My eyes narrowed. “That’s not funny, Selene. Bringing up my dead ex? Not classy.”
Selene’s easy smile faltered. “No, Ryan, it’s really me. I’m possessing Selene’s body at the moment, but I’m here. In the flesh… borrowed flesh, but still.”
Time out.
In the past year I went from being a gas station attendant to being a gun-toting, monster-hunting chosen one who stopped a demon invasion in its tracks. I have three hot monster girlfriends. Before that though, I was a regular guy who loved just one girl.
A girl named Hannah.
Unfortunately, Hannah died in a car crash out in the woods beyond Eastport. That same accident cost me my left hand, my fiance, my dreams of being a firefighter, and any chance I had had at being debt free. Medical bills for an amputation? Forget about it.
Well, my job at the Bureau was way cooler than being a firefighter anyway. Not to mention that it paid well enough that my debt problem would soon be solved. Due some mutagenic factors I still didn’t really understand, I gained powers from either fighting or fucking monstrous or magical entities. So when Tabitha and I got together, I gained her healing factor and regrew my left hand.
But what’s a hand, a job, and a handful of badass bitches compared to your first love?
Selene…or Hannah, I guess, leaned in again for a kiss.
Once again I pushed her back. “Whoa, whoa, no. Okay? No. Look, maybe you’re really Hannah, let’s just say I buy that. Stranger things have happened this year. But what about Selene? You said you’re possessing her. What does that even mean? Is she okay with this? Is she in any pain, is she even awake right now? You’ve raised a lot of questions in a very short amount of time here and I’m a little busy at the moment trying to stop another monster freakout like the one we just took care of upstairs.”
Hannah/Selene frowned. “I… I thought you’d be happy to see me.”
“I am happy to see you. This just feels off. You don’t look like you. It could be a trick.”
“Would you prefer to hear it from Selene?” Hannah offered.
“Yes, yes I would.”
“Okay, no problem.” Selene’s head tilted back and a white vaporous figure floated free of her chest. The figure resolved into a semi-transparent gaseous outline of Hannah as she had looked in life, and Selene shook herself slightly. Her body language shifted subtly. Gone was the saunter and the confidence Hannah had exuded in life, and in its place was a stiff and practiced tough girl persona. Selene was the kind of girl whose hand never seemed to be too far away from her sidearm.
“Uh, hey Ryan. Good to see you. I heard you wanted some clarification on the whole possession thing, yeah?”
I nodded, my eyes darting back and forth between the ghostly image of my beautiful ex and the hot girl in uniform standing before me. Maybe Euna and Lana were right and I really could use some downtime, because this was all a bit much.
“Is every day this crazy when you’re on the job with him?” Lana asked.
“More or less. It’s never dull. Usually pretty dangerous. But there’s lots of hot chicks and monster fights, so I mean, it’s not so bad,” Euna admitted.
Selene cleared her throat. “So, just a little bit of backstory. You remember earlier in the year when all those flashing lights popped up in the skies above Eastport?”
“The anomalies, yeah,” I replied instantly. Anomalies were wildly occurring portals that linked our world to other worlds throughout the multiverse. Eastport was something of an anomaly hotspot, so we got a lot of them around here.
Every time anyone tried to explain it to me more than that my eyes glazed over and I got really bored. All the technobabble about string theory and special equations just sounded like gibberish to me. The important part was anomalies cropped up, monsters fell out, and it was my job to either shoot them or get them up to speed on how they could be incorporated into our world safely without disturbing the human population who did not know monsters existed.
“Yeah, well, apparently a bunch of entities came through those anomalies.”
I frowned. “No. The Bureau would’ve detected any creatures or demons that came through. We scan for that sort of thing around the clock. I had my best operator on the scanner myself and she said nothing came through.”
Hannah folded her wispy arms and Selene shrugged. “Well, your operator got it wrong.”
The fuck I did, Io suddenly interjected. Who’s the new girl? I already don’t like her.
I winced. Calm down, Io. I’ll handle it.
Ooh, is that that hot cop girl? Nevermind. I take it back, she’s cool.
I cracked a small smile. One of the side effects of my bonding to Io, Tabitha, and Euna was that our psyches started to blend together. If I found a girl attractive, so did they. They usually seemed to know these things a lot sooner than I did, too, and were constantly trying to set me up with new girls.
For some reason though, just sleeping with a random monster chick didn’t automatically create a bond or grant me any of their magical powers. We found that out with the four other hopefuls who I definitely did sleep with but never quite clicked with. There had to be an emotional element to it or all I got was laid.
I know, I know, my life clearly sucks.
“While I doubt very much that she ‘got it wrong,’ I suppose there’s a first time for everything. Care to explain whatever it was that we missed?”
