by S. M. Reine
That damn exorcist.
She’d taken his money without actually exorcising the haunt.
O’Reilly strode toward the door, fingers tight on the rosary.
And then the ghost appeared in front of him.
He didn’t even feel her claws sinking into his gut, nor was he conscious long enough to watch his intestines splattering the rug. The attack was mercifully swift, and so was his death.
The ghost’s scream shattered the night.
5
Elise woke up in the hospital with saline dripping into her vein, a throbbing headache, and a sticky mouth. She heard someone shuffling beside her but was too groggy to turn her head. Judging by how slow and heavy the footfalls were, she was certain it was a short, heavy human—probably not a threat.
“What am I doing here?” Elise asked, smacking her tongue to loosen it.
A nurse stepped into view. He was barely five feet tall, very round, and not a threat, as Elise had suspected. “You have alcohol poisoning,” Nurse Leigh said. The picture on his ID badge was very unflattering. Made his head look like a basketball. “Don’t feel too bad. American tourists often drink too much here, especially ladies your age.”
She tried to focus on the wall clock. There were haloes around the hospital lights and trying to look at anything bright hurt. “What time is it?”
“Almost ten o’clock in the evening.”
Elise had gone on nights-long benders with Malcolm without getting alcohol poisoning, but she’d succumbed in a matter of hours that night. Of course, she’d never attempted to knock back that much beer all at once, either. And she didn’t plan on doing it again. She felt like hell.
“I need to make a call.” Elise lifted her hands to make sure they were still gloved. They weren’t. But she’d sliced one of her palms open when she’d fallen outside the pub, so her left hand was bandaged, shielding the mark on her palm. Small mercy. She clenched her other fist around the exposed mark to hide it.
“Here you go.” The nurse moved the phone within her reach. “You’ll be out in the morning, if you want to schedule a cab for your pickup. Your friends abandoned you at the emergency room. I doubt you’ll be seeing them again.”
So much for hooking up with Seamus later.
Shading her eyes with a hand, Elise tried to relax into the bed. She didn’t want to wait until morning to leave. She’d walked out of hospitals right after they finished repairing internal hemorrhages, and Elise certainly didn’t need an entire night of intravenous fluid to get back on her feet this time.
But she wasn’t sure where she was, and she didn’t know how to get back to the apartment James had rented.
Elise was going to have to call him and ask for directions. Which meant she’d also have to admit to how she’d spent her evening.
She waited until Nurse Leigh shuffled out of the room before grabbing the phone. She squeezed her eyes shut as she dialed the number and pressed the receiver to her ear. As long as she didn’t move too much or open her eyes, her head was bearably painful.
The phone rang.
It rang ten times before the answering machine picked up, delivering a generic message in a robotic voice.
She’d memorized the number for the apartment days ago. She was certain she still had it right. Elise forced herself to look at the keypad as she dialed again, ensuring her fingers hadn’t slipped.
The phone rang another ten times and kicked over to the answering machine.
Slowly, Elise set down the receiver.
James wouldn’t have left the apartment at night, especially not when he was alone. He was much too smart—and much too boring—to go into the darkness of night on his own unless he needed to. There was no reason for him not to answer the phone unless he’d been attacked. Or kidnapped. Or killed.
Elise sat up. Her head pulsed hard, like her skull was going to crack in half.
She couldn’t see her clothes anywhere. There was no sign of her knife, either. Someone had taken it from her—probably Walker or one of those other idiots. There was no time to search, though. James was in danger. Elise knew it as surely as she knew she was never going to drink Guinness again.
She ripped the IV needle out of her arm, stole a pair of latex gloves, and climbed out of bed.
It took James about thirty seconds to realize he’d walked through a puddle of blood. Normally, he wasn’t so oblivious to the signs of violence; where Elise was numbed to bodies, blood, and pain, James remained excruciatingly sensitive. He could never watch a human being die and think of it as an unavoidable casualty, simply an addition to the grisly statistics surrounding demon hunting. Likewise, he’d never become nose-blind to the scents of death: rot and perforated intestines and bile.
But he walked through a puddle of blood and didn’t notice it for half a minute, which was more than slightly unusual.
The surrounding circumstances could never have been described as usual, though.
“My God,” James whispered.
There were three dead tourists on the path leading to Castle O’Reilly, clearly identifiable by their novelty Stonehenge sweaters and expensive SLR cameras. All three had been gutted. Their intestines were strewn through the grass, rather like the remnants of a deer’s carcass after the wolves were done with it.
He covered his nose with a hand and stumbled through the front doors of Castle O’Reilly.
Only then did he notice that he was tracking blood behind him.
His first instinct was to grab the desk, trying to half-sit on it to get his feet off the ground. James wasn’t certain what he hoped to accomplish with that. Getting away from his own footprints? Wiping off his shoes?
While he was on the desk, another body hidden behind it caught his eye. It was Billie, the young lady who had sold tickets to them earlier. Her ginger hair was black with blood. Glassy eyes stared at the ceiling. Her large intestine was piled on her chest.
