the tech and culture peak. Here, Demonwall, it’s the medical hub –”

“Who are these clarifications for? I’ve lived here for three times as long as you have,” Dr. Saltzman reminded her.

“I’m just thinking out loud,” Nedjma retorted. “But –”

“GUYS!” Jose bellowed.

Finally, the two turned. Dr. Saltzman gasped. Nedjma’s face drained.

The entire front of Jose’s shirt was drenched in blood.

“Oh my God –”

Nedjma rushed up to him, Dr. Saltzman on her tail.

“How did this happen?” the two burst out at once.

“Are you hurt?” Nedjma demanded.

“Where are you bleeding from?” Dr. Saltzman pressed.

“I’m not!” Jose said quickly, and the two visibly relaxed. Nedjma punched his arm.

″Ouch!” Jose yelped. “The blood – it’s not from me, it . . .”

Helplessly, he motioned to Anti-Kenneth.

Nedjma’s face flushed green again. Currently, Anti-Kenneth was halfway through devouring two fistfuls of raw meat.

He noticed them looking and lifted his blood-smeared face from his right first.

“Better fooooood,” he announced. “Once held a sooooouuul.”

He considered his left fist. A steady trickle of blood poured from between his fingers.

“But not gooood food,” he corrected.

“Oh. My. God,” Nedjma gagged.

“My sentiments exactly,” Dr. Saltzman agreed, wrinkling her nose.

“I couldn’t get him to stop,” said Jose, his voice a few octaves higher than usual. He cleared his throat. “But I was trying to tell you before!”

He grabbed Nedjma’s and Dr. Saltzman’s hands in either of his own. For the first time, both seemed to notice the overstuffed backpack he was wearing.

“I told my mom the truth,” he said, his eyes suddenly shining. “The whole truth. She’s wicked – she totally believed me, and well, she gave me an idea!”

“Really?” said Dr. Saltzman. “She believed – just like that?”

“You don’t know Dr. Alexander,” Nedjma told her. “That woman believes in all her patients’ symptoms, whether or not they make sense – that’s why she’s such a good doctor.”

“Listen,” pressed Jose. “Nedj, we’re super bad about sneaking into places, right?”

Dr. Saltzman looked lost. “I would say you’re fairly good.”

“Sorry – bad means good – it’s a slang thing,” said Jose. “But Dr. Saltzman, you’re a ghost – the best at sneaking!”

He looked between them one last time, and his big brown eyes grew, if possible, even bigger. The expression could have come from excitement . . . or terror.

“There’s a plane leaving from Faraday Castle tonight, headed straight for Marranon Mountain. If anywhere’s got HCP Suits, they do.

“So . . . how’d you guys feel about being stowaways?”

*Listen to the audio version on “Buddies Grim,” the podcast, available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and more!

#paranormal #fiction #sciencefiction #scifi #fantasy #podcast

Written by Luna B.

A “plane” is a contraption that carries things and people through the air, so in a way, the name still made sense. It was the old word for the big, usually white, bird-shaped contraptions that did just that, only those were a lot bigger and a lot faster than what they used now.

Their ride puttered through the sky towards the station and it looked more like one of those mutated mountain goats stuck in the fencing that surrounded the village. Their bloated stomachs bulge around the knot-tied rope because the goats were too dumb to untangle their horns themselves. They watched it land in the hatch in the station hangar just as they neared the front doors.

“Nedj, do I smell?” Jose asked, lifting his arm and holding out his shirt for Nedjma to judge for herself.

“Grody! I’m not going to put my nose in your armpit, Jose,” she said with a disgusted shiver, earning a teasing laugh from the boy.

“I just don’t want people to be able to tell we hiked all the way here,” he said, taking a handful of hand sanitizer from a pump on the wall and shoving it under his shirt. They watched the more well-dressed clientele of the airport walk by in their fancy shoes that clacked with each step. Many of them eyed the two obvious country bumpkins with backpacks packed to the point it looked like the seams would burst if they shoved one more thing inside.

Better to be over-prepared than under, Dr. Louis had nagged. I’ve never had to bring a living body down the mountain, so you can’t be too careful.

“Easy for her to say,” Nedjma grumbled to herself. “It’s already way hard lugging a huge backpack up a mountain, but it’s much worse dragging a big brother with a tiny baby brain along too.” She glanced at the taller man just behind her that still looked like her brother in every way, and a somber expression crossed her face. Then the somber look broke when he reached up to try and pull his sunglasses off yet again. Nedjma smacked his hands away.

“No!” she yelled in a whisper, feeling like she was babysitting the neighbor’s twins again. Anti-Kenneth groaned through the cotton in his mouth. “We’re going to a place that has loads of souuuuls, remember?” She mocked his droning tone, but when he slurred something though the cotton that sounded vaguely an echo of her ”souuuuls”, she took that as a yes and yanked him along.

“You ready, Nedj?” Jose asked as they neared the first turnstile.

“You better make this work,” she said, nearly letting her voice shake as she tried not to stare at the woman manning the kiosk. The woman looked hardly awake, probably from working this early in the morning, but to the two nerve-wracked teens who knew they stuck out like a sore thumb here, she was someone who could throw them in the Faraday dungeon before their adventure even started.

“I’m a master wizard in training, remember?” Jose replied, but he sounded just as nervous as she did. He pulled his library card from his pocket, mirroring all the businessmen and women in front of them with their boarding cards. A clang as the turnstile unlocked for the next person. And the next. Jose’s hands got clammy around the little plastic card. It was finally his turn. After all that effort to find a three-person group in the parking lot and get Chanel Stamp to steal their pass long enough to use a copy spell on it, it would be a total disaster to let it fail now. Keep the spell up for just a few more seconds, and they were basically home-free.

He held his card over the reader on the turnstile, letting his hand hover there while it read the code. One second. Two. Three. And a beep. And a clang. Jose almost dropped the card from his sweaty hands in relief, but that would have revealed that it wasn’t quite the right card to use. Jose stepped through before the woman could stop him, Nedjma following behind until the woman’s “ma’am? Sir?” stopped them dead in their tracks. Nedjma turned almost a little too fast. Jose threw a knowing look at Nedjma’s furious-looking face, one that he knew meant she was actually at the edge of her nerves.

The woman hesitated at the sight, but stumbled on. “Is he alright?” she asked, waving a hand to Anti-Kenneth. He began to reach for a sandwich she had sat behind her kiosk, and Nedjma yanked his hand back. He groaned something else incomprehensible through the cotton.

“Oh, no, he’s fine,” Nedjma answered not at all naturally. “He just had dental and eye surgery, so he’s very loopy right now.” Nedjma waved her finger around in a circle next to her head to illustrate, and Anti-Kenneth groaned once more, moving to take the sandwich again, but she held his arm in place. That seemed to convince the woman enough, or at least make her uncomfortable enough to just let them go, because she nodded and wished them safe passage, turning back to the rest of the people in line.

Dr. Louis phased her face out of a wall just up ahead, sticking a thumbs up alongside her exaggerated but still glowing smile. Nedjma’s face twitched as she mouthed some more curses at her, telling her to leave. Whether she could read them or not, the Dr. got the message and rolled her eyes, phasing back into the wall. The cold trail she left in the Kingdom of Verithiel let her know she was following along at nearly the same pace.

“Okay,” Jose whispered. “Three... two... one... gotta motor!” They all took off down the corridor as soon as they passed the corner, not willing to wait and see how long it took for the real boarding card holders to show up. They ran to the terminal, where passengers for their plane were already lining up to board. Nedjma was nearly barreling through the line, pulling along a wobbly Anti-Kenneth with Jose pushing him from behind.

Suddenly being in the nice, rosewood lined cabin with velvet seats was enough to make her freeze. It smelled like lavender perfume and fancy wine, and the sparkle of the glass chandelier totally distracted her from the loudly complaining passengers she pushed out of the way to get on.

“Are we safe now?” Dr. Louis whispered from behind the curtain that covered the stewards closet. Jose and Nedjma shoved their bags in the closet with her and Jose pointed to the hall for them to keep going.

“We still have one possible obstacle, and if we get caught,” he started, walking down the aisle stiffly, glancing every which way. “Don’t worry about the dungeons, we’ll be killed to death.” Dr. Louis followed down the hall, staying just inside the walls.

“Is it really that dangerous? We really should have talked about this before, included it in our plans-”

“What?” Nedjma almost laughed, clapping Jose on the back from behind him. “Do you know how many planes there are? We’d have to be toootally unlucky to be on the exact same one. Relax, we’re fine on that account at least. Now if you would stop that-!” Nedjma pulled Anti-Kenneth’s hands away from his sunglasses, having nearly pulled them from the tape keeping them on his hat.

“Nearly to the back balcony,” Jose whispered to himself and gave a nervous laugh. “Yeah, totally unlucky...” Jose jerked to a stop and did a 180* so fast he went dizzy for a second, but no one but other passengers were filing down the hall. Nedjma stopped to look at him weird.

“No sight of that horrible mustache yet,” Jose explained meekly, and then thrust his arms to his sides, falling to his knees.

