“Can’t you guess?” Ilka said. A silky taunt.
And playing back the things they’d said, what had happened the first time she and Zurael visited Sinners, what they’d learned since then, Aisling could.
It was a mistake to vote you out of Sinners. Ilka found it hard to believe we’d been so easily manipulated into doing something not in our best interests.
You’ll find it far more entertaining to vote her out with the others. She’s a shamaness.
An interesting piece of information, Peter.
“Peter Germaine,” Aisling said, naming the mayor’s brother, the deputy police chief who was no friend to any human with supernatural gifts.
Almost as soon as she’d spoken, Aisling thought she must be wrong because he’d have to be gifted to make Ghost. But before the doubt could settle in, Ilka’s expression offered confirmation, and Felipe echoed it by asking, “Now what?”
The gray wall of fog parted and Elena’s brother stepped through to stand next to Aisling. “Felipe! Ilka! You can’t imagine how glad I am you’re finally here. I should have guessed you had something to do with Ghost.”
John rubbed his fingers over the cable around his neck as if stroking a dog’s collar. He leaned in so his face was inches away from Felipe’s, but the other man didn’t blink, didn’t seem to see Elena’s brother.
“Still under Ilka’s thumb?” John asked. “Still letting her call the shots? I’m curious. Did she order my death? Or did you resent losing business to me? A pathetic reason either way. I hardly made any profit supplying entertainment for your guardsmen, not by the time I shaved my rates to undercut yours. But then dear Ilka never did like me, did she? And if I remember correctly, she absolutely loathed my sister—not that I blame her there. I wish dear Elena could join us, it’s the only thing that would make this show better, but I’m still going to enjoy it immensely.”
He turned to Aisling. “Did you fantasize about me the way I did about you?”
“Why are you here?”
“To set the stage, my beautiful ang—” The steel cord pulled taut, his back arched, and the tattoos of a lawbreaker stood out in stark relief on his face.
John went down to his knees. The metal leash grew slack.
A hint of madness glittered in his eyes. He whispered, “I keep forgetting that where you’re concerned I have to be very, very careful not to offend.”
He reached for Aisling, as if he’d use her to pull himself to his feet. She stepped back, felt the rub of coarse fur against her bare skin and knew the entity represented by the bear fetish stood behind her.
John scrambled to his feet and began walking a circle. The thick strand of cable he’d hung from at his death trailed behind him. And as he paced out the design, the ghost fog thinned to reveal men, women and children by the dozens—all of them staring at Felipe and Ilka with feverish intensity—prevented from moving closer by the boundaries of the circle.
Aisling recognized four of the dead immediately. Their faces were undamaged though their bodies were ripped open. Organs hung by strands of muscle and sinew. Intestines looped to the ground through bloody, tattered clothing. They were the Ghosting men who’d died the night she and Zurael first went to Sinners.
Beside and beyond them were others who’d shared the same fate, men and women sent to their deaths when Felipe and Ilka led the vote. And intermixed with those were victims who’d been executed with shots to the head, who wore ropes or twisted wire around their necks. But they weren’t the most horrible of the dead.
Hollow-eyed children and young women stood with gaping chest cavities, their hearts extracted. And seeing them, Aisling knew this was what Ilka had meant when she said,
Some of the ingredients need to be brought in alive.
She’d wondered how the spiritlands could be held open so the winds would flow over an earthly substance and create a doorway into the ghostlands. She’d known such a feat couldn’t be accomplished unless powerful forces in the spirit world were involved.
Those beings would demand death. They would devour innocence and enjoy the screams of terror that came with it. They would find it amusing to use the hearts of the sacrificed as bait for souls yet claimed.
“Do you judge your prisoners responsible for the creation of Ghost?” a deep, masculine voice asked, and Aisling turned to face the entity whose name she’d called upon for protection.
She didn’t know whether it was his true form or the one he offered because her mind could accept it. But he was as she’d expected to find him—appearing like a shaman of old, a human form draped in the pelt of a bear.
