Ghost Story (39 page)

I just stared up for a moment and then shook my head faintly. “You saw that? What I was thinking?”

“I see you,” she said, as though that explained it. “Not what you were thinking. What you were remembering.”

“Interesting,” I said. It made a certain amount of sense that Lea could discern the spirit world better than I could. She was a creature who was at least partly native to the Nevernever. I probably looked like some kind of pale, white, ghostly version of myself to her, while the memories that were my substance played across the surface.

I thought about the wraiths and lemurs that Sir Stuart had put down on my first night as a ghost, and how they had seemed to bleed images as they faded away.

“Yes,” she said, her tone pleased. “Precisely like that. My, but the Colonial Knight put on a display for you.”

“You knew Sir Stuart?”

“I have seen him in battle on several occasions,” Lea said, her eyes somewhat dreamy. “He is a worthy gentleman, in his fashion. Quite dangerous.”

“Not more dangerous than the Corpsetaker,” I said. “She destroyed him.”

Lea thrust out her lower lip and her brow furrowed in annoyance. “Did she? What a contemptible waste of a perfectly doughty spirit.” She rolled her eyes. “At least, my godchild, you have discerned your foe's identity—and that of her pet.”

I shivered. “Her and Evil Bob.”

She waved a hand. “Evil is mainly an aesthetic choice. Only the spirit's power is significant, for your purposes.”

“Not true,” I said mildly. “Though I know you don't agree.”

Her expression was pensive for a moment before she said, “You have your mother's Sight, you know.”

“Not her eyes?”

“I've always thought you favored Malcolm.” The serious expression vanished and she kicked her feet again. “So, young shade. What happened next?”

“You know. You were there.”

“How do the mortals say it?” she murmured. “I missed that episode.”

I coughed out a surprised little laugh.

She looked faintly miffed. “I do not know what happened between the time you left Justin and the time you came to me.”

“I see.” I grinned at her. “Do you think I just give away stories for free? To one of the Sidhe?”

She tilted back her head and laughed, and her eyes twinkled. Like, literally, with little flashes of light. “You have learned much. I began to despair of it, but it seems you may have acquired wisdom enough, and in time.”

“In time to be dead,” I said. “But, yeah. I've worked out by now that the Sidhe don't give anything away. Or take anything for free. And after however long, I realized why that might be: because you can't.”

“Indeed,” she said, beaming at me. “There must be balance, sweet godchild. Always balance. Never take a thing without giving such a thing in return; never give a favor without collecting one in kind. All of reality depends on balance.”

I squinted at her. “That's why you gave Bianca
Amoracchius
years ago. So that you could accept that knife from her. The one Mab took from you.”

She leaned toward me, her eyes all but glowing with intensity and her teeth showing in a sudden, carnivorous smile. “Indeed. And such a
treacherous
gift it was, child. Oh, but if that deceitful creature had survived you, such a vengeance I would have wreaked that the world would have spoken of it in whispers for a thousand years.”

I squinted at her. “But . . . I killed Bianca before you could balance the scales.”

“Indeed, simple boy. Why else, think you, that I gifted you with the most potent powers of faerie to protect you and your companions when we battled Bianca's ultimate progenitors?”

“I thought you did it because Mab ordered you to.”

“Tsk. In all of Winter, I am second in power only to Mab—which she has allowed because I have incurred with it proportionate obligation to her. She is my dearest enemy, but even I do not owe Mab so much. I helped you as much as I did, sweet child, because I owed you for collecting a portion of my due justice from Bianca,” the Leanansidhe said. Her eyes grew wider, wilder. “The rest I took from the little whore's masters. Though I admit, I hadn't expected the collection to be quite so
thorough
.”

Memories flashed in my head. Susan. An obsidian knife. I felt sick.

I'll get over it,
I told myself. Eventually. It hadn't been much more than a day from my point of view. I was probably still in shock or trauma or something—if ghosts could get that, I mean.

I looked up and realized that Lea was staring at me, at my memories, with undisguised glee. She let out a contented sigh and said, “You do not settle things by half measures, do you, my godson?”

I could get mad at her for being callous about calling those memories to my mind, or I could revile her for taking such joy in so much destruction and pain, but there wasn't a point in doing so. My godmother was what she was—a being of violence, deceit, and the thirst for power. She wasn't human. Her attitudes and reactions could not fairly be called inhumane.

Besides. I had gotten to know Lea's sovereign, Queen Mab, in a fashion so hideously intimate that I could not possibly describe it. And believe me. If Lea had been the high priestess of murder, bloodlust, scheming, and manipulation, then Mab was the goddess my godmother worshipped.

Come to think of it, that was probably an apt description of their relationship.

Six of one, a half dozen of another. My godmother wasn't going to change. There was no sense in holding what she was against her. So I just gave her a tired, whimsical smile instead.

“Saves time,” I told her. “Do it thoroughly once, and you don't have to fool around with it again later.”

She dropped back her head and let out a deep-throated laugh. Then she tilted her head and looked at me. “You didn't realize what would happen to mortal kind when you struck down the Red King and his brood. Did you?”

“I saw the opportunity,” I said, after a moment. “If I'd stopped to think about the trouble it would create . . . I don't know if I'd have done it any differently. They had my girl.”

Her eyes gleamed. “Spoken as someone worthy to wield power.”

“Coming from you,” I said, “that's . . . a little bit unsettling, actually.”

She kicked both feet, girlishly pleased, and smiled down at me. “How sweet of you to say so.”

The best thing about my faerie godmother is that the creepy just keeps on coming.

“I'll trade you,” I said. “The rest of the tale for information.”

She nodded her head in a businesslike fashion. “The tale for questions three?”

“Done.”

“Done, done, and done,” she replied.

So I told her.

