Memento Mori: Nine – Fight the Power

Alone With the Dead: Memento Mori by Andrea Speed Nine – Fight the Power Gryphon noticed something that Ruby hadn’t, or at least that she hadn’t commented on. When the two way mirror fell away, the cops monitoring in the other room jumped up, some reaching instinctively for their weapons, but there were two people standing at the back of the room, looking on in mute horror: Kevin and Rachel. The cops in the now exposed room pulled their service weapons, and Romano barked, “Sit down, now, and stop … whatever the hell you’re doing.” That was when the funniest thing happened: Rachel stood up for him. “You can’t talk to him like. He hasn’t done anything.” Everybody, even Ruby, looked at her in general disbelief. Romano’s blocky shoulders...

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Memento Mori: Eight – Freak Show

Alone With the Dead: Memento Mori by Andrea Speed Eight – Freak Show Gryphon stared at the woman (Laurel; her name was Laurel Stanhope), pretending he didn’t know what she was talking about, but of course he knew. He didn’t want to know, but it was hard to deny. “He did this to you?” “We were the first. He didn’t know what he was doing, but he knows now. He’s coming back. He’s ready this time.” “Ready? For what? To do what?” “Gryphon? Clay said, and touched his shoulder. For some reason, that did it. This fragile reality shattered; whatever the rapport between him and the angry dead were, it just ceased to exist when other people tried to barge into it, and he felt the backlash like a physical thing. It seemed to hit him square in the...

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Memento Mori: Seven – Passive

Alone With the Dead: Memento Mori by Andrea Speed Seven – Passive The first appointment of the evening took them to a pre-fab house at the end of a cul-de-sac in a Portland suburb, right where it slowly gave way to the rural. In the cul-de-sac were perfect lawns and cookie cutter houses, and just beyond it, as if there was some invisible demarcation line, were wide fields and spiky tangles of blackberry bushes, the smell of cow shit faint but quite prevalent in the air when the breeze changed direction. Shane warned him they would refer to him as a “psychic”, as that was the term more people were familiar with – in a supernatural sense – than “agent”, and Gryphon honestly didn’t care. They could call him Patsy the Dog Faced Boy as long...

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Memento Mori: Six – Three Libras

Alone With the Dead: Memento Mori by Andrea Speed Six – Three Libras He actually thought he might make it out. Considering how his life had been running lately, Gryphon had no idea why. It seemed overly optimistic.They were passing by the emergency room, heading towards the lobby where patients in various states of need and impatience sat in hard plastic chairs, when he sensed someone, too late for him to tell Clay to choose another exit. The emergency room’s sickly green and white coloring gave way to a cozy bookshop, the warm white lighting bouncing off shelves of polished mahogany, where books overflowed the shelves in a manner suggesting planned chaos. It was a way to be orderly without actually appearing that way, the devious work of a store owner who...

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