by Lyn Benedict
In her chair, Jasmyn twitched and thrashed as Marianna Li fed off her, the barbed tongue wrapped twice about her neck, sinking into her chest. Marianna Li was going to wake up in a body full of bruises if she didn’t slow down, but the ghost’s hunger for a new life was like a starving dog’s whine; it resonated in her flesh, instantly understood.
Jasmyn thrashed once more and fell back to laxity—slack muscles, slack expression.
Beyond Jasmyn, Matteo twisted and struggled ineffectively; even as the lieutenant’s ghost fed on him, he seemed reluctant to fight back, to cause himself pain. A brute body and a delicate constitution.
Sylvie had no such compunction. She jerked her wrists back and forth, ripping at the rope, tearing her skin, greasing the ropes with human iron, until she was free.
She took a deep breath, began the effort of slipping out of the windings of rope. Though the knot was gone, the rope still fed through the gaps in the scrollwork, pinning her in place.
Marianna Li’s ghost pressed closer, embracing the girl from behind Jasmyn’s lap, then into her skin. The Hand of Glory went out, flame sucked inward. Jasmyn twitched once, twice. Her eyelids fluttered.
Sylvie yanked herself free, one hand already seeking out the dirt pouches. Right pocket, red bag, Li’s grave dirt. She wound up and threw it, fastball, into Jasmyn’s chest.
The cloth bag, porous, loosely tied, exploded as it was meant to do. The ghost erupted from Jasmyn’s body like a volcano plume, like a body blown to ash, burning the skin as she left.
Jasmyn sagged back in the seat, eyes glassy, body utterly limp. Matteo’s eyes bulged over the gag; his struggles doubled. In the shadows, Zoe made some shrill sound behind her gag.
Christ, Sylvie thought. She’d just killed her. Killed both of them. Jasmyn as well as the ghost.
The girl was dead already, her soul devoured, her little dark voice said. You just made it evident.
One more dead on her watch. Sylvie’s throat burned. No more. She was going to save the rest of them. Zoe, Demalion, Wright, even Matteo. And she was going to do it all before Margaret Strange showed up and turned them all into ghost chum.
Odalys spun around at the sound of Jasmyn’s de-ghosting, Sylvie’s gun in her hand. Odalys might be talented at necromancy and running a business, Sylvie thought, hitting the limestone so hard she felt it chip, but she couldn’t aim for crap. The shot went hopelessly wild, spanged off the eaves, splintered wood, and buried itself in the pine mulch around the pool. On her second attempt, the gun jammed, bloodying her hand. She cursed and hurled it into the pool.
“You shouldn’t even be awake,” Odalys said.
Sylvie rose, brushing at her scraped skin, still dark with graveyard dust, still humming with a shield she’d inadvertently applied. It coated her clothes, her skin; hell, she’d probably even breathed some in. That, coupled with her own willpower—she doubted Odalys could put her down again, even with a whole chandelier of burning Hands.
“I learn,” Sylvie said. “I came prepared. Besides, I think my soul’s too damn unpalatable for your ghosts.”
“Don’t bet on it,” Odalys said.
Behind her, there was a sudden breeze, a ruffle of dank, warm air, like a person’s stopped breath. The water on the pool, rippling where the gun had parted its surface, began rippling in another direction.
A peacock shrieked, its cry abruptly cut off, a deadly fade.
“I think Margaret will like you very much,” Odalys said. “In fact, I’m counting on it. The best of both worlds. I get rid of you, and I get to keep Zoe.”
Odalys smirked at her. “I always did want an acolyte.”
She stepped away from the table, stepped into a shadowy area beneath sheltering trees. The ground glimmered faintly in a familiar circle. Protection of Odalys. In the heart of it, a single chair. One where Odalys intended to sit and watch her dead clients come back to life. Priding herself on her work.
“If I pull you out of your safe space, how much do you think she’d like you?” Sylvie said. A choking gasp made her threat meaningless. It wasn’t just her and Odalys here. Wasn’t just a choice between her and Odalys that Strange would make.
It was Zoe. It was Demalion. It was Matteo. Best thing Sylvie could do would be to free them and get the hell out of here. Leave Odalys trapped in her circle, leave her attempting to placate the spirit she’d created.
Zoe kicked, spitting mad, wiggling fiercely in her bonds.