His face was hidden from her though his eyes shone through the snarling headdress. His human arms disappeared into folds of fur, his hands and fingers becoming bear claws.
“They aren’t solely responsible,” Aisling said, “but they are guilty.”
“Then you must kill them or see them dead.”
A shudder went through Aisling. She’d been witness to so many deaths. The Ghosting men. Those Zurael and Irial struck down. The assailant she’d killed in her home. What were two more? Especially these? And yet she knew these two would leave her changed forever. That by killing them here, in the spiritlands—on a circular stage created by a soul she’d come to believe was in her father’s possession—she was being drawn deeper into a world belonging to Zurael’s enemy.
She looked past the circle at the silent, waiting dead. They would kill for her. She had only to break the circle John created with the cable linking him to his master, and they would rush in.
But the risk was great. She might be killed. If not by them, then by what would follow.
She felt the phantom weight of the athame she wore in a sheath at the middle of her back, but when she glanced down, the naked view of her skin was unbroken except for the fetish pouch around her neck.
The old shaman’s arm lifted, drawing her attention back to the savage headdress, the yellowed bear teeth and impenetrable eyes, the wrists disappearing into fur and claws.
Without warning he struck. Raked the sharp claws down her face.
Pain drove her to her knees, an agony that left her gasping, sobbing, unable even to scream as a thousand shards of ice sliced through her eyes, leaving her terrified that when she opened them she would be blind.
Small tremors continued to ripple through her after the last of the freezing pain faded. She was left weak and frightened.
It took raw courage to force her hands away from her eyes. To open her lids.
Terror gripped her then. There was only gray nothingness everywhere she looked.
She was blind to the hands only inches away from her face. To her kneeling form.
Her heart thundered in her ears, as if to reassure her it still beat. Panic threatened to engulf her.
She fought it off and was rewarded with an awareness of movement. The mist pulsed to the rapid beat of her heart as she looked at the place she knew her wrists were.
Strands of gray emerged in a fine weave that captured and defined the shape of her fingers, her hands, her arms, the rest of her—as if she were encased in a spider’s web.
Gray gave way to color, blended so all that remained visible from those initial strands was a thin line leading downward—like John’s cable leash. Only, she understood intuitively that the thread she saw led back to her physical body—because she was alive, her soul her own.
Aisling glanced up at Felipe and Ilka. She saw the web overlay until she blinked and it was colored in, leaving only the threads leading to their physical bodies visible. She knew she had only to touch them, to sever those links—
And, as if following her thoughts, the deep voice of the old shaman said, “It’s your birthright. Use it to do what must be done.”
Aisling rose to her feet. She dared to look at him. He appeared exactly as he had before.
Elena’s brother and those who stood outside the circle were pure spirit, transparent and nearly formless until she willed herself to see them in the same way she’d always seen them. And they appeared—torn and riddled with bullets, most of them bound to unseen entities by silken threads, souls bartered for protection, or sold while living and claimed in death.
She couldn’t ask Zurael to do what she herself was unwilling to do—though she knew he was willing to kill Felipe and Ilka, had even promised as much in the library when they’d stumbled upon the picture in the newspaper and had names to go with the faces of the man and woman in red. But she refused to ask it of him. This was her task. Her burden.
“Is Peter Germaine your only partner?” she asked, her voice shaky as she grasped the cords tethering their spirits to their physical bodies.
Their eyebrows drew together in puzzlement over her odd behavior. She saw a flicker of uneasiness appear in Felipe’s eyes, only to disappear under oily slyness. “We’ve told you quite a bit about what we can offer you. But you’ve yet to tell us exactly what you have to offer us.”
A hard buffeting by the spirit winds warned Aisling she was running out of time. She didn’t respond to Felipe’s comment. Instead she looked down at the thin gray strands of silken thread she held.
