Velveteen (11 page)

Velvet stood up slowly, favoring the nurse’s sore knees, brushing the dust from the scrubs. She saw the dull glow of Quentin’s spirit in the dead thing’s eyes. “You don’t mind zombies, do you, Madame Despot—or whoever’s in there?”

The woman’s sunglasses fell from her face. She turned a pair of scornful glowing eyes on Velvet. “Shut up, girl. Don’t think I don’t know who you are.”

Velvet wasn’t prepared to fight another body thief, but the way this one was talking to her, she was kind of looking forward to it. It wouldn’t hurt to burn off some of her aggression after the afternoon’s run-in at Bonesaw’s shed. Plus, she had a pair of the best tackles in the business in Logan and Luisa. Velvet glanced over her shoulder at the twins, Logan as Grover the happy-go-lucky Muppet, blue hands balled into tight fists, snarling and ready to rumble, and Luisa, a pretty little girl in pigtails and a Catholic-school uniform. She stood in a crouch, her fingers clawing at the air dramatically. The ghost in Madame Despot didn’t have a clue what was coming at her.

Not a clue.

“I’m probably not going to shut up,” Velvet said as she strode into the hall and accepted the crystal ball from Quentin’s bony grip. “What I am going to do is shatter your evil plans, right about now.”

“You can’t stop the departure. It’s coming. It’ll be glorious. Angels will sing.”

Velvet hesitated, the words scurrying over her like bugs. But she couldn’t let the evil spirit win; she lifted the crystal ball high above her head, just as the fortune-teller turned.

“Oh, why be so hasty?” Madame Despot held her hands out in supplication. “Surely we can strike some sort of bargain.”

Velvet feigned considering the bitch’s offer, then brightened. “Maybe so. How about, right after I bust the crap out of this …” She tossed the cell into the air.

The woman cried out, and then relaxed a bit as Velvet caught it.

Velvet loved having the upper hand in negotiations.

“Let’s agree that you’ll be going back to whatever borough in purgatory you stole out of, and I won’t imprison you inside a Tylenol and feed it to this guy.” She stabbed her thumb in the direction of Quentin’s zombie suit. The corpse’s mouth hung open with the kind of disgusted expression that screams, “I need to be consulted about that kind of thing.” Velvet rolled her eyes. Sure a trip through someone’s bowels wasn’t exactly effective in expelling a possession, but it sure would be gross.

Madame Despot stood with her hands planted on her hips, sucking her teeth. “I don’t suppose we will be making any deal, then.”

“Smart.” Velvet turned toward the main room and raised the ball over her head.

The woman screamed and bolted forward, arms outstretched and hands balled into fists. Quentin stumbled toward her, as fast as he could move the corpse’s decaying muscles.

Velvet slammed the cell onto the floor with all the nurse’s strength.

Instead of a loud bang or the crash of glass shattering,
the second the crystal ball made contact with the floor, the room fell into an eerie silence. Nothing happened at first, but Velvet knew enough to jerk the nurse’s hands away from the cell and step back as quickly as she could. Even Madame Despot’s struggle with Quentin had diminished to a standstill.

A spark ignited deep inside the crystal ball, twitching there like a fleck of gold caught in the current of a souvenir snow globe. The more Velvet watched, the brighter it grew, until a brilliant flare of light exploded out of it, filling every corner of the murky room. The force of it hit Velvet and tossed her backward against the wall, and she slid down until her butt connected with her ankles. Across the room, Quentin and Madame Despot were a tangle of flowy robes and rotten flesh. Logan and Luisa were still in the process of tumbling toward the curtained doorway.

Light spiked and shimmered from the cell through a web of tiny fissures that spread across the surface of the crystal. Then, as the magic holding the little prison together truly fell apart, the ball glowed as hot as an ember, pulsing so brightly that they had to shield their eyes to follow the rest of its transformation.

The cracks disappeared entirely and the glass took on a molten gelatinous quality. It ballooned and twisted upward until it resembled a glowing blob of soft-serve and then abruptly fell over onto its side with a wet thud and throbbed against the floor. The thinnest end of the oblong shape split into two long appendages, and the upper melted into the shape of a head, torso, and arms.

The rest happened so quickly, it was hard to track through
human eyes. The glass crystallized and cracked. Velvet covered the nurse’s face with her hands. A sharp pop echoed through the room, and shards of glass rained down on them with an oddly musical tinkling.

