by Amy Lane
Her smile through her tears was a thing of beauty. “Josh Greenaway, your heart has never been anything but pure. Today’s going to fade away, but your love? I will never doubt that. Do you hear me?” Her bra was still unfastened, poufing up the front of her shirt, ignored, and Tucker felt a surge of love and admiration for the two of them that almost brought him to his knees.
Josh nodded, still destroyed, his face showing the marks of the terrible struggle that had occupied his body for so long, even in the long shadows of the setting sun.
“Oh holy fuck,” Tucker muttered. “It’s almost sunset. You guys, get the fuck out of here.”
Rae grabbed Josh’s hand and pulled him around the still-glowing silver-blue of the trap. They got to the other side, and Rae stopped. “Tucker, what are you going to do?”
Tucker smiled grimly, his vision going gray for the umpteenth time. He wondered if he was bleeding into his brain, if his ribs were bruised, if the agony in his wrist would somehow cause cardiac arrest.
“I’m going to tell his story,” Tucker said. “Angel? Angel, where—”
“Please don’t,” Angel said, and Tucker looked up. Angel was hovering above Conklin, glaring at him, keeping him pinned in place like a hawk would keep a rabbit, with his gaze alone.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t do what you’re thinking of.” Angel looked away from Conklin, and Tucker saw something so broken inside Angel, so frightened, that he was surprised Angel could still hover there like a ghost. He had to be human, didn’t he? Ghosts weren’t that afraid for another soul, were they?
Except James Beaufort had been. He’d been worried about his sister.
And Conklin—that level of hatred often sprang from fear.
“Angel?” Tucker said, voice trembling. “You’ll call me back, right?”
Angel shook his head and shrugged. “They’re all broken—the rules. The ones I used to keep you safe last time. I don’t know how to fix them, Tucker. What if I can’t?”
Tucker looked into the trap, saw Conklin’s ghost pacing like a tortured animal. “Then kill me and wrap me in the wire,” he said, thinking at least the pain would be gone. “Conklin’s spirit can rot with mine, and the world will never know him again.”
“Tucker, no!” Angel screamed, and Tucker took three careful steps into the pentagram.
Monsters
ANGEL WATCHED Tucker step inside the pentagram and right into Thomas Conklin’s soul.
And then his terror for Tucker, his fear for his injuries, his aching dread for Tucker’s battered soul, faded, and in its place was the same thing that had sustained him through all of those years with Ruth.
The story of the dead.
He saw, from his position above, Conklin remember being a child, riding a horse, excited because of the freedom, the power of the great animal, the joy of a successful lesson.
He wielded the whip with precision but not cruelty. This child was entitled but controlled. He was wealthy but not sadistic.
Not yet.
“Did you see, Meeks? Did you see me ride?”
The handsome young groom who took the horse as he approached the stable did not look excited. He nodded and grunted, pushing his blond hair from his blue eyes while saying the appropriate words: “Ya rode well today, young master.” But he eyed the child with loathing that twisted his pretty pale features into something awful. Thomas didn’t see.
“Thank you, Meeks. Would you like my help with the horse today?” The words sounded schooled, as though the boy was not naturally polite but was trying very hard.
“Naw. Is not fer yer grace to be getting filthy in the stables, is it?”
Young Thomas’s face fell. He had no idea what he could have done to irritate this man, but the man was an employee with a grudge. “I would like to help,” he said, smiling prettily. He was young, just out of puberty but not yet considered a man, and the look Meeks gave him was… unpleasant.
The unpleasant, covetous look of the groom was the only warning Angel and Tucker got before the memory changed.
Young Thomas was on his hands and knees in the straw and fetid horseshit, and the thing happening to him—the pain being driven through his rectum—was excruciating.
Tucker screamed, his body feeling every tear of flesh, and Angel dropped from his hover, landing in the center of the pentagram to hold Tucker through the pain.
And then they were both lost in Conklin’s consciousness, their bodies living through agony, their souls being twisted like the pendant that now hung on Josh Greenaway’s neck, heated in the crucible of pain and betrayal and reforged into a different shape.
