Pride and Poltergeists

by H. P. Mallory

  “Sam?” Casey asked as he turned to face me, presumably to see if there was anything I could do to help the poor man. I just shrugged and shook my head, being just as helpless as they were. This wasn’t any magic I’d ever seen before so I didn’t have the first clue as to how to neutralize it.

  “Careful,” said Rowena. “he’s radioactive.” Silas was bleeding strong magic into the air.

  He’s possessed is what he is, I thought, but there was no connecting cord. Nothing I could comprehend, at least, no connection to the spellcaster responsible. There should have been a string of the same color, stretching from Silas to whoever was controlling him, unless this was a glamour. But it couldn’t be; glamours are up close and personal, and he’d been fine twenty seconds ago.

  “I,” he said and the word wobbled in his mouth. It spun and compressed, dancing on a swollen tongue, bouncing off his straining vocal cords. “Am. Here.”

  The orange energy flared, spun, and sank into him, overtaking his blue completely. He went rigid.

  “Casey,” I hissed. “Someone’s speaking through him!”

  Silas opened his mouth and his jaw hung there for a moment, moving up and down slowly. Blue wisps curled up like smoke around the orange, pushing, burning, and fighting for control. “You. Will. Sur … sur … en …” Silas swallowed the word, choking on it, and gagging up a less cumbersome replacement: “Die.”

  No change of inflection, no volume shift. Just the word, perfectly vocalized, but no more important than anything else. And in the harsh fluorescent light, Silas should have been blinking up a storm—he hadn’t blinked once in the ten seconds I’d been watching him.

  “He’s possessed,” I whispered, but by now, I think Casey had parsed that out for himself.

  “Hail,” Silas groaned, “to the Darkness.”

  Casey squinted at Silas, reaching out with his own modest power to blearily see what Rowena and I saw. He watched it a moment, then slowly turned, like he was following a line, a string we couldn’t see. The connection eluded me.

  He looked at his mom, his expression turning grim.

  “I am so sorry about this, darling, but I’m afraid you’ve just committed treason,” she said in her lilting, singsong voice.

  I looked back. Margaret had what looked like a bazooka over her shoulder. She was grimacing as she squinted through the sight mounted on its side.

  Her amulet was glowing again. Violently.

  “Duck,” she said.

  We flattened ourselves on the ground, staring at each other, wondering where in the holy hell she’d been hiding a bazooka—and I kept watching Silas, who was staring blankly ahead, straight through Margaret into the night-black wall beyond her. He had no reaction to anything, not to us or our guns, or Margaret, or her bazooka, or her warning to duck. He was barely breathing, as far as I could tell, and standing at a weird angle, like he was hanging on wire strings. Glowing orange …

  I threw up a shield at the last second—not around us, but in front of Silas, who still hadn’t moved to dodge the rocket. A thin, shimmering wall of sheer will and stardust materialized between us a split second before it made contact, exploding into a burst of red and yellow light, along with desert black smoke, and the clap of a drunken thundercloud. The fire stayed where it was, but the force was enough to break the shield into little, bite-sized pieces. It blew Silas back against the elevator wall, where he slumped without a sound, the charcoal-grey fog leaking out of his skin.

  “There we are,” Margaret said brightly, hefting the empty bazooka off her shoulder to the ground with a clatter. “So sorry, darlings, I thought I had more competent security, I don’t know why Deanna didn’t call me.”

  Casey whirled on her. “Mom, what the hell?”

  Margaret looked wounded. “I just saved your life.”

  “From what?” Casey holstered his gun and went to Silas, kneeling beside him. “Christ, man, are you all right?”

  “Two minutes, ma’am,” said the technician beside her. He cast a furtive glance at the smoking bodies, and blinked at them, then looked away hurriedly before typing something into his computer. Margaret looked over his shoulder and nodded approvingly.

  “Casey, leave him be,” she said. “I’ll deal with him later.”

  Casey looked at her. His expression was pained, and his lips were pressed together in a solid line. “I’m …” he swallowed, “just making sure he’s out, Mom. It’s fine.”

