THE GHOST IN THE GREY

PART 1

The asphalt of Naval Station Norfolk wasn’t just hot; it was alive, a shimmering, malevolent entity that radiated heat through the soles of my boots and settled deep into my bones. The air tasted of sulfur, salt spray, and the distinct, high-octane tang of jet fuel—the perfume of my past life, now just an irritant in my current one.

I stood at the VIP checkpoint, a solitary figure in a navy blue polo and khaki pants, an island of dull utility in a sea of blinding white dress uniforms. My name tag read E. REED, cheap plastic pinned to cotton. To the hundreds of sailors, officers, and families swarming the pier for the fleet’s commissioning ceremony, I was furniture. I was a gate. I was an obstacle to be navigated around, not a person to be seen.

And that was exactly how I liked it.

At forty-two, invisibility was my tradecraft. I kept my brown hair pulled back in a severe, functional bun that pulled at my temples. I wore no makeup to hide the fine lines around my eyes—eyes that never stopped moving, never stopped scanning, never stopped calculating vectors of threat even when I was just staring at a driver’s license.

My left leg throbbed. It was a dull, grinding ache deep in the femur, a barometer for the humidity coming off the Atlantic. I shifted my weight, a micro-movement barely perceptible to the untrained eye, but enough to relieve the pressure on the titanium rod fused to the bone.

“Next,” I said. My voice was low, devoid of inflection.

A young Lieutenant handed me his ID. He didn’t look at me. He was looking past me, toward the massive gray hull of the destroyer looming behind us, dreaming of command. I scanned the card. Green light. “Clear. Enjoy the ceremony, sir.”

He moved on. They all moved on.

Then, the atmosphere shifted. It wasn’t a sound, but a change in pressure. The casual chatter of the crowd dampened, replaced by the sharp clack-clack-clack of polished shoes hitting the pavement with aggressive purpose.

Rear Admiral Thompson.

I didn’t need to turn my head to know it was him. I could smell his cologne—something expensive and woody, applied too heavily to mask the scent of a man who sweats the details. Thompson was a surface warfare officer, a man who believed the world was composed of straight lines and hard edges. He was order. I, a civilian contractor with a limp, was chaos.

He was escorting General Miller, a two-star Army General whose presence was the linchpin of today’s VIP list. Thompson was preening, his chest puffed out like a bantam rooster, guiding the General toward my checkpoint as if he were presenting a prize steer at a county fair.

“Right this way, General,” Thompson said, his voice booming with performative authority. “We’ll get you seated immediately.”

They stopped at my scanner.

I held up my hand. A simple, universal gesture. Stop.

“ID, please, General,” I said.

Thompson bristled. I saw the muscles in his jaw tighten, a rhythmic clenching that betrayed his soaring blood pressure. “This is General Miller,” Thompson clipped, his blue eyes engaging me with the warmth of a targeted missile lock. “His credentials are unimpeachable. Wave him through, Reed.”

I didn’t flinch. In my previous life, I had stared down threats that moved at Mach 2. A frustrated Admiral in dress whites didn’t elevate my heart rate above sixty.

“Protocol requires a scan for all non-naval personnel entering the secure zone, Admiral,” I said softly. I reached out for the General’s card. General Miller, to his credit, looked amused and began to reach for his wallet.

But Thompson put a hand on the General’s arm to stop him. The Admiral leaned in, invading my personal space. “Your scanner is faulty,” he lied, his voice dropping to a venomous whisper meant only for me. “I don’t have time for this nonsense. Let him pass.”

I looked at the scanner. It was working perfectly. I looked at Thompson.

“Sir, with all due respect, protocol requires a visual confirmation from the command post if I bypass the scan. If the digital scan fails—which it hasn’t—it will only take a moment to call it in.”

“I am the command post,” Thompson hissed, a vein throbbing in his temple.

The crowd closest to us had fallen silent. The ambient hum of the base—the cry of seagulls, the distant clang of metal on metal—seemed to fade away, leaving only the tension crackling between us. To Thompson, this wasn’t about security. This was about a “rent-a-cop” challenging a god of the sea.

He saw a middle-aged woman in a polo shirt. He saw a barrier.

What he didn’t see was the person who had spent the last twenty minutes analyzing the structural integrity of the lighting rig swaying precariously in the wind above the bleachers. He didn’t see the person who had clocked the unauthorized delivery van parked three hundred yards too close to the fuel depot. He didn’t see me.

