“Do you want to tell me why we intercepted a nine-one-one call this morning reporting a dead body in your basement?”
“Ha!” Beezle shouted, pumping his little fist in the air. “I told you that somebody would notice.”
“What do you mean, you intercepted a call?” I asked. “Am I under surveillance?”
“Of course you are,” J.B. said in a tone that implied I was an idiot. “It’s in the best interests of the Agency to publicly suppress all the weird shit that seems to happen at this address.”
“The neighbors do notice, then?”
“They’d have to be either dead or stupid not to. So tell me why it looks like there’s been a war in here, and why you’ve got bruises on your throat.”
I summed up the morning’s events. J.B.’s eyebrows went up to his hairline when I told him that it was the Hound of the Hunt in the basement.
“I don’t know whether to be impressed or depressed,” J.B. said.
“I often feel that way around Madeline,” Gabriel said, and the two of them shared a look of understanding.
“What’s to be depressed about?”
“You’re going to have to pay a price for killing Metatrion,” J.B. said.
“That happens to me all the time,” I said.
“And your enemies, which include my beloved mother, will perceive you as a greater threat since you managed to kill such a powerful being. Which means they will redouble their efforts to kill you.”
“Well,” I said, clapping my hands together, “what’s a few extra death threats when you’ve already got dozens of them? I have something more important to show you, anyway.”
I recounted the story of the cubs’ kidnapping and what I’d found in the cave as J.B., Gabriel and Beezle followed me into the basement. I pulled the bag of cameras from the dryer.
“That’s some security system you’ve got there,” J.B. said sarcastically.
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but my house was destroyed this morning and I’ve hardly had time to think about putting these in a safer place. Besides, now you can take them back to the Agency and put them behind a million layers of lead and steel if you want.”
J.B. untangled the knotted sleeves of my coat and pulled one of the machines from the bag, inspecting it. “It looks like a digital camera.”
“I know. I can’t figure out what they were doing to the cubs, but it definitely damaged their brains. The older cubs were acting exactly like the ghost I found.”
“So, is whatever is in this machine killing them? Or is it just damaging them beyond repair and their deaths are unrelated?”
“I can easily see someone dying by accident once they’ve been exposed to this machine,” I said slowly. “They could walk into traffic, or step off a cliff, and never even know where they are.”
“But it still doesn’t explain why they aren’t being tracked by the Agency. We’re finding these ghosts by accident, not at the sites of their deaths. If they have souls, then we should know when and how they’re going to die. But that’s not happening.”
“What if the mental damage is affecting the way the Agency perceives these people? They still have souls, but the Agency isn’t recognizing them as such because of…whatever it is that this machine does.”
J.B. looked doubtful. “We’ve taken the souls of people in many different mental states over the past several millennia. Recognition has never been an issue.”
“What else could explain how so many people are disappearing from the Agency’s radar?”
“I don’t know,” J.B. said, obviously frustrated. Then he grinned at me. “But I’m sure that if I wait, you’ll find out for me.”
“That’s nice,” I muttered. “Like I don’t have enough to do. And somehow I have to make new windows—and a new wall—appear out of thin air.”
“I can do that,” J.B. said, and pulled his cell phone out of his pocket. He barked a few terse orders at the person on the other end of the line and hung up. “Someone will be here in about an hour to fix everything.”
I stared at him. “You know, yesterday morning you were acting like I had a contagious disease. You haven’t spoken civilly to me for weeks. Do you have a multiple personality disorder or something?”
He shrugged and looked uncomfortably at Gabriel and Beezle, who were not disguising their interest in the least.
“Don’t mind them,” I said. “I can’t do anything these days without an audience.”
“Maybe I thought about some of what you said yesterday, and realized I was being unfair to you.”
“Can someone run and check the temperature in Hell, please? Because that sounded a lot like an apology.”
“You could just say, ‘Thank you for the windows, J.B.,’ and stop giving me a hard time.”
“Thank you for the windows, J.B.,” I parroted.
“And thank you for these,” he said, tying the knot of my coat back together and slinging it over his shoulder. “I’ll let you know what I find. Don’t forget your pickup at two.”
“So that’s when it is,” I said. “You wouldn’t, uh, happen to know where it is, would you?”
He rolled his eyes and pulled the piece of paper with the information from his pocket. “I had a feeling.”