Ariel looked around and noticed that the gloom the park naturally had was gone.
It was the loneliest park in the city, but once the wraiths accepted Weber, people started coming to visit the place.
"Their aura must have been chasing people away," Ariel noted, and Weber nodded affirmatively.
Weber dialed Josh one more time, but there was no answer. He tightened his grip on his phone and walked to Ariel's car.
Ariel got inside and began driving.
"So how will you use the wraiths to find Josh?" she asked, keeping her eyes on the road.
"I don't know. But I ought to use them wisely," Weber said, looking out.
"Andrej, Gabrielle," he called, and Andrej and Gabrielle manifested in the back seat.
Weber turned, "now, I need you two to... do something for me," he said, grinning. Gabrielle grimaced, and Andrej shrugged with a smile.
"What are you going to do?" Ariel asked, but he only said it would be fine if she parked at a bustling alley.
Weber got out, slammed the car door, and Andrej and Gabrielle followed him—no passerby able to see them except Ariel and Weber.
Weber went to a vendor that sold energy drinks.
Ariel squinted at Weber as he came back with a leather bag containing a dozen canned energy drinks.
"Those aren't normal drinks, are they..." Ariel said, looking at the cans as Weber brought one out and observed it.
"In Andrej's memories, he couldn't use mana but was able to improve his fighting prowess with these drinks sold on the black market," Weber replied.
Ariel snatched them from him, "I won't let you become an addict!"
Seeing no one was passing, Weber chuckled, made his wrist intangible, and swiped a can from inside the leather bag.
Then Weber's irises and hair changed to white, the Abyss aura flowed to his wrist, and he stretched out his hand for Andrej and Gabrielle to hold.
Ariel got out of the car to stop him, but she was too late.
The moment Gabrielle and Andrej touched his hand, they looked less pale and materialized to be more human.
But this made Weber collapse to one knee, pop the can open, gulp it down, and wipe his mouth.
"Now go around the city and ask for Josh," Andrej and Gabrielle were touching themselves; the feeling of being human felt foreign to them.
"As wraiths, you can go around the city and ask all day without exhaustion and blend in," Weber said.
"Ugh, as a child I used to be obsessed with finding mysterious entities posing as humans. Now I'm one!" Gabrielle grumbled.
Andrej clenched his fists, "What if I meet people who know I'm dead?"
Weber patted his shoulder, "I trust you can dodge familiar faces. Now, go!"
Andrej and Gabrielle split up and began showing people pictures of Josh all day, and when no eyes were on them, they became intangible.
---
Andrej sat down in a restaurant, keeping his head low in a lonely corner.
Raising his head slightly, he noticed everyone in the bar were average civilians.
The waitress walked up to him.
"What would you like to have?" she asked with a smile.
He only waved her away without a word.
She shrugged and left.
Andrej sighed as he saw no clue or sign of Josh.
He went from one restaurant or bar to another, with things getting more mediocre with the same pattern: sit down, observe, decline a waiter/waitress, and leave.
He sat down at a bus stop, and a few minutes later, a bus arrived. It was empty.
As Andrej walked in, the bus felt as though the air thickened.
He looked at the driver through the rearview mirror, cleared his throat, and began driving.
The driver noticed that Andrej made no noise or even moved from his sitting spot, not even slightly.
He just kept his head low with his hands clasped together, frozen like a statue.
The driver found it odd but waved it off.
As he looked at Andrej through the rearview mirror, he was gone, and the driver froze; his bus almost struck another one, but he regained control.
"You might want to be careful," Andrej said next to the driver, patting his shoulder.
The driver shuddered, having felt his touch but not seen him arrive, baffled.
"I'm curious, have you seen this person?" Andrej asked, showing the driver a picture of Josh.
The driver shook his head, then raised his brows as a memory came to him.
"Actually, I have! He was here with some woman the other day!" the driver said.
Andrej grimaced.
"I don't think Weber will like that he went out with a girl and put us through all this stress..." Andrej thought.
"Where'd he go?" Andrej asked.
The driver held his chin, furrowing his brows as he tried to remember.
"The last place I dropped them was at... Crystal City!" the driver said.
Andrej's eyes flickered white while the driver wasn't looking.
"That's all there is. And this is your—" the driver turned and ashened when he saw no one there.
The door untouched. No sound. Only disappearance.
---
Gabrielle was walking on the sidewalk of a busy district.
She stopped at various police departments and filed missing person complaints, vanishing once they turned back.
By evening, all the police departments in town knew that Josh Winston was missing.