“When that demon tried to open a portal to hell he miscalculated and ended up linking it to the afterworld instead. What came through didn’t register on your sensors because your sensors were expecting living beings. Instead, hundreds or maybe even thousands of phantoms poured through those anomalies and flooded all across Eastport. Do you remember that weird flu that passed through over the summer but kind of went away out of nowhere?”
Euna and I exchanged a glance. Now that Selene mentioned it, that flu thing had been pretty weird. Wrong season for that many people to get sick all at once. And it had kind of just disappeared once the rainy weather started, which was a little bass backwards.
“That was the phantoms all trying to find good hosts,” Selene explained. “See, most people can’t handle possession. The human host gets sick and their body starts rejecting everything to do with the spirit trying to feed on their energy. The phantom gets weaker and weaker every time they fail to take a host. It’s a very hostile and destructive situation all around. But a few of us regular mortals, for whatever reason, can act as perfect hosts. We don’t get sick, we retain our free will, and it is more of a symbiotic relationship than a possession. For instance, I think of Hannah as more of a…passenger, rather than a parasite. And yes, Ryan, she has my full consent to do whatever her heart desires with you using my body. Fuck knows I wasn’t getting any when it was just me in here,” Selene explained, ending with a self-deprecating jibe.
I opened my mouth and closed it once or twice as a perfect reply to all of that eluded me. Eventually I landed on, “Wow. That’s a lot to process. So are you saying that you,” I pointed to Hannah, “escaped with the rest of these phantoms?”
Selene blinked in surprise. “You can see her?”
“Yeah, she’s right there.”
Selene stared at me like I’d suddenly sprouted a second head. “You have no idea how many days I’ve spent trying to find someone else who could see phantoms. My entire department thinks I’m nuts right now. They stuck me on parking ticket duty for a while and a bunch of other bullshit because they think I’ve lost my marbles talking about ghosts. And then you can just see her like it’s no problem.”
I held up my hands apologetically. “If it helps, I’m sort of a ‘chosen one’ apparently.”
Selene’s mouth formed a thin line. “That doesn’t really help me. But to answer your question, no. All the phantoms that fled through those anomalies were the ones stuck in processing. They hadn’t crossed over the river yet. Hannah was already living it up…poor choice of words, my bad. She was already fully established within the world of the dead and had been working her way up through the ranks of their version of the Bureau.”
I glanced over at Hannah. “Oh? When were you planning on telling me this?”
After a permissive nod from her host, Hannah zoomed back into Selene’s body and took back over. Instantly, Selene’s body language shifted back into that confident strut. She stood taller and thrust Selene’s chest out just a little bit further, and smiled the moment she looked at me. “You’re not the only one going on adventures, Ryan. My work with the Omega Division is what allowed me to contact you in the first place. As an Oracle, I was sent here the minute the breach was detected. I found Selene. We discovered that she’s a perfect host. And after a short adjustment period, we have been tracking down the phantom fugitives ever since.”
Phantom fugitives, I repeated to myself. Huh.
“So you’re a marshal from the afterworld, tracking down runaway phantoms and bringing them back to limbo?”
Hannah/Selene got a dreamy look in her eyes. “I never thought of it like that. That’s a nice way of putting it, actually. Makes me feel like… like…”
“Like you finally got to become a cop like you always wanted?” I suggested.
She smiled. “Yeah. And look, I even got to have Selene as my partner!”
I inhaled sharply, overcome with sudden emotion. In life, all Hannah wanted to be was a police officer. She wanted to defend people, help clean up our broken city and stop it from becoming just another meat grinder like Westburg (don’t get me started on Westburg). That car accident robbed her of that chance. Yet now here she was, getting to live her dream (okay, bad phrasing, I’ll admit).
A soft hand alighted on my shoulder. I looked over to see Euna standing there, concern etched across her face. Lana hovered just behind her, also looking worried.
“Are you okay, Ryan? I just got a huge wave of sadness through our bond.”
I forced myself to breathe deeply and nodded as best I could. “Sorry, it’s just taking me a second here. I’m struggling to process all of this right now.” I looked back up into Selene’s eyes, and Hannah looked back through them. “So… did you girls just track me down to say hey, or did you need some help?”
Hannah smiled. “Why can’t it be a little bit of both? Yes, we’re in over our heads and we could use some help. But I chose you for a reason, Ryan. You’re our best hope to save Eastport. I need you to be my chosen one… again.”
Seeing that gorgeous smile crossing her face again, doing my best to ignore the fact that it wasn’t really her face this time around, was all it took to completely eliminate any chance that I was going to say no to her. Every resource I had at my disposal would be dedicated to helping her roundup these phantom fugitives and end this ghost apocalypse before it got started. I opened my mouth to tell her as much, when movement outside the office building caught my eye.
At my curious expression, Selene/Hannah glanced over her shoulder.
“Are those…zombies?” Lana squeaked out in a miniscule and petrified voice.