Gods & Monsters (15 page)

“Surprisingly sensible,” she said. “Do you still have clean towels?”

He flipped on the light, looking at her. “D’you have a black eye?”

She touched her face; it wasn’t particularly tender. “Just dirt, I think. Bruised ribs, shoulder, and hip, though. Odalys sent one of her bullyboys to my home. Kicked my door in.”

“You shoot him, too?” Wales grinned.

“Yeah.”

He stopped smiling. “Seriously? I thought your rep was all about shooting monsters. Not people. That’s two in one day, Sylvie.”

“I’ve learned to make exceptions,” she said. Sylvie ducked under his arm and trespassed. She stopped two steps later and looked at the room. Basic layout—two beds, dresser, TV, a table, and two chairs—except Wales had spent some time rearranging. The chairs were piled on the dresser, a tangle of legs, and the table was squished into the narrow space between the second bed and the wall, clearing a space near the window.

He’d also let the Hands out of their box. He’d made a circle of them, palms up, and stippled them with some pungent herbal ash that made Sylvie’s nose wrinkle and her lungs itch as she approached.

“Pennyroyal,” he said. “Helps ward off curses. Be a hell of a thing if I went to all that trouble to get Jennifer back here, and it killed me.”

“I thought you were going to talk to her, not drag her back. Just talk.”

Wales shifted, antsy under his skin. “I wish. If I were wanting to know about her past, what her favorite color was, her best memory—I’d just ask. But death’s traumatic as hell no matter how it happens. We don’t like to have our toys taken from us, and life’s about the biggest toy there is.”

“And trauma leads to muddled thinking,” Sylvie interrupted.

“Especially when what you’re wanting to ask about is their death. Then it’s all metaphor and scrambled words. Like talking to someone who got their Happy Meal with a side order of LSD. If I want to learn anything from her death, she’s gotta come back. And that requires more than a bit of thought.”

“Plus backup, or are you just using the Hands as ashtrays?”

Wales snorted. “Martha Stewart would have my hide. Nah, they’re going to be a fence of sorts. Hem her in. In case she tries to escape.”

Sylvie edged past the piled-up furniture, crawled onto one of the beds. Necromancy. A lovely way to victimize the dead. But they needed more to go on. As if he had had this same argument with himself, Wales said, “If she could understand what was at stake, she’d
want
to help us. Save the other women.”

“That’s sweet,” Sylvie said. “But I’ve always found that human nature involves a lot of ‘Fuck you, I’ve got mine.’ ”

Wales cracked a thin smile. “Truth. Are you gonna hang around for this shindig?”

“Nowhere else to go,” Sylvie said. The bed was comfortable beneath her. She might have won her battle with her attacker, been checked over by the EMTs and pronounced okay, but her side ached, her hands ached, and she thought there might still be splinters in her hair from the bullet hitting the door frame. Here was good. Even if it meant playing witness to coercive magic.

Plus, this way she could keep an eye on Wales. He might be more competent than he had pretended to be on their first meeting, but dealing with ghosts just made her skin crawl.

Dead things should stay that way,
her dark voice commented.

Demalion,
Sylvie rebutted. The dark voice sulked and slunk away.

Wales took a breath, flipped out his lighter, and Sylvie coughed. “Smoke detector?”

He clambered up with a shame-faced wince and yanked the wires. “Thanks.”

“Had enough excitement for tonight,” Sylvie said. “Hate to add hotel evac to the list.” She dragged a pillow to her chest, curled around it; the bruising ribs on her side appreciated the support. She felt like a tween on a sleepover—all they needed was a Ouija board and some Gummi Bears to replicate her seventh-grade birthday party—and patted her gun for moral support.

Wales lit a small brazier of herbs; they didn’t stink as strongly as the pennyroyal did, but they made a strange smoky trail that coiled not-quite-aimlessly through the circle of Hands. Where the smoke brushed up against the Hands, ghosts shimmered in grim outlines.

Yeah, this was going to be ugly. Drag a dead girl’s soul back through the ether, interrogate her, study her, and slap her in the center of a hard-eyed ghost ring of murdered ex-cons.

