by E. A. Copen
The stones pulsed brighter.
I blinked red from my vision and saw the seal drawn beneath the cement sidewalks and the landscaped earth. It was as clear as anything I had ever seen, stamped on the very energy of the Earth. Black blood seeped from a fissure running through the center, a fracture I had caused.
With a pained shout, I pushed all the energy I had through the stones toward the fissure. Power swirled up in a flashing, burning torrent, spinning like a hurricane. The sky turned black, and the ground quaked. Thunder pealed and lightning raked the sky.
Then it all began to die off with a whimper.
No! No way! That’s everything I have, all the power I can muster. There’s nothing left to pull from. It has to work! I waited, but the longer I waited, the more the glow of power faded.
I hung my head. It was over. I’d thrown everything I could at this spell, and it still wasn’t enough power to activate the seal. I’d need the power of a god, maybe several to finish the job, and Mask wasn’t going to give me that kind of time, not after this. I’d finally met my match, and now every soul in New Orleans and beyond was going to pay for my mistakes.
Souls… I opened my eyes to watch the vortex still spinning around me. I need souls. In the past, I’d been able to use souls to give myself an extra boost. When we took on Typhon, I’d used the willing sacrifice of souls to juice up a legendary weapon. Souls were raw energy, probably the most powerful form of it. The residual power of the cemeteries paled in comparison to what it felt like to hold a soul for any length of time. With just one willing sacrifice of a soul, I could give this spell the last push it needed.
But where was I going to find that? It’d taken me days to convince people to take part the first time, and I had minutes, maybe seconds, before I lost all the energy I had gathered so far. There was no one around either, just me, the seal, and the angry cloud of magic spinning slower and slower.
I was the only soul available.
I turned my face to the sky where distant lights moved over city blocks from above. Emma was in one of those helicopters. I’d promised her I was going to end this, and that I was going to come back in one piece. No matter what choice I made, one of those two things wasn’t going to be true.
“Before this is over, you’ll have a choice to make, Lazarus,” Odin had said. “The most difficult choice.”
“That son of a bitch,” I muttered to myself. “He knew all along.”
Wind surged, blowing my hair in front of my eyes and thought about how Emma had been hounding me to get a haircut. I should’ve listened. Should’ve done a lot of things probably. Maybe then I wouldn’t be sitting on a horse’s ass in the middle of a magic storm, considering my own death.
Could I even do it? I’d have to remove my own soul from my body—an excruciating process that would inevitably result in my death. But my body would theoretically stay alive a few moments after the soul was gone. I’d seen it happen every time I extracted one. No one died instantly. If I could hold onto consciousness long enough to push it into the spell… That would have to be enough, right?
But what if I didn’t? What if I lived?
Mask would win. New Orleans and Faerie would fall. He’d spread his sickness east and west, all over the globe until he owned that too. It’d be slow, though. Maybe even take years. In those years, maybe I could marry Emma and we could make the most of things, or maybe I could use those years to find another solution. I could try again.
Millions would probably die. No, that was the selfish choice, the one I would’ve made two years ago before I had people I loved. Before Nate, and Remy, and Emma…and Josiah too, I supposed. He was a good guy if he’d just kick the smoking habit. Even Drake had come around. I had more people who cared about me—and I cared about in return—than ever before in my life.
I swallowed the lump in my throat and called up my Vision. Might as well go out on a high note.
The one soul I’d never been able to see as the Pale Horseman had always been my own. It never showed up whenever I called up my Vision, but I knew where it was. It was in the same place as every other soul: dead center in my chest, just below the sternum. With my Vision on, my hand passed through my clothing and skin easily, as if they weren’t even there. I definitely felt it, though. Of all the pain I’d ever felt, that was the worst, like slicing myself open with a dull pair of scissors. After just a few centimeters, I had to pause to keep from passing out. I gave myself a few seconds, then pushed my hand in farther.
When my hand broke through into my chest cavity, it brushed against my soul and sent a shockwave of pain through the rest of me.
My body screamed for me to stop. I screamed at it to shut up.
Fingers closed around the warm, spinning ball of power in my chest. Around me. Around everything that I really was.
I opened my eyes to make sure the vortex of power still surrounded me and the stones were still glowing. It would really suck if I jerked my soul out of my body for nothing. It was. Everything was exactly as it had been, except for Josiah and Ulmir standing at the foot of the statue, staring at me with wide eyes.
You’re too late, I thought. Too late to stop me.
I yanked the soul out of my chest in one swift and excruciating move. The world spun. Colors washed out, turning gray and dull. My breath left my lungs with a loud wheeze. I looked at the soul spinning in my palm, finally able to see myself.
Huh. Guess it’s true what they say. Everyone’s beautiful on the inside.
I slapped the soul down on top of the stones and everything exploded in a brilliant white light.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“I looked and beheld a pale horse. He who sat upon it was named Death, and Hell followed with him.”
I blinked the bright light out of my eyes and found myself sitting in front of a desk.
On the other side, a woman in a smart blazer with a tight bun turned away from working on the keyboard and folded her hands as she addressed me. “It’s all very dramatic sounding, isn’t it?” she said in a British accent. Her voice matched the first one I’d heard.