James fumbled in his jacket’s inner pocket, extracting the Book of Shadows. He’d rearranged the pages on the bus to the castle so that more fire spells were on top just in case he needed to burn more bodies.
Wind gusted through the castle’s entryway. It smelled like rain and copper.
The Book of Shadows slipped from his fingers and landed open-faced on the floor. Wind flipped through the pages, ripping them from their rings.
“Damn it all!”
James lunged, stepping on a cluster of pages as they whipped past him. He left a bloody shoe print on the runes. Damn again . Muddying the runes rendered most of them useless, or unreliable at the very least. Human blood did strange things to magic.
He grabbed as many as he could. Some had already blown through the doorway and now fluttered on the wet lawn outside.
James raced to pick them up, too—and nearly ran into the so-called ghost of Castle O’Reilly.
He skidded to a stop before he crashed into her. She was taller than he remembered, her skin glowing brighter, raven-black hair floating around her shoulders. The semi-translucent legs of the spirit hovered just a few inches away from him. Being so close to the sidhe was like standing in waist-deep ice water.
The hand that Elise had severed earlier had grown back. This creature obviously had accelerated healing and regeneration, which were characteristic of some sidhe subspecies. His mind catalogued the attributes by habit as fear clawed at his chest.
Before he could flee, the spirit spoke.
Stop, human thing .
She didn’t open her mouth to speak. The words entered his mind directly.
James froze where he stood.
He was in a wildly terrible situation as the last person living in Castle O’Reilly. He was surrounded by death—three bodies outside, at least one behind the desk—and he’d already seen how intolerable the creature’s shrieking was when feeding off of a single body. With that many dead people around, she would be exponentially more powerful.
James really should have tracked Elise down at the pub before returni
ng to the castle.
“Please,” he said, hands extended, notebook in one hand and stray spells clutched in the other. “Let’s not fight, and—and no screaming. Let’s just talk about what you want.”
She swayed in the doorway. What I want? What makes you think I want anything? Her voice was pleasant. It reminded him of the patter of raindrops on leaves, the stirring of wind through damp tree branches.
“Everyone wants something,” James said.
And what if I were to tell you that I want to kill you?
He stiffened. “I would be forced to burn this entire damn castle to the ground with you inside of it.”
Your kind are so cold, she said to him.
“My kind? Humans? Witches?”
Do you think I don’t recognize you? It hasn’t been so very long since I faced down with creatures from above and below in the wars that came before. Her countenance shivered with fury. I remember the half-bloods. She drifted nearer and it took all of James’s strength to hold still. He’d seen how quickly she moved; trying to run away would do him no good at all.
“I’m only a man,” he said carefully.
You’re a half-blood bound to the exorcist who would have killed me today. Her ghostly figure darkened around the edges, like a thunderstorm skimming over her flesh. This is my home. I’ve been here for millennia—well before your forefathers thought to rut with mortal women and plant their seeds in mortal wombs. And that girl, that product of mass genocide and the sins of your conspiring ancestors—she would kill me after all that!
“You’ve been here how long, exactly?” he asked, diverting the conversation from revenge.
Since the Treaty. She massaged her temples as though she had a headache. It’s been so long. So many years to be trapped and alone… I once lived in a kingdom of a light with thousands like myself .
“Other sidhe, you mean.” She must have truly gone insane from all her time alone. Sidhe had always been rare, a species of few.
Her eyes brightened to a vicious shade of green. I’m one of the last .
“But there are others. Not many, but some. If company is what you want, we can find company for you.”
That was a lie. A terrible, painful lie. James’s shoes were coated in the blood of people this spirit had killed. Even if there had been millions of other sidhe to keep her company, this one was going to have to die sooner or later—preferably sooner.
But as long as she was talking to him, she wasn’t screaming. He needed to keep her talking.
“If you’ll stay here, I can bring them to you,” James said, edging toward the door.
You’re not going anywhere. The exorcist will come for you .
He focused his energy on the papers in his hand. “I don’t think so.”
He flung several runes toward her at the same time, igniting them with a word of power that boomed through the walls, made the floor shiver, sent a bookshelf crashing to the blood-stained rug. The magic drew strength from inside of him. It sucked energy from the earth below, the sky above, and the circle of power he’d cast back at the apartment.
But before the magic could strike the sidhe, she opened her mouth and blasted a short scream at him.
The force of it knocked him off of his feet.
For an instant, he was without gravity or orientation. All he knew was that he was flying.
Then his back smashed into the admissions desk. The wood buckled under him. The desk flipped over backward, dumping James on top of Billie’s body.
Even as dazed as he was, he struggled to get up, hands slipping in the puddles of her blood. He fell twice before regaining his footing.
The sidhe had dodged his fire spells, which had gone awry with the taint of human blood. She floated in front of a wall of fire. All those antique tapestries—they were smoldering to ash, and the flames climbed the rafters.
She opened her mouth to scream again, so James dived behind the wreckage of the desk, shielding himself with its bulk. The force of the blast struck the wood. It shuddered against his back. But even though his head throbbed from the sheer volume of her attack, he didn’t go flying again.
