Free Velveteen by Daniel Marks Page B

the energy there, the familiar suction, and was off.

Chapter 6
    M oonlight flooded the deserted street in an eerie purple glow, casting bruised shadows on the rows of buildings. In the distance, Velvet could hear the low rumble of car engines but nearby, quiet had settled in for the night, until the sound of a tiny bell jingled and Manny’s tabby sprang up and pranced across the hood of the abandoned car—blue, of course. The cat stared at her, one blue eye and one brown, and hissed. Velvet backed away, sidestepping a soppy mound of newspapers, and darted down the street.
    She peered in darkened windows as she hurried from shadow to shadow, frantically searching for a body to possess. Her mind reeled, recounting the events of her day. It seemed she’d been running from the minute she’d left Bonesaw’s shed. If one more thing went wrong, she swore she’d have an aneurysm or whatever the ghost equivalent was.
    At the very least she’d scream.
    The poltergeists would already be scouting out the source of the shadowquake, or hunkering down in the walls, or making ghost chains, or whatever it was they did to prep for their part in a mission. She kind of left it up to them. Logan and Luisa were damn good at their jobs, and if Velvet were the one to hold up the show, they’d never let her hear the end of it. She’d be witness to a near constant floor show of ridicule, and that was
not
something she was about to let happen.
    Man
, she thought, searching frantically for a host body.
At this rate I’ll be lucky to beat Quentin to the perp
.
    Fog crossed the next intersection looking exactly like a big fluffy semitrailer, but Velvet trudged through barely noticing, a rarity for her, as she loved nothing more than afternoon cloud identification … except for finding a body that worked well.
    As she came out the back of the thick mist, she spotted the most likely candidate of the evening. Well … “likely” might have been an overstatement.
    Smoke curled from the nurse’s wrinkled lips in greasy gray ribbons. It snaked around her sunken eyes and creased forehead before drifting up toward the glare of the streetlights in fluffy tufts. She slouched against the brick wall behind her, scraping her rubber clogs against the sidewalk and primping her silver hair, which was pinned back in an insane imitation of a pompadour. With each pat, a log of ash dropped from her cigarette, banked off her crisp teal scrubs, and exploded into tiny mushroom clouds as it struck the concrete.
    A miserable sour-faced woman—probably in the last hours of a double shift at the hospital, muscles lagging with fatigue—not the best choice for the job at hand. But she was all Velvet had to work with, the street being as quiet as it was on that cold October night.
    Velvet grumbled.
    What I wouldn’t do for a healthy street kid
, she thought.
    But she’d seen only two other people on the entire walk there.
    The first was a total waste of her time, a gangly homeless man with a scraggly beard spotted with the remnants of several meals. He wore a puffy floor-length woman’s parka, stuffing falling out where the rats had been at it. The minute she’d jumped into the guy, she’d understood what pickles must go through in their vinegary brine. He was pirate drunk, which, everyone knows, is the drunkest you can get. Velvet couldn’t even begin to figure out what to do with his boozy frame. It wobbled and stumbled as she grappled for control. To make matters worse, when she finally dispossessed the guy, she felt a little tipsy herself. Took a few minutes just to shake off the contact buzz.
    The second target was only slightly more amenable.
    A small boy pulled a squat pug down the sidewalk, pleading for the dog to do its business and shut up its yipping. Velvet kept pace with the kid for half a block, drifting in and out of the dark places, noting that he had the same scrunched-up face as his dog and a nose running like a summer fire hydrant. But it