A Ghost of a Chance: The Nightwatch book 1

by Cassidy, Debbie

  He let out a sharp bark of laughter. “Now that is a stupid question.”

  Uh-huh, right. I tugged at the thread and pinched hard. The weaving snapped, and my hands were free. Okay. Almost there. Legs next.

  “Humor me.” I smiled up at him thinly.

  “I offered them something they wanted. Life. They help me, and I weave them into new bodies.”

  “You can’t do that.”

  He leaned in and pressed a finger to his lips. “Shhh, don’t let them hear you say that.”

  I kept my hands behind my back, surreptitiously tugging on the thread I’d snapped. There was tightness around my ankles. While his attention was on me, I stretched out my foot and felt the give.

  Free.

  He scanned the air around me, clocking on to the fact just as I brought my fists around and boxed him in the ears.

  I shoved him backward and ran past Henri, straight for the doors. I had to get away, to stop him from using me for whatever his purpose was.

  My fingers grazed the door as the air slammed into my back and shoved my face against the wood. It wrapped around me like a hand and hauled me back before throwing me to the ground, flipping me onto my back, and slamming into my torso like a huge fist. The air rushed out of my lungs, but the fist remained, holding me down. The shimmer man walked over slowly, his boots clipping on the wooden floor, and came to stand over me.

  “Yes, you are something, Kat. But there is no getting away.”

  “What do you want from me, for fuck’s sake?”

  “Oh, what a loaded question.” His gaze blazed a trail over me. “Your body, your soul, and your power. You’re my ticket to freedom, Kat. I’ve been trapped for so long, and you’re the bridge that will set me free.”

  “Trapped, what the fuck are you talking about? You’re here right now.”

  “Am I?” He canted his head. “This isn’t me.” He poked at his chest. “This is a loaner form, a lesser form. My form is … Well, you’ll see soon enough.”

  “So, you’re not here?” I flicked a gaze at the door. So close, yet so far.

  He was the shadow man. He was wherever the shadow man lived, and it didn’t matter, nothing mattered but getting away.

  The air wrapped around me and hauled me to my feet.

  The shimmer man walked closer. He reached out and ran his thumb across my lower lip. “It’s time, Kat.”

  He grabbed my marked arm and pain shot through me, lighting me up like a Christmas tree.

  My scream filled the cavernous room.

  Chapter Twenty

  Tris

  As I transition from sleep to wakefulness, the wrongness grips me.

  Kat.

  Something is hurting my cupcake.

  Darkness hovers at the back of my mind, the same darkness I keep at bay for her each night. My lullaby reinforces the wall in her mind, and our bond tethers her, but right now, that bond is under duress. She is under duress.

  “Kat!”

  No answer.

  My body is still breaking free of the stone paralysis, and I urge it to hurry. I have to get to her. I have to be the shield that I was sworn to be.

  I don’t know what it is I’m protecting her from, that isn’t something Vinod explained. I got the impression not even he knew. All he told me was that she mustn’t dream deep, and my song, my link to her, would keep the deep, dark soul of the dreaming world at bay. It would keep the nightmares that plagued her away.

  And so far I’ve done my job. I’ve kept her safe, but now something is threatening my charge. The stone melts away, and my body swells to twice its size.

  Her scream echoes in my mind, and a growl spills from my lips.

  I bound off the bed and through the door.

  The splinter of wood is negligent.

  The yells and bellows that follow me don’t matter.

  I am bound to Kat, and I will find her.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Blood spattered my face, and I closed my mouth against it even though the instinct was to lap it up. He had me spread-eagled on the ground, with a crudely sketched circle around me. He’d drawn runes using the weaver magic. They’d flared brightly in the air for me to see before dropping down and vanishing. This was something new, something powerful, and Vinod had told him how to do this.

  The weaver had been a good man, an honorable man. To have given up this secret … He must have been in agony. Part of me wondered that if it took so much to break my bond with Tris, how much had it taken to forge it?

