Iona gasped loud enough that I swung my head around to check on her. A panic-stricken bald man wearing years of pub visits around his gut steamed toward her. He’d already knocked the two chairs in front of her aside in his bid to pass slower pedestrians, and he clearly intended to mow through her now, since she blocked his path to safety.
“Get out of my way, you!” he snarled.
I moved to deal with him, but stopped when I realized Rhona had pulled a snub-nose .38 out of her bag. She clutched it in both hands, which shook just enough that I feared she’d shoot the guy accidentally before she could even start with her demands.
“You leave my employee alone!” she screamed, her voice high and wild.
As the guy tried desperately to shift into reverse, Vayl spoke in his gentlest, most convincing tone of voice. “Rhona, put down the gun.”
She jerked the barrel on a track meant to land on him, yelling, “You men are all alike! Shouting orders! Making demands! Raping innocent young girls! You should all be shot!” Time slowed, as it always does when you realize a deadly weapon is about to swing past you and the person wielding it is out of her gourd.
I started to raise my hands, to say something harmless, but those jittery fingers of Rhona’s whoopsed into the trigger before the .38 had quite made it to Vayl. I dove to the floor, but even with the increased speed my donation to Trayton had given me, I couldn’t outquick a bullet. I felt it hit my arm and knew immediately the wound was minor. The impact hadn’t even made my shoulder twitch, though I could see blood welling through the hole in my jacket. Goddammit, that was expensive!
Rhona screamed again, dropping the gun, which thundered out another shot. Thank God it had twirled to face the opposite direction or I’d have been one dead Jaz. Iona moved quickly toward Rhona, holding up her hands, talking so softly I couldn’t understand what she was saying. She’s like a Horse Whisperer, I thought. Only for nutty old mums. Iona Clough, the Mum Whisperer.
At the same time Cole let out a surprised whoop. The guy who’d spooked Rhona had tried sidestepping to get beyond her, but his bulk wouldn’t allow a clean pass. He’d banged into Cole on the way out, who’d fallen into Iona, who did a domino and knocked Rhona off her chair. Though the Mum Whisperer tried to catch Rhona even as Cole reached out to cushion the ladies’ fall, they all crashed to the floor like an amateur circus act gone terribly wrong, pulling chairs with them while bags and bobby pins went flying in every direction.
When Cole sat up Vayl growled, “Dammit, boy, now you have done it! Your forehead is bleeding!”
Cole touched the cut with his fingertips, winced as he realized the truth. But the pain of his injury wasn’t enough to wipe out his indignation. “What the hell, Jeremy? Aren’t you supposed to be a little more concerned about the welfare of your employees? Not to mention the nice ladies here?”
Vayl began hauling people upright, starting with me. “Too much blood in one place is going to attract the ghosts,” he said. “We must go!”
“My dears, are you all right?” asked Floraidh. As she helped Rhona up, I glanced toward the front of the room. Vayl had predicted too well. The hippie and the soldier had blinked out of sight again. And the Highlander, along with Stumpy, were flying toward us like a couple of doomsday missiles.
I grabbed Rhona’s gun and stuck it in my jacket pocket as Vayl jerked Iona and Cole to their feet. Floraidh was hunting a tissue because blood streamed down Rhona’s cheek where she’d caught it on the edge of a chair back, but she looked so dazed she probably didn’t even realize she’d been injured. Iona shoved Rhona’s purse into her hands as I pushed them both toward the exit. Floraidh put her hands on their shoulders in a show of guidance and comfort. But they only took a few steps before stopping to look back. When their eyes went wider than my poker chips, I glanced behind as well.
We’d wasted our head start. The ghosts had arrived.
Chapter Seventeen
Though the tech guy had flipped on all of the lights in the great room, I had no trouble seeing our attackers. At this proximity, with the wall between our worlds crumbling as Rhona, Cole, and I bled and the ghosts moved toward the smell, I began to pick up their outlines. To catch glimpses of their hideous, grinning skulls. This is what would leap through to tear at our living skin. Not the pretty remnants Gerard and Francine had raised, but true-form ghosts. I’d been right about one aspect of their appearance though. They really were wearing torques, ancient necklaces favored by fierce warriors now long fallen to dust.