“Your job is to facilitate, not obstruct,” Thompson snarled, leaning so close I could see the broken capillaries in his nose. “Now, step aside, or I will have you removed from this base permanently.”

I held his gaze. I didn’t blink. I didn’t swallow nervously. I simply existed in the stillness.

“Waiting for confirmation, Sir,” I said, tapping my earpiece.

The silence that followed was heavy, suffocating. Thompson looked as if he might actually strike me. His hands curled into fists at his sides. For ten seconds, we stood locked in a battle of wills—the immovable object against the irresistible force of ego.

“Clear,” the voice crackled in my ear. “General Miller is green-lit.”

I stepped back, sweeping my arm toward the VIP seating. “You’re clear, General. Enjoy the ceremony.”

Thompson didn’t move immediately. He glared at me, his eyes promising retribution. He didn’t just want me fired; he wanted me erased. He wanted to scour the stain of my insubordination from his perfect day. Finally, he spun on his heel and marched the General away, leaving a wake of awkward silence behind him.

I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding, adjusting the tarnished silver bracelet on my right wrist. It was a nervous tic, a grounding mechanism. The metal was cold against my skin.

This wasn’t new. This war between Thompson and me had been simmering for weeks, a slow-burn conflict of philosophy.

He was a man of the surface—shiny, loud, visible. I was a creature of the depths—silent, hidden, critical.

I remembered the incident a month ago. The briefing room. I had been sitting in the back, invisible in the shadows, listening to the security plan for a foreign dignitary. Thompson had been presenting a motorcade route that exposed the vehicles to a 200-yard blind spot between the armory and Hangar 4.

I had raised my hand.

“Admiral,” I had said, my voice cutting through the drone of his presentation. “The surveillance tower has a restricted line of sight on that sector. It’s a kill box.”

The room had frozen. Thompson had looked at me over his reading glasses, his disdain palpable. “Let’s leave the strategic analysis to the people who actually wear the uniform, shall we?” he had sneered. The room had chuckled—nervous, sycophantic laughter.

I had sat down. I said nothing. But the next day, the route was changed. He knew I was right. And he hated me for it.

Then there was the fence. He’d caught me inspecting the perimeter wire, my fingers tracing the corrosion near a drainage ditch. He had mocked me then, too. “Stop inventing problems,” he’d shouted as he jogged by. But I knew the soil density there was compromised. I knew a determined intruder could breach that fence in under thirty seconds with a pair of bolt cutters.

He saw me as a nuisance. I saw myself as the last line of defense.

Back in the present, the heat on the pier was intensifying. The sun was a physical weight. I checked my watch. 1300 hours. The ceremony was about to begin.

I rotated my position, moving from the checkpoint to the perimeter of the VIP section. My leg dragged slightly—a catch, a hitch, a limp. I felt the eyes of the junior sailors on me. I knew what they whispered. Poor old Eevee. Probably a lonely spinster. Probably got that limp falling down some stairs. Sad.

They saw the limp as a weakness. They didn’t know the limp was the receipt for a life they couldn’t imagine. They didn’t know it was the price of punching out of a chaotic spin at fifty thousand feet, the violence of ejection shattering bone and tearing ligament. They didn’t know the titanium in my leg cost more than their cars.

I pushed the pain aside. Compartmentalize. Focus.

A new group was approaching the checkpoint. I squinted against the glare. They moved differently. Even out of uniform, or in partial dress, you can tell. They didn’t walk; they flowed. They occupied space with a predatory confidence.

Navy SEALs.

They were late, likely fresh off a transport. Their skin was tanned that deep, permanent bronze that comes from months in the desert sun, a stark contrast to the pale, office-bound complexions of the base command staff. They were here for a unit citation.

The leader was a Lieutenant Commander. Tall, lean, with eyes that scanned the crowd the same way mine did—threat, non-threat, exit, cover. He moved with a lethal grace.

I watched them, a pang of familiar longing striking my chest. I missed that brotherhood. I missed the unspoken language of the elite. But I was a ghost now. I belonged to the gray.

Just as the SEALs reached the outer perimeter, I saw Admiral Thompson detach himself from the VIP group. He was coming back.

My stomach tightened. He wasn’t done. The humiliation at the scanner hadn’t been enough to sate his ego. He needed a public execution.

