Ghostland (37 page)

“What happened then?” came a chorus of voices.

“Evil recognized evil!” a strident male voice answered, and Aisling turned her head to see the Ghost seller who’d been present that night approaching the tables, his finger pointing accusingly at her.

He was dirty, his clothing torn and his eyes burning with zeal. The shoulder-length brown hair was tangled and matted, wild—and for an instant his image was overlaid onto one she’d seen in an art book—of the Christians’ savior raging as he cast moneylenders from the temple.

“Evil recognized evil,” the man repeated. “They attacked her and were thrown out of the club. The men were torn apart and eaten by wolves and dogs while the shamaness and her lover ran and the sinners inside cheered for the beasts. And now evil has come into our home, like some of us said it would when we argued against taking money for distributing Ghost.

“You were wrong, Edom, to deal with the wicked, to send us out to their places of evil. And now we’ll all pay for it unless He sees that we can abide by his word and are worthy of protecting.”

The man opened two of the boxes and, without looking, reached in and pulled out snakes. They rattled furiously, struggled and writhed in his grasp, mouths open.

“You shall not allow among you anyone who is an enchanter, or a witch, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a necromancer. You shall not allow them to live!” he screamed, hurling the snakes at Aisling and reaching for more of them.

People surged upward from their benches. They scrambled to get away from the snakes that coiled and struck and slid across the wooden table.

A child screamed repeatedly, shrill and terrified.

Zurael lunged. He deflected a snake before it could reach Aisling, then raced forward.

A man yelled as a snake swung around and bit his cheek while he tried to subdue the Ghost seller.

Zurael struck and retreated. Returned to coil at Aisling’s feet, mouth open, his upper body raised and swaying.

The Ghost seller fell, dead before he reached the ground—just as Zurael had promised would happen to anyone who threatened her.

The air vibrated with the rattle of snakes, then was pierced by the screams of a child abruptly silenced.

Men closed in on the freed snakes, recaptured the ones that held their ground, hunted the ones that slipped into the forest.

Only slowly did chaos give way to calm.

Aisling heard the sobs then, the pleading, impassioned prayers. She turned to find Elisheba and Edom kneeling on the ground next to the chubby toddler.

The child was unconscious, shivering. Puncture marks marred her throat and arms where she’d been bitten.

They’d used a knife from the table to slice open her skin. Now they feverishly tried to draw the venom out with their mouths. But the toddler’s condition was testament to how quickly it had already spread.

Aisling took off the necklace with the witch’s healing amulet on it and knelt next to Elisheba. “Will you accept my help?”

Edom looked up and spat blood. His eyes bored into hers, not with the charismatic charm that seemed to offer forgiveness and understanding, but with a diviner’s intensity, as if he was looking for the black stain of evil on her soul.

He glanced at his child. For a horrifying second Aisling thought they’d deny her help.

Elisheba reached across the tiny body and placed her hand on his arm. “Edom, please,” she said and he nodded.

Aisling hoped the amulet was as powerful as Tamara claimed. She pressed it to the wound on the girl’s neck.

The effect was immediate. The little girl stopped shivering. Her eyelashes fluttered, fast at first, then slower, as if she were being drawn back to awareness at the same rate the venom was being absorbed by the amulet.

Underneath Aisling’s fingers, the woven strands of the amulet softened and took on the texture of wet yarn before hardening again, turning from pale gray to black, and finally crumbling from the outer edges inward.

The angry streaks on the child’s arms and neck, left by the spreading venom, receded. Disappeared.

A whimper heralded the little girl’s return to consciousness. Elisheba stroked the damp, silver-blond curls and whispered prayers of thanks. She cried in joyous relief when her daughter’s eyes opened and chubby arms reached upward.

All that remained of the amulet was a large coin-sized circle. It had stopped changing against Aisling’s fingers so she lifted it away from the child’s skin.

Edom said, “Will you give what aid you can to Brother Samuel?”

