by Lyn Benedict
His attention shifted to his hands with a grimace. If he’d been as young as his son, Jamie, she thought he’d be doing the cootie dance, complete with flailing hands. Any other time, and she might have been amused. She went back to her staredown with Wales, trying to make him see she was doing this, make him see she expected him to help her.
Zoe was out on the streets of Miami, somewhere. Sylvie hadn’t been able to find her, couldn’t see her safe and sound. But she could do this. She could take the ghost’s attention away from Zoe. Try to break whatever bond existed between them. That was worth any risk.
Wales sighed. “Fine. But yeah, you’re going in a ring. And Marco’s coming back, and your guy’s going to have to hold Hands with a dead man.”
Wright backed away, disgust and fear chasing themselves across his face, and while Sylvie’s first instinct was to order him to pick up the damn Hand and hold on, a cooler thought pointed out that he was her client, too. Not just a burden.
“The salt will contain the effect?”
“Not completely,” the Ghoul said. He didn’t sound worried. “But as before, claiming mastery of the other Hands will bring us into sync with it, make us family. Make us not-food.” He grinned at Wright, teeth surprisingly white and bright in his sallow face. “It’s like being a kid again. As long as you hold on to Daddy’s hand, you’re protected. But we’ll be lighting them all this time.”
“Great,” Wright said. Whether it was the Ghoul’s none-too-subtle name-calling, or just fatalism, he bent and picked up the Hand Demalion had dropped earlier.
Sylvie took up Zoe’s Hand of Glory, still tacky with milk, and Wales began making a single-occupant safety zone around her. The circle was barely wider than her outstretched arms, but better that than to run out of salt halfway through and have to brush it into shape; doing that risked adding in impurities. Sucked to have a spell get botched for a misplaced piece of carpet lint.
Wales chucked his lighter in just as he poured the last of the salt; she caught it and took a steady breath. Her skin crawled like a thousand ants were making themselves at home. She really, really didn’t want to do this. The Hand flared hot and furious at the first touch of the flame, shot fiery cinders toward the ceiling, before it settled to a steady hellish blaze. And Sylvie wasn’t alone in the circle any longer.
A woman blurred into shape, stiff and straight with age; her white hair streamed out around her, caught in the heated draft made by the flames. Unlike Marco’s hollow-eyed form, this ghost’s eyes glittered beneath her brows. And unlike Marco, equal parts menacing and drifting, she rocketed from confusion to sheer rage in a millisecond, drew herself up even straighter, hair streaming, and shrieked. Translucent teeth bulged like rat fangs, and her tongue elongated, rolled out, questing, utterly serpentine.
Sylvie’s every hair on her body stood up, screaming in silence for her to get out, to run, to flee.
Instead, she got one finger in her ear, trying to shake off that bone-rattle cry, sharper than a stooping hawk, and thrust the Hand as far from her as she could.
“Wales? A little help?”
The ghost shrieked again, still wordless, and every latch in the room snapped open. Wales tried to get Marco’s Hand lit with trembling fingers, and Wright was on his knees. Something lashed across her skin, gelid, sinuous, painful; the ghost’s tongue licked and stung and struck, forked at the tip, barbed the length of it. It drew her close, pulled at something beneath her skin.
“I lit you,” Sylvie gritted out. “Obey me.”
The tongue coiled around her skin again, questing for her soul, left frostbite and dizziness in its wake, and Sylvie thought she was going to die here, stuck in a circle with a ghost that refused to be mastered.
The salt circle was only salt. She could step out of it, fall out of it, but she’d drag the ghost free also. Free to attack the others in the room.
Two dead souls and a necromancer, her little dark voice said. Not a loss.
Sylvie stutter-stepped, dodged the ghost as she charged; she pivoted and felt the edge of her sneaker grit against the salt. “Wales!”
“Working on it!”
She panted, near panic—the Ghoul was right; the dead and the living shouldn’t interact—and told her inner voice to shut up, that she wasn’t saving herself at the cost of their lives, and hell, she wasn’t even sure their deaths would save her.
They might.
Distracted by her own adrenaline, by fighting her own desire to survive at any cost, she was too slow to dodge the next blow, and the ghost reeled her in, the tongue burning about her waist, caught her by the shoulders, and pressed against her. Sylvie went rigid in horror and repulsion, clawed at the intangible, then . . .
