Patricia Briggs Mercy Thompson: Hopcross Jilly

by Patricia Briggs

  Blackwood didn’t see her, even though he had been using the other ghost as an errand boy. I wondered what it meant. She smelled like blood, too.

  He put me in the cage next to the one that he had been keeping Chad and Corban in. Presumably he didn’t need to confine Amber anymore. “This could have been so much more pleasant for you,” he said.

  The woman and her hushing finger were gone, so I gave my tongue free rein. “Tell that to Amber.”

  He smiled, showing fangs. “She enjoyed it. I’ll give you one last chance. Be cooperative, and I’ll let you stay in the other room.”

  Maybe I could get out through the roof of the other room. But somehow I didn’t think so. The cage in the Marrok’s house looks just like all the rest of the bedrooms. The bars are set behind the drywall.

  I leaned against the far side of my cage, the one that backed up to the cement outer wall. “Tell me why you can’t just order me around? Make me cooperate?” Like Corban.

  He shrugged. “You figure it out.” He locked the door with a key and used the same key to open the oakman’s door.

  The fae whimpered as he was dragged out of the cage. “I can’t feed from you every day, Mercy,” Blackwood said. “Not if I want to keep you around. The last walker I had died fifty years ago—but I kept him for sixty-three years. I take care of what is mine.”

  Yeah, I bet Amber would agree with that one.

  Blackwood knelt on the floor where the oakman lay curled in a fetal position. The fae was staring at me with large black eyes. He didn’t fight when Blackwood—with a look meant for me—grabbed his leg and bit down on the artery in the fae’s groin to feed.

  “The oak said,” the fae said in English-accented Welsh, “Mercy would free me in the Harvest season.”

  I stared at him, and he smiled before the vampire did something painful to him and he closed his eyes to endure. If he’d understood Welsh, I was sure he’d have done something more extreme. How the oakman knew I’d understand him, I didn’t know.

  There are two ways to free a prisoner—escape is the first. I had the feeling that the oakman was looking for the second.

  When he finished, the oakman was barely conscious, and Blackwood looked a dozen years younger. Vampires weren’t supposed to do that—but I didn’t know any vampires who fed from fae either. He picked up the oakman with no visible effort and tossed him over his shoulder. “Let’s get you a little sun, shall we?” Blackwood sounded cheery.

  The door to the room closed behind him, and a woman’s trembly voice said, “It’s because you’re too much for him right now, dear. He did try to make you his servant ... but your ties to the wolves and to that other vampire—and how did you manage that, clever girl?—have blocked him. It won’t be forever. Eventually, he’ll exchange enough blood for you to be his—but not for a few months yet.”

  Mrs. Claus ghost stood in the cage with her back to me, looking at the door that had closed behind Blackwood.

  “What does he want from me?” I asked her.

  She turned and smiled at me. “Why, me, dear.”

  She had fangs.

  “You’re a vampire,” I said.

  “I was,” she agreed. “It isn’t the usual thing, I admit. Though that young man you met earlier is one as well. We’re tied to James. Both his. John was the only vampire James ever made—and I blush to admit that James is my fault.”

  “Your fault?”

  “He was always so kind, so attentive. A nice young man, I thought. Then one night one of my other children showed me the murdhuacha James had captured—one of the merrow folk, dear.” That faint accent was Cockney or Irish, I thought, but so faint I couldn’t be sure.

  “Well,” she said, sounding exasperated. “We just don’t do that, dear. First off—the fae aren’t a people to toy with. Secondly, whatever we exchange blood with could become vampire. When they’re magical folk, the results can be unpleasant.” She shook her head. “Well, when I confronted him...” She looked down at herself ruefully. “He killed me. I haunted him, followed him from home all the way to here—which wasn’t the smartest idea I’ve ever had. When he took that other man, the one who was like you—well, then he saw me. And found he still had use for this old woman.”

  I had no idea why she was telling me so much—unless she was lonely. I almost felt sorry for her.

  Then she licked her lips, and said, “I could help you.”

