September 21st, 2009
The young man crouched in the shadowy Minneapolis street tried to flee the hunter. She grabbed his arms and held him down while he fought like a wild animal, trying to rip and tear with his teeth and nails.
"Come on. Come out," Veronica asked. She shifted the clicker to the ball of her thumb. The ghost was a formless shimmer inside the kid. Every second counted in a possession case. She brought down the clicker and felt the droplet of blood form over her skin. "Leave him and come to me." The hunter's grasp gave the ghost pain. Veronica kept her whispers and murmurs up, compelling it to seek her and her blood.
Out. The ghost left its victim behind and slipped into the air. Veronica gave Martha the signal, and she beat it down with her nightstick and shattered it. A hunter and a seer, partners, working together to take down a ghost.
The kid had collapsed, but he was still breathing fairly well. Martha checked him over. He started trying to wake up almost immediately, blinking his eyes, which was always a good sign. Veronica updated the paramedics with their location, then brushed her small cut with an alcohol wipe.
The young man couldn't have been more than twenty, probably a college student. He'd discarded a backpack that spilt out a bunch of textbooks in his flight from them. He was grunting and trying to get up already; he looked very pale, probably seeming more than he really was because of his black hair. "Ma'am?" he whispered to Martha, dazed and terrified out of his mind. "Please ... thank you, ma'am?"
He had manners, too. Veronica walked over to her partner and their latest rescuee. The kid's angular features and dark clothing brought back a few old memories to her, her dead high school boyfriend, but this boy clearly had more respect for his elders in his little finger than J.D. ever had in his entire body. Veronica was old enough to consider that trait highly valuable in the youth of today, now. The boy coughed, then started to retch as Martha gently held him up. Then the two paramedics arrived, and took him over.
Veronica and Martha were public servants, removalists for the City of Minneapolis for fifteen years and counting. They dealt with routine cases and patrols, sometimes hospice or police duty. Heather Chandler still received Veronica's personal scariest ghost award, with her malicious intelligence and raw power, but the world was big and wide and there were many worse disasters. Veronica's work lay at the local-scale level, one small ghost at a time. About five years after Westerburg, J.D.'s old crew had hit the news for massive collateral damage coverups; they'd ended up in jail. Not Veronica's style. Start small, and get the job done.
Veronica had put down roots here, made the city her own. Minneapolis summer mosquitoes were hell and the long freezing winters were worse, but the local arts scene and breweries were top-notch. Parks, libraries, Friday night shows, and intensely civic-minded people who had a similar affinity to committees as the Emperor Nero to family violence. She and Martha had arrived together to take up the job offer, two years out of removalist academy. Over the years, they'd separated and reconnected any number of times. Martha had taken five years of maternity leave for her two children, a pair of annoyingly cute, freckled, and gap-toothed munchkins in her wallet photos that she'd show at the slightest provocation. Veronica had just come off a six months' posting to supervise an apprentice hunter, a middle-aged father in the market for a career change. It was good to be back together again.
Veronica's pager showed her a message that the area was clean. You needed to take your breaks when you could in this job; they'd patrolled for four hours straight and could use a coffee.
And a cigarette. Or three. "Are you ever going to give those things up?" Martha asked her, part ribbing her though mostly serious. They sat outside the coffee shop on a bench they liked to think of as theirs, looking across at the public library.
"Eventually. New Year's isn't so far away," Veronica said. Time and time again she'd tried. She still hadn't mastered the quitting thing, but lately she'd at least cut down on intake. Maybe it was time to change therapists again, find someone with the know-how to help her kick the habit for good.
There was a lull in conversation while Veronica smoked her next hit. Martha broke the silence. "Got an email from Heather yesterday," she said. Veronica knew she meant Heather McNamara; or rather, Heather Jones or James or whatever her husband's name was. "She's organizing the twentieth anniversary reunion. I won't talk about it again if you're not interested, but if you are ..."
"Not my style," Veronica said. It was Martha, not her, who kept track; Martha who knew that Heather McNamara was a nurse married to a hospital administrator, and was now up to four children, two dogs, and three guinea pigs. Or that Country Club Courtney was the CEO of a computer chip company in Arkansas, or that Heather Duke, a journalist, got bylined in the Washington Post and just published her second novel, which from the cover design looked like an unrelentingly grim piece of dark reflections on society.
"Heather still talks about how you saved her life twice over, you know. It wouldn't hurt you to put yourself out there and meet everyone," Martha hinted. A great double entendre there; Veronica had only just broken up with Tina. Honestly, the breakup was overdue if anything. A woman well into her thirties should not still care about what her family would (and probably didn't) think about coming out of the closet. Veronica knew she had a tendency to attract people on the wrong side of the line of 'fucked up enough to be interesting' and 'way too fucked up to be even remotely suitable'. She'd left a fairly long trail of discarded lovers in her wake, damn her lack of common sense, but she wasn't planning to hand in her ticket and expire out of the dating market any time soon.
"You have fun and come back with the stories of everyone else's intoxicated messes," Veronica told her.
"I'm looking forward to it," Martha said. "High school was mostly hell, but in that last part of it, I felt like things got better. I had you and Heather, and I figured out what I wanted to do with my life. I know things were hard for you after J.D. died. I still wonder sometimes if I'd done things differently, what I could have changed. He was only seventeen. He shouldn't have been apprenticed so early, he had a tough time ..."
One of Jason Dean's afterlives was as a footnote in an academic paper arguing for reform of the apprentice removalist system in the United States. Veronica kind of thought the authors had missed the point.
"He was reckless and violent long before he came to Sherwood. He was just a kid, we were all just kids. But I think sooner or later something like that would have happened to him," Veronica said.
In a way, he'd died well. She could imagine J.D. exploiting it in the afterlife, twisting it into a sarcastic gloat. Yes, I chose to go out that way. That's the perfecto beauty of it. You'll grow up, you'll start to wonder ... what if I failed to put out a helping hand in time? What if I could have stopped this poor boy's self-sacrificing suicide? he'd mock. Well, Veronica was admittedly something of an asshole back then, but he was a much bigger asshole, and she had her own damage to work out.
Veronica didn't actually believe in an afterlife, but if there was one, she'd like to think J.D. was still fuming mad about getting partial and undeserved credit for saving two Heathers.
"Perhaps," Martha sighed. "At least write your own RSVP, okay? It's only right to answer her."
"I'll be too busy to go, with the campaign heating up," Veronica said. With city elections on the horizon, she'd volunteered for envelope-stuffing, doorknocking, and generally corralling various people to actually do the things they impulsively put their hands up to do. Politics was high school writ large. Her mayoral candidate wasn't a bad sort. Decent ideas, and more importantly he put his nose to the grindstone and got the job done. Doing the right thing was the art of marrying pragmatism to idealism, and hoping that the resulting offspring inherited the best rather than the worst of its parents. Or like knowing you probably weren't a good person, deep down, but acting like you were anyway.
It was a time of optimism in politics. Not a bad time to be alive.
"You should run for city council yourself. I'm serious," Martha said. "You'd be a lot better than some of the current bunch. You're a long-term public servant, you're good at getting people to listen to you, and you do the research. You could really make a difference."
"Who knows?" Veronica said. She still knew how to snare and keep the attention of a room, how to walk as if with untouchable power and freeze with a snare or sardonic put-down. She mostly used it for socially acceptable causes these days, volunteered her time and made her choices one day at a time.
Except I've got more buried bodies than the average politician, there's that.
Veronica stood up, throwing the last of her cigarette into the bin. "I don't want to get all mushy on you, Martha, but I'm happy where I am. Shall we motor, partner?"