Wales tossed a piece of jewelry into the brazier; it sank under herbs so fast that Sylvie only had time to register the gold shine of it. It looked like a pendant charm.

He rattled off a long stream of words that could have been anything, a quick blur of vowels barely contained by a consonant here and there. Alex would have been making zombie-language references—all groan and moan and tongueless words. Whatever it was, it raised the fine hairs on Sylvie’s arms, made her clutch the pillow tighter.

Not fear,
she told herself.
Discomfort.
It didn’t sound like something people should say.

The smoke reacted to it, eddying back from the edges of the magical ghost circle, twining up Wales’s legs, creeping through the air like a snake tracking a rat’s scent.

“Jennifer Costas,” Wales said. Back to English, and it should have been a relief. But the Texas drawl was gone from his voice; he sounded crisp and hard and clean. It was a tone a stage actor would envy, meant for carrying cleanly to the rearmost seats. It was a sound to wake the dead.

“Jennifer,” Wales said again.

The smoke thickened, bunched like a swallowing snake, pulling at something Sylvie couldn’t see.

Belatedly, she wondered if she’d see anything at all, or if she’d be stuck watching Wales talk to more invisible people, trying to read success or failure in his body language.

Fire crackled in the smoke, a sullen flicker like a banked fire being poked. Sylvie thought of Jennifer Costas, burned up in a spell backlash, and found herself whispering the closest thing to a prayer she was capable of.
Please, let her not spend the afterlife eternally burning.

It depended, she supposed, on whichever god had laid claim to her soul. Some were more merciful than others. Some were indifferent. And some were downright cruel.

The smoke closed in, engulfed the flame, giving shape to the intangible. Jennifer Costas was formed out of smoke and distant fires, her long hair like fiber optics, glowing dully at the ends, drifting.

Her voice was a wisp, a child’s plaint.

Sylvie smothered guilt.
Sooner done, sooner she’ll be released.
For once, she and her inner voice agreed.

Wales swallowed, let the hard edge leave his tone. “Jennifer,” he said.

The ghost girl turned her head, and Sylvie decided she preferred the smudgy shimmer the girl had been in the’Glades to this phantasm, whose eyes gleamed with lambent flames. Jennifer shouldn’t have been threatening—lost, scared, dead—but panic lent strength to any creature.

Sylvie shifted on the bed, running over anything she knew on how to banish a ghost. Just in case.

Jennifer shuddered in response to one of Wales’s questions. Like a child, she repeated it,
Was I first? No. She and she were there. White eyes under the water, and he pressed me down under the water, a knife blade in my skin, crimson rivers flowing. . . . He gave us to him like a poisoned sweet, and he lodged in our bones. In our blood. We burn.

The fire crackle beneath her smoke skin doused itself, faded into silence. An utter silence. Utter stillness. Death in a smoke shell. A hollow core of memory and pain.

Sylvie shivered. She almost wished the flames were back.

“Do you remember the words he used?” Wales asked. “Can you tell me?”

Wales was dogged; Sylvie gave him that. Still concentrating on the spell that bound the rest of the women. Trying to figure out a way to safely unpick the knot they were in. Still trying to make sense of someone else’s malignancy. But his shoulders were tight, his eyes jittery, and she wondered how long he could hold Jennifer there.

Chains. More chains.
Jennifer mourned, turning about in the circle.
Trapped. I want to go home. I must. He calls.

Beneath the stillness, a tension. Sylvie thought of tides pulling back before tsunamis, of the silence before an earthquake.

“Wales,” she murmured. “Hurry it up.” Dangerous to interrupt, to divert his attention, but she couldn’t help but feel that time was short. A new sound grew beneath the smoke, something distant, repetitive, vaguely familiar. Something that made her edgy.

“What was his purpose?” Wales said.

The smoke shape turned her palms upward, wordless answer or a confused shrug. The sigils carved into her palms meant the motion could be either.

Sylvie peered through the haze of ghosts playing fence, tried to see what Wales might be seeing. All it was to her was featureless grey-black, a roil of distress.

“Hide from whom?”

Jennifer flashed in the circle, a rush of smoky movement, crashing up against the hedging ghosts, trying to escape. Her face, built of smoke and terror, was visible through the gaps; her lips moved soundlessly. The word was clear, though.