When the rape was over, Conklin collapsed to the dirty straw, weeping, blood running from his mouth, from his nose, from his backside. He sobbed into the horseshit, confused as to how his belief in human goodness had gone so terribly wrong.
“Get up,” Meeks snarled. “Pull up yer pants. Ye think yer precious dad’ll care what I just did? It’s no more than what he did ter me. Who’s the woman now? Who’s the mewling whore? Now get out of my stable. Next time just let me brush the fuckin’ horse!”
The boy pulled himself up, sniveling. “I don’t need to tell my dad what you did to me,” he said, the sneer that would line his face permanently beginning in that moment. “I can fire servants same as he can.”
“Do it and I’ll tell all yer friends ye put out like any whore,” Meeks said with a cruel laugh.
For a moment, Thomas’s heart shriveled, but then his eyes narrowed. “You could tell them,” Conklin said, bending down and picking a hoof pick up out of the straw. “But no one will listen to a one-eyed fucker like you!”
He turned and swung the hoof pick, and while he hadn’t been strong enough to fight Meeks off when they’d been wrestling in the straw, he was more than strong enough to drive the thing through Meeks’s eye.
Later, when he was describing the incident to his father, he said the groom had gotten impertinent, and they’d scuffled. That he’d defended himself, as was only proper.
His father had looked coldly at Meeks, cowering and holding a towel to the tatters of his eye, and then pulled out a gun and shot him in the head.
Conklin gasped, staring at the twitching corpse of his adversary, and his father put his hand on his son’s shoulder.
“Nobody touches us, son. Nobody.”
But that wasn’t true, was it? Because his father touched him that night.
And again, and again, until Conklin found the first rich woman he could marry and moved far from home.
And had a son.
Angel came back to himself with a thump and squeezed Tucker’s hands in panic, the rough towels wrapped around Tucker’s wrist and fingers rasping under his palms.
Tucker looked back, brown eyes troubled—but sane.
“I’m sorry,” he said, as though speaking to himself. “That was a terrible thing to have happen. That was a terrible way to grow up.”
“Nobody feels pity for me!” The words were coming from Tucker’s mouth, but the voice was Conklin’s. “I take what I need, and I don’t need your pity!”
“Oh, but you do,” Tucker said softly. He looked at Angel and squeezed his hands back. Then he let go and nodded up with his chin.
Angel shook his head.
Tucker nodded again. “Go,” he whispered. Angel lifted up, hovering, about a foot, and Tucker rolled his eyes and backed up just a little. “Thomas Conklin Senior, I can lay you to rest. I can put a name on your coffin and let you find peace.”
“You will do what I tell you to do—”
Angel sank to the ground again and seized Tucker’s hand.
And saw the struggle inside. It was like watching the men, all but naked, in a wrestling match. But Tucker had Conklin—the grown, fiftyish man in his prime—pinned.
“I will not!” Tucker gritted. “You can concede and let me lay you to rest or—”
“Or what?” Conklin sneered.
Tucker’s grin was
feral, triumphant, the snarl of the warrior who had won the pitched battle.
“You’re getting weaker, Thomas. Can you feel it? I can feel it. While we’ve been toodling down memory lane, your strength has been sucked into the earth of Daisy Place. You’re feeding the foundation right now, soldering the gold and the silver and the iron into an unbreakable, alloyed mass. This part of the yard won’t be a sponge for souls anymore, you understand? It will be a watershed, where they can escape and fade into dust if they’re peaceful. Only the angry souls need stay. Do you feel it? The freedom here? But not for you.”
Conklin almost broke free. He thrashed, his elbow catching Tucker in the jaw and then in the eye. Tucker’s nose broke—again—with a crunch, and Angel cringed, knowing that if he were to see Tucker from the outside, he’d see the injuries appear as though from nowhere, the blood and the bruising covering him, while Tucker could barely stand.
But that was his body.
