Ghost Shadow (Moon Shadow Series Book 4) (19 page)

“You gave human blood to the demon?”

“Of course not. We called him, took his blood and then banished him. If I’d really handed over human blood, I’d have had to break the circle, and we knew better. As soon as he used the syringe to extract blood, we told him to get lost.”

“We? Who could possibly have been idiot enough to help you?”

From this side, she was all ghostly gray except for the surge of black that occasionally pulsed through the veins of her face. Her eyes flashed with that same black flame in response to my question. “Ted would have done anything to save me. Just like Troy was helping me until you interfered!”

“Ted. The murdering bastard I tried to fight off.”

Patrick grunted. “He was briefly a patient here until someone spirited him away and locked him in a room marked as a lab after he started craving human flesh. Turning zombie was a side effect of the demon blood, no doubt.”

That explained the zombie that had attacked Lynx. “You and Ted both injected the demon blood. But you died anyway?”

“I would have died sooner without the demon blood. Because of you, I ran out of time and died!”

Her pinprick eyes glared at me. “Ted welcomed me, but even with demon blood he was rotting away. I had to cross back to In Between. But the demon was there, and he could smell me.”

Patrick had regained some of his composure. “It wasn’t the demon blood or lack of it that killed Ted. It was you sucking him dry. When Ted’s soul was consumed, you had no choice but to return to In Between. The demon blood kept Ted’s body animated, and that same demon blood would still have craved human flesh.” The vampire’s eyes were cold, but with anger, not hatred. He might lack a soul, but he wasn’t a soul sucker. Just a blood sucker.

“Why try to possess the vampire?” I didn’t dare look at either vampire. “They are already dead.”

“I only need a body for a short time. This is a perfect solution, and it won’t hurt anyone. Vampires have already solved the problem of not dying or rotting. I only need it until I find the one we prepared.” She turned her face to Patrick. “The demon blood will leave you stronger and better. It’s an even trade!”

Patrick must not have cared for her assessment, because he placed himself between Tina and Amy in less than a heartbeat.

I kept my eyes on Amy since tracking the vampire wasn’t possible anyway. “This won’t work.”

“Yes, it will! As soon as Tina picked the bag with the demon blood, I followed her here. Demon blood to demon blood, I can inhabit her body. It was the mistake I made when I tried to possess you. You didn’t have any demon blood in your system so I couldn’t force possession of your soul. But I’ve learned.” She flung a hand at Patrick. “It was perfect until he showed up!”

I stared at the circle, at the physical drops of blood. “You didn’t draw that circle from In Between. Ted is dead and gone, so he didn’t do it either. Someone else is helping you.”

Lynx hissed.

“The door was locked.” I glanced back at it. “But someone living drew that circle.”

Amy smirked. “I’m more powerful than you know.”

I shook my head. “If you could survive for even a few seconds, you’d have bridged the gap and possessed Tina. But you haven’t, because you can’t. Who is helping you?”

“Tina would have heard any living heartbeat that followed her.” Patrick’s teeth were bared, his lips pulled back in an inhuman snarl. Fresh anger interfered with his speech. “Free her!”

If I hadn’t learned to understand animals on the other side, I’m not sure I’d have understood him now.

Lynx planted himself in front of me. “How we gonna do that?”

I knew the answer. “We break the circle of blood. Only the living can break through it. Patrick can walk through it all day long, but it would only trap him. The berries I threw were ghost energy, which was dead, but I have the live ones.”

I tossed one, then another, rapid fire. The circle wobbled, but didn’t shatter. I’d have to cross the damn line.

Lynx’s reflexes were faster than mine. He pushed a packet across the line between two drops of demon blood using a single claw. When he swiped that same claw back, the concrete screamed.

A high-pitched grating noise vibrated across my bones and shot through the weave. The sound of hounds baying split the air. It was mixed with what might have been a broken bow across an untuned violin.

Amy’s wail as she was sucked backwards cut off when the weave snapped closed.

Chapter 25

I could have told Lynx that snapping the line the way he did was not the best idea. It could have blown him backwards or worse, sucked him into the circle. Luckily, between the berries I threw and whatever was in his packet that crossed the line before he did, the rogue energy circle burst outward.

