his hand behind Tucker’s head and pulled it back, wet with blood.
Tucker groaned, trying to see through the spots in his eyes. “Angel, if we don’t get a move on, Conklin’s going to do some really shitty things to Josh’s body. And worse, he’s going to let all the ghosts out of the cemetery, and then we’ll really be fucked. Let’s worry about me later, okay?”
Angel nodded, his face crumpling. “I am so worried now,” he whispered.
Tucker nodded, raised his good hand to Angel’s cheek, and wiped off the tears that gathered there. “I know. I don’t think you’re built for this, for the violence, for the fear. But you can do it, Angel—I have faith. We can’t fall apart now. Just hang in there. We need to see this through.”
With that he took a deep breath and wrapped his arm around himself, rooting through his other pocket for his cell phone.
The Greenaways were one of his few contacts.
“Rae, I need you. Man, some serious shit went down, and Josh needs your help.”
“Josh?” her voice cracked, and Tucker forced his aching body out of the room, past the fucking sander and down the stairs. “What did he do?”
“It wasn’t his fault,” Tucker told her. “Man, the thing came gunning for us—and then it rammed itself down his throat.”
“It what?”
“Rae—I need you to grab as much silver wire as you can, and more than that, and take it to the side road, the one facing the cemetery. He’s heading there, and I have an idea.”
He explained his idea as he got to the kitchen and found a dish towel to rip into pieces and tie around his wrist. He kept explaining as he and Angel got into the truck and backed down the driveway, then pulled around to head away from town and toward the cemetery road.
That was about the point when Rae hung up, presumably because she’d already grabbed the wire, the nails he’d told her to bring, and her kids to come help, then loaded up the minivan, determined to go get her husband out of the fire.
“Do you think that will work?” Angel asked, looking at him nervously.
“Sure,” Tucker told him, setting the phone down and letting his wrist rest limply in his lap. “It’s got to.”
“But how are you going to get him in the trap?”
Tucker kept his eyes on the road.
“I’m going to bait it myself,” he said grimly, and then prepared himself for the argument to come.
They were still arguing when they pulled off to the side road and rattled down the dirt track at top speed. The back end of the truck fishtailed, sending the post-hole digger Tucker had tucked there clattering from side to side, but Tucker kept going.
He skidded to a halt, the truck spinning half a donut, just as they drew even with the cemetery.
“The cemetery does not actually look worse,” Angel assessed coolly—then he lost his composure and went back to bitching at Tucker. “But that doesn’t mean this plan of yours is any safer. Dammit, Tucker, what happens if he jumps ship? Do you think you’ll have any more protection than Josh did? Do you? Because I’m thinking no! I’m thinking your empathic ability is going to make it worse—that you’ll become this horrible, horrible man, and that the Tucker I know and love is going to be lost and stomped flat by all of that… that crazy meanness!”
“I won’t become this horrible man,” Tucker said solemnly. But he had to tell the truth. “I probably won’t become this horrible man. Remember—I’ve felt ghosts inside me. I felt you inside me. You even took over a couple of times. But I was still me. I still knew right from wrong. Josh was caught unawares, that’s all. If he’d known what was coming—”
“But he did.”
“He didn’t believe it!” Tucker insisted. “Now look. Unless you’ve got a better plan, I’ve got some fucking cable to lay, and not the good kind!”
Tucker slid out of the truck then and grabbed the post-hole digger and the two brooms he’d remembered to get from the gardening shed. Wrapping his good arm around them, he made for the clear psychic line that marked the edge of the property, and the gate in the middle of it. The gate was the focus point, the center, because the ghosts still respected the rules of the physical world. But add some of Josh’s spilled blood, and that gate would become a portal to the outside world.
It was a