He strode toward me, cutting through the crowd, parting the sea of spectators. He stopped three feet from me, invading my space again, forcing me to halt my patrol.

“I thought I made myself clear earlier,” Thompson began, his voice no longer a whisper. He was projecting now. He wanted an audience. “Your job is to be seen and not heard. You are a civilian. A temporary employee.”

He jabbed a finger in the direction of the gate.

“You do not have the authority to delay a General. You do not have the authority to think, frankly. And right now, my discretion tells me you are a liability.”

The chatter on the pier died down again. This was spectacle. This was the Admiral dressing down the help.

“I want you off this pier,” Thompson barked. “Report to your supervisor. Tell him you’ve been removed from duty. Is that understood?”

It was a firing. A public, humiliating dismissal in front of five hundred people. I could feel the heat rising in my cheeks—not from shame, but from a potent mix of anger and adrenaline.

“My apologies, Admiral,” I said, my voice steady, though my pulse was hammering in my ears. “I was ensuring a clear path for the honor guard.”

“I give the orders here!” he shouted, his face flushing red. “Get out of my sight. Now!”

I looked at him. Really looked at him. I saw a man afraid of losing control. I saw a bully.

“Understood, sir,” I said.

I turned to leave. It was a “walk of shame,” designed to break me. I kept my head high, my back straight, ignoring the lurch in my gait.

As I turned, a gust of wind—sudden and violent—whipped off the harbor. It caught the loose fabric of my oversized polo shirt. For a split second, the sleeve rode up past my elbow.

It was just a flash, but it was enough.

The scar was revealed.

It wasn’t a neat surgical line. It was a roadmap of trauma—a thick, jagged lattice of puckered, discolored skin where fire and metal had fused. It twisted around my forearm like a snake, a brutal souvenir of high-impact trauma.

A Chief Petty Officer standing near the rope line saw it. I saw his eyes widen. He frowned, his brow furrowing in confusion. He had seen wounds like that in Fallujah. That wasn’t a kitchen accident. That was war.

I tugged the sleeve down instantly, a reflex honed by years of hiding. But the Chief was still staring at me, reassessing, his curiosity piqued.

I kept walking, moving past the VIP section, past the stage. I passed a Marine Gunnery Sergeant standing rigid guard. As I walked by, the wind teased the collar of my shirt.

Just below the neckline, on my upper back, lay another mark. Ink. Two sharp, angled black lines. The tips of a raptor’s talons.

The Gunny saw it. I heard his sharp intake of breath. He knew that symbol. It didn’t belong on a middle-aged security guard. It belonged to the sky. It belonged to the gods of aviation. It was the mark of the F-22 community.

I could feel the confusion rippling through the veterans in the crowd as I passed. Who is she? What is she?

I kept my eyes forward, focusing on the exit. I just needed to get to my locker. Get my bag. Disappear.

But I wasn’t watching the crowd anymore. I was watching the world through the lens of habit. I was watching the wind speed. I was watching the heavy lighting rig towering over the bleachers, the one I had worried about earlier.

The hydraulic line on the lift was vibrating. A fine mist of fluid was spraying into the air, invisible to everyone but someone looking for disaster.

The wind gusted again. Stronger this time.

The rig groaned. A sound like a dying beast.

I stopped. I didn’t look at the Admiral. I didn’t look at the exit. I looked at the metal structure swaying above three hundred women and children.

The Lieutenant Commander of the SEALs, standing ten yards away, was watching me. He wasn’t looking at the Admiral. He was looking at my walk. He was looking at the way I held my hands. He was looking at the scar.

He leaned toward his Master Chief.

“Chief,” he murmured, his voice cutting through the silence in my head. “Look at her.”

“The guard?”

“No,” the Commander said, and I could hear the dawn of realization in his tone. “That’s not a guard. Look at the mechanics. Look at the limp.”

He squinted, and I felt his gaze physically hit me. He was putting the puzzle pieces together. The scar. The stillness. The discipline.

“Wraith,” he whispered.

The name hit me like a physical blow. I hadn’t heard my call sign spoken aloud in five years.

Wraith.

And then, the world ended.

A screech of tortured metal ripped through the air, drowning out the band, the gulls, and the Admiral’s ego. The hydraulic line on the lighting rig snapped.

