The Ghost in the Hall (Beyond the Veil Book 1) Read online

  THE GHOST IN THE HALL

  BEYOND THE VEIL: BOOK ONE

  KM AVERY

  Copyright © 2021 by KM Avery

  ASIN: B09K5Y75VH

  ISBN: 9798752654268

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Epilogue

  Follow Me!

  About the Author

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  For Kat, who needs to take about 75% of the responsibility for this being a Thing; and for my husband, who puts up with the incessant clicking of keyboard keys, even in the middle of movies; and the cats, who have given up lap-time to a computer.

  1

  My name is Edward Campion. (No, for the nerdy history buffs out there, not Edmund—Edward.) And it’s actually Ward. Not Ed. Really not Eddie. And anyone who tries to call me Ned or, God forbid, Neddy will have their balls served up on a silver platter. Or maybe just a paper plate. I’m not exactly rolling in silver platters. Paper or mis-matched thrift store flatware is what you get with me.

  So my story…

  I was about six when wave one of the plague hit. Okay, so it wasn’t really the plague, per se. There were no buboes on people’s necks to indicate who was or wasn’t infected. And the plague—the Black Death, anyway—was a lot deadlier. That plague killed somewhere between thirty and sixty percent of Europe. This one only got something like eight percent straight off. Including my mother. Only a few weeks later, my father dropped me off with my mom’s sister, my Aunt Pearl in Baltimore. Then he turned around and drove himself straight back home, drank himself into a stupor, and wandered out into a snowbank in January in the upper peninsula of Michigan, slipped into a coma, and never woke up.

  That made Dad part of the nine percent who died as a result of the suicides and surging violence that followed in the wake of a global pandemic and the world-wide economic depression that resulted.

  Let me put this into perspective.

  The Spanish Flu of 1918 impacted one third of the global population. Ditto with the Arcanavirus. The Spanish Flu killed between three and five percent of the population. The Arcanavirus got eight percent. Double. Add in the victims of suicide and violence, and it was responsible for the deaths of about seventeen percent of the population. That’s almost two out of every ten people.

  Another seven percent found themselves with bizarre new… abilities. Like talking to dead people. Or knowing things about every object they touch. Seeing the future, or the past. The kinds of things we used to call being psychic or doing magic.

  And then there was the last, much-to-be-pitied six percent. People who changed as a result of contracting the disease rather than getting better or dying.

  Some of them thought they died. And then wished they had… or, rather, they sort of did die, they just didn’t stay that way. No, not zombies. Those are still very much Hollywood-only. Vampires, though. And ghouls. Those are real.

  Imagine saying goodbye to grandma in the hospital only to find that she woke up a few hours later and ate the face off the poor guy working the morgue. Those folks make a hell of a lot more in hazard pay these days. And most of them also wear neck guards and tool-belts with a variety of ways to kill things. A little more permanently the second time around. Most ghouls don’t make it back out of the morgue. I guess they’re a bitch to wrestle into submission. And feed. The few that get successfully muzzled seem nice enough once they work through their hunger issues… Ditto for vampires.

  What that six percent became are known collectively as Arcanids, or Nids for short. There are a handful of Arcanavirus metamorphoses. Some of them sprout fur and fangs. The shifters. Werewolves, werecats, were-whatevers. Turns out your genetics determine your were-species. Up side, I’ve never heard of anybody becoming one by getting bitten. Ditto for vampires and ghouls, actually. The whole notion of turning someone is just a fairy tale. Either you’re born that way to one or the other parent who’s already an Arcanid, or you get Arcanavirus and end up that way. At least Nids are immune to the Arcanavirus—they can’t even carry it, so if one of them bites you, you might have to worry about sepsis or maybe even rabies, but you won’t have to worry about the virus.

  There are other Nids besides the Hollywood horror monsters, of course. Some aren’t nearly as frightening. Elves, with their elongated bones and ears; and fauns, with horns and the legs and hooves of goats. And then there are orcs, with their greenish skin and lower fangs and muscular bulk. Bigger than most, sharper teeth, the protruding lower jaw with the sizeable canines that are visible even when their mouths are closed. An awful lot of their families just reject them outright after they change. Talk about insult to injury.

  Scientists tried their best to find a cure, or at least a vaccine. And they failed. Early vaccine trials turned into new cases almost immediately. For this disease, there was no making the Arcanavirus inert. No using a “dead” version—because when they tried it, the damn thing came back from the dead. Kind of like some of its victims.

