“Nah, we haven’t been in town,” said Drake. “Can I—”
“No,” said Vance. “You’re to guard the mirror from this side while I call Ivy.”
“She’s still in Faerie,” Drake added to me in explanation. “If you end up in the dragon realm again, can you send me a postcard?”
“I’ll think about it.” I walked to the mirror, which carried a faint whitish glow. No reflection faced me, making me feel oddly like I was on another midnight tryst around the mages’ headquarters—were it not for the vampire at my side.
I pressed my hand to the mirror. Take us to the Briar Coven. Take us to the other mirror.
The mirror turned transparent, and my hand passed right through. Then I walked into nothingness.
Fluorescent lights came on overhead, banishing the dark and revealing a small, empty room with tiled floors and plain grey wallpaper. A door lay half open ahead of us, revealing a corridor. The walls, floor and ceiling were the same shade of pale grey, giving our surroundings a lifeless quality. Like a more solid version of the spirit realm.
“I don’t think this is Foxwood,” I whispered. “Ilsa said it was a small village in the middle of nowhere, not… whatever this is.”
“You think someone stole the mirror?” he whispered.
“Must have.” I trod forwards, my boots clacking on the cool tiles. “I guess this must be the place the mages were connecting with when they had the other mirror at their headquarters. Not the dragons’ realm.” I’d had it wrong. But what in hell was this place? It put me in mind of the necromancer guild with its echoing corridors, but the lighting struck me as much more modern.
A ghost walked through the wall, male, with vaguely defined wispy hair.
“Ah,” I said, taking a step backwards.
The ghost’s eyes locked onto us, glowing silver-white. “You,” he said. “You’re not alive.”
“Uh… yes, we are,” I said. “Definitely alive and kicking here. Who are you?”
“I… can’t remember.” He turned on the spot, looking through the wall as though staring at something invisible. Oh, boy.
I looked incredulously at Keir. “I travelled into another dimension and I’m still being haunted by annoying ghosts. How is this possible?”
“I’m not annoying,” said the ghost. He turned back to face us, his transparent eyes crinkling at the corners.
“Do you remember anything about your life?” I asked.
“Cold,” he said, with a faint shudder. “So cold. Bright. And cold. So long… so long… so many years…”
“Years?” Ghosts shouldn’t be able to stick around that long. He must be totally addled. We don’t have time for this.
Keir caught my arm. “Jas… check the spirit realm.”
I turned on my spirit sight and jerked backwards in alarm.
The entire space around me was swarming with the dead. So many ghosts, overlapping, a mass of grey shapes that hardly resembled the living people they’d once been. Murmurs, moans and whispers echoed, like a distorted recorded tape played at a faint volume.
I’d been banishing spirits for a third of my life and I’d never seen a ghost who’d stuck around longer than a few weeks, but these spirits were so faded, they might have been here for months or more. Fear clawed at me from within. Whatever had killed all those people, instead of moving on, the ghosts had been trapped in an eternal hell.
“I think it’s probably safe to say the mages don’t have any necromancers working here.” My voice was shaky. “They’d lose their minds.”
“Can’t disagree there,” Keir said.
Even people who banished the dead on a daily basis could only tolerate so many spirits before they started to crack. But for all the ghosts, I hadn’t sensed any living people during my brief scan of the spirit realm. Then again, Vance and the others had taken the mirror at least six weeks ago. Nobody had come here since.
“Do you remember seeing any mages?” I asked the ghostly man. “Or… any other humans? When was the last time you saw someone living?”
The ghost flickered and vanished. Creepy was par for the course when it came to the dead, but the stifling stillness of the narrow, clinical-smelling corridors made the small hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.
I released a slow, steady breath, and imagined Lloyd cracking up laughing at me for being afraid of a single ghost. “Want to look around?”
“Sure, but we should be careful,” Keir said. “Someone really screwed up here.”
“Coming from the guy who tried to take on five hellhounds single-handedly.”
