Orpheus - Haunting the Dead.pdf - Dice

HAUNTING THE DEAD
STEFAN PETRUCHA
two things—your silence and your promise to stay and
help with the rest.”
“The rest? The rest of what?”
“Like I said, I’ve got a team out in the hall. We felt it
best that only Kleck and I enter the room. But I don’t
know why they haven’t answered my signal, so there’s
more going on here than we bargained for. You could be
an Orpheus agent. Or not. Whatever. But please, just
give me a reason. Just give me a fucking reason and I’ll let
him go,” Dennison said.
“Fucking bitch!” Kleck howled, doggish predator eyes
wildly reeling.
“Shut up, asshole,” Dennison said, not bothering to
look in his direction.
“Why?” Shutty asked.
“It would be a waste to let him carry on, just like it
would be a waste to let you fade,” Dennison said. “Whatever
other rules this world is made of, the only one I trust
is that waste sucks.”
“I’ll kill you! Blast you both to hell! Splatter your fucking
bitch brains against the walls!” Kleck pulled, yanked, and
tried to tear at his own shrinking ectoplasmic body, to sunder
enough of it free from the inky grasp to survive.
Dennison looked deeply into Shutty and said, “Well?”
Letting loose her imagined sympathy, which even now
she feared was but a pretense of the flesh, Shutty solemnly
intoned, “Okay. Cross my heart and hope he dies.”
Dennison did not react with emotion. She simply
yanked Shutty’s spirit into the hall. The move was so
quick, the girl feared a part of herself had come loose and
been left behind. It had. The tether that tied her was
gone. She was somewhere else now. Someplace exactly
the same, only different.
Strong arms pulled the door shut, but Shutty still
heard Kleck’s screams, each and every one, as though he
were sleeping right beside her in the dark, caught in
nothing more than a nightmare. Beyond that, an insistent
mosquito buzz drummed at the back of her hearing,
over and over, in squeaky near-silent sounds that seemed
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