chapter 5
I OPENED MY EYES AND FOUND MYSELF STARING INTO the über-bright glare of the sun. Blinded, I stumbled, and landed on my ass. A roar of laughter boomed from all sides, and I jumped up so fast my vision jolted back into focus. In front of me was a packed auditorium.
“Well, that’s what happens when you deal with the dead,” said a woman’s voice. “Some of them just aren’t too bright.”
I turned a glare on the speaker, but saw only the back of a redhead sitting at center stage. As she continued talking, I realized I was on a television set. The redhead and another woman sat in a pair of comfy armchairs in a set designed to look like someone’s living room.
I walked onto the stage, but every gaze stayed riveted to the two women. Wherever I was, I was still a ghost. I peered over for a closer look at the host, and mentally groaned. I’d seen her show once, when I’d been bedridden with morning sickness, too queasy to change the channel. I forgot the exact topic, but it had been the kind of “every life has meaning” psycho-crap gobbled up by people whose existence proved the credo wrong. The uplifting message did make me feel better, though. Uplifted my stomach right into the toilet, and after that, I’d felt much better.
I circled closer to the stage. I had a good idea who the redhead was, and another step confirmed it. She was a few years older than me, but didn’t look it. Long legs, bee-stung lips, and green eyes made Jaime Vegas the kind of woman for whom the phrase “sultry redhead” was invented. She packaged that sex appeal with her mediocre necromancy talents, and sold it to the grief-stricken. Some might call it a reprehensible way to make a living. I called it survival.
“But seriously,” Jaime said, as the latest round of laughter died down. “What I do can be lots of fun, and I love that side of it, but what I love more is what it brings to other people’s lives: the closure, the peace.”
The talk show host nodded. “And that’s really what spiritualism is all about, isn’t it? Healing the spirit. Not the spirits of the dead, but those of the living.”
Oh, God, someone pass the barf bag. The audience only beamed and echoed a chorus of yeses and Amens, like an army of zombies before a Vodoun priestess.
“Is it just me?” I said. “Or is that seriously creepy?”
Jaime jumped like a scalded cat. As she twisted, she saw me and her face went white. I’d say she looked as if she’d seen a ghost, but for a necromancer, that’s pretty much a daily occurrence. You’d think she’d have grown used to it by now.
“Nice gig,” I said. “Is it almost over? I need to talk to you.”
“Jaime?” the host said, leaning forward. “What is it? Do you see something?”
“Seems you have a resident ghost,” Jaime said. “Normally I need to open myself up to see them, but sometimes they shove their way right through. Impatient as children.” A razor-sharp glare my way. “Rude children.”
“Rude? You’re a necro. I sure as hell don’t expect you to jump every time a ghost—”
“Can you see him?” the host whispered.
“Her. It’s a woman.” Jaime paused for effect. “A witch.”
A murmured gasp from the audience.
“Not a real witch, of course,” Jaime said, her voice taking the soft singsong tone of a storyteller. “Though she thought she was. Thought she was all-powerful, but she wasn’t.”
“Excuse me?”
“She lived by violence, and died by it. And now she’s a tormented, lonely spirit, caught between the worlds, looking for redemption.”
I snorted.
“And if she’s not”—Jaime aimed another glare my way—“she should be, because she has a lot to atone for.”
I rolled my eyes and walked off the stage.
In the wings, I prepared a second plan of attack. When Jaime stepped off the stage ten minutes later, I fell into step beside her.
“Okay, now that you have that off your chest, let’s talk. Obviously you know who I am.”
She kept walking.
“You want a formal introduction?” I said. “Fine. I’m Eve Levine, ghost. You’re Jaime Vegas, necromancer. Now, what I need is—”
She had veered around a corner before I noticed. I had to backtrack and jog to catch up.
“I know you can hear me,” I said. “And see me. So let’s cut the crap and—”
She turned into an open dressing room and slammed the door.
I followed. “Maybe I can walk through doors, but that doesn’t give you any right to slam them on me. It’s still rude.”
“Rude?” she said, spinning on me so fast I took an involuntary step back. “Rude? You just—the most important spot of my career, the chance of a lifetime and you—”
Her hand flew to her mouth. She dove into the bathroom and leaned over the toilet, gagging.
“If it makes you feel any better, she has the same effect on me.”
Jaime wheeled, eyes flashing. She pulled herself to her full height…at least five inches below my six feet. Very intimidating.