  Above me, the human whose heart was now in the shimmer man’s hand slumped forward and closed his eyes.

  “Five down,” he said. “Seven more souls to go.”

  He sounded a little too cheerful and stared a little too long at the dead form of the man whose heart he’d just torn out using a dagger and his bare hands.

  “Stop it. If you’re going to do this, then make it quick for them. Use magic. You want their souls, then why take their hearts?”

  He sighed. “Oh, if only I could. Unfortunately, that kind of weaving is just too hard for a novice like me, even with the body to make it happen. And the hearts? That’s my own unique touch.”

  He was lying. He was enjoying inflicting excruciating pain and making the humans watch, making them scream, that much was evident with his method of murder.

  He’d unbound their mouths now, and the sobs and curses filled the air like a symphony interspersed with desperate pleading.

  He inhaled deeply. “Who’s next?”

  The room went silent.

  His gaze fell on someone on the other side of me out of view. “You.”

  A woman screamed.

  I closed my eyes and tried to block out the horrific sounds. I tried not to open my mouth. I tried not to drink.

  Tearing, gurgling, ripping.

  No. No more, please.

  “Halfway there, precious. Can you feel me?”

  There was a tremor in my mind, a shaking of a foundation I hadn’t even been aware had been laid.

  He straddled me, his hands coated in blood, and then pressed his thumb past my lips and mashed it against my teeth; the blood hit the inside of my mouth and stole my control for a moment. I opened for him, sucking on the pad of his thumb in reflex.

  “Yes, petal, yes.” His voice was thick with desire, and it jolted me out of the blood haze.

  I turned my head to the side, tears leaking from the corners of my eyes. I was a monster, a fucking monster.

  He laughed and stood, leaving me pinned by the invisible force that he was exerting.

  “You.” He strode out of view again, and this time, the scream was male.

  My sobs joined the man’s as I screamed at him to stop, to just take pity, to have mercy, and then I felt her.

  Tris.

  She was awake.

  Tris, can you feel me too? I need you. I need you now.

  “Seven down. Five to go,” he crooned. “I tell you what, because you’ve all been such a good audience, I’ll make the next one quick. One-time offer. Who wants to go next?”

  There was a trembling silence, and then everyone cried out at once, “Me.”

  He laughed. “Look at you all, fighting to have your hearts ripped out. It surely warms my cockles.”

  “You.” This time he picked a human who was directly opposite me.

  The man trembled in fear, his dark eyes wet with tears. But he lifted his chin and met the shimmer man’s eyes.

  Good on you.

  “These are the creatures you fear?” the shimmer man said. “Humans with their technology and weapons who would wipe you out if they knew you existed. Is this what you preserve the glamour for?” He snorted. “Once we’re done, none of that will matter.”

  He raised the dagger.

  “Wait,” the man said. “You said you’d make it quick.”

  “I lied.”

  The dagger plunged toward the man’s chest.

  The man screamed, and the doors to the warehouse sm
ashed open. A gray, mammoth blur bounded into the room. It was huge with a serpentine body and powerful legs and haunches, and it was headed straight for me. I locked eyes with it.

  Tris?

  It leaped and landed with its front legs straddling my shoulders, covering my face with its torso and roaring at the shimmer man. The air rippled and hit him full force in the chest. He slammed into the poor man who he’d been about to gut, and the dagger glanced off the human’s shoulder.

  The air holding me let go suddenly, and I slid out from under Tris. This new, huge version of my tiny gargoyle.

  “Get on my back, love.” Her voice was deeper and gruffer.

  I did as she commanded and held on as she roared again. The shimmer man bellowed as the rippling air hit him once more.

  Boots on the ground, daggers whizzing, yells and exclamations. The gang was here. Oh, thank God. And then riders were pouring into the warehouse from every wall. One hit Kris and knocked him off his feet.

  “Riders!” My warning came in time for Mai to hit the ground.

  They were defenseless unless I showed them. “I have to touch Kris and Mai.”

