Staying Dead

by Laura Anne Gilman

  He had woken up that morning, the world in his hands. Stopping by the pier mirror in the entranceway, he’d tipped his hat at a rakish level and grinned at his reflection, then adjusted it to a more sedate, respectable position. His coat just so, his hat just so, his world just so, he’d stepped out the door of his home…

  A voice, from out of nowhere. A woman’s voice. Kill him if you want. I will not let you have the girl. No more innocents.

  In the depth of his madness, the man who had once been heard the words as though the speaker were inside with him, safe in the eye of the electrical storm that surrounded him.

  “I don’t want to kill anyone,” he told the voice. “I just want to go home!” Home, with its polished wood furniture, and the white gauze his Sarah insisted on coating every window with. The heavy rugs, and the soft bed he so hated to get out of every morning…

  Sarah was gone. The house itself was gone. Everything was gone, save the building he had given his last days to. The building which had taken everything from him. And the man in front of him, his features, his name a direct inheritance from the man who had ordered this building created. Had ordered one life taken to protect his own miserable, worthless one.

  The tiny portion of what was left of Jamie Koogler went up the stairs of a long-gone townhouse, drew the curtains, and took his beautiful wife by the hand.

  And the ghost bared suddenly-sharp teeth at his victim. “See what granddaddy left you?” he asked, his voice horrible and stained with madness.

  Wren managed to grab Barbie Doll by the arm and drag her away from Frants. The ghost ignored them both, the current breaking around them harmlessly as they moved toward the door. The woman’s flesh was cold, almost as though she were dead, but the farther they got from Frants, the more vitality Wren could feel inside her.

  In the hallway, Wren propped her against the wall and knelt down so she could look into the woman’s eyes. Sure enough, there was still a bare spark of awareness there.

  “Stay here,” she told Barbie Doll. “You got that? Stay here, stay low, don’t move or blink or whimper or anything, no matter what, and you may just live through this. Okay?”

  A faint, jerking nod was all the answer she was going to get. Wren patted the woman’s head once, then got to her feet and stared at the door. A man’s scream, and the soft thump of flesh hitting something hard came through the open doorway.

  Oh damn it, damn it, damn it…

  She couldn’t do this.

  Charging back through the door, she pulled deep within, to the places Neezer had shown her back in the first days of their training. The cells that made up her body, the current which animated those cells. She reached deep and down and into herself, dragging everything out and shaping it into a ball, stretching it out until it was man-sized, and throwing even as she yelled “Stop!”

  twenty-one

  Agony! All there was in the universe was agony. Absolute, endless head-spinning pain that had no beginning, no end. All that existed, all that was, was agony.

  Empathy was another so-called magical ability that was more common in fantasy novels than among Talents, but the moment she passed through the doorway, Wren was on her knees with the overload of emotions. A second longer, and it sorted out into distinct threads: a wave of pain: sharp talons, digging into the flesh of his throat. Hot bile, burning his gut. Crashing tides of aching loneliness, a bowel-tightening yearning that could never, ever be soothed….

  Fight it, Valere! A stern voice commanded in her head. Sergei’s voice, his inflection, but her own brain. It took Wren precious seconds to realize that she was getting it from both sides of the combat, ghost and mortal. And a few more seconds to bring up enough of a barrier that she could only feel herself in her skin.

  Seconds that, if her blast of current hadn’t worked, could have stopped her from worrying about the job—or anything else, for that matter—forever.

  Raising her head slowly, fighting off the surge-headache that felt like a thousand hangovers, Wren blinked the tears away from her eyes and tried to see why she was still alive.

  The two figures hung in place, still held immobile by her blast of current. The ghost hovered over its victim, a recognizable human form zizzing and shorting with current, a hazy yellow-green tinting its unreal flesh. Frants had fallen in front of it, one arm up to shield his face, the other reaching behind him as though searching for a weapon. She saw the glint of dark metal against the carpet, and recognized the shape of a handgun, its steel more blue than shiny.

  Wren hated guns with a passion. You couldn’t outtalk them, you rarely could outrun them, and, as she now knew from experience, bullets hurt like a sonofabitch. A push of current, and the insides melted just enough to make it unusable.

  It was stupid waste of current, but she felt better immediately.

  Frants stirred slightly, as though he’d felt what she did, and she tightened the freeze-spell. It wouldn’t hold, was barely holding now, but for the moment she’d kept them from doing whatever it was they were going to do to each other.

  At least until she could figure out what the hell she was going to do next.

  The ghost turned to look at her, and she shuddered. You said I could have him.

  A hiss, even without sibilants. A low wind moaning through the trees. Everything of loss and pain and emotions, knotted so tight it could never be undone.

  I did. I was wrong. A private correspondence, instinctively. The ghost was as much current as anything else, held together by magic and sheer still-human stubbornness. Talking to it along the current was as easy as talking to herself.

  The ghost didn’t like her response, turning its red glare back to Frants. The mortal was on his knees, sweat pouring down his pasty-white skin. The ghost’s normal-looking human hands had grown talons, somehow, somewhen; sharp, black-tipped claws that rested one at Frants’s throat, the other on his face. Like the caress of a rabid tiger.