Cold.
Shock.
Cold.
Breathless.
Pressing.
Not breathing.
Something pressing on her face, through her mouth, through her nose, smothering her, and though she tried to drag it off with her free hand, all she did was claw her own skin bloody. The ghost was untouchable.
Implacable.
Sylvie, vision swirling, got a strange overlay. A hospital ceiling. White perforated tiles, stiff-bleached sheets, needles in her arms, and a smiling woman putting a pillow over her face. She kicked and struggled, and her voice said, It’s not your death you’re remembering.
She sucked in a thread of air, rank with dead flesh, but sweet in her lungs. Sucked in another, cold as the clay as she fought it through the ghost’s efforts to smother her. That hungry tongue, so like a succubus’s, lashed and stung and struck, but . . . couldn’t penetrate deeper than her skin. Couldn’t plug itself in. Couldn’t devour her soul. Holding the Hand gave her at least that much protection.
“You killed him,” she said. An old man in a hospital bed, his arms knobby and white-furred. Not her. Him. Like Bella’s dreams, it was a vision of the past. The ghost’s memory. Not hers.
“Of course I did,” the ghost said, a cold kiss in her veins. “A life’s such a little thing when it’s not your own. Where is my vessel?”
“Get off me, and I’ll tell you.” Like she could. She didn’t even know what the hell the ghost was talking about. But she’d say anything to get that cold invasion out of her bones. Was it like this for Wright? Did Demalion feel like this to him? How had he held on for so long?
The ghost withdrew to the very edge of the spell circle. Beyond her, Wales fumbled his spray bottle, Marco’s flaming Hand, and Wright’s slack form. The Hand of Glory that Wright was supposed to be mastering was slipping from his lax grip. On my own, Sylvie thought, gritting her teeth. Just like always.
She scraped up a little salt and tried to put out the flames with it. Shortsighted. She should have brought the milk carton in with her.
The ghost shrieked and attacked again, not slowed at all by the salt; the rat teeth chittered near her ear. Cold lanced through her arm; Sylvie’s fingers spasmed; she dropped the flaming Hand, and that snake-tongue lashed around and sank through her ribs.
It was a bright burst of pain, frigid and sharp, and she had the distinct and unpleasant sensation of feeling her heart miss a beat. Her vision was gone, just like that, that vertigo from before coming back, stronger than ever. She’d thought she was immune to this?
On her knees, and when had that happened, and her ears ringing, her lungs aching—was she still breathing?—and something being drawn out of her. No, she thought, no. Not like this.
Then human hands clamped down, hard and hot on her shoulders, the circle broken, the ghost whipping away from her, freed and exultant for a shared heartbeat as the tongue withdrew from its attack on Sylvie’s soul.
A moment later, the raging shriek started up again—thin, high, wavering. Nails against the chalkboard of her bones.
When Sylvie’s vision cleared, the shakiness faded; she found herself in Wales’s arms, Marco encircling him, in some horrifying parody of a three-way embrace. Wright slumped against the wall, the Hand in his la
p alight, and a looming ghost sheltering him, a dead ex-con so large he almost had to be called Tiny.
The woman’s ghost battered at the walls, bounced back, wailed, hit the door with no better result. In Sylvie’s ear, Wales said, “Paranoia comes in handy. As does concern for the neighbors. My home’s a ghost trap.”
“We’re inside the trap,” Sylvie muttered back. “We’re here and we’re tasty and I’m out of ideas. You got anything?”
“She’s a lich ghost,” Wales said.
“A what?” Sylvie shook her head, regretted it when the dizziness swung back around. “No. Never mind. Lesson later. Fix the problem now.”
“Which one?” He shivered against her back; his hands trembled, bare against her flesh.
Bare.
Marco’s ghostly arms were wrapped tight around Wales. But Wales—
She wasn’t the only one who’d dropped the Hand of Glory. In the center of the room, a fallen Hand burned, slow and sullen. It wasn’t the lich ghost’s, streaming fire toward the stucco ceiling. It was Marco’s.
“Wales,” she breathed. “Is that—”
“Don’t,” he said, shivering kicking up a notch. “Don’t question it. I’m not.”