I looked around in case she was talking to someone else, but there was no one else around. In fact, there wasn’t even a door. We were seated in a cubicle that was completely closed off from the outside world. Strange. “Excuse me?”
“You know, the whole Death thing.” She rolled her hand. “The apocalypse. Saving the world. All of it’s so very dramatic. Of course, if you’d known the author, you’d know to expect that sort of thing. John had a flare for the dramatic. Very loud and commanding. Not much of a sense of humor either, that one. Not that you’ll have to worry about that where you’re going. At any rate…” She picked up some papers and straightened them before holding them out to me. “Here are your forms back. I’m sad to say I can’t assign you for a proper reaping until you’ve completed forms 746-A and 552-B. Oh, and make sure to initial the rights and responsibilities paper—that would be the pink one—in triplicate.”
I stared at the offered stack of papers and frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“Oh, dear.” She lowered her arm and picked up the phone. “David, we have a code fourteen in my office. Could you be a dear and help me with the explanation? Yes. Thank you.” She hung up and smiled sweetly. “David from HR will be down momentarily. While we wait on him, let’s get the first part out of the way. I’m afraid you’re dead Mister…” She glanced at the papers. “Kerrigan.”
“Dead?” I looked down at my hands, or tried to. They were faded, iridescent versions of my hands. Slowly, the events from before came back to me. “New Orleans, the seal… Did it work?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Kerrigan. Unfinished business isn’t my department. You’ll have to submit an inquiry to the Department of Deceased Affairs.” She smiled and folded her hands. “This is Central Soul Processing. CSP’s primary job is to assign your soul to a reaper for transport. Normally, that process goes very smoothly but…”
“I killed my la
st reaper. And the one before that got reassigned.”
She cleared her throat and turned back to her computer, typing something quickly. “Yes, it does look that way. Oh, that’s odd.”
“What?” I leaned forward to try and see her screen.
She shifted it so I couldn’t, offering a sheepish smile. “Oh, nothing to be concerned about. Just a little file corruption.”
“File corruption?”
The computer made a loud screech, and her glasses reflected the flash of a blue screen. “Oh, dear.” She eyed me, scooted away, and picked up the phone again, putting her hand over her mouth as she whispered into it. “Cindy? This is Louisa. Have you ever had a client come in...missing parts?”
“Missing parts?” I stood and looked down at myself. Other than being very ghost-like, I seemed whole. I did feel a little unusual and empty, but I’d chalked that up to being a disembodied spirit.
“I’ll call you back.” She put the phone down but left her hand on the receiver. “Mister Kerrigan, I’m going to need you to calm down. It’s all under control. David will be here any minute and… Stop that. Stop that at once!”
I’d stepped away from my chair to run my hands over the felt walls of the cubicle. There had to be a way out of there.
“Mister Kerrigan!”
I pushed on the cubicle, and my hand moved straight through. That’s right. I was a ghost. Ghosts could move through most solid objects, as long as they weren’t made of iron.
I looked back at the pencil pusher. “Sorry, Louisa. I’d love to stay and chat, but I didn’t sacrifice myself so I could sit around the afterlife filling out paperwork in triplicate. I’ll be back when I’m ready.”
“Mister Kerrigan, wait!”
But I was already busy pushing my spirit body through the side of the cubicle.
When I tumbled out the other side, I expected to find myself in another office, or at least in a building somewhere. Instead, I was floating about a thousand feet in the air over New Orleans with no cubicles in sight. A red dawn had recently peeked over the horizon, but that was all I could tell about things from that high up.
I have to see if it worked. Then I can do all the stupid paperwork and move on. I willed myself to swoop lower gently but instead wound up plummeting like a rock at an angle that would hurl me into the ocean if I didn’t correct course. My ghostly body immediately stopped. No slow down, just an immediate halt that left me feeling disoriented. Moving around as a spirit was going to take a little getting used to.
Okay, so less propelling and more just…thinking. I closed my eyes and imagined myself gracefully sinking out of the sky at a reasonable pace. When I opened them again, that was exactly what I was managing. Sort of. It was more like the first time I learned to drive stick. Move a few hundred yards and then jerk to a stop, move, stop.
Getting a consistent pace going wasn’t easy, but I eventually made it down to street-level in an alley just off the Square. I floated through the front of the old church and toward the statue.
The wind picked up suddenly, pushing me backward. I lost control of which direction I was headed and wound up flying back into the church. By the time I righted myself and got back outside, the source of the sudden gust of wind was obvious. One of the black helicopters that’d been flying around landed, the wind from the propellers throwing up dust and dead leaves everywhere. I braced myself against the push of the wind and watched as Emma threw down her headset and jumped from the helicopter in a dead run.
If I’d had a heart, it would’ve been aching. I don’t want to see this, I thought and turned my head away. I could go back now. There’s no reason for me to linger. Even if it didn’t work, what am I going to do about it now? I’m just a ghost, and from the sounds of it, not even a complete one.
