by Karen Chance
“What do you want, Jimmy?”
“Be silent, Tomas! You have done enough damage tonight. I will deal with this.” Louis-César seemed behind on the action, but I wasn’t about to take the time to get him up to speed.
“Shut up,” I told him, and the expression of incredulity that passed over his face would have been funny in other circumstances. “Come on, Jimmy, what do you want to let…her…go? You wanted a deal, remember?” It was surreal, standing there in someone else’s body and arguing with a giant rat, but all I could see was my body with Billy Joe’s frightened expression. I couldn’t rely on him to get us out of this: he’d never even made it to thirty before he ended up drowned like an unwanted kitten.
“I want out of here alive; what you think?” Jimmy glanced, not at the vamps at my side, but at the ones lounging around the fight. Okay, maybe they weren’t his buddies after all. “And cutie here is going with me. Tony will forget about our little problem if I bring him Cassie, and that’s exactly what’s gonna happen.”
“No way.” I was not going to stand there and let Jimmy cart me off. None of my fantasies about Tomas’ body had included taking up permanent residence. “Try again.”
“Okay, fine. How about I slit her throat? Like that any better? Tony’d prefer her alive, but I’m betting even a corpse would get me outta the doghouse.”
“If you harm her, I swear it will take you days to die, and you will beg for death before it comes.” Louis-César sounded utterly convincing, but killing Jimmy, however slowly, wasn’t going to bring me back to life.
“He’s got a point, Jimmy. The only thing keeping you alive right now is Cassie. If you kill her, we’ll deal with you before Tony gets the chance.”
“So, what? I let her go, then you kill me anyway? I don’t think so.”
“You should recall that there are many ways to die,” Louis-César put in, and I could have kicked him.
“How many times do I have to tell you to shut the hell up?” I heard the edge of panic in my voice and forced myself to calm down. If I lost it now, no way were Pretty Boy and Rambo going to talk us out of this. Especially since Pritkin seemed to have disappeared, off chasing wererats probably.
“We will talk when this is done,” Louis-César said quietly. “I do not know what is wrong with you…”
“Exactly. You don’t. You really, really don’t.”
I smiled at Jimmy, but it only seemed to unnerve him. I figured out why a second later when I nicked my lip on a fang. Tomas’ were fully extended, but I didn’t know how to retract them. Great, bargaining for my life with a lisp—exactly my luck. “Okay, how about this, Jimmy? You give us Cassie, and we give you a head start. Say, two hours? I’ll even promise to distract the vamps over there long enough for you to make a run for it. They’re Tony’s boys, aren’t they? They’ll stand there and watch us kill you, or finish the job if you get past us. But we can keep them busy and off your back for a while. Now, that’s fair, isn’t it?”
Jimmy licked his muzzle with a long, pale tongue, and his little rat ears twitched. “You’d say anything to get her back, then kill me or let them do it. Besides, if I don’t take her to Tony, I’m dead anyway.”
I sneered. “Since when do weres take orders from vamps? I can’t believe you toadied to him all these years!”
Jimmy squealed; I guess I hit a nerve. “There’s a new order coming, vampire, and a lotta things are about to change. You may be taking orders from us soon!”
I backpedaled. I wanted to hit his pride, not goad him into doing something stupid. “Maybe, but it won’t do you much good if you don’t live to see it, right? You don’t know me, so you won’t take my word. But what about Cassie’s? How about if she promises to guarantee our good behavior?” Jimmy looked torn, like he really wanted to believe me, and I knew why. The bullet wound in his arm didn’t look too bad, but the injury to his torso was another thing. The long white strip of fur down his front had a widening red stain, and his breath sounded labored and a little bubbly. Ten to one I’d hit a lung, and even a shape-shifter was going to have trouble healing that.
“Come on, Jimmy. It’s the best offer you’re going to get.”
