by Karen Chance
A floor with boots. And mud. And men walking over me as if I weren’t there, which made sense. Only, if I wasn’t there, why were they avoiding me? Why weren’t they stepping through me, like they’d done before? And why was one kicking me—
And yelling: “Get this bastard out of the way!”
I didn’t see the speaker, but a second later, someone was dragging my legs to the side and cursing. And then kicking me again, when he dropped me with a thud. But it didn’t hurt. It didn’t hurt.
Of course it didn’t; you’re a spirit, some still slightly rational part of my mind said.
But if I was a spirit, how had he been able to move me?
And why was my hand all bloody?
My eyes had adjusted slightly, allowing me to see it better. Or, rather, to stare at it, because it wasn’t my hand. It was too big, too tan, too covered in clumps of dark hair on the knuckles when I didn’t have any there at all.
I stared at it some more. And then at the arm connected to it. And then at the hole in the torso next to the arm, which was big and jagged and went all the way through, bisecting red meat and blackened ribs and—
And it looked like someone had thrown a fiery basketball through me.
No, I realized. Not a basketball. A spell.
And not through me.
Through the body—the very dead body—I was currently inhabiting.
For a moment, I didn’t believe it. I watched the hand move and flex under my command, and I still didn’t. I kept listening for a heartbeat I didn’t have, for breaths I wasn’t taking, for all the signs of a living body that weren’t there because I hadn’t ended up in one of those; no, no, I’d ended up inside a corpse.
So why was it moving?
Because it was. Slowly, sluggishly, my unshaven cheek scraping across the rough wooden boards of the sidewalk next to me, which should have hurt except dead, I was dead, so I couldn’t be moving because it takes blood pressure for that, right? And . . . and air and . . . things. I didn’t know much about magic, but I knew that, I knew that. The only creatures who could move around without those kinds of things were ghosts and vamps and—
Zombies.
I stared at the hand, and okay, yeah, it was looking a little zombiefied right now. Bloodless and dirty and blood-speckled, and if I saw that in a movie, I’d be like, yep, zombie. But it wasn’t in a movie, or on TV. It was at the end of my arm, and I was in a body, somebody else’s dead, disgusting, still slightly sizzling body and—
“Augghh!”
And, okay, I was definitely moving now.
“Augghh! Augghh!”
And people were noticing, and turning, and looking a little freaked out, maybe because I was screaming and thrashing around, or maybe because of the big hole in my chest, or maybe because of the gun in my other hand.
Because there was one.
A big one.
And the leader was right in front of me, his barrel just off the edge of the sidewalk I was spazzing out on, and he was turning along with everyone else within earshot, eyes widening, mouth opening, probably to tell someone to shoot the freaking zombie already—
But too late.
I was already dead.
And the next second, so was he, because he hadn’t bothered with shields this far behind the lines. He fell off the barrel, blasted backward from the force of double barrels to the chest at almost point-blank range, and landed in the middle of the street, still twitching. I looked at him, everybody else looked at him, and then everybody looked at me.
And then I was staggering backward, riddled by bullets and spells and—
And zooming up out of the now useless body, scanning the crowd.
For my next one.
Because, okay, yes. This was a thing that was happening. Thanks to dear old Dad, who I knew less than nothing about because what I did know didn’t make sense. But one thing almost everyone agreed on was that, before he hooked up with a goddess on the run, he’d been a necromancer—and a powerful one. And a weird one, because he hadn’t dealt with bodies—he’d dealt with ghosts.
It was why, I strongly suspected, I’d been a ghost magnet all my life. I walked down the street, and ghosts came over to say hi and to tell me their life story—whether I wanted to hear it or not. I picked up a necklace in a junk shop and out popped a nineteenth-century cowboy. I went anywhere, did anything, and if there was a ghost around, it would probably come running.
Which was why the whole shifting-outside-your-body part of the Pythia job hadn’t weirded me out too much. I’d dealt with ghosts all my life; being one had almost felt familiar. Zombies, on the other hand . . .
Zombies were new.
The closest I’d come was possessing a golem—one of the clay creatures rabbis used to make and war mages still did—only that hadn’t gone so well. It almost hadn’t gone at all until I discovered that Billy Joe’s necklace, which contained a central stone that served as a talisman, also worked as a control gem for the golems. Shoved into their clay exterior, it had allowed me to ride an empty one around like it was a car—a huge, clay, robotlike car—and do some damage. But there had been a definite learning curve.
There wasn’t one here.
Because unlike giant clay people, human bodies were designed to hold a soul. That wasn’t a weird state for them—it was the default, and the trick necromancers used to control them. They placed a small amount of their soul in a dead body, using it like the control gem for the golems. To allow their magic to animate it.
And it looked like a whole soul worked even better. Now I just needed a body. And, thanks to the rampage from the hound from hell, there were plenty to choose from.