“Where’s Dormal?” I demanded as we struggled to get everyone into the aisle.
“Right behind me,” said Floraidh.
But she wasn’t. She’d gotten lost in the crowd, which had swelled in our section of the room as escapees bottlenecked at the main exit doors, forcing us and those around us back toward the main stage. Our path toward the door Vayl had used earlier looked even hairier. A bonfire’s worth of thrown chairs blocked our immediate escape, and it looked as if a heart attack victim had caused a backup closer to that exit. The door Humphrey had left through might’ve worked, if we hadn’t been forced to charge through a couple of rampaging shades on the way there. And Rhona couldn’t have pulled off that kind of move anyway. In fact, she kept spacing out, ambling forward with such a lack of concern and, more important, speed, that I began to suspect concussion.
“Come on,” Floraidh said, pulling at her just as the Highlander hit her. She screamed as the impact sliced into her already cut cheek.
Behind us I heard an enormous crash, almost like a bookcase falling, and someone yelled, “Snakes!”
Shit! It’s Bea! Of course, this is the perfect time to—
As I turned to look, I felt the blow, not unexpected, but still sharp and painful, as Stumpy opened an eight-inch gap along the length of my wounded arm. Cold! My mind shivered as what passed for his tongue darted out for a taste of the new blood that poured from the cut before the Raisers could rebuild the wall that bound him.
I wanted to run. God yes! Follow the example of my fellow me-firsters, shoulder these slow, struggling women aside and sprint toward the exit. Anything to keep that netherworlder from touching me again. Because in that moment I’d fully Seen.
Fear rested square on my head like a cage full of spiders, making me shiver as I came to my first realization. In the Thin everything is hungry. And I’d leapt in without weapons.
I stood, as ethereal as any ghost, hoping no one would notice yummy little me tucked away in the corner of a big, open room so dark I shouldn’t be able to tell it was a dungeon. But I knew.
The phantoms, glowing red with their own inner light, explained their Castle Hoppringhill absence by their presence here. Even now the RAF shade hadn’t jumped through the breach because the flower child was feasting on his entrails. I put my hands to my ears, certain his screams had made them bleed. But our worlds hadn’t experienced so much a collision as a near miss, so his howls couldn’t hurt me any more than he could die from the wounds her fangs inflicted.
I tried to blink. But my Spirit Eye doesn’t work like that. It’s either on or off. Lately—mostly on. Which was why I couldn’t look away when he strode in, the force of his personality placing color and form on what would otherwise be the thick inkiness of the Thin. The room he made consisted of rough-hewn stone. An arched doorway grew behind him, the brackets that flanked it containing not torches, but stacks of skulls whose eye sockets blazed with fire.
His boots thumped against the unfolding floor, hard and cold as his obsidian eyes as they caught mine. His dark, braided hair flew out behind his bare back as he moved, giving me a full view of his tattooed chest and arms. The barbed shards and looping whorls that painted his flexing muscles imprinted themselves on my brain. Remember this, I thought. It’s like the Phaistos Disk. Don’t forget. Because I knew, just watching that purposeful stride emphasized by rawhide breeches tied at the waist with a leather band, that anything carved into this man’s body wasn’t just decor. It meant somethin
g.
He glared down at the cannibalism taking place at his feet. Leaning over, he grabbed the gorging specter by the hair and yanked backward so hard I heard something snap.
You can do that here? Touch and twist? What the hell kind of rules apply in a place inhabited by the bodiless?
I’d thought what I was seeing was a version of hologram, the restless soul’s outpouring of its physical sense. Just like the visuals you get when a ghost materializes in the bedroom where it died. But the hippie girl screamed as her neck cracked. And the flyer, trying desperately to shove his intestines back into his stomach cavity, cried real tears. What the hell?
The tattooed man gave the girl a kick that sent her scurrying into a corner, her head listing so badly to one side that she had to support it with one hand. He stepped over the soldier, ignoring his whimpers as he moved toward me.
