by Daniel Marks
Her eyes darted toward Luisa. The girl was chewing on her lip and gawking in the direction of the black curtain. Velvet craned her neck to peer around the fallen table beside her. There, amid a carpet of broken glass twinkling like fallen snow, was the ghost of a boy, his head lolling against his shoulder, his long legs tangled up in the dark fabric.
Handsome, with one of those sharp angular jaws and the kind of comfortably disheveled dark blond hair that belonged on a surfer, but this kid wasn’t. He was lanky, more than six feet tall, and he had a body for basketball and trouble.
Luckily for Velvet, he was also totally unconscious.
Chapter 8
“Deal with him!” Velvet shouted to Luisa, stabbing one of the nurse’s spindly fingers toward the boy. The girl rushed across the room. Velvet spun back toward a howling Madame Despot. The possessed woman had wriggled free of Quentin and was sneaking toward the curtained room with more speed than the body’s weight suggested was possible, and with an inexplicable expression of glee.
Velvet followed the woman’s course to its ultimate conclusion and saw a surprise waiting for the fortune-teller, of the Jim Henson variety. Deep inside the hidden room stood Logan—Grover mask on but blue paws dangling from his bare wrists like sweaty winter mittens. He mashed his fist into his palm, polishing. Velvet couldn’t help but giggle as he leapt up and pounded not the turbaned woman, but the ghost lingering inside. Logan, small for his age, but lithe, clung to the front of Madame Despot’s muumuu with one hand, his knees pressed into her gut for leverage. With each punch, the back of the possessing ghost’s head broke past the confines of the turban, a glowing bulbous tumor in need of excision.
“Release that body, ghost!” Velvet shouted. “I can see you bouncing around in there like a lotto ball!”
A ghostly arm sprang from Madame Despot’s chest like an alien, connecting with Logan’s hip and knocking the little Muppet into the air and through the wall of the back room. The woman jerked her head toward Velvet and spat, “Never, body thief! She’s mine, and I’ll take her to the grave if I like.”
Behind Velvet rose the not so gentle stirrings of her fifty-seventh soul extraction.
“What the hell?” the boy shouted. “What’s happening?”
And then Luisa was on him, whispering into his ear, doing her best to calm him, or at the very least keep him busy while they finished the work at hand. Velvet couldn’t help sneaking a peek in their direction; the boy was on his feet now, towering over the younger girl. His eyes were as big as saucers, and his fingers were clawing at his basketball tank.
Freak-out in three, two …
A scrabbling drew Velvet’s attention back to the possessed woman. Madame Despot lurched forward and snatched a letter opener from a nearby bureau and held it to her own throat, even as Logan reappeared, his face scrunched in anger. A phantasm of chain dangled from his fist and trailed off behind him into the wall. Madame Despot’s eyes widened at the sight.
“Hold your poltergeist back, girl!” the fortune-teller yelled. Her voice had gone deep and gravelly, and her possessor’s eyes blazed fury from her skull. “Or I’ll banish the girl and the little furball to the cold depths of a jelly jar!”
Velvet was taken aback. Not by the threat, which was just that—Velvet knew of only one way to cram a soul into a jar, and that was by force … lots of it—but by the instantaneous desire for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, strawberry, preferably.
Damn food cravings.
“It’ll be hard to do your … banishing spell with a clammy corpse hand against your mouth, won’t it?” Velvet glanced over her shoulder and barked, “Quentin, get over here and muffle this thief. I’m tired of listening to it blather.”
“I’ll cut it,” Madame Despot said, and pressed the dull blade of the letter opener deep enough into the body’s neck that it disappeared in its folds. “I swear it.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Velvet yawned.
The corpse shambled forward to the strains of the new soul’s screams of “Zombie! Zombie!” And then, “This isn’t happening. This isn’t happening. This isn’t happening.” The boy had found a mantra.
Quentin clamped a rotten hand across the fortune-teller’s mouth. It settled there with a sickening sucking sound, and the woman’s eyes swelled. Velvet was certain Madame Despot had just taken a mouthful of pus, or something likewise as gross.