If Marco was loose, why wasn’t Wales dead? Why wasn’t she? Had Marco just not noticed? Or was he honestly trying to protect Wales?
Either way, it was a situation that felt too fragile to linger. Near Wright, the spray bottle lay tipped on its side, the nozzle broken, a puddle of milk seeping slowly into the carpet.
They had to be rid of the lich ghost before she got tired of clawing at the walls and came back for them. Had to get that Hand extinguished. She touched Wales’s arms gently, two pats, getting his attention, asking for release, gesturing toward the cooler, a whole ten feet away. It looked like a huge distance when she took into account the hungry ghosts in the room.
Wales eased himself away from her, and out of his arms, out of Marco’s—it felt like a spotlight was shining on her flesh, marking her as a target. She thought about saying, “No, on second thought, you do it. . . .” But she was stronger than Wales, less scared, more angry, and Wright was looking at her from across the room with eyes full of hope and fear. He’d trusted her instincts, and she’d been wrong.
The risk was hers to take.
She’d crossed only a few feet of the floor when the ghosts attacked. The lich ghost swooped in, fury and frustration distorting her face, and Wright’s ex-con, lumbering even in death, snapping at her with his teeth. Cold and vertigo chased themselves across her body, and she fumbled forward, catching the cooler by sheer determination and momentum. It tipped in her grip, spilling a carton toward her—nearly empty—and something much more precious.
Her gun.
She underhanded the milk carton in Wales’s direction, trusting him to use it to best effect, and grabbed her gun. Wales splashed milk over the lich ghost’s Hand, but it wasn’t working, wasn’t slowing the flames or the ghostly woman that emanated from it. The lich ghost and Tiny were duking it out. The lich ghost’s barbed tongue pierced the yardbird’s chest, seeking the soul.
“Too bad he’s dead already,” Sylvie said, but apparently there were levels and levels of dead she had yet to learn. Lich ghosts could apparently feed on anything. Tiny swirled away, diminished from within, sucked up in bizarre silence.
The room was quiet for a moment, then there was the quiet sizzle of Wright’s protecting Hand going out, of Wright slumping into the deadly lethargy. Unprotected. And the lich ghost still moved.
Sylvie spun around, gun in hand, and fired four shots into the lich ghost’s Hand, blowing it out of the remnant of the salt circle and against the wall. Gobbets of flesh spattered, bone cracked, and the lich ghost went out like a light.
Wales slid forward and poured milk over Marco’s slow-burning Hand.
“Is that it?” Sylvie asked. “Is it dead now? Did bullets do it?”
“No,” Wales said. “She’s only retreated. I can feel it still buzzing.” He stood shakily, a better man than her—she didn’t have any intention of getting off the floor anytime soon. Her wrists, her forearm, her pant leg were stippled in white where the barbed tongue had touched and burned with cold.
Wales dipped his fingers in the salt, wet them with the last of the milk, and made his way over to Wright, sketching shapes across his face.
“Is he all right? Both of them?”
“I don’t know,” Wales said. “Wouldn’t it be better if his possessor was gone?”
“No,” Sylvie said. She slid along the wall a little, got closer to Wright, wrapped her hand about his wrist. There was a pulse. “So, you said lich ghost. That wasn’t on your list of types. What is it?”
“A myth,” he said. His voice shook. “A lich is half spirit, half flesh. A spirit bound and forced to animate something dead. A rotting corpse with a spirit trapped within. The grisliest form of immortality. They’re flesh, and they feed on flesh. A zombie with a brain. But they’re easy enough to banish, a handful of salt will sever the unnatural bond.”
“You said lich ghost,” Sylvie said. “That’s different?” Wright’s hand twitched; she folded it in her own, rubbed his long fingers, trying to push warmth back into them.
“Obviously,” Wales said. “Or it would have fallen apart the moment you spilled salt on it. Look, we are far past my comfort level. Anything I tell you is, at best, a guess.”
Sylvie patted Wright’s hand, slowly rolled herself up to a crouch, the better to catch his flighty gaze with her own. “I need your guesses. They’re better than what I’ve got. So. Lich ghost.”
“A lich ghost, according to rumor, is an accident. A spirit anchored to a scrap of flesh, disincarnate. No body of its own. Doomed to madness and endless hunger. To keep their souls whole, they have to feed.”
