The green phantom came stumbling through the underbrush behind her, making enough noise to alert every enemy in the forest. “What’s wrong with him?” he demanded. “What’s been done to him? Get him out of there.”
Ayaan wasn’t sure if he should be moved but she tugged at one of his paws anyway. She might as well have pulled on a strand of ivy—Erasmus’ body, while still flexible, was stuck to the spot. She tugged again and again. Finally the green phantom stepped up to help her. He leaned his staff against the tree and pulled.
Erasmus came loose with a howl, a noise only an animal could make. His claws came up and he raked the green phantom across the belly, tearing open skin and flesh. With another scream he jumped away and headed deeper into the forest, moving as fast as his dead legs could carry him, following no trail that Ayaan could see but merely stumbling through the brush and smacking into tree limbs like a man possessed.
She had a feeling that was exactly what he had become. She saw a round space had been hollowed out of the tree, behind its wide knot. Inside someone had placed an hexagonal mirror, its frame made of human finger bones. Dark energy streamed from the thing—magic—and Ayaan was careful not to look into the glass. Instead she took the green phantom’s staff and used it to smash it into bits of silver and jagged glass.
Then she turned around, and realized what fate had offered her.
The green phantom lay disemboweled on the path. His dry, papery guts slithered onto the ground next to him, his hands trying in vain to keep them in. He wasn’t even looking at her. Ayaan could kill him easily, smash in his head with his own staff or fire a bolt of her own particular kind of darkness directly into his brain. It would take a mere second of her time. The handless ghouls coming up the path would destroy her or perhaps the Tsarevich would kill her from a distance but that was immaterial.
She stepped closer to the green phantom, intending to finish him off—and then she stopped.
I see his heart. His black and dead heart!
The words moved through her head like a pebble rolling around on her tongue. Half her face lost all feeling.
You be caution in all things.
The words stopped her in her tracks. A thin trickle of drool fell from her numb lip.
“It’s your big chance, now,” the green phantom said. He looked up at her with bitter fear in his eyes. “If you want to prove yourself. If you want to live.”
“Yes,” Ayaan said, “I want to live.” The words fell out of her mouth. She had thought nothing of the kind.
“Then you’ll go after him. You’ll go after that furry cocksucker who just gutted me and you’ll find out what happened. Yes or no?”
Ayaan drew breath into her lungs, trying to clear her head, but the unnecessary air just wheezed out of her again. “Alright,” she said, all thought of killing the green phantom gone. It just wasn’t in her head anymore. She could feel where the thought had been but she couldn’t remember what it might have been.
Your friend has friend in me, she thought. A curious thing to think, but it didn’t bother her too much.
15
Sarah’s ankle caught on something metal and she went down, hard, the skin of her elbows coming off on the pavement, leaves and bits of vine bursting up around her like green smoke. “I’m alright,” she told Ptolemy, and started to get up.
The thing she’d tripped on was metal, black metal spotted with rust. She could kind of make out its shape, hidden under tons of vegetation, small trees and blowsy bushes that shook in the wind. She had tripped over a wing. The entire metallic object, which had to be fifteen feet across, was an airplane, a small airplane turned upside down with its nose buried in the ground.
She would have looked at it some more if she hadn’t heard an air horn just then. The sound vented up out of the tree-clogged streets on every side. She couldn’t tell which direction it came from. “What do they want?” she asked, as if she didn’t know the answer.
Maybe she didn’t. When she reached into her pocket for the reassuring angularity of her pistol, her fingers touched the soapstone scarab instead.
they Celt came for relics the relics of the Celt, Ptolemy told her.
Sarah got to her feet—her ankle felt sore but not broken—and they headed uptown again. Away from the last place they’d seen the mold maiden. If she tripped again Ptolemy was going to have to carry her. She didn’t doubt that he could but it would hurt her image as the leader of this farce.
“You were supposed to watch the Tsarevich,” she told him, panting a little. There was a kind of natural trail up Broadway, a strip of bare pavement where the trees hadn’t taken over quite yet. The flat asphalt felt strangely good under her feet. “Those were my orders.”
and were so i sentries did but there and were i sentries, he told her. i spotted was i spotted
It actually helped a little to know he wasn’t perfect. “So you came looking for me, to report?”
yes and found instead i found yes her The mummy raced ahead and grabbed something out of a tree. Sarah stopped and leaned forward, catching her breath. more there is more, he said, but she needed to process this one piece at a time.
“Just a second. So the Tsarevich didn’t even send her here to take over Governors Island. He sent her for—what did you say?—relics? What kind of relics?”
Ptolemy held an undead squirrel in his hands. Its tail would never be bushy again and it was missing one leg. When it saw Sarah it grabbed at her with its tiny paws, gnashed its teeth at her. Lovely. The mummy turned away from her and crushed the animal to oblivion. Had he not grabbed it when he did it probably would have jumped down onto Sarah’s neck. It would have torn open her throat. It was desperate for her energy. For life.
