Born Again Read online

  Ben stepped around the box Peter had just left there on the carpet, wondering if there wasn’t a better place to put it before they officially called this demon banished. He headed toward Peter and April kneeling beside the brothers and lifted his hands to examine his palms. The pain had faded, but now that infuriating itch had taken over, reminding him of how desperately he’d wanted to scratch his casted hands in the hospital after burning them the first time. He gave credit to Ian for that one, too. The fully healed patches of skin didn’t look burned, though they still carried that shiny new glint of fresh scar tissue. Or in Ben’s case, fresh skin grafts.

  Ben had burned down the abandoned orphanage himself after they’d banished the Guardian. By shooting green fire out of his hands. What Ian knew and Peter didn’t was that Ben had had nothing to do with that; Ian had been running the show, driving Ben’s body like a bumper car, and had somehow managed the green fire without stopping to consider what it might do to Ben’s very alive, very real hands. As far as he knew from talking to both Peter and Ian—not at the same time, obviously—he’d passed out afterwards and spent four days in an inexplicable coma while the hospital staff scanned his brain, tested his blood, and tried to figure out what could possibly have caused such a thing. Oh, right. And they’d grafted skin from his thigh to his palms, because the burns had been too severe to leave well enough alone.

  He reached his friends and the unconscious brothers, standing over all of them just so he didn’t have to awkwardly hunker down so close to April. Of course he wanted to, but the night Ian had blasted green fire out of Ben’s hands had also been the night Ian seriously screwed up whatever thing had been building between Ben and April over the few weeks before. She’d kissed him … Ian … them after the stone sealed around the Guardian and fell to the floor, but then—

  Nope. Ben wasn’t going to think about that right now. He didn’t want to think about it ever, honestly, but that was a little difficult seeing as April had almost literally muscled her way into his and Peter’s little group of demon-hunting for two. She’d saved both their lives and Ben’s on more than one occasion, and she had her own kooky ability to help with that. Ben almost laughed aloud when he wondered if her dreams had told her about that stupid pillow.

  April turned from where she knelt to look up at him. “They’re not waking up.”

  ‘Obviously.’

  Ben closed his eyes with a sigh. He didn’t know what was happening with Ian’s attitude lately, but the spirit in his head sounded like an angsty, sarcastic teenager in a hate-hate relationship with the rest of the world. Well, in some ways, he kind of was.

  “They’re still alive, right?” Ben asked, and April nodded. Her frown of concern made him want to wrap his arm around her. Yeah, like now was the appropriate time.

  ‘She wants to speak to you,’ Ian said, his tone suddenly all business with a soft edge of sympathy mixed in.

  Now?

  ‘Yep. Says it’s important.’

  “Okay.” Ben wiped his hands on his pants, trying to ready himself for the trip to the spirit realm that hadn’t gotten easier since the first time the demon Ebra had tricked him into it. Not even a little. “Just one more thing I hafta do, guys,” he told April and Peter. “I’ll be—”

  A fierce pressure burst in his chest and imploded at the same time. Then he blinked and took in the nasty, green-tinged sight of the spirit realm. He stood in the same apartment, the same living room, at the wall beside the same hallway, but everything was different. A green film coated everything—the now-stained carpet, the furniture, the dim, eerie glow filtering in through the window despite the fact that in Ben’s world, it was dark outside. Long, jagged cracks split the apartment walls, filled with some putrid, black-green sludge he’d never understand here. This was the spirit realm, the other dimension—he hoped there weren’t others—where spirits of the dead and many, many eternal beings, demons or otherwise, existed in a timeline much faster than what living minds could comprehend. Ian had told him, the night Ben agreed to let his friend share his body so they could banish the Guardian, that a minute in the living world was something like two days on this plane. That Ian had essentially been stuck in the spirit realm while the Guardian tortured his shell of a body for something like thirty thousand years. Too long, to say the least, but it had given Ian the time to learn more about how all this realm-demon-spirit stuff worked than Ben ever could.

