Give Up the Ghost

by Jenn Burke

  Another ghost flitted across the circle, and the light in the battery jacked up another notch. Salzwedel grinned at it. “Go ahead and call. By the time they get here, it’ll be done.”

  “What will be done?” I demanded.

  He held up something that caught the light given off by the battery. It sparkled and the shape was vaguely familiar. “The summoning.”

  He placed the object on the battery, then did something to the other device, the one that had been sucking in ghosts from the beyond. Suddenly the dull device jolted to life, sharing the glow of the one I’d thought of as a battery. I couldn’t make sense of it—how the energy was being transmitted or anything—but there was no denying the evidence in front of me.

  Something was happening. And I couldn’t imagine it was anything good.

  “Wes!” Hudson shouted.

  Yep. Time to move. I sank fully into the otherplane—

  And collapsed. That low buzz I’d heard and ignored? It was infinitely more powerful now, sending shards of sound through my skull. I grasped my head and tried to breathe through the pain, but everything in me had seized up. The resonance vibrated through the core of me—if I were in the living plane, I’d say it hummed through my bones and flesh, but here, there was nothing so substantial. This was nothing like the compulsion in Salzwedel’s garage—there was nothing I had to do.

  It was all I could do to keep myself from shattering.

  Dimly, I heard Hudson shout my name again. Then a gunshot. A second.

  A third.

  I had to get up. I had to.

  I pushed myself to my hands and knees. I couldn’t feel the ground beneath me. The resonance pressed down on my back, as though it was a living, breathing thing determined to keep me down. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t lever myself up to my feet.

  So, I rolled sideways, out of the otherplane.

  My ears rang in the sudden silence. Except—it wasn’t really silence, because Salzwedel’s lips were moving and the devices on either side of the circle were vibrating enough that they should be making some noise. My eyes raked the scene, looking for Hudson—and there he was. On the ground.

  I stumbled and fell to my knees beside him. “Oh god, Hudson.”

  He looked up at me, his mouth moving, but there was no sound. Memories rose of the last time I’d been in a similar position—holding Iskander, blood bubbling out of his ruined throat, as he tried to tell me something.

  “No, shh, it’s okay. It’s okay.” I blinked hard, trying to keep the tears at bay. This couldn’t be happening again. It couldn’t.

  A strong hand gripped mine and squeezed. Hard. Hudson was staring up at me, his mouth moving, but more slowly.

  “Don’t you fucking leave me, Hud—”

  Hudson let go of my hand and tapped my ear with his fingers. Then he cupped my chin in a very firm grip and held my face still. With his other hand—and a wince—he pointed at his lips.

  “What?”

  He pointed to his lips again and mouthed something.

  I frowned. “What?”

  He moved the hand cupping my chin to the nape of my neck and tugged me downward, tilting my head so my ear was against his lips.

  “Your ears are fucked.” It sounded like he was whispering, but the strong puff of breath against the curve of my ear suggested otherwise. “I’m okay. He missed my heart. Just need to wait until the bullets are expelled.”

  Relief made me weak. I lurched forward, my forehead resting against Hudson’s shoulder. Vampires didn’t have many weaknesses, but a well-aimed bullet was one of them. Heart or head would kill Hudson. Anything else would only slow him down for a bit.

  Something in the air changed—pressure, or a pitch of the energy being generated by Salzwedel’s devices. I lifted my head in time to see a—a tear rend the air inside the circle. And maybe my hearing was coming back, because I swore I heard Salzwedel yell in triumph.

  Whatever this was, it couldn’t be good.

  Hudson managed to push himself up onto one arm so he could see what was happening. I threaded my fingers through his and held on tight. I should have reached out with my magic and interrupted Salzwedel’s celebrations and tried to seal the rift closed, but the magic in my head trembled. Whatever that pressure had been in the otherplane, it had messed with my abilities—and what if using them made the tear bigger? I couldn’t risk that.