“Tell your muscle to back off if you want a deal, or she dies.” He spat on the ground at my feet to underline the threat, and there was blood in it. Jimmy was running out of time and, as soon as he figured that out, so was I. His whiskers twitched, and I realized with surprise that I could actually smell his fear. It was a tangible thing, to the point that I felt like I could roll it around on my tongue like wine. It was musky with a sweet undertaste, although the latter might have been from his blood. Now that I had noticed the heightened senses of this new body, they were proving very distracting.
I suddenly understood that Louis-César was not angry; he was furious: a simmering, peppery scent radiated off him in waves, and I had the feeling that as much of it was directed at me—or rather at Tomas—as at Jimmy. It was mixed up with the myriad scents suddenly hammering me from all around: the faint, far-off whiff of the sewers running beneath the earth, diesel fumes and cigarette butts from the parking lot and the reek of sauerkraut from a day-old reuben in a Dumpster. My body, on the other hand, smelled good, really good, and at first I thought it was because it was familiar. Then I realized with a shock that it actually smelled like a favorite meal, hot and fresh and ready to eat. I had never thought of blood smelling sweet, like warm apple pie or steaming cider on a cold day, but now it did. I could almost taste the blood running under the warmth of that skin, and feel how rich it would be sliding down my throat. The idea that I smelled like food to Tomas staggered me to the point that I didn’t see what happened in front of me until it was half over.
A suffocating cloud of bluish gas billowed around us, obscuring the parking lot and causing my eyes to burn. Several shots went off, and I heard Louis-César shout for Pritkin to stand down. I think he was afraid that the maniac, who had circled around to come at the fight from a new angle, was going to hit me instead of Jimmy. Since I shared that opinion, I didn’t interfere. I was about to go wading into the blue, trying to find me before I ended up dead, when my body came crawling out of the noxious cloud, crying and gasping for breath. I didn’t understand what was wrong with it—I wasn’t having any trouble breathing—until I remembered that Tomas didn’t have to breathe and that I hadn’t been doing so the whole time I’d been inside him. That made me start gasping like a fish, while my body crawled up and grabbed me around the ankles. “Help!”
“Am I okay?” I dropped to my knees, almost bowling us both over in the process, and began scrambling around in my clothes. “Tell me you didn’t let me get cut up!” I could barely speak past the pulse in my throat, but other than for the thin-edged wound on my abused neck and the dazed, watering eyes, I seemed intact. “Stay here,” I told a very confused Billy Joe. “I’m going after Jimmy.” My head nodded and a hand flapped at me. I paused to hike up Billy’s blouse before anything tumbled out, then crawled into the fray.
Pritkin was yelling something, but although I could hear him, I could also hear everything else, and I do mean everything. Conversations in the locker room were as clear as if they weren’t happening half a parking lot away. Music, the ring of slot machines and an argument between a waiter and one of the chefs in the kitchen were all clear as a bell. The heartbeats of the few surviving weres, some of which I could hear trying to crawl away underneath the cars, the breathing of everyone around me and the sound of a small piece of paper being blown across the lot turned the quiet night into rush hour at Grand Central Station. Maybe vamps learned how to be selective and to differentiate between trivial stuff and more important things. I guess they have to or go insane. But I didn’t know how, and although I could see Pritkin’s grim face, I couldn’t make out what he was angry about.
Once in the heart of the swirling blue miasma, I found that Tomas’ eyes could see outlines, but no distinct features. Still, it wasn’t too hard to make out the fallen body o
f a giant rat. Damn. I knew they’d screw it up. I wasn’t likely to waste any tears on Jimmy, but I’d wanted to know what he’d promised to tell me about my father. Besides, we’d made a deal, and I didn’t like that my so-called allies had taken it on themselves to alter it without so much as a word in my direction.
“He better not be dead,” I began, as Louis-César’s flushed face appeared in front of me. I got no further because his hand reached out and caught me in a stranglehold that would have crushed a human’s throat. He was saying something in a harsh tone that didn’t sound much like his usual voice, but I couldn’t understand him. I had a second to think, Oh, crap, before the familiar disorientation flooded over me and the blue faded away. I closed my eyes, not wanting to believe this was real, that I was going to have a vision now of all times, but there was no way to deny it. I was suddenly back in that same unwelcoming, cold, stone corridor, hearing voices filled with unimaginable despair.