“Yes,” Aisling said, looking for the man who’d been bitten on the cheek as he tried to subdue the Ghost seller.

Brother Samuel was lying on a picnic table, moaning in pain. His face was already grotesquely distorted by the swelling, his chest rising and falling rapidly.

Aisling wasn’t sure there was enough of the amulet left to save him. But she hurried to him.

Someone had cut across the puncture wounds left by the fangs, but little blood seeped from the opening. “Hold him down,” Aisling said.

Guided by instinct, by her experiences with the fetishes she carried and the entities they represented, she pulled her athame from its sheath at her back and cut across the man’s cheek, deepening the wound already there until it bled freely.

He screamed and thrashed. Lifted from the table.

Out of the corner of her eye, Aisling saw Zurael prepare to strike.

“No!” she said and quickly pressed the amulet to the man’s skin.

He shuddered. Continued to struggle until what remained of the amulet grew soggy, then hardened and finally fell away.

“I’ll be okay now,” the man croaked, rolling to his side and vomiting when the others released him. His skin was clammy, but the swelling was gone from his face.

On another table lay the body of the Ghost seller. Guilt hovered over Aisling for bringing death with her. But she didn’t allow it to settle on her. In her mind’s eye she saw the vision of the future captured in a pool of her own blood in the spiritlands—the gleeful images of a world where malevolent spirits easily found pathways back to the place they once called home.

Aisling glanced around her and was met by somber expressions. She turned to find Edom and Elisheba standing, the little girl in her mother’s arms.

Tension mounted in the silence. And into that silence came the slightest rustle of leaves as a breeze rose from her feet, swirled around her, lifting her hair and making her think Zurael had shed the snake’s skin and now waited to take on a far more deadly form than the serpent’s.

“If you were guilty of creating Ghost, more of you would be dead, perhaps most of you,” she said, deciding to tell them the truth. “I came here looking for the person responsible for it.”

Edom met her eyes for a long moment. A slight tremor went through him before he seemed to gather his natural charisma. He glanced around, pausing on some of the older members of his church, and said, “God is a living god. He’s a spirit. He doesn’t have a body, except us.”

“Amen.”

“Usually when He comes on us we’re in a prayerful state. He tells us to take up the serpent, to put
His
mark on our flesh. But not always.”

“Amen.”

“There was a time
He
moved on me and I saw an angel.”

“Tell us more.”

“You want to hear it was a beautiful sight.”

“Yes, Brother.”

“You want to hear I was filled with
His
glorious love.”

“Yes, Brother.”

“Well, I’m not going to tell you either of those things. I’m going to tell you it was a terrible sight. It filled me with fear, the same fear I have now, standing in the presence of this stranger—this stranger who appeared with signs following!

“But I’m thankful for the fear! I’m thankful for the chance to make things right before it’s too late.”

Edom pointed at the corpse laid out on the picnic table. “Brothers and sisters, we’ve been fooling ourselves about Ghost. It cost us a good man.”

“He was a good man,” came the reply.

“Brother Scott saw the message
He
delivered in that place of sin but didn’t know how to interpret it correctly. We’ve been telling ourselves it was all right because we weren’t breaking any laws, because what little money we took for it went to do
His
work. But no more!”

“Amen.”

“We won’t be part of the devil’s plan.”

“You got that right, Brother.”

“Amen,” Edom said, releasing the hold he had on his congregation and turning to Aisling, motioning her forward. “Only a few of us know where the drug comes from. It’s best if we keep it that way.”

The gathered church members dispersed, respecting the need for privacy. Women and girls started clearing the picnic tables. Men and boys clustered around the corpse, discussing burial details.

“She doesn’t think we know who she is,” Elisheba said when Aisling stood next to the preacher and his wife. “Edom and I are the only two people who’ve seen her face. If she guesses that we recognized her, the guardsmen will be given an excuse to kill us and none will question it or be the wiser.”

“Who is she?” Aisling asked.

