City of Ghosts

Chapter Eighteen

Death came for her on thunderous black wings, in sleek black bodies way too large for the room. The ravens stole the air from her lungs, the thoughts from her head. They were coming, and she could not escape. How the hell did someone escape from a psychopomp?

Getting out of the fucking office might be a good start. Lauren’s sleeve almost slipped from her fingers as she flung them both to the floor just in time to avoid swooping claws like the spikes that carried dead cows in the slaughterhouse below.

One thing about Lauren, she could think fast. She usually thought wrong, but fast still had its virtues. Her gun was already in her hand; they’d barely hit the tile before she took aim and shot, an action that made Chess scream inside.

But not out loud. Instead she slammed her own fist into her leg, hard, to give herself something else to focus on. They didn’t have time. Didn’t have—

Mistletoe. She had mistletoe, taken from that hideous totem in her bag. It wouldn’t beat the ravens, at least she didn’t think so, but it might buy them a few seconds, and that was all they needed. Just enough time to get out the door.

Fire crawled across the ceiling above them. The ravens outlined against it looked larger than they had before, hollow outlines in the ever-moving ocean of flame.

Lauren shot again. The skull of the bird closest to them exploded in a cloud of bone fragments and dust, mingling with the smoke. No blood. No brains.

Chess had never known if psychopomps actually came back to life, if they were for the brief time of their use breathing creatures with pumping hearts. Seemed they weren’t. They weren’t animals at all, just reanimated corpses, empty shells full of instinct and magic.

Another shot. One of the ravens lost part of a wing. Feathers and bone flew, tiny scraps of desiccated skin hit the flames above and disappeared.

Yet another shot. A miss. No wonder—the smoke thickening the air made it harder and harder to see.

Chess stopped trying. Her fingers shook as they struggled with the plastic bag holding the mistletoe, finally yanking it open and pulling the leaves out.

No need to light a fire, at least. Lauren’s little pile of herbs still smoked a few feet away. Chess could have tossed them into the air, let them be devoured by the inferno hovering above them, but the mistletoe would have burned too fast. Instead she dug out her lighter and, holding the leaves by the stems, lit them.

“By this—” The words ended in a coughing fit. She struggled to swallow, dipped lower to try to breathe some fresh air—as fresh as it could be, anyway—and tried again. This time she managed to finish, dropping the leaves onto Lauren’s fire as she spoke.

“By this power I command the escorts of the dead. By my power I command the escorts of the dead. Hear me, escorts. I Bind you. Ornithramii mordreus, I Bind you.”

Shit. Not enough power. Maybe not enough power in the mistletoe; being used in a fetish bomb and then doused with salt probably didn’t do much for its effectiveness. Definitely not enough power in herself. She couldn’t seem to get grounded, to feel the energy flowing through her. Instead she felt the heat, the fire getting closer, the constant streaming ache in her eyes and the pounding in her head as her brain cried for more oxygen. They were running out of time. She didn’t want to die here, not this way.…

Taking her eyes off the ravens and blocking out the deafening gunshots terrified her, but she had no choice. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath. Reached inside herself as far as she could, past the filth and slime and fear, past the boiling pit of rage, and found the spark of power hidden there.

And set it free.

“Escorts, I command you! I Bind you! Ornithramii mordreus, I Bind you!”

The shock of her energy as it combined with the mistletoe and hit the birds reverberated through her. It hadn’t worked completely. The mistletoe was too tainted, was connected to whatever had made the ravens murder weapons instead of servants.

But some of it was there. A tiny germ of mistletoe’s true power still lurked beneath the filth, and it combined with hers. Unfortunately, so did the filth. Her stomach lurched, her mouth filled with saliva. Not good. Not good energy. Foul, sick, twisted energy, inside her now.

It wasn’t permanent, she knew; when she let go of the ravens it would leave her, just like any other spell. But it was there for the moment, and that was bad enough.

The ravens fell silent, landed on the desk not two feet away. Their bodies were still but Chess felt them struggling. The Bind already slipped and thinned.

“We have to get out of here now, it won’t hold them for long.”

Lauren tried to speak but coughed instead. Together they slipped under the back of the desk and crawled to the door. Staying low was their only hope if they wanted to keep breathing. Which Chess pretty much did.