He gave me a smile, but his eyes were wary as he walked out of the room, past the spot where the ghost had vanished. Fighting the instinct to turn heel and get the hell out, I followed.
Outside the room, the corridor was lined with glass-windowed rooms filled with shattered glass and broken machinery. The smell of decay underlaid the clinical scent, suggesting some of the ghosts were recent after all. The spirit realm didn't tell me how big the facility was, but the lack of windows suggested it might be underground for all I knew.
“How far did we travel?” I whispered to Keir. “Ilsa said the mirror was with someone she knew, and she wouldn't have had any reason to lie. This sure as hell doesn't look like the Highlands.”
He made a small noise of assent and carefully climbed through the glass frame of a shattered window into one of the labs. The movement stirred up a flurry of dust, making me cough as I climbed into the room behind him.
“Thirty years,” Keir said, reading the topmost page of a stack of papers on the desk. “No, thirty… thirty-one years. That’s when this place was set up.”
Three decades, some of these ghosts had been trapped in here. The mages might not even know, if they could only see the bones, not the screaming dead.
At the back of the lab stood a row of three tall glass cases, each big enough to fit a person inside. A long-decomposed skeleton lay in one of them. I pressed a hand to my mouth, fighting nausea.
Pages rustled as Keir lifted the notebook from the desk. “This place was an old Orion League stronghold. They—captured humans.”
“Supernaturals.” Fear squeezed my chest, imagining what it would be like to slowly suffocate here in a tank inside this cold, window-less lab. “The mages were in on this.”
“Not always,” said Keir. “Lord Sutherland wasn’t Mage Lord thirty-one years ago. I’d say it’s more likely that he found this lab later on and decided to steal some of the equipment for himself.”
“Out of academic interest, I suppose.” I gave a brittle laugh, thinking of the book Asher had said Lord Sutherland had stolen from him. “The League captured witches and forced them to use dark magic on humans, and the mages decided they wanted in on it.”
I climbed through the shattered window into the corridor, taking in a long breath. My lurching heartbeat kept me anchored to the present, if nothing else. Keir’s hand slid into mine and squeezed. “You good?”
“If I was, I’d be worried.” I let go of his hand. I’d nearly said I’d be worried I was turning into Evelyn, but that was a bit unfair. It wasn’t that she didn’t have feelings, but that she prioritised her own above all others.
I made for the next room. Old bloodstains the colour of rust marked the floor, along with heaps of disintegrated bones. “Ugh.”
Bodies, some still rotting, were heaped carelessly into a corner. In the room’s centre, chalk lines formed circles on the ground, hastily erased.
Keir swore. “Look at those marks.”
I didn't want to, but I forced my gaze to the nearest corpse. His arm was covered in faded symbols. So was his neck. As a necromancer, it was my job to ease their suffering, and yet there was absolutely nothing I could do to help the lost spirits trapped in this place.
Shivering, I tentatively turned on my spirit sight. Evelyn appeared at my side, her hands pressed to her ears. “Get me out of here before I lose my mind.”
“How am I suppo
sed to do that?” I grimaced as the chorus of the dead rose in the background, eerie, insistent.
“Who are you talking to—right, Evelyn,” said Keir. “I guess it can't be fun to be surrounded by ghosts even if you are one.”
“You're telling me.” My hands lit up with Hemlock magic, unexpectedly. “Whoa. My magic… it's reacting.”
A tugging sensation, like the tracking spell, spun me on my heel like the point of a compass.
“Reacting to what?” Keir walked at my side as I backed out of the room, turning in the direction of the faint tugging sensation. Wards rippled against my skin like static, coming from a locked door at the corridor’s end.
Instinct screamed at me to get out. Necromancer I might be, but I did have some sense of self-preservation left.
Curiosity won. I opened the door.
More glass tanks filled the space within the room. Inside each, a circle of candles lined the edges. And between each candle circle was a ghost.
Young, old, faded or clear… everyone in the lab was dead. A thousand transparent stares turned in our direction, pleading, desperate, trapped within their glass prisons.
