Hellsinger 01 - Fish and Ghosts (P) (MM) (31 page)

Winifred just didn’t seem to be cooperating.

“Tris! Duck!” Wolf yelled at him, but the words were muffled, the sound of the man’s voice barely breaking through the cotton in Tristan’s head. “Get. Down!”

“What?” Tristan had turned to see what Wolf was talking about when Winifred’s arm elongated out of her body, snapping toward him in a slithering wave of pale mist and dead flesh.

He couldn’t move fast enough to block Winifred’s attack, and she struck hard. Wolf proved to be no obstacle for the ghost’s nearly solid form. Her rubbery appendage smacked Wolf aside, sending him flying back over the reception counter. Tristan ducked, hoping to roll out of the way or at least hide behind something until he could figure out a way to stop her, but she found him.

And sank her fingers down through his shirt and into his chest.

Pain. It was all he could feel. It overwhelmed him in its intensity, and Tristan wasn’t certain he could find its beginning, even though the specter’s fingers were clearly diving down into his sternum, past the bone and into his soft tissue. She worked through him, and Tristan lost the air in his lungs when her hand passed straight through him to pop out of his back.

He tried to pull away, but the woman’s arm held him fast. A torrential fire burned inside of his lungs, flickers of its heat spreading outward to touch at the twisting ache of his muscles and nerves. Tristan tried to catch his breath, taking in small jerks of air only to find he couldn’t pull in much more than a huff or two before the pain began anew. Stumbling back, he slammed into the reception desk, Winifred’s hand clenched into a tight fist between his shoulder blades.

Her corporeal flesh gave somewhat against the wooden counter, and Tristan slammed back again. Some small part of his consciousness warned him against the lingering presence in his body, even if he couldn’t form a coherent thought. He lost everything to the pain, especially when it ratcheted up another notch and a soothing darkness began to creep up around the edges of his mind.

It would be so easy to give into the darkness, especially with its promise of peace and surcease.

Easy enough until Tristan heard Wolf calling out to him through the crackling noise of his body cooking around Winifred’s arm.

He pushed back again, forcing his hands up to close around the ghost’s flesh, then pulling away as hard as he could, using the countertop behind him to leverage the woman out of him. Wedging her hand against the wood seemed to help. Whatever powers the ghost had now, they didn’t include passing through walls or wood, because her hand was a solid lump against the desk’s side.

He’d gotten her to withdraw a few inches when she flew toward him, bringing her decayed form up against his, smearing a shadowy, inky grime over Tristan’s skin and clothes.

The dead woman’s mouth hadn’t quite kicked into a working model, and her chin slid around as she tried to form a sound, but her face certainly worked well enough to make out what she was trying to say.

“Diiiiiie.”

She wasn’t real, Tristan reminded himself, but it was hard to believe that when the stench of her breath was burning his nostril hairs.

“You first, bitch.” Wolf appeared behind Winifred, rising up over her shoulder.

His cupped hands were full of shards of salt that sparkled in the dim light, the thick grains’ surfaces catching the flames of the remaining banks of candles. Wolf slammed his palms into the dead woman’s sunken cheeks and growled something Tristan couldn’t quite catch.

Whatever he said… whatever its meaning was… it was enough to burn through Winifred’s hold, and she fell away, screaming in a shuddering agony as she pawed at the dripping remains of her face.

A face that really was made of nothing but shadows and sand.

Fine grains dribbled out of the thready dregs of Winifred’s cheeks. The tautly stretched skin over her skull was burning where the salt touched it, turning to ash and crumbling off the shadowy construct below. Her tongue lashed about in the emptying space along her jaw, anchored to something Tristan couldn’t quite see, but it was obvious by the murky plumes now pouring out of the smoking ruins of her face, her tongue wasn’t going to stay hidden much longer.

