a sword armlet a rope a sword an armlet
Sarah sighed. He could be so literal. She lifted her legs, trying to keep them from stiffening up, and looked behind them. Scattered movement a couple blocks away got her moving again. “A sword. A rope. And an armlet,” she huffed. “What does he hope to do with them?”
make magic, Ptolemy answered, as if she had asked what a soldier did with a firearm. he ghost will make ghost he will magic.
Ghost magic. Yeah. She knew how useful that could be. Maybe they should have kept the squirrel around. Maybe Jack could have used it to give them some pointers.
She could use some. She was running uptown, away from the mushroom queen, but also away from her boat. The survivors on Governors Island had assured her that Manhattan was almost free of ghouls, that they had all headed west. She wasn’t about to trust that, though, since she was already further up Broadway than any of Marisol’s people had been in twelve years.
There were some ghouls in Manhattan that she knew about. Weird, surgically maimed things in helmets that were hunting her like a deer. And they were lead by a female lich who could kill just by being near her.
the i spoke more something more i spoke of, he said from behind her, not even panting for breath. Well, of course, he didn’t need any, and anyway she didn’t know what effect breathing would have on telepathy.
it is ayaan about ayaan is it
That made her stop short. She just stared at him until he began speaking again.
lich she is dead a lich dead The words made Sarah’s head spin. Dead. Lich. Ayaan. Lich. Dead.
She couldn’t make them stop. “Shut up,” she said, to herself. He didn’t respond. She couldn’t make the words stop.
Ayaan was dead. Her rescue mission had failed.
When she had time she would think about that. In the meantime Sarah kept running. Ptolemy kept up with her easily. He could have run circles around her, frankly. Still, she was faster than the ghouls and that was what mattered.
Then she heard an air horn from the streets to her right and she knew that mere speed wasn’t going to save her. She had been about to head in that direction, hoping to circle back to the harbor and find some way back to Governors Island. She tried to sense where the dead men were but the buildings blocked her arcane vision. She spun around in a slow circle, looking at the streets that seemed to head in every direction, searching the windows of the dead and hollow buildings as if they could tell her. “Which way?” she asked Ptolemy, but he didn’t even shrug.
Uptown again. Into the belly of the beast, and farther from safety than ever. She raced uptown and listened for horns behind her, for any sign of pursuit. When her lungs cramped and her body doubled over, unable to run another yard, she stopped. Ptolemy stared at her with his painted eyes. They never showed anything but a cool, intellectual repose. She wanted to smash in the plaster over his real face, his real skull. Wait, she thought, as breath raced in and out of her. There was something...
A dark stain had appeared across Ptolemy’s facial portrait. A smoky trail of mildew curled across his cheek like a worm eating its way through his flesh. She grabbed his hands and saw spots on the linen that wrapped his finger, big colorless spots with paler rings around the edges, smaller spots like a spattering of some dark fluid.
Sarah dropped his hands and rubbed at her own fingers. A fine dusting of dark spores had come off on her skin. Her fingers started to itch and she scratched at them mercilessly. She backed away from the mummy as if he could somehow infect her, somehow make her—
SLAM!
Sarah’s body spasmed with fear. She looked behind her and saw a little store with a plate glass window. What had made that noise? She couldn’t see anything moving, she could only see a kind of greasy stain on the window and—
BAM!
A whip-thin ghoul in a stained white dress hit the glass face-first, hard enough to make the whole storefront shake. Her hands like bunches of twigs came up and slapped feebly at the glass, her body pressed against it. She must have been trapped inside that store for years—she had hit the glass with her face so many times her features were completely gone, smeared together into one homogeneous dark bruise. A few strands of blonde hair still stuck to her battered skull. As Sarah watched she drew her head back and launched it once more at the glass.
WHAM!
Sarah couldn’t move, could barely breathe. She was too horrified.