She went to a stadium, sat down, put on sunglasses, and blended in with the crowd.
A person scrolling through social media saw a young woman filing missing person reports, only to leave without a trace.
The man squinted at his phone, then turned to Gabrielle; as he compared the similarities, she vanished.
The man gasped and ran out of the stadium.
Far outside the stadium, Gabrielle saw people rushing a child into a van.
She squinted at them and got into the car, making herself invisible.
"We got the target. Good thing no one noticed," a guy in a mask said.
A woman in a suit smiled, "It's just a kid. People will think we're the parents. So the plan is simple."
They chuckled, then shuddered at the sudden drop in temperature.
But the air conditioners weren't on, and the windows were closed.
"What's going on?" the man asked.
The kidnappers looked back and saw the little boy they had kidnapped was gone.
Gabrielle had taken him to his parents, who were running around asking for their child.
"He was kidnapped. But those people won't bother him again," she said next to the child's parents, who jumped at her sudden appearance.
As the parents looked at the child and the father bent down and carried him up, Gabrielle was gone, leaving the parents looking around with no sign of her.
In the kidnappers' car, Gabrielle turned into her wraith form, which made Weber relieved of sustaining her human form.
The kidnappers turned back to look at Gabrielle, then she vanished.
They then heard tapping on the windscreen and slowly turned to see Gabrielle screaming and flying toward them.
They screamed before being grabbed by the neck, their heads put through the roof of the car, severely damaged and immediately lifeless.
People saw the sudden execution but couldn't see Gabrielle hovering above them, her face expressionless as she stared at the corpses.
Some screamed, while others ran toward the sound, ashened.
"Gabrielle!" Weber said, his body shaky as he put his palm to the floor and summoned her.
Gabrielle appeared in front of him, arms crossed.
Weber's eyes and hair flickered between their normal colors and white as he was quickly losing energy; the energy boosters he bought were empty.
"A little more and you'll be like me—dead," Gabrielle said with a shrug.
Weber glared at her, "What did you do?" he asked, then his features returned to normal as he could no longer hold his Wraith Keeper form.
Andrej walked into the alleyway in his human form, but as Weber was too drained, Andrej turned back to his wraith form.
"I asked what you did!" Weber snapped at Gabrielle.
She squinted at him, "That's odd, how'd you know what I did?"
Weber gritted his teeth, "I can't know exactly what, but I could sense you and the terrible fear of death in the same place. That's no coincidence."
Gabrielle sighed and raised her hand in surrender while smirking, "Got rid of some criminals."
Weber sighed, "Fine."
Andrej floated to them and looked around, "Where's Ariel?"
"I escaped from her sight," he said, smirking, then collapsed to one knee.
Ariel ran to them, stopping and hissing when she saw Weber's state.
She sighed, patted his shoulder, and helped him up; he lost his stance and rested on her shoulder as they walked out of the alley.
"It's supposed to be the other way around," Gabrielle said, holding her hands behind her back.
Weber rolled his eyes, "Talk again, and it's back to the Abyss till I need you."
Gabrielle rolled her eyes.
Andrej floated a bit ahead of them and turned back to face them.
"Thanks to my experience as a vigilante when alive, I got intel on where Josh might be," he said, raising his chin and shoulders high.
Weber sat down on the stairs of a school that was closed for the day.
"Tell me the details and... thank you, Ariel," Weber said, catching his breath.
Ariel flushed, then straightened, "I won't always be there. And contracting with the dead doesn't mean you have to kill yourself!"
Gabrielle floated behind Weber and put her hands on his shoulder, "You sure?"
She said with a dark grin.
Andrej rolled his eyes and laid out how he had searched for Josh without avail.
But a bus driver knew he had gone to Crystal City with a woman.
Weber squinted his eyes.
He stood up, walked up the stairs, and sensed no sign of life.
"But finding a person in such a city..." Ariel thought, crossing her arms, her face gloomy.
"That's the largest city in Vespera!" she said, and Weber only looked at her with a smile, the strain on his body clear.
"Andrej, are you sure?" Weber asked, and his phone buzzed with people on social media saying they had seen someone like Josh cited in Crystal City.
A gray aura came over Weber, and Ariel looked at his hands as he spread them wide open.
"Weber, don't! You could die!" she yelled, but his hair and eyes turned white.
She tried to grab him from the upper body, but he ducked and slammed his palm on the floor.
"Wail of the Abyss!" As he finished speaking, deafening wails and screams were heard as Weber released the 500 ghosts he had ready to search for Josh.