  “Casey?” I said quietly. Everything became tense suddenly, burning from the inside out with something marginally more urgent than our dread. Silas was orange from his head to his toes, drowning in a sulphurous cloud of somebody else’s influence—Margaret’s influence, it had to be. And she intended to kill Silas so he couldn’t provide us with any more information. But the only problem was that Margaret, Casey’s mother, didn’t have the magic necessary for possessing someone. “Casey.”

  Casey looked at me from the corner of his eye and mouthed I know.

  “Oh, please leave him alone, dear. I’ll take care of him after we’ve gotten you on your way,” Margaret said, waving off the notion like an annoying fly. Her amulet pulsated around her neck at longer intervals, the heartbeat of a sleeping dragon. Pump … pump … pump …

  Silas stirred with a flatlined, monotone, “Uh …” and suddenly, he was sitting upright, scratching his neck. Lumbering like a stiff mannequin to his feet, he seemed off balance and awkward, like a marionette caught up in a ceiling fan. He was clinging to Casey as he helped him up.

  “I …” Silas said, visibly straining. A speck of blue glowed in his core, pulsing, but dim as a flickering star. “Can …”

  “Sit down and stay there,” Margaret said irritably. “I have more rockets, you know, and I don’t think you want another one of those in the face.”

  “Mom,” said Casey. “He’s fine. I’ve got it.”

  Silas frowned. “Um … I …”

  Pump … pump … pump … went the orange rock. Faster now, throbbing in time with a panicked heartbeat. Silas’s blue glow ballooned outward, pushing back Margaret’s orange cloud. Margaret’s expression suddenly stretched thin.

  “Sam,” said Rowena, her tone just a whisper but with plenty of strength behind it.

  “I know,” I whispered back.

  “It’s coming from her necklace.”

  “I know.”

  Silas turned his head to Casey. Slowly, jerkily, like his bones were catching on themselves, he said, “C … Ca … sey …”

  Margaret sighed theatrically from across the room, opening another drawer and lifting the bazooka base to her shoulder again. “I’m warning you,” she sang gaily. Although she sounded slightly tremulous.

  “Silas?” Casey said warily, his voice hushed. “Where is my mom?”

  Silas blinked for the first time in two minutes. “Get out … now!”

  “Oh, that is it, young man,” Margaret scolded, her voice taut as she fumbled with another small rocket, trying to fit it into the launcher.

  Casey looked from her to me. “Get her necklace,” he whispered.

  Margaret froze and looked up. Her mouth curled into an ugly mockery of a smile. “Now, now,” she said, hefting the bazooka to her shoulder. “Why would you want to do that?”

  Casey already had his gun trained on her, his finger perilously close to the trigger. “Give the necklace to Sam.”

  Margaret chuckled warmly. “Oh, darlings,” she said, drawing a line up in the air. Silas stumbled to his feet behind us, fighting her wildly.

  “Silas,” I said, holding out a hand. Feeling the air for the invisible strings that bound him to the amulet.

  It was almost dormant, hiding in the folds of its own power, masking itself so I couldn’t tell what it was. Now, it had become a screaming fire, bright as burning magnesium. I couldn’t say why Margaret or whoever the hell she was would have bothered trying to hypnotize me and risk exposing the amulet’s power. Maybe that was plan A, to convince me to attack my team
or fall flat on my face, staying unconscious long enough for somebody else to deal with me.

  Last surviving member of Dulcie’s ANC, I thought, and for a second, I wondered what the Darkness believed I would do, and why it considered me so dangerous. Then I decided the Darkness was probably after Casey and his team, not specifically me. They were the last people in the world who had any chance of stopping him.

  But back to the amulet. It was older than stone, a fossilized relic of a bygone age, a half-dormant, old-world artifact that Margaret really shouldn’t have had any access to, let alone been able to touch it without bursting into angry flames. Artifacts as old as that are very particular about whom they allow to use them and for what purposes. They possess a kind of consciousness in their pickiness. A Wisconsin mother with no magical prowess at all wasn’t on their list.

  Somebody else, though, was on their list. Something that could defeat the rock’s power with its own. Something that definitely wasn’t human.

  The amulet’s cords recoiled from me, hissing and spitting, sending physical sparks flying through the air. Silas doubled over like he’d been sucker-punched.

