February 9th, 1985, Atlantic City

Something was rotten under Atlantic City. A week ago, an ordinary businessman knocked out his younger brother with a length of plumbing pipe, then cut out his heart and ate it. He slit his own throat afterward. Some isolated incident of a sicko in a family dispute.

Except that the trend caught on. A women's book club meeting at a library did the same thing to one of their number, and this time some of the perpetrators were still alive to tell their story. The same thing happened again in an elementary school, and a boardroom meeting above a casino.

It was a particularly vicious and dangerous ghost, an Ariel, sinking illusions into innocent victims and feasting on the blood that resulted.

It was only a few months since J.D. had joined the crew. A few months since that night in a hotel room in Dallas, waiting for Mom to come home. Her idea of take-your-kid-to-work-day was half past never when your job was ghost hunting, even though he had her powers. She was late, but normally that just meant he could get away with staying up and reading. Instead, his father and the entire crew showed up at the door, without her, and then he'd known something had gone very wrong. I think she knew. She said goodbye like she knew. She gave up.

There was no lower age limit to be an apprentice, since even a little kid with removalist powers was more likely to survive a ghost attack than an adult. And J.D. didn't consider himself a little kid, even if he was still waiting for a growth spurt. His father signed him on, he wore a hunter's badge like his mother, and they were on the trail of another ghost.

They crew had mapped out the past ghost attacks and were listening in to police radio. Ghosts didn't travel any faster than wind, so that narrowed things down. They split up into three pairs to cover more ground. J.D. could tell his father thought they were close, so at least one pair would be in place to find the Ariel as soon as it attacked again.

This street was lined with gold and floodlights, with unbelievably horrifying canopies above the road glittering with advertising and pure tackiness. The whole block was a giant casino. Plenty of people lined the streets, making it a good target for a ghost seeking blood. J.D. caught up with his father, watching his face for signs that he'd seen something. He knew he had to stay close and wait for a clear shot at the ghost. They rode the escalator up to the casino itself, getting in deeper among the crowd. Some people - the smart people, in point of fact - spotted the removalists' badges, looked nervous, and like a furniture truck started to make a move.

"It's here," his father said, looking up. And then the crowd started to attack.

"Murderer!" a man screamed. They weren't trying to fight the ghost, just the removalists. J.D. couldn't tell what the ghost made the crowd see but it was probably something awful. The mob fell on the hunter and seer, separating them from each other. J.D. ducked under an old woman's arm - "Pedophile!", she shouted, thanks to the ghost's delusions, which was pretty dumb considering he was in middle school - and ran straight into a man who grabbed him by the collar. So he sucker-punched him in the groin, and the guy howled in pain and let go. When they could still feel pain, it meant they weren't wraiths, just easily fooled.

Deafening gunshots rang in the air. His father had already fought his way free and fired blanks toward the ceiling. The sound was enough to break some illusions, make people finally run away. The area cleared, leaving only a few people with injuries behind, lying on the thick plush carpets.

His father yelled out instructions to him. Looked like there was an opportunity. J.D. took out his own gun - weapon of if you so much as touch this without orders you have no idea of the world of pain you will know - and tried to track the right angle. It was only loaded with blanks, since the power to hurt a ghost didn't lie in the weapon at all. He fired twice, and thought he might've hit it.

Then a man groaned and got up from the carpet. He lurched and stumbled - not like someone who knew how to fight, not even like a person - and bullrushed J.D. Apparently, the ghost had decided that the hunter was the biggest threat of the two removalists.

He knew how to fight. His dad wasn't going to rush in to do this job for him. Probably meant it as an extra training session. The wraith's body was on him now, moving fast, off-balance. J.D. slipped aside, then used the man's own weight and momentum against him. The wraith fell against the top of the escalator, overbalanced, then tipped over the rail and fell. He didn't scream as he hit the ground.

J.D. looked back at his father. His dad reached for a woman on the ground. She was dressed like a casino employee, with big round glasses in bright yellow frames. She looked completely unconscious. His father slammed her face against the wall hard so that she bled, from the glasses smashed over her face.

"Come on. Come here and feed," J.D.'s father hissed, staring at the thin air. His seer's power let him talk to ghosts, lure them and sometimes convince them to go where he wanted. Silver-tongued, like Saruman. The woman's blood was the bait. J.D. stepped into position. The ghost had abandoned the body it had used up, and it was wounded, it would try to feed again.

Then he got the signal, and punched as hard as he could into the empty air in front of his father. He only felt a slight drag of resistance, but he'd been told that knocked a ghost to fragments. His father nodded.

"That's done it," he said. It was over.

