by Laura Bickle
“… four, five…” Charon stumbled.
They had at least six shots in each revolver. No matter how much swimming Charon had done in the Styx, he wouldn’t be able to keep standing.
She pulled the first one into her throat, nearly choked. Her chest was filling, and she struggled to devour the second, coughing. More ghosts were filling the corridor, filling the void left by the guards. Newts swarmed into the darkness, but the ghostly columns seemed to stretch too far into the distance. And Anya couldn’t help but notice that there were fewer newts than when the battle had begun. A lump rose in her throat.
Charon fell to his knees, hands wrapped around his chest. Anya thrust his limp hair away from his face: “Are you all right?” It was a damned stupid question to ask a man who’d been shot.
“Yeah.” Charon took a shuddering breath. He reached up to finger the dent in Anya’s armor. “You?”
“Okay.” The armor had deflected the bullet, but it would leave a hell of a bruise. She could feel hot stickiness inside the armor, trickling down to her palm.
She hauled Charon to his feet. Sparky appeared at his side to take part of his weight.
“We’ve gotta break their formation,” he growled. “Get past the bottleneck.”
Anya nodded, turned her head to cough into her elbow.
Charon snatched her arm, and Anya saw that her gleaming armor was speckled with blood.
“How many ghosts have you devoured?” he demanded. He pressed his hand to her forehead, as if she were a child with a fever.
“I don’t know. I—”
Charon ripped open the latches of her armor, pulling open her breastplate.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Anya moved to cover herself, though she had an overriding urge to slug him. She felt cold air on her skin.
“Shit.” Charon’s blue eyes burned as he stared at her chest.
Anya looked down and nearly threw up.
When Anya took a spirit, it left a burn mark on her in the physical world. They eventually healed, usually over a period of weeks, and rarely scarred. But the battle, the dozens of ghosts, had reduced her flesh to burned bloody blackness. She looked as if someone had taken a blowtorch to her. Her skin felt numb under her fingers. Beyond it… she could almost touch that blackness that devoured ghosts.
“You’re burning out.” Charon’s eyes seared into hers. “Lanterns can only take so many spirits before they burn out.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this shit?” she demanded.
“I assumed that you knew your limits.” His eyes were frosty, accusing.
“It’s not like I eat these motherfuckers for breakfast.” But now she understood what the old man’s warning meant—the ghosts were poison to her. Too many, and…
Charon looked over her head at the newts. They were holding the line, but just barely. “We’ve got to figure out a way to retreat.”
Anya shook her head, fumbling with the closures on her breastplate. Sparky wound worriedly around her legs. “No. We keep going.”
Charon glared at her. “Here’s the plan. The newts and I drive a line up the middle. You get behind us. When we get to the end of the line, you break out ahead for Hope. Sparky will cover you.”
Sparky slapped his tail on the ground. Anya hoped he was taking notes.
A howl and a whinny sounded from the tunnel.
“Shit,” Anya muttered. That could only be Pluto.
“Let’s go.” Charon pulled the chain tight between his hands. Sparky fell into line beside him, and they began to push against the bottleneck. Anya plucked up Bernie’s sword from beside the body of a newt that was fading away like a wisp of smoke. Charon’s chain lashed into the battle, and Sparky launched himself into the fray. Anya stayed behind them, hacking at ghostly limbs that snaked through the spaces between.
Ahead, she could see Pluto rearing. Gallus clung to the saddle. The ghost-horse rolled an eye, foaming at the mouth. The end of Charon’s chain wrapped around the horse’s neck, and the ferryman pulled with all his might.
The horse struggled and wobbled in the crowd of ghosts, crashed down with an inhuman scream.
Gallus hacked himself out of the trap of ghost-limbs and tack, howling, “You killed my horse!” Tears glistened in his eyes under his helmet, and he raised his sword to behead Charon, whose fists were still tangled in the chain.
Anya thrust Bernie’s sword between them, clumsily blocking the blow.
Newts clung to Gallus’s back, chewed at his shoulders, but he cried, “That was my horse! Pluto has been my horse for two thousand years.…”
A well of pity rose in Anya, and she tenderly reached out to touch his wet cheek.