“Find yourself another necro, Eve. One who’s stupid enough to let you speak to Savannah. And my advice? When you find one, at least make some effort to follow proper protocol. That shit you pulled out there may have worked in life, but it doesn’t work now.”
There was a proper protocol? Damn.
Jaime stalked past me into the dressing room. When I followed, I found her rooting through an oversize makeup bag. She took out a bowl and a few pouches of herbs.
“A banishing mixture?” I said. “Look, Jaime, I know you don’t do a lot of real necromancy, so I’ll let you in on a little secret. That mixture only works on human ghosts. For it to work on a supernatural, you have to be a damned good necromancer and, no offense, but—”
Someone jostled me from behind. A physical jostle that, considering I was in the living world, should have been impossible…which meant that whoever hit me had to be another ghost.
“Watch where you’re going there, sweetheart.”
I looked over my shoulder to see a guy about a half foot shorter than me, dressed in spats and a straw hat, with a machine gun slung over one shoulder. He grinned, tipped his hat, and slid past.
I was on a sidewalk, across from a soot-crusted brick building with boarded-up windows and a sheet of paper plastered on the door. I sharpened my vision to read the paper on the door across the road. A notice of closure, in accordance with the Prohibition Act of 1920.
Ghost-world Chicago. Like most major cities in the afterlife, the landscape of Chicago was frozen in its heyday, and many of the residents, like the portly gangster, played along with the period. But if I was here, that meant Jaime really had banished me. Damn.
There were ways to avoid banishing. A few months before, Kristof had needed a necro’s help, and went to one who owed him major favors. Guy made the mistake of thinking Kristof’s death canceled out those IOUs, then made the even bigger mistake of trying to banish Kristof when he came to collect. Kris had done something that rendered the necro’s banishing powers impotent for the next few months, a reminder that you didn’t screw with a Nast—even a dead one.
So all I had to do was track down Kristof and ask for his help. Sounds easy enough…except for the part about asking Kristof for help. Oh, he’d give it to me—without a moment’s hesitation and with no expectation of anything in return. That was the problem. When I took something, I always gave something back—no favors owed, no debt remaining. While I counted Kris as a friend—the best I had in the ghost world—I hated asking him for anything. I’d taken enough from him already.
Better to try again on my own.
Jaime’s dressing room was empty.
“Damn,” I muttered.
There were ways to track a necro, but I hadn’t bothered to learn them. We were in Chicago, in late March. If she’d left the building, she’d have taken her coat, which was gone, as was her purse. But the suitcase with her outfit for the show was still here. I remembered her bout of dry heaves earlier, and guessed she’d gone onstage with an empty stomach. Now she’d likely slipped out for chow.
I considered dropping in on Savannah, giving Jaime time to eat and return. It’d only been a few hours since my last check-in, but a lot can happen to a teenage girl in a few hours. And yet…well, I had Jaime in my sights, and I hated to veer off track, even for Savannah. I’d almost certainly have time for a check-in after dealing with Jaime, as I waited for the Fates to prepare Janah. Better to stay on the trail for now.
I found Jaime a few doors down, sitting at a café window, pushing salad around her plate.
“Doesn’t look very appetizing to me, either,” I said.
This time she didn’t jump, just turned and glared.
“You know what I don’t get?” I said, taking the seat across from her. “How they can serve weeds like dandelion greens and expect people to pay triple what they would for regular lettuce.”
“Leave me alone,” she said, without moving her lips.
“I just want to talk to you.”
“And this seems like a good place to do it?” she whispered. “Do you know what I’m doing right now? I’m talking to myself.”
Her gaze cut to the table beside her, where an elderly woman stared, brow furrowed, at the poor woman carrying on a conversation with an empty chair.
“Damn. That is a problem.”
“Which is why you aren’t supposed to contact me in public,” she said, again trying to talk without moving her lips.
“You want to go outside?”
“I’m eating.”
“Doesn’t look like it.”
Another glare. She forked a few weeds into her mouth.
“Tell you what, then,” I said. “You eat, I’ll talk.”
She opened her mouth to snap something back, then stopped and rubbed a hand over her eyes. Her shoulders sagged, and when she pulled her hand away, there was an exhaustion in her face that no makeup could hide.
“Go ahead,” she murmured.
She listened, without comment, to an edited version of my story. Then she stifled a snort of laughter.
“Eve Levine, on a mission from God. I really must be wearing my stupid face today.”
“Trust me, if I were making this up, I’d have come up with something more believable. Remember a couple of years ago when Paige and Lucas ended up in the ghost world? Ever wonder how they got back? I cut a deal. Paige was there. Call her up and ask. She’s not supposed to talk about it, but she’ll confirm it.”
