Watcher of the Dark: A Jeremiah Hunt Supernatual Thriller (The Jeremiah Hunt Chronicle) Read Free

swallowed, I had just enough strength left to thrash my way over to the edge of the pool and grab hold so I wouldn’t go under again. I was hanging there, hacking up mouthfuls of chlorinated water, trying to catch my breath, and expecting at any moment to feel the cold, hungry grip of the ghosts’ hands around my ankles when someone pressed the barrel of a gun against my forehead.
    “Don’t you fucking move, cabrón ,” said a voice in my ear.
    I had absolutely no intention of doing so, but I didn’t tell him that. I couldn’t; I was still coughing up half of the swimming pool.
    I heard hurried footsteps—two, maybe three people, I couldn’t be sure—and then the gun was pulled away from my forehead. The voice spoke again. “You two. Get him out of there!”
    Rough hands grabbed my arms and hauled me out of the pool. I was still weak from my near-asphyxiation and almost fell when they tried to make me stand; the hands grabbed me again and held on until my feet steadied under me.
    “Damn it! The bastard’s dripping all over my new shoes,” the one on my right said. My brain automatically cataloged what it could from the sound: male, thirty, maybe thirty-five years old, a bit shorter than I was given the way the sound rose to meet me. He was from somewhere back east, like I was. New York. Maybe South Jersey. I wasn’t sure. He was a smoker too; the nicotine practically wafted off of him.
    “Fuck your shoes; they’re ugly anyway.”
    On my left. A tall female who I guessed had to be built like an ox because she’d lifted me out of the water one-handed. Russian, or at least Eastern European, from the sound of her voice. Was she the one I’d kicked in the bathroom? Must not have hit her as hard as I thought.
    “Ugly? What the hell do you know about…”
    Jersey didn’t get any further.
    “Shut up,” said the guy with the gun, and both of them went silent immediately.
    Definitely no doubt about who the boss was.
    I was getting tired of standing around shivering in the light unable to see the people who’d just livened up my day so nicely. The dead girls were watching us from the middle of the pool, so I reached out and stole the sight from one of them.
    There was a moment of dizziness, sharp and intense, and then the taste of bitter ashes flooded my mouth as the world swam back into view in rich, vibrant colors, ten times brighter and more vivid than anything I remembered from the days before I lost my sight.
    Oh, the things the dead can see! They see everything, from the fallen angels that swoop over the narrow city streets on ash gray wings to the changelings that walk among us unseen, safe in their human guises. The glamourlike charms that supernatural entities use to conceal themselves from human sight are no match for the eyes of a ghost.
    But what has always struck me as the cruelest irony is that despite being unable to feel emotions of their own, ghosts can see them pouring off the living without any difficulty whatsoever. It’s like each emotion has its own wavelength, its own unique color, like a beam of light seen through a prism. And it isn’t just the living, either. Inanimate objects can give off emotions too. If the object was important enough to its owner, over time it would soak up whatever emotions the living attached to it. A child’s teddy bear might glow with the pure white light of unconditional love, while a secret gift from a clandestine lover might shine with scarlet eroticism. The rule of thumb, I’d discovered, was that the more important the object was to its owner, the brighter the glow.
    I didn’t want them to know I was capable of seeing anything, so I kept my eyes slightly unfocused as I moved my head from side to side, trying to make it look like I was just trying to hear them better. In the process, I got a decent look at all three of them.
    The guy on my right didn’t look like anything too out of the ordinary, just a wiry fellow of medium height with a crazy shock of