“Jose, what-!” Nedjma tried to yell before she did the same thing, not managing to get the rest out through gritted teeth.

“Looking in all directions for incoming attacks means up as well, boy-o. I taught you better than that,” a voice bellowed from above before a portly man slid down the metal ladder next to them. The strong jaw made the handlebar mustache look unnecessary, instead making him look like an old timey boat man from those kids books. “And stop calling it horrible, you won’t convince me to shave it off no matter what you and your mother say.”

Jose slumped, utterly defeated.

“Yes sir, sir dad.”

*Listen to the audio version on “Buddies Grim,” the podcast, available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and more!

#paranormal #fiction #sciencefiction #scifi #fantasy #podcast

Written by Kacie Iuvara.

“That’s Captain dad, to you!”

Nedjma and Jose struggled against their invisible bindings, but it was no use – their arms and legs stayed pinned. Captain Alexander tutted as he watched them squirm.

“No need for alarm!” he announced to the airplane at large. “I’ve just rounded up a couple of stowaways.”

He arched a bushy eyebrow at Jose, as if he, Nedjma, and Anti-Kenneth were nothing but silly kids pulling a prank.

The other passengers didn’t seem moved. If they looked up from their magazines or turned off their Jogman cassette players, it was almost exclusively to roll their eyes.

“Take a chill pill, man!” called someone from the line of passengers still waiting to board. “Or not, whatever. Just let us on!”

“Certainly!” puffed Captain Alexander.

A flick of his wrist, and Jose, Nedjma, and Anti-Kenneth hovered a few inches into the air. Nedjma yelped, but Jose only scowled. Clearly, this wasn’t the first time his father had used magical means of punishment.

“We’ll be taking flight on schedule,” Captain Alexander boomed. “This will be a full flight, so middle seats must be filled. Oh, and remember, this is a drug-free zone, chill pills or otherwise.”

Giving a hearty laugh, Captain Alexander scaled the metal ladder connecting the passenger areas to the elevated flight deck. Jose, Nedjma, and Anti-Kenneth bobbed along after him.

“Captain,” the pilot greeted him. Her eyes raised to the three floating strangers, then widened. “Uh – what –”

“Stowaways,” said Captain Alexander, ruffling his mustache. “They’ll be off the plane in a moment, after I search and interrogate them.”

“Uh, sir – Captain, sir Captain,” interjected the copilot, who looked about as young as Kenneth and as small as Jose. “Isn’t that security’s job?”

Captain Alexander’s answering glare was so intense that the copilot turned right back around, mumbling apologies.

“Now,” said the Captain, facing his three captives, “why are you delinquents trying to leave Ferric Mountain.”

“Ugh, dad, we call it Demonwall now,” Jose groaned. “Get with the times.”

Ignoring the pilot and copilot, who had just exchanged a wide-eyed glance and mouthed, Dad? at each other, Captain Alexander crossed his arms.

“You didn’t answer my question, boy. And I see you’ve dragged your friends into trouble. ”

He turned to Nedjma and Anti-Kenneth. The spectre was still gagged and blindfolded, but he didn’t seem particularly upset about it. He sniffed the air, groaning, Ssssllllllssss.

“Kenneth Sanders, it’s been a while,” said Captain Alexander, smiling as if he hadn’t just magically kidnapped them. “I would’ve thought you would be opposed to such a mental scheme. What’s wrong with you, anyhow?”

“Double surgery,” Nedjma interjected. “Teeth, eyes, real horror show.”

“Ah.” Captain Alexander’s voice turned dry, but another smile spread underneath his mustache. “And Nedjma, you’re as spirited as ever. Feels like it was only yesterday I saw you last, graduating Middle School with that big purple bow in your hair.”

Nedjma scowled. “Yeah, well, that was five years ago.”

“And this is now,” the Captain agreed. “So tell me – why are you trespassing on my plane?”

“We’re not!” Jose insisted. “We – we got tickets and everything!”

Captain Alexander chuckled. “You’ve always been a bad liar, boy.”

He raised his arms and a pulse of magic swept through the flight deck like a cool breeze. Jose and Nedjma’s backpacks zipped into sight, hovering right into his grasp. For a moment, Captain Alexander’s eyes drifted off, as if he’d slipped into a daydream.

His shoulders tightened.

“Dad, you can’t just search our bags!” Jose exclaimed. “That’s super invasive!”

“You brought my book,” Captain Sanders said, in a different voice than before. He sounded confused, even a little unconfident. He tossed the backpacks to the floor. “You brought Basic Spells for Basic Wizards.”

All the blood drained from Jose’s face. Nedjma stared at him. Anti-Kenneth started sniffing the air again.

“Y-yeah, just – just in case,” Jose stammered. Sweat beaded on his brow. “It’s not like I c-could actually – you know, actually use it. Because I’m not . . . not a wizard . . . or anything . . .”

“You’ve always been a bad liar, boy,” Captain Alexander said again, quietly now.

He waved his hand, and Jose’s invisible restraints fell away.

“Uh, what about me and Kenneth?” Nedjma complained.

“Captain, are we still on schedule,” asked the pilot carefully.

Captain Alexander ignored both of them.

“So, boy . . . you chose your mother, and a life of mediocrity and trash. And for five years, I thought, Well, I can’t blame the poor boy. He’s got no skills to survive the outside world. And now I find out . . . you’ve been hiding your powers from me?”

“What?” yelped Jose, shifting forwards and backwards. Now that he was free, he didn’t seem to know what to do with himself. “N-no, that’s bogus!”

“How long, Jose? How long have you known?”

“I – look, let’s say I am a wizard,” said Jose, who looked paler and sweatier than ever. “And I, er – do want to live an adventurous life. You wouldn’t stop me from . . .” He swallowed hard. “From following in your footsteps, would you?”

Captain Alexander stroked his mustache, staring at his son.

“My son, a wizard,” he said, as though savoring the idea. Then his expression soured. “But you’re no adventurer, boy. Which means you’re lying, and you’re going back to your no-good hick mother.”

“DON’T TALK ABOUT HER LIKE THAT!”

Jose and his father stared at each other for the space of a heartbeat, Jose still breathing hard in rage. Then –

″Summon!”

An object burst out of his backpack and into Jose’s hand – Basic Spells for Basic Wizards. He flipped it open and yelled, ”Soulbare!”

Anti-Kenneth perked up in excitement.

The spell exploded out of him in all directions, a totally unfocused spray of magical energy. The force of it rushed over Captain Alexander, Nedjma, Anti-Kenneth, and even the pilot and copilot.

Suddenly, a sound built in the air. It was as if someone’s Jogman cassette player had magnified in volume, and was growing still . . .

The pilot and copilot exchanged a bewildered look.

“So that’s how you wanna play it, little boy,” said Captain Alexander – only he didn’t say it. He sang it.

″Think you’ll beat me, when magic is my game.

Practiced mage, versus you. We’re not the same.

Yeah, I left you, but what’s a man to do?

Now you’ve messed up, you’ve cursed your own self too.”

″That may be true,” sang Jose, who looked terrified. ”No! I am not like you. I’ve got tricks up my sleeve!”

″No more, talk, boy, I’m sending you away!”

Captain Alexander shot a spell at Jose, who yelped and dodged. Meanwhile, Dr. Saltsman appeared beside Nedjma.

“What’s happening?” she hissed. “Why is everything in song?”

Unhappily, Nedjma turned towards her and sang:

″Jose’s soulbare spell, it makes you share your heart. Specifically makes you share the music in your heart.”

“Oh, I see, because emotions create unsatisfactory magic. They distract your focus and your energy – oh my, that is genius!”

″Well . . . also kinda risky, emotions make magic stronger,” Nedjma pointed out. ”I hope they don’t go too much longer.”

Then she frowned, probably because of the singing.

At once, the two of them looked back towards the dueling pair, Jose and Captain Alexander.

″Enough games, boy! You never answered me!” sang the Captain, firing off a spell – but like the others, it didn’t land. ”I don’t want you, you chose your mom, not me! Curse this spell – why can’t I catch you?”

″What did you say before?” sang Jose, smiling slightly. ”A practiced mage, I’m sure. Bad dad, bad enemy!”

″UNCONSCIOUS! LIGHTS OUT!” bellowed Captain Alexander.

“Problem!” yelped Dr. Saltsman, throwing herself in front of Jose, Nedjma.

Much like Jose’s soulbare spell had done a minute earlier, the spell exploded from Captain Alexander, dousing the flight deck in magical power. When it subsided, the Captain, pilot, copilot, and Anti-Kenneth were all fast asleep.

“Saved you,” said Dr. Saltsman. “These spells don’t affect ghosts.”

For a moment, there was silence. Then another track picked up, this one slower, more melancholy. Jose riffed once, seemingly unable to help it.

″I haate my daaaad. You really suck as a daaaad. I hate my daaaad. Stupid jerkface daaaad.”

Nedjma touched his shoulder.

″Jose, I know this is really hard for you, but I have something I need to say to you. The plane took off.”

