Tempt the Stars

by Karen Chance

  “Factories couldn’t churn out pilots, too,” Pritkin said, narrowing his eyes at Daisy. Who was poking around in her apron for the lost lash.

  “Exactly,” Roger said. “The RAF kept running out of pilots, and couldn’t train more fast enough to meet the demand. They only held out because of an influx of qualified personnel from abroad. And even then, it was a close thing. But imagine if you could train someone once, yet use him over and over. Imagine if, when one’s vehicle was destroyed, one’s body remained unharmed and could merely flit back and pick up another. And another after that, and another after that—”

  “You’d never run out,” I said, watching Pritkin. Who’d started out angry and was closing in on furious.

  Roger nodded. “Think of it: an army of soldiers who can’t die—they already did. Or be captured and forced to answer questions by their enemies. Or be prevented from returning to base. After all, what can trap a ghost?”

  I could think of something, I didn’t say, because Pritkin had reached apoplectic. Maybe he was thinking about the destruction such a force could wreak on the Corps. Or maybe it was Roger’s attitude that bothered him. It was like he’d forgotten who his audience was and was happily holding forth on his favorite subject.

  “Of course, there were problems,” Roger told me. “Most annoyingly that the ghosts said the bodies didn’t feel like theirs.”

  “I kept drifting up out of it,” Daisy said. “And that was before I tried to move the thing!”

  “And practice didn’t help much,” Roger added. “I finally realized that I had merely created a vehicle, when what they needed was a body. So I did some research and discovered that the binding spell for a golem has similarities to the way zombies are made, and once I understood that, well, things began popping.”

  “I’ll say,” Daisy put in.

  “Of course, I still had to figure out an enchantment to lighten the weight of the bodies, so they weren’t burning through power like a 747. And ghosts can’t do magic. Therefore all their spells had to be transformed into a potion form that could be carried—”

  “But you managed,” I said, because obviously.

  “Well . . . more or less.” He patted Daisy’s massive thigh. “And unlike living soldiers, mine don’t get tired. They can’t be wounded. They don’t need sleep. As long as there are bodies to house them and energy to supply them, they can go on and on and—”

  He cut off because Pritkin had finally had enough. A wash of power suddenly filled the room, reminding me that Pritkin didn’t need weapons. He was one. He was a war mage.

  But then, so was Roger.

  Pritkin launched himself off the table and into the air, with something in his hand I couldn’t see but knew damned well he couldn’t use. It’s over, I wanted to yell. He can’t hurt anyone! He’s already dead!

  But I never got the chance.

  I was half out of my seat, hand outstretched and words forming on my lips, when Pritkin suddenly wasn’t there anymore. But a second later, something hit the far wall with a crack. I looked over to see him peeling off the paint behind the table—and the plaster and the bricks—having been knocked across the room and partly through the wall by something that had moved so fast it had been only a blur.

  And still was, because I was too busy running to look for it. I shoved a chair aside and knelt by the crumpled body, the one with an unexploded potion grenade falling out of one hand. Pritkin must have stayed conscious long enough to steal one off Big Red while being carried back, and shoved it down his boot.

  And damn it! I should have thought of that. But I hadn’t thought it necessary to frisk a naked man.

  “That’ll teach him not to bother with shields!” someone said, and I turned to see the creature itself standing in the doorway. The rain was blowing through a ghostly image of the colonel’s head rising out of the neck and looking smug.

  “It won’t teach him anything if he’s dead!”

  “Would you prefer your father dead, girl?” the colonel demanded.

  I picked up the golden grenade and threw it at him. “He was going to trap him—not kill him!”

  The colonel dodged back out the door, avoiding the sticky strands that hit the jamb and spread over the opening, like a giant web. “Well, how was I to know that?” he demanded, glaring at me through a gap. “And what good would trappin’ him do? This isn’t your time!”

  “It might force him to tell the truth! How many of you does the Black Circle have? Where are they keeping you—”

  “I should have anticipated that,” Roger said testily, coming over. He glanced at the colonel. “Next time, allow me to ask for assistance before you intervene.”

  “He’s a war mage. You wouldn’t have had time to ask,” the colonel protested—to no one, because no one was listening to him anymore.

  “Do something!” I told Roger, who had knelt beside Pritkin and was checking for a pulse for the second time that night.

  He looked up at Big Red. “Flashlight.”

  The giant snagged one out of a tool belt with one of the hooks it used for hands, and pushed it through a gap in the net. From the look of what else was hanging around its waist, it was plain that Red’s primary use wasn’t gardening. He could have hit Pritkin with something far worse than the flat of his hand, although that might have been enough.

  Roger retrieved the flashlight and pried up Pritkin’s left eyelid, careful not to move the head. “Normal dilation,” he told me, after a second. “And his heartbeat is strong. He should be all right, but we won’t know for certain until he comes around.”

  “If he comes around!”

  “You worry too much. He’s half demon—”

  “He’s half human, too!”

  “Well, what would you have me do?” he asked impatiently. “I’m not a doctor and he isn’t a vampire. I can manipulate dead flesh any way you like, but I don’t have power over the living.”

