Chapter 19: Somehow It knows Spencer
SPENCER'S POV
Consciousness returned not with a jolt, but as a slow, gentle tide, washing over the shores of my exhaustion. I woke to the delicate warmth of the morning sun caressing my face, a golden bar of light cutting across the hotel room and painting the air with the promise of a new day. For a blissful, disoriented moment, suspended between sleep and wakefulness, there was no fear. No assassins hunting me, no treacherous brother plotting my death, but a dead girl—just the simple, profound peace of a soft bed and a quiet morning. It was a luxury I had almost forgotten existed. Then, a subtle shift occurred. A shade slowly fell over me, blocking the light, and the spell was broken.
I sat up, my spine cracking in protest, stretching and rubbing the last part of sleep from my eyes. It had been the first peaceful, uninterrupted, nightmare-free sleep I'd had in days, a small miracle in the ongoing catastrophe of my life. My gaze, still blurry with sleep, drifted to the glass balcony door. Wednesday was standing there, her back to me, a stark silhouette against the brightening sky. Her arms were crossed, a posture I now recognized not as defiance, but as a shield. She was looking out over the waking city, but her stillness was absolute, her posture radiating a tension that seemed to vibrate in the very air of the room.
"Hey, good morning," I said, my voice a dry, rough croak. I cleared my throat, plumping the pillows behind me as if I could manufacture a sense of normalcy.
She turned sharply, as if I'd shouted, a smile instantly appearing on her lips. But I knew her now. I had spent days and nights with her, studied the subtle shifts in her spectral form, learned the language of her silences. This smile was a careful, constructed one, a beautiful mask that didn't reach her eyes. Those dark, depthless pools held a storm of worry, a sadness so profound it made my chest ache. Something was deeply, terribly wrong.
"How was your night?" she asked, her tone a little too light, a little too airy, like she was trying to convince both of us that everything was fine.
I couldn't help but return a genuine, relieved smile, the memory of a full night's rest still warm and comforting. "It was the best night I've had in days," I said, a disbelieving laugh bubbling up from my chest. The sound felt foreign and wonderful. "At least no assassins, no car crashes, no falling from bridges or haunted swimming pools." I continued, the relief making me almost giggle, a stark contrast to the grim reality waiting outside this room. "I actually feel... human."
"Okay," she replied, her voice soft but distant, as if she were speaking to me from the other end of a long, cold tunnel.
I narrowed my gaze, studying her. The way she held her shoulders, the slight tremor in her translucent hands. "Is there anything bothering you?" I asked, my voice dropping, losing its earlier levity.
Her eyes met mine, and for a fraction of a second, I saw it—a flash of pure, unadulterated panic, a glimpse of a sorrow so deep it could drown a soul—before it was shuttered away behind a wall of forced calm. "No," she said, the word a little too quick, a little too final. "There's nothing bothering me." Her eyes held a fierce, manufactured certainty that only convinced me of the opposite. She was lying, and she was terrible at it.
I decided not to push further. For now. The fragile peace of the morning felt too precious to shatter with a confrontation I wasn't ready for. I swung my legs out of bed, the plush carpet soft beneath my feet, and headed to the bathroom. The domestic normality of brushing my teeth, the minty foam and the routine scrubbing, felt unreal, a scene from a life that no longer belonged to me. After I was done, my stomach growled loudly, a demanding, living reminder that I was famished. I needed to eat something.
I headed downstairs to the hotel restaurant, the long lobby feeling like a movie set. I ordered a full breakfast—eggs, bacon, toast, everything I could think of. And I didn't forget. "And... three buckets of your best ice cream. Vanilla, chocolate, strawberry." The server raised an eyebrow, but I just smiled. Very, very necessary, I thought with a nice, internal smile. It was our thing, a small, absurd anchor in the chaos.
It was a small miracle that Wednesday had managed to retrieve my wallet, business cards, and transaction cards from the sunken wreck of my Aston Martin Valkyrie—a quarter-million-dollar masterpiece now sitting at the bottom of the river—along with other valuables I hadn't even had the presence of mind to ask about. Her spectral efficiency was a constant, life-saving surprise.
As I waited for the food, leaning against the counter, the memory of last night flooded back with the force of a tidal wave, and I felt a hot blush creep up my neck. The kiss. The shocking cold of her lips against mine. The desperate, hopeless longing that had propelled me forward. And then, the devastating words that had followed, dropping between us like stones. "I'm sorry, Spencer, but I am dead. I can't feel what you feel." The memory was a splash of ice water, instantly dousing the warmth I'd woken up with. The giddy relief of survival was replaced by the heavy, complicated ache of a heart getting involved where it absolutely shouldn't.
No doubt about it, I was in deep, terrifying trouble. I was gradually, unexpectedly falling for the least expected person imaginable. Someone dead. A ghost. A being I could not build a life with, could not introduce to my friends, could never grow old with. It was a special kind of madness, a cosmic joke played on the arrogant, wealthy Spencer Postlethwaith who thought he could control everything. The universe was laughing at me. And I couldn't help it. The connection we had, forged in the fire of survival and tempered by shared vulnerability, was more real, more raw, and more profound than any superficial connection I'd ever known in the world of the living.
I paid for the items with my platinum card, the transaction feeling meaningless. My mind circled one desperate, impossible question, a mantra of hopeless hope: Although she's dead, probably bound by rules I can't comprehend, can't she really fall in love again... with me? Is there not a single, spectral corner of her heart that could remember what it was to care for someone?