“Thanks,” she said, and then repeated herself. “What kind of relics?”
a sword armlet a rope a sword an armlet
Sarah sighed. He could be so literal. She lifted her legs, trying to keep them from stiffening up, and looked behind them. Scattered movement a couple blocks away got her moving again. “A sword. A rope. And an armlet,” she huffed. “What does he hope to do with them?”
make magic, Ptolemy answered, as if she had asked what a soldier did with a firearm. he ghost will make ghost he will magic
Ghost magic. Yeah. She knew how useful that could be. Maybe they should have kept the squirrel around. Maybe Jack could have possessed it and given them some pointers.
She could use some. She was running uptown, away from the mushroom queen, but also away from her boat. The survivors on Governors Island had assured her that Manhattan was almost free of ghouls, that they had all headed west. She wasn’t about to trust that, though, since she was already further up Broadway than any of Marisol’s people had been in twelve years.
There were some ghouls in Manhattan that she knew about. Weird, surgically maimed things in helmets that were hunting her like a deer. And they were lead by a female lich who could kill someone just by being near her.
the i spoke more something more i spoke of, he said from behind her, not even panting for breath. Well, of course, he didn’t need any, and anyway she didn’t know what effect breathing would have on telepathy.
it is ayaan about ayaan is it
That made her stop short. She just stared at him until he began speaking again.
lich she is dead a lich dead The words made Sarah’s head spin. Dead. Lich. Ayaan. Lich. Dead.
She couldn’t make them stop. “Shut up,” she said, to herself. He didn’t respond. She couldn’t make the words stop.
Ayaan was dead. Her rescue mission had failed.
When she had time she would think about that. In the meantime Sarah kept running. Ptolemy kept up with her easily. He could have run circles around her, frankly. Still, she was faster than the ghouls and that was what mattered.
Then she heard an air horn from the streets to her right and she knew that mere speed wasn’t going to save her. She had been about to head in tha
t direction, hoping to circle back to the harbor and find some way back to Governors Island. She tried to sense where the dead men were but the buildings blocked her arcane vision. She spun around in a slow circle, looking at the streets that seemed to head in every direction, searching the windows of the dead and hollow buildings as if they could tell her. “Which way?” she asked Ptolemy, but he didn’t even shrug.
Uptown again. Into the belly of the beast, and farther from safety than ever. She raced uptown and listened for horns behind her, for any sign of pursuit. When her lungs cramped and her body doubled over, unable to run another yard, she stopped. Ptolemy stared at her with his painted eyes. They never showed anything but a cool, intellectual repose. She wanted to smash in the plaster over his real face, his real skull. Wait, she thought, as breath raced in and out of her. There was something...
A dark stain had appeared across Ptolemy’s facial portrait. A smoky trail of mildew curled across his cheek like a worm eating its way through painted flesh. She grabbed his hands and saw spots on the linen that wrapped his finger, big colorless spots with paler rings around the edges, smaller spots like a spattering of some dark fluid.
Sarah dropped his hands and rubbed at her own fingers. A fine dusting of dark spores had come off on her skin. Her fingers started to itch and she scratched at them mercilessly. She backed away from the mummy as if he could somehow infect her, somehow make her—
A sudden banging noise behind her stopped her brain in mid-thought.
Sarah’s body spasmed with fear. She looked behind her and saw a little store with a plate glass window. What had made that noise? She couldn’t see anything moving, she could only see a kind of greasy stain on the window and—
A whip-thin ghoul in a stained maroon dress hit the glass face-first, hard enough to make the whole storefront shake. Her hands like bunches of twigs came up and slapped feebly at the glass, her body pressed against it. She must have been trapped inside that store for years—she had hit the glass with her face so many times her features were completely gone, smeared together into one homogeneous dark bruise. A few strands of blonde hair still stuck to her battered skull. As Sarah watched she drew her head back and launched it once more at the glass with a cracking noise.
Sarah couldn’t move, could barely breathe. She was too horrified.
The air horns came again, from two directions this time. Realizing she’d been paralyzed by a relatively harmless unorganized ghoul, Sarah started to hyperventilate. A handless ghoul appeared a few blocks away, half obscured behind some trees. It hadn’t seen her yet. She knew, however, that it wouldn’t try to recruit her. It would simply kill her the moment it found her.
“Go,” she said. She grabbed Ptolemy’s arm. “Go! Go take that thing out!”
She tried shoving him into the street but she might as well have tried to shove a bank vault. He turned his mildewed face to her for a moment, then shook off her arm. She couldn’t meet his painted stare.
She touched the soapstone but he didn’t have anything to say, for once.
He turned and started walking toward the ghoul, even as new air horns blared into life, seemingly from every direction. Sarah didn’t waste any time. She ran across the street and started tugging at doors, tried prying up window panes with her fingernails. Finally she found a basement-level entrance down a flight of stairs. The iron security gate had rusted half-open, wide enough for her to squeeze through. She opened the door behind it and ran inside, into a smell of old things slowly falling apart. She closed the door behind it and turned the creaking deadbolt.