Demalion growled, nothing catlike about it, only a stubborn refusal to scream. The general’s ghost drew back, circled the table, came back again. Sylvie, trying to keep an eye on Odalys, on Zoe, for the unbound ghost of Margaret Strange, who could be anywhere, fumbled through her pockets for the cloth with the general’s grave dirt. Demalion and Wright would have to come first in this soul-saving triage.
Matteo leaned away from the ghost, the lieutenant gone nearly translucent with effort. The ghost was weak, Sylvie thought, a tagalong from the general’s staff.
Sylvie hefted the bag, dirt bound with a blue ribbon, heard Odalys curse, and aimed—and balked. The general was draped over Wright’s body, seeking a way in. She couldn’t hit him without hitting Wright, without expelling his souls. She might take out the general, but Wright and Demalion would be forced out of body, and the lieutenant’s ghost could give up wrestling with Matteo and just step in.
But if she got Matteo’s ghost, saved Matteo, got him out of the tangle of iron and ghosts and flesh—she could have a clear shot on the general. If Odalys didn’t stop her.
She lunged the distance to Matteo’s chair, bent down, let the grave dirt bag fall, fingers working the knots, wishing she carried a knife. “Fight, Demalion. Keep fighting him.”
At least, given Matteo’s lackluster attempts at escaping, the knots hadn’t drawn tight, unmanageable to her fingernails. She got one of his hands free, working fast, murmuring, “Hold on, hold on. It’s going to be all right.” His eyes, when she glanced up, were glassy and wild. Her skin crawled, expecting the lieutenant’s ghost to object to her actions at any moment, but he was growing thinner and paler by the moment. The flames on the Hand on Matteo’s lap were dimming.
Sylvie got Matteo’s second hand free, already saying, “Hurry, run, don’t look back—” and took a fist to the jaw that sent her sprawling.
She tasted blood, her lip split against her teeth, and her head reeled. The table jerked on the stone, Demalion fighting to save himself, Wright, her . . . unable to do anything.
Sylvie spat blood, fury at yet another bad decision fueling her. She’d read it wrong. The lieutenant’s lich ghost wasn’t translucent because he had been weakening. It was translucent because most of his soul had taken over Matteo’s flesh: She’d just freed a bad guy.
Odalys was laughing, as entertained as if she were watching a pratfall comedy.
Knees under her, Sylvie pivoted, got up in time to block the next sluggish blow with her forearm. Her sneakers slipped on the damp stone, the wavelets lapping over the edge of the pool.
Matteo—no, the lieutenant—twisted in her grip, dodged her blows at nose, neck, groin, knee, and she gritted her teeth and cursed. He was getting faster, learning his new body. And that was nothing but bad news. Matteo had been fit in body but soft in experience. Sylvie, who fought dirty, ugly, and for keeps, could have had Matteo down and restrained by now, but she was fighting an experienced soldier in a young man’s body; a man who’d killed before, full of desperation to stay alive. Experience told. Despite her best efforts, Sylvie took a punch to the collarbone that sent her reeling, gasping for air; then his hand was at her nape, at her waist, dragging her the two steps to the glimmering blue-lit pool.
“Hold her! Hold her!” Odalys shrieked. Sylvie got a quick glance of Odalys looking alarmed, a more disturbing glance of Strange making the scene, her ghost shape swelled nearly solid with stolen bits of soul; then Sylvie’s world was blue-lit water and the bite of chlorine in her nose.
She had a heartbeat of
time to realize his intention, sucked in a thin thread of air, all she could manage before the lieutenant pushed her facedown into the water. He knelt on her hips, pressed her head deeper. Her hair streamed about her; her nails scrabbled at the stucco side of the pool, keeping him from slamming her head into the side wall of the pool. She refused to let out the air she’d taken, refused to give in and take a breath of water. She kicked, felt her heels hit his back, but too weakly.
One hand, her forearm on the wall of the pool, bracing her, she reached back with her other, clawing at his flesh, feeling the knotted muscle beneath the smooth skin. He flinched briefly, his grip on her nape slackening, and she got her head up, took a healthy gulp of air, caught a glimpse of something she hadn’t noticed before.
From this angle, so close to the concrete, Zoe’s chair was centered in a glimmering salt ring. Strange was pacing it, complaining in an incomprehensible fashion at an unbearable pitch.