“This shouldn’t be possible.” The words stuck in my throat. “How…?”
I knew how. For a ghost to be imprisoned in a cage, they must have been torn from their bodies while they were still alive. Even if their bodies rotted away, they’d endure. Forever.
Keir swore under his breath. “This is what the mages were doing.”
Separating bodies and souls. The spirit inside the nearest tank looked at me with faded blue-white eyes. His hands brushed the glass and I jerked back. “Is he… is he a vampire?”
“They all are.” Keir’s hands curled into fists at his sides. “Every last one.”
“Bastards.” I scanned the tank in front of me in search of a way to open it, but there didn't seem to be one, and the candles were on the inside of the glass.
I called on my Hemlock magic, my hands tingling with static as I touched the metallic edge of the tank.
“Watch it,” Keir murmured. “There'll be defence mechanisms.”
“I know that.” My voice shook, and so did my hands. Magic sparked from my fingers, bouncing off the tank’s glass front.
Then a live current slammed into me, sending me sprawling onto my back. Keir exclaimed, crouching at my side. “Jas. Speak to me, Jas.”
“I’m fine.” Shaking off the shock, I clambered to my feet and found myself face to face with the vampire inside the tank.
“Watch yourself,” said the vampire, his voice quiet but echoing. “Unless you want to join us on the other side, that is.”
“Who put you in here?” I asked. “The mages, right?”
“Does it matter?” The vampire shook his head. “Human, supernatural, dead, alive, you all look the same from here.”
“I can set you free,” I said. “I can help you to the afterlife. To move on. But first, can you tell me… why did they put you in the tank? What did they hope to learn?”
His mouth moved, but I didn’t hear a word. He was fading. My magic reached out, pushing at the tank’s edges. This time, I felt a spark, and stifled the current before it could shock me.
A splintering noise sent a jagged crack upwards through the glass exterior. Encouraged, I directed my magic into the tank, pushing the candles apart.
The ghost, however, didn’t move. He remained floating on the spot, his eyes glassy, almost empty of life.
“Hey,” I said to him. “You’re free now.”
The vampire floated out of the circle, through the place where the tank’s front had been. Then his hands latched onto me, and he began to feed.
Coldness pierced me through to the very core, rendering me still. Icy hands gripped my already-depleted spirit, and while I tried to back away, my body wouldn’t obey me.
Then Keir’s hands locked around the vampire’s ghostly arm, pulling him off me. I staggered, forcing my legs to keep moving away from the vampire’s pale, empty stare. The lucidity in his expression from earlier had vanished, and his form grew more shadowy as my spirit gave him life.
An incoherent growl slipped through the vampire’s teeth and he spun on Keir, hands reaching for his throat. Keir calmly sidestepped, wrenching the ghost’s arm behind his back. While he couldn’t feel pain in that state, neither could Keir.
“Don’t make me drain everything you have left, vampire,” he said.
“Shade,” growled the vampire. “You’re one of them, too.”
“What’re you talking about?” I rubbed my hands together to get some sensation back into them, both eyes on the restrained vampire. “You were talking to me just then—you haven't completely lost your mind.”
“He might as well have,” said Keir. “He's half-dead. There’s no coming back from this state.”
The vampire made a half-wild lunge, breaking out of Keir’s grip. Cursing, he snagged the vampire by the leg before his grasping hands found my throat. “I banish you beyond Death’s gates, vampire.”
The vampire vanished—then he reappeared again, directly behind me. His hands went through my chest, straight to my soul.
“I banish you beyond death, vampire.” I choked out, fighting the chill.
“I am already beyond death,” he snarled.
Keir crashed into him from the side, locking his arm around his neck. “Go peacefully or by force, it’s all the same to me, vampire.”
“You're dead,” I said. “No matter how long you try to feed on me, you can't come back to life. It'll be better for everyone if you move on.”
“No,” screamed the vampire. “I won't!”
