Stacia Kane - City of Ghosts

Lauren shouted something. Words of power Chess didn’t recognize but felt vibrate inside her. She watched Lauren set fire to a dish of herbs, she didn’t know which ones or where they’d come from but fuck, if she was going to keep beasts like that in her house she guessed she’d be prepared to send the fuckers back to wherever they came from, too.

The smell of the herbs hit her nose. It hurt, like breathing poison. The dogs howled again, in agony this time. They hadn’t finished destroying the First Elders. Scraps of them, chunks of ghostly bodies, littered the floor, legless feet planted in place.

Lauren went on shouting, the dogs went on howling. Chess screamed, sinking to her knees. She almost wished she’d let the First Elders take her, because she couldn’t do this anymore. She’d never been so exhausted in her life, and as the skulls fell back to the ground she looked up at Lauren and started to cry.

Shame rode those tears, streaming from her eyes and dripping down her cheeks. Not that it mattered. Lauren’s face was red and twisted with rage; she stormed across the floor, grabbed Chess’s hair, yanked her head to the side, and shoved the needle into her neck.

No more pain. Instead pleasure washed over her, raced up her veins and into her heart and mind, and just before she collapsed she wasn’t sure if she should laugh or cry. She knew that feeling. Loved that feeling. Lived for it, thought of it, pined for it, begged for it. And now she might die for it, and wasn’t that a fuck of a thing.

Lauren had shot her up with a massive dose of Dream.

Darkness cradled her, held her in soft arms and kept her warm. When she tried to open her eyes, light stabbed her and she shut them again, rolling over on the bumpy—Wait. She was supposed to be dead. Was she dead?

Silence made her think perhaps she was. The City was a silent place. If she was dead, she’d be there.

She didn’t want to open her eyes.

But … the City didn’t smell like garbage. At least she assumed it didn’t. It didn’t to living people, but as far as she knew, nobody had ever asked a ghost if the City stank to them.

The thought made her giggle. She tried to snuggle deeper into the—Wait.

Wait. No, she wasn’t dead. She was definitely not dead, because newspapers didn’t exist in the City, and newspaper covered her.

She opened her eyes. For one confused second she thought she was at the bottom of a hole of some kind, that she was wrong and she was in the City after all … until she realized she was looking at the gunk-spattered walls of a Dumpster.

They’d tossed her in there. Spiked her and thrown her body in the garbage. Fuckers.

Oh, shit, what time was it? What—It was still night, but what time was it?

It was Friday night—she hoped it still was, anyway. Saturday was the day of Elder Murray’s Dedication. They’d all be heading into the City for the ceremony, the entire staff—Would Lauren be with them? Would the Lamaru be waiting for them, would Baldarel?

Was her—Yes. Okay, her bag was there. Her phone? Did she have … Something was in her pocket and she thought it was the phone but she couldn’t tell for sure, couldn’t get her stiff hand in there. Okay. She’d get out of the Dumpster first.

The fact that she’d ended up in a Dumpster with a Dream OD pumping in her veins would have given her cold chills if she’d been able to feel them. As it was, she focused on the lip of the Dumpster and on getting out, on what she’d learned and what she had to do, and pretended this little movie hadn’t played in her head a few hundred times already with a much less cheerful ending. Not that this one was particularly happy.

Her muscles protested and her joints creaked as she pushed herself to a stand, clinging to the walls of the Dumpster no matter how sick it made her to do so. She didn’t have a choice. Once that ceremony started …

She needed to get to the Church.

The edge of the Dumpster was more slippery than she’d thought. It took three tries for her to get her leg up over it, cringing all the while at the smell and the bits of rotten food clinging to her clothes. She tumbled without grace to the dirty cement below.

That hurt. And since she was already in pain she might as well go ahead and throw up, too. Her stomach thought it sounded like a good plan, and who was she to disagree?

The world spun around her, jittered and shook before her eyes. She needed to figure out where she was. She needed to get to the Church. Needed help.

Her legs didn’t want to support her. They moved slowly, clumsily. It occurred to her that while she was still alive, she might not stay that way. It had been night when she’d gone to Lauren’s place and it was night as she wove her way down the alley, but that didn’t matter much; her system was pretty fucking loaded and so was she. The irony that her tolerance for Dream had saved her life—so far, at least—wasn’t lost on her.

The mouth of the alley opened onto an unfamiliar street. It didn’t look real; it was flat somehow, like a painting, or like the exhibits in the Church Archives made of plywood. People stood on it like they were talking but she couldn’t see their lips move, couldn’t hear them; their arms lifted in slow motion. She had the creeping sensation that if she walked too far into it she would be swallowed, turned into something flat and inhuman, too. It would trap her and never let her escape.

But the brick wall rubbed solid and rough against her palm. She stood in reality; she would stay in it.

Keeping her body in contact with that reassuring wall, she slipped out onto the street. Signs above doors made no sense. Shit, she couldn’t read them. The lines were nothing but squiggles; they didn’t form anything. She knew they must, she just couldn’t see them—was too fucked-up to see them—but it didn’t help. Her sluggish heart coughed in her ribcage.

Okay. Her hand slipped into her pocket—Yes! The phone was in there.

She braced herself against the wall and stared at it, trying not to see her blood-covered hands, trying to make sense of the buttons. Okay. Not being able to read created problems when trying to … Hell, she’d try them all. Wasn’t like she had all that many people programmed in there, right?

Her fingers slipped off the buttons. Maybe she should take a nap first. Her eyelids were so heavy, her limbs felt rubbery. If she—Speed. She had Nips in her pillbox, right? She could take some. That might help.

The heels of her boots slid over the sidewalk; her ass hit the pavement with a thud she didn’t feel. Her jeans were stiff with dried blood, still damp in places. Her arms were rust-colored with it. She didn’t even want to imagine how she looked.

Okay, pillbox … pillbox … Her hands got tangled in her bag and she couldn’t get them free. Long minutes passed while she struggled with it, almost crying except she couldn’t feel anything enough to cry. Finally her hand closed around it and she yanked it free.

Stupid little catch! Why did she have a pillbox with such a dumb little catch on it, she couldn’t seem to get it open … couldn’t see it very well, her eyelids kept closing on her …

Voices. She opened her eyes and saw a gang of teenagers across the street. What the—Shit, she’d passed out, hadn’t she. For how long?

What was that noise? Nobody on the street seemed to be making any, but it came from somewhere. And she knew that sound, it was a song, a familiar one, it—A phone call! Oh, shit, a phone call, that was awesome, that was what she needed. Okay. Gingerly she pressed the button, held it to her ear. “Hello?”