Chapter 3: Locket's Echo
POV: Adam Carter
The house exhaled cold breath as they crossed the threshold, and Adam's scar immediately began a slow, steady burn that made his teeth ache. The floorboards sagged under their weight, decades of neglect having turned the Welch home into a skeleton of rotting wood and peeling wallpaper.
"Cozy," Elena muttered, her flashlight cutting through air thick with dust and something else—something that tasted like tears and old rage.
Adam's mutterings had finally stopped, Constance's voice fading from his lips like an echo dying in a canyon. But the silence was worse. Without her regrets filling his mouth, he could feel her presence more clearly, a cold weight pressing against his consciousness like fingers trying to pry open his skull.
"Locket's upstairs," he said, the words coming from some deep certainty he couldn't explain. "Master bedroom. Hidden in the—"
The scar flared white-hot, and suddenly Adam was moving without conscious thought. His body shifted sideways out of reality, phasing through the physical world like smoke through a screen door. The sensation was getting familiar now, that moment of existing between atoms where everything was possibility and nothing was solid.
But Constance's despair hit him like a freight train.
Her emotions crashed over him in waves—the devastation of betrayal, the suffocating weight of abandonment, the way love could curdle into something poisonous and sharp. Adam stumbled, his concentration shattered, and instead of phasing back to solid ground, he kept going.
Down through the floorboard. Down through the support beam. Down through—
[Psychic residue's heavy, kid.] [Don't sink.]
He materialized inside the floor joists, splinters of wood erupting around him as his body forced itself back into reality in a space already occupied by sixty-year-old lumber. Pain exploded across his ribs as broken wood bit into his skin, and he found himself wedged between support beams like the world's most uncomfortable sardine.
"Jesus!" Dean's voice carried down through the floor. "What the hell was that crash?"
"Adam!" Elena was already moving, her footsteps pounding overhead. "Where are you?"
"Down here," Adam wheezed, trying to extract himself from the wooden embrace without impaling anything vital. "Slight navigation error."
Sam's face appeared through a gap in the floorboards, his expression hovering somewhere between concern and exasperation. "How do you accidentally phase into the floor?"
"Practice," Adam grunted, finally managing to twist free. Blood was seeping through his shirt where the wood had scraped him raw, and his mental energy felt like it was hemorrhaging. The gauge in his peripheral vision flickered: 40%. Then 35%. Then 30%.
Elena had found a way down to the basement and was helping him climb out of the structural maze he'd created. "That's going to need cleaning," she said, eyeing the gashes on his ribs. "And possibly stitches."
"Later." Adam pressed his hand against the bleeding and immediately regretted it. The contact sent another spike of Constance's grief through his system, and for a moment he was drowning again—not in river water, but in the suffocating certainty that everyone you loved would eventually betray you.
He'd found the locket, though. While he'd been tangled in the floor joists, his enhanced senses had locked onto it like a compass finding magnetic north. "Northeast corner," he said, pointing through the ceiling. "Behind the loose baseboard."
Dean was already upstairs, salt lines poured in careful circles around the bedroom door. "Found it," Elena's voice carried down. "Silver locket, engraved with—oh. Oh, that's not good."
"What?" Sam called up.
"The inscription. 'To my beloved Constance. Forever yours, Joseph.' And there's a picture inside of a woman who definitely isn't Constance."
Adam climbed the stairs on shaky legs, each step sending fresh waves of the ghost's anguish through his nervous system. When he finally made it to the bedroom, Elena was holding the locket at arm's length like it might bite her.
"Don't touch it," Adam warned, but it was too late.
Elena's fingers closed around the silver chain, and the room exploded with sound.
Constance's scream shattered the night, but this time it was different—raw with fresh betrayal, as if the touch of her anchor had reopened every wound her husband had ever carved into her heart. The temperature dropped twenty degrees in as many seconds, and Adam's breath came out in white puffs.
Then the emotions hit him.
Not the gradual bleed he'd been experiencing, but a full-force psychic tsunami that drove him to his knees. He was Constance, standing in their bedroom doorway, watching her husband tangle his fingers in another woman's hair. He was Constance, finding the locket—the locket she'd given him, that he'd sworn he'd always wear—discarded on the nightstand like garbage. He was Constance, driving through the rain with tears streaming down her face, the bridge looming ahead like a promise of an end to the pain.
The river water was cold. So cold. It filled her lungs, her throat, her—
Adam collapsed, gasping like a landed fish, his mental energy bottoming out at 30%. The locket had fallen from Elena's nerveless fingers and was glowing on the floor like a tiny star.
[Retribution: See ghostly afterimages for 24 hours.] [Watch the shadows.]
"What the hell was that?" Sam was beside him, one hand reaching out like he wanted to help but wasn't sure it was safe to touch him.
"Her death," Adam wheezed. "I felt—I saw—" He tried to sit up and immediately spotted movement in his peripheral vision. Constance's form flickered at the edge of his sight, translucent and accusing, before vanishing when he turned to look directly at her.
Great. Hallucinations. Just what he needed.
Sam's suspicion was radiating off him like heat from a forge. "How? How is that possible?"
Adam didn't have an answer that wouldn't sound completely insane. How could he explain that some alien system had apparently rewired his brain to copy supernatural abilities? That every time he used his powers, he risked drowning in someone else's trauma?
Elena was staring at the locket like it had personally offended her. "We need to destroy this thing. Now. Before she—"
Constance materialized in the center of the salt circle.
She was more solid than before, her rage having crystallized into something sharp and focused. Her wedding dress was soaked with river water, and her eyes were black holes that seemed to pull light out of the room. When she opened her mouth, her voice was the sound of drowning.
"Who touched it?" she whispered, and the temperature dropped another ten degrees. "Who dared touch my grief?"
Dean's shotgun was loaded with rock salt, but he hesitated. The ghost was inside their protective circle, and Adam's phasing ability was flickering like a dying lightbulb. His mental energy was too low, his concentration shot to hell by the psychic feedback from the locket.
"We burn it," Dean said, his voice steady despite the arctic air. "Salt and burn, just like always."
"She won't let us," Adam managed, watching Constance's afterimage flicker in and out of existence at the corner of his vision. The real ghost was focused on Elena, her form radiating menace, but the phantom version was staring directly at him with eyes full of terrible recognition.
Dean struck a match anyway. "Watch me."
[Achievement: "Locket's Echo" – Found the locket.] [+10% Mental Energy.]
The system's reward felt like a drop of water on a forest fire, but it was enough. Adam's gauge ticked up to 40%, and suddenly he could think clearly again. The locket was the key, but it was also the trap. Constance wouldn't let them destroy it—not while she could use it to anchor herself to their reality.
"Adam." Elena's voice was tight with fear. "Can you phase it? Get it out of the circle?"
He looked at the silver chain glowing on the floor, then at Constance's rage-twisted face, then at the ghostly afterimage still flickering in his peripheral vision. His ribs ached where the wood had cut him, and his scar was burning like someone was pressing a brand to his wrist.
"Yeah," he said, forcing himself to his feet. "I can do that."
But as he reached for the locket, Constance turned her attention to him, and her expression shifted from rage to something far more unsettling: recognition.
"You're not supposed to be here," she whispered, and Adam felt those words settle into his bones like a curse.
[Hell's curious, kid.] [So's Sam.]
The system's voice carried an edge of warning, and Adam realized that Sam was watching him with the intensity of someone trying to solve a puzzle that might explode in his face.
In the distance, carried on the night wind, another sound echoed through the abandoned streets of Jericho. Not a wail this time, but something deeper, wilder.
A howl.
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