Hunted

Realms Unseen: Hunted


Jeremy Michelson


Contents
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Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
What happens next?
Thanks for reading


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1
Hilario’s favorite pizza place was full of dead people.
Freshly dead. Their spirits still wandered in and out from what remained of the old, brick two story shop. Confusion and anger twisted their ghostly faces.
It must have been one heck of a fire. The stench of smoke was thick in the air.
He sat in his white van, parked at the curb about half a block down from the Stung Sparrow. Fire engines and police cars blocked the rest of the street. Red and blue lights flashed. Painted the narrow canyon of old brick buildings in blood and ice. Buildings that huddled shoulder to shoulder, holding each other up. Their tall, narrow windows looked down blankly at the sorrow below.
Water sluiced along the gutters. Looking too, too much like ichorous blood.
He didn’t want to get any closer anyway.
Thin streamers of smoke still rose from the wreck of the restaurant. Firefighters sprayed water on the collapsed roof and the walls of the brick buildings on either side. Grim faced police officers stood behind yellow barricades. Kept back the curious and the fire junkies.
A young woman in a red dress collapsed to her knees, hunched over a form covered with a white sheet. Her sobs rose into the night. Echoed off the brick canyon of old downtown. The ghost of a young man in a leather jacket kneeled beside her, gesturing and shouting.
She couldn’t hear him.
Hilario flicked his gaze away from them before the young man’s words started echoing in his head. He said a brief incantation to focus his spirit shields. For all the good it would do.
This would have been a good night to line his wig with aluminum foil.
Lingering smoke hazed the air. The smell of it clenched Hiliaro’s throat and sent his blubber encased heart into a tap dance of terror.
It was a stench of roasted foam upholstery and cloth and charred pizza. And…barbecue.
When people burned…their flesh smelled almost, but not quite, like pork. Most people wouldn’t know the difference.
Unfortunately, he did.
His empty stomach, the cause of him being on this particular street at this particularly bad time, twisted and threatened to launch hot, acidy bile up his throat.
He forced it back down. Food type things went into his tremendous gullet through his mouth. They didn’t come back that direction.
He clenched his white gloved fingers around the steering wheel. He was still in uniform, just off a bad party. The orange and white striped puffy suit that covered his 500 pound frame was soiled from the drunken boyfriend’s antics. Fortunately the flying cake had missed his fuzzy purple wig. That would have taken forever to clean out.
But he’d had to run out to the van for his emergency makeup kit. Cake had smeared his greasepaint. Had almost left bare skin exposed.
Bare skin was bad.
And the mother’s drunk boyfriend had almost made Hilario do something bad.
But he contained himself. Barely.
He recovered and got back to making the kids happy. Which made him more than happy. The children’s joyous laughter charged his depleted reserves of psychic energy. What he took from them was just the merest sip of what they produced.
It would be bad to waste it on petty revenge. Especially on a moron like that lady’s creep boyfriend.
He’d collected his check and exited. Even though the embarrassed woman had kindly invited him to stay for the barbecue.
Barbecue.
Now he wished he had.
He wouldn’t have had to see the still smoking remains of the Stung Sparrow.
And maybe Larry Sparrow’s ghost wouldn’t have seen him.
Larry Sparrow came running out of the smoking ruin of his restaurant. Tall and thin, with long, black hair tied behind his head, Larry ran around in circles, his hands pressed to the sides of his smoking skull. He shouted and wailed. He still wore his white chef’s outfit with the fancy double breasted button up coat.
Spotless, like always.
In all his years of knowing Larry and watching him make his wonderful pies, Hilario had never figured out how the man wasn’t covered from head to toe in tomato sauce. Chef Larry made pizza with an exuberance and zest that made a tornado look like summer breeze.
At least he used to.
Before he could stop himself, a jolt of sorrow went through Hilario for all the pizza Larry Sparrow would never make.
Followed instantly by a stab of guilt for weighing the value of his friend’s life with pizza.
Though, it had been really good pizza. The best in the whole city of New Bedlam, in fact.
But, even worse, the spike of strong emotion from Hilario was like a beacon for the spirit of Larry Sparrow.
Larry spun around. Jerked to a stop facing Hilario.
“Oh barnacle poop,” Hilario said.
He fumbled with the ignition key. Stupid! Why had he turned the engine off?
Too late.
Larry appeared in the passenger seat. A faint blue glow surrounded his translucent form.
“Hilario!” Larry shouted, “Hilario my-a big-a friend! Why-a am I a dead-a!”
Hilario hung his head. He would have beat it against the steering wheel,