I swallowed. Well, I tried. My throat was too dry to allow more than one sad attempt. He raised one powerful arm and made a curt, come-to-me gesture.
I shook my head.
He stopped, slapped himself on the chest with both hands.
“Aw, for chrissake, I’m not your poodle,” I said. “I’m not even a—” I pointed to the soldier.
“No, you are unique. But what?” His brogue twisted his words hard enough that I didn’t understand him at first. His voice, so gruff I’d have sworn he’d spent the last decade lining his windpipe with nicotine if I wasn’t sure he’d been dead for millennia, gave me an involuntary shiver. I knew he’d commanded death with that growl. As he was trying to control me.
“I’m just a girl who Sees too much,” I said. “And now I gotta go.”
“No! Stay!”
“Seriously, guy, you’d better stop with the doggy demands. It really pisses me off.”
“Brude.”
“Huh?”
“My name is Brude.” Even his beard demanded a curtsy.
Ahh. As in King Brude. The guy Floraidh’s loeden threatened us with. “Well, King Brude, you ghosts are trespassing and it’s about to get really ugly. So I suggest you back off—”
“I am no ghost.” And that’s final, his tone pronounced, as if he’d just passed a law.
“Sure you are.” Dumbass. You’re in the freaking Thin!
“You dare to argue with the king?”
“Well, yeah. I mean, it’s pretty obvious you’re wrong. And if I don’t set you straight, I’m fairly sure nobody will. They’re all too busy chowing on innocent humans. Or”—I jerked my thumb at the flower child—“each other.”
He folded his arms across his chest. “You should be frightened. And you do not quake. You should kneel and beg for mercy, yet you stand. You are certainly wrong about who I am, but in the absence of other proof I see that you will defy me.” He nodded slowly. “You are the one I need.”
Oh, crap, I do not like the sound of that.
“What is your name?” Brude asked.
“I’m Lucille Robinson. Now, if you’ll excuse me, we’re in the middle of a crisis down there. And your damn ghosts are the cause of it.”
“So your witches share no blame?” He pointed over my shoulder. I looked, and through a gap in the wall I could see the Raisers, panting and sweating. It was like waking up to sunlight after a week of rain. I reached for them with every bit of extra oomph I’d gained since becoming a Sensitive and snapped myself back to real.
We’ve gotta get outta here! I wanted to grab the PA and boom my message across the room until people had managed to crash through the walls and the place was empty as a midnight crematorium. Except for the bloodthirsty phantoms, of course. But, as I recalled, someone had hollered snakes. And it was my job to make sure Bea didn’t succeed tonight. Of course, they could belong to somebody else. But the way our evening had turned, I truly doubted it.
With Iona and Cole’s help, Floraidh had finally gotten Rhona into the throng blocking the center aisle. But the blood rolled down her face, so she continued to suffer the threat of attack, her ripped clothing and scratched skin evidence of the damage that had already been inflicted. I looked over my shoulder. The gap between worlds had closed for now, leaving Brude in his dungeon where he belonged. Instead the face I wanted to see filled my vision. And though Vayl’s lips were pressed together so tightly the outline of his fangs showed through his skin, I smiled as he put his arm around my waist.
I said, “You won’t believe where I’ve just been.”
“Tell me later.” He pushed me forward as Stumpy came at me again, corporeal enough that we could see his black tongue dripping blood as he ran it across his long, pointed teeth. My entire skeleton tensed for another cut, a second ride into the Thin. But the ghost whipped past my left shoulder, the wind from the near miss making my ear ache.
I spun around. “Vayl? Do you—” For a second I couldn’t figure out what had happened to him. Under Bergman’s sunblock his face had taken on the marble quality of a tomb ornament. His fist clenched and I saw the droplets of blood splatter onto the floor. His shirt tore as Stumpy attacked, leaving a line of red from neck to navel. As Vayl’s eyes lost momentary focus, I realized. He’d bitten himself. Drawn the phantom’s attack with his own blood.
