Read Ghost Trackers for Free Online Page A

in a straitjacket and carrying a circulatory system full of tranquilizers, allow me to leave you with this. She will call for you again, just as she did before. Only this time, you won’t be able to help her.”
    Drew felt a pit open up in his stomach at Rick’s words, but before he could ask the man what he meant, Rick bit down on his finger as hard as he could, and the blood began flowing in earnest. Rick laughed at first, but his laughter quickly faded to silence. His eyes rolled white, his jaw went slack, and his bloody finger slipped out of his mouth as his hand fell to his lap. At first, Drew feared the man had gone catatonic or worse, suffered a stroke, but before he could get up to go check on him, the man’s eyes came back into focus, and he blinked in confusion.
    “What . . . happened?” His voice was soft, little more than a whisper. “I remember we were talking about something. Pudding, I think, and then . . .” He frowned. “Why does my finger hurt so bad?”
    Before Drew could explain, Rick raised his hand and saw his wounded finger.
    “Aw, no . . . And I was doing so
good
. . .”
    He began to cry, and Drew rose from his chair and—professional distance be damned—walked over to him, leaned down, and put his arms around the sobbing man.
    A half-hour later , Drew was back in his office, sitting at his desk, typing up his notes from Rick’s disastrous session. A chill still lingered in the air, real or imagined, and he’d turned up the heat.
    He had typed several paragraphs so far, but he read over them, scowled, and deleted all but the first couple of lines. He kept
At first, Mr. Johansen appeared to display signs of progress in dealing with his obsessive-compulsive hand mutilation, and our initial conversation proceeded along the usual lines of making small talk about his day
. But he didn’t know what to say after that. At first, he’d tried to describe the events as objectively as he could, but when he reached the part about the room temperature dropping, he’d stopped and started hitting the delete key.
    Drew was a rational man who used his intelligence and education to help him deal with sometimes very irrational people. In a way, he saw his patients as sailors lost at sea, their ships surrounded by fog and night. Therapy was a lighthouse, a shining beacon of hope that could help them find their way out of the darkness, and he viewed himself as the lighthouse keeper.
    He could explain Rick’s cryptic pronouncements—
You miss them, don’t you? She will call for you again, just as she did before
—as the ramblings of a deeply troubled mind. It had only seemed to have meaning because he himself was tempted to ascribe meaning to it. Basic psychology, the kind of stuff undergrads learned in Intro to Psych. And the temperature drop could be explained as easily. It wasn’t uncommon for people to experience sensations of cold during traumatic events. Given his specialty in posttraumatic stress disorder, he knew this better than most. Just because he was a psychologist didn’t mean he was immune to experiencing trauma himself. It was always tough to watch a patient have a psychotic break. He’d had an emotional reaction to Rick’s meltdown, one that had manifested as a sensation of cold. Simple as that.
    But that was his mind talking. His instincts, his
feelings
, told a different story, and over the years, Drew had learned to rely on his feelings as much as his intellect when it came to dealing with patients. And his feelings now told him that whomever he’d been speaking to, it hadn’t been Rick, and the temperature drop he’d experienced had been real, not a symptom of intense stress. So that meant . . . what? That Rick had been possessed?
    He gave his head a quick shake. No way. It was ridiculous. That was the sort of crazy theory that Trevor might come up with for one of his books. Drew was a man of science. He—
    His cell phone sat next to the computer on his desk, within easy