Ghost Story (38 page)

From his place dangling over the pit, Morty said, in a slurred voice, “Tell him he ain't getting squat. Bitch can't have me.”

Listen lifted both eyebrows and looked at Lady Shade.

“I require his consent,” the Lady Shade said, her voice tight. “I will have it. Had you not interrupted me, I would have it already. Now dawn nears. It may be several hours after sundown before I complete the transfer.”

“Ah,” Listen said. Nothing in his tone made him sound overtly skeptical, but I got the impression that he was nonetheless. “Then with your leave, I will depart to carry word to my lord and trouble you no more.”

Evil Bob popped up into sight over Listen's shoulder again. “Are you sure you do not wish this creature to be
departed
, my lady?”

“Go in peace, Listen,” Lady Shade said without so much as glancing at Evil Bob. “Inform your lord that I anticipate that we will be able to move against the Rag Lady and her allies in the fortress sometime tomorrow evening.”

Listen bowed at the waist again; then he turned and, followed by the floating skull, stepped down into the floor, vanishing from mortal reality and into the spirit world.

The moment Listen was gone, Lady Shade waved a hand, and with reedy howls of protest, the wraiths in the pit were unceremoniously scattered from it, the heavy bass beat of the beacon spell coming to an abrupt halt. The will of Lady Shade pressed against them like the current of a river, and they were driven from the chamber, carried out through the walls and the floor by an unseen force.

I could feel it myself, the force of her will, simultaneously banishing the wraiths and commanding the attention of the lemurs in the chamber. I fought to hold still before it, to let it slide away from me around my veil, to use it to help me hide rather than being revealed by it.

“Children,” she said, her tone full of contempt, “beware: The dawn approaches. To your sanctums, all.” She turned to the Big Hoods. “Mortal dears. Mother is pleased with you. Keep safe the prisoner until nightfall. His life is worth the world to me. Guard him with your own.”

The Big Hoods shivered, as if they'd heard the voice of a god whispering in their minds, and bowed their heads as one. They murmured words of some kind of ritual devotion, though they were too mushmouthed for me to clearly understand them. The lemurs began clearing out at once, rising from their activities (or lack thereof) and departing, moving silently from the chamber.

I got lucky. None of them actually plowed into me by mistake.

“Well,” murmured Lady Shade to Morty. “We shall continue our discussion in several hours. You will have no food, no water. You will not be untied. I'm sure that sooner or later, you will see things my way.”

“I would rather die than let you in,” Morty replied, his voice a croak.

“You can't always have what you want, dear child,” Lady Shade said. Her voice was matter-of-fact, calm, and practical. “I will continue to hurt you. And eventually, you will be willing to do anything to stop the pain. It is an unfortunate limit of mortality.”

Morty said nothing. I couldn't tell whether he shivered at the coldblooded confidence in her voice, but I did.

And I realized, finally, who I was dealing with.

The Grey Ghost turned and sank into the floor, evidently moving into a demesne in the Nevernever. I waited until I was sure she was gone, then simply vanished, straight up, appearing over the streets of Chicago above. Dawn was a golden promise over the eastern horizon. I headed toward my grave as fast as I could possibly travel.

The Grey Ghost was a shade; that I knew. But where had the shade come from? From someone with a knowledge of possessing others' bodies. From someone who seemed confident she could confront the Wardens of the White Council, the cops of the wizarding world, and come out on top. From someone who had been known to this Omogh person, whoever he was, and who needed a body with enough of an innate gift for magic to support what was apparently a much greater talent.

Only so many people with a wizard's level of ability had perished in Chicago. Most of them had been foes of mine. I hadn't been the one to gack all of them, but I'd killed this one. With a gun, no less, from about ten feet away.

I reached the shelter of my grave and sank into it gratefully, still shivering.

Morty was in the hands of the Corpsetaker, one of the heirs of that lunatic Kemmler, a body-hopping wizard with a serious case of the long-term crazies and maybe three or four times my own ability with magic. If she got into Morty, I was guessing that, like me, she would have access to her full abilities once more. She would be able to start hopping bodies again, and pick up her career right where she left off.