J.D. walked back to the escalator. Something drove him to look down. There was no blood or anything, but the man who'd been possessed didn't look like he moved or breathed at the bottom.

"How many floors?" his father asked from behind him.

"Three. I think."

"Ghosts respect brains about as much as they do bodies. He was as good as dead the moment that wraith went inside him," his dad said. "Watch that sloppy footwork of yours.'

J.D. gripped the handrail with both hands, not looking back at his father, and found himself thinking that on Monday he'd be back at school. Fighting like this was easy. People were hard. They'd think he was weird and assume he was weak, and he couldn't fight back because that would see him expelled again. Before Mom died, she'd homeschooled him herself, which was a lot simpler.

He thought, there was the sort of cruelty because people felt like it. He could hear his father talking to the woman with smashed glasses, trying to wake her up and tell her what she should believe had happened to her. And then there was the sort of cruelty that happened along the way of just wanting something to eat. He knew which of the two was worse. J.D. looked down again at the man at the bottom of the escalator.

It was the first time he'd killed a person.

—

In the morning, in Sherwood, Ohio, J.D. almost took hold of one of his dreams, as if there were someone warm wrapped up over his back. He lost hold of that fantasy quickly as reality and a crashing headache set in. He was alone. He'd recently drunk a lot of alcohol. Apparently, this caused him to sleep on the kitchen floor for some reason. And also smash what appeared to have been a perfectly good bottle of red wine against the wall. It looked like a river of blood had run over the tiles. Alcohol normally lasted a long time in their house; J.D. doubted his father would have bought it at all if not for social conventions. Prefer protein shakes and you might as well be wearing makeup and lip-syncing to Gloria Gaynor. Bud only drank in company, and sometimes used a measuring glass to limit himself to the perfect diet. J.D. gingerly picked up the glass shards.

J.D. cleaned the hamster cage and then the house, bitterly nursing his hangover. Scrubbed out the john, took out the trash, started junking his father's room. He threw together some questionable potato dumplings out of the almost-expired dregs of the fridge, eating straight from the pan.

Harry and the crew had the next job lined up, cleanup after some forest fires in New Mexico. He'd already decided not to go with them, and so he wouldn't bother watching them clear out. The whole process of dealing with the business and settling his father's leavings was going to take months. He knew enough not to sign the first contract Harry offered him, but he'd probably let it go at the second offer. Add one carefully-convinced signature from one of the cleanup guys to claim that he was acting as a responsible adult, and J.D. was fine on his own.

He wrote part of an essay for American History. His father had made it clear he would have preferred J.D. to leave school early and hunt, but a couple of extra years didn't make that much difference. J.D. wasn't sure himself why he'd kept it up. High school was as masochistic an experience as anything else. Every school was the same, identical hierarchies and bullies and ignorant, indifferent puppets. He kind of liked school libraries as long as they didn't have any other people in them (and they were usually underpopulated, so that was one good thing).

No, I know why I kept it up, he thought. So that someday, we could scare people into not being assholes. He and Veronica had a mission, dammit.

Angles. You worked a situation by setting up multiple paths, using the scene and the tools that came to hand. Always something you could pick up, turn over, and send the whole house of cards crashing down. He kept his head down and listened, for the time being.

Arrogant, self-centered gossips talked about how Martha Dunnstock was in a hospital psych ward after attempting suicide. It didn't make any goddamn sense, J.D. thought. Martha's three chief tormentors were dead and you'd think that would have made it better. So, then, who better to ask about the new and fresh hells inflicted on Westerburg High?

—

Martha stared out of the hospital window at a bright sunshiny day, the wind shaking up a bunch of evergreens. Was boredom a better or worse reason to kill yourself than being a complete idiot? She hated herself. God, she'd been so stupid. She told Veronica the worst possible theory of complete nonsense, making herself believe that Kurt Kelly secretly still loved her and a kid at their school was guilty of murder. No wonder they called her fat stupid Martha. She believed that Veronica would never hurt her, and she'd also been so wrong about that. Laughing at her behind her back, forging a note just to hold her up to ridicule. Sure, Veronica had come over to the hospital all apologetic and guilty and chrysanthemum-laden, but as the guilt weakened over time Veronica would soon dump Martha all over again for thinner, more popular friends.

Martha had managed to break her bones pretty badly and was stuck in here until further notice, and until the psychiatrist cleared her. Her parents were horrified at what she'd done and she felt even more guilty that she'd hurt them. They would never trust her again and probably never have a reason to. They didn't know what to say to her and their conversations always ended in awkward silences. Her body was one big ache. She could move one hand without agony, and that was about it.

