Grave Memory: An Alex Craft Novel (49 page)

The plan was moving forward, the trap half set. I had the spirit box, which was small enough to carry one-handed but Caleb assured me could hold whatever size spirit or any amount of energy I needed to shove in it. Holly and Rianna had a double ring of circles ready to be erected behind the theater. Now I just needed Briar to stop asking questions and do her part.

“Well, I guess when you hear the screaming, you’ll know it’s done,” she said, stepping around the corner and striding toward the small theater.

“Just drop him. Don’t hurt him,” I called after her, but if she heard, she made no indication.

She was right about one thing. People screamed.

Caleb and I exchanged a glance, and then we both ran for the theater. We were headed against the flow as we pushed our way into the building that people were trying to escape as fast as possible.

Briar stood in the center of the theater, her badge over head, yelling her credentials and commanding everyone to remain calm. Clearly that failed, but her aim had been dead-on. Death sat slumped in a seat in the front row.

“You get his feet,” Caleb told me, and I nodded.

Caleb took Death by the shoulders and in that way we carried him toward the emergency exit. Briar opened the door for us, the alarm going off as she did, but the patrons had already evacuated, so it couldn’t make anything worse.

We carried Death’s unconscious body past the edge of the first inactive circle and into the center of the second. Then Caleb retreated, and Rianna walked into the circle, the enormous relic-turned-spear in her hand. When she
channeled the grave through the spear, she could physically touch Roy. I only hoped it would be enough to protect her from the rider.

“Everyone ready?” I asked and got a chorus of nods.
But am I ready?
I had to be. “Remember, don’t drop the circles until the rider is trapped or destroyed, no matter what happens.”

This time the nods were more hesitant.

“Be careful, Al,” Caleb said.

“I will. Just keep the circles up.” I took a deep breath and then nodded to Rianna and Holly. “I’m ready. Let’s do it.”

Rianna’s circle was the inner one, and it sprang to life first, followed closely by Holly’s. I didn’t bother erecting a third circle—my Aetheric magic was the weakest in the group. The two different colors of their magic barriers obscured the world beyond the circles but I smiled at Holly, Caleb, and Briar’s silhouettes. Then there was no more prep work.

“Moment of truth,” I muttered. I pulled my dagger from my boot. Then I knelt beside Death’s prone form and opened the spirit box before setting it beside my knees. Using the dagger, I opened a deep cut in my finger—I didn’t want it closing before I finished tracing the runes.

“Al?” Rianna sounded uncertain.

I hadn’t told her I planned to use blood magic.

“Just be ready, and don’t let go of the grave.”

She nodded, her knuckles turning white around the shaft of her spear.

I looked down at the man who held half my life, who’d become mortal to save me.

“No matter what happens, I want you to live,” I whispered to him despite the fact I knew he couldn’t hear. Then I placed my hand on his cheek, opened myself and gave his essence a push. It didn’t want to be in me anyway, it belonged with its soul. As Death’s cold immortality fled my body, my own living essence flooded back into my body.

Death’s eyes flew open, Briar’s spells no longer affecting him. He separated from the rider as well. For a moment
they occupied the same space, but no longer the same body or even the same plane.

I gave myself one single heartbeat to smile at him. “Live,” I said, and then grabbed the box at my side.

The rider rose like a black tide, but I didn’t stand—that would just be farther to fall. I touched the first glyph on the box, saying the name Rianna had taught me and letting my blood fill the thin groove as I traced the intricate shape. Magic rushed through me and the rune glowed blue.

The rider descended on me, ripping at the wounds in my soul, trying to draw my living energy out of me. I couldn’t fight back. Couldn’t defend myself. I just had to endure as I activated the glyph.

The rider reared back, the head of Rianna’s spear emerging through its dark form. It bought me time as she pulled the spear back and drove it into the rider again. The creature descended on her, and Rianna screamed.

I looked up, still in the middle of the third glyph. Then the first seizure hit. The box fell from my hands.

Fuck.

I did the only thing left to me. As my body began to convulse, I threw open my shields and lunged at where the rider ripped at Rianna’s soul. Sinking my hands into the creature, I fell into the land of the dead, taking the rider with me.

T
he buildings crumbled. Turned to dust. Then even the dust vanished.

I stopped falling. The
waste.

The rider bellowed in rage. I thought its earlier attacks had been vicious, now they turned into an onslaught. I was too weak to fight back.

Then a shimmery form flickered somewhere in my peripheral and a ghost dove through the rider, taking a piece of the creature with it.

The rider howled. He grabbed for the offending ghost. Two more dive-bombed him. Then another ghost appeared. The rider lashed out at random, but the ghosts were quick, flitting away while another hit the rider from a different direction.

“Up you go,” Roy said, as arms lifted me by the armpits.

“You got the ghosts.”

“Hey, it was my job, right boss?” He smiled and shoved his thick glasses farther up his nose. “You don’t look so good.”

I looked down at myself. Neither the soul nor the psyche can bleed, but it could show tears. He was right. I looked bad.

“Well, you going to join the buffet?” he asked. Then he darted forward, taking his own chunk of the rider.

