Evan appeared, giving the bike a bit of a nudge as he settled on the handlebars. It was the helping hand I needed.
I could feel the stinging warmth of the Eye on the back of my head and neck as he got closer.
Gunshots rang out. I could see the flashes. Fell stood by his car, driver’s door open, gun in hand. He emptied it at the Eye, and all but one shot hit.
Buying me a chance to get away.
I climbed on the bike.
Normally when riding a motorcycle, the engine needed to warm up first. Fuck up and move too soon, and the engine could sputter or die. With the Eye closing on me, the consequence would be me dying a sputtering death. I couldn’t even trust the temperature gauge.
Staying meant the same thing. Death.
I could only hope that the engine was still warm from the earlier ride, and that the ambient temperature wasn’t taking hold on the thing.
I was moving a moment later, stopping only long enough to give Tiff a chance to climb on. While she got in position, I looked back.
The Eye had shrugged off the bullets, but wasn’t giving chase. It remained near the flames. Reality continued to distort around it, alternating between showing glimpses of reality and the spirit world.
Distant sirens filtered into this world from the other, moving to the scene. The Eye was quick, but not fast enough to follow on foot.
He thinned out the border between our world and this one, freeing him to affect both.
But how had he found us?
As I rounded the corner, putting the Eye behind us, I saw more ghosts accumulating. Maybe it was better to say that I saw them more clearly. There were no silhouettes, no dark, faceless figures representing the people in the real world. These were ghosts, wisps, apparitions and specters. Where the silhouettes were faceless, the expressions on the faces of these guys were exaggerated, their features taken a step too far.
The ones who smiled smiled too wide, the angry expressions twisted their faces into something monstrous. The wounds that marked how they died were taken a step too far. A woman with black veins stretching around lower half of the face and throat. A man with a tumor grown wild, emaciated but for the fleshy lump that stood out from his sternum.
The Shepherd’s servants. Was he doing something to bring out their more unusual qualities?
Was he the one that was tracking us?
Each of these ghosts could be reporting back to him.
The car caught up to me. Fell was driving as recklessly as he had when he’d dropped me off with the Knights.
The ghosts all watched us as we streaked down the carless road. Macabre faces turned as we passed.
How many years had the Shepherd been active? How many people had died in Toronto in that span of time? How many of those deaths had been violent or painful enough to make an imprint in reality?
Did he have a mechanism to handle it, or did he simply do it full time? Collecting the echoes?
The number of ghosts didn’t decrease, even as minutes passed. If anything, they only got more numerous. I saw the same ghost twice, then three times. As if they were being moved ahead of us as we left them behind.
He was with us, even if we couldn’t see him.
I looked for a connection and didn’t find one. I couldn’t take my eyes off the road or the ghosts nearby to look up or behind us.
Fell drove in the incoming lane, pulling up to my left. I could see Alexis in the passenger seat. She was talking, saying something to Fell. Reporting on my condition, maybe.
The car abruptly slowed, dropping back from my left.
I could see why. Ghosts were streaking across the street, more like flashes of light than people. All towards one central point.
They congealed into a form. The Shepherd.
As the other ghosts had, he watched us, his head turning to track us.
He raised his staff-
We passed him. He disappeared behind us.
I turned a corner, and Fell turned to follow. Break from the pattern, maybe catch him off guard-
No such luck. More ghosts. More streaking lights. One or two passed through me. I could feel it, cold, flickers of emotion so brief I couldn’t pin them down or even react.
I wobbled a bit before righting myself. I heard Tiff yelp, a brief sound that the rush of wind tore from us.
I moved away from the point where the ghosts were converging.
It wasn’t the Shepherd making another fleeting appearance. It was a ghost.
A man, older. I couldn’t make out anything else.
We approached, then passed it. My focus went to the road, watching for potholes.
An explosion rocked the space behind us. My heart skipped a beat as the shockwave swept past us. I experienced a brief, paralyzing terror, a sense of something unfinished.
I wobbled more violently than before in the wake of it. I slowed, focusing on getting control.
There weren’t half as many ghosts on the sidewalks now. They watched as I steered the bike around. I checked over my shoulder, and I saw smoke rising from the point of detonation. It had images etched in it, the man’s face, repeated over and over.
Fell’s car slowed, continued forward in neutral, then stopped.
I huffed out a breath. I’d had moments where I’d worked so hard I’d been out of breath, and I’d tried to suppress it instead of make a lot of noise panting and recovering.
This was like that. It came with a general feeling of unpleasantness, almost but not quite nausea. Throughout my entire body.
When I felt it starting to concentrate in my left hand, I fumbled with the clutch and slowed.
It got worse fast. Strength going out of my hand and arm. More nausea. A cold sweat.
My heart had skipped a beat, and it hadn’t started up again. Not properly.
I managed to stop the bike, but I didn’t get the kickstand down. We wobbled, and Tiff had to brace us with one leg to keep all three of us from tipping over. I leaned over the handlebars, gasping like a fish out of water.
Fuck me, this hurt. I felt like something heavy was sitting on my chest. Big and dense enough that the force of the crushing was enough to take the strength out of the rest of my body. The limbs couldn’t work if the core didn’t.
“Blake,” Tiff said. “The Eye, it’s at the end of the road.”
I closed my eyes, because absolute darkness was better than seeing spots and sparks across my field of vision.
“Blake?”
“It hurts,” Evan said.
I forced my eyes open. I was breaking out in a sweat. All the little things your body did that pointed to something being very, very wrong. Evan was on the headlight, looking up at me. He was lopsided, and his little hop to one side was clumsy, obviously debilitated.
Sympathetic pain?
“That really sucked, whatever it was,” Tiff said. “Did it get you harder than it got us, little guy?”
“Got Blake most of all,” Evan said. “He’s really hurting.”
“Blake,” Tiff said. She got off the bike, holding it and me up, fumbled for far too long to get the kickstand down.
The ghosts around us were drawing closer. I heard the report of Fell’s gun. Shooting ghosts?
No. The Eye.
“They aren’t coming to help. I don’t know what to do.”
“Get help.”
“I can’t leave him. If he falls over- can you go?”
“Can’t fly like this.”
“Hey!” Tiffany yelled. More sparks exploded across my field of vision at the loud noise.
I was deflating, getting weaker and more numb from moment to moment. My hands, head, and feet felt heavy. I’d bled myself out, but this was my heart giving out. When you died, the doctors used the moment the heart stopped to mark the time of death. This was… kind of backward. The heart had stopped, and now the rest of me was swiftly moving from ‘okay’ to ‘dead’.