  Vampires are evil. It was almost as if the Marrok himself were whispering in my ear.

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “If you feed me, I’ll tell you what to do.” She smiled, her fangs carefully concealed. “Just a drop or two, love. I’m only a ghost—it wouldn’t take much.”

  12

  “I COULD JUST TAKE IT FROM YOU WHILE YOU SLEEP dear,” the ghost said. “I was only trying to make it a gift. If you give it as a gift, I can help you.” She looked like the sort of woman you’d hire to watch your children, I thought. Sweet and loving, a little complacent.

  “You won’t,” I growled. And I felt a little pop of something. Something I’d done.

  Her eyes widened and she backtracked. “Of course not, dearie. Of course not—if you don’t want me to.”

  She’d tried to cover it up. But I’d done something. I’d felt it once before, in the bathroom at Amber’s house when I’d told the ghost to leave Chad alone. Magic. It wasn’t the magic the fae used, or the witches, but it was magic. I could smell it.

  “Tell me,” I said, trying to put some push behind it, imitating the authority that Adam wore closer than any of his well-tailored shirts. “How did Blackwood manage the haunting at Amber’s house. Was it you?”

  Her lips tightened in frustration, and her eyes lit up like the vampire she had been. But she answered me. “No. It was the boy, James’s little experiment.”

  Outside of the cages and out of reach was a table stacked with cardboard boxes. A pile of five-gallon buckets—six or eight of them—was on one corner. They fell over with a crash and rolled to the drain in the center of the room.

  “That’s what you were,” she called in a vicious tone that sounded wrong coming out of that grandmotherly face. “He made you vampire and played with you until he was bored. Then he killed you and kept playing until your body rotted away.”

  Like Blackwood had done to Amber, I thought, except he hadn’t managed to make her into a vampire before he’d turned her into a zombie. Here and now, I told myself. Don’t waste energy on what you can’t change just now.

  The buckets quit rolling and the whole room was silent—except for my own breathing.

  She shook herself briskly. “Never fall in love,” she told me. “It makes you weak.”

  I couldn’t tell if she was talking about herself or the dead boy or even Blackwood. But I had other things I was more interested in. If I could just get her to answer my questions.

  “Tell me,” I said, “exactly why Blackwood wants me.”

  “You are rude, dear. Didn’t that old wolf teach you any manners?”

  “Tell me,” I said, “how Blackwood thinks to use me.”

  She hissed, showing her fangs.

  I met her gaze, dominating her as if she were a wolf. “Tell me.”

  She looked away, drew herself up, and smoothed her skirts as if she were nervous instead of angry, but I knew better.

  “He is what he eats,” she said finally, when I didn’t back down. “He told you so. I’d never heard of it before—how should I have known what he was doing? I thought he was feeding from it because of the taste. But he supped its power down as he drank its blood. Just as he will yours. So that he can use me as he wants to.”

  And she was gone.

  I stared after her. Blackwood was feeding from me, and he’d gain ... what? I drew in a breath. No. The ability to do just what I had been doing—controlling a ghost.

  If she’d stuck around, I’d have asked her a dozen more questions. But she wasn’t the only ghost around here.

  “Hey,
” I said softly. “She’s gone now. You can come out.”

  He smelled a little differently than she did, though mostly they both smelled like stale blood. It was a subtle difference, but I could discern it when I tried. His scent had lingered as I’d questioned the old woman, which was how I’d known he hadn’t left.

  He had been the one in Amber’s house. The one who’d almost killed Chad.

  He faded in gradually, sitting on the open cement floor with his back toward me. He was more solid this time, and I could see that his shirt had been hand-sewn, though it wasn’t particularly well-done. He wasn’t from this century or the twentieth—probably sometime in the eighteen hundreds.

  He pulled a bucket free of the pile and rolled it across the floor, away from us both, until it hit the oakman’s empty cage. He gave me a quick, sullen look over his shoulder. Then, staring at the remaining buckets, he said, “Are you going to make me tell you things?”