Tucked completely inside my living body, the blast was a snapping wind that stung like sand. The smell of blood and sulfur tainted the air. My ghost self shivered.

Patrick ducked behind his leathery wing and grunted, but other than experiencing some level of pain, he appeared unscathed. Spook jumped behind me and stayed there.

Lynx stepped in front of me too late to buffer me had it mattered.

“Amy is out of time,” I said. “Troy and the scent of his energy is gone. The demon is able to track her again. Somehow she escaped through the portal after we snatched Troy’s ring back. Whoever was hosting her must have helped her with this diagram.”

“Where’s the body if she used up another host?” Lynx sniffed the air suspiciously.

“Whoever it is must have bolted after drawing the circle to ready Tina. Is there another way in and out of here? Secret or not, Amy could have discovered it from In Between.”

Patrick’s head spun my way. I held my hands up in a “not-threatening you” way. “Amy can watch through the weave without making a sound. I know because I did it often enough. She could have bounced back and forth from here to In Between, planning, spying and using a host to prepare the blood and the circle.”

He turned back to Tina, lifting her gently. “Your warning is appreciated, late though it has proven to be. There was no one here when I entered other than the hole to that other place. I was barely in time to stop her from jumping into the circle.”

“Why not just permanently possess whoever was helping her?” Lynx wondered.

I shrugged. “Maybe whoever is helping her is too strong and knows a way to hold her off without escaping to In Between like I did.”

“Or the host is running out of soul to feed her,” Patrick said.

On that ominous note, Lynx ushered me out of the room, leaving Patrick to care for Tina.

By the time we climbed in the car, Spook had appeared in the backseat. “Good dog.” I wished he were more substantial so I could wrap my arms around him in a giant hug.

Lynx drove without saying a word until I asked, “Will Tina be okay even though she drank demon blood?”

He slanted his eyes at me. “Do you really care?”

“Dead people aren’t inherently bad. The whole drinking blood thing is disturbing, but it beats a lot of other things I’ve seen.”

“’Trick will take care of her. If anyone can save her, he can.”

“I hope the demon’s blood doesn’t allow Amy to come back and make herself at home. Even if Amy finds a host here, the only way she can stay is to keep absorbing life.”

“’Trick should have smelled the scent if someone else was in that room.” He shook his head. “But there was a lot of blood smell and a lot of magic. The blood stinks like it’s been dead a long time, yet it’s mixed in with fresh blood. Either way, I didn’t smell any humans.”

“If Amy possessed someone even temporarily, maybe that person smells like Amy now.”

He frowned. “When Roberto opens a portal to In Between, there’s a smell of damp and dead. Sometimes magic, sometimes a whiff of burning, but mostly there’s dampness mixed with scents I can’t identify. The wet is like this buffer that blocks me from smelling what might be there. ’Trick’s room smelled like that today. If there is a human helping her, there isn’t much of one left because it doesn’t smell human anymore.”

That I could believe.

Chapter 26

Even with a relapse that left me able to do little more than sleep and eat the next day, by the following morning, it was time to start paying my debts. There didn’t seem to be a way to accomplish much of anything without involving Lynx, so I shared the story about Kyle and his wife. “I need to deliver the message to her.”

Lynx rubbed his face, his eyes closed. “Okay. I’ll find them. Maybe Roberto can help.”

My hands clenched. “I don’t know if Kyle’s music stopped the demon. He and Martin may not have escaped.” I looked up in time to catch a Cheshire grin.

“Don’t worry about Martin. He knows to have an escape hatch. I’ll check out the address Kyle gave you. Meanwhile, you gotta get some protection. I don’t know the right spell, but Adriel, she’s the best there is. If there’s a spell that can watch over you when you’re roaming outside yourself, she’ll know one or she’ll invent one. I can always duplicate it later once we figure it out.”

Lynx drove me to Adriel’s and walked me to her doorstep. Instead of knocking, he turned away from the door. “She’s in the garden around back. You don’t need me for this. It’ll just make her suspicious if I hang out. I’ll check on the other business.”