“Oh no . . .”

“Yeah.”

A look of dawning comprehension washed over Jose’s face. The plane had indeed taken off. The pilot and copilot’s sleeping faces had slammed right into the controls, launching the aircraft into the air.

″FINALLY!” sang someone from the passenger section.

″We can land it if we try, or maybe let it fly – agh, I don’t know!” sang Nedjma in a panic. Dr. Saltsman ghosted to the controls and shoved the pilots unceremoniously onto the floor.

“I’m a dreadful singer,” she said, as she inspected the controls. “But I’ll try to put this in a way that fits the mood.”

So, naturally, she rapped:

″So the plane is in the sky

But I think it’s worth a try

To navigate, to fly

There’s a good chance you won’t die.

Time is of the essence

In our spectre-slaying quest

And out of all our options

This one is the best.

With my ghostly magic powers

I’ll manipulate the dashboard

Nedjma on steering, Jose maps,

Drive us forward!”

She cleared her throat. “Ahem. Did you get all that?”

″I’ll watch windows and these maps to keep the airship on its course. Nedjma steering, Saltsman powering, and we’ll move like a force!” Jose rapped back, setting aside Basic Spells.

″Jose, you were amazing, and I didn’t even mention,” Nedjma rapped. ”Your spellwork – well, that deserves attention.”

“And the spell you chose, what a clever choice!” said Dr. Saltsman. Then she frowned. “Oh, rats. I forgot to rap.”

She ghosted into halfway into the dashboard, before looking back at them. “I’ll be listening for any disturbances. Shout if you need me. Or, well – sing, I suppose.”

She disappeared into the dashboard, and immediately the dials whirred to life. Jose jumped to face the map. Nedjma reached for the wheel, but hesitated.

“I’m . . . scared, Jose,” she sang. “Can we do this?”

A new song was building in the atmosphere, which meant Jose’s spell still hadn’t worn off. This one was upbeat. Even . . . hopeful.

Jose sang back: ”I don’t know how to fly a plane, but I think that we can. What do you say?”

Nedjma stared at him. Did he look different? Then she grinned and took the wheel . . . and sang.

″I don’t know how to fly a plane, but when we’re together, I know we can.”

They sang these lines again, then sang together, harmonizing in the way only childhood best friends could do without rehearsal.

″I don’t know how to fly a plane, but I think that we can! What do you say?”

″I don’t know how to fly a place, but when we’re together, I know we can!”

″Jose, are you feeling okay?” Nedjma asked musically. ”You can tell me anything.”

″I’m fine, I swear,” Jose returned in song, not meeting her eyes. ”I don’t wanna talk about it. Besides, right now, we’ve got things to do.”

“Why is there so much singing up there?” Dr. Saltsman’s voice issued from the dashboard.

Nedjma ignored her.

″Jose, I need you to know, you are my little brother. My family.

Jose, you are not alone. You’ve always got a sister. Yeah, you’ve got me.”

Jose, come here and take my hand. You are my closest friend, it’s you and me.

Jose, leave the past behind you. Let the future find you –”

“Guys! Focus!” yelled Lulu.

″If we think we can, that’s how we do! Just you and me!

You are meant to be – to be with me. My family!”

With one final refrain, the song started fading.

Jose’s gaze drifted away from the maps, towards the unconscious Captain Alexander. Nedjma took his hand and sang quietly, ”I know we can.”

Dr. Saltsman’s voice rattled through the dashboard. “Well, that was just adorable. And (with a lot of my help), we are truly flying the plane.”

“Whoa,” said Nedjma, wide-eyed. “This has gotta be the craziest day of my life.”

Then she laughed a relieved laugh, because she’d spoken the words rather un-musically in her usual grumbly voice.

“I’m glad that’s over,” said Jose. He looked out the window, watching the clouds as the last traces of magic and background music faded away.

Nedjma lifted one hand from the steering wheel and touched Jose’s shoulder.

“You sure you don’t wanna talk about it?”

Jose didn’t answer for a second, still watching white condensation swirl outside the airplane.

Then he cleared his throat and put on a smile. “Nah. Like we said in the song, we’re leaving him behind.”

Nedjma looked doubtful, but she let it go. A few minutes passed in silence – excluding the shouted questions of a few concerned passengers, like, “Why did I just harmonize with the AC?” and “Hey! Why did my fiancée and I just rap battle about getting the window seat?”

With each question, Nedjma and Jose glanced at each other, smiling carefully. They seemed to be speaking with their eyes: Hey, I know that was weird and vulnerable. But we’re good, right?

“I’m gonna loot him,” Jose announced suddenly. He stepped away from the navigation and faced his unconscious father.

Dr. Saltsman’s silvery head popped into sight. “Excuse me, did someone just threaten ‘loot’ a person?”

“I like it,” said Nedjma. “Daddy narbo deserves a good looting.”

“I . . .” Dr. Saltsman sighed. “I am inclined to agree, though thievery goes against my better nature.”

Nedjma snorted. “Then why’d you choose two medicine thieves to help you save the world?”

“Limited options,” said Dr. Saltsman, rolling her eyes. But she couldn’t hide a faint smile as she sank away. Also half-smiling, Nedjma turned back to the steering wheel. She waved her hand over her shoulder and Chanel Stamp appeared, squeaking indignantly as if to say, About time!

Meanwhile, Jose kneeled down and riffled through his father’s pockets. He withdrew nothing but a set of keys, packs of gum and cigarettes, and one suspicious-looking napkin.

That was, until he reached the last pocket.

“What the . . . ?”

It was a secret little pocket, hidden inside of Captain Alexander’s aviator jacket. The fabric didn’t match the coat’s interior, as if someone had added the pocket later on.

Reaching inside it, Jose’s fingers closed over something soft and velvety. He withdrew the tiny drawstring pouch and opened it.

“Gold?” He blinked, as the realization settled in. “GOLD!”

Nedjma barely had time to say, “Huh?” before Jose zoomed to her side. “Look, look!”

He pulled open the pouch and revealed two hunks of glittering stone.

“Whoa,” said Nedjma, her eyes popping open. “D’you think it’s real gold?”

“No idea . . .”

Jose stared at Captain Alexander one last time, holding onto the sight of his absent father as if he would never see him again. Perhaps, that was exactly what he’d just decided.

“I don’t wanna be like you,” he said. “I wanna be a community wizard. Solve problems. Keep families together. Not tear them apart.”

He cleared his throat, itching the corner of his eye, then looked at Nedjma and held up the pouch.

“I’m keeping it,” he said, slipping it into his discarded backpack. “And, um . . . I’m changing my name.”

Nedjma’s eyebrows shot up.

“Last name,” Jose corrected quickly. “Mom can keep his, if she wants, but I’m gonna use hers. Shane. Jose Shane.”

“That sounds . . .” Nedjma thought a second, then smiled. “Amazing.”

She took Jose’s hand, pulled him close, and did something very unexpected. Perhaps it was the lingering effects of the soulbare spell, or perhaps she was just feeling more affectionate than usual, but she wrapped Jose in a firm hug. Chanel scampered down her arm and curled up on his shoulder.

A little startled, Jose took a second to hug back. When he did, he melted into Nedjma. Little sniffles and shaky breaths quivered through him.

Expectedly, since no one was steering, the airplane dipped sideways.

“GUYS!” Right as several passengers below screamed (very non-musically now), Dr. Saltsman’s upper half leapt out of the dashboard. Her glowing blue eyes swept over Nedjma and Jose, then lifted towards the heavens. ”Teenagers.”

She ignored the fact that she had herself had died as a young woman, and didn’t appear (physically, at least) much older than the two hugging teens. She snatched Nedjma’s hand and dragged it back to the steering wheel.

“Do I need to do everything?” she tutted, sinking out of sight yet again.

Quietly, Jose took his place by the maps again, rubbing a fist under each eye. Nedjma chivalrously looked out the window to pretend she didn’t see.

A minute passed in silence, broken only by Chanel Stamp, now pitter-pattering across the dashboard. The lack of noise was especially jarring after the last fifteen minutes.

“So like, if this college thing doesn’t work out, at least we’ve got singing careers,” said Jose.

Nedjma snorted. ”You can sing, I’ll write the lyrics.”

“As if!” Jose cracked a smile. “Then they’d all be goth, like, ’uuhhh, no one understands me, oooooh sadneeeeess–”

“Better than ‘I don’t know how to fly a plane’,” Nedjma countered. Without the spell, her singing voice sounded flat and unsteady, but she and Jose grinned anyway.

“And did you hear Saltsman?” Jose laughed. “She’s a wicked rapper!”

“Totally bad,” Nedjma agreed, shaking her head in awe.

A pause fell between them. Chanel Stamp squeaked once, nibbling on a button.

“Also . . . uh, I meant what I said,” Nedjma blurted out. Chanel’s button must have become suddenly fascinating, because she stared at it instead of meeting Jose’s eyes. “I know the soulbare spell makes you tell the truth, and uh, pour out your heart or whatever. But I wanted you to know – you know, spell-free. Um. Yeah. So . . . yeah.”

