“I see them.”
There were people in the car, and they were screaming. He counted three, but he couldn’t be sure because the wraiths had come. They darted around the car, long thin arms flashing in through shattered windows, curved blades hacking and tearing. The rain and the wraiths’ tattered clothing whipping in the wind blotted out much of their view, but the screaming continued. Arms flailed but passed through the creatures. They could reach into their victims’ flesh, into their very souls, and no one could touch them.
“That’s Mrs. Robideau’s car!” Amber said, sounding much younger than her twenty-one years. “They live right down the street from me.”
Octavian aimed his car at the Honda, turned on the bright lights, and laid on the horn. He hit the brakes, and the tires skidded on the oily pavement. The wraiths were in a frenzy around the crashed Honda—sharks in the water, like Amber had said—but now they all looked up. The bright lights seemed to strip some of the mist away from them, leaving them nothing more than slim black bones, but the effect lasted only a moment.
They darted away from the Honda. Octavian slammed the car into park and popped open the door, his skin prickling with magic summoned up by instinct. A rich silver light leaped in arcs of energy between his fingers as he stepped out into the rain, but already they were fleeing. He counted five wraiths, and three of them had those amorphous colorful lights speared on their blades, dragging beneath them.
Octavian didn’t know exactly what they were stealing from people, but he had seen souls manifested in the world before, and they looked nothing like this. He suspected it was something that fed chaos, that the wraiths fed on human passion or imagination.
Officer Moschitto pulled up, tires skidding so badly on the slippery rain that his patrol car bumped the curb and the big blue mailbox on the sidewalk.
“You know where Amber lives?” Octavian asked as the cop jumped out of his car.
“Just around the corner,” Moschitto replied.
“Do what you can for these people and catch up to us there,” Octavian said, and he slid back behind the wheel of his car.
“They all took off in the same direction,” he said. “Maybe it’s a coincidence, but we’re going the same way. The wraiths were headed toward your house.”
Octavian put the car in gear and hit the gas, the tires spinning as he made the turn onto Herman Street. Amber’s house was number 136, and he bent to stare through the smeared windshield, searching for any sign of the wraiths, hoping he was wrong about their destination.
It took him several seconds to realize Amber hadn’t replied. Frowning, he glanced at her and saw that she was staring down at her hands, which were turned palm upward.
“Amber?” he ventured.
Over the drumming of the rain on the car, he hadn’t heard the sound at first, but now he could make out the low hitching of her breath, and he saw the tears on her cheeks.
“Look at me,” she said.
Octavian skidded to a halt again, only blocks from her house. Blood running cold, he turned on the interior light. He clenched his jaw to keep from cursing out loud, because he didn’t want to scare the girl. He was the sorcerer, the one who had lived a life that to her must have seemed almost eternal. If he didn’t know how to help her, she would think her death was imminent. Octavian thought it might be.
The skin of her forearms had taken on a darker tint and begun to harden. It had an almost chitinous texture, like the shell of an insect. Her fingers had grown longer and narrowed ; soon they would be claws.
“When did this start?” he asked.
Her head shook and she gave a tiny shrug. “I was itchy. I scratched . . . I thought it was just itchy,” she said, an edge of hysteria in her voice. Then she looked up at him. “What will it feel like, do you think? Being one of them?”
Octavian reached out and touched her arm. She flinched, then stared at the silver light sparking from his hand.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Does it hurt?”
“A little.”
“Give me your hands,” he said.
She turned to him, there in the illumination of the dome light with the rain pounding above them and the darkness of the storm cradling the car, rocking it with gusts of wind. They linked hands, and Octavian closed his eyes.
“What are you doing?”
“Hush,” he said.
Octavian felt the magic within him reacting to the dark magic infecting her, transforming her. He let his mind slip back to his centuries in Hell, to demons and twisted souls he had encountered there, to things that had tried to taint him and enslave him. The filth of those things, their poison, felt something like this.
He took a deep breath and exhaled, forcing away the violence and lewd thoughts the chaos storm had raised within him. A second breath, and this time when he exhaled, he let the magic flow from him, the energy of it crackling along his arms and through his hands, then spreading up Amber’s arms and engulfing her in silver light. She let slip a tiny noise, a gasp of surprise or pleasure or both.
Octavian spoke.
“Káto apó to dérma kai sto esoterikó ton ostón, píso apó ti génnisi kai tin koiliá tis mitéras tou, katharízei tin kardiá kai sárka ólon ton dilitiriáseon, káthe kakó, kai i kilída tis skoteinís mageías.”
Amber’s eyes fluttered as if she were waking from a dream. He released her hands and she reached up to wipe her tears.
“It stopped itching,” she said, but when she held up her hands, they remained altered, the flesh of her arms like hard carapace, her fingers like claws. “But . . .”
“I did a purification spell,” Octavian said. “It might cleanse you completely, or it might only slow whatever is being done to you. If I can figure out the nature of this transformation, that will help.”
She stared at her hands, horror etched on her face. Octavian could feel her fear and uncertainty, but he needed her attention.
“Amber,” he said firmly. “Your family.”
She nodded. “Drive.”
The tires spun as Octavian hit the gas. They spoke not a word as the car sped through the storm, engine growling, houses flashing by in the unnatural dark. He had felt the dark power working inside Amber and wondered how many hours had passed since it had first begun its work on her parents and great-grandmother.
“Right here,” she said. “On the left.”
He turned into the driveway of the well-kept, bone-androse-hued Victorian and killed the engine. It loomed above them, almost brooding, and Octavian felt a presence filling the house as though the walls were its womb and it cried out to be born.