Of course, also thanks to the hound, they weren’t all in great shape, or even in one piece, but beggars can’t be choosers. Beggars have to take what they can get, even if that means taking a severed torso, which was nonetheless still clutching a machine gun. A machine gun that was soon spraying bullets in all directions, although not hitting all that much, since this body lacked serious motor control.
But it did the trick.
A bunch of dark mages had been headed this way, already looking panicked for some reason, a fact that was not helped by meeting a hail of bullets. The ones in front turned on the rest of the stampede, causing a tangled knot that had several so flustered they started attacking each other in an attempt to get away. And then running over me, trampling my bloody torso into the floor.
But hey, more where that came from, I thought, feeling a little giddy as I rose into the air again. Or a little crazed, because the next dead guy was laughing his head off as he sprayed bullets and threw potion bombs at his former buddies. And then kept it up even while getting stabbed by one guy who had shielded in time, with a vicious upward stroke that broke a few ribs before it bisected the heart—
And didn’t hurt at all.
Because Dead, motherfucker, I thought, still laughing helplessly as I searched around on my new body’s potion belt for something that would eat through a war mage’s shields. He kept stabbing and stabbing, and cursing and cursing, and I kept walking and walking, because he was falling back and I didn’t want to lose him.
And then I came up with something, a bilious green slime I’d seen on Pritkin’s potion rack once, but hadn’t known what it did.
I found out what it did.
The mage went up in green, phosphorescent-like flames, and then lost it as his shields buckled and failed. And then ran off through a thick section of mages, setting some of them on fire, too. And this time, there was no leader to re-form them into a controlled unit. They panicked and ran at another group, who started shooting at them to keep them away from their shields. For a moment, I had the satisfaction of watching two groups of dark mages try their best to kill each other, before I rose back out of my latest, all but minced, body.
And felt the
room spin around me.
Chapter Eleven
I didn’t know that you could stagger as a ghost, but I did it. I looked down at my torso, confused and fuzzy-brained, and realized that I could barely see it. A few minutes ago, my spirit had been reassuringly solid, almost bodylike except for the whole flying-around-the-room thing. Now it was virtually transparent, like Billy Joe’s when he badly needed an energy draw.
Because spirits don’t make their own energy, do they? Only bodies do that. Living bodies, which I hadn’t been in. It was why even regular ghosts needed a talisman like Billy’s to feed them power, or a donor like me to give it to them, or a graveyard to haunt to pick up the scraps of living energy that human visitors shed.
Because, otherwise, they would fade away to nothing when they ran out of power.
Like I was about to do.
I stared around, trying to come up with some options, but I couldn’t see past the crowd. So I pushed off from the floor—easier this time, too easy, like I weighed about the same as a wisp of smoke. And quickly realized the truth.
I hadn’t affected the fight much at all.
It was more disorganized now, with the leader gone, but something else was gone, too. The last gleaming strands of the great ward had dissolved, leaving Augustine’s cobbled-together shield as the only barrier our side had. Which looked like it was going to last all of another second.
No, I thought blankly.
No!
But there was no denying it. After everything we’d done, after holding out for so long, after putting up a defense that nobody could possibly have expected, it didn’t matter. It wasn’t going to be enough.
“Cass! Cass!” I jerked my head down, to see Billy’s bright red shirt dodging through the sea of black.
“Up here!” I yelled, although it sounded more like a whisper. But Billy heard. And a second later, he was in my face.
“What are you—” he began, then got a good look at me and stopped. “Cass—you’ve got to get back to your body!”
“In a minute. I’m trying to—”
“You don’t have a minute! And neither do they.” He gestured at the shop, which had so many mages in front of it now that I almost couldn’t see it anymore. “Everyone in there is about to get killed—and your body along with them!”
“Why haven’t they left?” I asked, trying to clear my fuzzy brain. “I thought everyone was going to—”
“They tried. But Augustine—damn his eyes—was so worried about theft that he boxed himself in! There’s nowhere to go.”
“What do you mean, nowhere? There’s plenty of—”
But Billy was shaking his head. “A slab of support for the parking garage is directly below him, and we don’t have the firepower to blast through it. And even if we did, it’s load-bearing!”
“Behind him, then—”
“Cass, the casino’s main vault is behind him. It’s solid and it’s spelled. Nobody’s getting through that thing! And moving side to side won’t help when the other shops aren’t in any better shape, and most don’t even have shields! You’ve got to shift them out—”
“If I could shift, do you think I’d be here?” I asked, wishing I could think. But fatigue or panic or God knew what was clouding my head, making it impossible to do anything but stare at the battle. And at the shield, which was taking a hell of a beating.
I felt like that, too, like I could feel every blast myself. And if Billy was right, I was about to. But I didn’t have anything left. I didn’t have anything left.