  Margaret’s eyes shifted as I came closer, their color bleeding away into her skull—leaving them the dull iron grey of a shapeshifter.

  “What is that?” Judy whispered, nodding to the amulet. Everyone had a gun trained on her now, and the technicians were cowering like good, little bystanders, peering over their consoles to gawk at their boss.

  “It’s a …” Fuck! I didn’t even know what to call it. “It’s a really ancient magical doo-dad with an angry spirit stuck inside of it.” Or it could have been a stockpile of magical energy from a group of powerful warlocks that definitely died while making it. Or possibly even dragon’s blood and unicorn tears. It could have been any number of things that could turn rocks into arcane killing machines.

  “It’s an arcane focus,” said Rowena, glowering at it.

  “That sounds bad,” said Marcus.

  Margaret smiled. “It is.”

  She lifted her hand and I felt the invisible strings turn to jelly, slopping to the floor. They lay immobile for several seconds.

  I had time to think, What the hell …

  Then the strings drove themselves right through our skin, and I stopped breathing.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Sam

  There was a moment of darkness. A long minute of slack lungs and stilled hearts, when nothing was working, like all of our organs were on strike. I felt like I was being sucked into myself, my bones collapsing inward, like all the blood in my body was being compressed into a black hole. The muffled sound of laughter reached my ears, manic and chaotic. Then the shrivel and pop of an opening portal …

  We slammed to the ground, falling backwards and forwards from wherever we’d been standing. We hit the floor hard. My muscles jittered and pricked from the inside, feeling asleep. I blinked, looked left, and saw Casey’s mother—or whatever had pretended to be his mother—lying on the ground with smoke pouring out of both her ears. Even as I watched, her form shifted and changed. The shapeshifter returned to her original form—a smallish woman with sharp ears and skin darker than night. The amulet was in pieces all around her, drained of its glow.

  Standing above her was a rather irksome shadow.

  Oh, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me, I thought.

  I expected some snide comment, or at least a leery grin, but Dagan was all I saw glaring at me. Blood stained his face, his hands, and around his mouth. A line of red connected him to the shifter. Black leather jacket, black pants, brilliant red shirt beneath—as close to dressing casual as he’d ever been. “And I thought my mother had issues.” He tutted softly, nudging the unconscious woman with his foot. “We should go.”

  I dragged myself upwards, groaning, my bones prickling with an uncomfortable heat. Casey, who was next to me, did the same, grunting and holding his ribs.

  “Who’s he?” Casey asked, gesturing vaguely at Dagan. Dagan scowled at him, as though everybody in the world should have known his name.

  “Dagan,” I said, confused even as I answered. “The demon I talked to in Splendor about Dulcie’s whereabouts.” I took a deep breath. “As to why he just saved us? I have no clue.” And on that question, I demanded an answer. “What the hell are you doing here?” I asked Dagan.

  “Saving your life, apparently,” he said. “And you’re welcome, by the way, all of you.”

  “Thanks,” I started uncomfortably because I was well aware that everything Dagan did had to benefit him in some way. How this situation benefited him wasn’t exactly clear yet, but I figured it would reveal itself in time. “So how in the hell are you here right now?”

  Dagan sighed. “I was following you. I had … let’s call it a bad feeling. So, despite my better judgment, here I am.” He shrugged. “And it’s a damn good thing to! Guess it’s true what they say about trusting your guts and intuition.”

  “So who’s that?” Casey asked, pointing to the woman on the floor. Rowena knelt beside her and gave the air a cursory sniff, her stone eye gleaming in a silver light that wasn’t there.

  “Shapeshifter,” she said after a moment. “She hasn’t been in this form for long.”

  I barely heard her. “Let me get this straight,” I said, squinting at Dagan. “You had a bad feeling and you followed me. Just because you had nothing better to do, or what?” As I’ve said before, Dagan made Bram look like the paragon of innocence. Dagan was chaos incarnate, the living manifestation of every sour thought the world could conceive—the kind of creature that spent warm summer evenings roasting marshmallows over house fires. He would have been delighted to watch me burn, just for the hell of it.

  He had absolutely no reason to save my life.

  Dagan sighed. “I admit, it sounds a bit … contrived, but I assure you, I have every reason to be here.”