Wales frowned, his face tight and stern. “Tell me,” he commanded. The ghost wept flaming tears.

Sylvie wondered if Alex would still find him sweet now. She didn’t dwell on it. That sound came again, just on the edge of her hearing. A displacement of expelled air. An explosive sigh, but with anger beneath. The bed shivered beneath her. She dropped the pillow, held her hands out before her. Steady as a rock. The trembling wasn’t her. It was something else. Something approaching. Something sniffing them out. Sniffing the ghost out.

A power filter, Wales had said. Power went in, changed, came out again. That kind of thing left a mark on a soul. That kind of thing could make a ghost a tasty morsel for anything powerful enough to sense it.

Another thought crossed her mind, sent her heart into rocketing overdrive.
He gave us to him.

It wouldn’t be the first time a sorcerer had bartered with a god for power. If the soul-devourer had given these women’s souls to a god . . . if Wales was keeping Jennifer here when a god was expecting her.

“Wales!” Sylvie snapped. “Send her back. Do it now.”

“Just a minute more,” he crooned, equal answer to Sylvie and comfort to the ghost. “Just a moment, now.” He circled the ghost, scribing a circle within the ghost circle, and Sylvie’s nerves seized with a sudden realization.

Wales was inside the ghost circle. Contained as much as the ghost he summoned.

Too late,
Jennifer whispered.
He comes.

Sylvie rose, paced the outside of the circle in an echo of Wales pacing the inside. The cold barrier of the Hands kept her at bay.

Leave him,
her dark voice suggested.
Run.

The air hummed, seethed in the room like locusts, something fiercely alive, something terrifyingly hungry.

The entire room trembled around them, a localized earthquake. In the hall, people were beginning to cry out, a hastening of footsteps running for the exits.

And the explosive grunting cough was getting stronger.

God, Sylvie thought. A god, coming to see what was keeping his newly gifted soul.

“Wales!” she shouted. “End the spell!”

Wales’s head came up, only then catching on to his danger. His expression went blank with shock; Jennifer’s burning gaze was tilted upward, terrified, waiting, a huddled creature in the glare of a headlight.

Sylvie gritted her teeth, sucked in willpower, hoped there were enough remnants of Wales’s protective spell on her skin, and reached through the ghost barrier.

Ice and cold and vertigo; her arm went dead to the shoulder, but her hand hit what she was aiming for, closed tightly around Wales’s thin forearm. She leaned back and yanked.

He barreled out of the circle, shouting protest; Sylvie only yanked harder, pulled them both down between the beds. Light exploded into the room after him—the spell breaking on two fronts.

The room shuddered; Sylvie scrabbled for her gun, got Wales between her and the floor, and stared into the heart of the light, trying to see what was coming for them. For Jennifer.

Something clouded the light, a dark mass, the shadow of a god reaching out toward them. The air in the room stung Sylvie’s skin, magic crawling over her body, jangling every nerve all at once. Again, she heard that hungry, moaning grunt.

Jennifer’s ghost blazed with heat, flames rushing outward, crawling the ceiling, the walls, the floor.

Sylvie rolled, trying to angle herself for a shot. Took it. Hit nothing but the wall. Got another roar of complaint.

We’re fucked.
Too late to run.

She ducked, curled tight around Wales, choked on ovenhot atmosphere, her ears throbbing with pain as that animal howl went on and on, too loud for human comfort, Jennifer’s shriek mingling with it.

Heat on the back of Sylvie’s neck, a supernatural shadow drifting over her skin, Wales a bony, quivering mass beneath her. Jennifer’s scream cut off like someone had flipped a switch. The heat in the room subsided.

That angry moan sounded again, close enough to rattle her bones. And then . . . nothing. The shaking stopped; the light blinked out; her ears rang tinnily; spots danced before her eyes.

When she was convinced the god was gone, not merely playing with them, she rolled off Wales. He was out, eyes sealed shut, bruising beneath it. Yanking him through the circle hadn’t been a good idea. But it had been the only way. Ending spells, like starting a spell, took time that they hadn’t had.