get to finish. Because before the last word hit the air, the ghosts—who’d clearly been waiting for just this sort of noisy fun—slipped through the walls. Four of them.
And thanks to the debris and shit on the floor, including what appeared to be a damned cigarette lighter sitting on top of a backpack tucked against one of the drier sections of wall, they were ghosts with weapons.
Chess started to throw her dirt, put as much power behind it as she could, but missed as the teenagers freaked out and started running. One of them knocked her against the wall; another bounced off her and tumbled back. The third … the third had a face half obscured by blood, presumably from the chunk of concrete the ghost beside it was readying for another swing.
The kids screamed. Riley yelled something. Chess fought the rising tides of fear and irritation and grabbed another handful of dirt.
Go for the concrete-wielding ghost first, because if it smacked that kid again there’d be a nice layer of brains added to the general slime and mess on the floor. She managed to freeze that one, glanced around to see Riley doing the same with another.
That left two. Two ghosts and three teenagers who really should have fucking known better crowded into that small space. There was barely room to move in there, much less do anything else, and two of the ghosts were still mobile.
Flames erupted in the corner of her vision. That backpack had apparently been filled with papers—of course it was, they were high school kids—and one of the ghosts had set the whole thing alight. It threw the flaming sack at her.
She ducked, and slipped in the vile sludge covering the floor. Eeew. Cold water—and who knew what else, probably blood and urine and vomit—soaked her jeans.
Worse, while she’d been distracted, the other moving ghost had found a length of pipe and used it to try to pop off one of the teenagers’ heads like a ball off a tee.
At least that’s what she assumed had happened. The flashlight in the one guy’s jacket had gone out, or been smashed. The unearthly, hideous glow of the four spirits provided the room’s only illumination, giving everything the unreal look of a nightmare.
Another garbled yell from Riley. She barely heard him over the sound of her breath in her ears and the shouts of the teens. One of them slipped just as she had. The ghost raised its pipe.
Graveyard dirt still in her fist. She threw it, threw her power, too. The ghost froze and dropped the pipe; it clattered on the kid’s back, knocked him down into the floor sewage.
Riley had managed to freeze the fourth ghost. Not that it mattered that much. They wouldn’t stay frozen forever; ten minutes tops. Riley and Chess needed to get passports on the things, and they needed to get a salt circle down as fast as possible—that would be fun, in the wet sludge.
And they needed to get those motherfucking kids out of there before the scent of their blood, the taste of their terror in the air, attracted more dead. Who knew how many there might be in the area? She and Riley had been told to expect two at the most, and here there were four. Like a deadly double-score bonus on the world’s worst game show.
Well, hey, at least she got to win something, right?
“Riley, get them out of here.” She managed to stand, cringing at the feel of her nasty wet jeans touching her skin, and started digging through her bag for her salt. “I’ll try to get a circle down.”
“I don’t think I can,” Riley said.
“What?” Had some of the salt spilled when she fell? She’d thought she packed more.
“I don’t think I can.”
How could he not shoo a couple of injured kids out of the building? They were probably desperate to leave anyway. She looked up at him, annoyed, but what she saw changed the annoyance to the sort of oh-fuck-no feeling she was all too familiar with.
He stood against the wall, his face pale, his body still, staring at the ghosts with fear-wide eyes. “I don’t think I can, Chess. I’m sorry, but I—look at what they did, look at those kids.”
“Yeah, but Riley, they’re frozen now, right? They can’t move. Let’s just—I’ll lay the circle and you start the ritual, okay? Or you lay the salt. The sooner we start, the sooner we can get out of here, right?”
He shook his head. “I can’t get close to them.”
“You got close to them in training.” In another minute or two the first ghost was going to shake off the power holding it—him—and start moving again. She needed to at least get him marked, and now. “Remember training? You can do this, you can.”
“That was different. That was in class, with the Elders and everybody. I can’t … I can’t …”
Choice time. Keep trying to coddle Riley and hope to get him to de-stun, or ignore him and Banish four ghosts by herself, with her lone psychopomp, which would probably require two separate callings.
The teenagers—aside from the one with the broken nose, who huddled against the wall moaning—watched with interest. That, at least, wasn’t a tough decision. “Get your friends and get the hell out of here. Now!”
“But, we want to watch you—”
Her sigh passed through every inch of her body before it finally came out. “Get. The hell. Out of here. Or I will make sure you all get a nice long afternoon in the stocks next Holy Day.”
Finally, something she said produced some kind of result. They left, brushing past her as they walked out the door. They’d probably stand just outside listening, and the knowledge pissed her off, but it would take too much time to lecture them any more.
“Riley. Are you going to help me?”
He shook his head. Great.
Another bone-sucking sigh, and she popped the cap off her Ectoplasmarker. At least her psychopomp could be counted on to behave the way it was supposed to.
Chapter Two
Teach your children from a young age to be careful in their choice of friendships. Unwise acquaintances can have unforeseen consequences.
—Families and Truth, a Church pamphlet by Elder Barrett
And it had, thankfully, but the whole thing—including driving that pussy Riley back to the Church, filing her report, and giving Elder Griffin a quick rundown of Riley’s freakout—took way longer than she’d thought, which pissed her off again. One of the benefits of taking a newbie along was supposed to be sticking them with the paperwork. Just her luck to get the one who couldn’t handle it.
That wasn’t fair of her, but she wasn’t in the mood to be fair. Especially not when the effects of her pills were starting to wear off, leaving her ragged around the edges and even antsier than she would ordinarily be. She grabbed her pillbox from her bag, shook four Cepts into her palm, and downed them with a slug of water before heading for the shower. Rushing through her shower, really, and everything that came after.
That quick, tickly, lifting sensation in her stomach—that feeling that never got old, that feeling she would give her soul