She took one hand from the steering wheel to scratch the back of her neck. Jose caught it in his grasp, squeezing once.

“Thanks, Nedj. Love you.”

“L . . . love you too, Jose.”

Still hand in hand, they let their voices drift away. Their eyes drifted too, straying back to the cloudy scenery.

An hour later, a stunning sight broke through the cloudy scenery: an enormous, unfamiliar mountaintop.

SONG LINKS: https://soundcloud.com/kacie-iuvara

*Listen to the audio version on “Buddies Grim,” the podcast, available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and more!

#paranormal #fiction #sciencefiction #scifi #fantasy #podcast

Written by Luna B.

It’s pretty hard to find a hangar to land in when you’re searching a place you’ve never been to in your life, even harder when you don’t even know what a hangar looks like from above. And super hard when the pilots you knocked out start to wake up.

When the first groan came from one of the pilots - thankfully not Captain Alexander - Nedjma and Jose were pulled from their emotional and supportive mood and shoved back into stressful hysteria.

“Oh nards,” Jose whined, turning to watch the copilot start to stumble to her feet, holding her head. “What do we do?”

“Well we have two options now,” Nedjma started, sounding sure of herself. “We stay and hope the pilots are cool. They help us land, tie your dad up, and we get to leave as soon as we land.”

“As if,” Jose said, then adding, “but I wish. Option two?”

“You knock ’em out with your magic and keep searching for the hangar?” Nedjma said, but this time without a shred of the confidence from before, a weak smile and a glance at him to top it off.

Jose gave a guilty look. “That’s one spell I haven’t been able to get even a little bit right. The most that happened was mom admitted to sleeping well that night.”

Nedjma pulled her lips into a very tight frown and looked at the copilot, who was now on her feet and looking at them through what looked like the worst headache ever, and it seemed to be disappearing at a very inconvenient rate. She looked back out the window and considered the tallest castle spires that pierced the empty stratosphere.

“Then we’ll have to go with option B.” Nedjma yanked the controls up towards the castle itself, sending both the copilot and an oblivious Anti-Kenneth stumbling back into the rear wall, a surprised wail coming from the passenger end of the plane’s carriage.

“You’ve spilled my champagne on my suit!” whined one passenger the clearest. “I’ll have your job for this!”

Even Jose had to step back to keep balance.

“Whoa! Where are we going now?! And I thought we were going with numbers? And wouldn’t it be option C, anyway?”

“Whatever! I’m under a lot of pressure here!” Nedjma complained.

“And I’m not?!”

“Focus, please!” Dr. Saltzman’s voice commanded from the dashboard.

“We gotta get as close as we can before we get... gotten, then the pilots can have the plane and your dad back. And us...” Nejma gulped, and Jose cocked his head with a worried and suspicious stare.

“Anti-gravity spells are definitely not in my, uh, repi-tower.”

Nedjma rolled her eyes.“Repitoire. And not everything requires magic, you know.” Her gaze shifted from Jose to the little shimmer o f a rat on his shoulder and nodded towards the copilot trying her best to walk up the incline to them. “Can you buy us some time with her?”

Chanel Stamp gave a high-pitched squeak and a raised paw that could possibly have been an attempt at saluting and scampered down Jose. The two were watching the gleaming metal castle creep closer while the sounds of squeaking and panicked, more human shrieking came from behind them.

“Sorry!” Jose couldn’t help but yell to her.

When the castle was close enough to see the freeform-shaped windows in the new-tech castle walls, Nedjma decided that was a good time to let go of Jose’s hand and shove it onto the controls.

“Just keep it steady! I’ll be back!”

“Wha- I can’t - Hey!” Jose blustered even after Nedjma had already disappeared into the carriage hallway.

“Where is that girl going?” Louis said from the dash, her face popping out for a moment.

“Wherever it is, she better make it fast, ” Jose said, the groans of the main pilot waking up somehow audible through the copilot’s shrieks getting increasingly frantic.

“I have good news and bad news,” Nejma yelled as she reappeared in the cockpit, picking up their bags in one hand and shifting the parachutes she brought to the other.

“Good news would be nice,” Jose said, looking too stiff from nerves to turn and look.

“Then you can give up the controls. Chanel, if you please,” she said, and the mouse disappeared immediately, reappearing as she climbed up Nedjma’s pants leg. The copilot, now realizing the horrifying spector no longer plagued her, threw a new angry look at Nedjma. Nedjma threw a look back at her, though it was more of a questioning one, as if to say, ‘is revenge on me really the important thing to do right now?’ She glanced to the now unoccupied control station, and the copilot paused to sneer before rushing to take the wheel.

“Time to go!” Nedjma yelled, and Jose ran to meet her, Dr. Saltzman flying from the dashboard to do the same. The ship lurched for a moment without her to power it, but the controls sputtered back to life as the main system took over itself again soon enough.

“You too, big bro!” Nedjma dragged Anti-Kenneth to his feet and ran down the hall, followed by Dr. Louis’ ghostly form.

Jose stopped for a second beside his dad on the floor, a nasty lump beginning to form on his brow where he had fallen.

“I’m officially uninviting you to the holiday gatherings. Especially Founders Day.” Jose gave a big and angry raspberry that was cut short by Captain Alexander’s first stirrings of consciousness, startling him into running down the hall after Nedjma and the others.

“I don’t really want to ask, but what’s the bad news?” he asked, catching up about halfway down the carriage hall.

“Bad news is,” she started, opening the door to the balcony and causing the chandelier in the hall to chime as it swayed in the harsh wind. “Anti-Kenneth can’t go on his own! You’ll have to take him!” She shouted over the wind, dropping the bags to put her parachute on, wearing her backpack on her front.

Jose reeled, offended.

“Wha- why do I have to?! Are you calling me small?!”

“Well, you have to admit that your body mass is less than-” the doctor started explaining, her ghostly voice somehow perfectly clear through the noise.

“Thank you, I am aware!” Jose pouted before snatching the parachute from the floor and throwing it on unhappily. He pulled Anti-Kenneth away from the open door, who had been leaning half out the door to bite at the wind as it pushed his cheeks around his face. Jose shoved his own bag at Anti-Kenneth and gave him a stern look.

“You get to carry my bag then. You lose my stuff and I’ll... I don’t know what I’ll do but it’ll be really annoying and inconvenient for a long time!” Anti-Kenneth gave him an empty stare and Jose sighed, helping the child-man into a harness.

Nedjma was already out on the balcony, looking below at the castle grounds and gripping the railing so hard her knuckles turned white.

“We got this, Nedj,” Jose yelled, the crack in his voice betraying his own fear. He clipped a cord from Anti-Kenneth’s harness to his and pulled it taut. “That’s probably good,” he mumbled, quiet enough not to be heard.

“Jose, this is crazy, maybe we can wait until we land-”

Jose set a hand on her shoulder.

“I promise. We got this.” His voice was as set as his smile and Nedjma started to return it despite her worry.

Until the plane started to steer away from the castle, no doubt because the pilots regained control.

“I’ll get him over, you two just go!” Dr. Louis appeared behind Anti-Kenneth, who had turned to continue biting at the wind. Thanks to that, at least, his sunglasses stayed taped to his hat, pressed to his face by force. The doctor held him up and dangled him about a foot off the balcony, much to Nedjma’s surprise. “Honestly, the time you both spend dawdling! We could be at the base of the mountain by now!”

With the two looking like the direction shift had been more motivation than the nagging, they gave each other a meaningful look before climbing over the railing together. A moment of hesitation while clinging to the other side was swiftly dismissed at the sight of Anti-Kenneth basically tossed over the railing after them.

Nedjma and Jose screamed as they fell through the open air. Anti-Kenneth, dragged along by the short cord connecting him to Jose, seemed to start screaming just because they were.

“We have to spread out!” Nedjma screamed over the deafening sound of wind that was much louder than before, the roar of the plane propellers quickly disappearing behind them. Nedjma tried to flip over to face the ground using various swimming motions and managed it with some difficulty, while Jose tried his best to pull Anti-Kenneth closer by the cord so he could too.

“Ready to pull?! This has to be the one!” Jose said, pointing to the only bright orange handle on his harness. Nedjma nodded and yanked hers. She was pulled back away from Jose with a grunt just before he did the same.

Both of them veered away from each other before they got ahold of the handles on each side of the Twunkie yellow parachutes, but despite their best efforts, neither of them really knew how to steer one.

The castle loomed ever nearer, but they seemed to be heading right past it to the other side of the city below.

“Jose, do something!” the still crystal clear clarity of Dr. Saltzman’s voice rang. She looked worried as she was pulled along by her grip on Anti-Kenneth, though it’s not likely it was for her own safety. Jose wracked his brain in a panic for the simplest, quickest spell he could think of.

“Gust!” he shouted louder than he ever had, which was an accomplishment for the all-time champion of shout-chicken. Jose was never too embarrassed to yell weird things in public if it was to beat Nedjma at a game.