Her wet sleeve offered no protection at all from the doorknob’s heat, but she turned it anyway, steeling herself against a sight that nothing could possibly prepare her for.

How did the roof still stand? How had the metal walkway not collapsed? They stood in the middle of a nightmare, silent now save for the hungry, eerie susurration of the flames.

Ghosts still wove themselves in and out between the columns of burning wood and softened steel. They didn’t seem to have noticed Lauren or her yet; she imagined the intense heat masked them and the minor energy their bodies radiated. For now, at least. It wouldn’t be long before they were spotted, and not all of the spirits wandered on the lower floors. It could be a trap, a chute of fire just like the metal livestock chutes below. She shuddered at the thought and forced her heavy feet to move.

Her lungs burned. Every breath was an effort. The thin dry air didn’t seem to provide any oxygen at all. She expected to burst into flame at any second; the heat ravaged her, made her feel like dust herself, like an empty, hollow body—a psychopomp.

But she wasn’t heading for the City. At least she hoped to hell she wasn’t.

With Lauren at her side she led the way back toward the psychopomp room and the fire escape she hoped still existed. If it didn’t … if it didn’t, they would die. She almost didn’t care; at least the City was cool and dim.

No, not cool and dim. Cold and dark. She would not go there. Not today. Hell, when she finally went she’d probably end up in the spirit prisons herself; just because she worked for the Church didn’t mean she was a good person.

And she couldn’t bring herself to give a shit just then, either. She and Lauren clung to each other; Chess didn’t know who was helping whom. Every breath turned into a cough, every desperate swallow into sand rubbing her tonsils.

Walking caused its own set of problems. Smoke so thick she could cut it with her knife clouded her vision, forced her to feel the floor ahead with a careful toe before putting her weight on it. Lauren slumped against her; Chess didn’t know which bothered her more, the extra weight or the forced intimacy. Maybe Lauren wasn’t so bad—at least she’d shot down one of the psychopomps, had summoned them to begin with and saved both their asses—but that didn’t mean Chess wanted to snuggle with the woman.

The walkway hadn’t collapsed yet, but she had the uncomfortable feeling that it was only a matter of time. It jolted and shifted under their feet, their steps loud and somehow inappropriate against the hungry whisper of the blaze. She wanted to say something to Lauren, to push her off, but it didn’t seem worth the trouble.

Instead she coughed, her chest aching, and dragged her feet along the walkway. A dead Lamaru blocked the way, his face a mess of charred flesh.

And behind him, his ghost.

Chess whipped her head around, checking one last time for another exit. Nope. Instead, there were more ghosts. They’d been spotted, and two spirits had almost reached the top of the stairs by the office.

Oh, for fuck’s sake, were they ever going to get out of this place? Couldn’t something, sometime, just be straightforward and easy?

Right. Stupid question.

Lauren saw it too. They stopped short a few steps from the Lamaru. Through his spirit’s translucent form the door to the psychopomp room beckoned. Hell, it practically fucking glowed at them, promising all manner of seductive escapes, like a very expensive Downside hooker.

Those were promises Chess intended to see that it kept, ghosts be damned.

The last of her asafetida barely filled her palm. She had more graveyard dirt, she could—No. Hold on.

“When I say go,” she muttered to Lauren, “run for the door. But stay down, okay? Low to the ground.”

Lauren’s skin had a grayish cast to it. Any doubts Chess had about the dangerous, half-assed plan forming in her head were dispelled by the sight. She still didn’t like Lauren, still wouldn’t trust her with anything more important than a piece of lint. But they were in this together, and that little flash of the Grand Elder’s face, of her career being sidetracked into Debunking cases like ghostly mice in an abandoned barn, tipped the scales.

She’d been trying to ignore the heavy illness from the fetish still riding in her gut. Now she reached for it, felt the ravens and their fury, felt their utter ruthlessness. Creatures without soul, whose only purpose on the earth was to constantly seek what they did not possess.

She let them go.

Lamaru energy ripped through her; their revenge, the spell’s backlash, the effects of ten minutes of solid smoke inhalation combined with fear and stress and sadness and Cepts made her retch. Good thing her stomach was empty. There was never a good time to puke, but this moment had to be in the top ten worst moments.

“Go!” she shouted, as the ravens swooped out of the office and around the corner.