She breathed him in, in the same breath as the broken and twisted horse. She tried to be gentle. She felt them mingling in her lungs, smoky and musky, bound together for all time.…
She smiled sadly. The cold breath of the spirits seized her throat, paralyzing her breath. She couldn’t inhale. Couldn’t exhale. She felt as if she was drowning, could hear nothing but the echo of blood thumping in her helmet. She felt the sting of the ghost-burn crawl up her chest through her throat, seizing her voice.
Charon was holding her by her arms, shouting at her. He shook her so hard that the helmet rattled off her head.
But the thunder of her blood blotted him out. She could feel the poison of the burn spreading up her face, numbing it and crawling blackly over her vision.
The last thing she remembered was falling over Charon’s shoulder with Sparky tangled in her legs.
IT FELT AS IF THE ghost train had taken hold of her again, that queasy sense of weightlessness washing over her.
Anya opened her eyes in the familiar setting of the Devil’s Bathtub, and she sighed in relief. The old tin ceilings, the scarred wood floors, the jewel-toned bottles perched behind the bar, even the layer of dust on the stained-glass lamps over the bar—all of it familiar. She was home.
But then she realized that the perspective was all wrong.
She was floating at the ceiling, the stamped tin tiles close enough to touch. Below her, she could see her physical self sprawled in the bathtub fixture on the floor, the center of a flurry of activity.
Her body had sunk into the change-filled bathtub. Brian was straddling her, pumping her chest with interlaced hands. Each thrust rattled change from the bathtub onto the floor. A fire extinguisher rolled on the floor, bits of chemical foam smeared on the floor and in the coins. She smelled something burning, and wondered what it was.
“You came back.” Renee floated beside Anya.
Anya chewed on her lip. “I don’t understand. Why am I not down there, with them?”
Renee tenderly touched Anya’s cheek. “Honey, you’re slipping away.”
Jules was shouting into the telephone at a 911 operator, and Katie was running out the door to flag down paramedics. Max stood behind Ciro’s wheelchair, the old man’s hands clutching his chest. Tears were streaming down the old man’s cheeks.
“… five, six, seven, eight…” Brian counted out the chest compressions.
“… five minutes,” Jules was saying. “She hasn’t breathed in five minutes… how the fuck should I know?”
Anya looked down. The silver cord connecting her astral double to her physical self was severed. She fingered the frayed edges of it in her hand, blinked.
Brian lifted her limp body’s head to straighten her airway. “You. Don’t go,” he whispered as he pressed his mouth over hers and forced a breath into her throat.
It wasn’t the cold breath of a spirit. Anya could taste it. It felt warm. Alive.
Anya coughed, sputtering up against arms that held her.
“Brian,” she whispered, fingers wound in his shirt.
“Wrong place,” a voice told her. “Drink.”
Lukewarm water slid past her lips down her throat. It tasted like slime, and she hacked it out.
She blinked, her vision fuzzy. She wasn’t in Brian’s arms,
but in Charon’s. She lay across his knees in the crook of one elbow. He held a filthy bottle of water in his free hand. His coat smelled like gunpowder, and she realized her fingers were twined in the bullet holes. Sparky licked Anya’s face.
“What is—” she was overtaken by another fit of coughing.
Charon’s eyes crinkled in relief. He capped the bottle and stuck it in his pocket. “Water from the Styx.”
Her eyes widened. “You said it was poison.”
“Just a sip.” Charon’s eyes darkened. “Don’t worry. You’re not invincible… and you’ll pay for that later.”
“The newts…” She struggled to sit up.
Charon gestured with his chin. “They’re tough little bastards.”
The newts scuttled through the tunnels, feasting on shreds of fading ghost-flesh. Their amber light flashed from one corner of the tunnel to the other, like fireflies.
She reached around her neck for the newt that had tucked himself into her armor. The body felt cold and stiff. With a lump in her throat, she laid it on the ground. Sparky nosed over it, whined, as it began to fade.
“How many survived?” Anya asked, self-consciously disengaging her fingers from Charon’s coat.