“Why are you summoning more wind!” Louis yelled, exasperated, but it turned out to be just what they needed. The extra burst of wind pushed them just over the edge of the castle wall and into the gardens for a painful landing in the fake trees.

They were scratched up and bruised, but safe. But neither of them could be sure of the other, because as far as they could see, they were stuck in the trees alone.

Or, at least, Nedjma was.

*Listen to the audio version on “Buddies Grim,” the podcast, available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and more!

#paranormal #fiction #sciencefiction #scifi #fantasy #podcast

Written by Kacie Iuvara.

Nedjma celebrated her safe landing with a few colorful exclamations.

Once she’d gotten the cursing out of her system, she inspected herself: She was tangled in her parachute, and her parachute was tangled in the branches of a clearly-synthetic tree. Jose, Dr. Saltzman, and Anti-Kenneth were nowhere in sight.

“Great,” Nedjma growled. Her voice sounded hoarse, most likely from the amount of shouting, singing, and swearing she’d done in the last hour.

She scanned the area, but no one was rushing to greet or arrest her. She seemed to have landed in a huge castle courtyard, decked out with rigid artificial greenery and dozens of wires and security cameras. The moon hung overhead, its light bouncing off the plastic leaves to create a stark, almost fluorescent glow. Red, blinking little lights surrounded her like a thousand spectre eyes.

Nedjma squinted through the darkness as the closest red light, which – fittingly – issued from the top of the closest security camera. It swept left to right, but didn’t seem to capture her in its field of view. For once, Nedjma might have gotten lucky.

She sighed, yawned, then began wriggling in her parachute cocoon.

″Jose!” she hissed. ”Dr. Saltsman! JOSE!”

*****

Jose couldn’t hear her. He was too busy making an absolute ruckus in another fake tree at the opposite end of the courtyard. He wiggled and thrashed his legs – which, at the moment, were tied together by parachute cord and suspending him upside down.

“This – is – so – laaaaame!” he complained in a whisper.

“Laaaaame,” Anti-Kenneth agreed. His hat and mouth gauze had flown away in the fall, though his sunglasses miraculously survived, sitting crooked on his face. “No sooouuullls . . .”

“That’s enough outta you,” said Jose, shoving the spectre’s hungry face away. Unfortunately, Anti-Kenneth hung upside down next to Jose, so that the two resembled a poorly-made Newton’s cradle. A second later, gravity brought Anti-Kenneth swinging into Jose’s side.

″Oomph!”

“This is ridiculous,” said Dr. Saltzman, as Jose and Anti-Kenneth bounced into each other like a pair of dueling yoyos.

“I mean, you could always help,” Jose pointed out.

Dr. Saltzman opened her mouth, then snapped it shut. Her body tensed . . . and she vanished in a puff of silver mist.

″There they are!” came a voice from below.

“I got it, Niha,” said a second speaker. ”Summon!”

The characteristic trill of wizard-magic hit the air, and before Jose could so much as shout, “Dag!” he and Anti-Kenneth zoomed out of the tree (and their parachute bindings) and landed in a crumpled heap.

Jose peeled his gaze up from the artificial grass. He took in two pairs of feet, two bodies, and finally two faces, both wearing matching irritated expressions.

″More trespassers, hm?” said the left one. A badge gleamed on her chest, bearing the phrase Night Guard and the name Najiba . . .

Jose blushed red. Clearly the last name – which carried a heavy innuendo – wasn’t one he felt particularly comfortable with.

“So predictable, these kids,” said the person on the right. Her title was the same, and her name, not much better: Niha Sackville-Bagg.

“Uuuhhh,” was Jose’s only response. He still seemed preoccupied with the night guards’ bizarre last names.

“Uuuhhh,” Anti-Kenneth echoed him. He straightened his sunglasses, then ripped up a fistful of fake grass and shoved it in his mouth.

Niha and Najiba exchanged a look.

“Drugs,” they decided in unison.

Without further ado, they hoisted Jose and Anti-Kenneth to their feet. Niha thumped Anti-Kenneth on the back a few times (he’d started choking on the grass), before she and Najiba slapped pairs of handcuffs onto the two young men.

“Wait, wait – we’re not on drugs!” Jose protested, finally dragging his focus back to the situation.

“Exactly what someone on drugs would say,” Najiba said keenly.

“Druuuuugs,” Anti-Kenneth groaned, rather unhelpfully.

“A confession,” said Niha. “As we suspected.”

Jose looked between the three of them in a panic. ”No, that’s not – he’s not – uuugh!”

“Come on, kid, take it easy,” Najiba said, patting his shoulder. “We’ve got a nice, comfy place for you to sober up . . .”

″. . . before you tell us where you kids are getting this stuff from,” Niha finished. “And why you all think it’s funny to try and vandalize High Council property.”

“We don’t!” Jose squeaked.

“Jeez, kid, were you huffing helium?” said Niha.

“No!” Jose insisted. Then he cleared his throat and said in a noticeably deeper voice: “How – how could we be those vandal kids, anyway? We’ve got parachutes!”

Niha and Najiba exchanged another dark look, like, Well, this one’s a total burnout.

“Uh-huh, parachutes,” said Najiba, with obvious skepticism. Neither she nor Niha bothered to look up at the synthetic tree, still knotted and mangled with multicolored parachute bits.

The two dragged Jose and Anti-Kenneth away from the scene, Jose still shouting, “No, wait! Just look! Parachutes! Skydiving!”

*****

His shouts were so loud, in fact, that they carried across the courtyard.

“Jose?”

Nedjma looked up, but she couldn’t see anything through the darkness besides bleached reflections off the leaves.

″Dag – freaking frick –”

She got a few more choice words off her chest, before slumping in the parachute.

“Well, don’t give up now!” insisted a nasally voice.

“OHMYGOSHWHAT – oh,” Nedjma sighed, as Dr. Saltsman’s face materialized between the branches.

“Quieter, please,” Dr. Saltzman advised. “Looks like you were lucky. This place is crawling with cameras, but you seem to have fallen just out of sight.”

“Lucky,” Nedjma grunted. “Yep. Feeling fantabulous.”

“Good,” said Dr. Saltzman, who hadn’t noticed the sarcasm, “because Jose and Anti-Kenneth are currently being detained.”

″What?”

“Yes, yes, it’s not ideal. Fortunately, the palace guards let slip some information.” Lulu’s ethereal blue eyes gleamed, the only color visible in the darkness. “For one, Jose and Anti-Kenneth will be safe. The guards seem to be laboring under the delusion that the two are – for lack of a better term – totally blitzed, which means they won’t be questioned or bothered until the morning.”

Nedjma yawned again. “Maybe they’re the lucky ones, then.”

Louis considered this. “Perhaps. Anyway, I’ll watch over them just in case. Secondly, they confirmed that this castle is High Council property, just like Tunstead’s ruling castle! It’s the perfect place to store HCP suits! And, as you’re not being detained, you’re free to seek out the suits’ locations – at least, if they’re real.”

“They’d better be real,” said Nedjma darkly. “Otherwise I skydove, performed in a musical number, and talked to Captain Alexander for nothing.”

She thought a second, then added, “And there’s a flaw in your plan.”

“Oh?” said Dr. Saltzman.

Nedjma fidgeted in her parachute trap. “I’m stuck.”

Dr. Saltzman actually slapped a hand to her forehead. “Are you a necromancer, or aren’t you?”

Nedjma scowled. “Wish I wasn’t. Also, if I leave my body here, they’ll totally find it!”

“Not until the sun comes out,” Dr. Saltzman countered. “Under the cover of darkness, the night guards haven’t noticed a thing. And ideally we’ll have all the information we need by morning.”

For a long minute, Nedjma mulled this over, until she finally relented. “Fine. Whatever. But if I end up in another morgue, I’m blaming you!”

Dr. Saltzman smiled. “I trust you. You’ll do wonderfully.”

Nedjma couldn’t hide a small, grudging smile. “Thanks.”

“Of course. Now, I should bug out. If you need me, just wail.”

Nedjma blinked. “Just do what now?”

“Oh, come on.” Dr. Saltzman stared at her, as if trying to spot the joke on her face. ”Really? That was one of the first necromantic tricks I learned! Oh, Nedjma, you’ve been missing out –”

“Okay, okay, I know, I’m uneducated,” Nedjma grumbled.

Dr. Saltzman smiled understandingly. “Well, if you’d like to learn this trick, simply think of me, or any necromancer you know – so, again, probably just me. Search for the sense of me in the Kingdom of Verithiel, try to recognize me. Then speak to me.”

“Uh, but what’s supposed to –”

“You’ll see,” Louis interrupted, another ghostly twinkle in her eye.

Then she was gone.

Nedjma’s spirit dropped out of her body, muttering crossly, ”You’ll see, ooh, my name’s Lulu, I’m so mysterious, oooooh . . .”

She looked up at her corpse, now dangling limply in the tree. A white, misty sheen had fallen over the world, the typical Verithiel glow. Helpfully, it illuminated the dark parts of the scenery, like x-rays or those new infrared devices.