The multi-ton steel skeleton, loaded with hot lights and heavy cabling, began to tilt. It wasn’t falling in slow motion. Gravity doesn’t wait. It was falling fast, arcing directly toward the packed bleachers.

PART 2

The sound of catastrophe is rarely loud at first. It’s a vibration. A change in air pressure. But when that hydraulic line finally sheared, the noise was absolute—a shrieking tear of metal that sounded like a jet engine eating itself.

“Incoming!” I didn’t think the word; my body expelled it.

Time didn’t slow down. That’s a myth civilians tell themselves. In a crisis, time sharpens. The blur of the world falls away, leaving only vectors, velocity, and impact points.

The lighting rig, a two-ton lattice of steel and hot glass, was free-falling. The crowd in the bleachers—families, children, sailors in dress whites—did what human beings have done for millennia when faced with sudden death: they froze. It is the reptilian brain’s fatal flaw. They stared up at the descending guillotine, mouths open, paralyzed by the sheer impossibility of the moment.

Admiral Thompson was one of them. I saw him out of the corner of my eye. The man who had just lectured me on authority and control was standing with his mouth slightly agape, his hands hanging uselessly at his sides. His brain was trying to process a scenario that wasn’t in the itinerary.

My brain didn’t need to process. It had been re-wired decades ago in the cockpit of a fifth-generation fighter. I didn’t see a lighting rig; I saw a bogey. I saw a collision course.

“Brace and cover!”

My voice wasn’t the polite murmur of the security guard. It was a command detonated from the diaphragm, a sonic boom that cut through the panic. It was the voice of God in the headset.

I moved.

The limp was gone. Pain is information, and right now, the information was irrelevant. I drove my bad leg into the asphalt, exploding forward with a speed that shouldn’t have been possible for a woman with a titanium femur. I wasn’t running away from the danger; I was running parallel to the kill zone, calculating the splash radius.

“Move! Now! Stage right! Get to the bulkhead!” I roared, my arm chopping through the air, pointing toward the solid steel wall of the docked destroyer.

The paralysis broke. The sheer violence of my command shocked them into action.

I saw a young mother, eyes wide with terror, clutching a toddler to her chest. She was scrambling backward, directly into the path of the falling scaffold’s support arm.

“Forward!” I screamed at her, sprinting to close the distance. “Don’t back up! Dive forward!”

She hesitated.

I didn’t. I hit her with a linebacker’s tackle, wrapping one arm around her waist and the other around the child, using my own momentum to throw us all into the gap between two heavy equipment cases.

CRASH.

The world turned to dust and thunder. The impact shook the pier like a bomb blast. I felt the shockwave ripple through the pavement and into my chest. Shards of glass and twisted metal rained down, pinging off the crates we were sheltering behind. A heavy steel crossbeam slammed into the asphalt exactly where the woman had been standing a second ago, gouging a crater into the concrete.

Dust billowed up, a choking grey cloud that smelled of ozone and pulverized stone.

Silence followed. That terrible, ringing silence where you wait to hear who is screaming.

“Stay down,” I ordered the woman, my voice low and steady. I checked the child. Wide-eyed, silent, but unhurt. “You’re safe. Stay here.”

I was up before the dust settled. The “OODA Loop”—Observe, Orient, Decide, Act—was spinning in my head like a turbine.

Threat assessment: Rig is down. Secondary collapse unlikely. Casualties: Unknown. Asset status: First responders are confused. Leadership is absent.

I stepped out of the smoke, a ghost emerging from the fog. The scene was chaos. People were weeping, stumbling, covered in white dust. Sailors were looking around wildly for orders.

I saw two young Seamen, maybe nineteen years old, staring blankly at the wreckage.

“You two!” I barked. They snapped their heads toward me. “Secure the perimeter. No one comes in, everyone goes out toward the medical tent. Now!”

“Aye, ma’am!” They didn’t question the polo shirt. They didn’t question the khaki pants. They heard the tone of command, and they obeyed instinctively.

I spun around. “Corpsman!” I pointed at a medic who was looking at the Admiral for direction. “Check the back row of the bleachers. Potential head trauma. Go!”

He ran.

I moved through the wreckage, scanning. My eyes were cameras, recording everything. I saw a Chief Petty Officer trying to lift a piece of debris. “Leave it, Chief! It’s unstable. Get the civilians clear first.”