  Catching his breath again after the jump—or shift; he still hadn’t decided what to call this bit—Ben turned around to see the twelve-year-old version of his technically-not-dead friend smiling politely at him. “Seriously? You couldn’t let me finish my sentence first?”

  Ian shrugged. “What were you gonna say? ‘I’ll be right back?’” Yeah, actually, that was exactly what Ben had planned to say, and Ian knew it. He was inside Ben’s head. “That’s a stupid thing to say, anyway. They won’t even realize you left.”

  Finally, here, Ben could speak freely with Ian without anyone overhearing and thinking he’d lost his mind. Again. He opened his mouth to tell the guy to cut it out with the criticism, but Ian nodded toward the apartment wall beside the hall. Ben turned around again.

  He hadn’t noticed that, while Peter and April had disappeared when he entered the spirit realm, the brothers they’d been trying to save still remained, lying on the floor just as they’d fallen in the real world. That was weird. Ben had to work it out for a minute. April and Peter would never come to this place while they were totally still alive. As far as he knew, Ben was the only living person who could jump back and forth between realms, seeing as he’d stepped through a portal when he wasn’t supposed to eleven years ago and somehow became one himself. According to Ian. So those brothers shouldn’t have been here. Then it clicked. If they’d showed up here, too, either the demon had really messed them up in a way he didn’t understand, or they were dying. Or they’d already kicked the bucket in the millisecond between Ben’s interrupted sentence and Ian carting him off into the spirit world.

  “Hi, Ben.”

  He jumped at the unexpected voice, then turned to see the spirit of the woman who had called him to this task in the first place. She wore the same maroon sweater, muddied in the green light of this realm, her long dark hair falling over her shoulders to frame her face. Unlike Ben and Ian, both of whom were still technically alive, this woman’s skin held the gray tinge of the dead spirits here, her colors muted, marking her as one who had passed and would not leave this realm until her unfinished business was … well, finished. Hopefully, she would; Ian had told him that some spirits never left this place. But this woman was making an effort, and she’d come to Ben Robinson to get the job done.

  “Hi,” he said. “Uh…”

  “My name is Melanie.”

  “Melanie.” Ben nodded awkwardly. It was definitely weird to stand here and talk to her now, especially knowing she was dead and especially after having heard nothing but tortured wails coming out of her mouth for almost a week. Not to mention the constant aggravation of it when he and his friends had stumbled into that apartment to find her sons strangled by a black cloud of demon greed.

  Her sons.

  Ben glanced again at where they lay motionless on the nasty-looking carpet. Apparently, he and his friends hadn’t been fast enough. “I’m so sorry,” he muttered, feeling like a complete failure. What a way to start a burgeoning career as a kicker of demon ass—banish it into the stone, but sorry, the loved ones are just gonna die anyway.

  Melanie shook her head with a gentle smile and stepped toward her grown boys. She didn’t look much older than mid-thirties, but Ben guessed that just meant she’d died when these men were still fairly young. “Don’t apologize,” she said. “They’ll be fine.” She stopped beside them and stared down at their slack faces, eerily like Ben had beside April and Peter. “You still reached them in time. That thing would have pulled them all the way here if it had the chance. It would have bound them to it forever the way it
wanted me bound before I refused.”

  This was starting to sound oddly like a Sci-Fi movie; when did normal dead people start talking like this, all calm and ethereal and smiling at their half-dead kids? Ben cleared his throat. “Why did it want you?” He couldn’t help it. He’d wondered that since the day she’d found him and Ian in the spirit realm, but her constant screaming and tearing at her own hair made that pretty much impossible.

  Melanie’s eyes grew wide when she looked back up at him, as if she’d forgotten he was there. “I’m not sure. I’d dabbled in this stuff when I was alive. Spirits. Harmless ones only. I think I caught that thing’s attention, nothing more.”

  “Oh.” Ben nodded, as if that made all the sense in the world. Apparently, to dead people, it did.