  I’ll have him anyway.

  And with a slashing movement too fast to follow, the ghost tore five terrible scores down half of Frants’ face. Shreds of skin clung to the claws, and Wren stared, fascinated, as the ghost raised one hand for another blow. Let him suffer as I have suffered….

  Don’t…

  She said it out loud as well, she thought. She might even have screamed it. “You’ll regret it,” she said rapidly, getting up off her knees and moving forward as carefully, as non-threateningly as she could. Out loud, to appeal to whatever might be left of his humanity. “You’re not like him. You never were. Not if you were a builder. You were a builder, weren’t you? You created this building. Imagined it. Dreamed it. Drew it.”

  She was playing a hunch, the one she and Sergei had shared that moment before all hell broke loose here. For the magic that tied him into the protection spell to work, disgraced, out-of-favor magic that depended not on the caster herself but on taking and making deals with greater forces, there had to be a connection on both sides.

  Frants’s grandfather, on one end, desiring protection at any cost. And the victim, with an equal desire to see the building defended, successful.

  A builder, maybe. A dreamer, certainly. The architect, most likely. Sergei had almost had it; if he’d only been given a moment longer to get into those files….

  At the thought of her partner, she felt the warmth tingle low at the back of her spine. He was on his way, she could feel him racing there on foot, a madman on the street.

  Not enough time, and he couldn’t do anything except be in danger too, but he was coming. She could count on him. He wouldn’t leave her alone. That knowledge made it a little easier to coax the current-charged monster in front of her. Affection. Appreciation. Love. The things that bound humans—living things—together.

  “You made this building be what it is.”

  I did…I did…for this one! The ghost started to turn its attention back from her to the sobbing, bleeding Frants. He did not deserve it.

  Wren didn’t have time or energy
to explain to a mad ghost that he was two generations too late. “No. Not for him. For them.” She risked a glance over her shoulder. At the poor guard, the dismembered bodies. And then further out, to where Barbie Doll stupidly huddled in the hallway, unable to move any farther away. “For everyone who uses this building. Do you know how many people work here every day? It’s a good building. A safe building, because of you.”

  All the things she had learned about the building from her basic research, came tumbling to her lips. The security systems. The wide, carefully lit stairs. The fail-safe air ventilation system. The care and upkeep that went into it, every single day, so many years after it was first sketched out on paper.

  I want…

  “I know,” she told him, real regret in her voice. She’d want the same thing, too. “I know.” She flicked a glance at Frants, cowering in an almost fetal ball on the carpet, and inspiration struck. “But there’s—maybe—another way to do it.”

  The ghost was listening to her now. So was Frants, uncurling enough to look at her, his eyes pleading underneath the streams of blood. Human eyes. But who was the victim? Who had the right to ask for justice?

  Tell me. Quickly.

  “Go back into the stone—”

  The ghost turned on her, sharp needle teeth gleaming as he raised a hand toward her. Never!

  She was dancing on cracking ice, her mind working faster than she thought possible, her skin tingling with the effort it took to keep them both still. “Go back for now. For a short time, a time you’ll barely notice.” She assumed. She hoped. “The length of a mortal lifetime.”

  And then? He thought he knew where she was going with this, she could tell by the way his ruined lips were beginning to smile. It was terrible, and she repressed a shudder.

  “And then he’ll take your place.”

  Frants yelped a protest, and they both turned to stare at him.

  “He’ll take your place—” an unspoken threat to Frants, to shut up and let this play out “—and you’ll be free.”

  You can do this?

  “When the time comes, it will be done.” If she had to get every damn lonejack to hold the bastard down while she brought the knife down on him herself, it would be done. And the Council could just sit and spin. They had set her up to hide the fact that a member of their damned coterie used blood-magics in place of current, committed murder to enforce a spell. And Frants knew all about it, had to, and had used her to strike back at the Council’s refusal to help him now. Why the hell should she care about any of them?

  “Hell no I won’t,” Frants said. Or tried to say…his face wasn’t in much better shape than the ghost’s right now, and it came out soft, as though he’d lost a bunch of teeth at some point, too.

  You would rather die now, and find hell that much faster? The ghost sounded honestly curious, and Frants’s eyes widened. He shook his head once, blood spraying across the room. Wren noted almost in passing that while the ghost was solid enough to do damage, the blood drops went right through him.

  Swear to it. Swear, when the years pass, you will submit. You will replace me, and complete the spell.

  Frants looked at Wren, who looked back at him as emotionlessly as she could. He could die now, or die later. It was up to him now.

  “Yeth. I thwear it,” he said.

  Wren felt her shoulders sag a little in relief. She didn’t think she could have stopped the ghost again, wasn’t sure she would have even if she could. It was a dilemma she was glad not to have to face. Frants will spend the rest of his life trying to find a way to wrangle out of the promise, by logic or magic or any other means he can find. His using Barbie proved that. But that’s a worry for later. For someone else.

  “Satisfied?” she asked the ghost privately. It considered for an endless moment, then dropped Frants, its claws retracting into normal-looking fingers.

  It’s cold in there, it told her. And lonely.