“They don’t eat flesh,” Sylvie said. She started to pace the room, her anxiety level too high to let her sit still. Her body protested, sore and shaky with fading adrenaline, but her brain pushed it on.
“They can’t,” Wales said. “Not equipped. Most of them starve and howl and kill people in the attempt. It’s like some bastard mix of Glory and lich, and I don’t know how it happened. Don’t even know how you could screw the spells up badly enough to create the monster . . . It’s a nightmare. I mean, the Hands of Glory are static tools. They expend and devour energy in the same proportion. A lich ghost is all hunger, all the time, and they eat souls. Legend says the only people who can survive lich ghosts are immortals and gods.”
Sylvie said, “Legends are nothing more than old gossip given weight. C’mon, Wales. A human created them out of human flesh and spirit. A human should be able to destroy them.”
Wright jerked, woke all at once, and crawled toward Sylvie, cursing the entire time, moving through English, Spanish, Latin, and something Sylvie thought might be cat for all the guttural hissing that went with it. It finally resolved into a single complaint as he collapsed against her side. “Fucking Wales and his fucking safe enough.” Demalion shot Wales a poisonous glance, and said, “You okay, Shadows?”
“You?”
“I asked first,” he said.
She considered it. She felt like crap. Her body ached. Her temper was foul. Wright had nearly died, and Wales was utterly freaked-out. But the lich-ghost Hand was quiet and contained, and that could only be a win. No more snacking on Zoe’s soul.
“Not too bad,” she said.
“Lich ghost,” Wales murmured on autopilot.
“Can we go home, then?” Demalion asked. “I want a shower. I’ve been playing with corpses, and I’m covered with milk. I’m never going to be clean again.”
“Finicky as a cat,” she said, but stroked his arm in soothing motions. He linked his fingers with hers, ran his gaze over the marks on her arms. They were fading slowly, frost white going to burn pink and back to tan. They ached.
“Yeah,” Sylvie said. “Yeah. Let’s go home. Wales, you’ll dispose of the Hands for us, right?”<
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“What?” Wales said. “No!” His shoulders spiked; his drawl disappeared for clipped fury. “You fuck up my evening, drag me into this, nearly get us all killed, and now I’m supposed to take out your trash?”
“It’s not like there’s not enough shit on my plate. I don’t have time to mess around with disposal when I still have to find out who made them. And if they’ve made more. Unless you want to take that task on.”
Wales paced a quick, tight circle. “Fine. I’ll do it. You don’t have a clue anyway.”
“You said the one’s dead, and the other’s got a hole blown through it,” Sylvie said. “How hard can it be?”
“You don’t listen. I told you. To destroy the flesh is simple. But if you just fuck up the flesh, the ghost gets loose. I’ve got a method for the regular Hands. I bind the souls tight, squeeze them down into the bone, then I dissect them. It’s a spiritual vivisection. It’s not gentle. And it’s not pleasant for any of us.”
Sylvie thought of Zoe, hiding the Hand in her wall, that lich ghost in her house with her parents. She had no reservations. “They’re murderers.”
“So are you,” Wales said. “Marco knows one when he sees one. That’s what he whispered to me the whole time I was trying to shield you. ‘Let her go. She’s a killer. She’ll kill you. . . .’ ”
“Nice,” Sylvie said. “Glad a dead murderer sees fit to make judgment. I know what I am, Wales. But I don’t kill toddlers and little old men. I kill monsters.”
“You’re protecting one,” Wales said. He gestured at her huddle with Demalion, their shoulders pressed tight together, their fingers still twined.
“He’s not anything like the ghosts we’ve just removed,” Sylvie said. “He’s a benign and temporary possession—”
“There’s no such animal,” Wales said. “I’m sorry.”
Demalion jerked. His mouth twisted, so much more mobile in Wright’s flesh, and crossed his arms over his chest. Sylvie shivered as his warmth left her side.
“Some things aren’t meant to be shared,” Wales continued, each word one she had already known. Already told herself. “And mixing living and the dead . . . it confuses everything.” He leaned closer to Demalion, reached out. Demalion slapped his hand away—so instinctive he might not even know why. But Sylvie knew. She remembered the god of Love reshaping his human flesh to be something other.