  “Thank you,” she said.”

  “I… uh, you’re welcome.” Ben heard Ian snigger softly behind him, but hey, he was new at this part. “But they’re still here…” He gestured toward the unconscious men on the floor.

  Melanie knelt, leaned over her sons, and raised her palms over each of their chests. “Not for long.” She looked at Ben again. “Will you tell them something for me?”

  Ben turned back to glance at Ian, wondering if that was even allowed. His friend folded his arms with a smirk and just nodded. “Sure.”

  “Their names are Trevor and James,” she said. “Tell them I will always love them.” Then a grin broke the serenity of her face, and she dipped her head toward Ben. “And tell James he needs to move out of this apartment and marry that girl already.”

  For the first time, Ben saw a glimpse of the witty, confident woman Melanie must have been when she was alive, before the terror of her sons’ fate had followed her all the way into death. He nodded. “Okay.”

  The woman turned back to her sons and lowered her palms to their chests, pressing into them with a force Ben thought looked particularly painful. Then she closed her eyes, and the green light of the spirit realm glowed beneath her hands. The brightness of it grew, surrounded all three of them, and then they were gone.

  “I’ve only seen that happen a few times,” Ian said behind him. “This was way cooler.”

  Ben turned around. “Did she… take them with her?”

  “I don’t think so.” Ian squinted. “Probably sent them back.”

  “Back?”

  The thirty-thousand-year-old spirit with a twelve-year-old’s face squinted. “Back to life?”

  Ben chuckled. It didn’t happen often, but Ian looked especially uncomfortable with his own vague reply. “Let’s go find out, huh?”

  Ian clapped his hands together.

  2

  The jolting return to the real world made Ben take a deep, sharp breath. The green dropped from the air, the apartment once again looked like a regular, relatively clean home—at least as clean as it could be with two brothers in their twenties living there—and Ian had returned to his permanent place inside Ben’s mind only. Plus, Melanie’s sons were back where they’d always been, lying there while April and Peter knelt over them in concern.

  He hadn’t been in the spirit realm that long, so it wasn’t the worst return. But Ben staggered a little under the rush of dizziness.

  Peter turned toward him with a frown. “You’ll be what?”

  “Huh?”

  April looked back at him too. “You okay?”

  Ben glanced around the room. “Yep. Just a little dizzy.” He should have remembered he’d come back at pretty much the same instant he’d left, with his sentence cut off in the middle. “What about them?” He nodded at the brothers.

  That frown of confusion on April’s face was starting to bring back a lot of memories—all from a time when people used to look at Ben like he’d turned a different color or grown an extra limb. He hated seeing that behind her light-blue eyes. “Ben, I just said they aren’t—”

  One of the brothers groaned and stirred on the floor.

  ‘Don’t tell me that wasn’t perfect timing,’ Ian said.

  The first man who might have just been brought back to this side of the line between life and death by his mother’s released spirit pushed himself up on shaky arms and shook his head. Then he noticed the three strangers crowded around him in his living room and froze. “Dude,” he whispered, shaking his brother’s shoulder with wide eyes. “Dude, wake up.” He shook harder, glancing quickly from Ben to April to Peter like a rabbit trying to make the best choice between staying put and crossing a busy road.

  His brother moaned in almost exactly the same way, then jerked his shoulder away from the hand vigorously shaking him. “Cut it out,” the second guy grumbled.

  Ben had to remind himself of their names—Trevor and James. Only when the second brother sat up and leaned against the wall, finally realizing why he’d been shaken so hard, did Ben realize he’d never be able to tell them apart. Even if he’d met them before. They were twins.

  Maybe he shouldn’t have been so surprised, but it wasn’t like Ben and his friends had had the time to closely inspect these guys’ faces. They’d been just a little more concerned with the massive, writhing mass of demon strangling its victims in midair and doing whatever else it meant to do to them. Not to mention the deafening wails of their mother’s spirit, who was most likely somewhere else entirely. Ben didn’t think anyone would be hearing from her again any time soon. But her shrieking alone had made it hard enough to focus on anything.