  Maybe not, but I knew someone who did.

  He caught my arm as I jumped up. “She isn’t there. She—”

  “Like hell she isn’t!” I broke away and ran for the stairs.

  Chapter Eleven

  There was only one flight, which let out onto a small hallway. There were two doors on either side, with the first opening onto a junk room, piled high with old furniture, and the next onto a tiny bath. But the door across the hall led to a bedroom, with a big brass bed, a window cracked enough to toss the sheers around, and an old-fashioned wardrobe. And another door—

  Leading to a nursery.

  There was no one in it except for a baby in a crib, who had somehow slept through the storm outside and the fight downstairs. But who woke up when I slammed in the door. Woke up and started screaming.

  “All right, that’s enough,” Roger said, coming in behind me.

  For a second, I wasn’t sure if he was talking to me or to her.

  Not that I guess it mattered.

  He hurried past and picked up a small thing in a yellow onesie, with a mop of downy blond curls and a scrunched-up face. “Your mother is in the forest,” he told me, feeling frantically around in his jacket for something. “Dealing with the mess you two made before it consumes half the state!”

  I didn’t say anything. He finally came up with a pacifier that he stuck in the wide-open mouth that was emitting all the noise. That worked for a couple of pulls, until she promptly spat it out. He sighed.

  “I always wonder about babies who can be fooled by those things,” he said, jiggling her up and down. “She—you—never is. A few pulls and when nothing comes out . . .” He shrugged and put her head on his shoulder, doing the please-shut-up baby dance all parents seem to know.

  I sat down.

  There was a rocker underneath my butt, but I’m not sure I’d known that. Right then I wasn’t sure I knew anything. I was looking at a concerned fat
her gently tending his fussy child, the dim moonlight from outside flooding in a small window to halo their blond heads, one straight as a pin, the other a mass of curls. And nothing made sense.

  “You killed hundreds of people,” I said numbly.

  He looked up. “What?”

  “Ghosts don’t work for free. All that power . . .”

  “What power?”

  “To fuel your army. It had to come from somewhere.”

  He frowned. “Are we back to that again?”

  I stared at him, wishing he looked like the picture I carried around in my head. The crazed mage shooting at me and Agnes in a dank dungeon; the manic, stumbling idiot, barely staying ahead of the Spartoi on a desperate flight through London; the sarcastic, angry man downstairs. Any of them would make this easier.

  Instead, I got a frazzled-looking guy with spit-up on his shoulder. I got a hand desperately clutching a diapered bottom, with the please-don’t-let-her-need-changing-while-her-mother-is-out look of men everywhere. I got a ridiculously goofy grin when he realized she was dry.

  I didn’t get easy.

  “What did you offer your legions?” I said, deliberately making it harsh.

  “My what?” He looked confused for a moment, maybe because he’d started trying to fish a bottle out of a dorm-type fridge stuck under a table while also holding a squirmy baby.

  “The ones you were telling Pritkin about!”

  He finally snared the bottle. “The war mage, you mean? We never got around to introductions.”

  “Yes! The one your creature almost killed! You told him—”

  “What he wanted to hear,” he said, sticking the bottle on the table. And then muttering something and waving a hand at it. And then trying to test it on a wrist, but that’s a little hard with an infant drooling on your shoulder. “Here,” he told me, pushing her at me.

  I shied back, but he just thrust her at me again.

  I took her.

  She didn’t look like me. She didn’t look like anything in that distinctive way of babies and half-baked loaves of bread. Until she got bored staring at the pocket on Pritkin’s shirt, and a familiar pair of baby blues met mine.

  They didn’t appear impressed.

  “Son of a—” Roger cursed.

  I looked up to find him with a red welt on his wrist, courtesy of the now steamy hot and curdled contents of the bottle. I waited while he fished out another, tried whatever spell he was using again, and finally managed to get the temperature right. “I don’t usually do this,” he explained. “I’m not, that is, I drop things, and her mother said—”

  “Your. Legions,” I repeated, because I had to. I had to know.

  “Oh, for—” He broke off, looking like he wished he could still stop my mouth with a pacifier. “My legions consist of an ex-marine who died in the Spanish-American War and a bag lady who expired under the Forty-fourth Street Bridge! And I never drained anybody to keep them. It’s quite the contrary—they usually end up draining me!”

  He took the baby back, popped the bottle in her mouth, and glared at me.

  “But . . . you made an army for the Black Circle. You just said—”

  He shrugged. “I’ve always been good at telling tales. And your war mage . . . well, he deserved a few bad moments. He gave me enough tonight!”

  “Are you trying to tell me that wasn’t true? That you just made it all up?” I didn’t believe it for a second. The evidence to the contrary had just thrown Pritkin halfway through a wall.

  He looked at me impatiently. “The theory is sound enough, but in practice—it’s like I told you. It was a failed experiment.”

  “It looked pretty successful to me!”

  “Well, of course. It was designed to.” He held the bottle under his chin and pulled over an ottoman, I guess so he wouldn’t drop me, and plunked down.

  “Designed to do what?”

