The next day, Bradley showed up in Henrietta's room after school looking thoroughly unnerved. "I think they're evolving or something.
Georgie folded his arms. "Please. This isn't Chinpokomon."
Bradley glared. "I'm serious. I used to be able to track down an exact location, but now I'm only getting a general area."
Henrietta rolled her eyes. "Are you sure you're not just fucking up the readings? We still have three to go, and this is definitely gonna throw a wrench in things."
"See for yourself," Bradley shot back, gesturing to where his laptop was on the bed. Henrietta squinted down at the screen, which had a Google maps-like setup going on. But where there had once been exact points on the map pinning down the hubs of spiritual activity, there was now only a single area near Denver that was glowing softly with the same sinister darkness.
"That wouldn't happen to be the bar we're playing at, is it?" Dylan asked, not sounding at all surprised.
Evan checked the address the guy had scribbled onto his palm. "It's around there, yeah." "What's with all these coincidences," Dylan muttered to himself, sounding unnerved. "I don't know," said Evan gloomily. "But they're getting harder to deal with, and we're not any better equipped than we were before."
"Dunno about you guys, but I'm definitely not interested in any kind of training montage," Georgie put in.
"There's no need for a montage," said Henrietta, attempting to remain calm. "We'll be fine. We just need to go out there and look around, play our show, use that stupid-looking EMF thing, and we'll be fine."
Dylan examined the map closely. "There's three left. How come only one area is lit up?" Georgie shrugged. "Let's just get this over with," he said. "Then we can think about finding the others."
They showed up in Denver a couple hours early for their show, just in case something came up. The car ride over had been tense, especially since they'd come out with even less ritualistic trappings than the last time. "The stronger you get, the less you'll need them," Bradley had counseled them sagely. No one seemed to accept this at face value, all of them at least somewhat skeptical.
"No one's getting any stronger," Georgie had pointed out rightly, and they'd insisted on taking the salt with them. "Maybe we should just sort of drive around for a while," Dylan suggested. "See if we can find anything."
No ghost appearances were forthcoming, however, and after about forty-five minutes Georgie was ready to give it a rest.
"Let's just go get set up early," he said. "It's not like ghosts are gonna go around wandering the streets like a gang, or something."
"It's better than doing nothing," Evan shot back, peering out the window. It was going to get dark soon, and the promise of nighttime set them all on edge. They started calling out a false alarm every couple minutes or so, all of them turning out to be regular shadows. Dylan was about ready to join in Georgie's campaign to drive back to the bar when he saw something out of the corner of his eye. At first, he didn't think anything of it; he'd been seeing things out of the corner of his eye since this whole thing started. But somehow, this park looked different.
A kid dressed in black had been sitting on a bench underneath a streetlamp, smoking. However, just as they passed by, the streetlamp had gone out abruptly. In the flash of light before it was snuffed, Dylan could've sworn he saw a pale, flailing hand fly out to grasp at nothing and then disappear completely.
"Pull up here," he told Henrietta. She did so immediately, turning to him with a tense look on her face. "Did you see something?"
Dylan just nodded. He bounced on the balls of his feet, impatiently waiting for them to unload the bag with their things inside of it. As soon as everyone was ready, he took off in the direction of the streetlamp. For a moment he was unsure of himself; it was almost completely dark outside now, and it was difficult to figure out the exact location of the bench. The mystery was soon solved, however, as they heard someone let out a terrified shriek only a few feet away from them.
"There," Evan shouted. They hurried over to where the shout had originated, finding the kid bleeding on the ground with the spirit hovering over him. Dylan's mind was suddenly filled with an unpleasant sense of self-satisfaction that he could immediately tell came from the spirit.
Hurriedly, Evan set about creating a salt circle around themselves and the injured kid. Dylan felt relieved after it was finished; the spirits had never before been able to cross them.
This time, was clearly different, however; it let out a terribly noise inside their heads, something more intense than ever before. Henrietta groaned and clutched her forehead. Dylan got the sick feeling that this was its way of laughing.
Sure enough, as soon as the noise abated, it blew into the circle as though it was nothing and stretched its ghastly arms toward the kid, who seemed at this point to be beyond terror.
"The rest is silence," he gloomily intoned.
Dylan and Evan exchanged looks. As far as last words went, those were pretty good ones, but hopefully this kid wasn't going to die today. The two of them each grabbed one of the kid's arms, fighting tooth and nail to bodily drag him away from the spirit in a game of tug-of-war.
"Focus on the energy," Henrietta shouted over the spirit's din, neatly dodging an errant swipe of its unnaturally long claws. "Focus!"
"Fuck off, Yoda," said the kid, but Dylan decided to let it go, seeing as he sounded pretty hysterical.
Dylan looked over at Evan desperately. It was taking all of his concentration to just keep this fucking kid from getting ripped apart in front of their very eyes. Evan looked similarly clueless, but as Dylan watched, his face stiffened into something like resolve.
"Focus," he repeated, more quietly. "C'mon, we can do it, alright, just focus."
"God," groaned the kid, jerking wildly between them. "You too?"
Dylan repeated the word over and over in his mind, struggling to block out all distractions, but without the salt circle's buffer, it seemed impossible.
As if sensing Dylan's struggles, Evan leaned forward and pressed their lips together. It kind of hurt because of the whole thing with being jostled by the murderous spirit attempting to rip the kid away from them, and Dylan thought the romantic timing could have been a whole lot better, but he soon realized that Evan meant for him to focus on that instead of everything else that was happening.
