“Wales! Less coaxing, more commanding!”
“Not that easy,” Wales snapped. “He’s not exactly a normal ghost.”
“Sic Marco on him.”
“He’s a victim here, not the enemy,” Wales said. “And remember, we were trying not to alert Azpiazu—”
She dropped, rolled, came up on the other side of the pool table, aggravated, and smelling of carpet powder and rot. “Easy for you to say. He’s not chucking stuff at you. C’mon, Tex—”
Wales let out his breath, stiffened his spine, jammed his hand out into the room—a flat-palmed
Stop!
“Enough.”
A glass and two striped balls dropped midflight. The room, already cold, grew frigid. Frost laced across the flatscreen TV like a shatter mark. “Sylvie, bring me some of his hair.”
“Serrano’s?” It was a stupid question; she knew it even as it left her lips: Who else’s?
She twined her fingers in his hair, thick and glossy still; the lead that had filled his blood had killed him too quickly for his hair to show the damage. She yanked, ungentle, uncaring. Serrano was dead, even though his bones creaked, and his head jerked back as if he felt the sting of her hurried fingers, her pinching nails.
She brought Wales the dark lock, pressed it into his free hand. “Now what?”
“I show him who’s in charge.”
Wales held the tuft of hair up, two hands out before him; the
halt
and a cupped palm, the hair resting in it like an offering. A wisp of smoke rose; Sylvie blinked. She hadn’t seen anything like fire coming near it. The smoke grew higher, lit from beneath with a blue flame that burned like ice, cooling.
In the arctic mist blooming from Wales’s hand, the ghosts took on a visible shape. Marco’s looming, hollow-eyed presence, familiar, inimical, shoulder to shoulder with his necromantic partner. And Serrano. Or what Sylvie assumed to be Serrano. At first she thought his ghost had been cleaved in two, mutilated even after death—she knew Azpiazu was no respecter of the dead. Then she saw him more clearly. Not a ghost split in two, not a mutilated ghost, but a mutated one. One body, dividing midtorso to stretch two necks upward, two heads, one flushed dark with rage, one blanched with fear.
“What the fuck—”
“Your time is spent; your life is gone to dust and ash. I bind you and dismiss you from this plane,” Wales said.
Serrano twitched and faded in chunks, left leg, angry face, torso, until the only ghost left was Marco. Wales closed his fist, let ashes dribble out, streaks against his bony hand, and sighed.
“That was ugly,” he said.
“What was that?” Sylvie said. The frigid air faded to something approaching warmth by comparison. She doubted the room temperature made it to sixty.
Wales shrugged. “Harder to dismiss than he should have been? Something warped his ghost, broke him into—”
“I saw,” she reminded him. “Ghost schizophrenia?” She remembered the double-headed skink outside, twitching and jerking its way forward, and surreptitiously ran her fingers along the line of her neck.
“Azpiazu’s magic.” Wales shoved his hands into his pockets, closed his body up, shoulders turned inward, chin tilted down. Thoughtful. Worried. “I think . . . I want to see that binding spell again.”
“Why we’re here,” Sylvie said. She shook off the chill that the room, Serrano, Wales’s magic working had left in her bones, and headed back into the hallway.
Bedrooms, bathrooms were likely toward the back, more public rooms toward the front of the house. If she were a lap pool, where would she—
She opened doors gingerly, as if she’d open one to Azpiazu leering at her. As if he’d have done nothing while Wales cleaned ghostly house for him.
Each door opened revealed nothing out of the ordinary. Her nervousness grew. It felt like a game of Russian roulette, each innocuous room bringing her one step closer to the loaded chamber.
The tang of chlorine overrode the scent of death and guided her finally in the right direction. For a brief moment, entering the pool room, she found the scene not only peaceful but beautiful. The lap pool was lit softly from below, casting a wavering blue gleam over the ceiling. The women, curled into seated positions, looked more like spa visitors than victims, resting peacefully in a beautiful room.
Until Sylvie took that next step into the room, saw the lines of strain on their faces, the haggard pallor to Maria Ruben’s skin; then it was all too easy to see the truth. It made Sylvie itchy under the collar, coldly furious.
Wales swore quietly. “Sylvie, we have to do something.”
“You’re the necromancer.”