“Okay, stealth,” she said to herself.

Chanel Stamp appeared on her glowing shoulder and squeaked a greeting. Nedjma scratched between the rat’s ears, then took off across the grass.

The courtyard led to the castle – an enormous skyscraper even shinier and silverier than Tunstead’s best buildings. More security cameras winked at her from the walls.

She jogged until she reached a door, which was chrome-colored and fitted with a high-tech lock.

“Shoot,” she muttered. This door was much thicker than any wall she’d ever passed through. “What if . . .”

She hesitated, then pressed her fingers against the lock. A few moments of pushing and aggressive concentrating, and her fingers slipped through the metal, much like Dr. Lulu’s whole body had done to the plane’s dashboard. A sharp pull, and the lock’s lights dimmed.

“Nice,” Nedjma muttered, though she looked a little freaked out by her own power. She swung the door open the tiniest sliver and slid inside.

Two long hallways greeted her. Wires lined the ceiling, and electrical boxes dotted the walls.

Nedjma looked left. She looked right. She took a deep breath. Then she looked at Chanel.

“Here we go.”

The differences between Ferric Mountain (or Demonwall, as the kids called it) and Marranon Mountain began with their specialties. Ferric boasted the Allied Peaks’ finest medical care, while Marranon flaunted the Peaks’ most innovative technology. True, as a neighboring mountain, Ferric’s capital city, Tunstead, did receive high-end medical tech from Marranon’s laboratories. However, there was something intrinsic about growing up on Marranon, a sort of inherent knowledge of the latest, best machines.

If Nedjma had grown up on Marranon, she might have understood the castle’s circuit-board layout. She might have understood the technical requirements of an HCP suit, if such a thing did exist, and been able to guess where such a secretive, tech-heavy project might be stored. She even could have figured out what, exactly, the HCP suits protected travelers from in the miasma, and reverse engineered her own product.

But Nedjma had not grown up on Marannon Mountain, which meant the only thing she accomplished was getting very, very lost.

“This is hopeless, Chanel,” she burst out, dropping to her ghostly knees. Three hours in, and all she’d found were hallways, hallways, and more hallways. Where were the rooms? The storage closets? The bathrooms?

Chanel didn’t squeak; she just sniffed unhappily, like, Yeah. Hopeless. Give up?

“We can’t,” said Nedjma miserably. “Jose needs us. And Lulu – er, Dr. Saltzman – and Kenneth. And all of Demonwall.”

She ran her hands through the glowy, undead version of her choppy black hair, but the action didn’t calm her stress like it did in the corporeal world. Then she sighed deeply, and closed her eyes.

“Lulu? Lulu?”

She opened them, but nothing had changed.

“Ugh,” she said. “Wail. Okay.”

She hesitated, then made a weak crying noise: “AaaaAAAaaahhhh . . .”

Chanel squeaked at that one, like, Dude, you sound pathetic.

“Fine, fine.” Still on her knees, Nedjma centered herself. “Search for Saltzman . . . search for Saltzman . . .”

She closed her eyes again, slipping into a calmer state. After a few minutes, a shiver ran through her shoulders. Her eyes snapped open – and her pupils glowed Lulu’s ethereal blue.

″Lulu?”

She spoke again, but her voice sounded magnified and warped, like bats squeaking in a tunnel.

″You did it!”

A second screechy voice flickered through the Kingdom of Verithiel. It was almost unrecognizable, until it added, ”And you called me Lulu again? Are we on that level?”

″Uh, sure, I guess,” said Nedjma, momentarily distracted. ”What is this? Is this the wail thing?”

″Yes, it’s a method of communication between necromancers. Perhaps the easiest and most convenient necromantic power,” said Lulu’s voice. Then her tone transformed – from delighted to gravely serious in a matter of seconds. ”Tell me you found what we need.”

″I can’t find anything! I can’t even find a room!” Nedjma confessed, and her own words seemed to weigh on her – her shoulders drooped.

″Well, take an elevator!” Lulu said, sounding torn between exasperation and something less easily identifiable. Was it fear? Or something worse? ”We need to get out of here, and fast!”

″What?” Nedjma blinked. ”I thought we had till morning. What’s going –?”

″Nothing, nothing, Jose and Kenneth are fine. It’s just – this place is closer to Faigables with Louisketree than Demonwall Mountain, correct?”

″Ugh, yeah, it’s the next mountain over,” said Nedjma, blinking again, multiple times now. She seemed taken aback by Dr. Saltzman’s question – as well as her use of the outdated, strange name of High Council Mountain. ”Those two are, like, the closest peaks. You didn’t know that?”

″I did, I did!” Dr. Saltzman snapped. ”I just – I didn’t think about – I didn’t think – just hurry up and find those suits so we can get out of here!”

She’d never sounded so frazzled or hostile. Nedjma seemed to consider questioning it, but she only said, ”Well, can you help me find them?”

No answer. Nedjma tried the question again, but the poor connection didn’t seem to be a fault of the necromancy. Or at least, not a fault of her necromancy.

“What was going on with her?” Nedjma wondered. “Faigables of Louisketree . . .”

She shook her head, maybe to shake away the horrendous mountain name, and stood.

Someone walked through her.

″Ah!” Nedjma yelped, spiraling off to one side.

“Ugh,” shivered one of three people that had just appeared around the corner. “It’s cold in here.”

“Shh,” said another.

“Come on,” said the third.

They walked briskly down the hall, clutching clipboards to their chests. The one at the back – the one who’d walked through Nedjma, and who was also clearly the youngest – glanced around furtively, as though worried someone might catch them and their bosses sneaking around.

Nedjma raised her eyebrows.

“Well, that’s promising.”

She jogged after them.

They spanned the length of the hall and turned one more corner before stopping. The three gathered around what seemed to be an empty stretch of wall. The tallest person stepped forward, withdrawing a keycard from her lab coat and tapping it onto the silver wall.

The wall slid open, revealing a gleaming silver elevator. Nedjma’s jaw dropped, for more reasons than one.

The three of them strode into the elevator, and so did Nedjma. As the elevator puttered upwards, Nedjma maneuvered between the three until she reached the tall woman.

Slowly, Nedjma extended a hand, as if to touch the woman’s face. She looked transfixed, dazed.

“L . . . Lulu?” she whispered.

The woman was almost a perfect replica of Dr. Louis Saltzman . . . only very clearly alive.

Nedjma stared. It looked, ironically enough, like she’d just seen a ghost. Perhaps she’d never imagined Dr. Saltzman alive, the way most kids never imagined their teachers outside school. But this woman – she even matched Lulu’s mannerisms! The way she scrunched her nose, the way her dark blue eyes flitted back and forth as if running invisible calculations in the air . . .

Luckily, for the sake of Nedjma’s sanity, she also spotted some obvious differences. The height (this woman was a few inches taller, at least) . . . the hair (instead of Lulu’s old-timey teased flip hairdo, this woman sported a simple brown bob) . . . the age (where Lulu couldn’t have been out of her twenties when she died, this woman looked closer to thirty) . . .

Even so, in the dark, the two could’ve passed for one another.

“No way . . . no way no way no way . . .” Nedjma muttered, wide-eyed. She inspected the woman’s notes over her shoulder, looking for a signature, a name . . . there.

Professor Rena Saltzman.

The elevator doors slid open again. As Nedjma shuffled out with the three people, a million questions flickered behind her eyes: Who is she? What’s she doing here? Does Lulu know about her? What’s going on?

They had entered a laboratory. Dark metal ran across the walls. Vials of red and black liquids and gasses littered half-a-dozen silvery desks. A yelp ran through Nedjma when she noticed a half-dismembered uniform sprawled over a rolling chair.

“Is that – that totally looks like – HCP suit!” she said excitedly to Chanel, who squeaked happily back.

“You can speak freely here, Mr. Halcomb,” said Professor Saltzman, situating herself behind a desk at the center of the space. Even her voice perfectly matched Dr. Saltzman’s. “How is your success?”

“Oh, it’s successful,” said Mr. Halcomb, striding forward. He was the only one not wearing a lab coat, sporting a tailored suit instead. His face faltered. “I mean, uh – I’ve been successful. With my success. It’s been good.”

“Right,” said Professor Saltzman dryly. “So you called this clandestine meeting to tell me your success . . . has been successful?”

“Well, there’s more!” Mr. Halcomb protested. His grey flyaway hair wisped into the air as he turned agitated. “Councilfolk Roja, Curran, Hanson, Mayo, and Kearns are all ready for subjugation, which only leaves Fields and Rodriguez. Once we get all the mountains onboard, we’ll be ready for the Magical Cooperation Conference.”

“Still set for next week?” said Professor Saltzman.

“Yes!” Mr. Halcomb insisted. “You know, it’s not easy being covert when your boss is the Councilwoman of Faigables of Louisketree –”

″Please, do not use the full name,” Professor Saltzman interrupted. “High Council Mountain will do, or Faigables if you must.”