  A pale, bony hand reached through the tear, followed quickly by a skeletal form of an old, frail woman. Her long, wavy, and ragged white hair hung listlessly over shriveled and drooped shoulders, and her arms were little but skin and bones. Age spots stood out on her parchment-like skin, and her eyes were pits of blackness. She wore nothing but shadows, as far as I could tell—or maybe the blackness flowing over her torso and legs was a diaphanous fabric.

  “I did it, Aunt Silvia!” Salzwedel’s voice seemed to come from very far away, but at least I could hear again. “I followed your instructions and I did it.”

  This was Silvia Samuels—née Salzwedel. Dead for five years. Jesus Christ.

  “Good boy.”

  I felt rather than heard Silvia’s voice. It slithered through me like dark, unbridled dread. I didn’t know what she was, but she wasn’t a ghost.

  “I killed Uncle Vincent, like you asked,” Salzwedel said.

  “No less than he deserved for abandoning me when I needed him most.”

  “And I retrieved your brooch.”

  “So I see.” She extended a bony finger to brush the cheap metal of the brooch where it still sat atop one of the devices. Her fingernails were like long, thin daggers—I think I’d seen something like them in a horror movie once, but right now, I couldn’t think of which one. Carefully, she picked the brooch up and pinned it to her chest.

  Oh god. To the skin of her chest. The cloth—if that was what it was—covered it.

  “Thank you, Arwin. You were always such a good, obedient boy.”

  “You taught me so much, Aunt Silvia. I’m only sorry that—”

  “Shh, it’s done. You need to do only one more thing for me.”

  “Anything.”

  She drew the back of her hand down Salzwedel’s cheek—reaching beyond the boundaries of the circle to do so.

  She shouldn’t be able to do that.

  Before I could shout a warning, she drew her hand back and punched her dagger-nails through Arwin’s chest. He let out a stunned gasp and looked down, then back up, blood starting to trickle from his lips. Silvia pulled her fist back, yanking it out of his chest cavity—and there was something in it. She opened her mouth wide, wider than anyone should be able to, displaying row after row of sharp, pointed teeth, and shoved her bounty inside.

  Chewed. And swallowed.

  Salzwedel, now ignored, toppled to the ground at her feet.

  “Did she—” Hudson swallowed “—eat his heart?”

  If I opened my mouth, I was going to puke, so I said nothing. Instead I stood shakily and positioned myself in front of Hudson. Silvia’s black, black eyes fastened on me and, not gonna lie, my knees shook and my bladder threatened to let go.

  “Well, well, what have we here?” She lifted her nose to the air and walked out of the circle as though it was nothing. “Vampire? No—that’s you,” she said, turning her attention to Hudson, still laid out on the rubble behind me.

  I shifted to block her view, and she looked at me again. Good...but, uh, not good.

  “I don’t know what you are.” She sounded bemused. “Not human, that’s clear.”

  “You don’t belong here,” I managed, and my voice trembled only a little bit. Go, me.

  “I disagree.” She took another few steps toward me. Behind her, the tear rippled, like something else was trying to come through.

  Shit. Could I physically shove her back through that rift? I had my doubts. Par
t of the success I’d had with grabbing the hellhound and ghosts and forcing them back into the beyond was that they didn’t belong in the living plane, or even the otherplane. The living plane was for the living and the otherplane was transitory. The beyond beckoned them, tugged at them.

  But Silvia had been summoned. Invited. She moved on the living plane as easily as any human. I wondered if that had to do with the brooch, if it acted as an anchor of some sort.

  My magic burbled in my chest. Its rhythm felt off, thrown into disarray by whatever that force had been in the otherplane, but I had to work with what I had. I drew it out, wincing as the ripples in the tear grew more pronounced. This was going to go very bad. I knew it. But I didn’t have a choice.

  I wouldn’t go down without a fight.

  Silvia stopped her advance and her fathomless eyes grew unfocused. “Oh, I know that,” she murmured. “That lovely aroma has been leaking all over the beyond. Maddening. I need it.”

  She started forward again and I lashed out with my magic, imagining it as a whip. It snapped against her cheek, flaying the flesh—but there was no blood. She stopped and lifted the flap of skin back into place, where it stitched back together.