“On it!” he shouted back.

For three minutes, I was the conductor of a symphony of disaster. I directed traffic, triaged injuries, and established a secure perimeter. I was pure energy, pure focus.

Then, I felt it. The gaze.

I paused, breathing hard, the adrenaline beginning to curdle into the familiar throb of pain in my leg. I looked up.

The dust was clearing. The SEAL team hadn’t moved to help—not because they didn’t care, but because they had realized they weren’t needed. They were standing in a loose formation, watching me.

The Lieutenant Commander was at the front. His arms were crossed, and there was a look on his face that I knew well. It was the look of a professional recognizing another predator in the wild. He wasn’t looking at a security guard. He was looking at the way I stood, the way I scanned, the way I had just taken absolute control of a mass casualty event while a two-star General and a Rear Admiral stood by and watched.

He nodded. A barely perceptible dip of the chin. I see you.

I turned away, my heart hammering against my ribs. The crisis was over. The reality was crashing back in.

I wasn’t a commander. I wasn’t a pilot. I was Eevee the gate guard, and I had just spent the last five minutes barking orders at active-duty personnel.

I saw Admiral Thompson. He was standing near the edge of the wreckage, his white uniform dusted with gray ash. He looked diminished. The bluster was gone, replaced by a hollow, shell-shocked expression. He was looking at the crater where the beam had hit—the crater where the mother and child would have been if I hadn’t tackled them.

He looked up and locked eyes with me. Confusion warred with embarrassment on his face. He opened his mouth to speak, perhaps to reprimand me for manhandling a civilian, perhaps to ask what the hell had just happened.

But he never got the chance.

THE GHOST IN THE GREY
PART 3

The silence on the pier was heavy, heavier than the humidity, heavier than the twisted steel lying on the asphalt. The wail of distant sirens was approaching, but right here, in the eye of the storm, no one spoke.

I brushed the dust off my khaki pants, my hands trembling slightly. The adrenaline dump was hitting me now. The pain in my leg was a screaming crescendo, a hot iron rod shoved down my marrow. I just wanted to go home. I wanted to sit in my dark apartment, drink a glass of cheap scotch, and forget that for a few minutes, I had let the ghost out of the box.

I turned to slip away, to fade back into the background where “rent-a-cops” belong.

“Hold fast.”

The voice was quiet, lethal, and carried effortlessly across the pier.

It wasn’t the Admiral.

I froze. I knew that tone. It was the ‘Command Voice’—not the shouting of a drill instructor, but the calm, terrifying certainty of a man who kills for a living.

The SEAL Lieutenant Commander was walking toward me.

He didn’t rush. He moved with a deliberate, hydraulic smoothness. His team, six men who looked like they were carved from granite, fell into step behind him. They cut through the crowd of stunned sailors and officers like a shark fin cutting through water.

The crowd parted. Admiral Thompson stepped forward, regaining a shred of his composure. He looked from the SEALs to me, his brow furrowed.

“Commander?” Thompson asked, his voice sounding thin and reedy compared to the operator’s. “What is the meaning of this? We need to clear the area.”

The Lieutenant Commander didn’t even look at the Admiral. He walked right past him. He walked past the General. He walked past the gaping sailors.

He stopped three feet in front of me.

Up close, he was even more intimidating. He had the thousand-yard stare of a man who has seen the edge of the world and found it wanting. He looked at my name tag—E. REED—and then up to my eyes. He studied the scar on my arm, now fully visible where my sleeve had torn during the tackle.

Then, he looked at the Admiral over his shoulder.

“Admiral,” the Commander said, his voice flat. “I don’t think you know who you were just talking to.”

Thompson blinked, caught off guard. “She’s… she’s a security contractor. A guard. I was in the middle of dismissing her when—”

“No, sir,” the Commander interrupted. He turned his body fully, placing himself between the Admiral and me, a shielding maneuver. “You were dismissing a legend.”

A murmur rippled through the crowd. I felt the blood drain from my face. Don’t do this, I pleaded silently. Let me stay dead.

The Commander turned back to me. His expression softened, just a fraction. A mixture of awe and profound sadness filled his eyes.

“Admiral,” he continued, addressing the room but looking only at me. “You are addressing Major Evelyn Reed, United States Air Force, Retired.”

The title hung in the air. Major.

