Ghost Shadow (Moon Shadow Series Book 4) (25 page)

“There’s another restaurant several buildings over.” He waved at the exit on our left.

This particular room looked newer and was swept cleaner than the previous ones, but it was crowded with what might have been the remains of the other buildings. There were at least three statues of praying saints and a large table that was probably an old altar. Only two carved legs remained, so someone had taken the time to prop the side with no legs against a set of adobe bricks that formed a shelf along one partially tiled wall. No plaster remained on the bricks; they just hung on the wall, pieces of straw and dirt.

Gilded paint on several items was now little more than tarnished brown specks. An old chandelier, the type that required real candles, rested on the floor. Deep niches three-quarters of the way up the walls still held candelabra and half-melted candles.

As we exited beneath an arched doorway, I swear the gargoyle perched on the edge blinked at me. Must have been the dusty light. The half-bat, half-dog stone statue was an odd, mismatched piece for a monastery, but Lynx did say that Tino had reclaimed several old buildings. Some of them had to have been used as something other than a monastery at some point.

We were almost through the next corridor when Spook showed up, nearly giving me a heart attack. He nipped at my jeans, chiding me for leaving him behind. “I didn’t know we were going this way,” I told him.

Lynx looked back and shook his head. “That dog is spooky.”

Spook wagged his tail in happy acknowledgment.

The next doorway was obviously the back of a building in use. The wooden staircase with thick, scuffed planks led to a second floor. The space housed two simple bedrooms with a modern bath. Muted kitchen noise floated up from the floor below. “This is the back of The Monastery restaurant, second floor. The other half of the second floor is behind this wall. It’s a balcony where the musicians play on weekends. There’s an emergency exit that way, but we don’t use it because of the crowds.

“The first floor is the dining area. There aren’t any meeting rooms like at The Owl, but it’s easy to come and go here without being noticed because it looks like you’re just coming for a meal and then leaving a couple of hours later.”

The second bedroom had a hidden doorway. The stairway past the door was tight.

The bell tower contained an old bronze bell that was anchored into place and sealed around the edges. There was space for a single bed, an antique oak desk and a matching set of drawers. The wood floor was warped in places and hadn’t been polished in a long time. One frayed Navajo rug bordered the side of the bed.

Adriel and White Feather were crammed inside next to Aunt Brenda and Espy. The aunt had lost weight and worry was adding wrinkles to her face.

The aunt recognized me immediately, the girl shortly thereafter.

She jumped in front of Espy. “You!”

Her vehement reaction wasn’t a huge surprise. It wasn’t every day a ghost showed up in the flesh.

Lynx stepped closer to me. “She’s the one who made sure you got out of the hospital.”

Espy peeked around her Aunt Brenda. “Shadow.” She stared at me with big brown eyes. Her cute braids were starting to grow out, frizzing near her head. She was far more serious than any nine-year- old deserved to be. Fear radiated from her so loudly, it was sound and touch.

“You know my name?” The weave wasn’t such a one-way ticket after all, not for the right people.

“Did you follow us here?” she asked instead.

I shook my head. “I didn’t know where you were, only that staying in the hospital was a bad idea.”

Her Aunt Brenda closed her eyes briefly, her shoulders relaxing. “We sneak out to the park in the mornings, and this afternoon we took a second jaunt because Espy was so restless. I thought you had seen us and followed us back.”

“Leaving here isn’t very safe,” Adriel scolded. “Even with the new protection spell, it’s not a good idea. I’m not certain anything but another soul can disguise her from a demon.”

Aunt Brenda tightened her arm around Espy. “It may not be safe, but she needs exercise. We can’t stay cooped up here forever.” She hesitated. “I’ve watched carefully. It’s hard to tell if anyone follows us. So many people come to eat here.”

That was the point of the place. My mouth was dry when I tried to swallow. I wondered what else Espy had picked up from In Between besides my name. Names were important. They were always attached to the life lines that leaked through. Everyone knew their name, except me. I had forgotten mine, left it behind or it had been ripped from me. But the new name had stuck, and she had felt it from across the weave. Maybe she had picked up other things as well. “Do you know the name of the creature stalking you?”

Espy’s eyes widened. “The stuff in my blood? It does have a name. But it’s all jumbled. There’s more than one name like it’s tacked on every person that it’s touched.”

