City of Ghosts

by Stacia Kane

  Lamaru still ran around, shouting, their tattered robes flapping behind them. A few of them argued and fought, wrestling with one another—No, wait. They weren’t wrestling with one another. Who the hell were those people?

  “The door to the hall—the one we came through earlier—is blocked off. I started to climb down the escape and another bomb, or whatever, went off at the foot of it. I barely made it back inside.” Lauren held up her hands. Patches of raw skin crisscrossed them.

  “I called the rest of the Squad, and the fire department. They’re on their way. Did you have a fire escape? Where were you?”

  “In the psychopomp room. There’s an escape there—shit, they might bomb that one, too. We need to go.”

  Damn. They needed to fight the ghosts first. Chess saw them over Lauren’s shoulder, seeping through the walls. They’d had to leave their weapons outside, of course, but it wasn’t like they couldn’t find more. “Shit!”

  She dug in her bag for the rest of the asafetida, for her graveyard dirt and what little supply of iron filings she had. If the Lamaru bombed the other fire escape, too, they’d have no way out of there, not if the office door was truly blocked. Sure, Lauren had called the fire department. The possibility even existed that one of the slaughterhouse’s neighbors had called them, although they were probably too busy killing the escaped animals or planning a looting.

  But Downside didn’t have a fire station; what was the point? It would take at least fifteen minutes for an engine to arrive, and by the time it did, it wouldn’t matter. The fire was eating the slaughterhouse, crawling along every inch of wood and plaster like a starving, handless beast. Already smoke drifted through the office wall. They had five minutes, ten at the outside, if they hoped to avoid the City.

  Less than that, of course, if they couldn’t do something about the five ghosts taking full form between them and the door.

  Lauren ducked, yanked her raven skulls from her bag and set them on the floor. Her already bleeding hands touched each one, lightly, leaving a faint smear.

  Chess fought down the panic rising in her chest at the sight of them and dug out her plastic bag of salt. Psychopomps probably weren’t a great idea, but they didn’t have much choice, did they? Just because there’d been a couple of accidents, just because she’d been right about the Lamaru’s plans, didn’t mean Lauren couldn’t control her ravens.

  Of course, technically she shouldn’t have been able to control the ravens anyway—but whatever.

  And standing there gaping like a moron wouldn’t do anybody any good. Chess found her Ectoplasmarker and popped the cap, tapping Lauren’s shoulder with the other hand. Power zinged up her arm; for the first time she could remember, the feeling bothered her. Too much stress, too much rage and fear slithered along the underside of that power. Whatever had happened to Lauren in this room, it hadn’t been good.

  But Lauren’s eyes didn’t reflect much of those emotions. She glanced down and nodded; she’d made a pile of herbs on the tile. While Chess watched she lit them, then filled her hand with more.

  “Go!”

  The ghosts leapt forward at the same time Chess did, which was exactly what she wanted them to do. She jumped to the side, letting salt from her Baggie pour onto the floor. If she could just keep them focused, keep them watching her eyes—

  Icy cold sliced through her brain. One of the ghosts’ hands. For that second she was blind; agony ripped through her skull. Instinct and Church training kept her focused. She ducked, ready for the next freezing swipe and better able to ignore it when it came.

  Behind them now. Constant cold as their hands passed through her, tried to grab her, hit her. Their rage infected her, made her already speeding pulse race faster, until it felt like she’d taken a bagful of Nips and a heart attack was waiting to pounce.

  But she’d almost finished the circle.

  Lauren’s voice rose behind her, behind the ghosts. Shit, why was she starting her summoning, the circle wasn’t finished yet—

  Glass shattered. Pain lit her nerve endings like thousands of white lights as tiny shards of it embedded themselves in her skin. The windows high up on the walls. They’d exploded from the heat. Smoke poured in through the empty spaces.

  Shit. And double shit, because not all the bits of glass were so small. A particularly large and sharp piece caught the light as one of the ghosts lifted it; she tried to jump out of the way but didn’t quite make it. A slice on the back of her right arm reminded her—as if she needed it—of the penalties for poor reflexes.

