Caitlin Kittredge - Soul Trade

“Aren’t you pretty,” Brandi growled in the guttural tones of East London. The voice of Mickey Martin, made rough and hot with hatred. “Pretty enough to turn heads.” Brandi crouched over Pete, inhaling deeply at the nexus of Pete’s neck and shoulder. “I can smell it on you,” Brandi intoned. “Wickedness. Sin. The filth of the streets dripping off your skin.” She grinned, black spilling over her tongue and down across Pete’s cheek. “Going to enjoy slicing you open and watching it all bleed out.”

Pete was glad Mickey Martin was a talker. It gave her time to plunge her hand into her opposite coat pocket and bring out her metal police baton. She tried to snap it open, but the bolt of lightning up her left arm told her that the plan was dead before it began. Her arm was sprained, at best. Shattered, at worst. Later. She could fix her arm later, when she was alive and away from here. Otherwise, they could arrange it in her casket so nobody would know. Either way, she had a more pressing problem.

Instead, she wrapped her good hand around Brandi Wolcott’s neck and squeezed. Ghosts riding bodies needed life, breath. They weren’t zombies, hunks of corpse revived by a necromancer. So Pete squeezed, with every ounce of strength left in her.

She expected that Mickey Martin would vacate Wolcott’s skin, and then she’d have a fighting chance to send him back to the Bleak Gates and the land of the dead beyond. She never expected the smoke pouring from Wolcott to wrap itself around her wrist and begin the slow crawl up her own arm.

Not again, Pete’s mind screamed. Not this.

She didn’t allow herself to give voice to the scream she felt bubbling up in her throat. When a nasty from beyond the beyond was bent on her flesh, panic was a luxury she didn’t have. She let the onslaught of the ghost’s form come, because it was better for her to be Mickey Martin’s victim than Wolcott. Wolcott didn’t know how to save herself.

“You think this’ll end well for you?” Brandi growled as the black smoke overtook Pete’s hands, her arms, crept toward her mouth and throat.

“Better than it will for you,” Pete rasped, as the first fingers of cold found their way over her tongue.

The ghost of Mickey Martin didn’t feel right, as it bled out of Brandi Wolcott in a flood and rushed up at Pete’s consciousness. It didn’t feel like a ghost; it just felt hungry, and cold.

This is wrong . Pete didn’t have to be a psychic or a professional exorcist to know when things had gone pear-shaped. She’d had a ghost try to take up residence in her skin once before, and it hadn’t felt like this, this … nothing, howling and trying to swallow her.

Brandi collapsed on top of Pete, choking, and Pete managed to wriggle out from under her and get herself upright. She was still tangled with Mickey Martin’s ghost—or the thing that had been his ghost. Pete knew that the regular exorcism that she’d planned would do less than shit. It might tickle this thing that had grown out of the ghost, or ruffle a few hairs, but that would be about it.

Then it would just be a matter of how many pieces she and Wolcott were found in, once someone noticed they were missing.

What would Jack do? Something stupid, likely, but as Pete felt the chill air against her face, felt the smoke creeping into her nostrils, she decided stupid was better than nothing.

Rather than fight the smoke any longer, she let it come. She might not have the sort of talent that let her throw fireballs or read minds, but she did have one. She felt the thing trying to move into her flesh, overpower her mind, and she welcomed it. Let it in until it touched her talent, and reared back with a scream.

“Oh no,” Pete told it, as the thing coalesced into a form, tall and skinnier than any man, with a mouth as wide as Pete’s two hands put together. “You wanted me, you have me.” She felt her talent wake up, begin to drain the cold from the thing, the malice and the hunger. It thrashed like a fish on a line, screaming now in pain rather than anticipation.

Pete recognized the thing now—a wraith, a personification of the hunger and the rage that were the dregs of a spirit. Wraiths consumed ghosts, fed until they’d burned through the spirit’s energy like a bad battery, and then moved on. Any humans that happened along would be found by an unfortunate passerby after they’d been wholly consumed, desiccated and frozen from the inside out.

This wraith, though, would never escape to feed on any of the other spirits that haunted the churchyard. This wraith belonged to her now, and she felt its cold magic seeping into her, as her talent drank the wraith down. It gave one final spasm before it detached from the battered shell of Mickey Martin’s ghost and scattered on the cold wind, wisps and faint trails and finally only the echo of its last howl against the headstones.

Pete felt her legs give out, and she sank to her knees in the rough dead grass at the base of the obelisk. Her fingers were blue, and her breath when she blew it out was frosty and opaque white. She could feel the wraith’s magic fluttering inside her like a dying bird, and she let it go. If she held it in too long, her talent would burn her from the inside out. It hadn’t been easy, to learn to let go of that dizzying high that came with sucking another being dry. That high was the ostensible upside of being a Weir, a channel for the darkest and oldest powers in the Black. Unlimited power, as much as you could steal—if you could hold it. Otherwise, you went insane when you hit the threshold and took too much of another’s power. Or simply burst a blood vessel and keeled over dead, because magic was more powerful than any narcotic, and your lust for it had eaten you alive.

Weirs didn’t usually last long. To make it to thirty-one was a feat, according to Jack. Most days, Pete wasn’t sure it was something to be proud of.

“Fuck, my head,” Brandi Wolcott groaned. “What happened, Pete? What was that?”

“Mickey Martin,” Pete said quietly. “Or what was left of him.” Wraiths were rare; it took a clever predator to survive by eating the innards out of ghosts, and London, while rife with spirits, was also rife with mages, exorcists, and psychics who ensured that predators like wraiths stayed where they belonged—in the vast screaming nothing where unfortunate lost souls could be consumed by any number of hungry things. They couldn’t usually fight their way out to attempt to make a meal out of flesh-and-blood people.

Pete supposed she was just lucky she’d been the one to get the full brunt of this wraith, rather than poor Wolcott or some unsuspecting priest or church worker.

“So it’s over?” Wolcott looked a bit mussed, but none the worse for wear. Most victims of possession never even knew it had happened. The mind glossed it over, a horror a regular person couldn’t contemplate.

“Yeah,” Pete said. Wolcott came and helped her up, and Pete bit down hard enough to draw blood when her arm spasmed again. “Fuck,” she hissed. She simply couldn’t be laid up right now—not only did she have more jobs booked over the coming weeks, but it was also going to be impossible to hold, feed, and change a baby with one working arm.

“You all right?” Wolcott’s alarmingly orange brow furrowed.

“I’ll manage,” Pete said. Wolcott considered for a moment, and then nodded.

“Right. I’m parked up on the high street. Should get on home, probably.” She started to walk away, then turned back. “He’s … it’s … that thing’s not … coming back, is it?”

“No,” Pete said. “That’s done with.”

“And those things he said to me … they’re not true.”

Pete shrugged, the last of her ability to sugarcoat gone. “I don’t know what he said to you, Wolcott. I can’t know if any of it was true.”