He strode back to the car, leaving me in front of the neat stucco residence. The house could have been carved straight out of the rocks around it. When I slid sideways, colored lines were visible, winding through and around it. The odd mix of silver and icy blue energy wrapped all the way around the house, flickering as I scooted around back to find Adriel.

Sure enough, she was standing in the midst of an herb garden. She must have heard me coming because she was staring right at me as I rounded the corner.

I stopped on a nearby sandy patch to avoid stepping on any of the plants. “Lynx says you’re the go-to person for spells. Martin talked about you, too.”

Adriel raised an eyebrow. Talking to her face-to-face for the first time, I noticed her left eye had a green streak dancing through the brown like a lightning bolt. My Aunt Violet flashed in my memory with the words,
witch mark
. I sucked in a breath because I’d seen Violet cross In Between, but hadn’t realized she was my aunt at the time.

“You don’t sound convinced that I can help,” Adriel said.

Maybe she was insulted by my lack of faith. I pulled my attention back to the present. “It’s a tough problem. I need protection.”

She crossed her arms and studied the dirt at our feet as if she were reading critical information from it. Maybe she was. Martin and Lynx said she was an earth witch.

I waited patiently. Martin had often spent time like this, thinking far away. At least she wasn’t singing.

Taking a chance, I slid sideways just enough to watch the energy around her. The ground at her feet was white, just as it was under Lynx. There were masses of silver energy coiled around her bracelet and neck. Her wedding ring was a blinding white.

“Did you tell Lynx what kind of protection you needed?”

I snapped back to myself, a little shaky from the rough transition. It wasn’t difficult to shift sideways, but I’d done too much of it the day before yesterday and hadn’t fully recovered. I needed to learn better control and strengthen my reserves.

“Are you okay?”

I nodded, but that made the ground tilt. “I need to sit down.” And I did so, right on the dirt. It was a welcome relief. If I could learn to draw energy from the ground the way Lynx did, or store it in a bracelet, my life would be a lot easier. “What did you ask me?”

“The part about you being okay or the part about whether Lynx knows what kind of protection you need?”

“Oh. He said he could cover basic protections, but I needed something stronger.”

A smile bloomed across her face. “I
knew
it! He’s been copying my spells. I told him I’d train him, but being a sneaky cat, he’s been learning on his own. His education would be much broader if he was willing to accept some direction.”

Feeling better, I eased back to standing. “He prefers back doors.”

“Yes, he does. Okay, you require more than basic protection then. He must have been disappointed. That kid loves to have all the answers.”

That was one way of putting it. Lynx had thought long and hard on the problem, asking me all kinds of questions before deciding he needed Adriel to help.

There wasn’t an easy explanation for my problem, but I gave it my best shot. “Let’s say I was in the hospital, in a coma. And I didn’t want anyone touching me, but I couldn’t protect myself. I can’t move. I don’t want anyone taking my blood—Lynx said to add that part—and I don’t want anyone giving me anything either.”

She stared at me and blinked. Even without being sideways, I noticed a flash of electricity spark around her bracelet.

“Moonlight madness! Do you think someone will knock you into a coma again? Because it’s a lot easier to keep you out of that state in the first place than it is to protect you after the fact.”

I shook my head to stop the flow of words. “That won’t work. It’s a state I can achieve on my own whenever I need to. But when I do, I’m vulnerable. Even if Lynx follows me around and guards me, which he seems to do whether I’m in a coma or not, I have no way of protecting myself.”

Adriel was quiet for so long, I thought she’d already given up on the problem until she asked, “You can visit that place—In Between, you called it. Whenever you want?”

“No.”

She stared at me. “Okay. That’s not where you go.” Her fingers rubbed her turquoise bracelet. The electrical charge traveled up her arm. “I don’t ask questions. I just help clients.”

“He said he’d pay you, but I’d rather work off my own debts. I’m not entirely certain what I’m good at yet, but—”

She waved a hand. “We’ll work something out. And even if we didn’t, I have a running tab with Lynx. At any given time I probably owe him three hundred dollars.”

“It’s better if I pay my own way.”

“But Lynx will do what he wants either way. He always does. If he says you need protection, then you need it, one way or the other. Can I assume he’s given you something to hide your appearance?”