  Hey, blood would help set the circle, right? Yes. Look on the bright side. Bright-side Chess, always sure in the knowledge that things would turn out just fine.

  She flung herself onto the desk, dropping salt along the way. The beginning of her circle lay on the floor at Lauren’s left hand; all she had to do now was close it so the ghosts were subdued and mark them.

  “I call you!” Lauren shouted. Chess, stunned, tumbled to the floor with a painful thud she hardly noticed. What was one more bruise? Far more important were the rising skulls, the bodies forming in the air covered with sleek black feathers. Her entire body went cold, colder than it had even moments ago when she was playing keep-away with the dead.

  “What the fuck, Lauren? The circle isn’t—”

  Too late.

  The ravens rose into the air, screeching their death cries and drowning out Chess’s voice. The circle wasn’t finished. The ghosts weren’t marked. The psychopomps were free to latch on to any soul in the room.

  Huge heavy wings stirred the smoke. Chess’s eyes watered and stung. She didn’t want to cough, didn’t want to draw their attention, but she couldn’t help it. Flames ate into the ceiling of the office.

  “Benchitak! Benchitak!” Lauren shouted, words of power Chess didn’t know but that sent more of Lauren’s ugly, strong power rippling over her skin. Could she control the ravens that way, just with her power?

  Two of the ghosts disappeared into the ragged hole between the worlds Lauren’s ritual had opened; the remaining ravens flapped around the other three, their wings punishing the air. The ghosts tried to flee back through the walls but the salt line, incomplete though it was, held them long enough for the ravens to catch them, sharing the extra ghost between them.

  Chess’s muscles relaxed. She hadn’t realized how tense she was, how much she’d expected the ravens to grab her, to drag her off.

  Church magic. She could still believe in Church magic. It felt good.

  What didn’t feel good, of course, was the volcano heat she stood in, or the rawness of her throat, or her dry, itchy eyes and her hair sticking to her forehead and cheeks. Time to get the hell out of this place before it collapsed around them—on top of them.

  She’d been standing close to the wall—too close. Any second that thing was going to burst into flames like a Haunted Week effigy, and it would take her with it.

  Lauren still stared at her psychopomps, watching them disappear through the opening between the worlds so intently that Chess wondered for a moment if the woman didn’t have some sort of psychic connection with them. She’d done that once herself with birds, the month before. The night Terrible—

  No. No fucking way. The last thing she needed to do at that moment was to start having those thoughts again. Not when her own death was so close that she could smell its hot smoky breath and only her fear of the City—and her absolute refusal to let the Lamaru beat her, those sleazy fuckheads—kept her from simply collapsing on the floor and letting it have its way with her.

  That thought, more than anything else, galvanized her. She grabbed Lauren’s wet sleeve—she wasn’t the only one soaked in sweat—and pulled.

  “We need to get out of here. Come on, I haven’t heard another explosion.”

  “Just let me get my …”

  “What?” Chess looked down. Looked down, and saw the empty floor at Lauren’s feet. The smoke hadn’t reached the lower half of the room yet; she could not blame what
she saw—what she didn’t see—on blurred vision or optical illusion or anything else.

  Oh, fuck.

  The skulls weren’t there. The ravens still had form.

  They’d gone to the City and taken their skulls, and they still had form, still had physical bodies. They’d disobeyed Lauren, disobeyed their training and instinct and just about every rule of magic Chess knew.

  Her head refused to turn; she didn’t want to check to see if the hole between the worlds had closed behind the ravens the way it should have. The longer she didn’t look, the longer she could lie to herself—always an important skill to cultivate, and she was an expert at it—and pretend the hole had closed, that she couldn’t still sense it there, feel its faint chill on her slick skin.

  She forced her neck to work, and turned toward the hole just in time to see the ravens burst through it and head straight for her.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The creation of a psychopomp is a complex process, one only designated Church employees may perform. It is to them we entrust the safety of all humanity.