They hit the ghosts at the top of the stairs. One raven grabbed one ghost. The other two ravens kept on coming.

Well, shit. So much for that half-assed plan.

The ghost grabbed for her and Lauren as they neared him. Too late, Chess saw what she had not before: He held a jagged shred of steel.

He swiped at them as they ran past. Chess managed to shift to the side, narrowly avoiding a slice in the throat. Lauren wasn’t quite so lucky. The metal missed her throat as well but caught her shoulder.

Lauren screamed. Drops of blood showed purplish against the smoke. The ghost tried to scoop them up and absorb their power.

Whether the ravens saw it too, Chess didn’t know. All she knew was the sensation of talons scraping at her head but failing to find purchase. The tip of a wing slammed into her back and knocked her forward through the doorway of the psychopomp room.

The ravens shrieked their fury. The ghost made no sound but obviously shared their feeling. The remaining two ghosts pushed their way past him, reaching for Lauren, reaching for Chess as she scrambled to her feet and grasped the door so hard rust gritted into her palm. The ravens swooped around in a half-circle and came in for another dive.

They all appeared framed by the doorway: three dead men, their faces studies in frustrated anger and thoughtless greed. Two ravens pitch-black against the rippling red-orange wall behind them, getting closer every second.

Chess slammed the iron door.

Had she thought the psychopomp room felt like an oven earlier? Ha. That had been nothing more than a warm summer day. Her concerns about the iron-cored walls and floor had been absolutely correct. It didn’t seem possible that the room could actually be hotter than the fire outside, and intellectually she knew it wasn’t, but it sure as hell felt like it.

But it didn’t matter. Didn’t matter one bit, because they’d be out of there in a few seconds.

Lauren slumped against the wall while Chess leapt over the fetish to the window. Barred, yes, but her small victory over the ghosts and psychopomps outside gave her another burst of adrenaline; she felt capable of ripping the bars out of the window with her bare hands.

So much for feelings. No. No way could she pull that off. But it did feel like the bars shifted a little.

“Lauren!”

Lauren’s muffled reply sounded vaguely like “Mphgr.” Or maybe “Fuck off.” Or a combination of the two. Who cared? Not Chess.

“Lauren, get over here.”

This time Lauren obeyed, keeping her distance from the fetish still on the floor. Its horrible body had shriveled from the heat. “What?”

Shit, she really looked sick. Maybe this wasn’t the greatest idea. Well, of course it wasn’t. Did she have a choice?

No. “Get on the floor, on your hands and knees. I need to stand on you.”

“Are you kidding?”

Ah, Lauren was back to normal. Sort of.

“No. I need to get these bars off the window, and I need better leverage.”

For the first time since the ordeal had started she let herself really think about Terrible. He could have pulled those bars out of the window with one sharp tug. A wave of longing, of misery, washed over her so intensely that for a moment she was actually grateful for the heat and dryness. If even a few molecules of water still existed in her body she probably would have started to cry. And she definitely didn’t want to do that.

But she kept him in her head. Before she’d betrayed him—okay, before he’d found out she was betraying him—he would have reassured her. Would have reminded her that she could do anything. He’d believed that once.

So she could believe it now.

She grabbed the bars and stepped onto Lauren’s back, planting her right foot at the base of the other woman’s spine. Her left settled between Lauren’s shoulder blades.

The fire escape still existed. Thank the gods who didn’t exist, the fire escape hadn’t been destroyed.

Not for lack of trying, though—at least so she assumed. The Lamaru simply hadn’t had the chance to do it, caught up as they were in their fistfight below. Not so many as there had been—she checked her watch—just under ten minutes before, when she’d looked out the window in the office. Had that little time really passed?

Yeah. Less than ten minutes, and the Lamaru were still fighting whoever it was they were fighting.

Wait a minute. Vanhelm and the woman he’d been with, the blonde. She’d said if Vanhelm entered Downside, Maguinness would find him, hadn’t she?

Looked like she’d been right. Now that she knew what she was looking for she saw, at the very edge of the circle of illumination from the single streetlight in the center of the slaughterhouse parking lot, the fluorescent glow of Maguinness’s assistant’s tall purple hairdo.