I turned back as Emma’s form disappeared behind the final set of hedges that obscured the center of the square from view. No, I need to see. I should try to give her a sign, anything, to let her know it’s okay.
I floated toward the statue, pushing through a hedge.
I’d read about plenty of near-death encounters, stories where people reported hovering over their bodies. They always described those moments with a sense of peace and acceptance. I thought that’s how it would be for me too until I saw myself.
Josiah and Ulmir must’ve dragged me down from the statue, or I’d fallen, because my body lay on the sidewalk covered in burns and bruises. Red streaks colored my skin as if someone had taken a marker and drawn jagged lines over my face and hands. My clothing was black and scorched as if I’d been struck by lightning.
Josiah knelt to one side of me, my wrist in his hand as if he’d been checking for a pulse and stopped to look up when Emma came running in. She’d stopped just on the other side of the hedges, her hand over her mouth, face twisted in agony as tears streamed down from her eyes.
I moved closer and tried to put a comforting hand on her shoulder, but it just passed right through.
Ulmir scratched at the drying blood on his armor. “Do you think he did it?”
Josiah put my hand down and looked over at the stones resting on the pavement nearby. In life, they’d been brightly colored, glowing whenever magic touched them. As a ghost, they just looked like dull gray rocks. “Only one way to know for sure.” He picked up the stones and placed them one by one in a deep shadow cast by the statue in the rising sun.
Finn, I thought. He’s with Remy. I need to know they made it. I started to leave but hesitated. The sound of Emma crying pulled at me. Maybe I’d made the wrong choice, being selfless. It’s seemed right at the time, but what if it was just another stupid mistake? Another time for everyone else to pay the price. God, what had I done? She was hurting so bad because of me…
But there wasn’t anything I could do for her now but make sure Finn got those stones.
I rose into the sky to look down at the city. Let’s see, there’s the river, and there’s the church, so Bourbon Street should be right here. I dove back toward the city, this time a little more gracefully and wound up on Royal Street. Luckily, moving parallel to the ground was much easier, so long as I didn’t think too hard about it.
I floated through an empty cafe building with broken glass and found myself on Bourbon Street on the other side. A group of infected scurried past me—and through me—snarling and foaming at the mouth. I looked down the street in the direction they were headed and saw Finn and Remy running hand in hand for a flickering streetlight and another group of infected racing toward them. The sun had come up, but the local buildings were situated in just such a way that the streets were still very dark. The only viable shadow was being cast by an overflowing trash can under the streetlight, and the infected were going to converge on them long before they reached it. Their only chance was to stand in the light, but if that light went out…
Then I’d better make sure it doesn’t go out. I flew over the band of infected and circled the lamp post, flying to the flickering light. Like with Emma, my hand passed through it. Dammit, how was I going to help anyone if I couldn’t even interact with anything on this plane? How’d they do it in books and movies? Maybe if I concentrate really hard…
“There!” Remy shouted.
I opened my eyes as she and Finn slid into the flickering pool of light.
Finn huffed, puffed, and reached into the shadow, but his hand came out empty. “Dammit, the shadow’s not stable enough. Stupid light!” He kicked the pole and sent a reverberating kong up through the metal streetlight.
“He’s here.” She inched closer and pointed up the street.
Mask, still in Codey’s body, rounded the corner and limped toward them, furious. He was beaten and bloodied like someone had given him a run for his money, but he wasn’t down. It would take the stones to put him down, and he’d only stay down if the seal was properly in place.
Finn took Remy’s face in his hands and leaned in to kiss her.
“Oh, come on! The bad guy is right there, idiot!” I ge
stured to Mask. “Now is not the time!”
The light suddenly flared brighter, forcing the shadow deeper. I blinked. Did I do that?
Remy’s eyes widened. She pushed Finn away and pointed. “Finn, look! Hurry!”
Finn dove for the shadow, his arm going in up to the elbow.
Mask roared and jumped into the air, literally walking on the heads of the infected to get to them.
Finn shoved his other hand into the shadow.
Come on, come on! If I’d had fingernails, I would’ve been biting them.
Mask cleared the last few feet and dropped down into the pool of light, paying no mind when it left his skin steaming. He grabbed Remy by the throat and gritted his bloody teeth. “I’m going to snap your neck, you bitch, just like I did to your precious knight!”
“Hey, Mask!” Finn called.
Mask made the mistake of looking up.
Finn held up the stones. Beautiful prismatic white light exploded from Finn’s hands. Mask lifted his arms in front of his face. The infected screamed as one and fell over as the light washed over them.
When the light faded, the only thing left of Mask was Detective Codey’s empty shell, and a shadow burned permanently into the pavement.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Finn and Remy hugged, and then Remy cried.
The infected slowly woke up and didn’t seem to have any memory of where they’d been or how they’d gotten there.
I followed Finn and Remy as they wandered through the Quarter and ran back into Paula. She put away her shotgun full of rock salt and pulled them both into an embrace I would’ve called motherly, but not to her face.
More Humvees and helicopters rolled into the Quarter, carrying doctors like Nate and his dad, as well as all their supplies. True to his word, Nate was first on the scene to set up triage and assess wounds, both mental and physical.