  “It was rude,” I admitted, without really answering. If he knew something that would help me get Chad, Corban, and me out of there in one piece, I’d do anything I needed to. “I don’t mind being rude to someone who wants to hurt me, though. Do you know why she wants blood?”

  “With blood, freely given, she can kill people with a touch,” he said. “It doesn’t work if she steals it—though she might do that just for spite.” He waved a hand, and a box tipped on its side, spilling packing peanuts on the tabletop. Five or six of them whirled up like a miniature tornado. He lost interest, and they fell to the ground.

  “With her touch?” I asked.

  “Mortal, witch, fae, or vampire: she can kill any of them. They called her Grandmother Death when she was alive.” He looked at me again. I couldn’t read the expression on his face. “When she was a vampire, I mean. Even the other vampires were scared of her. That’s how he figured out what he could do.”

  “Blackwood?”

  The ghost scooted around to face me, his hand going through the bucket he’d just been playing with. “He told me. Once, just after it had been his turn to drink from her—she was Mistress of his seethe—he killed a vampire with his touch.” Lesser vampires fed from the Master or Mistress who ruled the seethe, and were fed from in return. As they grew more powerful, they quit needing to feed from the one who ruled the seethe. “He said he was angry and touched this woman, and she just crumbled into dust. Just like his Mistress could do. But a couple of days later, he couldn’t do it. It wasn’t his turn to feed from her for a couple more weeks, so he hired a fae-blooded prostitute—I forget what kind she was—and drained her dry. The fae’s powers lasted longer for him. He experimented and figured out that the longer he let them live while he fed, the longer he could use what he’d gained from them.”

  “Can he still do that?” I asked intently. “Kill with a touch?” No wonder no one challenged him for territory.

  He shook his head. “No. And she’s dead, so he can’t borrow her talents anymore. She can still kill if he feeds her blood. But he can’t use her now like he used to before that old Indian man died. It’s not that she minds the killing, but she doesn’t like to do what he wants. Especially exactly what he wants and no more. He uses her for business, and business”—he licked his lips as if trying to remember the exact words Blackwood had used—“business is best conducted with precision.” He smiled, his eyes wide and innocent. They were blue. “She prefers bloodbaths, and she’s not above setting up the killing ground to point to James as the killer. She did that once, before he’d realized he wasn’t still controlling her. He was very unhappy.”

  “Blackwood had a walker,” I said, putting it together. “And he fed from him so he could control her—the lady who was just here.”

  “Her name is Catherine. I’m John.” The boy looked at a bucket, and it moved. “He was nice, Carson Twelve Spoons. He talked to me sometimes and told me stories. He told me that I shouldn’t have given myself to James, that I shouldn’t be James’s toy. That I should let myself go to the Great Spirit. That he would have been able to help me once.”

  He smiled at me, and this time I caught a hint of malice. “He was a bad Indian. When he was a boy, not much older than me, he killed a man to take his horse and wallet. It made him not able to do the things he should have been able to do. He couldn’t tell me what to do.”

  The malice freed me from the distracting pity I’d been feeling. And I saw what I’d missed the first time I’d looked him in the eye. And I knew the reason that this ghost was different from any I’d seen before.

  Ghosts are remnants of people who have died, what’s left after the soul goes on. They are mostly collections of memories given form. If they can interact, respond to outside stimuli, they tend to be fragments of the people they had been: obsessive fragments—like the ghosts of dogs who guard their masters’ old graves or the ghost I’d once seen who was looking for her puppy.

  Immediately after they die, though, sometimes they are different. I’ve seen it a couple of times at funerals, or in the house of someone who’s just passed away. Sometimes the newly dead keep watch over the living, as if to make sure that all is well with them. Those are more than remnants of the people they’d been—I can see the difference. I’ve always thought those are their souls.

  That was what I’d seen in Amber’s dead eyes. My stomach clenched. When you die, it should be a release. It wasn’t fair, wasn’t right, that Blackwood had somehow discovered a way to hold them past death.

  “Did Blackwood tell you to kill Chad?” I asked.

