Death. What happens after it? What lies beneath the surface?
Poor Arielle Daniels stumbled through dangerous hoops to figure this out. She wakes in a new place--the Void--and discovers that what waits after death are layers, dimensions, and sadly...
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Benny didn't spook easily, not in his line of work. He'd been scratched, screamed at, shoved; he'd been threatened and tormented and almost tortured. Sordid spirits had followed him home, haunted his dreams, messed with his sleeping cycle, rendered him nauseous and shaky and catatonic.
And yet as he sat in the passenger's seat of Kylie's rental car, arms outstretched and palms pressed to the dashboard, he struggled to steady his breathing. Something about that house, about its energy, stirred a deep-rooted fear in his gut. A fear he'd never experienced until this day, no matter how many terrifying creatures he'd encountered, or how many legends he'd been asked to debunk... without success.
When he'd felt a slight tug on his voice recorder, he'd shrugged it off as his own instability; but the throwing across the room part was something else. Not that something like that hadn't happened to him before, but the intensity of this event rattled him to the core. It was more violent, more real than any other occurrence in his past investigations.
He'd once investigated a boarded-up shack by the sea where a spirit had a tendency to toss things at anyone who entered. And he'd also visited a mansion where the specter who loomed there loved to move objects around to block pathways and cause people to trip and fall.
But this incident, this revelation of spiritual activity left a taste of malice in his mouth. Icy prickles had coated his fingertips in the moments before the device yanked out of his reach, and a lingering aura of vice and cruelty circled about his head for a few seconds after. That same aura now lodged in his throat as he tried to recompose himself in front of Kylie.
I can't look too horrified, or she'll freak out more.
He peered up at the house and a chill coursed up the middle of his spine. "Fuck."
"Uh huh," said Kylie, who had immobilized halfway through putting her keys in the ignition. She'd parked the car in the narrow, pebbled driveway that led up to the building, but kept the vehicle in the shadows of the trees, blocking the way should any other cars somehow meander there. It wasn't an easy path to find from the rest-stop where Arielle's car had been abandoned, but Kylie knew how to get there, from her series of visits with her team.
Benny was frightened, yes; but he had no clue how to define Kylie's feelings. He was used to this sort of fear, despite this event being the scariest he'd been through so far. But Kylie? Sure, she was an FBI agent, and she'd seen her share of bloody crime scenes, attended gruesome murder trials, and shrugged it all off with a semi-smile. This house, these sensations... they were different, and Benny was certain they had affected her more than she was ready to admit.
She'd turned sheet white and tumbled backwards when the device shattered against the wall, and he'd had a hard time helping her up. Lips trembling, shoulders sinking, and legs like Jell-O, she'd begged him to leave the house at once so they could reconvene, review their plan, rest.