I grabbed him by the hips, as if I could pull him into a safer reality by sheer will. “No, you—”
“I can survive this,” he said between clenched teeth. Another slash, leaving Vayl’s left shoulder bare and bloody. “I will get them out. You find out what you can about the snakes. But do not endanger yourself.” He pulled me close, so no one could’ve heard him, not even from an arm’s length. “If we should fail this mission, so be it. Your life is of much greater value than Floraidh’s.”
“But Pete . . . the Oversight Committee . . . our jobs?”
His eyes burned into mine. “I will never let you down.”
I nodded curtly, tucking my emotions tightly into my heart as I watched him join Floraidh, Cole, and Iona. He offered Rhona his arm, which she took gratefully. His strength, coupled with his ability to make suggestions most humans found compelling, caused them to make actual progress down the aisle.
Following Rhona’s earlier example, I stood on the chair next to the one she’d downed, trying to get a sense of where the threat originated. I noted Dormal, stuck maybe twenty feet in front of Floraidh, craning her neck to see if she could find her leader in the crush. Behind Vayl’s group by another twenty feet, the experts had deserted the stage, managing to knock over the podium on their way out. But Gerard and Francine still worked to wrangle the ghosts into submission. Four of them had gathered around again, though they markedly avoided the aisle. It was almost like they were making way for the panicked escapees. But I knew that couldn’t be true.
I watched as the RAF boy reappeared at the far left edge of the stage, keeping his distance from the flower child. They’d both managed to repair the damage I’d seen on them before. And then, without any outward signal from the Raisers, the ghosts turned toward the right-hand speaker, all of them giving it a look of revulsion. A snake had slithered to its top edge, reached out with its neck and forked tongue, tasting the air.
“Snake on the stage. I can’t tell what it is,” I told the guys on my party line. “I’m going forward to look.”
“Be careful,” said Vayl.
“Are you okay?” I asked, then immediately wished I hadn’t. My backbone was going to buckle if I couldn’t learn to deal with Vayl in pain.
“The ghost has retreated. Something put it off the moment I moved into the aisle. Perhaps Francine and Gerard have convinced it to behave once more.”
“How about you, Cole?” I asked, mainly to cover up the massive relief I felt at Vayl’s news.
“I’ve lost Iona,” Cole said.
“Find her quick,” I told him. “We don’t want anybody snakebit.” And if you catch her trying to control this reptile, so much the better. This mission sucks and I wanna go home.
Staying off the floor whenever possible, I stepped from row to row, a
pproaching the stage at a diagonal. Francine hadn’t seen the snake, which held its place closest to her. It hesitated, as if undecided what to do next. But when forty of its fellows joined it, I realized what was happening.
“It’s going to be a mass assault,” I said. Now that I’d made it closer to the stage I added, “And they are Inland Taipans. Bea definitely has an affinity for snakes, but she’s not a Medusa.” Which is somewhat of a relief. But not much. Because she must be wielding some major wham to be able to transport and control that many wild, venomous creatures.
Vayl glanced back to the stage, took note of what I’d just described, and said a bad word into our receivers. He never swore. Unless, apparently, the danger was snake related. “Let us get moving, ladies,” he urged. I could see him shoving people aside now.
Dormal had stopped in her tracks, allowing traffic to flow around her like a highway median. The group had nearly reached her when Floraidh stumbled. She’d have fallen, and probably been stomped by the people behind her, if her Gatherer hadn’t caught her.
The snakes began to move, slithering down the speaker and across the stage like a living carpet. They didn’t spread out much or move in random directions. It was as if an unseen hand guided them resolutely in a single direction. Forward, down the edge of the platform, onto the event floor.
The Connies who’d seen them spread the hysteria quickly, so that everyone who hadn’t panicked to start with now began screaming and shoving, the people in the back literally crawling on top of those in front of them to avoid the reptiles at their heels.
The last of the crowd had made it halfway down the aisle now. But the snakes were advancing. When the Connies realized they couldn’t escape straight ahead, they voted for the side routes and began parting like the waters of the Red Sea.
My group had nearly made it to the door. The cushion between them and the Taipans had flattened alarmingly as the crowd scattered. And yet I could practically feel their freedom, like the cool hard steel of a cell key in my fingers. But they were never going to make it without help. And I had so little to offer.
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