Sylvie spat blood, fury at yet another bad decision fueling her. She’d read it wrong. The lieutenant’s lich ghost wasn’t translucent because he had been weakening. It was translucent because most of his soul had taken over Matteo’s flesh: She’d just freed a bad guy.
Odalys was laughing, as entertained as if she were watching a pratfall comedy.
Knees under her, Sylvie pivoted, got up in time to block the next sluggish blow with her forearm. Her sneakers slipped on the damp stone, the wavelets lapping over the edge of the pool.
Matteo—no, the lieutenant—twisted in her grip, dodged her blows at nose, neck, groin, knee, and she gritted her teeth and cursed. He was getting faster, learning his new body. And that was nothing but bad news. Matteo had been fit in body but soft in experience. Sylvie, who fought dirty, ugly, and for keeps, could have had Matteo down and restrained by now, but she was fighting an experienced soldier in a young man’s body; a man who’d killed before, full of desperation to stay alive. Experience told. Despite her best efforts, Sylvie took a punch to the collarbone that sent her reeling, gasping for air; then his hand was at her nape, at her waist, dragging her the two steps to the glimmering blue-lit pool.
“Hold her! Hold her!” Odalys shrieked. Sylvie got a quick glance of Odalys looking alarmed, a more disturbing glance of Strange making the scene, her ghost shape swelled nearly solid with stolen bits of soul; then Sylvie’s world was blue-lit water and the bite of chlorine in her nose.
She had a heartbeat of time to realize his intention, sucked in a thin thread of air, all she could manage before the lieutenant pushed her facedown into the water. He knelt on her hips, pressed her head deeper. Her hair streamed about her; her nails scrabbled at the stucco side of the pool, keeping him from slamming her head into the side wall of the pool. She refused to let out the air she’d taken, refused to give in and take a breath of water. She kicked, felt her heels hit his back, but too weakly.
One hand, her forearm on the wall of the pool, bracing her, she reached back with her other, clawing at his flesh, feeling the knotted muscle beneath the smooth skin. He flinched briefly, his grip on her nape slackening, and she got her head up, took a healthy gulp of air, caught a glimpse of something she hadn’t noticed before.
From this angle, so close to the concrete, Zoe’s chair was centered in a glimmering salt ring. Strange was pacing it, complaining in an incomprehensible fashion at an unbearable pitch.
Zoe’s soul and body apparently weren’t up for grabs.
The relief was sweet, if short-lived. Zoe, possessed by a dead woman or a slave to a necromancer—there wasn’t a win there. At best, there was a delay of game.
Sylvie gasped for air, for breath. Her attacker firmed his grip, fingers pinching tight on the back of her skull, and down she went again. Waiting for her to lose consciousness. To breathe in when she should be breathing out. To slacken her grip on her will, her body, and open a path for Margaret Strange.
She twisted, managed to get her mouth above water for the moment, an ear that popped with water flowing out of it. Margaret Strange complained,
“You promised me a body, Odalys. I paid in advance.”
“A deposit’s not enough,” Odalys said. “Your estate is worthless. But I’ll give you a body, out of the goodness of my heart. Just not Zoe.”
Sylvie clawed at the coping, tried to claw him again, and he yanked her jacket up over her flailing arm. The grave-dirt package still left in her jacket—Lt. Charles Sorenson’s grave dirt—slid into the water and drifted downward in muddy clouds. Sylvie clawed at it, tried to catch it, but her fingers tipped it deeper in a slimy cloud.
Weight hit her back, and she coughed—water rushing into her mouth, choking her, her vision blurred by more than the dirty water—Sylvie went limp, praying,
Let this work, let this work
. . . .
And she found herself pulled out of the water, flung onto the limestone with jarring force; water burbled out of her throat, dark and gritty, and Sylvie couldn’t breathe for coughing. The lieutenant knelt on her outflung arms, kept her splayed and displayed. “Odalys. She’s ready now.”
Sylvie held back the laughter; oh, she was ready. Just give her the chance and she’d show them how ready she was. . . .
Strange peered down at her, the ghostly blur of her face sharpening. “
This
one?”
“It’s better for your purposes,” Odalys said, voice sweet, low, coaxing. “Zoe’s magically talented. A budding necromancer. Too much for you to take over, perhaps. But her sister . . .”