And she'd start by killing Molly.

I'd survived my original encounter with her thanks only to the intervention of “Gentleman” John Marcone, a little bit of good luck and better guesswork, and some truly epic paranoia. She was an absolute, first-class threat, one I would prefer to avoid confronting at all, much less alone.

Sunrise came roaring over the land, and I felt grateful to have it between the Corpsetaker and me. I was glad to have a chance to rest while I could.

Things had gotten considerably more urgent.

Come nightfall, I knew, I was going to have to find a way to take her on.

I
huddled in my grave as the sun rose. I would have thought I'd be more nervous about a personally lethal, fiery cataclysm sweeping over the world, but I wasn't. When dawn came, it was like listening to a big truck roll by outside—dangerous if you were in front of it, but nothing but background noise if you weren't. My grave was peaceful.

I tried to track that feeling, to identify that sense of contentment I enjoyed down in the ground. It took me a few moments, but then I understood: It was like being in my basement apartment during a winter storm. Outside, the wind howled and the snow and sleet fell, but I was home with Mouse and Mister piled onto the couch for warmth, sipping a cup of hot chicken soup in front of a big fire in the fireplace, and reading a good book.

It was the same thing, resting in my grave. Peace. I wasn't going anywhere and it made me happy. If only I'd brought a book, my day would have been perfect.

Instead, I just leaned back against the earthen wall of the grave and closed my eyes, soaking in the quiet. I would be trapped here until sundown. There was no sense in chewing my own guts out worrying about what would happen that evening.

I drifted through my memories, sad and joyous and just plain ridiculous.

I thought about Elaine and me in high school. We had lived like superheroes: two young people with incredible powers who must hide themselves from those around them, lest they be isolated and persecuted for their different-ness.

I hadn't really been interested in girls yet when I met Elaine. We'd both been twelve, bright, and stubborn, which meant that we generally drove each other crazy. We had also been best friends. Talking about our dreams of the future. Sharing tears or a shoulder, whichever was needed. At school, we both found the subject matter to be tedious beyond bearing—in comparison to the complexity of Justin's lessons, acquitting ourselves well in the public-school curriculum had been only nominally more difficult than sharpening a pencil.

It was difficult to relate to the other kids, in many ways. We just weren't interested in the same things. Our magic talents increasingly made television a difficulty, and video games had been downright impossible. Elaine and I wound up playing a lot of card and board games, or spending long, quiet hours in the same room, reading.

Justin had manipulated us both masterfully. He wanted us to bond. He wanted us to feel isolated from everyone else and loyal to him. Though he put up a facade about it that fooled me at the time, he wanted us to work through our nascent sexuality with each other and save him the bother of explaining anything—or the risk of either Elaine or me forming attachments with someone outside our little circle.

I never suspected a thing about what he really wanted, until the day Elaine stayed home sick. Concerned about her, I skipped my last class and came home early. The house seemed too quiet, and an energy I had never sensed before hung in the air like cloying, oily perfume. The second I walked in the door, I found myself tensing up.

It was my first encounter with black magic, the power of Creation itself twisted to maim and destroy everything it touched.

Elaine sat on the couch, her expression calm, her spine locked rigidly into perfect posture. I now know that Justin had put the mental whammy on her while I was gone, but at the time I knew only that my instincts were screaming that something was wrong. A wrongness so fundamental it made me want to run away screaming filled the room.

And besides. Elaine only sat like that when she was making a statement—generally, a sarcastic one.

I still remembered it, plain as day.

 

Justin appeared in the kitchen doorway, on the other side of Elaine, and stood there for a moment, looking at me, his expression calm.

“You skipped class again.” He sighed. “I probably should have seen that coming.”

“What's going on here?” I demanded, my voice high and squeaky with fear. “What have you done?”