“Cass, listen to me,” Billy said, his voice tight. “The Graeae are supporting the shield, feeding it power, but they’re looking pretty damn tired. And without them, it’ll stand up to maybe a second of that kind of barrage. If you’re gonna do something, it has to be now.”
And yeah, it did, I thought, blood I didn’t have pounding in my ears. Or maybe that was the spells, thud, thud, thudding against the shield, like the hands of that damn clock in London. Ticking down the seconds we had left.
London, I thought, as some thought scurried through my head, too fast for me to catch.
“Cass? I know this isn’t what you want to hear, but there is a way out.”
I looked up, to meet Billy’s worried hazel eyes.
“I’m going to help you, okay?”
“How? How can you help us?”
“Not us. You. Look, I took a draw before I left. You couldn’t really afford it, but I needed it to help you burn through one of these guys’ shields—”
“What?”
“—and once I get him, once we’re in charge, we’re gonna push our way to the front of the line when they take the shop—”
“What? Billy, what are you—”
“Listen to me, okay? You and me, we’re gonna get your body out of there. I’m not in it right now, so it looks like you’re already dead. We say we want the corpse for a souvenir or—or that we got orders to take it to one of their leaders, or—”
“No!”
“—or something, anything, to get you out of this building—”
“I’m not leaving them!”
“Then you’re gonna die with them!” He grabbed me. “Look at yourself! It’s gonna be touch-and-go to see that you don’t fade as it is! And there’s nothing else I can do for you, okay? This isn’t London—”
“London?”
“—there’s no more tricks up my sleeve! We’ve got to move, and move now—”
“What about London?”
“Cassie—”
“Billy! What about London?”
“Damn it!” He stared at me, exasperated. “I just meant that you’ve won against some crazy odds, like when we were at Agnes’ old court a couple days ago. I thought we were goners, but I took out those two mages, and then you pulled that stunt with the golem—”
“Golem.” I stared at him.
“—but that won’t help us now. Even if you possessed one, it’s one guy—”
He cut off, probably because I was shaking him. “Have you seen one? Billy—do they have one here?”
“They got three, but what difference does it make? I told you— Oh, shit!”
That last was in response to my zooming off, up near the top of the ceiling. And desperately scanning the crowd. And spotting not one, not two, but three of the creatures, just like Billy had said, their bright orange clay standing out even in the gloom.
And even better, they were all together, clustered over in a clump at the edge of the fighting, along with their owners.
I tore off after them, with Billy on my heels.
A second later, I was hovering in front of a seven-foot colossus. Who should be able to see me, because it was a spirit, too. One of the incorporeal types of demons Rosier had talked about, who had been tricked and trapped by a mage.
And it looked like I was right. Because I’d no sooner landed than the huge head tilted slightly, and the clay eyes seemed to focus on mine. I swallowed, really hoping I was right on this.
“Billy,” I said quietly, “possess a mage.”
“Which one?”
“Any one.”
“About time! I didn’t think you were gonna come to your senses!”
He moved off and I looked up at the golem.
“Hello,” I said nervously, and smiled. I don’t know why.
It didn’t smile back.
Of course, I wasn’t sure it could; I’d never actually seen one of those faces move.
“Uh, look. I . . . kind of have a problem here,” I said, trying not to sound as desperate as I felt. “And I was wondering—you’re a demon, right? A powerful one? I was told that’s the only kind the mages bother to, uh, to trap in one of these things, and—”
It just looked at me.
But it hadn’t looked away, so I floundered on.
Nothing. Not even a nod. I started wondering if it spoke English.
“Look, if I release you, will you help me?” I asked in a rush. “These people, they’re in trouble because of me, but I—I can’t help them right now, and—” And that had probably been a mistake, too, because demons admire strength, and I’d just admitted that I didn’t have any. But I thought that was pretty obvious anyway, and . . . and what had I been saying?
I stared at him, desperate and despairing, and tried to think up an argument that might work. But whatever connection I had to my brain wasn’t functioning too well, or maybe it was my brain that wasn’t. Because my body currently had no soul in residence, so it was in a state we call dying, and—
And—
And—
“Cass!” A stranger’s voice shocked me enough that I jumped and whirled. And saw a dark mage standing behind me, grinning. “Got one!”
It took me a second, but the smile was the same.
Billy, I thought. Gun, I thought, because he had one in his hand. “Shoot,” I said, because that one idea was still clear, clear like crystal.
Billy frowned. “Shoot what?”
“Him!” I pulled back out of the way, pointing not at the golem, but at the guy standing next to it.
“That guy?” Billy said.
“Yes!”
“That guy right there?” he repeated, now pointing with his gun—
In the face of a startled mage, who nonetheless got a hand on his weapon—
“Yes! Shoot him. Shoot him!”
And Billy did.
The blast echoed in my ears, the mage fell over, a look of surprise still on his features, and the man next to him shot Billy—or, rather, Billy’s purloined body.
“Well, shit,” Billy said, looking down at his chest.