“Ilka Glass,” Edom said, naming the predatory woman in red who’d so easily swayed the crowd at Sinners so they voted the Ghosting men out to their deaths. “She’s the wife of the man who’s in charge of the guardsmen.”

“And powerful in her own right,” Elisheba added. “She’s the daughter of one of the First Families to reclaim Oakland. Her husband has never come with her, but he must know or be a part of what she’s doing. There are more guardsmen hunting The Barrens on the days she gives us Ghost and collects what we took from those who bought the previous batch.”

A man’s voice interrupted. “Brother Edom, what should we do about this? It’s still full.”

Aisling shivered at the sight of the small, coffinlike container the Ghost seller offered her at Sinners in the seconds before a coldness swept into the room along with a malevolent presence.

Last one.

“Bring it here,” Edom said, and as if picking up on Aisling’s thoughts, he added, “We don’t have any more Ghost. Brother Scott took all that was left of what we got last month to the city. We won’t accept any more of it if it’s offered to us after the next full moon.”

“That’s when you get it?” Aisling asked, knowing the full moon was a week away and not surprised a substance like Ghost would most likely be created at a time when power for many supernatural beings peaked and the barrier between this world and the spirit one thinned.

“We get it the day after the full moon,” Elisheba said.

The man who’d discovered the container walked as if he was carrying a bomb that might detonate in his hand, or an item that might cause the heavens to open and a bolt of lightning to strike him. When he reached them, Edom took it from him and shoved it into Aisling’s hands. She fought the impulse to hurl it aside and wipe damp palms on her pants.

Her heart raced. She braced herself, almost expecting the spirit winds to claim her despite the onyx pentacle hidden in her fetish pouch and the thin slice of metal keeping the powerful substance contained.

Nothing happened.

Her heart rate slowed. The breath she was holding eased out.

Aisling slipped the container into her jacket pocket. Women and young teens were picking up baskets and gathering the smaller children, intending to return to the Fellowship compound hidden from view.

“Ghost wasn’t the only reason I came here,” Aisling said, finally locating Anya standing apart, her features wearing the shell-shocked expression Aisling had seen often enough on the faces of those left on Geneva’s doorstep. “I came for one of the children brought here from The Mission.”

“Recently?” Elisheba asked.

“Yesterday. She has a home elsewhere.”

“Ah, those children haven’t been taken in by families yet,” Elisheba said, relief in her voice. “Edom?”

He nodded. “Take the child with you. If you’ve been to The Mission, then you know there are many others we could raise in our community.”

Aisling glanced at the sky. The return trip would be faster since they wouldn’t need to search for the symbols leading to the Fellowship. If they hurried, they should make it back to the outskirts of Oakland in time to catch the bus and get Anya to the Wainwright house before dark.

“We’ll leave now,” she said, surreptitiously looking for Zurael but not seeing the serpent.

“May The Spirit stay on you,” Edom said.

“Amen,” Elisheba murmured.

Aisling went to Anya. The little girl took her offered hand, and surprised her by saying, “I dreamed you came for me.”

A wave of homesickness assailed Aisling as she thought about her sisters and brothers, especially the young, gifted ones. “I’m taking you to a family where you’ll belong.”

Anya nodded solemnly.

A church member gave Aisling a basket packed with food as they passed. “For your journey. May The Spirit stay on you while you’re in the land of sin.”

“Thank you.”

At the edge of the forest Aisling felt the hot breath of a swirling breeze pass by her. From the dark shelter of pine and oak, Zurael emerged to block the path.

Anya’s hand tightened slightly on Aisling’s. In the same solemn voice with which she’d greeted Aisling, she said, “You’re magic. Like the ferret.”

Zurael chuckled and the gentle expression on his face as he looked at the child sent warmth cascading down to Aisling’s toes. She handed him the food.

He leaned in, whispered a kiss across her lips. “Thank you. We’ll have to hurry if we hope to make it.”

They traded off, each of them carrying Anya, alternating between walking and running. They raced the sun, dodging the guardsmen and lawless humans patrolling The Barrens in the daylight.