  “Hi,” April said sweetly, looking at them with that smile that made Ben melt like an ice cube in the sun. Apparently, it only had that effect on him.

  “What are you doing in our apartment?” the first brother asked.

  “Who are you?” the second added.

  “Oh, just your friendly neighborhood demon hunters,” Peter replied.

  “Huh?” The first brother jerked his head back in confusion. April scowled at Peter and gently slapped his chest with the back of her hand.

  Peter shrugged. “What? That was awesome.”

  For once, Ian didn’t comment on someone else’s jokes, and Ben took a deep breath of relief. “Somebody asked us to help you,” he told them. It felt a little odd to still be standing now when everyone else was on the floor, but it would have been even weirder to get up in their faces if he knelt or sat. So instead, he just slowly stepped back until he could lean against the arm of the couch.

  “Who?” the second brother asked, then his eyes widened. “Was it Sharon?” His head whipped toward his brother. “Dude, I told you she was trying to mess with us. She hates me.”

  His brother leaned away from him and rolled his eyes. “No she doesn’t.”

  “Sharon said we needed help, huh?” the second brother asked Ben. Peter and April exchanged an awkward glance.

  “Uh… no.” Ben put his hands on the couch’s armrest and leaned forward.

  “What do you guys remember about what happened?” As always, April seemed impervious to these kinds of suddenly uncomfortable situations. She was always thinking clearly and got right down to the important stuff. Fortunately, Ben and Peter had a particular lack of those same qualities, which made it a lot easier for them to keep her around.

  ‘Yeah, that’s why you want her with you,’ Ian quipped.

  Shut up.

  The first brother frowned, blinking at the floor. Apparently, he did remember; his eyes grew wide, and he stared with a laser-like focus at the carpet in front of him. “Holy sh—”

  “We came home,” his twin added, staring at his brother until they were finally looking at each other again. “And there was this thing…”

  “Right there.” The first brother pointed to the center of the living room where, yes, in fact, the demon had been writhing around in the air. “It was black. And cold. Someone was screaming.”

  “And then we…” The second brother grabbed his own throat, like he was trying to confirm the sensation he remembered. They stared at each other again. “That’s impossible.”

  “Are we dead?”


  “Definitely not,” April said with a small laugh. That seemed to help lift the terrified mood a little.

  “You said demon hunters,” the first brother said, nodding at Peter.

  “Like, for real?” his twin asked.

  Peter turned his head and shot Ben a questioning glance, and of course, Ben’s mind went blank. Why did he have to be the one making these kinds of decisions? They hadn’t exactly come up with a game plan as to how they’d explain themselves after the fact. They hadn’t needed to before. “Uh…” Man, he sounded stupid.

  “You can call us whatever you want,” April said, saving him again. “What matters is that we were able to help. And that thing isn’t ever coming back.”

  How did she manage to stay so cool about any of this?

  “Well, thanks,” one of the brothers said. Ben couldn’t quite keep track anymore; they were both wearing white t-shirts and jeans.

  “All in a day’s work.”

  “Peter…” April shot him a frown, though she was obviously trying hard not to laugh.

  Peter raised his hands. “Okay, okay. I’m done.”

  “We should go,” April said, looking back at Ben. He nodded, and before anyone could do or say anything else, something thumped against the front wall from out in the hallway of the apartment complex. Everyone turned to look at the front door, which no one seemed to notice had been left open a few inches the entire time. A muffled curse came from the hallway, and then someone moved away from the door. Almost like whoever it was had been caught spying on this not-so-awesome party.

  “You expecting somebody?” Ben asked the twins, who both shook their heads with mirrored, dumbfounded expressions.

  “I’ll go check it out,” Peter said. He nodded to the brothers with a weak smile, then stood and headed toward the front door.