In Jane Austen's tidy, well-regulated universe, no one ever died for love or lies or suffocating under the weight of their own ugliness. Austen herself - famously cynical, joking that a woman's miscarriage was probably caused by accidentally looking at her husband - would have laughed at Martha's pitiable effort to kill herself. A large bulky figure has as good a right to be in deep affliction as the most graceful set of limbs in the world, Austen would have said, but nonetheless ridicule will always seize this unbecoming conjunction.

There was a knock at her ward door. She wasn't expecting Veronica again so soon, and her parents should be at work. She opened her mouth in shock as she saw who the black-clad figure was, and she wished she could pull up her blankets and just hide under them forever.

"Greetings and salutations, Miss Dunnstock," he said. "You don't know me; just one of your humble classmates. Jason Dean."

She did know him. That was the whole problem. "What are you doing here?" Martha croaked. This was a horrible punishment - that someone she'd been so unkind to turned out to be one of only two classmates who voluntarily came to visit her. She wanted to disappear.

He watched her neutrally, standing in front of the door. She didn't want to look him the eyes and dropped her gaze down to the floor. That was some lovely pink cross-ways tiling.

"Since my father killed himself a few days ago, I've been a bit lost. Do you have any good advice?" J.D. said.

"I had no idea that sounds really rough," Martha stammered. Was it true? She hadn't heard any news since being here. That was a bombshell and a half. He'd said it relatively calmly, but there was probably a lot more going on underneath.

"Oh, I'm trying to have a positive attitude. I brought a peace offering." J.D. held out a battered, second-hand copy of Wuthering Heights.

"That's nice. Thanks," Martha said. The conversation flagged. She was afraid he'd somehow find out what she had claimed about him, felt horribly guilty for her suspicions, and didn't even know what to say to him to help with his own issues.

Then he came out with it. "Why are you scared of me?" he asked directly. He'd pegged her feelings exactly. Martha writhed with shame inside. She couldn't possibly tell him the truth.

"You brought a gun to school once ..." she said.

J.D. looked taken aback, as if he hadn't expected that particular reason. "Well. My formal education did begin in the great state of Texas," he said, doing an exaggerated, mocking accent. He wandered over to the table. "Nice bouquet. Are they carnations?" he asked, as if he were deliberately trying to jump from guns to flowers and land on the least scary subject possible.

"They're chrysanthemums. My friend Veronica brought them," Martha said.

"Oh." J.D. stared at them a little longer. "You two used to be close?" he asked.

"It was more like the three of us," Martha said. "Me and Veronica and Heather Duke. The Three Musketeers, except that none of us wanted to be Porthos." The fat one was always the joke character; she grimaced.

"It's such a bleak world," J.D. said. "They fight the cardinal to save the queen, they turn around and befriend the cardinal, the queen forgets them, and the wheel of history rolls over them and squashes them flat. The only thing that matters is fighting in the moment. It's almost realistic."

"I guess that's why I like the adaptations better," Martha said. "More swashbuckling."

She talked more about the versions that she liked most and about the scenes they'd acted out as children, distracted from her problems. Hopefully he was distracted from his as well, Martha thought. The time flew and by the time the visiting hour was up, J.D. was halfway through teaching her how to play poker.

—

Veronica walked down the street with Heather Chandler by her side, trading gossip about clothes and boys. It was almost like when they were both alive.

"Ugh. Hate her outfit." Heather pointed to a passer-by. "Top half says, I shop out of dumpsters, bottom half says, I muff-dived in college and regretted it ever since. She deserves to die."

Veronica shook her head, mouthing no. The ghostly tendrils of Heather's form whirled toward the woman nevertheless, ready to pass through her and drain a fraction of the energy in her blood. At the last moment, Heather seemed to change her mind. Instead, she patted Veronica's cheek and her fingers passed through. Veronica felt the ghostly chill run through her veins, eating away some small portion of her life.

"This is why I like you, best friend," Heather said. "It's the good stuff. Did you have a nice time crying at the bedside of the fat girl you drove to suicide?"

"Martha's going to be fine," Veronica said. She knew better than to believe herself, but she was trying with Martha, trying to do better. Martha was still angry with her, which was a good thing; it meant she still had enough self-esteem left to feel anger.

"Martha Dumptruck's a liability to you. You should encourage her to finish the job. It would be doing her a favor," Heather said. "If she's a real suicide, she won't even create a ghost. It could be your only way to save her from me."

"That's not funny, Heather."

"Whatever." Heather smirked. They walked past a shoe shop Heather had liked in life, the windows glittering with an early display of this winter's fashions. "It's great to get you all to myself, now we've driven the removalists out of town," she said. "Except for the one I've got unfinished business with."