  Tris leaped through the riders and came to a skidding halt beside Mai. I touched her, pushing my sight into her. Tris turned so I could get Kris with my left hand.

  “Motherfucker.” Kris lashed out with his baton, tearing a rider in two, but it reformed quickly.

  Salt banished regular spirits for a time, but riders were stronger. But they were only attacking because they thought the shimmer man could give them what they wanted. They were only attacking because they wanted to live, and that wasn’t a real possibility.

  The shimmer man was getting to his feet. While Mai and Kris dodged the riders and tried to get the humans free, I raised my head to the rafters, to the shimmer man’s army of riders.

  “He lied to you! He can’t give you life. Nothing can give you life. He lied.”

  The shimmer man let out an unearthly scream, his face contorting with rage. He flung out an arm and the power he ejected knocked me off Tris and into the air.

  “You will not have her,” Tris cried. “Begone. Begone back to the darkest depths.”

  I hit the ground in a roll as Tris covered me, but not before the shimmer man locked gazes with me.

  His lips curled in a satisfied smile. “Soon enough,” he said. And then Lark’s body dropped like a sack of potatoes.

  The riders paused in their attack, they hovered, seething, moaning, and then they shot through the walls of the warehouse and away.

  Tris faltered and then fell to the ground. Her huge body shuddered and then began to shrink until she was back to her regular size. Her round eyes glowed green for a moment longer, and then she closed them with a deep sigh.

  “Tris?” I scooped her up and cradled her. She was alive, as alive as a gargoyle could be. Probably wiped out from the awesome transmutation she’d just pulled. I’d heard tales of the power of gargoyles, but now I’d seen it.

  My eyes pricked.

  She’d come. She’d come for me, and she’d saved me.

  But the humans? I glanced over my shoulder to see Kris had gathered the surviving humans in a circle, his soothing voice, his calming tone lulling them as he spun a story, something to mask the horror they’d just witnessed. But something like this, it would leave scars. Something like this wouldn’t just let go easily.

  “Lark?” To my left, Mai lifted Lark’s head onto her lap. “He’s alive. He’s breathing.”

  I tensed.

  She looked over, her expression torn.

  “We have to know for sure it’s him.”

  She nodded then pulled a glowing rope from her pocket. “It’s enchanted. It will hold him.”

  She wrapped it around his wrists.

  I stood, with Tris in my arms, amongst the death and the blood and the scattered hearts, and the warehouse slowly filled with ghosts.

  They hovered around us, their faces filled with relief. Mai let out a strangled gasp, and Kris’s eyes widened, and his voice wavered as he wove his memory manipulation.

  I recognized several of the ghosts from the bar. A man wearing a fifties suit walked up to me.

  “He’s gone,” he said. “He’s truly gone. Thank you. Good Spirits welcomes you any time.”

  They dematerialized, and then there was nothing but the potent coppery smell of blood.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Henri lay still and silent on the bed where Kris and Killion had laid him. His eyes were open but unseeing, his lips still pressed in a line as if he had been resisting something. Not knowing the word to activate him meant that he was stuck like that until I could get hold of Gramps and find a way to get the information I needed to free him. Vinod, the weaver who’d made him, was the only one with the word. But surely he’d archived it somewhere? There was a way to circumvent this.

  I perched on the edge of the mattress and reached out to stroke his hard cheek. He looked like he wanted to say something, probably berate me for not doing something right.

  “I’m sorry, Henri. I promise I’ll free you.”

  What was this like for him? Was he stuck in some dark place? Could he hear me? Goodness knew what he was experiencing. The weavers called golems constructs, and the Academy taught us that they weren’t real, that they couldn’t feel, but they were wrong. I’d lived and worked with Henri for almost two years. He was the most real person I knew. He was so much more than a thing. He was Henri, and I needed him back.

  More than that, I wanted him back with an ache in my chest that both scared and confused me.

  Dawn had come an hour ago, and I should have been sleeping, but Tris was too weak to protect me, and now with the shimmer man after me, sleep was a luxury I couldn’t afford.