  Fuck.

  I couldn’t retreat—it would leave Hudson vulnerable. So I attacked her again, and again, causing wounds that seemed more annoying than anything else, but which kept her at bay.

  Then the first hellhound dropped out of the tear.

  For the briefest of seconds, I thought it might attack Silvia, since she was the closest. But no...it trotted over to her and stopped at her side, like it was an overgrown and very ugly pet. Smiling at me, she gestured to the hellhound, and it leaped at me.

  By this time, Hudson had pushed himself to a sitting position, and he was trying desperately to gain his feet and fight. But he’d lost a lot of blood and needed more, and there wasn’t time to let him bite me. So I fought as best I could, but I couldn’t get a grip on the hellhound with my magic like I’d done before. It was slippery. Or maybe I was finally finding my limits.

  Another hellhound slipped through the widening tear. Then imps and ghosts. The hellhound I was fighting took advantage of my distraction and fatigue and shoved me to the ground. Its teeth fastened onto my shoulder and shook me. I couldn’t hold in the cry of pain and fear.

  We’d failed. No—I’d failed.

  The hellhound held me down, pinning me in place with a paw on my chest and its teeth still embedded in my flesh. It hadn’t gone for the throat, at least—probably because Silvia herself wanted to kill me.

  Or, let’s be honest now—she wanted to eat me.

  She approached, looking slightly less skeletal now than she had when she’d first stepped out of the beyond. I guess ingesting a human heart worked wonders. I tried to turn my head to see Hudson, but the hellhound pressed harder on my chest and growled. Its teeth scraped against the bone in my shoulder and I cried out again.

  “Just stay still,” Silvia advised. “It will all be over soon.”

  One of the ghosts swept by her and she froze. For the first time, I saw something like uncertainty or even fear in her eyes. Unexpectedly, she retreated a step, then another, and with a snap of her fingers, the hellhound let me go.

  “I will find you again. Don’t worry.” With an extra-wide smile that showed off her shark-like teeth, she turned and began walking up the hill created by rubble that led to Hudson’s backyard. “Take it down,” she said to one of the ghosts.

  Energy surged, but it wasn’t mine or Silvia’s. Dust fell into my face. Coughing, I turned onto my side, only two thoughts in my head: Hudson and get out.

  Hudson lay unmoving a few feet away, but it might as well have been kilometers. I reached out and dragged myself toward him with my one usable arm, and whimpered with the surge of pain that threatened to take my vision.

  “Hud!” I croaked. More dust came raining down, and the walls around us made a disturbing squeal.

  Take it down, Silvia had ordered. She meant the ruins of the goddamned house.

  “Hudson!” My shout wasn’t much stronger this time. I needed to get to him, but the distance between us seemed insurmountable. I gritted my teeth and dragged myself forward—

  Just as the house roared, shook, and tumbled down on top of us.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I knew I was dreaming. I wasn’t sure how I knew—though it might have been the presence of a pair of boobs on my usually boobless chest. They were covered by a flimsy white nightgown I definitely didn’t own. As was the nature of dreams, it didn’t bother me. It just was.

  My gaze swept across my surroundings. The apartment was familiar but not—not mine, but it belonged to this other me. Lacy, diaphanous material draped from the skeleton of the canopy bed, and even in the candlelight, I could see that the fabric was yellowed and darkened with age. The bed itself sagged in the middle and the coverings looked worn and nearly threadbare. The rest of the furniture was equally shabby—the dresser had rough corners worn by age and neglect, and even the woven throw rug covering the scarred wooden floors was matted with years of overuse.

  My body felt brittle. Achy, fragile. Getting up from my kneeling position would be difficult, but anything worth doing was also worth a sacrifice. The air around me nipped at my nose and fingers—my asshole landlord had started turning off the heat for a few hours each day, each period of time without heat getting longer and longer, but he wouldn’t scare me off. He was another asshole of a man trying to control me, and I would not bow. I would not break.

  And if he managed to win the battle, he would not win the war.