I fell to my knees in shock, not at the surroundings, although they were far from welcome, but at the voices. I’d thought before that it was the people inside the torture room making the high-pitched keening, but now I knew it wasn’t. The men chained to the wall had started crying out only when they saw me, and their tones, although desperate, hadn’t sounded like this. This was a chorus of hundreds, thousands maybe, and they weren’t alive, at least not anymore.
I realized that the icy cold of the corridor was less from the weather than from the positive miasma of spirits crowded into it. Never had I felt so many ghosts in one place at one time, like a spiritual mist permeating the walls and filling the air to the point of suffocation. It was despair made tangible, like a film of freezing grease on my face that ran down my throat until I thought I would choke on it. This time I was alone and, without the bully of a jailer to distract me, I could concentrate on the voices. Slowly they became a little clearer. I quickly wished they hadn’t.
There was a definite feeling of intelligence, of many minds here, and none of them were happy. I thought at first that they might be demonic, there was that much—for lack of a stronger word—rage floating around. But they didn’t feel like the few demons I’d met; they felt like ghosts. After a few minutes’ soaking up their fury, I finally figured it out. Haunters are usually dealing with one of three main issues: they died before their time, they died unjustly—usually, but not always, murdered—or they died with something vital unfinished. Sometimes there are other contributing factors—ghosts, like people, can have many issues bugging them at the same time—but normally one of the big three is there. What I was sensing was thousands of ghosts who had all three of the big ones and a whole galaxy of contributing issues as well. If they’d still been alive, they could have kept every shrink in the United States working around the clock for the next century trying to sort them out. But they don’t have psychiatrists in the ghost world. What they have is revenge.
A ghost created by vengeance issues either gets some satisfaction, gets some payback, or hangs around lusting for it until its energy runs out. Most ghosts don’t have regular energy donors like I am for Billy Joe, so they fade over time, getting less and less powerful until only their voices remain, and then finally passing on to wherever it is ghosts go. I sensed that some in this throng were about to run out of juice, while others were as powerful as if they’d died yesterday, which maybe they had. The implication was staggering: wherever I was, it had been used for torture for decades at least, and probably for centuries, racking up enough spiritual dark energy to be felt even by nonsensitives. I doubted there was anyone, no matter how obtuse to the psychic world, who could walk into this chamber of horrors and not get a serious case of the creeps.
I looked around, but it was still just me and the chorus line. I didn’t know what to do. I was used to my visions behaving in a predictable way: they came; they hit me like a freight train; they left; I cried; I got over it. But lately, my psychic abilities were branching out into new and uncomfortable areas, and I was feeling resentful that the universe had suddenly decided to change the rules. Especially since, if I had to get stranded anywhere, I sure wouldn’t have picked this place. A cold wind slapped my face—they were getting impatient.
“What do you want?” I barely whispered it, but you’d have thought I’d taken a stick and stirred a hornet’s nest. So many spirits descended on me at once that I got only flashes of color, flickers of images and a roaring in my ears like a hurricane had decided to blow through the hall. “Stop! Stop it! I can’t understand you!”
I backed against the wall and realized only when I fell through it that I didn’t have a body, at least not a corporeal one. After a stunned instant I recognized the torture room I’d visited before, but this time only the victims were there. I got up and took a few tentative steps forward. I felt very solid. My feet didn’t disappear into the stone as I’d half expected, and I could see my arm. Thankfully it was mine instead of Tomas’; at least my spirit knew which body was mine. I felt the arm and it was solid, too. I could take my pulse. I was breathing. And yet none of the prisoners seemed to notice me.
The woman I’d freed at the casino was lying right in front of me, back on the rack as I remembered, except she wasn’t burnt. She didn’t look good, but I could see a faint rise and fall of her chest and an occasional flutter of her lashes, so I knew she lived. I heard a noise behind me and looked back over my shoulder to see a couple of thousand people, all standing quietly, watching me. The room couldn’t possibly hold that many, but they were there anyway. And, unlike my experience with Portia’s brigade, that didn’t seem to be playing havoc with my senses. I could see them without my eyes crossing or trying to crawl out of my head; maybe I was getting used to it. “I don’t know what to do,” I said, but no one gave me any hints.