His spirit was strong here, and he kept holding, kept his arms locked, until Conklin’s struggles weakened.
“What’s it going to be?” Tucker asked, his voice muffled by the blood but still sound.
“My hatred will never die,” Conklin rasped.
Tucker stood, dropping Conklin’s body on the mat.
“Then the heat from your anger will forge this place more tightly together,” he said sadly. “You could have had peace. Warmth and sleeping in the sun. You’ll have the coldness of iron, the cruelty of silver, the absolute mercilessness of gold. Just remember—it was your choice this time. What happened in the stable, that was wrong, that was against your will. What happened later, with your father—that was worse. But this? You chose this. You chose to inflict that on Sophie. You chose your afterlife.”
Tucker met Angel’s eyes with his own and winked.
“What you can’t change, you need to live with, Conklin. Or die with, if it’s your time.”
Angel stepped back then and hovered, looking around him at the darkening sky. Rae and Josh were still there, staring anxiously at Tucker, and Angel was so grateful for other humans he could have cried.
“Tucker,” he called. “Tucker!”
Tucker’s body broke free from the circle, leaving Conklin’s fading soul in the center, lying on the ground. The broken boy had become a powerful man, but that power had been a lie. What was left was a shell, the twisting headless snake, the defeated wrestler who couldn’t get up.
If Conklin’s soul were to bother anybody ever again, it would be as a particularly lowly toxic worm, one that could be crushed underneath a sneaker or driven over by a car—or salted like a slug by a child’s laughter.
James Beaufort had been right. Conklin had lost to his abusers the moment he became one, and now he’d lost to his own malice, his pitiful spirit writhing in the dust.
Angel didn’t care about him anymore.
Tucker had been facing the dirt road when he stepped into the pentacle, and when he’d stumbled, he’d stumbled backward.
Straight into the crowd of waiting ghosts.
Even Angel recognized Damien, his face pulled back in a rictus of triumph as Tucker delivered himself to his worst nightmare.
“Oh no. No! Tucker!”
Tucker looked at Damien, and the self-possession he’d shown in the face of Conklin’s evil disintegrated. His mouth twisted and trembled, and the strength that had held him up through it all crumbled.
“Damie,” he cried and sank helplessly to his knees.
The Unsullied Souls of Men
“DAMIE!”
Oh, everything hurt. Tucker’s body was one big throbbing mortal pain. His nose was going to explode through his brain. But he’d do it all again, throw himself in a car and charge a brick wall, if he could escape the fury on Damien’s face.
“I’m sorry,” he sobbed, at a loss. Rae and Josh were fine. Conklin was vanquished. There was only Tucker and his ghosts, and Tucker had been alone for so long.
“Ouch!” There was something burning in his pocket. He recoiled from the fury of the ghosts surrounding him, closer and closer, and reached into his pocket to see what it was.
James Beaufort’s button was cool to his fingers, but he swore he’d have the print of that damned sailing ship tattooed forever on his thigh.
“Dammit,” he muttered. “I promised.”
“Who’d you promise?”
Tucker looked up, into the ghostly twisted face of the man he’d loved since boyhood.
And Damien Columbus looked back curiously.
Gone were the tatters of flesh remaining after the bullet destroyed his head.
Gone was the recrimination of the vengeful spirits.
In their place was just… Damien.
Happy-go-lucky Damien, whose life had always seemed charmed, and whose smile had gotten Tucker through his worst days.
“I promised someone I’d help him find his way home,” Tucker muttered, wiping his bandaged wrist under his eyes, carefully avoiding his nose.
“Well, if you promised them, you need to follow through,” Damien said seriously. “I mean, I used to get mad at you, right?”
“You did?” Tucker asked, lost and drifting.
“Yeah. You’d never promise you could meet me, never promise we could do something. You didn’t want to disappoint me if you couldn’t make it.”
“I wanted to make it, so bad,” he whispered.
Damien fell to his knees on the dirt in front of Tucker. “I know that now,” he said.
