by D. N. Hoxa
I walked ahead, too, determined to keep my cool until we passed each other. Was it too much to wish for that he wouldn’t talk to me?
“Why do you smoke?” he asked the next second. There went my wish.
“Why do you exist?” I blew the smoke out in his face. He didn’t even flinch. Now that we were close, I could see him in perfect detail, which wasn’t doing me any favors. Yes, I was still attracted to him—physically—if you couldn’t tell. It didn’t mean anything at all, especially after I found out that he was a damn liar, too, but it still made it difficult to focus every once in a while.
The left corner of his lips tilted up and his black eyes took all of me in, as if he were measuring me.
“To make you miserable.”
“Finally, something we agree on.”
“There’s a bit of blood on your hoodie,” he said. “But that’s nothing new.”
“It’s an accessory.”
“I imagine it went well.” He nodded at the warehouse behind me.
“Very well.” I grinned.
“I don’t suppose you’ll tell me what he told you?” He raised his brows as if he were truly genuine.
I was not going to fall for it, obviously. “You are smart when you want to be, birdie. What happened to your vacation and orgy plans?”
He sighed, putting his helmet under his arm and looking at the ground for a second. “You don’t have to make this difficult, Princess.”
“I really don’t.” But I was going to anyway.
“So, don’t get in my way, at least.”
“Actually, you’re in my way.” He was right in front of my way out.
“For the last time, we can work together on this.” It cost him to say those words. Maybe that’s why I enjoyed it so much. “I’ve already spoken to the witches. I can tell you what they told me.”
But if the witches knew something useful, they’d have been able to find the nocturnal witch themselves. It’s why I hadn’t gone to them first, and the fact that Lexar was here after speaking to them confirmed my suspicion.
“Thanks, but I’d rather shit in my hands and clap.”
“Great. Then stay out of my way.”
“I am not—”
“You’re either on my side or in my way.”
I smiled and leaned closer. “What’s the matter, Nevermore? Are you afraid that I’ll find her before you do, and that Daddy will be disappointed in you?”
He wasn’t concerned in the least. Instead, he came closer to me as well. “I’m afraid you’ll fuck everything up and I’ll have to deal with the mess like last time.”
Fucking prick.
No, wait. He wasn’t just a prick. He was a whole, entire cactus full of pricks, just like Tobias.
“Then you should call someone to hold your hand while you’re here.” I threw the cigarette butt to the side and walked around him.
“Think about it, Princess. This is bigger than the two of us. She really is dangerous.”
I flipped him the bird without turning and walked out of the warehouse’s yard. Then, just to spite him, I grabbed one of my knives really quick and stabbed the back wheel of his bike to death.
Three times.
While he watched.
Ah, the little joys in life.
“Real mature,” he said, but I didn’t turn to look at him. Yeah, maybe it was childish, but it made me feel a bit better. No big deal, though. Hank would probably help him out, anyway.
Plus, I needed a head start if he was going after the witch on his own. Nobody said I had to play fair. Lexar sure as hell wouldn’t. My car was parked at the beginning of the street—an old silver Audi that never failed me. By the time I got in it, Lexar was inside the warehouse.
Until next time.
I had to get back to my apartment to clean my bloody hands and change my hoodie. Contrary to (Lexar’s) popular belief, I did own my apartment. I bought it just a few months ago. It was all mine now and I loved it—not only because of the dog park that always had plenty of things for me to take pictures of, but because it was my space. I’d been living in it for almost seven years now, and it was perfect for me.
Usually, I hunted maggots. They weren’t that hard to do in, especially since they couldn’t suck out my energy like they did with everybody else. I saw right through them, and I never needed more than brute force and my knives to handle even vampires, who were the strongest of their kind.
That’s why my knives were all I took to what—I later found out—would be a gun fight. Well, not exactly gun, but…you’ll see.
The northeast wasn’t a place I frequented often. I knew a couple people—one of them a ghost. She was the only actual ghost in the city that I knew of. I’d only met her twice before—once when I needed to see into a very well-guarded safe where I’d heard there would be a few Books of the Fallen—a.k.a. spell books. Since she could walk through walls, she had no trouble taking a peek for me. Turned out, there was no true Book of the Fallen in that house, so I hadn’t had to get my hands dirty at all, which was a shame.
The second time I worked with the ghost was just days before Lexar came to town the first time, a year ago. She wanted me to take care of a couple maggots who were living near her house. She was actually a very kindhearted ghost. She cared about all the people in her neighborhood that the maggots were hurting, and apparently, they’d been having parties there every night for weeks. I hadn’t been able to feel anything because they kept indoors and out of my territory, but once the ghost told me about it, I had no trouble finding and killing them.
It’s a very funny—and fun—story the way I crashed their party that night, but perhaps another time.
When I parked my car in front of the house, she already knew I was there. Her name was Elizabeth Tate. She used to be a lunar witch. Her kind attuned to the cycles and phases of the moon, and they, too, worked at night, just like nocturnal witches. Except most lunar witches weren’t fucked up in the head as far as I knew, and their magic was still considered light.
