Staying Dead

by Laura Anne Gilman

  She came out of the kitchen, having turned on all of the appliances. “Okay. Now or never.” She took the sling off and handed it to him. “Don’t bitch. It was only a scratch, really, and I may need to use both arms for…something.”

  He looked at her, then nodded, taking the fabric from her. “Be careful, Zhenechka. This isn’t worth dying over.”

  “Not a hell of a lot is,” she said in easy agreement. “Hold the fort.”

  He touched the side of her face with two fingers, looking down into her eyes as though searching for some sign, some indication of uncertainty. A brush of his lips—dry, soft—on her forehead, and she almost cried at the promise implicit in that touch. “Mind the arrows,” he replied in turn, and stepped back.

  Drawing a deep breath, Wren closed her eyes, found her center, and visualized the Frants building, tying that picture to a sense of where she wanted to go, so she didn’t end up in the elevator shaft, or something equally unpleasant. Then she reached out in a way she had never been able to explain to Sergei’s satisfaction, and yanked all the threads of electricity being funneled into her apartment.

  To Sergei’s eyes, Wren appeared to glow for an instant, an electric blue streak sizzling around her like a silhouette, then there was a painful “zzzsssst” sound, and everything in the apartment shorted out at once.

  By the time he had found the flashlight she kept by the door and turned it on, Wren was gone.

  twenty

  She landed in darkness, the static charge still zipping along her skin. For a moment she was disoriented, fighting down the urge to puke that came with translocation, then the crash of something obviously breakable nearby reminded her where she was—and why. The darkness wasn’t just because she had her eyes closed—none of the lights were on. She reached out, crawling forward until she found the wall, then searched until she found a switch and flipped it. Nothing happened.

  “Damn,” she whispered to herself. The power must have shorted out here as well. Not surprising, if the ghost was—likely, if not certain—tapping into the current to give itself more form, more power. Not surprising, but inconvenient as hell. For a moment, Wren wondered if they were going to have yet another citywide blackout as fallout from this. If so, she was never going to hear the end of it.

  Pulling whatever current was left in the quiescent wiring into her against the probably inevitable need to come, she moved forward, keeping her injured arm to the wall, just in case. There were no windows; faintly glowing emergency lights picked out darker shadows, indicating where furniture was placed. She was in a reception area, just behind the heavy desk that greeted visitors as they came out of the elevator.

  “Pick a direction, any direction,” she told herself, trying to remember where the sound of breaking glass had come from. A man’s guttural bellow echoed from down the hallway. “Okay, pick that direction.” Staying against the rough-papered wall, she moved down the hallway, flinching when her shoulder came into contact with the corners of framed pictures. Bruises were going to be the least of her concerns when this was all over, but it bothered her no end that she couldn’t add a medical rider to her contracts to cover hospital bills. Or at least a nice long visit to Jay, the masseur who worked down the block but was too expensive to indulge in.

  Focus, you idiot.

  There was light coming out from under the double doors at the end of the hallway. Not steady, clean light from overhead fixtures, or even the flickering glow of sunlight through office windows. This light was colored, like an aurora borealis, shifting blue to red to green to yellow without any particular pattern. And every now and then, an angry spark of metallic silver sizzled through, burning a jagged line in the carpet and leaving the smell of burned fibers and ozone hanging in the air.

  Guess I’ve found my ghost. Or one really, really pissed, heavily charged mage. She pondered a moment about which would be worse, forcing herself to move closer to the door against every instinct which told her to turn tail and run.

  The door handle was cool, causing her to jump a little. She didn’t know why she had been braced for it to be hot, but apparently she had. Closing her hand around it more firmly, she turned, and pushed the door open.

  To her surprise, it swung freely, causing her to stumble a little over the threshold. And there she stopped, caught in the scene that met her eyes.

  This had once been a beautiful office, filled with heavy wood desks and upholstered chairs, and decorated with high-ticket artwork. All the furniture was crashed against the far wall now, the frames and canvasses of the artwork shattered against it like so much storm wrack. The plush carpeting was zigzagged with burn marks, and the air was filled with acrid smoke and the smell of charred wires. A step farther into the room, and all that was wiped out under the load of another unmistakable odor—burnt flesh. A figure lay sprawled facedown on the carpeting, the blue blazer jacket identifying him as building security. God, she thought. Not Rafe. Please… One arm was outstretched, as though trying to grab at whatever had fried him. The skin was bubbled and crisped until you couldn’t tell if the person had been white or black or Asian. Another leg lay half under a chair…unattached to a body. Three legs, total. And another arm, heavily muscled, flung over a desk, blood pooling where it lay. Body part…the bodyguards Sergei had mentioned? Wren felt something gag at the back of her throat, and fought to keep it down. Throwing up wouldn’t help anyone, and now was not the time to have screaming hysterics. Later. Assuming she was still around to enjoy them.

  The swirl of building energy brought her attention up, off the body, to the others remaining in the room.

  “Oh, shit.” She thought she whispered it. It might have been a whimper, though.