Zoe’s eyes were huge above her gag; her hands were nearly free. Blood streaked her wrists.
Sylvie coughed water, let her limbs stay limp as if the fight had been beaten out of her. “You think you’re going to keep Zoe? As an apprentice? After you kill her sister?”
Odalys came to the very edge of her salt ring, and said, “Zoe will remember you came here all hotfoot to keep her from her birthright. From her power. She’ll get over it. Her kind always does. What’s family compared to power? And if she proves recalcitrant? Well, there are spells for that.”
“She’s older,”
Strange said.
“She’s legal,” Odalys said. “No waiting. I know you’re a woman of . . . appetites.” The coaxing tone dropped from her voice, became blunt. “Take it or leave it, Strange. You stiffed me my fee. I’m being extraordinarily generous here.”
“Generous with my body,” Sylvie snarled. “I don’t think—”
“Put her under again,” Odalys said. “She’s too lively.”
Sylvie twisted, fought, kicked, but it was mostly for show. After all, he was taking her back the direction she wanted to be. The pool. Still, she needed to—she managed to squirm away from him enough that he had hold of her hips when she went back into the water, instead of her neck. It allowed her the leverage she wanted.
Sylvie pushed forward, put her hands against the wall, pulled herself
into
the water, splashing free, ungainly as a beached dolphin. But she was in; she was free of his hands. She hit the bottom, pushed off, lunged upward, and caught the lieutenant around the knees, pulling him into the water after her.
He shrieked as he hit it and went utterly limp, as if the surface of the water had slapped him senseless. He sank past her, hit the bottom, and drifted back up again, limbs splayed. Foam splattered from his skin.
Grave-dirt soup,
she thought, but was already moving past him. She surged out of the pool, toward Demalion. Zoe was safe enough for the moment, and Odalys was stuck in her circle.
Sylvie’s clothes were clammy, slapping and constricting her skin, and in the midst of that she missed the first cold press of Margaret’s barbed tongue lashing tight about her neck. But she couldn’t miss the muffled breathlessness of a pillow pressed tight to her face, even in the ghost’s memory, replaying the murder that gave her another chance at life. All the grave dirt on her skin, in her clothes, in the water streaming off her meant nothing to Strange. Just like the showdown at Invocat. An unbound lich ghost was more powerful than that.
Faintly, even as she clawed uselessly at the feeding tube, scoring her own skin, she heard Strange say,
Acceptable. Keep your little would-be witch.
Relief seared her, weakened her just a little bit: Whatever happened here tonight, Zoe would live. . . .
As a slave. But you won’t. Demalion won’t. Wright won’t. Maybe they’re already gone, and you’ll miss it.
As if to emphasize the voice’s point, she heard Demalion kicking at the table; it sounded entirely too much like death throes.
Sylvie shuddered; the barbed tongue re-formed no matter how she clawed at it, ghost plasma immune to all her human determination and strength. She was conscious of her soul being drawn up, fed on, peeling out of her flesh like her marrow being cored from her bones.
The god of Love had taken a piece of her soul once to shore up his own. He had returned it once he no longer needed it.
She didn’t think Strange would be so generous.
Her head ached, her body felt smothered, and her heart kept to irregular bursts of panic. She was going to die. Wright was going to die. Demalion—
There had to be something she could do, besides lie here and feel her soul ripped out.
As if a ghost could do it,
her little dark voice growled.
When a god had to ask permission . . .
She’s doing it,
Sylvie thought. Eros had just been polite about it.
She’s not doing it very well,
the little dark voice pointed out.
Sylvie relaxed, calm suddenly, even as a particularly vicious pull on her soul woke pains in places she never knew had nerves at all. Strange sighed above her, the sound tired, frustrated. Exasperated.
Not doing it very well, indeed,
Sylvie thought. She was Lilith’s human daughter, and she didn’t yield. She wasn’t unconscious, wasn’t lost in the lich ghost’s memory of death, wasn’t giving in. . . . She could still fight.
The faint taste of victory receded as fast as it had come. She could fight, felt like she could fight this ghost forever, but Demalion couldn’t. Wright couldn’t.
Sylvie clawed at the ghost’s connection again; this time, the tongue felt nearly real, nearly flesh, as Strange poured all her effort into devouring Sylvie’s soul. And flesh was something she could fight.