Wales closed his eyes, listening to Marco, listening to his own instincts. Sylvie watched him, seething with impatience and a slow, guttering anger. There had to be a way. Something she could do to free them. She’d walked away once and had been regretting it ever since.
Kill the sorcerer,
the little dark voice said.
No sorcerer, no curse, no deflection spell.
Hell, it would be the best of all worlds. Kill Azpiazu, and she wouldn’t need to worry about Tepeyollotl’s making the scene . . . or maybe she would. Gods could be cranky about having their punishments interrupted.
Worth the risk.
The water rippled, a tiny movement disturbing its glassine smoothness. Maria Ruben was quivering. Tremors so small that they seemed more felt than seen.
Maria Ruben’s time was up.
“Think fast, Tex,” Sylvie said. “I’m going in.”
“What? Sylvie—”
“We don’t have time. Maria’s in trouble, and Azpiazu will be returning to harvest her soul.”
Wales nodded. “Give me three minutes. Let me see if I can start wearing down the spell defenses. Keep them from shifting or flaming out, at the least.” His eyes rolled back in his head, blind to anything but the power he was calling on. Sylvie shuddered. Shuddered again when he sliced into his hand and walked the perimeter of the lap pool, dripping his blood into the water, unerringly on target. Marco whispering directions to him, or magic at work?
Her curiosity got stomped hard when Wales began whispering into the room, nonsense words, broken syllables that somehow, upon repetition, crawled inside her head and translated themselves.
I am death the slowing drum the lassitude of bone I enfold all and I am death the clinging shroud the beetles’ breath the clock wound down . . .
She tuned him out in self-defense, waited for him to finish his slow circuit around the pool. The moment he did, she darted into action, clawing at the ouroboros about her neck. If Maria was about to die anyway, yanking her from the binding spell seemed like a worthwhile risk. The snake-scale necklace scratched her skin, snagged her hair, but Sylvie tugged it off, held the cord wide, and dropped it over Maria Ruben’s head. The result was instantaneous.
The room hummed; the water bubbled as if someone had suddenly nuked it to boiling. Maria Ruben’s eyes flew open, her mouth gasped, the tendons in her neck stood out like hawsers. Sylvie grabbed her shoulders, pulled—
The woman was heavy, as stiff in her arms as a corpse in full rigor; the other women were moving, too, eyes opening without awareness behind them, their skin flowing . . . sluggishly, like raw clay softening in the water.
Time ran short.
Azpiazu had to know, had to feel it. He would have felt Maria destabilizing, would already be on his way. One unbalanced binding spell, and somewhere Azpiazu was losing control of his shape, showing the world the monster he was on the inside.
Maria’s breath shivered coldly on Sylvie’s cheek, a brush of soundless words.
Help me. Help me.
The ouroboros around her neck tarnished from bright gold to something hot and dull, the magic being sucked from it. Overwhelmed.
She was going to lose Maria, Sylvie thought sickly. All the ouroboros was doing was bringing her back to awareness of her suffering and impending death. The sigil on Maria’s forehead began to seep blood at the cut edges.
Wales dropped down beside her, hauled Maria out, muttering a spell that sounded like the hissing of snakes and pounded against Sylvie’s body like the tide. Pushing, pressing. Sylvie felt like she was drowning and forced herself to let it slide by her, let it reach Wales’s target.
Maria.
The woman gasped, breathed in harshly as if she’d been drowned and just had the water punched from her lungs. “What—”
“Let’s go, let’s go—” Wales said.
“The others—”
“He’s
here
—”
A growl traveled through the room, a vibration that had Sylvie dropping the argument, and spinning around, trading Maria’s jerking flesh for the hard steel of her gun. She rolled back, making space and taking aim—the trigger juddered beneath her finger.
“Run, Wales!” on an outborne breath, panted between shots.
He did his best to obey, burdened by Maria’s slack weight.
A series of perfectly placed shots on an easy target: Azpiazu twisted to monster form, a distorted patchwork of predators, wolf teeth and bear bulk and long, lashing cat tail, claws leaving marks in the tile, coming straight for her. She put the entire clip into his chest.
Azpiazu didn’t even slow; her gun clicked on empty.