  It was him. I knew it was him that Gramps must have been unwittingly protecting me from. He was my nightmare, and staying awake was the only way of keeping him at bay. I couldn’t risk closing my eyes until Tris was back on form. She’d stopped the ritual, she’d saved me, and I needed her to keep him at bay.

  Mai was with Lark in the cells below. We couldn’t risk letting him roam free, not until we were sure the shimmer man’s influence was completely gone. He was alive, and that was a bonus, and Mai … Mai was an emotional mess. Jay hadn’t surfaced, though. Strange considering all that had happened, but when I’d asked Mai about it, she’d said he sometimes went out during the day and would be back at sunset.

  A yawn ripped at my jaw, and I gave it rein. God, I needed coffee and lots of it. If I pulled the rope in my room, Emmet would probably bring me a pot. No, I needed company. Maybe Kris was about? For some reason, being alone didn’t feel good right now.

  With a final look at Henri, I got up to leave. I peeked in on Tris, tucked up in my bed and turned to stone. Her eyes were usually open in stone form, but today, they were closed.

  Kris wasn’t downstairs, but Emmet was in the kitchen. He took one look at me and reached for the coffee pot. I pulled out a chair and sat, and he placed the pot and the mug in front of me.

  “There are sugar cookies in the jar on the counter,” he said. “There are always leftovers in the fridge.” He gave me a piercing look.

  He knew I liked food. Of course, he knew. He knew what we needed, after all.

  I smiled up at him. “Thank you.”

  He inclined his head and then left the room. The coffee was dark and sweet, just the way I liked it. God, that hit the spot. Laughter echoed in my mind, and blood filled my vision. I blinked it away.

  No. No more images. It was over.

  All those people dead.

  Oh, God. The hearts …

  “Can’t sleep, either?” Kris joined me in the kitchen.

  I took a shuddering breath, biting back a yawn. “I wish I could. But with Tris out of action, I’m too afraid to close my eyes.”

  He took the seat opposite me. I’d filled them in on the shimmer man, on my past, and Tris and her abilities.

  “I’m so
rry to bring this shit to your door.”

  He snorted. “It’s not your fault, it’s this shimmer man’s fault. We stopped him today, but I’m thinking we need to be vigilant.” He played with the cuffs at his wrist, his jaw tight.

  “He won’t stop coming at me.”

  “No.” Kris locked gazes with me, his eyes blazing with conviction. “But you’re not alone anymore. You have us, and trust me, we do not go down without a hell of a fight.”

  His sincerity in light of all the sarcasm over the past couple of weeks really hit home. After all this time, after harboring my secret and remaining distant from the world, I finally had friends, real friends who knew what I was, who I was. Okay, so it had taken riders ripping ghosts and weavers becoming reapers and the kidnapping of twelve humans to get to this open and honest stage, but it had happened, and there was no going back.

  I’d told them my secrets, but they still had theirs, like why they were holding a fomorian in the cells below. And why Jay wouldn’t go on patrol. What was the issue between Kris and Jay? I needed to know all this, but I wanted to give them the chance to confide in me like I’d confided in them. I could be patient.

  There was a knock on the front door.

  Kris looked up with a frown.

  “Are you expecting someone?”

  He shook his head slowly. “We never get visitors.”

  He pushed back his chair with a scrape and stood. I followed him into the foyer and hovered by the bannister as he answered the door. Two men in calf-length coats and dark trousers stood on the porch.

  “Can I help you?” Kris asked.

  One of them held up a badge, and my heart nearly stopped. Nightwatch Recovery Agents. They were the Nightwatch internal enforcers of warrants. While we dealt with the scourge, they meted out punishment to the Nightwatch operatives.

  Kris’s back tensed. “What can I do for you, agents?”

  “We have a warrant for the recovery of Kat Justice.” He looked past Kris into the foyer right at me. “You’re to come with us immediately.”

  Oh, fuck.

  To be continued…