“There!” Amber said, pointing at a wraith darting in through a second-story window. But there were others, some on the roof and some flitting around the turret at the top like wasps around a nest.
“Stay in the car,” he told her, stepping out and pocketing his keys.
Amber got out. “I don’t think so.”
She rushed for the door, slipping on the driveway a little before regaining her footing. Octavian chased her, passed her, reached the front door first and didn’t let her bother using the keys she fumbled from her pocket. With a wave of his hand, the door swung inward.
A wraith lunged out at them. Amber screamed as Octavian thrust both hands forward, hurling concussive magic at the thing. The spell passed right through it and struck a table in the foyer, shattering a vase and smashing framed family photos, and then the wraith was upon Octavian, black blades flashing, ripping into him without cutting his skin. They slashed at his consciousness, at his mind, and he shouted in pain and confusion.
He staggered back. Amber screamed again and it hesitated.
Octavian snarled, reached out, and thrust his own hand into the black, smoky ribbons that were its garments. He muttered words learned in the torment of Sheol and the smoke solidified. His fist closed around the narrow pipe of its neck and he summoned a deeper magic, old as angels, and the wraith stiffened, then froze solid, its essence turned to anthracite coal.
With a kick, he shattered it.
“What did you—”
“Go!” Octavian snapped. “Where’s your parents’ room?”
Rain-slicked hair veiling her face, Amber bolted, leading him through the foyer and up the first flight of stairs. His skin prickled, a dim golden light dancing from his fingers as he pursued her, glancing around for any other wraiths.
Amber stopped in the open doorway to her parents’ room, then backpedaled until she hit the corridor wall. Octavian hurried past her and entered the room.
The Morrisseys lay in their bed, eyes closed, limbs contorted as though they had been sleeping poorly. The bedclothes had been tossed or kicked aside. Amber’s mother wore a nightshirt bearing the image of Tweety Bird. It had rucked up to just beneath her breasts, exposing her plain white underwear. Mr. Morrissey wore pale blue boxer shorts.
There were barely recognizable as human. Their facial features had almost completely vanished, the flesh hardening and smoothing out, turning into the same black plating that the other wraiths had for faces. No hair remained. They still had human weight and heft, but their bodies had withered horribly, thinning so much that soon they would be nothing but skeletal piping, like the creatures flitting around outside their house.
“No,” Amber said. “Please, you’ve got to help them.”
Seconds ticked by as Octavian stared at them, racking his brain for some spell that might reverse what was being done to the Morrisseys. In the vast store of occult knowledge he had acquired in Hell, there must be something, but he did not have time to think on it, and the Morrisseys didn’t have time to wait for him.
Cursing under his breath, he raised his hands and sketched at the air. His muttering turned into a spell, and the color began to drain from everything in the room. The furniture, and Amber’s parents, started to fade until they were almost ghostly themselves, their pallor turning a strange sepia. Octavian backed into the hallway.
“What are you doing?” Amber demanded.
“Buying time. I’ve frozen them in a single moment. If stopping Navalica doesn’t heal them, and you, they’ll stay like this until I can figure something out.”
Amber tried to reach into the room, her fingers bumping against an invisible barrier in the open doorway.
“Where is your great-grandmother’s room?” Octavian asked, looking around.
That woke her up. “Top floor.”
Octavian ran. Down the hall, he saw something flitting from room to room, but he did not slow as he mounted the next flight of steps two at a time.
“Do you think they were all people once?” Amber asked, huffing with effort.
“Looks that way,” Octavian said.
Then there was no more time for questions. They reached the third-floor landing and rushed toward her great-grandmother’s room. The door stood halfway open. A low whisper of motion, like silk on silk, issued from the bedroom. Octavian nearly barged in, but paused, listening to that sound. Amber made a small, urgent noise behind him as he reached out and gave the door a light push.
It swung inward.
The wraiths slid against one another, brushing together like animals huddled for warmth. There must have been nine or ten of them around the old woman’s bed, and several of them clutched undulating masses of light and color, as though stripping it from the old woman’s flesh. Others had their smoky hands plunged deep inside her.
“Oh, no. Gran,” Amber whispered.
The wraiths all looked up, almost as if she’d screamed.
Octavian charged into the room. His left hand snapped up and he cast the spell that brought their intangible essence in synch with this dimension. The one at the front door had hurt him because he hadn’t anticipated its true nature, and he wouldn’t allow that to happen again.
He thrust out his right hand, summoning all of his strength, tapping the core of magic in him that burst out in a wave of concussive force. Wraiths blew back into the walls and crashed through windows. One hit the ceiling. A crucifix fell from the wall and snapped in half when it hit the floor. Knickknacks tipped over on a shelf. A lamp shattered.
“Kill them,” Amber said, hatred in her voice, the chaos in the air giving her a savage edge.
Octavian grabbed the nearest wraith, working the hex that would transform its smoke into anthracite, just as he had done to the one downstairs.
But then he heard Amber cry out.
“Gran?” the girl said.
Octavian turned and stared. The old woman had begun to change, but there was no carapace, no black smoke, no skeletal bone structure. As he and Amber watched, her youth and vigor were restored, but her body altered, shifting, growing. Her skin darkened not to black but to a pale blue and her chest pulsed and blossomed as new breasts pushed out from her flesh.
Her hair ignited in cold, blue-black flames, and then that indigo fire was her hair.
“Oh, shit,” Octavian whispered.