When Velvet gaped at the spot where the soul had taken form, it was gone.

A little sigh of relief escaped her.

The dark magic was broken. Even now the dark mists would be receding from the Latin Quarter, the tentacled beast releasing its imprisoned audience, the ground stilling.

Her eyes darted toward Luisa. The girl was chewing on her lip and gawking in the direction of the black curtain. Velvet craned her neck to peer around the fallen table beside her. There, amid a carpet of broken glass twinkling like fallen snow, was the ghost of a boy, his head lolling against his shoulder, his long legs tangled up in the dark fabric.

Handsome, with one of those sharp angular jaws and the kind of comfortably disheveled dark blond hair that belonged on a surfer, but this kid wasn’t. He was lanky, more than six feet tall, and he had a body for basketball and trouble.

Luckily for Velvet, he was also totally unconscious.

“D
eal with him!” Velvet shouted to Luisa, stabbing one of the nurse’s spindly fingers toward the boy. The girl rushed across the room. Velvet spun back toward a howling Madame Despot. The possessed woman had wriggled free of Quentin and was sneaking toward the curtained room with more speed than the body’s weight suggested was possible, and with an inexplicable expression of glee.

Velvet followed the woman’s course to its ultimate conclusion and saw a surprise waiting for the fortune-teller, of the Jim Henson variety. Deep inside the hidden room stood Logan—Grover mask on but blue paws dangling from his bare wrists like sweaty winter mittens. He mashed his fist into his palm, polishing. Velvet couldn’t help but giggle as he leapt up and pounded not the turbaned woman, but the ghost lingering inside. Logan, small for his age, but lithe,
clung to the front of Madame Despot’s muumuu with one hand, his knees pressed into her gut for leverage. With each punch, the back of the possessing ghost’s head broke past the confines of the turban, a glowing bulbous tumor in need of excision.

“Release that body, ghost!” Velvet shouted. “I can see you bouncing around in there like a lotto ball!”

A ghostly arm sprang from Madame Despot’s chest like an alien, connecting with Logan’s hip and knocking the little Muppet into the air and through the wall of the back room. The woman jerked her head toward Velvet and spat, “Never, body thief! She’s mine, and I’ll take her to the grave if I like.”

Behind Velvet rose the not so gentle stirrings of her fifty-seventh soul extraction.

“What the hell?” the boy shouted. “What’s happening?”

And then Luisa was on him, whispering into his ear, doing her best to calm him, or at the very least keep him busy while they finished the work at hand. Velvet couldn’t help sneaking a peek in their direction; the boy was on his feet now, towering over the younger girl. His eyes were as big as saucers, and his fingers were clawing at his basketball tank.

Freak-out in three, two …

A scrabbling drew Velvet’s attention back to the possessed woman. Madame Despot lurched forward and snatched a letter opener from a nearby bureau and held it to her own throat, even as Logan reappeared, his face scrunched in anger. A phantasm of chain dangled from his fist and trailed
off behind him into the wall. Madame Despot’s eyes widened at the sight.

“Hold your poltergeist back, girl!” the fortune-teller yelled. Her voice had gone deep and gravelly, and her possessor’s eyes blazed fury from her skull. “Or I’ll banish the girl and the little furball to the cold depths of a jelly jar!”

Velvet was taken aback. Not by the threat, which was just that—Velvet knew of only one way to cram a soul into a jar, and that was by force … lots of it—but by the instantaneous desire for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, strawberry, preferably.

Damn food cravings.

“It’ll be hard to do your … banishing spell with a clammy corpse hand against your mouth, won’t it?” Velvet glanced over her shoulder and barked, “Quentin, get over here and muffle this thief. I’m tired of listening to it blather.”

“I’ll cut it,” Madame Despot said, and pressed the dull blade of the letter opener deep enough into the body’s neck that it disappeared in its folds. “I swear it.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Velvet yawned.

The corpse shambled forward to the strains of the new soul’s screams of “Zombie! Zombie!” And then, “This isn’t happening. This isn’t happening. This isn’t happening.” The boy had found a mantra.

Quentin clamped a rotten hand across the fortune-teller’s mouth. It settled there with a sickening sucking sound, and the woman’s eyes swelled. Velvet was certain Madame Despot had just taken a mouthful of pus, or something likewise as gross.