It had shrunk in size, its darkness thinning. I couldn’t quite see through it, but at the rate the ghosts were stealing away chunks of it, I’d be able to soon. I hated the idea of that thing’s sludgelike energy in me, but I reached out anyway, drawing hard. A thick funnel of energy shot from it to me and the rider screamed. He shrank. I, on the other hand, felt more steady on my feet, if a little greasy from the energy’s source. Reaching out, I drew more energy.

“Alex.”

I paused. I knew that voice. I couldn’t remember why. But I knew it.

“Alex, are you out there?”

It was a female voice. Somewhere far away a woman with red curls and blazing green eyes stood, straddling an enormous chasm.

Rianna.

I looked around. I was in the waste. No grave witch was supposed to reach the waste, and I couldn’t feel the land of the living.

“Alex, if you can hear me, you need to get back to your body. Now. Your collector caught a part of your soul and is holding it in your body, but you need to come back.”

My body.
Where was it?

“Roy? How do I get out of here?”

The ghost looked over at me, stopping midattack. “You go up.”

Up?

I looked around. There, right behind me, was a thin silver thread that shimmered like a soul. My soul.

It led up, and up.

Arms grabbed mine. “Come on, Alex,” Roy said, pulling me. “Time for you to get out of here.”

He pulled again and the wastes changed. He wasn’t the only ghost with me either. A dozen hands grabbed at me, pushing and pulling me toward the surface. The farther I
traveled the more the world around me rematerialized. Dust turned to crumbled ruins, and then to dilapidated buildings. But the farther I got, the thinner the thread became.

I’m running out of time
.

The ghosts pulled harder and the landscape smeared past me as I sped along, following the thinning thread. Then I hit the chasm. A chasm I was on the wrong side of.

“This is the end of the line for us,” James Kingly’s ghost said.

I looked out across the impossibly large chasm. How was I supposed to cross that abyss? In my hand, the thread tethering my soul to my body thinned.

I was a grave witch. I’d bridged this gap hundreds of times. I could do it. Normally I opened myself to the grave. But I was already immersed in the grave and the land of the dead. Instead I opened myself to life.

Warmth rushed into me, color flooding the world.

“No you don’t,”
the rider screamed in my mind. Something with claws grabbed hold of me as I crossed.

I gasped, lungs burning as if I hadn’t taken a breath in a long time. I opened my eyes, my real eyes, to Death’s concerned face, his hand planted firmly in my chest.

“I thought I’d lost you,” he whispered.

“It’s not over.” My voice broke in my too dry throat. I swallowed and looked around. Something was missing.

Crap.
“Get the circles up.” The yell was more of a croak than words, but circles in purple and red popped up around me.

Just in time.

I arched my back as the rider moved
through
me. It had ridden me across, but it couldn’t take my body. It hurt, not in a physical way—it was too drained for that, but it ripped at my psyche to get through.

I tried to scramble to my feet, failed, and Death pulled me up. Held me there when I would have fallen.

“The box? Where is the box?” My gaze shot around the circle and I spotted it several yards away. I scrambled for it
and nearly collapsed. Again it was Death who kept me upright. He reached for it and horror appeared on his face as his fingers slid through it.

I collapsed beside it because standing was too hard. The first two glyphs still glowed faintly blue. My throat didn’t want to cooperate, but I got out the name of the third and pressed my still bloody finger against the box, tracing the faint glyph. Magic ripped through my raw psyche.

The rider stalked along the opposite edge of the circle, looking for a weakness or a hole it could exploit. I aimed the opening of the box at it and named the final glyph, tracing its form.

I felt more than saw my skin heat and glow as Faerie’s magic filled me. A whirlwind caught the rider, dragging it toward the box. It struggled, its dark form twisting and fighting the pull.

It lost.

The whirlwind sucked it into the box and the lid snapped shut. I flipped the lock. Relief washed over me, mixed hard with exhaustion and I leaned against Death. “It’s over now.”

The circles dropped, my friends running forward.

Caleb hauled me to my feet, clearly unaware I was already in good hands. Holly threw her arms around me.

“I thought you were dead,” she whispered, hugging me tight.

I handed off the box to Rianna. “Somewhere in that castle is a secure place to store this, right?”

She smiled, her eyes full of relief. She tucked the spear in the crook of her arm so she could hold the box with both hands. “I’m sure we can find somewhere.”

Death stepped back as my friends crowded around me. I twisted, reaching for him.

“Don’t go. I need you.”

He stared at me for a long moment, and I was sure at any second he’d vanish and I wouldn’t see him again. Then he stepped forward, swept me into his arms, and kissed me.

“Uh, is it just me,” Briar said somewhere behind me. “Or is she floating and glowing? Humans don’t glow.”

She’ll definitely put this in her report.
I didn’t know if it would negate my OMIH license, and in that moment, I didn’t care. We were all alive, the rider was trapped, Tamara would be safe, and Death didn’t forfeit his soul.

We won.

“C
an he hold him?” Nina Kingly asked, looking from me to her husband’s ghost. She looked exhausted but she glowed with her new motherhood. She’d also taken meeting her husband’s ghost a lot better than I thought she would. A whole lot better.

She handed the baby to her husband and I kept a firm grip on the ghost, making sure he remained corporeal enough to hold his son. Iridescent tears streamed down his cheeks.

“He’s perfect,” he said, staring in the same wonder any new father would have. Then he handed the baby back to his wife. “I guess it’s time then?” he asked, looking toward Death, who stood in the doorway of the hospital room.