Zoe’s soul and body apparently weren’t up for grabs.
The relief was sweet, if short-lived. Zoe, possessed by a dead woman or a slave to a necromancer—there wasn’t a win there. At best, there was a delay of game.
Sylvie gasped for air, for breath. Her attacker firmed his grip, fingers pinching tight on the back of her skull, and down she went again. Waiting for her to lose consciousness. To breathe in when she should be breathing out. To slacken her grip on her will, her body, and open a path for Margaret Strange.
She twisted, managed to get her mouth above water for the moment, an ear that popped with water flowing out of it. Margaret Strange complained, “You promised me a body, Odalys. I paid in advance.”
“A deposit’s not enough,” Odalys said. “Your estate is worthless. But I’ll give you a body, out of the goodness of my heart. Just not Zoe.”
Sylvie clawed at the coping, tried to claw him again, and he yanked her jacket up over her flailing arm. The grave-dirt package still left in her jacket—Lt. Charles Sorenson’s grave dirt—slid into the water and drifted downward in muddy clouds. Sylvie clawed at it, tried to catch it, but her fingers tipped it deeper in a slimy cloud.
Weight hit her back, and she coughed—water rushing into her mouth, choking her, her vision blurred by more than the dirty water—Sylvie went limp, praying, Let this work, let this work. . . .
And she found herself pulled out of the water, flung onto the limestone with jarring force; water burbled out of her throat, dark and gritty, and Sylvie couldn’t breathe for coughing. The lieutenant knelt on her outflung arms, kept her splayed and displayed. “Odalys. She’s ready now.”
Sylvie held back the laughter; oh, she was ready. Just give her the chance and she’d show them how ready she was. . . .
Strange peered down at her, the ghostly blur of her face sharpening. “This one?”
“It’s better for your purposes,” Odalys said, voice sweet, low, coaxing. “Zoe’s magically talented. A budding necromancer. Too much for you to take over, perhaps. But her sister . . .”
Zoe’s eyes were huge above her gag; her hands were nearly free. Blood streaked her wrists.
Sylvie coughed water, let her limbs stay limp as if the fight had been beaten out of her. “You think you’re going to keep Zoe? As an apprentice? After you kill her sister?”
Odalys came to the very edge of her salt ring, and said, “Zoe will remember you came here all hotfoot to keep her from her birthright. From her power. She’ll get over it. Her kind always does. What’s family compared to power? And if she proves recalcitrant? Well, there are spells for that.”
“She’s older,” Strange said.
“She’s legal,” Odalys said. “No waiting. I know you’re a woman of . . . appetites.” The coaxing tone dropped from her voice, became blunt. “Take it or leave it, Strange. You stiffed me my fee. I’m being extraordinarily generous here.”
“Generous with my body,” Sylvie snarled. “I don’t think—”
“Put her under again,” Odalys said. “She’s too lively.”
Sylvie twisted, fought, kicked, but it was mostly for show. After all, he was taking her back the direction she wanted to be. The pool. Still, she needed to—she managed to squirm away from him enough that he had hold of her hips when she went back into the water, instead of her neck. It allowed her the leverage she wanted.
Sylvie pushed forward, put her hands against the wall, pulled herself into the water, splashing free, ungainly as a beached dolphin. But she was in; she was free of his hands. She hit the bottom, pushed off, lunged upward, and caught the lieutenant around the knees, pulling him into the water after her.
He shrieked as he hit it and went utterly limp, as if the surface of the water had slapped him senseless. He sank past her, hit the bottom, and drifted back up again, limbs splayed. Foam splattered from his skin.
Grave-dirt soup, she thought, but was already moving past him. She surged out of the pool, toward Demalion. Zoe was safe enough for the moment, and Odalys was stuck in her circle.
Sylvie’s clothes were clammy, slapping and constricting her skin, and in the midst of that she missed the first cold press of Margaret’s barbed tongue lashing tight about her neck. But she couldn’t miss the muffled breathlessness of a pillow pressed tight to her face, even in the ghost’s memory, replaying the murder that gave her another chance at life. All the grave dirt on her skin, in her clothes, in the water streaming off her meant nothing to Strange. Just like the showdown at Invocat. An unbound lich ghost was more powerful than that.
Faintly, even as she clawed uselessly at the feeding tube, scoring her own skin, she heard Strange say, Acceptable. Keep your little would-be witch.
