The Ravaging in Between (The Reanimation Files Book 3) by A. J. Locke

probably once very colorful, but was now faded and dirty. He was thin and his clothes draped off him. Behind him was the ghost of a young boy. The clothes he wore looked like they were from the fifties. A few other ghosts I’d seen had been wearing old-fashioned clothes. One woman had on a glitzy flapper dress complete with strings of pearls and a fascinator headpiece.
    Did a bunch of people get killed on their way to Halloween parties?
    “It’ll make ya feel real good,” the man said, lowering his voice as though he was telling me this in confidence.
    “And what exactly would this be?” I asked, glancing at the glowing blue rune in his palm.
    “Filled with ghost energy,” he said. “Pulse some into ya, and you gonna feel real good for a li’l bit. Cool, calm, buzzed.”
    “Full of Rot!” I smacked the rune out of his hand before I caught myself. He looked startled for a moment, and the boy ghost ducked behind the post he was standing behind. The old man quickly retrieved his rune, and gave me a less friendly look.
    “It ain’t enough to give ya Rot,” he said. “Just a little thrill, then I’ll pull it outta ya. Fifty bucks for five minutes.”
    “I’m a necromancer, so it won’t have the same effect.”
    I knew that non-paranormal humans often felt a chill if a ghost passed by them, and for the most part, it was uncomfortable. However, some people liked it, and I’d heard about people who would walk around cemeteries in the hopes that a ghost would pass near them. Ridiculous, if you asked me, especially since ghosts tended to rise long before the body was buried, but everyone needed a hobby.
    I knew this old bit’s rune wasn’t enough to give me the Rot, but I had good reason to be paranoid about ghost energy entering my body these days.
    “Then maybe ya wanna buy an enchanted object? They got real ghosts trapped inside. Real spooky.” He indicated his table where there were several items that were not at all aesthetically pleasing. There was an old-fashioned table clock that was falling apart, two dingy horse figurines that looked like they’d been broken off a carousel decoration, a dirty ceramic geisha figurine, and a faded, black and white photo of a man standing in front of a river in a cracked picture frame. The shopkeeper picked up the picture and showed it to me.
    “The eyes be moving,” he said. “His soul is trapped inside the picture.”
    I resisted rolling my eyes at his hustle. I could feel ghost energy coming from the picture as well as the other objects on the table, but I was a hundred percent sure there were no ghosts trapped in these items. Rather, small pieces of runes filled with ghost energy had been hidden inside the objects to trick people into thinking ghosts were trapped within them. The man’s eyes in the photo didn’t move, but if you really wanted to believe it, then you’d see whatever you wanted to see.
    There used to be stores aboveground claiming to sell haunted items, but in the past decade they’d been cracked down on a lot, and a lot of them had moved to the Underground. There were still plenty of gullible people to sell to.
    “Buddy, I’m a necromancer with a Grade A education behind me. I know there are no such thing as haunted items. Just garbage you picked out of someone’s trash and hid pieces of energy-infused runes in.” The energy would eventually deplete, at which point the purchaser may or may not realize they’d been scammed, but the seller certainly wouldn’t care.
    The man sucked his teeth and turned away from me. “Damn it.”
    “Hey, quick question.” I pulled a twenty out and shoved it in his hand. “Have you seen a ghost that looks like him?” I pulled out my phone and showed him a picture of Ethan. He was alive in the photo…well, he was in his body. I’d never really thought of Ethan as being dead since his body had been jacked. I had saved the picture from his Facebook profile some time ago. I had a feeling I’d done it to