Justin walked to the couch to stand over Elaine. Both of them stared at me for a long moment. I couldn't read their expressions at all. “I'm making plans, Harry,” he said in a steady, quiet voice. “I need people I can trust.”

“Trust?” I asked. His words didn't make sense. I couldn't see how they applied to the current situation. I couldn't see how they would make sense at all. I looked from Elaine back to Justin again, searching for some kind of explanation. Their expressions gave me nothing. That was when my eyes fell to the coffee table and to the object lying quietly next to my well-mauled paperback copy of
The Hobbit
.

A straitjacket.

There was something quietly, calmly sinister in the congruence. I just stared for a moment, and the bottom fell out of my stomach as I finally realized, for the first, awful time, what my instinct had been screaming at me: I was in danger. That my rescuer, teacher, my guardian meant to do me harm.

Tears blurred my vision as I asked him, in a very quiet, very confused voice, “Why?”

Justin remained calm. “You don't have the knowledge you need to understand, boy. Not yet. But you will in time.”

“Y-you can't do this,” I whispered. “N-not you. You saved me. You saved us.”

“And I still am,” Justin said. “Sit down next to Elaine, Harry.”

From the couch, Elaine said in a quiet, dreamy monotone, “Sit down next to me, Harry.”

I stared at her in shock and took a step back. “Elaine . . .”

Justin threw kinetomancy at me when I looked away.

Some instinct warned me in the last fraction of a second, but instead of trying to block the strike, I moved with it, toward the front picture window, weaving my own spell as I went. Instead of interposing my shield, I spread it wide in front of me like a sail, catching the force of Justin's blast and harnessing it.

Me, my shield, Justin's energy, and that picture window exploded onto the front lawn. I remembered the enormous sound of the shattering glass and wood, and the hot sting of a dozen tiny cuts from bits of flying glass and wood. I remember being furious and terrified.

I went through the open space where the window had been, fell onto the lawn, took it in a roll, and came up sprinting.

“Boy!” Justin said, projecting his voice loudly. I looked over my shoulder at him as I ran. His eyes were more coldly furious than I had ever seen them. “You are here with me—with Elaine. Or you are
nowhere
. If you don't come back right now, you are dead to me.”

I lopped the last two words off the sentence to get his real meaning and poured on more speed. If I stayed, he meant to render me helpless, and from that beginning there could be no good endings. If I went back angry, I could fight him, but I couldn't win—not against the man who taught me everything I knew. I couldn't call the cops and tell them Justin was a mad wizard—they'd write me off as a nutcase or prankster without thinking twice. It wasn't like I could run to Oz and ask a more powerful wizard for help.

He'd never told me about the White Council or the rest of the supernatural world. Abusers like to isolate their victims. People who feel that they are completely alone tend not to fight back.

“Boy!” Justin's voice roared, now openly filled with rage. “Boy!”

He didn't need to say anything more. That rage said it all. The man who had given me a home was going to kill me.

It hurt so much, I wondered if he already had.

I put my head down and ran faster, my tears making the world a blur, with only one thought burning in my head:

This wasn't over. I knew that Justin could find me, no matter where I ran, no matter how well I hid. I hadn't escaped that straitjacket. I had only delayed it for a little while.

I didn't have any choice.

I had to fight back.

 

“What happened next?” asked a fascinated voice.

I shook my head and snapped out of the reverie, looking up to the sunlit sky outside my grave. Winter's hold was definitely weakening. The sky was grey clouds interspersed with streaks of summer blue sky. There was a lot of water dripping down the edges of my grave, though the snow at the bottom was still holding its chill.

The Leanansidhe sat at the edge of my grave, her bare, dirty feet swinging back and forth. Her bright red hair had been bound back in a long tail, and she was dressed in the shreds of five or six different outfits. Her head was wrapped in a scarf that had been knitted from yarn duplicating various colors of dirty snow, and the tattered ends of it hung down on either side of her head. It gave her a sort of lunatic-coquette charm, especially considering the flecks of what looked like dried blood on the pale skin of her face. She looked as happy as a kid on Christmas morning.