Dylan squeezed his eyes shut tight, renewed his grip on the sleeve of the kid's jacket, and worked furiously to block everything out and build up the energy. Soon enough, he could feel it happening.
"Hey," said the kid indignantly. "I thought we were fighting for my life here—" he was cut off by his own shriek as the thing made a swipe at his head, but Dylan and Evan heard approximately none of it.
Once they'd built up enough that Dylan felt positively electric, hair standing on end, toes going numb, Evan broke apart from him. Dylan made a scared noise, thinking that their fragile store of energy would shatter, but it stayed. He couldn't see it, or anything, but somehow Dylan knew it was there.
"Ready?" Henrietta called from where she was with Georgie, holding his hand tightly. Both of them seemed to be attempting to bodily push each out of harm's way, which mostly just ended up with them both being jostled around a lot.
"Yes," said Evan frantically. "Go go go go go!"
And so they did; Dylan felt the energy being unleashed from them and finding its way to the spirit as it paused with its wicked teeth only moments away from the kid's face. He'd fainted after his last unhelpful comment, eyes rolled back in his head and body limp.
The spirit screamed once inside their heads, a sound and a feeling somehow even more terrible than its laugh. It hung for a moment, suspended, and then the pearly gray mist overtook it, just as it had overtaken the others. The four of them collapsed to the ground as one, breathing hard and crawling over to each other until they were more or less just sitting in an exhausted heap, waiting for their breathing to return to normal.
For a while, it was enough to just sit in silence. Soon, though, the kid was roused from his fainting spell. He looked around himself, as he came to gradually, taking a few seconds before he noticed the four of them sitting together and regarding him in exhausted silence.
"Am I dead?" the kid asked skeptically. "Is this hell? Does anyone have a cigarette?"
"No such luck," said Georgie. "I'd get out of here before another one of those things shows up to eat your eyeballs. I would also stop smoking in parks after nighttime if you're not familiar with any pagan rituals."
The kid scrambled to his feet, checking out the perimeter warily. "Right," he said. "Thanks for saving my life." He gave them a quick salute, and with that he scurried away. They watched him go with a detached sort of fascination, none of them able to find the energy necessary to get up off the ground and make for the car.
"You know," said Evan after a solid minute or so had passed. "We're late for our show."
Dylan flopped backwards, not appearing to notice as his head thumped against the dirt. "Shit."
They got into the club with little incident, even though it was pretty obvious that they weren't old enough to play in a place like this. Once inside, they met the manager, a bald and harassed-looking man who told them to set up as quickly as possible and kept muttering to himself about booking acts that his kid suggested from his kid.
They set up and launched into their first song with as much enthusiasm as they could muster, but unfortunately, it wasn't very much at all. The people at the bar seemed much more interested in getting drunk on cheap beer and hooking up with each other than they did Evan's tortured wailing, which was pretty much altogether what they'd been expecting. Even so, it was somewhat disheartening to play to an audience so completely disinterested in what they were doing. Dylan would never admit it out loud, but he thought that even the faggy vampire kids were a better audience than these assholes.
They had to cut the set off without finishing because they'd showed up late, and no one seemed to mind all that much.
As they were loading their stuff back into the van, Henrietta swayed on her feet. "I am so tired," she said, stifling a huge yawn. "I don't care what Bradley says, spirits can wait for a day. When we get home, I'm sleeping for literally twenty-four hours."
Evan, however, had an odd look on his face. "I'm not sure that's gonna happen," he said, looking at something beyond them.
Dylan guessed before he looked, groaning out loud as he looked down the alleyway they were parked in front of. He saw the hideous, oily smoke gathering, and felt the thing rummaging rudely through his mind, as it always did.
"This is getting really old," said Georgie.
"Let's just get it over with," said Dylan, attempting to fight down the terror he felt. They definitely weren't firing on all cylinders, and even though it hadn't worked last time it still felt weird to not have any means of protection at all.
"We can do this, said Henrietta reassuringly. "Concentrate."
She grabbed Dylan's hand, and Dylan grabbed Georgie's, and Georgie grabbed Evan's, and the four of them concentrated as hard as they possibly could.
Even though Dylan was bone-tired, it seemed almost easy by now to reach inside himself and draw out the final, guttering stores of energy he had left within him.
He focused on drawing it to the place where Henrietta's hand was in his, and she did the same. The spirit howled around them, sent terrible thoughts into their mind, battered at them. It even managed to slam Dylan's head into the brick wall of the alleyway, but the other three went with him, and pulled him back to safety, and the spirit was unable to separate their linked hands.
"Now," Evan called, just as Dylan was starting to feel the same electricity as earlier.
Dylan focused outward, and for the first time he found himself able to send a message to the spirit's mind.
Got you now, he thought smugly, and the thing seemed almost surprised at that, before it was shot through with the smoke that Dylan was beginning to recognize as being composed of their essences, the physical manifestation of the invisible energy they were able to call forth.
He was still feeling self-satisfied when the side of his head gave a nasty throb just at the same time as his knees gave out, falling to the asphalt for the second time that night.
Using his own last reserves of energy, Evan hoisted him up into the backseat. The four of them slept in the car for a couple hours and then took shifts driving home, because Henrietta thought she would careen off the side of the road for sure if she had to take them the whole way. They stopped at each person's house, made sure that they were safely inside before stumbling through the front path.
Dylan was the last to be dropped off before Henrietta, rousing himself for long enough to stumble up his front path before faceplanting into his bed without even getting under the covers, lost to the world.