He broke free of Keir’s grip and vanished once more. Tapping the spirit realm, I recoiled from the solid wall of ghosts. Hands grabbed at me—ghosts, not vampires—and I turned off my spirit sight. But the vampire had vanished among the other lost spirits, fleeing the room.
Keir swore under his breath. “The mirror.”
Shit. The vampire might not even know the mirror was there, but if I were him, I’d head straight for the nearest way out. Right into Edinburgh.
Turning my back on the other tanks, I broke into a jog, retracing our steps. The vampires’ moans and whispers pursued us, trailing like ice on the back of my neck, but I’d learned my lesson from freeing the first guy. As awful as their punishment was, if they got out into Edinburgh, just one vampire could kill multiple people in seconds.
I skidded into the room with the mirror to see the vampire’s ghostly form pass through the mirror’s rippling surface.
“Fuck,” said Keir, echoing my own thoughts. “If he possesses a vessel, we’ll have a hell of a job finding him.”
“I’m more worried for my friends on the other side.” I ran to the mirror, and Keir caught up with me as we passed through the glass into the hotel room.
In front of the glass, Drake lay in a crumpled heap on the carpeted floor. I clapped my hands to my mouth. “No. Drake—"
“He’s alive,” Keir said.
Sure enough, I tapped the spirit realm and found a faint but strong glow above Drake’s body. The expanse of grey seemed blank and quiet after the chaos of the trapped dead in the lab.
Keir shouted a warning, and the vampire slammed into me from behind, his ghostly hands locking around my throat. Once again, a chill permeated my blood, needles prickling at every inch of skin. “Get off me!”
“Let her go,” Keir said, grabbing the ghost from behind. “I banish you, vampire, beyond Death’s gates.”
“Likewise.” I twisted out of the vampire’s grip, flying out of my body to face him directly in the spirit realm. Necromantic power suffused my hands and I pushed it all at him, willing him to calm and move on. “I banish you. Go to rest.”
“I will not be beaten,” roared the ghost, and necromantic power exploded from his hands, knocking me flying backwards into the air.
By the time I’d caught my balance, he was gone.
“Damn, he’s a shade,
” said Keir.
“Come again?” I shook out my hands, wishing I had a warm fireplace to hold them near. “He’s dead.”
“I know,” he said. “But he’s been brought back from the edge at least once. He’s not bound to a body, but he can’t be that strong without being a shade. That banishing ought to have worked.”
No kidding. The guy was so faded, he ought to have disappeared right away. “Was that what Lord Sutherland was doing in the lab? Bringing vampires back from the edge and then… turning them into shades?”
“There were at least a hundred in that lab,” Keir said.
A hundred. Every one of them furious, ravenous, deadly.
“He wasn’t just conducting experiments,” I said. “He was building an army.”
Had anyone ever destroyed a shade before? Even for the guild, it was unchartered territory. But if the vampire’s ghost showed himself in front of the mages, Lord Sutherland would know where he came from right away. Then it was one step from there to tracking down the mirror… and he'd be able to set the entire army of vampire shades loose into Edinburgh.
Drake groaned, stirring at my feet. “It feels like I took an ice bath,” he mumbled into the carpet.
“Not quite,” I said, relieved he seemed okay. “An angry vampire’s ghost escaped through the mirror. Sorry.”
“I thought you were going to find your coven’s friends, not the vampires.” Drake pushed to his feet, looking around the hotel room in confusion.
“That mirror doesn’t lead where we thought it did,” I said. “Is Vance around? And Wanda?”
“Wanda’s outside,” he said. “I’ll call her back in. What’s on the other side of the mirror?”
“Lord Sutherland’s army,” I said. “Vampires. Starved, angry vampires, pushed into Death and brought back to life.”
“Vampires have been disappearing off the streets for ages,” Keir added. “Everyone assumed they didn't leave a trail deliberately, so nobody would be able to track or follow them. I didn't know…”
None of us had known. And if not for my allies taking the mirror back, those vampire ghosts would have been the next monsters to fill Edinburgh’s streets.
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