"J.D. and I are through. You can kill him if you want, and it'll only make life safer for me," Veronica said. It was only half the truth, half reverse psychology; she didn't want J.D. dead, but she wanted him to stay out of her life.

The only thing she'd heard from J.D. since they broke up was a thank-you note to her mother, for the condolence casserole. It was brief, polite, and perfectly innocent, except that he'd written it in his father's handwriting.

"I think you're lying. I guess I'll see how much you miss Billy the Kid when you're sitting there all lonely in bed, rubbing yourself off to The Cure," Heather said. "I was hoping for a lovely spot of filicide. Bo Diddley starting something he couldn't finish. I would so have put money on Papa Wolf winning a cage fight with Junior. But then you got in the way. Sorry about the whole dirty old man thing," Heather said insincerely. "Jeez, pop on some Birkenstocks, forget to shave the pits, and talk about how all men stink, right?"

"You can't be all that sorry. I gave you a new recruit," Veronica said.

"I spent a lot of time hanging out inside walls and watching him work," Heather said. "Someday I'll be fighting removalists, so it's best to know your enemy. Those guys were serious. But don't think I can't handle them."

There's some time left to play with, Veronica thought. She's still doing a waiting game, she doesn't fully know what a removalist is capable of. And - as long as I can keep her strung along - she's much more interested in punishing me.

Veronica's house was quiet at night, with only the murmur of the television downstairs. She went to bed early again. She felt like she was always tired, lately. She wiped off her protective coating of makeup in front of her mirror, trying to pretend she didn't look any paler than normal below it. Maybe half of her still existed in the sunlit surface world of clothes and school and parties and untroubled adolescence, the half of her that she showed to her parents and teachers. The other half was dragged down to the underworld. She had to deal with death and murder and ghosts. The surface part of her was increasingly fractured and shattered, these days, fragments of a mirror swimming on a chasm of black water. Heather Chandler crashed through a glass coffee table, and what was left of Veronica's life went to hell from there.

She drifted, half-asleep, memories and ideas flickering in her mind.

There had been some good times with the Heathers. In freshman year math, Mr. Blake went on and on about how girls couldn't do geometry because they lacked a spatial sense, and Veronica took him personally and proved him wrong. She got a perfect score on that damn test and waved it in Carl Kellerman's stupid face when he bragged about his ninety. Carl called her an ugly geek in front of the whole class.

"Let's show him that no one in the Heathers is ugly or geeky," Heather Chandler told her, and snapped at Duke to hand over the lip gloss. "He will respect you when we're done."

Catching glances from Carl and most of the other boys that they couldn't help but leave was fine, but it was only the tiniest part of the revenge. Veronica planted a note in Carl's locker, promising him special supplies and a serious cut of the takings, and they paid Heather McNamara's college brother a week's lunch money to meet Carl out the back of the football field in a suspicious-looking fedora and sunglasses. He gave Carl vitamin pills and a baggie full of flour. First Carl was nearly expelled for drug dealing, and second became the laughing stock of the school. He'd also been benched from all sports teams for a good six months.

And after that prank, Veronica had found it much less easy to say no to Heather, even when her targets became people like Grace Bailwick, for crimes like wearing the same skirt as Heather while being fifteen pounds heavier. Or people like Martha Dunnstock, mostly for existing.

Heather liked to boast that her father and mother would buy her anything and believe any excuse she gave (which they did), and Veronica had never heard her talk to them in any more civilized way than yelling or raising her middle finger.

Heather tended to phone up Veronica and boast about her incredible dates with College Man David and how superior he was to hormonal high-school neanderthals like Ram and Kurt, but sometimes you wondered, was that a note of insecurity there? And what kind of mature college man wanted to be with a sixteen-year-old anyway?

But Heather's level of public confidence was flawless and she hated mushy stuff. She didn't accept excuses and didn't tender them either.

A vivid memory of Heather alive floated in Veronica's head, Heather taking the lead at the senior kegger despite being only a sophomore at the time, cheeks flushed red with alcohol and excitement, yelling at Veronica not to be such a pillowcase, drawing her into a game of spin-the-bottle that turned out to be fun.

Am I the demonic avenger you want to believe? Heather asked her in her sleep, childish and wistful and wide-eyed. Or just a murdered sixteen-year-old girl, revolting against the injustice of my early death?

Veronica woke up alone in the bleary dawn, cold with sweat and tangled in her sheets, after a very uneasy sleep.

—

Note: "A large bulky figure ..." - Martha's quoting/paraphrasing Jane Austen's Persuasion.

—