  They tried creating mRNA vaccines. That just… didn’t work. The Arcanavirus might look and act like a normal virus, but we’re not talking about a cough here. It carries magic. Arcane abilities and attributes. It changes not just your DNA—which it does, by the way—but also something fundamental about your relationship to the metaphysical part of the world that science doesn’t yet fully understand, although let me tell you, metaphysics came back as a discipline of academic study hardcore once we realized that magic was fucking real.

  Magic was real, and magic practitioners were real. In other words, some of the people who said they were witches really were witches. Entirely unrelated to the Arcanavirus, by the way. Or, at least, they weren’t given their abilities by it. One theory said that one of them caused it. Not on purpose. But one of them contracted a nasty virus and that’s where it picked up the magic that made Arcanavirus arcane. But that’s just a theory.

  In the aftermath of the pandemic, people did what people do best. They shunned. They ostracized. They praised the beautiful and rejected the ostensibly ugly. Those whose bodies were no longer considered acceptable to their families and friends banded together, forming communities and slums with others like them or others in similar situations. Not legally, of course. Legally they had the same rights as everyone else. But since when has that mattered to humanity?

  The fauns, some of the shifters, and vampires managed to mingle. Some of them even managed to pass—shifters, mostly—as human or human-with-brand-new-magic. The few surviving ghouls and the orcs… they lived mostly in segregated or low-income neighborhoods, working the jobs that no one else wanted to work and trying to live their lives under the proverbial radar. Only the elves managed to get by in the so-called normal world without too much effort.

  It was a repeat of the same, age-old human bullshit. We don’t manage to reduce racism based on melanin until we have something even more obvious—like fur or fangs—to use as a means of discrimination.

  Because even in the midst of a global pandemic, people continue to suck.

  The real kicker of the Arcanavirus was that unless you ended up as a Nid, you could get it again, and surviving it once was no guarantee that you’d live through it a second time. Or a third. The only up side of re-infection was that if you were still human after round one, you were going to stay human. If you did acquire some magic the first time, you weren’t going to acquire new abilities in round two. Whatever you got the first time is what you got. So you could get really sick or die, but at least if you did recover, you were guaranteed to still look like you on the other side of it.

  But since there was no cure and no vaccine, pandemic protocols are still very much in effect. No sharing food or beverages with casual acquaintances. Masks worn in public places. Special UV filters on all forms of public transportation and in public buildings. Lines and dots and arrows on the floor telling you where you can and can’t go to stay away from other people.

  At least we figured out pretty quickly that sunlight kills it, so you can be outside without a mask and essentia
lly no risk.

  And if you do come into contact with someone who falls sick or grows fangs? If the government catches you, you spend seventy-two hours in a room with people staring at you and swabbing your nose or poking you with needles to see if you develop either symptoms or antibodies. If you do, you go into an isolation ward in the hospital. Nothing, and you can go back home, a little more rumpled for the experience.

  Me?

  I’m what they call an Arc-human. Still human. Mostly. We come in several flavors, too, although you can’t tell just by looking at us. At least not by looking at our bodies. A lot of Arcs, at least those who accept what they are, wear the symbols of our newly acquired arcane abilities.

  It’s funny, actually, to see your average middle-aged white yoga-practitioner swathed in scarves, bangles, and wearing hoop earrings because she suddenly acquired the ability of foresight after twelve days of a nasty fever. Or the paunchy guy with a beard who wore flannel and carried a fishing pole before he went into the hospital and who suddenly has developed the taste for black leather and ankhs to go with his newfound ability to speak with the dead.

  That last one would be me. Even though the first wave hit when I was six, I didn’t catch it until two weeks after my twenty-eighth birthday. I’m not sure if it still counts as a pandemic once it’s into its third decade or just the “new normal,” but life hasn’t changed much from when I was a kid. For the most part, the city-wide infection numbers are around a few hundred all the time. There are still larger outbreaks here and there, such as the one that hit my incredibly boring job maintaining the website of a massive and inhuman corporation that mostly just made money out of other people’s money.

  Somebody came to work sick, despite all the policies that tell you not to, and it was somebody’s birthday, so there were cupcakes in the breakroom that everybody took back to their cubicles and offices to eat. And since somebody had made those cupcakes, somebody had put their germs all over them, all over the napkins, and all over the plates they’d also brought. And then over the next three days, everybody else ran around spreading it because they didn’t realize they’d been exposed and were carrying it.

  More than three-quarters of the office went down. Most of them came back. Some of us never did, either because of long-term sickness, newly-acquired arcane or Nid status, or death.

  I lost the paunch during the twenty-nine days of semi-delusional fever and vomiting followed by two months in rehab while I re-learned how to eat and walk. And figure out how to actually cope with the fact that I could now see and hear actual dead people. That took more than a bit of getting used to.