My life was a stupid, spectacular, total mess. I have a wonderful, living, breathing girlfriend in a hospital bed whom I missed terribly, and here I was, nurturing forbidden, hopeless feelings for a dead avenger from a Halloween past. A ghost who I may never see again after the next Halloween night, if we even made it that far. It was more than crazy; it was a Shakespearean tragedy in the making, and I was the idiot prince walking blindly toward the precipice.
I trailed my fingers through my hair, frustration and confusion twisting into a tight, painful knot in my chest. I exhaled sharply, the sound lost in the hum of the hotel. Thank goodness I had a trustworthy P.A. and a team of supremely competent managers who could run my multi-billion dollars company while I was… away. 'Away.' What a harmless, useless word for being hunted(by assassins), haunted(by a ghost), and falling in love with that same ghost.
I grabbed the heavy bags of food and ice cream and dashed back up the staircase to our room, preferring the physical effort to the uncomfortable and tight silence of the elevator. I pushed the door open and placed the orders on the table. "Hey Wednesday, I got your ice creams!" I yelled out to her, forcing a cheerfulness I didn't feel into my voice.
Hearing no immediate response, a nervous energy kept me moving. I stretched my hand to the lamp stand and took the TV remote. I switched it on, absently flipping through the channels, needing the noise, the distraction of other people's realities to fill the heavy silence between us. I landed on a 24-hour news channel, the volume low, just for background filler.
The first thing to pop up on the screen made my blood run cold and my heart stutter to a halt.
"Wednesday, come look at this!" I said, my voice tight, all pretence of normalcy gone.
She phased through the wall beside me, her form solidifying as she came to sit on the edge of the bed, her eyes instantly glued to the screen, her earlier deep thoughtful and gentle sadness,a rather lingering pensive sorrow replaced by a sharp, focused intensity.
A grim-faced news anchor was reporting, his professional calm barely masking a undercurrent of panic. The banner at the bottom of the screen screamed in bold, red letters: "THE ENTITY: Digital Plague or Mass Hysteria? CITY ON EDGE."
"...reports from multiple sources confirm that this phenomenon, which authorities are reluctantly dubbing 'The Entity,' seems to be a contaminater of the mind, transmitted through digital signals—smartphones, computers, any internet-connected technological gadgets, social medias precisely," the anchor stated, his voice grave. "The pattern is horrifyingly consistent. Victims who have encountered The Entity experience a complete psychological break. They either turn the violence inward, committing suicide in grotesque ways, unnaturally distorted, bizarre or they wreak havoc on a massive scale, causing millions in damages and attacking anyone in their path with superhuman strength."
A shaky, vertically-filmed cell phone video played, the sound of screaming and crashing filling our silent room. It showed a man, his suit torn, his face contorted in a rictus of insane glee, single-handedly overturning cars as if they were toys. His laughter was the most chilling part—not joyful, but a distorted, cackling sound that scraped against my nerves and promised nothing but madness and pain. The camera zoomed in on his face as he turned toward the lens, and my heart stopped, my breath freezing in my lungs.
It was Mr. Thorne. The head of security of the Continental Hotel. The man who had been rationally, methodically investigating the bartender's death.
"What?" I exclaimed, lurching forward to the edge of the bed, my breakfast forgotten, a cold dread seeping into my bones.
But he was… transformed. Profaned. His eyes were a pure, blazing, infernal red, glowing with an unnatural light that the camera pixels couldn't properly capture. Prominent, yellowed fangs protruded over his lips, too long and sharp to be human. He looked like a demon straight from a medieval tapestry, a thing of nightmare given flesh. And his once-dark, neatly styled hair was now a stark, wiry, premature grey, as if the life had been sucked out of it.
Suddenly, in the video, he stopped his mindless rampage. His head snapped around, and those hellish red eyes seemed to lock directly onto the camera lens, a terrifying, impossible feat of perception. It felt as if he were looking through the screen, through the miles of city, directly into this hotel room, directly at me.
"I am looking for Spencer," he growled, his voice a distorted, multi-layered rasp, like a chorus of the damned speaking through a single throat. "I know he can hear me."
A jolt of pure, undiluted, primal fear shot down my spine. I flinched back from the TV as if it had bitten me, my hands gripping the comforter until my knuckles turned white.
He then lunged forward and grabbed the camera, his distorted, monstrous face filling the entire screen, his fangs glistening with saliva. "Spencer Postlethwaith," he hissed, the name a curse, he called my full name,he referred to me?, a promise of utter malice burned in those crimson eyes. "I know you can hear me. And we will meet pretty soon. I promise you that."
The video cut out abruptly, returning to the pale, stunned face of the news anchor in the studio,"And here we go this phenomenon seems to know the popular billionaire, what connections do they have?,the news anchor stated and my image was displayed on the screen.
I sat in stunned, suffocating silence. The bags of food on the table now seemed ridiculous, the ice cream a mockery. My mind was reeling, trying to process the sheer, impossible horror of what I had just witnessed. "What virus is this kind of madness called again?" I asked, my voice barely a whisper, a child's plea for a rational explanation in an irrational world.
Wednesday didn't look away from the now-blank screen where the monster's face had been. Her expression wasn't one of shock or confusion, but of grim, resigned recognition, as if she had been waiting for this shoe to drop. When she finally spoke, her words dropped into the room like stones into a still pond, their implications rippling outwards into a horror far beyond any virus, any assassin, any human betrayal.
"That is not a virus," she said, her voice low, flat, and deadly serious. She turned her head, and her dark eyes were filled with a ancient knowing that sent a fresh chill through me. "It's a DEMON from the deepest pits of hell. And Mr. Thorne is just its host."
To be continued....