Silence. She could hear the air horns outside, more and closer than ever, but there was a barrier between her and them. She felt the still, settled air of the basement room and she dropped to a crouch on the floor, her face buried in her hands.
Ayaan was dead. Her mission was a failure.
She had no idea what to do next.
16
It was dark in the fire lookout atop the ridge but moonlight came in through the windows and made dappled patterns on the walls. It curled around the broken radio, glistened on the peeling finish of the enameled chairs and table. It just barely reached into the bathroom where the dry toilet had become home to thousands of spiders. From time to time, putting aside all squeamishness, Ayaan reached through another stratum of ancient webs and scooped out a handful of them from the darkness inside. Then she would pop them in her mouth and chew them slowly. The wriggling on her tongue wasn’t so bad—it was the legs that got caught in her teeth that bothered her.
With every tiny life she took her body vibrated with joy. The hunger came back almost instantly but the shivering ecstasy of each new morsel was like nothing she’d ever felt before. She wondered, in the most private part of her mind, if it was what sex felt like for a living girl.
She had little to do but sit, and think, and wait. The fire lookout station offered few other opportunities to entertain one’s self. She had a small telescope with a scratch on one lens. It let her study the valley below. Nothing had happened since she’d arrived, her legs aching and rubbery as she powered her way up to the top of the ridge. Nothing had happened since she’d found the lookout and installed herself. Nothing would happen, she imagined, until dawn.
Erasmus stood down there as if at attention, his spine locked in perfect posture. He stood in the middle of a group of buildings, on a scratched-out section of land that she had decided was a barnyard. The barnyard lay in the middle of a fenced-off patch of land that sat in the center of the valley. Whatever magic had possessed the undead werewolf had drawn him directly to its dark and vibrant heart.
Ayaan suspected that whoever had laid the trap lived in the tidy little farmhouse down there. Like the barn and the silo it was protected by round wards hung from its eaves painted in bright geometric patterns.
They’re called hex signs, the ghost told her. The ghost who was trapped in a brain in a jar a hundred miles away. He was standing next to her, too, just barely visible in her peripheral vision. She turned her head and there was nothing there. She looked back at the valley and he was next to her again. They protect those who live inside, aye, but they need a taste of the life to keep them strong. Life’s blood, that is.
Ayaan nodded. There were plenty of goats down in the pen behind the barn. It could easily be their blood that activated the hex signs. Their energy that licked out of the signs in purple rays.
Magic was everywhere down in that barnyard. Death magic. It pulsed around Erasmus, pinning him like a dart in a dartboard. It flickered from the windows of the farmhouse and lingered like smoke around the tarpaper roof of the barn. Deep, dark beams of it escaped through the vents of the silo. There was something bad in there, something that needed half a dozen hex signs to keep it locked away.
“That’s what we’re here for, isn’t it?” Ayaan asked.
Aye. It’s not what you think, though, lass. Don’t fear it.
“Believe me, it’s rather low on my list of things to be afraid of.” Ayaan leaned forward, her chin resting on her steepled fingers. “You, on the other hand...” She fought the urge to look at him.
I’m your friend. I’m your best friend, under these circumstances.
“Friends don’t hypnotize each other. They don’t leave little commands buried in each other’s minds.” Semyon Iurevich, the mind-reading lich back in Asbury Park, had bound her with a spell. It had been his voice she heard telling her not to kill the green phantom. No, worse than that, his voice had wiped the very idea out of her mind. He hadn’t merely revoked her freedom. He had made it so it never existed.
And he had done so, she was certain, at the ghost’s behest.
Is that what’s worrying you? That I wouldn’t let you throw your life away?
“My life. Mine,” she said. “Do you think I like being this—this thing, this monster?” she gestured at her leathers.
I know that shame better than anyone, dearie. Don’t you come all indignant with me,
when I haven’t even a body to speak of. His tone softened, grew soothing and low. Listen, there’s a game here, a deeper game than you know. You haven’t even met all the players yet.
Ayaan let that go for a while. The ghost had power over her. She wasn’t going to talk him into relinquishing it—that never worked, never in the history of the human race had anyone given up power freely once they had it. You had to take it back yourself.
Something else worried her, though. “You want the Tsarevich dead, yet you made sure I would survive long enough to see whatever’s in that silo. You want us to find it, even if it means the Tsarevich gets it. What’s your scheme? At least tell me that much, tell me what you hope to gain from—”
He was gone, of course. She couldn’t sense him anywhere.
She went for another handful of spiders. When she came back she got a shock. Something was actually happening down in the valley. A light had come on in the farmhouse. It moved from window to window, then emerged from the door, and revealed itself to be a kerosene lantern. The man holding it glowed a brighter gold than the lamp in his hand. There was no question in her mind. This was the wadad, the magician who had enchanted Erasmus.
He wore a baseball cap low on his brow with the name JOHN DEERE on the front. Old bloodstains decorated his white t-shirt and faded blue jeans; more recent stains discolored his tan leather work boots. His face was ringed with a fringe of beard and hidden behind a pair of mirrored sunglasses, even though the sun had yet to rise.
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