“More than half,” Charon said. “Even in the physical world, that’s a pretty good survival rate for salamanders in the wild.”
Her vision blurred, and she wiped her nose. “I guess.”
Charon hauled her to her feet as easily as if she were a doll. “C’mon. Let’s go kick Hope’s ass.”
Anya nodded. With her arm wrapped around the ferryman’s waist and Sparky at her heels, she followed him into the dark tunnel.
The newts had made vicious work of the ghosts. Smears of glowing iridescence smeared the walls. Anya could make out handprints and spatters of what would have been blood in the physical world covering the walls in what looked like glow-in-the-dark paint. The marks gleamed eerily in the dark. In a corner, three newts fought over the remains of Marie Antoinette’s head, the curls of her wig strewn on the floor of the tunnel like seaweed.
The tunnel turned back on itself several times and opened up into a large, echoing chamber. The chamber reminded Anya of when she’d gone to Shenandoah Caverns as a child: a rocky room with a vaulted ceiling, studded with stalactites and stalagmites. Deep in crevasses, water and quartz gleamed. Water dripped from somewhere distant.
“Hope,” Charon called. “It’s over.”
Something moved in the pitch. “You can’t hold me.”
Sparky’s amber light cast shifting shadows, before finally illuminating a figure perched on a four-foot jar. Pandora’s Jar appeared much the same as it did in the physical world, except the paint was fresher. At the foot of the jar, Bernie’s artifacts were strewn. Anya recognized some of the bottles and bits of jewelry glinting in the light.
But Hope was not the same on this level. The creature perched on top of the jar reminded Anya of the gargoyles she’d seen on gothic churches: warped head, leathery wings, and hands curled into claws. It was Hope, in this world. Anya thought it a more realistic depiction.
“Ah. Death and the Lantern have come to take my treasures,” the creature using Hope’s voice hissed. Her mouth was filled with needle-like teeth; Anya figured that they were hell to floss.
“Your army’s been chewed to pieces, Hope.” Anya narrowed her eyes. “Give us the jar.”
Hope slithered from the top of the jar. “Be my guests. Forever.”
She shoved it over, and the mouth of the jar rolled to face Anya, Sparky, and Charon. The interior of the jar shimmered with crystalline blue light, a glow that bent and warped the air. It sucked at them, and Anya dug her armored heels into the dirt. But the vortex at the lip of the jar widened. Charon stumbled. Sparky wrapped his tail around a stalagmite, his claws churning in the air for Anya. Through the howl of air, Anya felt herself slipping toward the mouth of the jar. Her arm popped out of its socket, and she watched as her fingers warped and stretched, like light before a black hole.
This must be what it feels like to be a ghost when I devour them, she thought. Her hair lashed past her face, stretched out beyond her hip by the jar’s terrible gravity.
“Nothing can escape that,” Hope cackled from the shadows behind it. “Nothing. Not an elemental. Not a Lantern. Not even Death himself.”
Charon growled at her. “You know better than that.”
“The Underworld will be mine. Without you to protect it, I’ll begin my collection of spirits over again.”
The soft, sandstone stalagmite Sparky clung to splintered. He clawed in the dirt, tail stretched into an infinite spiral, pulled toward the jar. Pebbles rattled past him, sucked into its gaping mouth.
Anya snarled. There was no way she’d let that bitch take Sparky. She turned her full attention to the shadow behind the jar, and let go.
She skidded past Charon and Sparky, twisting and turning in the maelstrom vacuum of dirt and light. She let herself be sucked into the rim of the jar. She clutched the rim with all her strength in twisted fingers. She looked over the rim at Hope’s dark shape and glowing eyes…
… and breathed in.
Hope shrieked. Anya felt the metallic taste of Hope in her throat, curling into her lungs like smoke. If she was going to spend the rest of eternity stuck in a jar with Charon and Sparky, she was damn well going to take Hope with her.
Charon’s chain flashed past, slamming into the edge of the jar. The jar fractured, splintering quartz fragments in Anya’s face.