  His fists clenched. “He has everything. Everything. Books and toys.” His voice rose as he spoke. “He has a yellow car. Look at me. Look at me!” He was on his feet. He stared at me with wild eyes, but when he spoke again, he whispered. “He has everything, and I’m dead. Dead. Dead.” He disappeared abruptly, but the buckets scattered. One of them flew up and hit the bars of my cage and broke into chunks of tough orange plastic. A shard hit me and cut my arm.

  I wasn’t sure if that was supposed to be a yes or a no.

  Alone, I sat down on the bed and leaned against the cold cement wall. John the Ghost knew more about walkers than I did. I wondered if he’d told the truth: there was a moral code I had to follow to keep my abilities—which now seemed to include some sort of ability to control ghosts. Though, with my indifferent success at it, I suspected it was something that you had to practice to get right.

  I tried to figure out how that talent might help me get all of us prisoners out of there safely. I was still fretting when I heard people coming down the stairs: visitors.

  I stood up to welcome them.

  The visitors were fellow prisoners. And a zombie.

  Amber was chattering away about Chad’s next softball game as she led Corban, still obviously under thrall to the vampire, and Chad, who was following because there was nothing else for him to do. He had a bruise on the side of his face that he hadn’t had when I left him in the dining room.

  “Now you get a good night’s sleep,” she told them. “Jim’s going to bed, too, as soon as he gets that fae locked back up where he belongs. We don’t want you to be tired when it’s time to get up and be doing.” She held the door open as if it were something other than a cage—did she think it was a hotel room?

  Watching the zombie was like watching one of those tapes where they take bits that someone actually said and piece them together to make it sound like they were talking about something else entirely. Sound bites of things Amber would have said came out of the dead woman’s mouth with little or no relation to what she was doing.

  Corban stumbled in and stopped in the middle of the cage. Chad ran past his mother’s animated corpse and stopped, wide-eyed and shaking next to the bed. He was only ten, no matter how much courage he had.

  If he survived this, he’d be in therapy for years. Assuming he could find a therapist who’d believe him. Your mother was a what? Have some Thorazine ... Or whatever the newest drug of choice was for the mentally ill.

 
“Oops,” said Amber, manically cheerful. “I almost forgot.” She looked around and shook her head sadly. “Did you do this, Mercy? Char always said that you both suited each other because you were slobs at heart.” As she was talking, she gathered up the buckets—though she didn’t bother cleaning up the broken one—and stacked most of them where they had been. She took one and put it inside Chad and Corban’s cage before removing the used one in the corner. “I’ll just take this up and clean it, shall I?”

  She locked the door.

  “Amber,” I said, putting force in my voice. “Give me the key.” She was dead, right? Did she have to listen to me, too?

  She hesitated. I saw her do it. Then she gave me a bright smile. “Naughty, Mercy. Naughty. You’ll be punished for that when I tell Jim.”

  She took the bucket and whistled when she shut the door. I could hear her whistling all the way up the stairs. I needed more practice, or maybe there was some trick to it.

  I bowed my head and waited for Blackwood to bring the oakman back with my arms crossed over my middle and my head turned away from Chad. I ignored it when he rattled the cage to catch my attention. When Blackwood came in, I didn’t want him to find me holding Chad’s hand or talking to him or anything.

  I didn’t think there was a rat’s chance in a cattery that Blackwood would let Chad live after everything he’d seen. But I didn’t intend to give the vampire any more reason to hurt him. And if I lowered my guard, I’d have a hard time keeping the fear at bay.

  After a time, the oakman stumbled in the door in front of Blackwood. He didn’t look much better than he had when Blackwood had finished with him. The fae looked a little above four feet tall, though he’d be taller if he were standing straight. His arms and legs were oddly proportioned in subtle ways: legs short and arms overlong. His neck was too short for his broad-foreheaded, strong-jawed head.

  He walked right into his cell without struggling, as if he had fought too many times and suffered defeat. Blackwood locked him in. Then, looking at me, the vampire tossed his key in the air and snatched it back before it hit the ground. “I won’t be sending Amber down with keys anymore.”