  An older man she assumed was Frants was backed up against the wall, his nose bleeding and probably broken. His white dress shirt was shredded, as though something with claws had raked across the front, and there was blood dripping down one arm as well. A woman huddled at his feet as though she had been tossed there and then forgotten. Her hair was wildly disheveled, covering her face, but her body was perfectly still, like a mouse hiding from a hawk. Neither had so much as glanced at her when she came in, and Wren couldn’t blame them.

  The apparition she had encountered at the mark’s house had been mostly ephemeral, more energy than substance, and it had scared the piss out of her. The figure in front of her was very much solid, with color and texture, from the mud caking its—his—pants leg, to the faint shadow of stubble on his chin and cheek. Disturbing enough, that it had somehow managed to anchor itself that well in the living world, but what was even more frightening to Wren was the low-level aura which flickered and snapped around him. That was the source of the strange light—and the probable cause of the dead man’s imitation of a bucket of KFC.

  The dead guy might not have been a mage, but he’d obviously been floating in the current long enough to pick up a few tricks. Interesting. If she lived long enough to follow up on it. Right now, it was just another thing on a very long list of things that were pissing her off about this case.

  The ghost looked directly at her, and she sucked in a breath of shock and fear. Nothing sane lived in those eyes, if anything lived at all. His pupils were wide and fixed, and within them flickered the agony of a human system overwhelmed by magic.

  Wizzed. He’s wizzed. I never knew a Null could wiz…never knew anything dead could wiz…I’m dead. So very, very dead. Almost without her willing it, she grounded herself deep into the steel and concrete of the building, reaching for the bedrock deep beneath, praying that her ability would go that far. Praying desperately that her training would be enough to hold against whatever undead skills this thing had brought back with it. And why the hell didn’t anyone ever write down anything about ghosts interacting with current, she railed to Sergei in her mind. I may not go by the book but damn it, there’s supposed to be a book!

  To her astonishment, however, the ghost turned away from her, rubbing one hand against his muddy pants leg as th
ough trying to brush it off. He had dismissed her, somehow, and even though it was what she had wanted, the thought of it made her illogically angry.

  Don’t let him finish whatever he’s started.

  “Hey!”

  The ghost turned again, and his face moved, almost as though he were trying to say something. It might’ve been a good-looking face, once, before the death blow turned half of it into tapioca. The jaw didn’t seem to be working, and the ghost-thing gave up finally, returning its attention to the other humans in the room.

  No, Wren realized. Not both. Just one.

  “That’s it. That’s why you’re here. Duh!” God, her brain must have gone on vacation the minute she took this job. It wasn’t about haunting, not the way they’d been thinking, anyway.

  Fuck. Like lightning into her system it all made sense. Revenge. Damn it, they should have figured on the whole revenge angle…or they had, but they were thinking about the human, living side of it. Not the one who was most wronged. Legally? None of this holds up legally. But I don’t think the ghost, for one, much cares. Her own words, just that day.

  The ghost wanted revenge on those who stuck him there—and failing the mage who was long dead and gone, where else but on the man who bore the name of the building he was trapped in? Okay, so it wasn’t the guy who had built it in the first place, but that’s why they did that whole thing about the sins of the father, yadda yadda yadda. Revenge…

  Yeah, she had been right, she’d swear to it—the Council had set it all up from the very beginning. Frants challenged them, dissed them, and so they decided to take him down. They’d tipped Prevost—probably others, but Prevost took the bait—about there being an Artifact practically unguarded and for the taking. Then, when Frants yelled, they refused to get involved, probably told him he was on his own, so he’d hire an expendable lonejack to get it back…. Expecting—hell, knowing that the stress of translocation would be enough to crack the seal of the spell. And then when she not only survived but stayed on the job, they had tried to take her out so the ghost would remain free. Free to take his revenge on his killer—or close as made no difference—and get rid of a troublesome former client at the same time. And a troublesome lonejack, too, once their sniper missed. The proverbial two birds, and someone else’s stone, so their hands, to all the Cosa, remained clean.

  Only who was to say what the ghost would do once they—she and Frants—were gone? Had the Council thought that far ahead? About what it might do if it figured out that a Council mage had been the one to cast the spell in the first place? The Council might have purged that mage’s name from their ranks, but the knowledge of it happening survived; that was the thing about memory dumps, someone had to remember it had been done, and why. So there was still a trail to the Council.

  But while she was congratulating herself on being so clever, if a little late, the ghost had gathered power in again. To Wren, safely grounded, it felt as though a stiff breeze had started from within the office. The dark-haired woman, however, was thrown against the wall behind them, slamming hard and crumpling without ever moving to defend herself. Frants, on the other hand, grabbed on to what was left of a desk and refused to budge.

  The ghost raised one arm, fist clenched, and gestured at Frants, who snarled back at him in defiance. Another window shattered, clearing a man-sized hole, and Wren reacted before she could think about it.

  “No!” she screamed, pushing her unwilling body directly at the ghost. She half-expected to impact something, but instead went into a forward roll right through him. It was like flying through severe turbulence, jolting her physically and sending her adrenaline levels skyrocketing even faster. She landed and turned almost in one motion, only then discovering that her action had put her directly between the ghost and his intended prey.