“Then why are you, and the others, so angry?” He let out a sigh and slumped into the earth a little more. “You’ve been scaring the hell out of me, Damie.”
Damien’s hand went to brush Tucker’s hair back from his brow, but Tucker didn’t feel it. Didn’t even feel the passage of it. It was like Angel’s touch had taken the place of the touches he’d longed for from Damien.
“I don’t know,” Damien said softly. His mouth quirked up a little, and Tucker wished he could move. He’d love to trace that lush mouth. Just once. To say goodbye. “I know I was pissed about being dead,” he pondered. “But not at you. Not until we saw you, and it was… it was like those movies about lynch mobs, where you forget who you are and only think about the hate. You were alive, and we hated.”
“I don’t want you to hate me,” Tucker begged, too weak for pride. “I loved you for so long.”
Damien’s gaze contained the infinite compassion of a thousand angels. “I know, Tucker. I loved you too. I was so afraid. You couldn’t promise anything. And then I just loved you so much I had to tell you. I thought we could work it out, promises or not. But I was selfish. You’d told me, and I ignored you—”
“It wasn’t your fault.” Tucker’s throat ached so much he almost didn’t get the words out. “It wasn’t…. I should have….”
“It wasn’t yours either.”
Damien framed Tucker’s face in both hands, though Tucker couldn’t feel it. Would never feel it again. Only Angel’s hands—those he could feel. “You need to believe me,” Damien said softly. He looked behind him, and as though from mist, the other ghosts—the familiar ones of those Tucker had missed—materialized, as human as they’d been the day their lives had ended.
“I’m sorry,” Tucker told them. “I tried—”
“I was depressed for a really long time,” said a pretty, pale girl, the razor stripes at her wrists still bleeding. “Yeah, maybe you could have helped, but maybe you couldn’t have. Maybe I was just in too much pain. You tried—that means something. A complete stranger tried.”
“I got on that train every day,” said a middle-aged man in a suit. “I went to a job I hated. I could have turned my life around without you. It’s not your fault I slipped on the tracks that day and hit my head.”
Tucker couldn’t argue; he couldn’t even stand. He could only sit there and listen, mute and weeping, as the people he’d hated himself for, one by one, came forward and told him that it wasn’t his fault.
He’d w
anted to help.
He’d tried.
He was only one man.
He could hardly breathe for the tears by the time they were through.
“See?” Damien told him. “Forgive yourself, Tucker. We forgive you.”
“Will you be at peace?” Tucker asked. “Can you leave now that we’ve fused the foundation?”
They looked at each other, frowning like sleepers from a collective dream.
“Yes,” Damien said slowly, a man testing the boundaries of his world with his mind. “But… but we’re tied to you. We’re conscious because you know us.” Damien shook his head. “Tucker, we’re in a bubble here. Can you feel it? As soon as we’re gone, as soon as we find freedom and peace, the rest of the spirits here are going to converge on you. We can’t protect you, and we can’t hold this forever.”
Tucker remembered Angel, afraid of letting go. He must be panicking. He’d broken so many rules of heaven already. Maybe Tucker could break one or two of his own.
“Just long enough for a kiss,” Tucker begged. “That’s all I wanted that day. All we never got.”
“We would have been glorious,” Damien whispered. Close, so close. Tucker couldn’t smell him, couldn’t feel his breath.
“I would have loved you until time ended,” Tucker told him.
“Maybe we’ll have each other then.”
Tucker closed his eyes and felt it, the whisper of their lips together, their first last kiss goodbye.
He opened his eyes, and Damien was backing away. “Get up, Tucker. We can hold them off for a little while, but you need to make a break for it. Please, baby, live to fight another day, okay?”
Tucker planted his good hand on the ground and pushed up. The brightness of the bubble they’d inhabited was growing dim, dark as the night beyond, and he turned grimly toward the dirt road. The trap was fading, Conklin’s spirit on its last dregs, but Tucker wouldn’t risk breaking that, not when it was so close to done. Instead he turned toward the end of the trap, ready to run away from the graveyard and hopefully make it to the property line.