Thompson’s jaw actually dropped. “Air Force? A Major?”

The Commander wasn’t done. He took a breath, preparing to drop the hammer.

“But you wouldn’t know her as Reed,” he said, his voice dropping an octave, becoming almost reverent. “In the sandbox, over the skies of Syria and Iraq, we didn’t call her Major.”

He paused. The silence was absolute.

“We called her Wraith.”

The word hit the crowd like a physical force.

Wraith.

I saw the recognition spark in the eyes of the older veterans. I saw the Marine Gunny straighten up as if electrocuted.

“Wraith?” someone whispered. ” The F-22 pilot? The one who flew the solo interception over the Black Sea?”

“The Ghost of Raqqa,” another voice murmured.

“She was the first,” the SEAL Commander said, driving the point home. “First female flight lead for the Raptor squadron. Distinguished Flying Cross. Two Silver Stars. She punched out five years ago after taking a missile meant for her wingman. They said she’d never walk again.”

He looked down at my leg.

“They were wrong.”

My throat was tight. I couldn’t speak. I had spent five years burying Evelyn Reed. I had buried her under layers of khaki and silence and mediocrity. I had hidden the scars and the medals because the sky was too painful to look at when you knew you could never go back.

The SEAL Commander stepped back. He locked his heels together. The sound was a sharp crack.

He raised his right hand.

It wasn’t a casual salute. It was a slow, crisp, perfect render of honors. A salute from one warrior to another, acknowledging a debt that could never be paid.

“Ma’am,” he said. “It is an honor.”

Behind him, his six men snapped to attention in unison. Six hands rose. Six pairs of eyes locked onto mine with fierce respect.

Then, the Marine Gunny moved. He stepped out of his post, turned toward me, and saluted.

Then the Army General.

Then the pilots in the crowd.

It was a wave. A contagion of respect. Sailors who had been mocking my limp ten minutes ago were now standing at attention. The pier, covered in dust and debris, became a cathedral of silent reverence.

I stood there, trembling, tears finally stinging the corners of my eyes. I felt naked. I felt seen.

Rear Admiral Thompson was the last one left.

He stood alone in the sea of salutes, a man on an island of his own making. He looked at me—really looked at me—for the first time. He didn’t see a janitor. He didn’t see an obstacle.

He saw the scar. He saw the posture. He saw the woman who had saved the child he had been too slow to save.

His face crumbled. The arrogance melted away, leaving only the raw, burning shame of a man who realizes he has been punching down at a giant.

Slowly, painfully, Admiral Thompson drew himself up. He turned toward me. His movements were stiff, humble. He raised his hand to the brim of his cover.

He held the salute. He held it long after protocol required. His eyes were wet. It was an apology without words, a total surrender of his ego.

I took a deep breath. I straightened my back, ignoring the screaming metal in my leg. I didn’t return the salute—I was a civilian now, and protocol was protocol—but I nodded. A single, slow nod of acknowledgement. I forgive you. Now do better.

“As you were,” I whispered, though only the Commander heard me.

I broke eye contact. I couldn’t take it anymore. The pedestal was too high, and the fall had been too long.

“Commander,” I said softly to the SEAL. “Clear the area. Get the medics in.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, dropping his salute.

I turned around. I didn’t look back at the Admiral. I didn’t look back at the crowd. I picked up my clipboard from where I had dropped it in the dust.

I limped away.

The crowd parted for me this time, giving me a wide berth, not out of annoyance, but out of awe. They watched the woman in the khaki pants walk toward the exit gate, her silhouette framed by the setting sun and the grey steel of the warships.

They would tell this story tonight. They would tell it in the mess halls and the bars. They would tell the story of the Admiral and the Guard.

But as I swiped my badge at the turnstile—beep—and walked out into the lonely parking lot, I knew the truth.

I wasn’t a hero. I wasn’t a legend. I was just a soldier who hadn’t stopped serving just because the uniform came off.

The Admiral had learned a lesson today, one that is written in blood on every battlefield in history: Rank is what you wear. Respect is what you earn. And the most dangerous person in the room is often the one you never noticed standing watch.

I got into my beat-up sedan, tossed the clipboard on the passenger seat, and looked at myself in the rearview mirror. The eyes of the Wraith stared back, just for a second, before fading back into the tired hazel eyes of Eevee.

I started the car. I had a shift tomorrow at 0600.