“This isn’t happening. This isn’t happening. This isn’t happening.”

Okay
, Velvet thought.
That’s getting a tiny bit annoying
.

“We’ll be with you in a second, got it?” she growled, glancing quickly away as Quentin dragged the fortune-teller, kicking, screams muffled, into a shadowy corner of the room.

“I guh-guess so,” the boy stammered, and stood, confused, the fear visibly quaking in his legs.

It wasn’t that Velvet didn’t have any sympathy for the kid—of course she did—but she had a job to do. Besides, this was the fun part.

As Madame Despot jerked and struggled, Quentin’s borrowed arms creaked and popped like knuckles, as though one jerk away from dislodging and flopping onto the floor. The woman cursed and growled like a dog protecting a bone.

“You’re not coming out, then?” Velvet asked.

More growling.

“All right, this shit is getting old.” Velvet sighed and nodded to the poltergeists. “Bring on the bear traps.”

Logan tore off his mask. It hung off his shoulders like a furry hood. Luisa ordered the new boy to stay put and shoved her hand into the nearest wall, tongue thrusting as she searched and then found the end of another chain. Glowing links, as blue as ice, emerged one by one, clinking and clattering until a ghostly trap slid from the wall, already set, its sharp teeth glistening and sparking.

Velvet crouched down as, on the opposite side of the room,
Logan whipped the chain around his head like a lasso. His trap swung dangerously in a broad loop, cutting through the walls soundlessly.

“No!” the ghost inside Despot screamed.

Luisa slid her trap into the center of the room as Quentin pitched the fortune-teller forward onto it. The body thief stumbled directly onto the trigger and howled as the teeth snapped through Madame Despot’s legs and bit into its hijacking spirit. Logan shouted, “Punk rock!” and launched his trap forward. It caught the woman’s chest with a sharp snap. The human body fell away, taking a few awkward steps before collapsing into a mound of robes and flesh with a thud and a groan.

What remained upright was gray, nebulous, and totally pissed off, its form slipping from human into something sluglike and splotchy with dark oily smudges. The old guard Salvagers called the affliction “going banshee,” since the longer a ghost tread in dark magic, the more deformed it became.

And the louder it could scream.

The sound reverberated through the room. Free from its human shell, the ghost’s voice carried an unfettered violence that quaked every surface. The dust on the floor clouded around their ankles. The chandelier above the seer’s table swung.

The banshee began to twist and struggle with the bear traps, its form wringing and spasming even as it continued to wail. Chains whipped and jumped in Logan’s and Luisa’s hands, forcing them to anchor their feet ankle-deep
into the hardwood floor. Dimples pocked where the pair of traps gnashed and continued to clamp tighter into the ghost’s flesh. Fat globs of ectoplasm plopped onto the floor and snaked their way back to the creature’s feet, where they were reabsorbed.

“Gross.” Luisa crinkled her nose, even as she tightened her grip on the chain.

“Seriously,” Velvet agreed. “You got it, though, right?”

Luisa nodded. Logan’s sneer and cocked brow more than implied he’d taken offense. “Obviously!” he shouted.

Velvet turned to Quentin and gestured back at the boy crouched by the curtains. His chanting done, her fifty-seventh soul had jammed his palms ineffectually over his ears to close off the sound of the banshee’s nearly constant scream—as if that were possible. “Let me get this guy out of here and then, well, you know what to do.”

She didn’t have to tell him twice.

He forced the corpse to hunch over and right a chair. The zombie took a seat, wriggled its shoulders, and closed its eyes, face turning slack and placidly calm. Undertaking took the most concentration of any Salvage position, but it was also the dirtiest.

Better him than her, Velvet thought, knowing all too well the teeming process underway beneath the dead body’s skin. She ducked under the bucking chains and crossed the room to meet the freed soul.

He was taller than she’d first thought, probably older too—seventeen or eighteen—and he was likely a hot guy when his face wasn’t twisted up in a mask of horror. He wore his sandy hair closely cropped to his skull, but messy, tussled
in an unintentionally sexy way. Like he’d just finished making out with someone and didn’t care who knew it.

Not Velvet’s type at all.

Though—she cocked her head to the side and squinted—with the right scars, tattoos, and piercings, he wouldn’t be so terrible to objectify on a regular basis … given he kept his mouth shut and didn’t annoy her.