  “To fool the Black Circle.” He saw my expression and made a disgusted sound. “Look, it doesn’t work, all right? But the Circle didn’t know that because no one had ever tried it. The demonologists who could create a proper binding spell couldn’t see ghosts, and you can’t bind what you can’t even tell is there! And the necromancers who specialize in ghosts can’t do a binding.”

  “Daisy said otherwise,” I reminded him.

  He rolled his eyes in unconscious imitation. “Do you know how zombies are made?” he demanded, putting the baby on his shoulder and patting her back. “They’re not like ghosts. They have no souls. So a necromancer must send a tiny bit of his own to animate his creation.”

  “So?”

  “So it’s not like you can spare that much! That’s why you don’t see zombie armies roaming about, despite what the movies would have you believe. A necromancer can only direct two, maybe three at a time with any success. Any others he tries to raise will be on autopilot—the lights are on but nobody’s home, all right? And as such, they’re sitting ducks. Useless.”

  “I still don’t see—”

  The baby interrupted me with an astonishingly loud burp. We both looked at her, me with shock, him with satisfaction. He wiped her chin and popped the bottle back in her mouth.

  “I told you, I modified the binding spell used on golems with the spell we use for making zombies. And it worked, more or less. But you know how it is with magic—it always bites you on the ass somehow. And in this particular case, I found that the new spell was limited in the same way the zombie spell is—I could only bind two or three ‘bodies’ at a time. I couldn’t make an army if I tried!”

  I scanned his face, wanting to believe him. His blue eyes looked guileless, and he sounded completely convincing. But then, he had downstairs, too.

  Roger scowled, I guess because I was taking too long. “Think, girl! Why do you think nobody’s used ghosts as a weapon before? I’m not a genius and nothing’s new under the sun. Somebody probably tried at some point, then gave up in disgust and went back to zombies! They may be disgusting, but at least they’re reliable.”

  “Yet you’ve done it, at least with two—”

  “Yes, two. And you wouldn’t believe the merry hell they give me, either. I mean, think about the logistics of it for a minute. If you could find enough independent-minded spirits, who weren’t obsessing over revenge twenty-four-seven, and if you could somehow find enough energy to feed them, and if you could convince them to support your cause . . . well, then you might have a force to be reckoned with. But do you know what the odds are on that?”

  He was right, I realized. And if I hadn’t been so busy worrying about him and Pritkin going for each other’s throats, I might have realized it on my own. Billy Joe was just one ghost and he gave me a fit. I couldn’t imagine controlling an army, or even managing to recruit it to begin with. No wonder nobody had ever done it. It would be like trying to herd cats.

  “Obsessive, chattering cats,” Roger agreed, because I guess I’d spoken that last out loud.

  “But Jonas—the head of the Silver Circle—told me your ghost army was watching the Circle’s every move.”

  Roger laughed. “Did he, now?”

  “You’re telling me that wasn’t true, either?”

  “Of course it wasn’t true. I don’t like the Silver Circle, but the Black’s even worse. I wasn’t about to help them, but they kept insisting. They’d gotten the idea that I had several hundred ghosts lying about, which I suppose they thought was a waste since they were feeding them! So I made sure that rumors reached the Silver Circle to make them extra paranoid and give me an excuse for not catching much.”

  I stared at him. He sounded so blasé about it, like lying to the two most powerful magical organizations on earth was no big thing. “And your army—”

  “When people hear the term ‘army’ paired with anything, they tend to give it respect. Ask Tony.”

 
“You lied to him, too.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Well, we couldn’t stay at the house,” he said peevishly, looking a bit annoyed. Like he’d expected me to ooh and aah over his accomplishments. I was impressed all right—that he’d lasted as long as he had. I was also coming around to Pritkin’s point of view—there was a damned good possibility Daddy was nuts.

  “Why couldn’t you stay at the house?” I asked, not sure I wanted to know.

  “Your mother outright refused. I told you, she prefers the woods, and anyway, she didn’t like Tony.”

  Imagine that.

  “And in any case, the bastard bunch of ghosts they have over there kept trying to savage Sam and Daisy! I had to get us out.”

  “So you faked the demon attack so Tony would exile you to the cottage,” I said, because of course he had.

  “Fire spell. You know how vamps are.”

  “—and then you booby-trapped the forest—”

  “Well, we had to grow it first.”

  “—and built those things so nobody would come out to spy on you.”

  “I’m less worried about the spying than the dying,” he said dryly. “If the damned Spartoi show up, I need something better than Tony’s lot to buy us time. Something even a god won’t expect. And I still had the specs for the homunculi from when I was with the Black Circle, so . . .” He shrugged.

  I sat there. I had about a thousand questions I wanted—needed—to ask, and this might be my only chance. Because if Mom was anything like Agnes, she wasn’t going to be happy to see me. I knew that, knew I needed to seize the opportunity while it was here, but I was having a hard time with it.

  “You . . . you lied about everything,” I said, trying to wrap my brain around the idea of this completely ordinary guy somehow convincing everyone—the Black and Silver Circles, Agnes, a master vampire, everyone—that he was a force to be reckoned with. When all he had were some junky robots and a couple of smart-mouthed ghosts.