“This isn’t happening. This isn’t happening. This isn’t happening.”
Okay, Velvet thought. That’s getting a tiny bit annoying.
“We’ll be with you in a second, got it?” she growled, glancing quickly away as Quentin dragged the fortune-teller, kicking, screams muffled, into a shadowy corner of the room.
“I guh-guess so,” the boy stammered, and stood, confused, the fear visibly quaking in his legs.
It wasn’t that Velvet didn’t have any sympathy for the kid—of course she did—but she had a job to do. Besides, this was the fun part.
As Madame Despot jerked and struggled, Quentin’s borrowed arms creaked and popped like knuckles, as though one jerk away from dislodging and flopping onto the floor. The woman cursed and growled like a dog protecting a bone.
“You’re not coming out, then?” Velvet asked.
More growling.
“All right, this shit is getting old.” Velvet sighed and nodded to the poltergeists. “Bring on the bear traps.”
Logan tore off his mask. It hung off his shoulders like a furry hood. Luisa ordered the new boy to stay put and shoved her hand into the nearest wall, tongue thrusting as she searched and then found the end of another chain. Glowing links, as blue as ice, emerged one by one, clinking and clattering until a ghostly trap slid from the wall, already set, its sharp teeth glistening and sparking.
Velvet crouched down as, on the opposite side of the room, Logan whipped the chain around his head like a lasso. His trap swung dangerously in a broad loop, cutting through the walls soundlessly.
“No!” the ghost inside Despot screamed.
Luisa slid her trap into the center of the room as Quentin pitched the fortune-teller forward onto it. The body thief stumbled directly onto the trigger and howled as the teeth snapped through Madame Despot’s legs and bit into its hijacking spirit. Logan shouted, “Punk rock!” and launched his trap forward. It caught the woman’s chest with a sharp snap. The human body fell away, taking a few awkward steps before collapsing into a mound of robes and flesh with a thud and a groan.
What remained upright was gray, nebulous, and totally pissed off, its form slipping from human into something sluglike and splotchy with dark oily smudges. The old guard Salvagers called the affliction “going banshee,” since the longer a ghost tread in dark magic, the more deformed it became.
And the louder it could scream.
The sound reverberated through the room. Free from its human shell, the ghost’s voice carried an unfettered violence that quaked every surface. The dust on the floor clouded around their ankles. The chandelier above the seer’s table swung.
The banshee began to twist and struggle with the bear traps, its form wringing and spasming even as it continued to wail. Chains whipped and jumped in Logan’s and Luisa’s hands, forcing them to anchor their feet ankle-deep into the hardwood floor. Dimples pocked where the pair of traps gnashed and continued to clamp tighter into the ghost’s flesh. Fat globs of ectoplasm plopped onto the floor and snaked their way back to the creature’s feet, where they were reabsorbed.
“Gross.” Luisa crinkled her nose, even as she tightened her grip on the chain.
“Seriously,” Velvet agreed. “You got it, though, right?”
Luisa nodded. Logan’s sneer and cocked brow more than implied he’d taken offense. “Obviously!” he shouted.
Velvet turned to Quentin and gestured back at the boy crouched by the curtains. His chanting done, her fifty-seventh soul had jammed his palms ineffectually over his ears to close off the sound of the banshee’s nearly constant scream—as if that were
possible. “Let me get this guy out of here and then, well, you know what to do.”
She didn’t have to tell him twice.
He forced the corpse to hunch over and right a chair. The zombie took a seat, wriggled its shoulders, and closed its eyes, face turning slack and placidly calm. Undertaking took the most concentration of any Salvage position, but it was also the dirtiest.
Better him than her, Velvet thought, knowing all too well the teeming process underway beneath the dead body’s skin. She ducked under the bucking chains and crossed the room to meet the freed soul.
He was taller than she’d first thought, probably older too—seventeen or eighteen—and he was likely a hot guy when his face wasn’t twisted up in a mask of horror. He wore his sandy hair closely cropped to his skull, but messy, tussled in an unintentionally sexy way. Like he’d just finished making out with someone and didn’t care who knew it.