The vortex spun out and collapsed like a dust devil, leaving Anya with two feet in the cracked jar and a chain around her wrist. Hope was nowhere to be seen, but Anya could feel the disgusting taste of expensive perfume in the back of her throat.
“Ow,” she muttered, spitting sand out of her mouth.
Sparky scuttled up and licked her face, wrinkled his nose. Apparently, he could smell it, too.
Charon gave Anya a hand up, nudged the edge of the jar with his foot. The fracture extended from the lip of the jar halfway through the picture painted on the side. Pandora’s peplos was cleaved neatly in half. He righted the jar, fingering the scar.
“The magick’s gone from it,” he said. “Any ghosts put in it would leak right out.”
Anya sighed. “Charon?”
“Yeah?”
“At the risk of sounding like a petulant Dorothy, I want to go home.”
He smiled, and this time the light seemed to touch his eyes. “I’ll take you to your train.”
Sunlight streamed through the high windows of the train station, passing through the ghosts milling in the crowd. Charon and Anya walked slowly though the crowd, trailed by Sparky and the newts. The newts darted around feet, clambered up briefcases, and harassed the ghosts at the ticket counter.
“What am I going to do with them?” Anya asked. She’d counted thirty-two newt survivors. She was relieved that they’d made it, but dreaded the chaos they’d bring to her daily life.
Charon shrugged, hands in his pockets. “They’re big and strong enough to make their own way in the world.”
“Charon, they’re just babies.…”
“Look.” He gently turned her around and pointed. The newts were hopping away through the crowd to the train platform. They leaped off one by one, whisked away by the ghost train.
Anya’s eyes filled with tears. She felt like she’d been punched in the gut. “Where are they going?”
“To new homes. I imagine many of them will attach themselves to artifacts, like the ones in Bernie’s collection. There are probably a few idiot witches out there trying to summon salamanders. Some of them will probably hang out around ironworks and firehouses—that’s just what they do.”
Anya rubbed her eyes. “Bye, guys.”
The last newt paused on the platform. It turned to Anya and chirped before it flung itself into darkness.
Charon awkwardly patted her shoulder. “I’ll look in on them once in a while. I swear.”
&nb
sp; Anya nodded, unable to speak. She looked away, into the crowd of ghosts.
Something snagged her attention. While most of the ghosts were bent on their destinations, oblivious to their surroundings, one ghost watched her. He stood in a closed phone booth beside the ticket counter, his hands folded over his hat.
She recognized him from his morgue photograph.
He was Calvin Dresser, the computer scientist who was the model for Brian’s neural network, ALANN.
Anya walked briskly to the phone booth, reached for the handle. It was locked. Calvin looked at her sadly, trapped behind the door.
“He’s in limbo,” Charon said. “I’ve never seen anything like it. He can’t move backward or forward, though he’s fully aware. Very curious case.”
“How do I get him out of here?” Anya’s breath fogged the glass.
Charon tipped his head, hands clasped behind his back. “You could break him out.”
Anya doubled her armored fist and broke the glass near the handle. The glass spidered and shattered, trickling down the door frame. The man inside didn’t flinch. He stepped hesitantly outside of his glass prison.
“Hello, Anya,” he said.
“Hello, Calvin.”
He tipped his hat. “Thank you for freeing me. I knew you would somehow.”
Calvin smiled and walked away into the crowd toward the platform, whistling. Her heart swelled to see him free and on his way.
“You did well.” Charon watched him walk away. “You could have my job someday.”
Anya’s skin prickled. “Hope called you ‘Death.’” She couldn’t help but feel as if Charon wasn’t telling her the full truth… about himself, or about the Styx.
Charon waved his hand dismissively. “Hope’s full of shit. She doesn’t know Hades from Hestia.”
“Mmmm…” Anya was dubious. “I have questions.”
“Save ’em for later. Sleep on it.” His blue eyes darkened. “Don’t ask any questions you don’t really want answers to.”
“You’ll be at the morgue?” she asked.
“I’m always around. You can use the coin I gave you to come back.” He leaned forward and kissed her cheek. His lips were cold, and he smelled like gunpowder and winter.