I
ran and ran for a good long while. I wasn't on the cross-country team at school, but I often went running with Elaine. It was how we'd hidden sneaking off to make out—and stuff—from Justin. He was a thorough sort of guy, so we made sure to actually do the running, too, in order to make our deception flawless. And the whole time, we thought we were getting away with it.

As an adult, I could see that our efforts were about as obvious as they could possibly be. Justin had known, I was certain—now. But back then, Elaine and I had been sure that we were masters of deceit.

That scheme's trappings were sure as hell turning out to be handy that day. My strides slowed but turned longer, steadier, machinelike. I was sixteen. I didn't wind down for almost an hour.

When I finally stopped, the terror had faded, if not the heartache, and I found myself in an entirely unexpected position.

I didn't know what was coming next. I didn't know what was expected of me.

I had to think. All by myself.

I ducked off the road and into a large culvert, huddling there while I got my breath back and flailed at the wet paper bag my brain was trapped within.

Mostly, I just kept thinking that I should have known. No one in my life had gone an inch out of their way to look out for me once my parents were gone. Justin's generosity, even seasoned with the demands of studying magic, had been too good to be true. I should have known it.

And Elaine. She'd just sat there while he'd been doing whatever he was going to do. She hadn't tried to warn me, hadn't tried to stop him. I had never known anyone in my life I had loved as much as Elaine.

I should have known she was too good to be true, too.

I wept for a while. I was tired and cold and my chest ached with the pain of loss. In a single moment, my home had been destroyed. My life had been destroyed.

But I shook my head ferociously, wiping my eyes and my nose on the leather sleeves of my jacket, heedless of what it did to them. I was still in danger. I had to think.

I had no means of travel, no money, and no idea of where to go. Hell's bells, I was lucky I had my shiny new driver's license in my pocket. It was mid-November, and my school letter jacket wasn't going to be enough to keep me warm once it got dark. My stomach made a cavernous noise, and I added starving hunger to my list of problems.

I needed shelter. I needed food. I needed to find someplace safe to hide from my mentor until I could figure out how to take him on—and to get all of that, I needed money. And I needed it fast.

So, once it got dark, I, uh . . .

Look. I was sixteen.

Once it got dark, I sort of knocked over a convenience store.

 

For lack of anything better to hide my face, I'd tied my sweaty T-shirt around my head in a sort of makeshift balaclava. I didn't have anything else to wear except my letter jacket, which seemed more or less like a screaming advertisement to make it simple for the cops to figure out my identity. There wasn't much I could do except to rip all the patches off of it and hope for the best. After that, I'd scavenged a paper sack from a trash bin, emptied it, and stuck my right hand in it.

Once I had my equipment ready, I looked up at the streetlights glowing outside the QuikStop and flicked a quick hex at them.

Learning magic is hard, but if you can do even fairly modest spells, you find out that wrecking technology is
easy
. Anything with electronics built into it is particularly susceptible to a hex, but if you put enough oomph into it, even simpler technology can be shorted out or otherwise made to malfunction. At sixteen, I wasn't anywhere near the wizard I would be even five or six years later—but those lights didn't have a prayer. The two streetlights over the parking lot flickered and went black.

I hit the lights outside the store next, and two security cameras. I was getting increasingly nervous as I went along, and the last hex accidentally blew out the store's freezers and overhead lights along with the security camera. The only lighting left in the place came from a pinball machine and a couple of aging arcade video games.

I swallowed and hit the door, going through in a half-doubled-over crouch, so that there wouldn't be any way to compare my height to the marker on the inside frame of the door. I held out my right hand like it was a gun, which it might have been: I had the paper sack I'd acquired pulled over it. There was something cold and squishy and greasy on the inside of the bag. Mayonnaise, maybe? I hated mayo.

I hustled up to the cashier, a young man with a brown mullet and a Boston T-shirt, pointed the paper sack at him, and said, “Empty the drawer!”

He blinked reddened, watery eyes at me. Then at the paper bag.

“Empty the drawer or I'll blow your head off!” I shouted.

It probably would have been more intimidating if my voice hadn't cracked in the middle.

“Uh, man,” the cashier said, and I finally twigged to the scent of recently burned marijuana. The guy didn't look scared. He looked confused. “Dude, what is . . . Did you see the lights just . . . ?”

I really hadn't wanted to do this, but I didn't have much of a choice. I made a little bit of a production of turning the “gun” to point at the liquor bottles behind the counter, gathered up my will, and screamed, “Ka-bang! Ka-bang!”

My verbal incantations have actually gotten
more
sophisticated and worldly over the years, not less.

I know, right? It shocks me, too.

The spell was just basic kinetic energy, and it didn't really hit much harder than a baseball thrown by a high school pitcher—a regular pitcher, not like Robert Redford in
The Natural
. That wasn't really enough power to threaten anyone's life, but it was noisy and it was more than enough energy to smash a couple of bottles. They shattered with loud barking sounds and showers of glass and booze.

“Holy crap!” shouted the cashier. I saw that his name tag read STAN. “Dude!” He flinched down, holding his arms up around his head. “Don't shoot!”

I pointed the paper bag at him and said, “Give me all the money, Stan!”

“Okay, okay!” Stan said. “Oh, God. Don't kill me!”

“Money!” I shouted.

He turned to the register and started fumbling at it, stabbing at the keys.

As he did, I sensed a movement behind me, an almost subliminal presence. It's the kind of thing you expect to experience while standing in a line—the silent pressure of another living being behind you, temporarily sharing your space. But I wasn't standing in a line, and I whirled in panic and shouted, “Ka-bang!” again.

There was a loud snap of sound as pure force lashed through the air and the glass door to a freezer of ice cream shattered.

“Oh, God,” Stan moaned. “Please don't kill me!”