“Is your name there?” Fear nearly choked my voice.

Every eye was on her. Lynx was barely breathing.

She sniffled and stared at Spook. He had floated to the top of the bell and sat there watching us. “I don’t like to get close to it. I can’t get rid of the blood. The other witches came, the healers. But they said they can’t separate it out.”

Adriel’s head jerked. “Mom and Tara came earlier today. Tara tried the trick she used on the tat ink last year, but it didn’t work.”

I didn’t know what trick had been tried, but the girl was marked just as surely as Troy had been marked. “It’s demon blood. It’s after your soul.”

Aunt Brenda’s face tightened.

“There’s not a lot of it,” Espy reassured her aunt. “And besides, I told you, I keep it away.”

“We have to bleed it out!” her aunt hissed.

I shook my head. “It’s not really blood like our blood. It’s something else. But I don’t think she was infected with much of it. The problem is that if the demon comes through, it can track its own blood. I am not sure it’s possible to hide from it.”

“Even though we’re in a monastery? Doesn’t that protect us?”

Adriel answered for me. “There are old lines of magic here. Some are protective. I’ve added new ones too, here and where you sleep. There’s holy water in the spells. That will help, but I’m not sure it can dilute the smell of the blood.” She turned to me. “Does the demon have any of her blood?”

“I don’t know. It depends on whether anyone extracted blood from Espy after the IV.” I hesitated. “I saw the demon blood mix with Espy’s, but Espy was hiding from it.”

“We moved her out as soon as you told me to,” Lynx said.

I nodded. “But time is warped by the weave. Just because I didn’t see anyone extract blood after the IV doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”

Espy made a fist. “It does not have any of me or my soul. Aunt Brenda taught me a long time ago how to shut the ghosts out. I can’t banish them the way she does, but I can shut them out. So when it came for me, I shut it out. But I can’t make it leave.” Tears welled in her eyes. “Can you get it out?”

I clicked my fingernails to signal Lynx and slipped sideways. The tip of Espy’s finger was a boiling black. The energy churned against itself, unable to leave or merge with her energy.

“What about an exorcism?” her Aunt Brenda asked.

I slipped back inside my body. Everyone was looking at me with high expectations. I hated to let them down. “She’s right. She has it contained. By itself it doesn’t have much power. If we banish the demon back to where it belongs, the demon blood may go with it. Or lose any potency. Right now what she carries is more like a mark that the demon can smell.”

“How do we send it back?” Aunt Brenda demanded.

Lynx and Adriel answered at the same time, “We need the demon’s name.”

Espy held up her finger. “There are sounds there, sort of like when I hear the name of a ghost. But I never saw the demon, not the whole thing. Just this thing in my blood.”

“She’s only nine,” her aunt cried. “You can’t expect her to hunt down and exorcise a demon!”

“Maybe one of the names is enough,” I hoped aloud.

Espy sighed. “It’s not exactly a name.” She waved the infected hand. “It’s a sound. More like...like a song, but it’s ugly.”

I shuddered, thinking of the hellish music the demon had played. “Well, that fits. Can you duplicate the sound?”

She shook her head vehemently. “No way. It’s just an ugly scream. There are names, but it’s an awful noise like the time my brother ran over my bike in the driveway. Only it’s longer than that.”

I nodded. “Like a violin played with a rusty metal bow, breaking the strings right in the middle of the notes. But maybe if you can’t play back the names there is someone who can. We just have to figure out how to let him hear what you hear.”

“Can’t I just give him the demon blood? Won’t he hear the sound too?”

All eyes were on me again. “Well. The problem is, he’s dead.” The room sucked in a disappointed breath.

Before dismay could take further hold, Espy giggled. “That’s not really a problem, not for me. I just need to meet this friend of yours.”

“We are
not
going demon hunting,” her aunt protested again.

“No, no,” I agreed. I turned to Lynx.

He answered before I asked. “Roberto. Maybe we should have kept that guitar a little longer. He might need it to reach Kyle.”

I smiled and clicked my fingernails. Slipping just a little bit sideways, I felt behind my ear before sliding back. “I still have Kyle’s guitar pick. All we need is Roberto to tell the guys where to be. Then maybe Espy can help Kyle hear the name that’s contained in the blood.”