Stop fighting me,
Strange complained.
Sylvie growled, her voice a ragged whisper beneath the constriction. “You’ve not seen fighting yet.” She let go of her death grip on the hungry hold Strange had on her, stopped throttling the flow of something intangible, and scraped her hands along her own skin. Searching.
The cloth bags of graveyard dirt were gone, one dropped, one in the water, but Margaret Strange’s ashes had been shoved in the nearest Ziploc. Sylvie found the plastic bag; clammy, greasy, a gritty weight. She punctured the bag with torn nails, and flung a handful into Strange’s face.
“That’s your bones,” she snarled. “You’re dead. You should stay that way.”
The ghost recoiled; the ash blowing across her surface and sticking, like sand to wet skin, like metal filings to a magnet. It wasn’t destroying her, wasn’t dissipating the spirit as the grave dirt had done for Li or the lieutenant, but it was . . . working in its own fashion, reminding Strange of what it was like to be flesh.
The ash seeped inward, sketching bones beneath the ectoplasm, creating vulnerabilities—old bones could ache, old bones could break—Sylvie kicked hard at the ghost’s forming skeleton, got purchase, and felt impact race up her own shins. Margaret Strange stumbled back.
Sylvie scrabbled for the rest of the bag. If one handful could slow her, bring her to a shape that could be harmed . . .
Getting as close as she could—she wanted all of the ash to hit Strange—she ripped the plastic apart. Bone scrap and ash flew outward, carried on the evening breeze and zoomed in on Strange like hornets.
Strange twisted, flickered, shrieked, and slowed. Bones sprouted and grew like kudzu, opaque, brittle, a faint hint of organs ghosted into place. All vulnerable. All mortal frailties in an untouchable spirit.
Matteo’s iron chair, abandoned when he attacked her, loomed close, and Sylvie grabbed it, grunted with the effort, and swung it as hard as she could. Wrought iron, and she couldn’t get it off the ground more than a foot, but it smashed satisfactorily into Strange, through the ectoplasm, and juddered hard against bone. The ghost . . . fell, her shin-bones cracked, her knees out of place.
She flailed at the stone, howling, and Sylvie sagged over the chair, breathing hard, willing herself to swing it again. And again, as many times as was needed to pulp bone. Her hands shook; the lich ghost might not have stolen her soul, but the fight had exhausted her. She tightened her grip on the chair, sucked in a breath, and heard its pained echo in another gasp.
Demalion. Another breath. Her name on his lips, a sibilance barely voiced. “Syl—”
His body was a taut arc of pain; his soul being torn out, though the general’s ghost was nowhere to be seen. Gone translucent.
That
close to success. That close to erasing Wright
and
Demalion, and digging a new home for himself in Wright’s flesh. The general reeled back for a moment, looked startled and sated, a man finding his pleasure sooner than he expected.
Demalion screamed, his voice rough and full of despair.
“Hey, General!” Sylvie said. Her heart felt frozen in her chest, terror for Demalion girded round with scalding rage.
Odalys swore, and rose from her seat, paced a tight circle within her salt shield, her prison. She wouldn’t stay put much longer, and there were Strange and Zoe yet to deal with. . . . But Demalion . . .
Sylvie remembered the bag she’d dropped, unwilling to risk hitting the joined spirits of Wright and Demalion. That risk seemed a hell of a lot smaller now, when they were going to be lost anyway if she didn’t act.
The bag felt like lead in her hands, heavy with her fear and exhaustion, with the potential for this to go so wrong. The general growled, pressed as close as a lover to Wright’s body; his eyes glimmered at Sylvie with hatred.
She could feed that, she thought, get his attention, maybe draw him away. “Looking for your lieutenant? I left him dead in the pool.”
The general stiffened, raised his head, animal-bright eyes narrowing. His lips curled up, bared teeth. “You—”
“Guess you’ve been off the battlefield too long,” Sylvie said. “You’ve forgotten how to look out for your men.”
The ghost took one furious step forward, and it was enough. Sylvie smashed the bag down at his ghostly feet; the dust plumed upward, and the general billowed and dissolved.
She hissed in satisfaction, but then Demalion went limp, and Zoe screamed, recognizable even through the gag. Sylvie spun and wanted to scream herself. Couldn’t she catch a break?