  —Careers in the Church: A Guide for Teens, by Praxis Turpin

  Death came for her on thunderous black wings, in sleek black bodies way too large for the room. The ravens stole the air from her lungs, the thoughts from her head. They were coming, and she could not escape. How the hell did someone escape from a psychopomp?

  Getting out of the fucking office might be a good start. Lauren’s sleeve almost slipped from her fingers as she flung them both to the floor just in time to avoid swooping claws like the spikes that carried dead cows in the slaughterhouse below.

  One thing about Lauren, she could think fast. She usually thought wrong, but fast still had its virtues. Her gun was already in her hand; they’d barely hit the tile before she took aim and shot, an action that made Chess scream inside.

  But not out loud. Instead she slammed her own fist into her leg, hard, to give herself something else to focus on. They didn’t have time. Didn’t have—

  Mistletoe. She had mistletoe, taken from that hideous totem in her bag. It wouldn’t beat the ravens, at least she didn’t think so, but it might buy them a few seconds, and that was all they needed. Just enough time to get out the door.

  Fire crawled across the ceiling above them. The ravens outlined against it looked larger than they had before, hollow outlines in the ever-moving ocean of flame.

  Lauren shot again. The skull of the bird closest to them exploded in a cloud of bone fragments and dust, mingling with the smoke. No blood. No brains.

  Chess had never known if psychopomps actually came back to life, if they were for the brief time of their use breathing creatures with pumping hearts. Seemed they weren’t. They weren’t animals at all, just reanimated corpses, empty shells full of instinct and magic.

  Another shot. One of the ravens lost part of a wing. Feathers and bone flew, tiny scraps of desiccated skin hit the flames above and disappeared.

  Yet another shot. A miss. No wonder—the smoke thickening the air made it harder and harder to see.

  Chess stopped trying. Her fingers shook as they struggled with the plastic bag holding the mistletoe, finally yanking it open and pulling the leaves out.

  No need to light a fire, at least. Lauren’s little pile of herbs still smoked a few feet away. Chess could have tossed them into the air, let them be devoured by the inferno hovering above them, but the mistletoe would have burned too fast. Instead she dug out her lighter and, holding the leaves by the stems, lit them.

  “By this—” The words ended in a coughing fit. She struggled to swallow, dipped lower to try to breathe some fresh air—as fresh as it could be, anyway—and tried again. This time she managed to finish, dropping the leaves onto Lauren’s fire as she spoke.

  “By this power I command the escorts of the dead. By my power I command the escorts of the dead. Hear me, escorts. I Bind you. Ornithramii mordreus, I Bind you.”

  Shit. Not enough power. Maybe not enough power in the mistletoe; being used in a fetish bomb and then doused with salt probably didn’t do much for its effectiveness. Definitely not enough power in herself. She couldn’t seem to get grounded, to feel the energy flowing through her. Instead she felt the heat, the fire getting closer, the constant streaming ache in her eyes and the pounding in her head as her brain cried for more oxygen. They were running out of time. She didn’t want to die here, not this way.…

  Taking her eyes off the ravens and blocking out the deafening gunshots terrified her, but she had no choice. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath. Reached inside herself as far as she could, past the filth and slime and fear, past the boiling pit of rage, and found the spark of power hidden there.

  And set it free.

  “Escorts, I command you! I Bind you! Ornithramii mordreus, I Bind you!”

  The shock of her energy as it combined with the mistletoe and hit the birds reverberated through her. It hadn’t worked completely. The mistletoe was too tainted, was connected to whatever had made the ravens murder weapons instead of servants.

  But some of it was there. A tiny germ of mistletoe’s true power still lurked beneath the filth, and it combined with hers. Unfortunately, so did the filth. Her stomach lurched, her mouth filled with saliva. Not good. Not good energy. Foul, sick, twisted energy, inside her now.

  It wasn’t permanent, she knew; when she let go of the ravens it would leave her, just like any other spell. But it was there for the moment, and that was bad enough.

  The ravens fell silent, landed on the desk not two feet away. Their bodies were still but Chess felt them struggling. The Bind already slipped and thinned.