Chapter 32

We retreated single-file down the stairs, but instead of accessing the tunnels, we turned right and used an unmarked door that led to a closet. White Feather did an air check to make sure the hallway was empty before we stepped out. The flooring here was a beautiful new hardwood that matched the woodwork that swallowed the door as it shut silently behind us.

Across the hall from where we emerged there was a door labeled, “Employees Only.” From the sounds behind it, it must lead to the kitchens. Another door along the hallway led to the employee bathrooms.

White Feather and Adriel left via the door at the opposite end of the hallway that led to the restaurant.

“They’ll meet us out front and drive us back to The Owl,” Lynx explained.

We waited a few seconds before strolling up to the same door they had used. Noise from the front leaked back here, and the only lighting was a small scone.

Lynx fidgeted, his head cocked back towards the hidden exit. He could probably hear whether anyone was close by outside the door, but I couldn’t. If I really needed to know I could have floated sideways or sent Spook, although the dog seemed able to hear too because he stepped forward right as Lynx reached back and grabbed my hand again.

I tensed, waiting for the lights to go out.

His smirk told me I’d been had.

As we slipped forward again, the door marked “Employees only” opened and a lady with a mop stepped through.

I recognized her from the hospital and finally placed the picture in Amy’s apartment. The cleaning lady was dressed nearly the same as when I’d seen her through the weave doing laundry. She did not wear her name tag with “Julia” this time, but no one paid attention to cleaning staff anyway. If she had smelled Espy and found her outside earlier, all she had to do was grab a mop and show up to clean. No one would stop her and no one but me could see Amy’s face hovering over hers.

Amy’s mother was stooped over and far more aged than the face that had been next to Amy in the photo. Her smile from the picture was nothing but bitter wrinkles now. Dead shark eyes sunken into her face matched the lifeless set of Amy’s ghost eyes floating in the head above hers.

“Lynx!”

Spook yelped a warning and spun around in a dead run back the way we had come, zipping faster than most four-legged dogs. I didn’t blame him. Even without sliding sideways, the ghosted image around Amy’s mother’s head was clearly visible.

Amy’s youth and beauty had been stripped away. A few remaining strands of hair stuck out from her head, like straw pieces clinging to an adobe brick. Her ghost face was a demented screaming thing with elongated teeth and a jaw that was completely unhinged.

Lynx ruined every diner’s meal in the restaurant with a high-pitched cat scream.

I don’t know what he saw. Maybe to him it was just a cleaning lady, but the body that housed Amy spurted forward faster than any normal human was capable of moving.

Lynx grabbed my shirt and twisted it, crushing the pack underneath. I had forgotten about the illusion spell he and Adriel had given me. There wasn’t time for it anyway. Lynx had badly misjudged Amy’s speed and abilities.

My staff was up and behind him as he faced me. I hugged him between the staff and my hands, stopping Amy’s claws from connecting with his back. I knew what her touch could do. She wasn’t stealing any part of Lynx, not his flesh and not his energy. With my arms around him, he was momentarily trapped, but he heard the scrape of danger as my staff connected with her raw power.

The illusion spell snapped into place. Other than an odd wavering fog, it made no difference to me.

Lynx twisted under my arms as I spun sideways and around him, jabbing to keep Amy back.

Lynx yelled, “Run!”

The kitchens and back door were behind us. So were the tunnels, but those led to Espy, and she was Amy’s real target. With matching blood, Amy would have a younger body, a fresh soul and more power.

“Not in this lifetime,” I ground out. Lynx couldn’t fight the thing that was Amy on his own.

Then again, the swipe he took at her arm not only left a bloody gash, it almost tore it off.

White Feather and Adriel burst through the door leading to the restaurant. A stiff wind slammed into Julia’s body, but Amy wasn’t deterred in the least, and she was by far the larger danger.

I snapped the staff at her ghostly figure, dead center with splash of energy meant to kill. No point in wasting my efforts.

The pulse slammed into her, forcing her face down directly on top of Julia’s head. With Amy slightly dazed, the physical shell nearly collapsed. There was nothing of Julia left. Amy must have finally consumed her soul. She may not have wanted to use her mother up, but it was beyond too late now.