  “Oh shit,” she said again.

  “Hold it still!” Frants ordered, his bravado quickly dissolving back into the arrogance of a man who was raised to give orders. Client or no, this guy was really begging to get hurt. Unfortunately, dead client meant no payments at all. Sergei would be pissed.

  Trying to remember anything she had ever learned about deflecting hostile current, or anything else that might save her ass, Wren had the sudden visual of Sergei trying to explain some weird-shit sculpture thing. What was he saying?

  The artist meant it to show how we all take from those around us, every moment of the day. All humanity is one life form, broken up into smaller mobile parts.

  All one form. All one energy. All current comes from the same source….

  And the ghost hadn’t been substantial long, his current might still react to the spell she had cast to track it.

  “Bone within casing

  Bone long removed from its skin

  In sympathy, connect!”

  Even without the talisman in her possession, the spell worked well enough that she could slowly siphon off some of the ghost’s stolen energy, using the connection between her current and the spell, and the spell and his current. It was hard, damned hard, but she could feel it working. More current flowed, and her gut felt warm and tight, as though she’d just consumed a particularly rich meal. She was going to pay for this overload tomorrow, assuming she didn’t get killed first. There was only so much a human body could contain before it burst, and she was dangerously close to that now. But it was the only safe place to put the energy: shielded, he wouldn’t be able to get to her to retrieve it.

  At least, that was the theory.

  The ghost faltered then, eyes narrowing, tried to pull back the current. It was the weirdest tug-of-war she’d ever been involved in, nothing like the lessons Neezer had put her through—

  “Energy without will is just energy. Power you can’t use isn’t power at all. Now, can you feel the current when I do this?”

  She had yelped as the static charge passed from his fingers to hers, a thousand times worse than anything she had felt before. “That hurt!” she had cried out, indignant.

  John had shaken his head. “Of course it did, Jenny-wren. It doesn’t like being mastered. It will fight you every chance it gets. But you can’t use it until it bows to your will. You must control it, channel it. Otherwise it’s useless, and you’re powerless. Now do it again. And concentrate this time!”

  Concentrate. Control. She exhaled, inhaled, letting the energy she had taken in sink lower, until her legs felt like lead weights, like part of the steel of the building. A mantra, taking her back to those early days of basic channeling…“As I will it, so let it be. As I see it, so let it be. As I channel it, so let it be.”

  The chant soothed her, twined the power with her own signature until her body hairs stood on end, and her spine tensed and arched from the pressure building within.

  “Now, let’s discuss this properly—” she started to say to the ghost when a sharp suction of energy from behind her pulled Wren off balance. She whirled to face Frants, completely forgetting the ghost for a dangerous instant. “What the hell are you doing?” she demanded, feeling her grounding shudder under the two-pronged assault. He ignored her, forcing his lips to form words that didn’t want to come through his throat. Wren grabbed at him, latching on to his shoulders and shaking him until he lost his last threads of concentration and fell silent.

  “What the hell are you doing?” she yelled at him again.

  “Damned spell won’t work without the sacrifice. That’s what I’ve been doing wrong; they don’t want blood, they want everything.” He shook free of her grip and reached down behind him to haul the woman to her feet, obviously intending to pick the spell up from where he had left off. The woman’s eyes were aware and terrified, but she seemed unable to help herself.

  “Blood to blood, bone to bone!

  Soul to soul, spell contain!

  Take this gifting, double hold—”

  Bastard, Wren thought, realization dawning as she tried to make sense out of what he was saying. He was trying to force the ghost’s energy into the woman’s bo
dy. But how? A spell was only a recipe—the magic had to be done by someone with Talent. He would have to be letting someone else channel Talent through him while he said the words. Stolen Talent. Some of the bodies…they must not have been complete Nulls. It wasn’t the ghost—the bastard killed them and stole what little current they maintained!

  Wren howled in conjunction with the ghost’s scream. It was an abomination, a travesty of everything she had been taught, to rip current that way from unwilling innocents. And in order to actually recreate the spell that way, he’d have to—

  “Bastard!” She screamed at him, the ghost completely forgotten at this point. In order to recreate the spell, he would have to use the same elements. Suddenly the woman’s presence made sense: he would kill the woman as well, releasing not one but two souls into the magic. Repeating the sins of the father—grandfather—and adding a half-dozen more to the mix.

  Screw you, Frants. And screw the paycheck you rode in on. All her concentration narrowed to the man in front of her. The woman sagged in his arms, nobody at all home in her eyes. And it wasn’t likely she was a willing participant, not the way she was hanging there like a broken Barbie Executive Dress-Up doll. Wren dropped the threads of current binding the ghost, and cast them toward Frants. If the ghost wanted to take revenge, goody for him. She was getting Barbie Doll the hell out of there. She balled that thought up into a tight little wad, and shoved it with all her slight empathic talent into the ghost’s aura. Either he’d get it, or he wouldn’t. She couldn’t worry about it anymore.