A Ghost In The Trenches Novels & Stories

But your mother's about to die—I know you'll show up. Her words jolted me back to reality. I pressed a hand to my chest, where my heart ached with a dull, numbing pain. How I wished I could tell her myself. That I've been here all along. It's just that... I've been dead for four years.

Every knock of stone, every dusty shiver whispers: we must hurry. Lower down, the air grows damper, the stones gleam colder on the walls, as if the earth’s own sweat had gathered in them. As a child, I often heard ghost stories about these tunnels: that lost soldiers’ spirits wandered them, or that once darkness itself had tried to break through them. Yet now, they are the only refuge we have. The children’s soft, whimpering sounds beat against my mother’s heart, and each tiny movement drives me to step quicker, firmer.

The uncounted didn’t charge the throne. They flowed into the kitchen like spilled ink, their violet eyes bleeding into the silver threads until the air turned the color of a fresh bruise. I waited for the sounds of a massacre. I waited for the shadows to tear the red feathers from my mother’s back. Instead, the three thousand ghosts did something far worse. They knelt. The man with the missing arm lowered his head, his ashen forehead touching the silver threads. A low, rhythmic humming rose from the army, a vibration that sounded like wet paper tearing. It wasn't a growl of war. It was a hymn of recognition.

Christopher and Zyter exchanged a fierce glance, their determination unshakeable. Suddenly, the tranquility shattered as the Blood Ghosts emerged from the darkness. They materialized before the hunters, their red eyes glowing with malice. The sight sent shivers down Christopher's spine, but he steadied himself, gripping his sword tightly. The Ghosts were relentless, their numbers seemingly endless.

I look at Marcus as he looks at Analise he nods smiling. "I know kitty, for two to witness it, it means it is true. Ghosts don't scare me kitty." I look at him confused. "Kitty my life was full of ghosts; they all keep coming back to haunt me. Hearing the screams of the team on the battlefield, watching them die in traumatic circumstances, you see things." I look at him even more confused.

The chat screen that had once been so cold on her side—now the roles were reversed. Looking at the baby's breath she'd left behind, my forehead wrinkled in a frown.

"You can burn down a man's life, salt his memories, and scatter his ashes to the corporate wind, but you can never truly kill a ghost until it comes back to slit your throat." The acid rain of the northern slums tastes like rusted iron and ash against my tongue, burning my throat with every harsh breath I pull into my chest. My boots stick to the foul, grease-slicked pavement of the alleyway, the synthetic fiber in my arms sparking faintly with a low, agonizing blue flicker. Every step feels like walking on shattered glass, the cold damp seeping straight through my jacket and gnawing at the fragile, frantic life growing inside my lower stomach.

The Logistics of the Ghost Fleet We left the server farm two hours later, moving through the industrial wasteland of Gary under a sky that had turned the color of a wet slate shingle. The air was thick with the scent of sulfur and the dying breath of the rust belt, a perfect camouflage for two ghosts who were no longer interested in hiding.

If her uncle trusted the human enough to legally take under his wing then she trusted him enough to not question his judgement. Auxilia wasn’t just a guest house, it was Neutral Ground, meaning that all ghouls who wanted to pass on and eat dead human flesh only when necessary, come here for their stock ups, some come here for shelter, others rented and lived here. The point was, the whole place was a ghoul sanctuary. That was why it was called Auxilia Guesthouse and café; Auxilia was greek for ‘help’ or ‘safety granted’.

It was displayed. My chest tightened as I lifted it with a gloved hand. The scent hit immediately, chemical, sharp, layered with something metallic underneath. Chlorine and cold steel. A smell I had not encountered in years but recognized all the same. It was the same ghost note that had clung to the air the night my parents died. This was not chaos. It was not a fight gone wrong or a rogue passing through. This was intent. Someone had gotten close enough to Owen to inject him, or had taken him elsewhere and left this behind as a message. Either option required control, preparation, and knowledge of what we were.