Chapter 15
The patrol van smelled like oil, old leather, and the faintly antiseptic tang of something that had been scrubbed so many times it forgot to smell like anything useful. Ethan stood on the ramp and let the campus shrink behind him: clusters of students, a dozen whispering faces, someone pointing like they were watching a scene in a play. He swallowed the amusement and the small, hot spike of embarrassment.
William was all easy swagger and impossible posture, cracking open a pack of gum like he owned the noise. Mark checked his gear with the slow, uninterested thoroughness of someone who'd seen too many fights to be dramatic about them. They looked the part: the two halves of something that, when it collided, and sometimes did, made people die or apologize or both.
"Don't get ahead of yourself," William said without looking at him. "This is patrol. You're… not doing anything. Got it?"
Ethan smiled the kind of smile that admitted he was listening and not entirely trusting the promise. "Reassuring," he said. "The old 'you're not allowed to help' routine. Classic."
"Classic is efficient," William replied. "Don't make a mess."
The vehicle eased out, the campus receding into a neat square of roofs and flagged walkways. Ethan watched dorm windows blink past and tried to catalogue how surreal it felt—two weeks ago he would have been making ramen in an oven that now felt like another life. He asked the question everyone on a first patrol asks, because curiosity hurts less than boredom.
"So how bad are they, really? The ghosts. Like—how striking?"
Mark glanced at him, expression flat. "The levels are straightforward. Lowest registered are level four. Even amateurs—new hunters—take those. Predictable patterns, low power."
Ethan cocked an eyebrow. "So four is the 'start here and maybe live' tier. Noted."
"Level three's stronger. Faster reflexes, messier attacks, but a hunter with sense can handle them." Mark's voice was the calm of someone reciting a recipe. "Level two—smarter, faster, dynamic. You need a team, usually. Level one—top of the registered scale. Full package: speed, power, tricks. Highly dangerous. Not common."
Ethan blinked, then grinned. "Right. So levels go down while danger goes up. That's very reassuring. Reverse numbering—my favorite system."
William snorted. "Mark forgot to mention the real fun."
"Did I?" Mark asked. He sounded bored by the idea, as if the subject were an old itch.
"You forgot the mystic level." William's tone was too breezy, like he was reading the name off a menu and not naming something that might carve a hole in your ribcage.
Mark's hands slowed. "I personally think those are folk tales. I've never seen one. Never seen one killed either. Most of what you hear about 'mystics' is story passed around campfires and long nights."
Ethan sat very straight. "Mystic level?"
Mark looked at him with something that might have been honesty or a practiced façade of concern. "A mystic-level ghost is… beyond the usual. Not just stronger; different. Rumor says they can command other ghosts, bend them. No one's ever recorded killing one. Seeing one, some say, is like seeing death proper. It's old superstition dressed up in bad habits, but—" He shrugged, and the shrug didn't make the words smaller.
William just shrugged, too, like shrugging could cancel a myth.
The van slowed and soon the countryside opened: rolling fields, a fence that had been patched too many times, and a farmhouse that looked like someone had hollowed out a story and left the furniture. Ethan's face fell. "A farmhouse? Really?"
William grinned. "You wanted spooky, kid. This is where spooky goes to get milk."
They split the farm the way everyone splits in training: Mark and Ethan to one flank, William to the other. The fields smelled of damp earth and late hay. Crickets did a polite, insect chorus. The farmhouse windows were dark like closed eyes.
"Listen," Mark said, "we got intel that there might be trouble here. This isn't a job for students. Technically, you two aren't supposed to be here. But William's a freak—he's allowed to do what he wants. You, Carter—" he used Ethan's last name like a small admission, like it had been accepted overnight "—you watch."
"Only watch," Ethan repeated, mock-pious. "I'll be a very quiet observer. I'll write notes."
"Notes are fine unless the ghost eats them," William said, already moving toward his side of the fence with a casual, predatory ease.
Ethan and Mark walked, boots scuffing the soft dirt, conversation thinning into the kind of companionable silence people use when they don't want to be awkward on the way to a potentially awkward death.
After a while Mark's voice came low and pointed. "So—what the heck are you doing here, really? And how the heck are you alive?"
Ethan exhaled. He told it in fragments—short, fast beats: the robbery, the gunshot, the black like someone had turned off the lights, the other side where Mark had been, waking up in a body that should have stayed still. He didn't recite the whole thing; Mark didn't need every detail nor did he need the melodrama; Mark needed the facts.
Mark considered that, clean as a blade. "You awakened," he said at last. "But not the way I've seen awakenings. You died—" his voice cut off just enough that the sentence kept its weight "—I saw you. Interesting. Somebody, or something, gave you a second chance. Don't waste it, kid. Make it count."
Ethan shrugged, because what do you say to a man who'd watched corpses and come back bland? "I plan to. Preferably with minimal disembowelment."
They walked a few steps more. Ethan mentioned, half in passing, that he had no magic ability. Mark waved it away like a minor ragged order. "Don't worry. Not every tool shows on the first day."
William's shout cut the air like a whip. He came sprinting back across the field—arms flailing, face sharp. "Mark! Carter! Light—get over here—now!"
They found him at the far edge of a shallow ditch, eyes fixed on the farmhouse's shadow like it had grown teeth. The sound William made was the same sound Ethan's stomach made when something long in the dark realised it had been uncovered.
There was movement at the farmhouse's side. Not the shuffle of a stray animal. Not the wasteful clumsiness of a level-four.
It slid out of the shadow like oil making a shape. Huge—not tall so much as vast, a bulk rimmed in absence. It had a head and a crooked spine, limbs that bent in ways that belonged to nightmares borrowed from a child's fever. It moved with a wet, decisive intent.
For a second Ethan's brain tried to file the thing into a known category and came up empty.
He had seen ghosts. He had seen dead men twitch. This—this was a thing that made his breath misplace itself.
He had never seen anything more monstrous.