  I crossed my arms and stared at him. “Name one.”

  “I do not want the world, as I know it, to go up in smoke for one, Madam White,” Dagan said stiffly. “But we can talk about this when we we’re far away from here. Your shapeshifter here, as I’m sure you’ve gathered, is no friend to you, and there are many other unfriendly creatures making their way to this building as we speak. They intend to … deal with you as they see fit.”

  “What are you talking about?” Casey demanded. “Unfriendly creatures?”

  Dagan rolled his eyes. “I mean, a very bad someone has sent some very bad people to make sure you never reach your destination.”

  “Who specifically?” I asked.

  Dagan shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “And how do you know that?” Casey asked suspiciously.

  Dagan shrugged again. “Aftershocks. I was touching your girlfriend’s scars,” he said, “and sometimes, I continue to see things.”

  Casey looked at me, tacitly asking, can we trust him? I nodded although I wasn’t really sure if we could trust Dagan. But it looked like we were also out of options.

  The metal disk trembled beneath us—and a moment later, it started to fold in from the outside, melting away to reveal the deep, inky blackness of a two-dimensional portal.

  “Um,” said a technician. “It is. Um. Ready. Sir.”

  Dagan sighed, storming over to a technician and picking him up by his lab coat before hoisting him a foot off the ground. “Where does it lead?” he shouted in a voice dripping with angst.

  The technician swallowed. Poor guy, just trying to do his job. Probably had no idea he nearly got us killed. “Um … the Archaic, sir,” he stammered. It was an ocean, big, angry, and dark. Full of hungry fishies with very sharp teeth.

  Okay, he probably knew we wouldn’t survive that. Nice to know we escaped that horrible fate within a matter of seconds.

  Dagan brought the technician closer to his face, and his irises blazed. He opened his mouth, fire crackling in the back of his throat, backlighting his white teeth. “How’d you like to go for a swim?”<
br />
  “That’s not …” I started to protest, but Dipshit Scientist III interrupted me.

  “The Darkness will f-find you,” he said. “And k-kill you all. It’s j-just a m-matter of t-t-time.”

  I sighed. “Never mind; fuck him.”

  Dagan chucked him through the portal headfirst, screaming, and we heard a muffled splash on the other side. Sound doesn’t travel particularly well through portals. Casey opened his mouth, probably to say something about proper ethics. Good thing he shut it again.

  One bad guy down, twenty thousand to go. Slow progress.

  “Anybody else feeling bold?” Dagan asked. He puffed out his chest, licked his lips, and seemed to revel in the room’s discomfort. Scientists looked at each other and shook their heads. None of them could tell what he was, surely, but no one dared risk making him angry, even if he were just a very aggressive human.

  “We need to move,” he said to me. “Now.” More intense than I’d ever seen him, he was urgent, minutes from full-blown panic—not an emotion demons ever displayed. I bounced to my feet—swaying for a moment, and let the grey drain out of my vision. Then I nodded, pulling Casey’s arm to get him standing.

  “Um. What’s the plan?” I asked.

  We could have asked the technicians really nicely to change where the portal let out, but that would have taken time, time that we didn’t have. And if we could trust them not to dump us in some godforsaken desert or poisonous bog or something even worse. Yeah, we couldn’t trust them at all—not when they were probably mind-whipped by the Darkness or maybe they were the Darkness’s own people …

  Dagan said nothing but held out his arm and drew a large circle in the air. His hand trailed red sparks—carving a hole in space. The magic he was calling on was unclean. Its source was a deep, dark, desolate abyss, full of moans and whispers and bellowing like a half-broken fever, an impenetrable wall of self-imposed silence, stitched together from all the worst sounds into a steady, unbroken hum …

  “Get Silas,” I said to Casey.

  But Casey was way ahead of me, hefting the elf over his shoulder fireman-style. Silas was unconscious and moaning, but alive. He’d have a monstrous headache when he came to, but hopefully, that would be all. Mind-control is tricky magic even when you know exactly what you’re doing. Never mind when it’s at the hands of a slack-jawed amateur! Somebody keener on making an impression than actually hijacking your brain. If he were massively unlucky, he’d get away with only a blood clot or brain damage as a result.