No sooner did he have that thought than the sand-and-smoke-formed organ convulsed violently. Spurting out of a hole in the side of Winifred’s face, it struck the floor with a solid, moist-sounding thump. Once there, it twitched and writhed for a few seconds, an angry gray slug furious at being ejected from its den.

Amid the howling, Tristan and Wolf skirted around the desk, crunching through specks of fallen salt, sand, and broken candles as they hunted for some cover. The table was too far away to be useful. Too small, really, since Gidget and Matt took up refuge behind its wide circular top, and the reception area was too open, despite the pigeonholed demi-wall built up behind it.

It was the best they could do, and Tristan dove behind its somewhat useless shelter, the winds cutting through the lobby dampened slightly by the counter’s high rise.

Winifred’s tongue did its best to follow them, a tripe-like skinned golem intent on its prey. It humped along the floor, undulating its unwieldy mass through the debris to reach Tristan’s hiding place, and he watched in sheer horror as the thing flopped around, inching closer with each screech Winifred let loose from her now denuded skull.

“I need to grab some more salt,” Wolf practically screamed into Tristan’s ear. “Stay here.”

“What about that?” he asked, pointing to the determined tongue heaving its bloated mass across the parquet.

“I don’t know. Make a sandwich? Maybe with a nice golden mustard?” Wolf kissed the corner of his mouth, and Tristan was left with the taste of the cinnamon candy he’d sucked on during the séance mingled with the smokiness of Wolf’s natural flavor. “Hold our position, Pryce. I’m going in for reinforcements.”

“Be careful. Apparently we’re supposed to be going for Chinese after this,” Tristan replied. “I want to read what my fortune cookie will say. Should be interesting.”

“Deal.” Wolf got to his feet and took a look around. “I’ll be right back.”

The other man sprinted across the lobby toward his mother, leaving Tristan behind. Another peek at the tongue startled Tristan into action. It had gotten much closer, wiggling and flopping nearly six inches while Wolf kissed him.

As he ran, Wolf’s foot passed over the muscular organ, and it arched up, a moment too late in its attempt to touch Wolf. Denied its new prey, it resumed its slow sea-cucumber flailing dance. As Tristan watched its uncoordinated crawl, it lurched another few inches, rapidly closing the distance between its initial landing place and the reception desk. A smoking trail of gunk curled up in its path, its pseudo-flesh smearing ichors on the wood and pieces of its form falling off where it made contact with any of the spilled salt.

“If I’m going to die by anyone’s tongue, it’s going to be Wolf’s.” Tristan ducked back behind the desk as Winifred’s arm swooped out and nearly struck his head. “Shit, this is like a game of Whack-A-Mole.”

He spotted a silver letter opener he’d left on one of the desk’s shelves. Originally from a writing set his uncle insisted once belonged to Elizabeth I, the piece was heavy and sharp enough Tristan often used it to carve apples as he waited for guests to arrive during the morning hours.

“That’ll work. Silver is good.” He couldn’t remember if silver actually worked for anything other than werewolves, and even then, there wasn’t any guarantee. Despite his connection to the Grange, Tristan knew he was woefully uninformed about the supernatural, and if it hadn’t been for a cheesy George Hamilton movie, he’d have thought silver would work on vampires too.

Hefting the letter opener, he steadied himself with a long, hard breath. “Okay, tongue. Now we do battle.”

It was much larger than he expected. So much bigger than it had been a few feet away, because when Tristan peeked around the side again, the smoldering organ was nearly the size of a gorged, legless Chihuahua, and from the way it was flailing, about as pleasant.

Tristan leapt around the corner, arms stretched out and makeshift dirk at the ready. His aim was slightly off, but it was keen enough to plunge the letter opener through the bulbous tip of the tongue’s end. Pinned to the floor, it began to struggle violently against its capture, its flesh tearing slightly from the silver opener’s sharpened edges.

The tongue leaked something black and sticky from its flesh, and wherever Tristan got it on his skin, it burned slightly, pocking up the area with small red spots. Despite the blade plunged through it, the tongue refused to give up its hunt and struggled to break free by dragging its end against the sharp edges to split its own flesh.