Not Velvet’s type at all.
Though—she cocked her head to the side and squinted—with the right scars, tattoos, and piercings, he wouldn’t be so terrible to objectify on a regular basis … given he kept his mouth shut and didn’t annoy her.
She didn’t have to worry about any of that anyway. The guy was only along for the ride until they got him through to purgatory. After that, she didn’t care what happened to him. Didn’t have the time to care. Or the energy.
But he was pretty freaked out, and Velvet wasn’t completely heartless. She supposed there was a tiny ghost of the organ still beating inside her, shrunken and dark and cold, a last line of defense against the encroaching apathy.
Still.
She squatted beside him and rested her hand on his shoulder—Manny always stressed the importance of empathy, real or feigned, in guiding new souls out of dangerous situations. It made them placid, like sheep or something.
But the boy didn’t react. Zero eye contact. He rocked in place, and there was a low murmur that she could barely detect except when she saw that his lips were moving.
Velvet gave the boy a quick slap on the cheek.
Empathy only went so far … and they were, after all, on a timeline.
Startled, he fell back on his butt and glared at her, panting. Confusion clouded his eyes. “The girl said I’m a ghost, like her,” he whispered. “She’s crazy, right? Tell me I’m right.”
Velvet glanced back at Luisa. “The girl” had wrapped her end of the chain around her wrist and was grinning, tugging at the bear trap ferociously. With each pull, the banshee’s wail changed pitch a little, until Velvet could make out just the hint of a song in its cry.
Was that?
Yes.
“London Bridge.”
Velvet returned her attentions to the boy. She nodded. “Most definitely. Luisa’s clearly insane. Nothing to worry about.”
His shoulders sagged a bit at that, and she thought she heard a gentle sigh escape him. Her gaze lingered on his mouth, on the gentle bow of his lips, parted and perfect. She had the odd urge to kiss them, and recoiled immediately.
What the hell was wrong with her?
Her job was to protect. To deliver.
To extract.
And certainly not to terrorize this kid with the crinkled lips of her old lady suit.
“Listen,” she said, probably a bit too harshly. “Get up and follow me. Those crazy kids over there are going to be doing something you don’t want to see.”
His eyes grew large, and he shot a glance at the struggling banshee, the ghostly twins, and the corpse rotting in the corner. “But, what’s—”
“No questions.” Velvet noticed Quentin’s skin was already starting to pock and vibrate. Beneath the banshee’s scream, an almost undetectable hum filled the room. “We’ve got to move!”
The boy scuttled to his feet, and Velvet motioned for him to fall in behind her. When he lingered, she snapped her fingers in front of his face and screamed, “Now!”
She herded him past Luisa and into the entry hall, turning to catch the girl’s attention. “Get out as soon as Quentin makes the transformation. Don’t risk it. You know how that could end up.”
Luisa quivered.
Once outside, the boy seemed to calm down a little, though he was intently focused on her—apparently it was easier to connect with an old nurse than the ghost of a twelve-year-old girl in a Catholic-school uniform. Velvet could see how that would be a little weird. Souls don’t even know they’re dead when they come out of the cells, let alone know to identify a kinship with other spirits immediately. That’d be too easy.
She figured she’d better take advantage of his temporary serenity, before things got crazy. “What’s your name, new guy?”
“Na-Nick,” he stuttered meekly. “Nick Atherton Russell.”
Velvet narrowed her eyes. “What’s that, one of those hyphenated names? The kind rich people have?”
He shook his head, the hint of a smile at play on those amazing lips. “No. Far from it. My mom’s a cocktail waitress in SoHo.”
“Was,” Velvet mumbled, correcting him as she glanced toward the curtains in the front window of Madame Despot’s shop. The thick fabric had opened a crack during the struggle, and deep against the far wall, beyond the horrific mutation of a spirit, Quentin’s corpse had nearly doubled in size. The surface of its flesh bubbled and throbbed with such intensity that, from where they stood, Quentin’s zombie began to look like a smear on the windowpane.
“What’d you say?” the boy asked, stepping between her and the window.