“Oh, don’t worry, I will make that call. As soon as I’m near a phone.”
“Good. Please do that.”
Some of her unease evaporated, but there was still a healthy dose of caution behind her shuttered gaze. Nothing new for me. I’d spent my life trying to build a reputation as a fair dealer, but when you’ve also built a rep in the black arts, no one ever gives a shit about how fair you are. Blast a person’s eyes from their sockets, and you can be sure that story will blow through the grapevine faster than an energy bolt, but somehow, the part about the “victim” siccing a demon on you gets lost in the transmission.
I opened my mouth to say more, when something across the café caught my attention. I’m not easily distracted, but this was a sight to divert even the most focused mind. A man, in his early thirties, weaving between tables, with his head in his hands—literally, his severed head in his hands. Gore trickled from his neck stump, congealing on the collar of his dress shirt. Intestine poked through a small hole in his shirt. All around him people continued to eat and talk and laugh. Which could only mean one thing.
“Ghost at ten o’clock,” I murmured to Jaime. “And it’s a ripe one.”
She turned and gave a tiny groan, then sank into her chair.
“Not a first-time visitor, I’m guessing,” I said.
The man strode up to the table. His gaze cut to me.
“What are you looking at, spook?” he snarled.
“Exactly what you want me to be looking at,” I said.
“Kill the theatricals. The necro is not impressed, and neither am I.”
“Oh, does the horror of my death offend you? Well, excuse me. Next time, I’ll make sure I die all neat and tidy.” He slammed his head onto Jaime’s salad plate. “There. Better?”
Jaime’s cheeks paled. I swung my gaze up to glare at the ghost…only his eyes weren’t there, which made the move slightly less effective. I glowered down at him.
“She’s not talking to you until you put your head back on,” I said.
“F*ck y—”
“Put your goddamned head back on now.”
He crossed his arms. “Make me.”
I slammed my open palm into his ear. His head flew off the table, rolled across the floor, and settled in front of a seeing-eye dog. The dog lifted its muzzle, and its nostrils flared as it picked up the whiff of decay.
“Yum,” I said. “Go on, boy. Take a bite.”
The ghost’s body flew across the restaurant, plowing through tables and diners. Beside me, Jaime made muffled snorting noises, stifling laughter. She mouthed, “Thank you.”
The decapitated ghost stomped back to the table. Only he was decapitated no more, having apparently decided his head was safer attached to his shoulders. He’d also freshened up his wardrobe. This would be his normal ghost self. The headless accountant look was a glamour, a trick some ghosts used to revert to their death body—the condition they’d been in when they’d died—either to play on a necromancer’s sympathy or to scare the bejesus out of humans with a little necro blood.
“Now, doesn’t that feel better?” I said.
“Oh, you thought that was funny, did you?” he said, advancing on me. “It’s always funny to pick on those less fortunate than yourself. Maybe when you’re done here, you can go back to paradise, and have a good laugh, tell them how you abused the earth-spook.”
“Earth-spook?”
“I’m a spirit in torment,” the man said, his voice rising like a preacher at the pulpit. “Condemned to tread the earthly realm until my soul finds peace. For five years—five unimaginably long years—I’ve been trapped here, unable to move into the light, seeking only a few minutes of a necromancer’s time—”
Jaime thudded face-first onto the table and groaned. The elderly woman at the next table inched her chair in the other direction.
“See how she treats me?” the man said to me. “She could set me free, but no, she’s too busy going on talk shows, telling people how she helps tormented spirits find peace. When it comes to an actual spirit, though? In actual torment? Who only wants to avenge himself on the driver who ended his life, left his wife a widow, his children orphans—”
“You don’t have any children,” Jaime said through her teeth.
“Because I died before I could!”
I leaned toward Jaime and lowered my voice. “Look, the guy’s a jerk, but if you helped him, you could get him off your back—”
She swung to her feet and strode toward the door. When I jogged up beside her, she said in a low voice, “Ask him how he died.”
The ghost was right behind me, and answered before I could ask. “I remember it well. The last day of my life. I was happy, at peace with the world—”
“There’s no Oscar for death scenes,” I said. “The facts.”
“I was driving home after a business meeting,” he began.
“A meeting held in a bar,” Jaime added as she turned into an alley.
“It was after office hours,” he said. “Nothing wrong with a drink or two.”