“Whichever,” said Mr. Halcomb, who, like Nedjma, seemed to understand the discomfort caused by the worst mountain name in all of history. “Councilwoman Fields and Councilperson Rodriguez have a meeting set for Tuesday, and I’ll prime them both then. You have the specimen?”

“I do.”

Professor Saltzman stood and crossed the room. She lifted a jar of red liquid from a row of shelves and handed it over.

“Uh . . . and you’re sure this is a sample?” Mr. Halcomb asked, eyeing the jar.

“Yes, as I’ve told you a thousand times,” Professor Saltzman said impatiently. “Goodness, Halcomb, use your necromancy for once. Just because you can’t see it out of Verithiel doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”

Nedjma’s eyes popped open.

Halcomb muttered something about being “out of practice” and stashed the jar in his coat.

“Er, Professor Saltzman,” interjected the third person.

“Yes, Harley?” said Professor Saltzman. Her voice sounded much kinder and more Lulu-like when directed at the younger scientist.

“You wanted me to remind you about the Demonwall spectre I lost contact with, so, um . . . reminder.” They laughed awkwardly, then grimaced at themself.

Dr. Saltzman’s shoulders fell. A dark cloud passed over her face. “Ah, yes . . . thank you, Harley.” She looked at Mr. Halcomb. “You know my associates monitor our assigned spectral activity across the Allied Peaks? Well, my apprentice here received a call not two hours ago that our oldest Demonwall plant has gone rogue.”

“Ooh, the necromantic chef?” said Mr. Halcomb, grinning as if this was a favorite joke of his. He hastily composed himself. “So the man has left the his job at Faraday?”

“The spectre took over the body and ran away from home,” said Professor Saltzman, straightening to her full height and looking deadly serious. “Do you know what this means? It’s just like the old experiments. We failed him. Somehow . . .”

There was no humor on Mr. Halcomb’s face now. “But how could – it was perfect! The binding spell was flawless! I watched you perform it!”

“I . . . I don’t understand it either.”

Professor Saltzman crossed back to her desk and sank into her chair. She dropped her forehead onto her hands. “I failed him. He has a sister.”

Nedjma stared. A thousand emotions battled across her spectral face, none of them good. It looked as if her whole world had just been torn apart, then glued back together to form a new picture.

Harley hurried to Professor Saltzman’s side, hesitated, then placed a hand on the woman’s back. Professor Saltzman lifted her head, then covered Harley’s hand with her own.

“Thank you.”

“It is . . . just one failure,” Mr. Halcomb pointed out carefully. “One, compared to a hundred successes.”

Professor Saltzman’s answering glare was cold as ice. “One too many.”

The ice melted, returning her to the neutral tone she’d started the meeting with. “I tell you this so you can alert the High Council staff on each peak. Tell them to watch for this man, to detain him but treat him with care. My assistants have already been informed.”

“Sure,” said Mr. Halcomb. He smoothed his grey flyaways, straightened his tie, then added, “Well, that’s it for the update. I’ll, ah . . . show myself out?”

“Harley, would you mind?” said Professor Saltzman. Harley nodded and stepped away, ushering Mr. Halcomb out of the room.

In the silence, Nedjma couldn’t move. She just stared at Professor Saltzman, as if waiting for the woman to offer a logical explanation of her last conversation.

Instead, the professor fished something out of her desk – a framed photograph. Nedjma moved forward in a sort of trance, peering down at the picture. Of course, it was of Lulu.

“Not again,” Rena Saltzman whispered, touching the glass. “I promised you, never again.”

Nedjma knelt down, so that she and the professor were face to face. “Never again what? What happened?”

Professor Saltzman didn’t answer, of course. Nedjma let her eyes fall back to the photograph. This time, she noticed a second figure in the shot – a much younger girl with brown hair and dark blue eyes, peeking out from behind Lulu’s labcoat. Lulu had one hand on the girl’s head, midway through mussing her hair, and a seemingly empty jar in the other.

″Nedjma Sanders!” said an impatient voice.

Nedjma whirled back to her feet.

Dr. Saltzman had appeared, her hands on her hips, fixated on Nedjma. “I’m so sorry, but we need to beat feet. This mountain is unsafe – I couldn’t tell you earlier, but I sensed another necromancer in the building, a powerful one. We need to speak carefully in case they . . . they are . . . listening . . .”

At last, her glowing blue eyes fell to the figure in the chair.

“No,” breathed Dr. Saltzman. “No . . . no, no, no . . .”

“Yeah,” said Nedjma, standing and walking slowly towards her. “You have . . . a lot of explaining to do.”

Dr. Saltzman’s eyes turned huge. They flitted left and right, but no imaginary calculations could save her from the grim, jilted look on Nedjma’s face.

“But – but I –” she stammered, staggering backwards. Apparently, she had forgotten she could fly and phase through solid objects, because she stumbled right into one of those shelves stacked with red jars. Her eyes snapped to it, and she screamed – an involuntary, horrified noise.

“Explain,” said Nedjma, as dark and serious as she’d ever been. ”Explain.”

Lulu didn’t even look at her. Her attention had drifted to the laboratory, a sight she only just seemed to fully absorb. Vials of black and red liquids . . .

Nedjma got sick of waiting. Anger coursed through her – not inside, but outside of her, an eerie pulse that ran over her spirit form.

″TELL ME!” she screeched. Then she jumped back, as if she’d surprised herself with the noise. But it was too late: The death rattle shook the room, shook all the shelves, all the vials –

Crash! Crash! Crash!

One by one, glass objects rolled off the shelves and shattered.

“NO!” Professor Saltzman burst out, leaping to her feet. “Halcomb! Is this you? STOP! STOP!”

“We need to run, before she enters Verithiel!” Lulu cried. “Take my hand!”

“Tell me what’s going on?” Nedjma demanded. “Who is –”

“LOOK!” Lulu bellowed miserably.

Nedjma looked. A few of the red jars had shattered, and their liquidy contents were bubbling into shapes . . . human shapes . . .

“Spectres?” Nedjma gasped.

The destroyed vials of black liquid were bubbling too, but differently. They seemed to be eating everything they touched, coating it in necromantic residue . . .

″It was me!”

Lulu’s voice rang out through the Kingdom of Verithiel, a different kind of ghostly wail.

″I started it!” she sobbed. Her hand outstretched, reaching for Nedjma. Her eyes swam with spectral tears. “It wasn’t some faceless villain, or even the High Council, it was me! My experiments led to the creation of spectres!”

Nedjma took a step back, horror creeping across her face.

“That’s your unfinished business,” she breathed. “Not stopping the spectres or saving the world . . . finishing your work.”

″No!” Dr. Saltzman insisted. Her hand still hovered suspended in the air, but Nedjma wouldn’t take it. “I – I don’t want this anymore! I didn’t realize what it would become until . . .”

She looked over Nedjma’s shoulder, just as Professor Rena Saltzman’s body toppled lifelessly to the ground. White wisps and black bubbles worked together to form a human spirit as the professor stepped into the Kingdom of Verithiel.

Lulu’s face twisted and broke.

“Until my sister murdered me!”

*****

Several floors down, Jose and Anti-Kenneth sat together on a cot in a cell. Anti-Kenneth had started chewing on his sunglasses. Jose sighed.

“Sucks they took my backpack,” he remarked.

Anti-Kenneth slobbered down his front, then patted Jose’s hair. “Good sooooouuuul . . .”

“Yeah, thanks.”

The two stared at the cell bars, then sighed at once.

“Dang,” said Jose. “I wish we’d got as lucky as Nedj.”

Anti-Kenneth stood bolt upright, suddenly alert. His red eyes swiveled through empty air as though it had suddenly filled with a million killer bees.

“Whoa, buddy, calm down,” said Jose, grabbing onto Anti-Kenneth’s arm.

Anti-Kenneth shook him off. “This plaaaace . . . not saaaaafe . . .”

“What do you mean?” Jose asked, nervous now. “Are Niha and Najiba coming back?”

Anti-Kenneth’s head lolled down. His eyes fell onto Jose.

“Speeeeeectres. Like me. You aaare . . . in daaaaanger.”

Jose’s skin drained. “M-me? But I’m not a necromancer?”

“Raaaarer,” Anti-Kenneth told him. “Goood sooouuul.”

Jose blinked as he digested this. “So . . . what? Dr. Saltzman said we had to stay here!”

Anti-Kenneth stared at Jose for a long while. Without pupils, irises, or white scleras in those red eyes, it was nearly impossible to find anything other than emptiness and menace in the expression.

But Jose found a way.

“You . . . care?” he realized.

Anti-Kenneth hesitated. “N . . . nooooo . . .”

“Very convincing,” said Jose, smiling. Then the smile dropped away. “So, uh . . . what do we do? As long as we’re in not in the Kingdom of Verithall –”

“Veriiiithieeeel,” Anti-Kenneth corrected.

“Man, not you too,” Jose complained. “As long as we’re not in the Kingdom of Ve-ri-thi-el, I’m safe!”

“Until you diieee.”

Jose gulped. “Oh. So you guys like good souls for eating, huh?”