She intended to break them. It was in her mind to do it. But before she could act, they blackened between her fingers, dissolved into nothingness with a sensation that had her mind flashing back to the instant when she’d touched her downed assailant in the workroom, when he opened his eyes and stared in horror at something unseen as his spirit left his body and entered the ghostlands. She’d wanted him dead, willed it as she fought him—and now she suspected it was her touch that killed him, and not striking his head against the edge of the workbench as she’d believed.
Movement in front of her tore Aisling from her thoughts. Freed from the tether of their physical bodies, Felipe and Ilka were no longer held immobile, trapped in the ghost fog.
They didn’t yet understand what had happened to them. Their expressions told Aisling as much, the way their eyes held the same predatory intensity as when they’d glided toward the bay window where she and Zurael stood.
She stepped back involuntarily, and their smiles widened. “It’s a shame you didn’t strike a better bargain while you could,” Ilka purred, stepping forward, their audience still unseen.
Aisling retreated farther, to the edge of the circle. Ilka and Felipe moved apart, thinking to trap her between them, heedless of the boundaries defining their safety.
Their ignorance was short-lived.
John’s eyes flashed with glittering triumph when Felipe’s foot broke the plane of the circle and the truth was revealed. For the first time, Aisling saw true terror on Felipe’s and Ilka’s faces.
Those gathered surged forward, their glee and satisfaction like a living, breathing thing. They reached in hungry vengeance, using hands and teeth to rip into flesh and muscle and organ tissue. They meted out a punishment that could last for eternity, filled the air with screams that were carried on the spirit winds as Aisling was swept from the ghostlands.
Seventeen
ZURAEL caught Aisling before she crumpled to the ground. He swung her into his arms, took the few steps necessary to reach the bed. The coldness of her skin alarmed him, and he hurried to undo his shirt so he could cuddle her against him, warm her with Djinn fire.
She smiled, and it touched every part of him, reached his heart and completely encased it. “It’s done?” he asked, though the corpses on the floor seemed to answer the question.
“There’s one more. Peter Germaine. He was here that night.”
“I remember him.”
Zurael pressed his lips to hers, shared the breath that was Djinn spirit.
The raw feelings of helplessness he’d experienced while she was in the spiritlands with Felipe and Ilka faded with Aisling in his arms.
In his time with her he’d gained a new appreciation for those pledged to the House of the Raven, and the ones who loved them. If the human ghostlands were a dangerous place, then the spirit birthplace of the Djinn would be no less harrowing. He didn’t envy those whose task it was to guide the Djinn back for rebirth.
He deepened the kiss and moaned when her tongue greeted his with a warm slide of heat against heat. Fierce emotion swelled in his chest and he pulled her more tightly against him. He felt so close to her—spirit entwined with spirit—as if they were one being forced to live in separate bodies and unable to find completion unless they were together.
“Aisling,” he whispered when he lifted his mouth, allowed her to take a breath that wasn’t his.
He lost himself in eyes that were an endless blue sky, a deep ocean pool. When her lips parted and she glanced down shyly, suddenly appearing more vulnerable, his heart raced in anticipation of hearing her name what was between them.
“I—” she started, only to stiffen and turn in his arms, her skin chilling against his.
Protectiveness surged through Zurael. He put Aisling in the center of the bed before rising to his feet. With barely a flicker of thought, clear fingernails became black demon talons.
The corpses stood. Felipe’s blank, dead eyes slowly filled, revealing amusement along with a hint of cruelty and madness. Ilka’s held the nothingness of a zombie.
What had been Felipe laughed with John’s voice and touched his neck. His gaze flicked over Zurael, dismissed him in favor of Aisling. “Another deadly pet, beautiful? And I was hoping . . . Well I’m sure I can amuse myself elsewhere before I’m forced to leave.” He tilted his head toward Ilka. In a stage whisper he said, “Now she’s
dead
weight, which is a shame, but I’ll make sure she’s taken care of.”
John grabbed Ilka’s arm, then noticed the studded baton at his feet. He bent down and scooped it up.
“A toy. How fun! Using it on Ilka won’t be the same since she’s not really with us, but it’s the thought that counts, and I will enjoy the thought.”