I turned back to the woman and saw with surprise that she was looking straight at me. She tried to say something, but nothing came out of her cracked lips except a thin croak. Someone handed me a dipper of water. It was slimy and vaguely green, and I looked at it dubiously. “This stuff is gross.”
“I know, but there doesn’t appear to be anything else.” It shows you how out of it I was that it took me at least five seconds to connect the voice to the person.
I looked up slowly, then jumped back, sending the slimy water sloshing across the room in a wide arc. “Shit! Tomas!” I swallowed my heart back down to where it belonged. “What are you doing here?” He was holding a bucket with more of the disgusting water in it. He looked solid, but that didn’t mean anything. So did I, and I’d just fallen through a wall.
“I don’t know.” I was inclined to believe him since he looked as shaken as I felt. I suppose even for a vampire this counted as strange. The water in the bucket was trembling in a grip that wasn’t entirely steady, and neither was his voice when he spoke. “I remember you taking control of my body, and being unable to speak or react. Then, suddenly, we were here.” He looked around in amazement. “Where is this place?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Is this where you went before?” Something that looked like eagerness came over his features. “Is that Françoise?” He saw my surprise. “Raphael told me about the vision that upset you. Is this the woman you saw?”
“I guess.” I was still staring at the bucket he was holding, because it had occurred to me that he shouldn’t have had it. If he’d somehow piggybacked onto my vision, we should both be bound by the usual rules. We weren’t actually here; this was a record, an image of something that had happened long ago. We should be nothing more to it than the viewers of a movie are to what happens onscreen. But there he stood, holding a heavy wooden bucket like it was no big deal. “Where did you get that?”
He looked bemused. “It was in the corner.” He gestured with his free hand to a spot where the condition of the straw made it obvious that it doubled as a latrine. Of course, the whole room smelled like a cross between an open sewer and a butcher shop, one where the meat wasn’t too fresh and unused bits were a
llowed to rot in the corners. I thought irrelevantly that it was unfair that I had to smell this when I didn’t even have a body. My old visions had never come complete with scents and sensations, and I vastly preferred it that way.
“I can’t give her that.” Screw the metaphysics; I’d figure them out later. If Tomas could hold a bucket, obviously we could interact with this place, at least a little. And if that was true, maybe we could change a few things that had gone—or were about to go—seriously wrong. My first priority was to get the woman out of here, but she wasn’t going to last long without something to drink, and she kept sending longing glances toward the filthy bucket. I wondered how thirsty you had to be before something like that looked good.
Tomas smelled it and dipped his finger in for a taste. I remembered how acute his senses were when he made a sound of distaste and spat it back out. “You’re right. It is about a third salt. It is merely another form of torture.” He threw it down and the noxious stuff soaked into the dry straw. “I will try to find something else.”
“No! You need to stay here.”
“Why? Am I not merely a spirit here? What could happen?”
I looked nervously at the thousands of ghosts quietly observing us and wondered whether I should tell him. Normally, spirits don’t frighten me. There are rare examples who, like Billy, can feed off the energy of humans to a limited degree, but I have always been able to repel them at will. Besides, most find that it requires more energy to attack a human than they get from the process, so they usually don’t bother unless you irritate them. But things had changed. Here, I didn’t have the protection of a body and all the defenses that went along with it. I was a foreign spirit on their turf, and if they decided to be annoyed about it, I might be in big trouble. Billy had told me that ghosts can cannibalize one another for energy—apparently it’s a lot easier than using human donors. He’d been mugged more than once, and one time it had been so bad that I’d had to donate some power quickly or he might have faded too far to come back. Now here I was, facing several thousand hungry ghosts who had every reason to be steamed that I was intruding on their territory. So far they hadn’t made a move, but they might not like us roaming around their castle. I didn’t intend to find out.