“Yeeeeep.”

“Ah.”

“They waaaant to kiiiill you,” Anti-Kenneth said, his face creasing. “Maaaybe they can. They’re strooong.”

“O-okay,” said Jose. “M-maybe I have a spell or something to help. How long till they get here?”

Anti-Kenneth looked around the cell again, at each wall, the floor, and the ceiling. When he answered, his voice was shortest and sharpest it had ever been.

“They’re here.”

*Listen to the audio version on “Buddies Grim,” the podcast, available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and more!

#paranormal #fiction #sciencefiction #scifi #fantasy #podcast

Jose waited a long moment in uncomfortable silence, frantically looking every which way, trying his hardest to see what Anti-Kenneth saw.

"You're just joshin' me, aren't you? Yankin' my chain?"

       "…souls… don’t have… chaaaaaains…" Anti-Kenneth lost his worried expression for a moment to stare at his empty palms, perplexed, grabbing at the air just to be sure.

       The plain walls of the cell and the cot they sat on had nothing to move around, so as much as Jose could tell, nothing had changed. 

      "There's no specters here, right?" Jose asked in a laugh that betrayed his nerves. "My soul's not about to be slurped up like a slushie, right?" 

        "Need to kill you fiiiiirst… But they're heeeeere…" Anti-Kenneth frowned, watching the space in front of Jose, and reached a limp hand to shoo something away in a jerky motion.

        "Then we're probably fine!" Jose squeaked a little bit, clearing his throat and speaking in a lower register like he had with the guards with uncomfortable names, then seemed to remember something. "Until they come back to interrogate us and lock us in real jail…" Jose got up to pace around the cell with his hands shoved in his pockets, circling the space he could walk in the span of only a few seconds. 

       "Do we still have to wait for the signal to leave? Can't we just leave early and come back here to meet ghost doctor later?" Jose asked, toying with the card in his pocket. 

        "Maybe safer heeeeere. Ghost doctor said waaaaait," Anti-Kenneth answered, still watching him. Or the space around him, it was hard to tell when the man didn't have pupils. Jose didn't seem to be put at ease by this combination of a response. 

       "…I'm gonna go anyway." He started for the door, pulling the security key Dr. Saltzman had slipped him from Najiba and clapping it to the metal square on the wall. The barred door clanged as the bolt slid into the wall and Jose pushed it open before Anti-Kenneth could stumble off the cot to stop him. 

        Jose peeked into the hallway. So did Anti-Kenneth –– or at least, he tried to. Instead, he stumbled right into Jose's back, sending the boy stumbling out of the cell and into plain sight. Annoyed, Jose spun around, socked him lightly in the gut, and shoved him back into the cell hurriedly just in time for someone to round the corner. 

What the security guard found inside the cell was Jose laying halfway on the cot, rubbing his forehead and groaning. 

     "I think we took too many pills of the drugs this time, man…" 

     The guard looked from him to Anti-Kenneth still standing in the corner where Jose had shoved him.  Someone standing stock still and facing the corner in silence was not something he seemed to want to deal with, so he kept walking. When the footsteps had mostly faded, Jose dragged Anti-Kenneth back out of the cell and pulled him along down the hallway in the opposite direction. 

      "Necromancy isn't the only way to do stealth. If I can sneak away from my dad, castle guards are nothing." Jose paused. "I know we got caught, don't say anything." From the looks of the mostly blank stare from the man behind him, it didn't look like he was going to anyway.

      One of them crouch-ran down the halls back towards the elevator he was taken on while the other stumbled along at full height. The sound of several pairs of polished shoes clacked towards them from around the corner and Jose slapped the security key to the wall, dragging it along as he ran the other way, hoping to find some room to hide in. 

     Jose found himself dragged to a stop instead, Anti-Kenneth staring at the wall. 

     "No soooouuuls behind hereeee…" 

Jose stopped to marvel at him for a second. "If you can see where people are, why haven't you been doing that from the beginning?" he whispered angrily, but Anti-Kenneth only licked his lips and stared into space in response. Jose huffed in annoyance and began to rub the security key all over the wall until it passed over a reader, a door sliding open for the two boys to run through. 

       As the clacking passed the closed door and receded behind it, Jose jumped at the loud clattering of plastic behind him. He swiveled, fully expecting to get clobbered by some scientist finding intruders, but instead finding Anti-Kenneth with his hand buried in someone's leftover fast food bag on a shelf, having knocked over a tray of broken circuit boards to reach it. It might have been just a tray of totally fine circuit boards before, but it was hard to tell now. Anti-Kenneth rummaged through the bag, frowning in disappointment when all he pulled from it was wrappers.  

        "I can't wait to get you back to your sister. It's about time for her turn to babysit." Jose ran a hand through his hair with a sigh. Looking around the room, they seemed to be in some kind of storage space, and judging by the solitary desk covered in wires and broken things and the peg board of tools above it, it was also some lonely repairman's office too. Anti- Kenneth went straight for the mountain of similar looking fast food bags, knocking to the floor whatever he thought was in the way . Packets of screws, a soldering iron, strips of plastic and circuit, bags of fabric –– a whole mess of things. 

     "Dude, you're making an even bigger mess than there was. They're gonna know we were here." Jose picked up the soldering iron, turning it over in his hand and making a stabbing motion before shaking his head and putting it back down. Anti-Kenneth groaned sadly at his failed search, and Jose rolled his eyes, piling the junk back on the desk. One last spark of hope flashed across Kenneth's face as he snatched the bag of fabric from Jose's hands, tearing open the seal. The hope was soon lost and he turned away to mope even more, dropping the shiny yellow fabric back into Jose's arms.

    "Uh… thanks?" Jose said, then tried to shove it back into the torn bag and stopped at the sight of a label sewn onto it. "This is the HP…! The HDC…! The! The suit!" Jose squatted and held it out in excitement to Anti-Kenneth, who only looked back confused. Jose clutched the suit to his chest and dashed to the floor for the other sealed bags, tearing them open to find the same shiny yellow fabric. 

    "We got 'em!" Jose yelled, stopping to look at the door and then yelling the same thing again, but quieter. "Now we can go! Dump out that tool bag over there and shove these in! You're on bag carrying duty again."

-------------------------------------------

"…M-murdered?" Rena Saltzman sputtered after having just stepped into the Kingdom of Virithiel. Nedjma's half-presence wasn't even registered, her gaze fixed on her sister.

"Get out of here and find the others, they should still be in the holding cells," Dr. Lulu Saltzman's voice wavered as she tried to regain her composure. "I'll keep them all busy. Meet you outside."

Nedjma looked dumbstruck, displacing a bit of her anger, but she still didn't move. "Whether you think it's my fault or not, we still have a mission! Go!" As she yelled the last command, a bit of the room rumbled once more, sending one or two more bottles crashing to the floor. Nedjma looked to the stuttering spectral form near tears across the room and then to the reddish, vaguely human shapes starting to drift towards her. She gave Lulu one last hard look before phasing through the door.

    If ghosts could sweat, Lulu might have done that as she took in the sight for herself. As Rena recovered from her initial shock, she might have as well. 

      "I… murdered…? No, I…" Rena stared at her older sister until a red figure stepped into her line of vision. She blinked hard and took a breath, then held out a hand to Lulu. "Wait. Don't leave, just wait –– the alarm ––" 

     Rena watched the figure creep towards her as she stepped back and fell into her body again. She woke up from her heap on the chair and dashed to the other side of her desk, sending a few papers flying. She reached under it for a button, sending a siren blaring overhead. 

      "CODE COSMO. EVACUATE AND CONTAIN. CODE COSMO. EVACUATE AND CONTAIN." 

     The robotic voice now calling for help in her stead, Rena looked back where she last saw her sister's form, though it was empty now.

     "I know you're still there, I can feel you now. Please, talk to me. Let me explain!" It was Rena's turn for her voice to crack in pain. Nothing happened for a moment while she waited for a response, and Rena balled her fists when her hands began to shake. "Please! I'm…" Rena lowered her head and wiped her eyes, raising it once more with an expression that made Lulu reel.

    "I'm so happy you're here," Rena said through tears and a smile. "This means I can fix it! I can finally bring you back and we can ––"

      "You'll what?! Bring me back?!" Louis yelled as her form shifted to the visible spectrum, momentary anger turning to hurt again. "You did this to me!"

      "I –– I know, b-but it wasn't supposed to ––"

      "And here you are-" Lulu pressed her fingers to her temple, setting the other hand on her hip as more tears threated to fall on her own face. "I don't even know what to say." 

      "I can fix it," Rena pleaded again, reaching out to touch her with trembling hands, only for them to pass through her ghostly form. "I can, you can come back!"

      "I'm dead!" Louis yelled, causing even Rena to jump. "And you know as well as I do that spirits can't possess inanimate objects, so don’t even try to tell me there's another robot shell failure to–-"

      "Yes! Yes, you're right!" Rena cut her off, her smile widening as she feigned holding her sister's face. "You're right, I do know. I don't need a robot body. I have yours."

Written by Luna B.