Velvet shrugged, absently peering over his shoulder. “Well, technically, I guess you’re right. I’m incorrect. Your mom could very well still be a cocktail waitress. The ‘was’ applies to you, mostly.”
“Okay. Now you’re talking like that nut-job kid in there.”
She ignored the boy. Luisa and Logan stretched the banshee sideways, both pulling like quarter horses. Luisa was almost to the window, the petite oval of her face twisted with effort, ready to drop the chain and slip through the wall as soon as the undertaking was complete.
And from the looks of things, it wouldn’t be long.
Quentin was about to pop.
“Now, you’re going to hear something a little weird, Nick,” she said. “That’s your name, right?”
He nodded.
“Like I said, it’s gonna get weird.”
“So just now? Like in a minute?” The sarcasm dripped from his words. “ ’Cause all that stuff from before? Perfectly normal.”
Velvet glanced back at the boy. She was certain he thought he was being cute, and that may have been true, but the truth was, he was her responsibility only until they crossed into purgatory. “Yep. Whatever you do, don’t turn around.”
“Why not?” he asked, and turned toward the crack in the drapes.
She reached out and grabbed his cheek, turning him to face her. “Because it might freak you out. And I’m not really in the mood to chase you down the streets of Philadelphia in the middle of the night. It’s been a really taxing day already.”
“Oh! You’ve had a bad day!” Nick shouted. He threw up his hands and started to pace back and forth in front of the window, gesturing wildly. “I’m sorry, lady. Did you just recently wake up in the middle of a horror movie and realize you were the ghost?”
Nick’s outburst couldn’t have come at a better time. The low hum from before had turned into an angry buzzing, so loud that it began to drown out the piercing scream from inside. Velvet watched as the body in the chair exploded into a swarm of flies.
“So you realize it, then?” she asked, keeping the distraction going. “That’ll make things a ton easier.”
“Is that supposed to be a joke?” Nick asked incredulously.
But Velvet didn’t need to answer. Luisa darted through to the sidewalk a second before the flies rained sideways against the window, tapping and fluttering and getting stuck between the curtain and the glass. Nick turned to see where the girl had come from and recoiled at the sight of the fl
ies. He stumbled back into the street at the very second a car sped by, zipping quite unaffected through his ghost.
“Really?” he shouted after the speeding car, and then louder, “Really?”
Velvet peered back into the shop.
Flies swarmed about the raucously undulating spirit, carpeting its gray flesh in a teeming, chomping mass. The banshee let out a final scream, clogged quickly to silence as the black army of insects marched past its lips, stuffing phantom entrails. The occasional disfigured limb sprang from the throng, dense with spasms and pain, and was bitten free and dropped to the floor.
While the new guy continued to make an ass out of himself ranting and raving about reckless driving, Velvet walked quietly back to the shop door and opened it. She stood back and felt an infinitesimal pressure on her arm as Luisa slipped her hand through the crook of Velvet’s elbow, huddling up.
“Do you suppose we should warn him?” the girl asked.
Velvet glanced in the direction of Nick; the boy was pacing, shouting, making fists, and throwing pretend punches. From the look of Logan, who’d made a stealthy appearance, he was egging the ridiculous boy on. Free from the rotting corpse he was engineering, Quentin merely leaned against the wall, squinting with his chin trapped in the cage of his thumb and index finger.
Waiting.
“Nah,” Velvet grunted. “Why bother? He’s busy distracting himself from the inevitable.”
Luisa nodded.
With a whoosh, a solid entity of flies punched from Madame Despot’s vestibule like a fist, black and howling. Victorious. The doorframe creaked and splintered from the weight and bulk of their exodus, showering the sidewalk with toothpick shards of wood and sheared-off nailheads. The swarm slammed into the window of the building across the street, a rubber stamp store called Inkies, before banking upward into the sky. The force of the impact left the glass as pocked as a road trip windshield.
Nick, staggered to a stunned silence, wandered back over to Velvet, scuffing the gravelly concrete like a child as his gaze followed the insects’ dramatic exit.