He shuffled through the remnants of his Book of Shadows. Come on, come on…
Another scream.
The desk shattered. James gathered his papers and tried to run, but the sidhe was on him before he could escape. She spun him around, curving icy fingers around his throat. Her luminous eyes loomed in his vision. You’re burning my castle , she hissed into his mind.
Great, James had made her angrier.
Her mouth opened. From that close, he could see that she didn’t have an ordinary set of teeth and tongue inside her maw. There was nothing but a vast pit filled with fog and darkness, as though her mouth opened to another world.
He flinched in anticipation of the strike.
But then she jerked, her hands released him, and she dropped to the ground with a tiny wail of pain.
Behind her stood Elise, knuckles stained green with blood.
James was pleased—and relieved—to see his kopis at first. Bafflement followed quickly. Elise was wearing a hospital gown, a pair of latex gloves, and nothing else. The cold wind tugged the hem of her paper dress, exposing the freckled kneecaps he’d been trying not to stare at earlier that night. Her bare feet were caked in mud. She looked beautiful, exasperated, and ridiculous all at once.
It was enough that he momentarily forgot about the beansidhe. “What in the world happened to you?”
Elise shrugged.
The sidhe sat up from where she had struck the floor, touching her fingers to the back of her head. The fingertips came away green. She glared her fury at Elise. I knew you would come back. I’m ready for you. In a flash, the damage was healed.
Rapid healing, regeneration, and weaponized screams.
James was glad that the sidhe were near extinction.
Elise had noted the same characteristics. She turned to James. “How do I kill her?”
“I haven’t read that far in the bestiary yet,” he said, showing her the book he’d brought.
“Get reading, James.”
The spirit opened her mouth and began to scream again.
As James had drawn energy from the surrounding earth for his magic, the sidhe drew energy from the dead. Billie’s body rapidly began to rot. The skin bubbled as though there were maggots underneath the surface, twitching as it was drained of matter.
The sidhe blasted all of that at Elise.
It was no short blow, like the spirit had been using against James. It was the full force of her bitter hatred for kopides.
Elise seized James by the collar and dived out of the way, dragging him behind her. The sidhe’s scream struck a display case against the wall. The panels shattered and showered glass to the floor.
They ran past the flaming tapestries and ducked into one of the bathrooms just in time for the sidhe to direct the force of her shriek at them again. Elise slammed the door shut. The bathroom walls groaned and dust showered onto the dirty stone tiles, dislodged from the aging ceiling.
“She’s a beansidhe,” James said. “That’s why the exorcism didn’t work earlier.” The walls didn’t muffle the sidhe very well, so he couldn’t hear himself speak and wasn’t sure if Elise heard him, either.
She ducked into the stall, grabbed clean toilet paper, twisted it into plugs. “Take this,” she mouthed at him. She crammed the toilet paper into James’s ear canals.
Now he was even deafer. But the pain from the spirit’s cries alleviated fractionally, which was an improvement compared to the bleeding he’d experienced earlier.
He flipped to the page on the beansidhe and showed it to Elise as she fashioned earplugs for herself.
She poked a finger at the page. “Go find rowan. I’ll distract her.” When she spoke, he noticed that her breath smelled strongly of beer.
“Rowan?” He wasn’t certain he’d read Elise’s lips properly. He turned the book to read it. Indeed, the text said that
all subspecies of the sidhe were vulnerable to rowan. James had seen some trees on the property, but he wasn’t sure if they were the right kind. If that land had been housing a sidhe for centuries, then probably not.
Elise turned to leave, but the sidhe materialized in front of the door before she could open it. She phased into the bathroom just as effortlessly as she had into the dungeons that morning.
James shouted a warning at Elise.
The sidhe shouted back.
Waves of force slammed into them. Elise was knocked off her feet, striking James hard enough that they both crashed into the wall of the stall. It was an old, rickety installation, poorly anchored in the ancient stone walls, and it broke underneath their weight. James’s elbow slipped into the toilet. The chilly water soaking through his sleeve was only fractionally less horrifying than walking through a blood puddle.
His kopis was on her feet again in an instant, snapping a high kick at the sidhe. Her foot went right through the creature’s face.
I won’t let you touch me again, hissed the sidhe. She could talk and scream at the same time. Impressive. And painful. The toilet paper earplugs were pathetic against the volume of her wailing.
James flipped through the bestiary as Elise ducked around the sidhe, moving the fight back into the foyer. Elise was doing a great job of distracting the sidhe, dodging every one of her attacks with the kind of reflexes only a kopis possessed. But they wouldn’t be able to kill her until James figured out how.
Unfortunately, the section on the beansidhe only said that they were vulnerable to rowan.
There had to be something else. James didn’t have time to go outside, figure out what the hell a rowan looked like, and fashion a weapon out of its branches.
He walked out of the bathroom as he continued flipping through the pages—and nearly walked right into flames.
James leaped away from the fire with a cry. “Good Lord!”
His magicked fire had spread, though not of its own volition. Elise was wielding a half-burned tapestry, swinging it at the sidhe and flinging embers everywhere in the process.