Maguinness’s men were there. Not only were they there, she realized as one of them lit something and tossed it into the blazing building that they’d set the fire. She and Lauren had walked right into an ambush intended for someone else.

“Cesaria, are you done?”

Oh, right. “Almost.”

But she wasn’t. The bars moved a little, and left welts and bits of rust in her palms, but they refused to give. Exhaustion dragged at her limbs and clouded her mind. Too hot in that room. She was being cooked.

One last try. Her palms burned, it took every bit of will she had not to let go. Her feet lifted off Lauren’s back and braced against the wall. She leaned back, putting all of her weight behind it, all the strength she had.

The bars shifted, so fast Chess lost her balance and let go, landing on her side on the hot floor. Pain jolted through her upper arm, her shoulder and hip, but it didn’t matter. The bars had come loose. They would get out.

And would walk right into a Lamaru/whatever-he-was battle at the bottom of the fire escape. Shit. She didn’t see any possible way they could get through that unharmed or unnoticed; the Lamaru would be looking to kill them because they’d caught on to the Lamaru plot, if not just on general principles, and the Maguinness crowd—well, they’d probably want to kill her just for fun. They needed help.

So, while Lauren finished pulling the bars off the window and smashed the glass, Chess grabbed her phone and dialed the one person whose help she really wanted—the one person she thought could actually help—and the one person she knew wanted to talk to her less than anyone else.

But he would come. He wouldn’t let her die, no matter how angry he was. Right? He wouldn’t just let her die.

“The number you have dialed is no longer in service. Please check the number and dial again. Facts are Truth.”

What? That couldn’t be right. Okay. Don’t panic.

She scrolled though old texts until she found one from him, hit reply, and quickly tapped out a help-I’m-in-the-slaughterhouse-and-need-you-here-it’s-on-fire message. He probably knew about the fire—well, no “probably” about it, of course he knew—and she’d be willing to bet he was in the area. Bump had a pipe room not far away, and they wouldn’t chance the fire spreading to it.

“Your message could not be delivered.”

“Cesaria! Come on, we need to get out!”

Chess barely heard. The bright screen of the phone hurt her eyes, mocked her. He’d changed his number. He hated her so much that he didn’t even want her to have his number anymore. Even with them working on this together.

Fingers like the raven’s talons earlier gripped her arm and yanked her off the floor. “Cesaria, come on!”

Semi-clean Downside air swirled through the now open window to caress her face. She almost fell down again, it felt so fucking good. Not good enough to heal the ache in her chest—nothing could feel good enough to heal that, she didn’t think—but good. Her lungs practically danced with relief when she sucked it in. She grabbed the rough edge of the window frame and hoisted herself up.

Leaning too far out gave her vertigo; in her mind she saw ghostly hands poised right behind her—hell, she saw Lauren right behind her—ready to give her that one solid shove that would end all her problems. In her mind she saw herself stepping over the edge of the window. He’d changed his number, it didn’t make a difference, all her stupid hopes about getting him to forgive her, to talk to her again … She could just let go. Just fall, and make the pain in her chest stop.

Then she saw the City, and gripped the window frame harder. Nope. Not today. The fire escape waited for her, just barely out of reach.

One more deep breath, cool and sweet despite still being tinged with smoke. Her muscles tensed, her eyes narrowed, and she jumped.

Landing on the rickety steel made a horrible clattering sound. Fuck! They had to have heard that. No matter. Keep going. She was out, she’d gotten out, and if she’d done that she could do almost anything.

The steep steps shook and groaned beneath her, rusted railings bit her palms slick with sweat.

Carefully she started down. From this vantage point on the side of the building she saw how close the place was to complete destruction. Smoke and fire poured out of every window, climbed the outside walls. They didn’t have much time.

Lauren came down after her. The ladder gave a mighty creak, the balcony above broke free of the wall and hung crazily over them. Shit. Go faster. Faster.

Her hands slipped on the rails, her fingers stiff and aching. With every step down it got harder to let go; her legs ached, her head went light.

The ladder boiled and shifted beneath them. Down, and down; she’d been doing this forever, all her life had been spent on this fire escape, with orange light taunting them and the sky a hazy dull gray above them.

Flames danced along the wall and found her right leg; her jeans caught fire. Without meaning to, without thinking, she screamed. Her right hand left the rail, batted at the fire, and she fell.