“Fucking hell.” Tristan ducked another fling of Winifred’s arm, her fingers narrowly missing his explosion-mussed hair. A few feet away, Wolf flung something into the ghost’s face, and she retaliated, screaming her defiance in a garbled mess of sound.

The salt under his hands and knees was uncomfortable, and he sat back on his haunches, feeling the crunch of the crushed grains under his shins. Staring at his hands, a small light bulb—probably not much brighter than one of Meegan’s candles—went off in his head.

“Fuck. Salt.” He frantically looked around, spotting the small sweeps of grains around him. “Wolf
just
used it. God, Tristan. Think sometimes.”

It took him longer than he’d hoped to gather enough of the salt from the floor to make a decent-size pile, and by the time he had a handful, Winifred’s tongue had worked its way free of the letter opener. With its back end spread apart much like a dissected fluke worm, it was turning over to begin its slog when Tristan scooped up his ammunition and jumped the unsuspecting tongue.

The handful of salt he’d gotten off the floor proved to be enough. He plunged his cupped hands over the squirming pseudo-meat, driving the chunky grains deep into the tongue’s severed flesh. Trapped between Tristan’s salty skin and the grain-covered floor, the tongue thrashed about, struggling to free itself from the burning torment capturing it.

Using all of his weight, Tristan pressed down, smashing as much of the salt as he could get into the tongue’s surface, pausing long enough to scoop more on before leaning on it again. Thick smoke began to swirl up from the tongue’s flat, rough surface, and the familiar burn of the thing’s odd sticky core began to eat at Tristan’s palms.

Unable to stand the scorch any longer, he yanked his hands away and skittered back, just in time to see the tongue burst outward, its fleshy bits sparking in the air before falling to the floor in drifting specks of burnt sand.

Relieved at the tongue’s demise, he got to his knees and turned, hoping to find out where Wolf had gotten to amid the craziness of Winifred’s detached body parts, when the ghost struck again, this time slamming him across the head with a winding snake of her shin. He toppled back, falling into the tongue’s remains and the piles of salt-speckled sand around him.

The shock of hitting the ground forced the air from his lungs, and for a brief moment, Tristan wondered if the tongue was having its final revenge as he saw Winifred rise up over his sprawled-out body with her fingers wiggling out of her hands and pushing into the startled O of his opened mouth.

Chapter 19

L
EAVING
T
RISTAN
by the desk was hard. Fucking difficult was really what Wolf was thinking, but he was going to go with hard. Especially with Winifred lurking over them.

The haunting was bigger than any he’d ever seen before. Whatever his mother had done, she’d broken through to something stronger than she could control, and he’d be damned if Tristan would pay for their mistakes. Sprinting across the lobby, he avoided Winifred’s detached tongue as it squirmed about on the floor and reached his mother’s side in a few strides. Meegan was still chanting or cajoling, her arms raised over her head as she beseeched the angry ghost to join them to work things out.

Or at least that was what Wolf thought she was saying. At some point his mother had left her Latin behind and seemed to be working through what sounded like fractured Bengali, not a language she was good with even without a furious poltergeist hammering at their heads.

“Mom! Put your hands down!” Wolf grabbed at Meegan’s arm as she began to drone out a recipe for
basanti pulao
, wrenching her hand down from above her head. “And stop with the chanting. You’re making things worse. What the fuck’s in that sand?”

“Just the usual.” His mother finally put her arms down, and the winds died to a whimpering breeze, an occasional gust picking up the feed into Winifred’s growing bulk. “The sand I got from the holy men down the street. Oh, and some ground chicken bones. It keeps better than the whole ones. Really, I got tired of eating two pounds of hot wings before a séance. It was giving me indigestion.”

“Shit, Mom.” Wolf chewed the inside of his cheek, trying to remember the lessons he’d gotten from one of the many older Hellsingers who’d raised him.