The air horns came again, from two directions this time. Realizing she’d been paralyzed by a relatively harmless unorganized ghoul, Sarah started to hyperventilate. A handless ghoul appeared a few blocks away, half obscured behind some trees. It hadn’t seen her yet. She knew, however, that it wouldn’t try to recruit her. It would simply kill her without warning, without thought.
“Go,” she said. She grabbed Ptolemy’s arm. “Go! Go take that thing out!”
She tried shoving him into the street but she might as well have tried to shove a bank vault. He turned his mildewed face to her for a moment, then shook off her arm. She couldn’t meet his painted stare.
She touched the soapstone but he didn’t have anything to say, for once.
He turned and started walking toward the ghoul, even as new air horns blared into life, seemingly from every direction. Sarah didn’t waste any time. She ran across the street and started tugging at doors, tried prying up window panes with her fingernails. Finally she found a basement-level entrance down a flight of stairs. The iron security gate had rusted half-open, wide enough for her to squeeze through. She opened the door behind it and ran inside, into a smell of old things slowly falling apart. She closed the door behind it and turned the creaking deadbolt.
Silence. She could hear the air horns outside, more and closer than ever, but there was a barrier between her and them. She felt the still, settled air of the basement room and she dropped to a crouch on the floor, her face buried in her hands.
Ayaan was dead. Her mission was over.
If she stayed perfectly still nothing bad could happen.
Chapter Sixteen
It was dark in the fire lookout atop the ridge but moonlight came in through the windows and made dappled patterns on the walls. It curled around the broken radio, glistened on the peeling finish of the enameled chairs and table. It just barely reached into the bathroom where the dry toilet had become home to thousands of spiders. From time to time, putting aside all squeamishness, Ayaan reached through another stratum of ancient webs and scooped out a handful of them from the darkness inside. The wriggling on her tongue wasn’t so bad—it was the legs that got caught in her teeth that bothered her.
With every tiny life she took her body vibrated with joy. The hunger came back almost instantly but the shivering ecstasy of each new morsel was like nothing she’d ever felt before. She wondered, in the most private part of her mind, if it was what sex felt like for a living girl.
She had little to do but sit, and think, and wait. The fire lookout station offered few other opportunities to entertain one’s self. She had a small telescope with a scratch on one lens. It let her study the valley below. Nothing had happened since she’d arrived, her legs aching and rubbery as she powered her way up to the top of the ridge. Nothing had happened since she’d found the lookout and installed herself. Nothing would happen, she imagined, until dawn.
Erasmus stood down there as if at attention, his spine locked in perfect posture. He stood in the middle of a barnyard. The barnyard lay in the middle of a fenced-off patch of land that sat in the center of the valley. Whatever magic had possessed the undead werewolf had drawn him directly to its dark and vibrant heart.
Ayaan suspected that whoever had laid the trap lived in the tidy little farmhouse down there. Like the barn and the silo it was protected by round wards hung from its eaves painted in bright geometric patterns.
They’re called hex signs, the ghost told her. The ghost who was trapped in a brain in a jar a hundred miles away. He was standing next to her, too, just barely
visible in her peripheral vision. She turned her head and there was nothing there. She looked back at the valley and he was next to her. They protect those who live inside, aye, but they need a taste of the life to keep them strong. Life’s blood, that is.
Ayaan nodded. There were plenty of goats down in the pen behind the barn. It could easily be their blood that activated the hex signs, that licked out of them in purple rays.
Magic was everywhere down in that barnyard. Death magic. It pulsed around Erasmus, pinning him like a dart in a dartboard. It flickered from the windows of the farmhouse and lingered like smoke around the tarpaper roof of the barn. Deep, dark beams of it escaped through the vents of the silo. There was something bad in there, something that needed half a dozen hex signs to keep it locked away.
“That’s what we’re here for, isn’t it?” Ayaan asked.
Aye. It’s not what you think, though, lass. Don’t fear it.
“Believe me, it’s rather low on my list of things to be afraid of.” Ayaan leaned forward, her chin resting on her steepled fingers. “You, on the other hand...” She fought the urge to look at him.