  “It’s not forever.” And it was the best she could do.

  The ghost nodded.

  “What was your name?” she asked him suddenly.

  Jamie. And there, overlaying the ravaged face, the maddened red eyes and needle teeth, she saw him. Young, vibrant. A serious expression, almost studious, but with the enthusiasm of a man in love with his work and his life. The ripped fabric swathing his body reformed into a handsome fifties-styled suit, the shirt underneath gleaming white.

  Brown eyes under heavy brows sparkled at her, and he raised one calloused hand as though to tip a hat perched on his short-cut hair. He seemed surprised that there was no hat to touch, and looked around for it with an air of distraction, then shrugged in apology.

  He looked once more at Frants, pointing one slender, groomed finger as though to say remember, and then he faded into the current and was gone.

  Gone from the room. But not entirely. Wren was still grounded in the building. Now that she knew what to look for, what to feel for, there were threads of Jamie throughout, like a parent watchful over a child on the playground.

  It made her feel safe, protected. And as she slowly disengaged from the building, she could swear that she felt him acknowledge her in return. Then even that faint awareness faded, and she was totally herself again.

  A clunk and a whine deep inside the building, and the overhead lights came up again. The sharp click of computers rebooting came from somewhere down the hallway—the one in this office would never work again, not fried as it was—and somewhere deep in the steel she could hear the whine and wail of an alarm.

  The elevators were running again. They didn’t have much time left.

  “Come on,” she said to her client. “Get up.”

  He cringed away from her, scrambling backward like an animal.

  “Get up,” she said, infusing as much command into her voice as she could manage. He didn’t stand, but did stop cowering. “People will be here soon. Do you really want them to see you on the floor?”

  She personally didn’t give a damn. But better they rush to him for answers than look to her as the only person still standing.

  The appeal to his pride seemed to work, as she thought it probably would. Grabbing the edge of a still-intact table, Frants hoisted himself to his feet, using the back of his arm to wipe away the blood that still flowed from his face. He stared at the blood left on his sleeve as though he had no idea where it came from.

  That’s going to hurt once he comes out of shock, she thought, not without some sympathy. “Come here,” she said, rubbing her hands together and trying to find some remnant of current left in her system. It stirred, sluggishly. The building was too weak, still, to pull from, and there were no other sources available, so it would have to do.

  When he—understandably—refused to come any closer, she sighed and stepped forward over the wreckage of what had once been an antique chair and reached out to touch the side of his face. “Hold still, I just want to make sure you’re not going to bleed to death standing there, okay?” She’d read somewhere that scalp wounds bleed worse than they actually were, damage-wise, but she didn’t know if that held for facial wounds, too.

  “Slow, breathing steady

  The body repairs itself.

  Cells reknit, blood clots.”

  A standby she had been using since high school, something even her limited Talent could make work reliably on surface cuts and abrasions like this. If he was bleeding internally, they were both just shit out of luck.

  She winced as her arm reminded her that Frants wasn’t the only one injured. It would have been damned useful if the healing cantrip worked on her, but self-healing with current was a major no-no. You were too close, things could get overwhelmed and go wrong way too easily. Neezer had told her horror stories of organs fused together by a Talent who got carried away feeling the inside of his or her body. It still gave her major jeebies, just thinking about it. No thanks.

  Taking her hands away, she frowned. The blood had slowed, anyway. But that’s going to scar pretty bad
ly. Good. She wasn’t feeling too charitable toward the bastard right now, for all that she wouldn’t let him get killed.

  A familiar-sounding chime pinged out in the hallway, and the rumble of voices indicated that the cavalry had finally arrived. She picked out Sergei’s lighter bass out of the worried-sounding cacophony with relief.

  “In here,” she called, and two very serious-faced cub scouts rushed in, followed by their father. She blinked, and the boys refocused into still-young paramedics, who zeroed in on Frants. They knelt in front of him, pulling out instruments and bandages, and doing other paramedic-like things. Their “father,” she assumed, was building security, since he immediately started talking into his walkie-talkie, giving updates to someone somewhere else.

  She ignored him, turning to the nearest, far too baby-faced paramedic. “There’s a woman out there—”

  “Someone’s with her,” the older-by-hours paramedic assured her, then did a double-take. “Ma’am? Are you okay?”

  She looked down at herself. The sling was long gone, and the bullet hole had begun to bleed again under the bandages. She hadn’t felt anything until he mentioned it.

  “I’m okay,” she said, willing it to be true. “He’s the one who got hurt.”

  “Holy shit,” Security Guy said in tones of awe. She looked up. He’d discovered the body parts.

  Think it’s time to get the hell out of here. There was barely enough current left inside her to hotwire a car, but she managed to wrap herself in distraction long enough to slip out the door.

  Sergei caught her by the elbow of her uninjured arm as she entered the hallway, and she noted absently that her distraction spell didn’t work on him very well anymore. Curious. Something to follow up on. Some other time. Whole lot of things for some other time.

  “What happened?”

  A reasonable question, she thought. What the hell had happened? Another paramedic was kneeling on the floor by Barbie, taking her pulse and checking her eyes. She looked reasonably alive, if not quite alert.