text: (Un)deadly Force I’d never meant to end up in this position, but hell, sometimes even the dead have unfinished business. More often than you’d think. And I wasn’t complaining about the job security it offered. And it gave me the variety I so craved. I’d decided before I was out of high school that I would blow my brains out before becoming a puppet for the corporate establishment, so even though it was beyond weird, I relished my job, and usually got paid for it well. My current job was to knock off some mafia hitmen; my client had been dumped in a river, becoming fish food before he’d even gotten to say goodbye to his family. He wanted me to snuff out the men’s lives, but the kicker was the boss. Easily one of the most feared men in the city of Hydra, Cain Faulkner was someone who preferred to hire others to do his dirty work, and that alone made me hate him. If you were going to go to all the trouble to kill someone, why wouldn’t you do it yourself? It didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t have an exactly functional moral compass, but that was crossing the line to me. I was following the pair of men down the street, keeping to the shadows, and the ghost hovered right over my shoulder, murmuring incessantly, though I couldn’t understand most of it. Once you were dead for a certain amount of time, there was little left of you to remain on the earthly plane. What remained was you’d left unfinished, whatever emotions you hadn’t had a chance to face before your death. The spirit gnashed his invisible teeth, and I could hear the sound as a screeching inside the walls of my skull. “Don’t worry,” I said quietly. “I’ll make this right for you. I promise.” With that reassurance, its wispy form vanished, but I could still feel its presence, weighing heavy on my mind. It wasn’t going to let me go until I’d held up my end of the bargain. The men took no notice of me, or of the wrath that lingered around them like an oily, spicy-sweet perfume. They were too absorbed in one another, focused on their next task, likely of killing. “Boss Faulkner says he coulda seen the guy’s face when I stabbed him through the heart,” One of them was saying, and I winced, feeling the spirit batter my mind full-force now. “It was almost like the poor mook couldn’t see it coming.” “We sure showed him, Ernie,” His cohort replied, chuckling into a cupped hand. “That’ll teach his family and everyone else in the neighborhood that Cain Faulkner isn’t one to be crossed.” I allowed the two of them to carry on for a few minutes more, and then I opened my mouth. The ghost slipped in, gentle and so quick I barely felt it. This was the true secret to my line of work: I let the spirits use my body to do what they needed to. Sure, it was a bit instrusive and personal, but a girl’s gotta pay her bills somehow. “I wouldn’t be so sure of that, gentlemen,” The ghost said through me, smirking widely. With a crash, I moved, and shoved one man against the wall, hands wrapped around his throat. “You were saying?” I turned to the other man, and I smirked naturally when I saw his face pale.