I’m your friend. I’m your best friend, under these circumstances.
“Friends don’t hypnotize each other. They don’t leave little commands buried in each other’s minds.” Semyon Iurevich, the mind-reading lich back in Asbury Park, had bound her with a spell. It had been his voice she heard telling her not to kill the green phantom. No, worse than that, his voice had wiped the very idea out of her mind. He hadn’t merely revoked her freedom. He had made it so it never existed.
And he had done so, she was certain, at the ghost’s behest.
Is that what’s worrying you? That I wouldn’t let you throw your life away?
“My life. Mine,” she said. “Do you think I like being this... this thing, this monster?” she gestured at her leathers.
I know better than anyone, dearie. Don’t you come all indignant with me, when I haven’t even a body to speak of. His tone softened, grew soothing and low. Listen, there’s a game here, a deeper game than you know. You haven’t even met all the players yet.
Ayaan let that go for a while. The ghost had power over her. She wasn’t going to talk him into relinquishing it—that never worked, never in the history of the human race had anyone given up power freely once they had it. You had to take it back yourself.
Something else worried her, though. “You want the Tsarevich dead, yet you made sure I would survive long enough to see whatever’s in that silo. You want us to find it, even if it means the Tsarevich gets it. What’s your scheme? At least tell me that much, tell me what you hope to gain from—”
He was gone, of course. She couldn’t sense him anywhere.
She went for another handful of spiders. When she came back she got a shock—something was actually happening down in the valley. A light had come on in the farmhouse. It moved from window to window, then emerged from the door, and revealed itself to be a kerosene lantern. The man holding it glowed a brighter gold than the lamp in his hand. There was no question in her mind. This was the wizard, the magician, the wadad who had enchanted Erasmus.
He wore a baseball cap low on his brow with the name JOHN DEERE on the front. Old bloodstains decorated a white t-shirt and faded blue jeans; more recent stains discolored his tan leather work boots. His face was ringed with a fringe of beard and hidden behind a pair of mirrored sunglasses, even though the sun had yet to rise.
His left arm was missing entirely. It had been replaced with a tree branch covered in rough gray bark. It ended in three thick twigs less like fingers than the tines of a pitchfork. Dark energy surged through the wooden arm and it twisted like a snake. The tines reached up and scratched the magician’s chin. He studied Erasmus, moving around the werewolf, tapping his sternum and the back of his skull. With his human hand he plucked a hair from the paralyzed lich’s cheek.
The wooden arm slapped at Erasmus’ chest and tore a strip of skin away from the rigid muscles beneath. They were pink and grey and they didn’t glisten at all. No blood emerged, but she could clearly see the edges of his skin where it had been torn open. In the midst of all that fur the wound looked like a sickly orifice, a new and monstrous genital.
Ayaan pushed the telescope away and stood up. It was a long way down the ridge and for all she knew there were mines planted all around the little barnyard but she couldn’t wait any longer. She stumbled out of the lookout station and practically threw herself down the side of the ridge, grabbing at tree branches to slow her descent, her feet barely touching the ground. A torrent of pine needles and rustling leaves swept around her while bits and pieces of rock and soil pattered and bounced down before her like a miniature landslide. She skidded to a stop in a copse of trees near the floor of the valley and pushed the branches away from her to take a look. Nothing had changed in the barnyard. Ayaan moved forward until she was standing before a seven foot high fence of thin wooden palings, the only barrier between herself and the barnyard.
Maybe, she thought, maybe she still had the element of surprise. She would need it—this wizard had more power than any living man was supposed to. Careful to be as silent as possible she climbed up one side of the fence and jumped down on the other.
Her foot barely nudged something round and hard as she landed. She looked down and saw a human skull there, bleached white with all its delicate nasal bones still intact. Other skulls littered the ground just inside the fence. Dark energy flickered inside every cranium.
The skull she touched gave off a blood-curdling shriek. Whether it actually made a sound or it was just inside her mind—and presumably the wizard’s—she couldn’t say, but the scream made her clutch her ears and duck her head.