The house Elizabeth lived in was built upon her and her family’s graves. She never told me when she’d lived and died, but I suspected it must have been a really long time ago. She also never told me how she managed to come back as a ghost, but it had felt rude to ask.
Her neighborhood was quiet, a bunch of small houses built way too close together to have any semblance of privacy. I walked through the fence, and I looked up at the two windows of the two-story house. The curtains didn’t move, but they didn’t need to. Elizabeth was watching me—I could feel the weight of her eyes on my face.
When I reached the door, I didn’t even need to knock. The knob turned, and the door slid open with a weak screech. I stepped inside and closed it behind me.
The place hadn’t changed at all since I’d last been here. The foyer was round and very bright, the walls covered in wallpaper with pale green and orange flowers, an oval-shaped mirror across from the door. I saw myself and flinched. The black hoodie I’d worn drained all the color from my face and turned up the brightness of my hair. I looked worse than the ghost whose house I was in.
Good thing Elizabeth popped to my side the next second, and she was looking at me in the mirror, too.
“You’re very pretty, Sassy,” she said, her voice light as a breeze, so light you would think it was just the wind blowing in if you couldn’t see her.
“We could totally pass for sisters,” I said with a grin. She wasn’t anything like me, but she was a ghost, and my skin was so pale it almost looked like hers.
I couldn’t see Elizabeth in the mirror—ghosts don’t reflect in them—but I could see her just fine from how close she was standing. She looked like a 3D projection, better than anything today’s technology could come up with. You could see all the colors on her, too. It had freaked me out the first time, but it didn’t anymore. I couldn’t even feel her presence, like she wasn’t even there. Which was probably closer to the truth than what my eyes were telling me.
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br /> “Perhaps we should try it sometime,” she said, giggling. “Please, come on in.” She walked ahead toward the second door on our right—her living room. I couldn’t hear her footsteps at all, though I could see her putting one foot in front of the other. The black dress she always had on covered her completely from her neck down to her ankles, but it was so plain, I could never guess from what era it was from.
She opened the door with so much ease, it blew me away all over again. Logic said that ghosts shouldn’t be able to touch physical objects. She could literally walk through walls. She wasn’t corporeal and could be invisible when she wanted to be, but she could still open doors.
“How do you do that, Elizabeth? How can you manipulate objects?” I asked. It might have been rude, but I was really curious. I’d already held off asking the first two times.
“It’s my energy. What’s left of my magic does it, not me specifically,” she said, waving for me to follow. The first time I’d been here, we’d talked in the foyer, so I was excited to see how the rest of this place looked like. Her living room was pretty spacious and very bright, too. She had about five lamps on, plus the three windows on the wall. I wondered who even paid for the electricity around here. But the strangest thing in there were the crystal figures that were suspended midair, and they reflected the light of the lamps in all kinds of patterns. There were deers, bears, snakes, birds—and they looked half alive hanging there on air.
“And how the hell do you manage these?” Because I doubted she had that much magic left in her to keep all these things levitated all the time.
But Elizabeth smiled. “Fish wire.” She pushed one of the figures to the side just a bit. Only when it began to swing to the sides did I notice the thin string it was attached to. “Almost invisible,” she said proudly. Well, shit.
“But, still, you can grab the knob and turn it.” I saw it just seconds ago.
“I’ve just had a lot of practice. I can synchronize my energy with my movements just fine. It’s what happens when you’ve been around as long as I have.”
“And how long is that exactly?” I slipped in the question discreetly.
She smiled again, showing me her slightly crooked teeth. “I don’t really remember anymore.” She said the lie like it was an unquestionable truth. “To what do I owe this pleasure, Sassy?”
Her voice was perfectly polite. My ears liked it. I sat down on one of the mauve-colored couches. The velvet felt nice under my hand. I had no idea why she kept everything so perfectly tidy and shiny in this place, but only after I sat did I begin to feel the…cold. Cold air hit the side of my legs from the left, even though there was nothing there except the wall. Huh. I pulled my legs closer to the couch, but the cold still came, like an invisible air conditioner was right there.
“I’m in a bit of a tricky situation, to be honest,” I said with a smile. I did like Elizabeth, and I already had no doubt she would help me if she could. I was nice to people—and ghosts—I liked. I just happened to not like a lot of people.
“How so?” Elizabeth asked and she went to sit down opposite me, on the other couch. I noticed how, when she sat, half her butt and thighs sank into the couch. It was weird as fuck and trying not to stare was proving to be very difficult. She didn’t mind, though. Probably.
I cleared my throat. “There’s a nocturnal witch in the city. You know those are no good, right?” Her thin brows shot up. She definitely knew. “She’s been banished from the Alliance, and they can’t find her anywhere. I’m trying to catch her, you know, before she causes trouble, and I heard she was spotted here in the northeast a few days ago. Since nothing goes on around here without you knowing about it, I thought I’d come by and ask.”
Out of the blue, something sort of whistled from outside the room. I looked out the door, into the hallway, my breath held. Was there somebody else in the house?
But Elizabeth didn’t seem like she’d heard anything. Maybe I was just being paranoid. Shit, my legs were really cold, too. Invisible wind was still blowing on them.