  I smiled as I sliced my inner arm with the knife and let the blood drain into the chalice in the center of my circle of candles. Words fell from my lips, words I knew but didn’t know. Words I’d memorized a decade ago. Or more. My memory was as unreliable as the heat in my apartment—sometimes burning brightly, sometimes cold and dark. But these words...they’d never left me. They were my comfort. My salvation. My revenge.

  My landlord was only the latest in a long line of men who’d wronged me. My father was the first—he’d cast me out when he realized I had the sight. Touched by evil, he’d called me. My would-be fiancé, who’d come home married to a Vietnamese woman he’d gotten pregnant. My brother, who’d refused to help when I’d shoved my dignity aside and asked for a loan to pay my rent.

  Entitled, egotistical pricks, every single one of them.

  I could feel my death approaching, the dark rider on a pale horse lingering beyond my sight. It wouldn’t be tonight, but soon...soon he’d come to carry me off. As long as he gave me enough time to prepare my soul for revenge, I would go with him willingly. Laughing, even. Because death wasn’t the end.

  As cliché as it sounded, it really was only the beginning.

  * * *

  “Wes!”

  I blinked my eyes open, visions of Silvia’s apartment and her bloodstained skin wisping away like the tattered lace she’d draped over her bed. I had no idea why I’d dreamed that, or if it was...more of a vision of the past. Something shifted above me and the present intruded on my foggy thoughts. For a moment, I couldn’t tell where I was—then I remembered the crash of the house, and I thrust my hands out to find I was surrounded by wood and god knew what else.

  “Here!” I croaked, then coughed and tried again. “Here!”

  I explored the darkness with my hands. My legs appeared to be free too, so however the house had fallen, it had left me with a little bubble to myself. God, I hoped the same thing had happened for Hudson. I didn’t know if a crushing injury was something a vampire could heal from, and I didn’t want to find out.

  Light flared by my head and I squinted and turned my face away. That was full-on sunlight, not the weak rays of dawn. Jesus—how long had I been trapped? How long had I been dreaming? Wary of the light, I turned back to the hole, and my bre
ath almost stopped as I recognized the face looking down at me.

  “You’re not going to make us dig you out, are you?” Hudson asked with a wavering grin.

  “You’re okay,” I managed.

  “Yeah. I woke up shortly after the collapse and dug my way out, thinking Mr. Ghost-Not-Ghost would be out here waiting for me.” His smile dimmed. “Not so much.”

  “So you hung around waiting for me to show?”

  “For a bit, yeah. Then we had to wait for my nosy neighbors to head to work.” He tilted his head. “Go ghost, dummy.”

  I grunted and let my body go insubstantial. I wasn’t a hundred percent—not even seventy—but everything seemed a little easier in the otherplane. I passed through the rubble without any effort, and once I was free, rejoined the living plane. Suddenly all of the aches and pains returned with a vengeance, and I staggered. Hudson was there to catch me, though—and Iskander and Evan hovered nearby.

  Clearly the sun continued to not bother either Hudson or Evan. Yay, magic blood.

  “Where are Ben and Joelle?”

  “In Hudson’s SUV,” Iskander rasped.

  “Passed out in the back seat, hanging on to each other,” Evan supplied. “They had a pretty good freak-out when the house went down.”

  I leaned hard against Hudson, and I didn’t miss the fact that he was not standing particularly straight, either. We needed to rest and regroup—and plan. As much as I liked the office for planning, it wouldn’t be good to be slumped over furniture if a client came calling.

  “Lexi’s,” I said, then realized no one else was privy to my thoughts. “We need magical advice.” Then I groaned. “I need to see if there’s a tear.”

  Hudson grabbed my arm as I made to turn around. “You’re barely upright. We can ask Rosanna to patch it, if there is one.”

  I glanced back at the ruin of Hudson’s house and thought of Arwin Salzwedel’s body buried in the rubble. “We should call Kat too.”

  Hudson paused. “She’s gonna start to hate me.”

  My chuckle was more air than sound. “Oh, honey, I think you’re already firmly on her shit list.”