  “We have to get out of here now, it won’t hold them for long.”

  Lauren tried to speak but coughed instead. Together they slipped under the back of the desk and crawled to the door. Staying low was their only hope if they wanted to keep breathing. Which Chess pretty much did.

  Her wet sleeve offered no protection at all from the doorknob’s heat, but she turned it anyway, steeling herself against a sight that nothing could possibly prepare her for.

  How did the roof still stand? How had the metal walkway not collapsed? They stood in the middle of a nightmare, silent now save for the hungry, eerie susurration of the flames.

  Ghosts still wove themselves in and out between the columns of burning wood and softened steel. They didn’t seem to have noticed Lauren or her yet; she imagined the intense heat masked them and the minor energy their bodies radiated. For now, at least. It wouldn’t be long before they were spotted, and not all of the spirits wandered on the lower floors. It could be a trap, a chute of fire just like the metal livestock chutes below. She shuddered at the thought and forced her heavy feet to move.

  Her lungs burned. Every breath was an effort. The thin dry air didn’t seem to provide any oxygen at all. She expected to burst into flame at any second; the heat ravaged her, made her feel like dust herself, like an empty, hollow body—a psychopomp.

  But she wasn’t heading for the City. At least she hoped to hell she wasn’t.

  With Lauren at her side she led the way back toward the psychopomp room and the fire escape she hoped still existed. If it didn’t … if it didn’t, they would die. She almost didn’t care; at least the City was cool and dim.

  No, not cool and dim. Cold and dark. She would not go there. Not today. Hell, when she finally went she’d probably end up in the spirit prisons herself; just because she worked for the Church didn’t mean she was a good person.

  And she couldn’t bring herself to give a shit just then, either. She and Lauren clung to each other; Chess didn’t know who was helping whom. Every breath turned into a cough, every desperate swallow into sand rubbing her tonsils.

  Walking caused its own set of problems. Smoke so thick she could cut it with her knife clouded her vision, forced her to feel the floor ahead with a careful toe before putting her weight on it. Lauren slumped against her; Chess didn’t know which bothered her more, the extra
weight or the forced intimacy. Maybe Lauren wasn’t so bad—at least she’d shot down one of the psychopomps, had summoned them to begin with and saved both their asses—but that didn’t mean Chess wanted to snuggle with the woman.

  The walkway hadn’t collapsed yet, but she had the uncomfortable feeling that it was only a matter of time. It jolted and shifted under their feet, their steps loud and somehow inappropriate against the hungry whisper of the blaze. She wanted to say something to Lauren, to push her off, but it didn’t seem worth the trouble.

  Instead she coughed, her chest aching, and dragged her feet along the walkway. A dead Lamaru blocked the way, his face a mess of charred flesh.

  And behind him, his ghost.

  Chess whipped her head around, checking one last time for another exit. Nope. Instead, there were more ghosts. They’d been spotted, and two spirits had almost reached the top of the stairs by the office.

  Oh, for fuck’s sake, were they ever going to get out of this place? Couldn’t something, sometime, just be straightforward and easy?

  Right. Stupid question.

  Lauren saw it too. They stopped short a few steps from the Lamaru. Through his spirit’s translucent form the door to the psychopomp room beckoned. Hell, it practically fucking glowed at them, promising all manner of seductive escapes, like a very expensive Downside hooker.

  Those were promises Chess intended to see that it kept, ghosts be damned.

  The last of her asafetida barely filled her palm. She had more graveyard dirt, she could—No. Hold on.

  “When I say go,” she muttered to Lauren, “run for the door. But stay down, okay? Low to the ground.”

  Lauren’s skin had a grayish cast to it. Any doubts Chess had about the dangerous, half-assed plan forming in her head were dispelled by the sight. She still didn’t like Lauren, still wouldn’t trust her with anything more important than a piece of lint. But they were in this together, and that little flash of the Grand Elder’s face, of her career being sidetracked into Debunking cases like ghostly mice in an abandoned barn, tipped the scales.