“Or five or six.” She stopped, out of earshot of the sidewalk now, and turned to me. “Coroner reported a blood-alcohol level of at least point two five.”
“Sure, okay, I was drunk,” the man said. “But that wasn’t the problem. The problem was a seventeen-year-old kid joyriding in my lane!”
“You were in her lane,” Jaime said. “Got a police report to prove it. Who killed you? The idiot who got behind the wheel of his convertible, so pissed he couldn’t even fasten his seat belt. That kid you hit will spend the rest of her life wearing leg braces. And you want me to help you exact revenge on her?”
I turned on the man, eyes narrowing. He met my gaze and took a slow step back, then wheeled and stalked away.
“Don’t think this is done!” he called over his shoulder.
“I’m coming back. And next time you won’t have your ghost-bitch bodyguard to protect you.”
“You want my help, Eve?” Jaime said. “Make sure he doesn’t come back. Ever.”
I smiled. “Be glad to.”
Massachusetts / 1892
THE NIX SNIFFED THE AIR. IT REEKED OF HORSE AND human, the sweat and shit of both. That hadn’t changed. She stood in the intersection of a street wide enough for four or five buggies to pass. Metal rails were embedded in the road, and a strange horseless carriage glided along them. Wooden poles lined the street, with wires strung from pole to pole, crisscrossing over the rows of brick buildings three, four, even five stories high.
Gone were the bustling markets, the narrow cobbled streets, the pretty little shops she remembered. The last time she’d walked the earth, this New World had been nothing more than a few bleak settlements on a wild continent, a place to send murderers and thieves.
The Nix rolled her shoulders, twisting her neck, trying to get used to the feel of this new form. In all the years she’d inhabited Marie-Madeline, she’d never quite grown accustomed to the stink of it, the pain and tedium of a mortal existence. Still, there had been a freedom there that she’d never known in her natural form—the freedom to act in the living world and wreak her own chaos. But now she was in another shape, somewhere between human and demon, a ghost.
A horse and coach veered toward her. She reached out, fingers curving into claws, ready to rip a handful of horse-flesh as the beast ran past. The horse raced through her hand without so much as a panicked roll of its eyes. She hissed as it continued down the road. Even a human ghost should be able to spook a horse. Once, her very presence would have put such fear into the beast that it would have trampled anyone who came near. She closed her eyes, and imagined the chaos she could have created. And now what? After two hundred years of damnation, had she escaped only to moan and lament what she had lost? No, there had to be a way—there was always a way.
The Nix took a few steps down the road, sampling the passing humans, tasting the thoughts of each. The men’s minds were now closed to her. She’d learned that soon after her escape. Having died in the form of a woman, her powers were now restricted to that gender.
Her gaze slid from face to face, looking for the signs, searching the eyes first, then the mind. Sometimes humans hit on a moment of profundity more complete than their dim minds could comprehend, and they took that nugget of truth and dumped it in the refuse for the bards and the poets to find, and mangle into yodeling paeans to love. The eyes were indeed the windows to the soul. Clear eyes, and she passed by without pause. A few wisps of cloud behind a gaze, and she might hesitate, but likely not. Storms were what she wanted—the roiling, dark storms of a tempest-tossed psyche.
She made it halfway down the street, finding nothing more than a thundercloud or two. Then she had to pause before a woman with downcast eyes. In her late twenties with a plain, broad face, the woman waited on the sidewalk outside a store. A man exited the store, swarthy and rough-skinned, dressed in the clothes of a working man. As he saw the woman, a smile lit his face.
“Miz Borden,” he said, tipping his hat. “How are you?”
The woman looked up with a shy smile. “Fine, thank you. And how are you?”
Before he could answer, a tall man with white whiskers strode from the store, his eyes blazing. He grabbed the woman by the arm and propelled her to the street without so much as a glance at the other man.
“What were you doing?” he hissed.
“Saying hello, Father. Mr. O’Neil greeted me, so I—”
“I don’t care what he did. He’s a farmhand. Not good enough for the likes of you.”
What man is good enough for me, Father? None, if it means you and she would have to hire a second servant to replace me. The thought ran through the woman’s mind, spat out on a wave of fury, but only the barest tightening of her lips betrayed it.
Her gaze lifted enough for the Nix to see eyes so clouded with hate they were almost black. The Nix chortled to herself. So she wished her father dead…just like Marie-Madeline. What an appropriate start to this new life.
The Nix reached out and stroked her fingers across the woman’s pale cheek. Would you like me to set you free, dear one? With pleasure.