He howled, turned one gold eye, one black on Wales’s retreating form, crouched to spring. His first lunge after Wales coincided with a sudden hiss in the air, a window shattering and spilling glass in a storm toward him.
Marco, defending his master.
Azpiazu rocked back, shook glass off like a spill of sharp-edged raindrops.
Sylvie grabbed the warning bell out of her pocket and threw that in his face. It rang wildly, raised a cascade of sparks, but Azpiazu batted it away with a savage paw.
The bell served its purpose, though, bringing Azpiazu’s attention back on her and let Wales vanish to safety, Maria slung any which way over his bony shoulders. Sylvie scrabbled for a weapon, found metal to hand—freestanding towel rack—and slammed it into his chest and side. The metal crumbled beneath the impact.
She rolled away from the next attack, splashed into the pool, flailed away from the women who reached for her with slow-forming claws. As she clambered back out, a heavy paw slapped her between the shoulder blades.
Numbness, crashing pain. Dizzy speed. Sylvie slammed into the wall, as spread-eagled and ungainly as a landed starfish, breathless, blackness hovering.
She crashed to the tile, got her hands down in time to prevent her from cracking her skull, but her back screamed protest.
Six inches higher, and he would have broken her neck.
“Mine!”
Azpiazu’s voice was a guttural thing, a wolf’s snarl, a cat’s scream, a bear’s grunt.
“No,” Sylvie said, her voice inaudible. Didn’t matter. She heard it in her head, felt it in her throat. Maria Ruben
wasn’t
his. Not anymore.
The room swooped and swayed about her. She dodged the next crashing blow, managed to shift her weight enough to kick Azpiazu square in the drooling, misshapen muzzle.
His jaw slammed shut, teeth severing the lolling tongue. Blood spattered her face, the floor, Azpiazu’s patchy fur.
He howled, a gargle of blood and rage, and Sylvie shoved past him, all plans gone, traded for the basic need to survive this unexpected fight. Survive it long enough for Wales to get Maria away.
Azpiazu lunged after her, knocked her sprawling, crouched over her, growling, salivating. His mottled fur was unmarked; her bullets hadn’t done any good at all. Metal wasn’t going to do the job, she thought. Not in bullet form, not in any form.
Fucking transformationist necromancer, she thought. Hard enough to kill something that was immortal. Even harder to kill something that could change a weapon’s composition to something useless.
“Kill me, and you’ll be cursed forever,” she rasped out. “Thought you wanted my help.”
Being this close to him set her skin afire with magic, corruption of the natural order. It made her gag, made her recoil.
He lashed out with a bear’s massive paw, claws nearly an afterthought behind the physical power that could break bones with a single blow.
Sylvie kneed him in the jaw, knocked him back, kicked him once more, hearing bones creak beneath her heel, before he wrapped a human hand around her wrist.
“Die,”
he snarled.
Her blood kindled; her skin burned as if it had been struck with a branding iron. He flung her back, and she curled around her arm, watching the symbol for lead rise on her flesh, scarlet and black, a burn welling up from the inside.
No,
she said,
you won’t be rid of me that easy.
It wasn’t really her voice, but the thing that lived within her. She gouged at the hot lash of the brand, tore at it, intent on ripping the magic out of her skin if necessary. Blood burst beneath her nails, hot, wet, crimson. Human.
Blood, but not lead.
The fire in her veins, the heat that throbbed at her temples, the fever—they all faded until she was left with the taste of metal in her mouth and a bloody wound on her forearm. She got up, shook her matted, soaked hair back, and stared into his eyes. “Come on. Want to try again?”
Faintly, beneath everything else—the flutter of broken water, his panting, hers—she heard a sound familiar and welcome: a garage door rising, a car engine working at speed. Wales and Maria were nearly gone.
He surged in their direction, and Sylvie, burning adrenaline, picked up a potted palm and hurled it at him, breaking his stride and his jaw. His muzzle was streaked with blood; his teeth were wet with it. His pelt grew gore-clotted.
She’d hurt him more with that than with an entire clip of bullets.
“Give it up,” she said. “Maria’s gone.”
“Replaceable,” he slurred.
He paused, still crouched, still drooling blood and teeth, the first glimmer of something human beneath the monster coating. The first hint of the cleverness she knew he had.