At the center of the barnyard the wizard looked up. His wooden hand dropped a ball of fur and skin on the ground and Ayaan felt his attention hit her like a spotlight.
“This a friend a your’n, monkey-boy?” the wizard asked, looking over at Erasmus. The furry lich didn’t move an inch. “You shoulda said somethin’. I coulda redded up the place.” The wizard’s face cracked in a wide, toothy smile.
Ayaan wasted no time. She dropped into a shooter’s crouch and flung her hands in wide arcs. Energy spilled from her core and sizzled as it cut through the air. The wizard turned, far too fast, and put his wooden arm up. The bark there cracked and snapped and the wood underneath creaked and groaned. He reached inside the back pocket of his trousers and whipped out a pocket knife. Ayaan saw that the palm of his remaining hand was one smooth callus from fingers to wrist. He slashed the callus with his knife and then squeezed his fist until blood dropped onto the dry grass of the barnyard.
The door of the barn rattled on its hinges. Ayaan shot another bolt of death energy at the wizard but he caught it easily in his wooden hand. He absorbed the darkness into his own body with a visible shudder of delight. Ayaan raised her hands to attack a third time but then the door of the barn slammed open.
Dead people came slouching out. They were skin, skeletally thin. They were missing pieces. Very few among them still had four limbs. A few were missing all the flesh from their heads and all but the sinews of their necks. All of them had chunks of their torsos and abdomens carved away. Their ribs stuck out from denuded sides or were cut away entirely leaving them horribly lopsided. None of them had body hair of any kind. None of them had eyes, nor much skin.
Ayaan had seen plenty of decomposing bodies in her time. She’d seen human flesh gnawed on, torn apart, burned, hacked, eaten away by disease. She’d never seen human bodies systematically butchered, though. Not butchered for their meat.
“Just like prime aged beef,” the wizard chuckled. “If you sauce it just right, it gets so you hardly can tell.” He squinted at Ayaan. “Now, I figger I could do with a nice skirt steak for breakfast.”
The carved dead shuffled toward her, their faces unmoving, their hands up to grab and claw and tear.
Chapter Seventeen
Sarah ran a
finger across the top of a water heater and stared at the dust that came up, a thick felt-like layer of forgotten time.
She started to reach for the soapstone in her pocket and stopped herself. Whatever Ptolemy might have to say to her she knew she didn’t want to hear. She had essentially used him as a diversion to save her own skin. He was smart enough not to appreciate that.
Ayaan was dead. Nothing mattered.
She knew what she was doing, and how wrong it was. She couldn’t stop, though. Or rather she couldn’t start. Leaving the basement would mean engaging the horrors outside. It would mean the possibility of dying. She’d been taught how to survive, had been taught so well, in fact, that her body would go on doing what it needed to do to keep living even if she stopped thinking altogether. It would take real willpower to go against that training, to throw herself into the fray.
In the back of the basement the building’s superintendent had set up a little personal lounge: a broken-springed recliner, a coffee table holding an ashtray full of old cigarette butts, a record player and a pair of speakers. All of it dead, rotting with age, covered in dust. She found a stack of plastic crates full of old records. She took out a few and studied the album cover art. She tried not to listen for air horns or screams or sounds of violence outside. If there had been power in the basement she could have played music to block out the sounds. That might be nice. To go back in time for a little while. To pretend like her whole life had never happened yet, that it was thirty years prior. It would be nice to...
She dropped the record she was holding and it slapped on the naked concrete floor, not breaking. White fur had sprouted inside the gate-fold cover. It grew longer as she watched, soft-looking tendrils that reached for the moist air.
She had to turn around and look at the door, make sure it was locked. She needed to make sure it was locked because if it wasn’t, she still had time to go and lock it. Fear took her over, though. It was like a spotlight blazing into life in a still, dark night. She couldn’t move, she was dazzled by the fear. Then adrenaline poured into her circulatory system and flipped every switch to ON.
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