Relief seared her, weakened her just a little bit: Whatever happened here tonight, Zoe would live. . . .
As a slave. But you won’t. Demalion won’t. Wright won’t. Maybe they’re already gone, and you’ll miss it. As if to emphasize the voice’s point, she heard Demalion kicking at the table; it sounded entirely too much like death throes.
Sylvie shuddered; the barbed tongue re-formed no matter how she clawed at it, ghost plasma immune to all her human determination and strength. She was conscious of her soul being drawn up, fed on, peeling out of her flesh like her marrow being cored from her bones.
The god of Love had taken a piece of her soul once to shore up his own. He had returned it once he no longer needed it.
She didn’t think Strange would be so generous.
Her head ached, her body felt smothered, and her heart kept to irregular bursts of panic. She was going to die. Wright was going to die. Demalion—
There had to be something she could do, besides lie here and feel her soul ripped out.
As if a ghost could do it, her little dark voice growled. When a god had to ask permission . . .
She’s doing it, Sylvie thought. Eros had just been polite about it.
She’s not doing it very well, the little dark voice pointed out.
Sylvie relaxed, calm suddenly, even as a particularly vicious pull on her soul woke pains in places she never knew had nerves at all. Strange sighed above her, the sound tired, frustrated. Exasperated.
Not doing it very well, indeed, Sylvie thought. She was Lilith’s human daughter, and she didn’t yield. She wasn’t unconscious, wasn’t lost in the lich ghost’s memory of death, wasn’t giving in. . . . She could still fight.
The faint taste of victory receded as fast as it had come. She could fight, felt like she could fight this ghost forever, but Demalion couldn’t. Wright couldn’t.
Sylvie clawed at the ghost’s connection again; this time, the tongue felt nearly real, nearly flesh, as Strange poured all her effort into devouring Sylvie’s soul. And flesh was something she could fight.
Stop fighting me, Strange complained.
Sylvie growled, her voice a ragged whisper beneath the constriction. “You’ve not seen fighting yet.” She let go of her death grip on the hungry hold Strange had on her, stopped throttling the flow of something intangible, and scraped her hands
along her own skin. Searching.
The cloth bags of graveyard dirt were gone, one dropped, one in the water, but Margaret Strange’s ashes had been shoved in the nearest Ziploc. Sylvie found the plastic bag; clammy, greasy, a gritty weight. She punctured the bag with torn nails, and flung a handful into Strange’s face.
“That’s your bones,” she snarled. “You’re dead. You should stay that way.”
The ghost recoiled; the ash blowing across her surface and sticking, like sand to wet skin, like metal filings to a magnet. It wasn’t destroying her, wasn’t dissipating the spirit as the grave dirt had done for Li or the lieutenant, but it was . . . working in its own fashion, reminding Strange of what it was like to be flesh.
The ash seeped inward, sketching bones beneath the ectoplasm, creating vulnerabilities—old bones could ache, old bones could break—Sylvie kicked hard at the ghost’s forming skeleton, got purchase, and felt impact race up her own shins. Margaret Strange stumbled back.
Sylvie scrabbled for the rest of the bag. If one handful could slow her, bring her to a shape that could be harmed . . .
Getting as close as she could—she wanted all of the ash to hit Strange—she ripped the plastic apart. Bone scrap and ash flew outward, carried on the evening breeze and zoomed in on Strange like hornets.
Strange twisted, flickered, shrieked, and slowed. Bones sprouted and grew like kudzu, opaque, brittle, a faint hint of organs ghosted into place. All vulnerable. All mortal frailties in an untouchable spirit.
Matteo’s iron chair, abandoned when he attacked her, loomed close, and Sylvie grabbed it, grunted with the effort, and swung it as hard as she could. Wrought iron, and she couldn’t get it off the ground more than a foot, but it smashed satisfactorily into Strange, through the ectoplasm, and juddered hard against bone. The ghost . . . fell, her shin-bones cracked, her knees out of place.
She flailed at the stone, howling, and Sylvie sagged over the chair, breathing hard, willing herself to swing it again. And again, as many times as was needed to pulp bone. Her hands shook; the lich ghost might not have stolen her soul, but the fight had exhausted her. She tightened her grip on the chair, sucked in a breath, and heard its pained echo in another gasp.