  At least the black leather looks far better on me now than it ever would have before I caught the damn virus.

  It also only lasted about six months before I realized that it really wasn’t me, and I went back to the old comfy jeans, t-shirts, and flannel, although I did ditch the beard. I mostly only grew it to hide my lack of jawline, which I have again now, thanks to the Arcanavirus and my exciting new food allergies and nutritional processing problems. I take about ten different prescription supplements and two antihistamines to help my body deal with the aftermath of Arcana.

  I keep the leather for the days when I need to look the part for a job. Some of my contracts are with law enforcement or pro bono cases for people whose sob stories get to me or Auntie Pearl, and they don’t usually care what I look like. But when I take the better-paying gigs, they want a little drama to go with their dead—the higher the price tag, the more drama they expect. And since they’re paying for it, I’m okay providing it.

  At least my new Arc skills mean that it doesn’t matter that the soulless corporation fired me for not coming to work while I was busy puking my guts out and getting fed by tube so that I didn’t join the eight percent mortality rate. It only took about a year for me to get established as a medium, so now I make enough to pay back my own medical bills. When I’ve finally done that in a couple of years, I’m going to incrementally start paying Auntie Pearl back for the rest of it without her noticing, since she would be mad if she knew I was doing it because she thinks of me as her kid. Which, given that I’ve been with her since I was six, I kind of am.

  All the more reason for me to try to pay her back, although I know I’ll never be able to. But it isn’t going to stop me from trying.

  All that was the reason why, on this particular day, I was in full leather gear, ankh around my neck, selenite studs in my ears, and a single amethyst in my right nostril to aid with spiritual communication. I’m not sure how much they actually help, but my birthday is in February, so I like wearing the amethyst anyway.

  I used to have to take it out every time I went to work—at the heartless corporation—because it didn’t go with their so-called professional image. Suits and button-down shirts and chintzy bad ties aren’t apparently complemented by an amethyst nose stud. To be honest, it usually clashes with the flannel, too. Men’s flannel just doesn’t tend to come in tones that complement amethyst.

  Not that I really care. Auntie Pearl usually has something to say about my lack of color-coordination, although always with that tell-tale twinkle in her eye that says she doesn’t really mind, especially since she’s usually wearing at least one article of clothing or accessory displaying a cat. Sometimes a cat she actually owns, like the sweatshirt I had made for her when I was ten at that put-your-photo-on-it store in the mall, which has a fairly terrible cutout photo of her now-deceased favorite black furball, Milton.

  Yes, the cat’s name was Milton. Auntie Pearl loves books. Her first cat—one she had way back in her twenties—was named Shakespeare and lived to be almost twenty. There’s a picture of him on the fridge. Big ginger tom. At the moment, she has four: Bertha, a giant white prima donna of a cat with long fur she can’t keep at all orderly so Pearl keeps having her shaved; Winston, a sleek grey cat with a white smudge on his forehead; Gatsby, an undersized hellion of an orange tabby; and Annabelle Lee, one of those weird hairless Sphinx cats. My aunt calls her “Belly.” Pearl also named Peveril, an oversized long-haired tan-and-brown fluff-ball of a cat that she rescued for me as a kitten when I was recovering on her couch.

  On the cat side of the family, Bertha hates me, Winston and Gatsby tolerate me as belonging to Auntie Pearl, and Belly will accept pets on alternate Tuesdays and Sundays if there are treats involved. Pevs and I, of course, are best buds. He sleeps on my bed, eats my food, and keeps watch in the bathroom when I take showers. Peveril knows he’s my cat and I’m his person. And the rest know exactly which hand fills their food bowls (not mine).

  Anyway, enough about the cats.

  Clearly I don’t have much of a social life.

  Back to me and the gig and leather pants. Leather pants, black cotton t-shirt, leather jacket, scarf instead of a conventional mask. All black, except the scarf, which was embroidered with silver and gold constellations. Silver ankh. Selenite and amethyst. Black leather belt with blue agate cabochons set in silver. Black leather boots. At least four cows have died for the making of my clothing. But I save up and buy high-end so they last a while. And the jacket was actually my father’s. One of the few things I have of his, since most of what he and Mom owned had to be sold to pay for their funerals.

  I and my dad’s leather jacket pulled into one of those circular pull-through driveways owned primarily by the very wealthy. This one had a massive gate between two brick pillars, each topped with a cement or stone artichoke. For some reason I don’t fully understand, artichokes—which are tasty, but now borderline toxic to me—have somehow come to represent prosperity and wealth when cast in a rigid substance and mounted on top of things.