Even though she was a ghost, the expressions on her face were unmistakable. She looked confused, then surprised, and then finally very curious—which confused me in turn.
She stood up, since almost all her legs and hips had gone into the couch by then. Maybe she needed to be focused to do stuff—like sitting and opening doors, but what did I know. There wasn’t a manual on ghosts anywhere.
Or if there was, it would be in Hell.
“I have heard some rumors,” Elizabeth said, slowly walking around the couch to stand behind it, hands folded in front of her as she looked down at me. “What has she done?”
“Nothing yet, but I have information that she’s in possession of some very dangerous spells. Nothing good’s going to come out of it.” It was common sense. Nobody who didn’t want someone to die, for example, would be in possession of a spell that could kill.
And just as I thought that, another whistle came from the hallway, and something groaned over my head—the ceiling. I looked up, ignoring the shivers running down my back, and my instincts that insisted I needed to get the fuck out of there fast. Keep it together.
“I see,” Elizabeth said, looking down at her hands.
Well, that was interesting. “I assure you, nobody will know who told me about it, Elizabeth.” And nobody would know how scared I was to be in that place at all, not even Chelsea.
“I know, just that…” Her voice trailed off, almost like she was afraid to say what was on her mind.
“If you know where I can find her, you tell me, and I make sure that the next time you come to my door asking for help, I’ll help you.” That’s what we’d agreed on, the first time I came looking for her, and it had worked just fine. I could always force her, but—
Wait. How the hell do you force a ghost to do anything, when she could just disappear from my sight completely any time she pleased?
Damn. I couldn’t force her to do shit.
“Actually, I do need a bit of help with…something else,” Elizabeth said, and when she looked up at me, I realized she hadn’t looked afraid before. She was just in deep thought, almost as if her mind was working overtime. She couldn’t focus on anything for longer than a split second. Her eyes kept moving to the sides so fast, I wondered if she would get a headache soon. Did ghosts get headaches?
Wow, I really would like to read that manual on ghosts. Maybe I could ask my father for it.
Yeah, I’d rather shit bricks first.
“So, tell me what it is, and I’ll see what I can do,” I said, while my mind raced to come up with things ghosts needed. I couldn’t because those damn whistles and groans were everywhere again. How could she not hear them? Maybe they were all in my head?
“I’ve heard that another one of your kind is in the city,” Elizabeth started, speaking really slow, taking my mind off the voices in that house that only I seemed to be hearing.
“Yes?”
“What I need is very specific,” she continued, pinching her thumb and index fingers together. “Something important. Something he can give to me, as he is the son of Dagon.”
My brows shot up. “Just tell me what it is already.” She wanted something from Lexar. He was the only one of my kind up here—and the son of the fallen angel Dagon.
“Lightning,” Elizabeth said in a breath. I almost missed it.
“Lightning?”
“Exactly. If you can come closer,” she said and turned to a stand right under the window. I stood up eagerly, my legs freezing. At least the stupid cold didn’t follow me when I moved. I went closer to her, keeping my head down so I didn’t hit the crystals hanging from the ceiling. On the stand were some vases, some glass bottles and a straw basket full of colorful yarns. “These bottles are lightning-proof. Take any one you like.”
Lightning proof bottles. I totally knew those existed.
“You want me to get him to bottle a lightning strike for you?” Because that’s what it sounded like
to me.
She smiled. “Yes. It would mean a great deal to me if you could do that.”
I thought about it for a second. “Why in the world would you need a lightning strike in a bottle?” It just didn’t make any sense. What could a ghost do with lightning?
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you that,” she said, and her smile slipped when she looked down at the polished wooden floor. “But it’s important. I will tell you everything you need to know about the witch, if you can get this for me.”
“Are you sure hellfire won’t cut it?” Because I had plenty of it, burning right under my skin. She shook her head. “What about catching a lightning strike yourself?” She could wait for a lightning storm as long as she needed to. She was a ghost already. She couldn’t get old and die twice.
“No, it has to be hell-lightning,” Elizabeth said.
I wanted to try harder, to convince her that what she was asking for was absurd. Me, asking Lexar for a favor? Especially now that we were both on this stupid witch hunt? I can’t even tell you how much I didn’t want to do this. At all. But I could see in her eyes that she wasn’t going to budge. I looked down at the lightning-proof bottles with a sigh. What were the odds that Lexar would even agree to this?
He might if I gave him some kind of information. Hank would have told him the same thing he told me, but I doubted he knew about Elizabeth, and he probably didn’t know anyone worthy in the northeast.
I had no leverage, damn it, and no patience to be here for much longer. Those damn whistles were growing louder.
“She really is dangerous, Sassy. I heard whispers that her spells come straight out of Samayaza’s Book of the Fallen,” Elizabeth said.
Ugh. Samayaza was one of the seven Fallen—and a nasty motherfucker if the rumors about him were true. And rumors were always true in the paranormal world. He had a thing for torture and orgies, apparently—both at the same time.
I scratched my forehead. “It’s not going to be as easy as asking him for some lightning, you know.” I would have to give him something in return for it.