Suzanne McLeod - The Cold Kiss of Death

‘No, you look, sidhe.’ She pointed to my hand where she’d nicked it with the knife. ‘See, I can still ’urt you as a ghost, and if you don’t listen, I’m gonna come an’ haunt you an’ make your life a bleedin’ hell. So, you gonna help my Daryl or not?’

‘Depends if I can ...’ I paused as an idea struck me. ‘Do you know where the devil-witch lives?’

She nodded. ‘Yeah, Lunnon Bridge way, underneef it, I fink.’

The arched-roof tunnels of the bridge’s foundations! Of course—where I’d done the ghost survey with Finn; no wonder the place looked familiar.

‘Okay,’ I said, ‘if you want me to help Darius, then you have to help me.’ I turned her round and pointed at Malik. ‘See that vamp?’ I said. ‘His name’s Malik al-Khan. When you wake up, or whatever it is you do, you get Darius to tell him what you’ve told me, and tell him he’s got to come to the devil-witch’s place before midnight tomorrow night, Hallowe’en, and he’s got to kill me.’ I squeezed her arm; her bone felt as thin as a bird’s beneath my hand.

I decided that I needed more than one basket if I was going to have a chance at saving the souls destined for the egg and the demon. I pointed at Bobby. ‘Tell him the same thing; tell him if he does this, Rosa will be his master.’ Then I pointed at Grace. ‘And tell the doctor everything too—then tell her to go to the police. Got it?’

‘Yeah, gottit: you wants ’em all to come an’ kill yer tomorrow—but ain’t you already dead?’

‘Yeah, I think so, but my body isn’t,’ I said, trying to sound matter-of-fact. ‘The devil-witch is in it.’

‘Ah, now I got you.’ She nodded sagely.

The red thread yanked my hand high into the air.

I pulled it down, then turned back to the blonde-me again. I could see ghosts—but the blue eyes of my Glamoured self were still staring fixedly at Grace kneeling next to Moth-girl’s body; I didn’t appear to notice the ghostly me at all. I tried tugging the blonde ponytail, then pinching my cheek, but my fingers touched nothing, felt nothing. Could I take over my body, as I’d done when I’d picked up the Autarch’s sword?

‘You’ll give ’er nightmares like that,’ Moth-girl sniffed. ‘’Er spirit’ll know sumfing’s wrong, even if it don’t know what.’

I pursed my lips, then walked round the back of the blonde me and stepped forward, merging myself with ... myself. Still nothing. I stood and looked out of my eyes and tried to lift my hand; my ghostly hand moved, but the blonde-me hand didn’t.

‘How do you know about the nightmares?’ I asked, sticking my head out of blonde-me’s face to talk to her.

‘I ’ad it done it to meself once.’ She gave a little shiver. ‘Couldn’t sleep for a week, an’ I know it was me pal as done it, seeing as I asked ’er to. Awful it was.’

‘Were they like picture nightmares, as if someone was telling you a scary story?’

‘Nah,’ she shook her head. ‘I just kept fallin’ into this big black ’ole all the time.’

Disappointment settled like an iron ball in my stomach. So much for getting inside the blonde-me and trying to communicate, by dreams or otherwise.

The thread jerked me out of blonde-me and slammed me back into the cold, invisible barrier, and back to staring into Necro Neil’s blank, mind-locked face.

Damn. He was getting impatient.

‘Oy!’ Moth-girl ran over to me. ‘Yer gonna save my Daryl, ain’t yer?’

‘I’ll do my best,’ I said, not wanting to promise something that might be impossible.

‘Okay,’ she chewed her lip, then held out the knife. ‘’Ere, take it. You ain’t gonna ’urt no one livin’ wiv it, but it can hurt the dead all right.’

‘Thanks.’ I grasped the knife—for a ghost blade it felt warm and heavy and very real in my palm.

She sauntered back to where her body was lying. ‘Watch out for my Daryl, won’t yer?’

‘Yeah, I will. Oh—’ I realised I didn’t know Moth-girl’s name, but the thread jerked again, and the next second I was airborne. ‘Don’t speak to him’—I pointed down at Necro Neil—‘or let him see you out of your body. He’s a necromancer, and he’s in league with the devil-witch.’

Her lip curled with disdain as she looked at Neil. ‘Gotcha: ’e’s a fuckin’ ghost-grabber.’ And with that she fell apart into hundreds of tiny moths that disappeared into the patchwork of lace and satin and velvet her body was wearing.

I looked anxiously up at the tiled ceiling; it was only a foot away. I slashed the knife against the thread—maybe I could break his bond—but the knife slipped through it as if it didn’t exist. Then the thread yanked again and the wind rushed past me as I streamed through the red-blackness of wherever.

The stench of putrefying flesh invaded my nose as skeletal fingers squeezed my throat, choking me, and a heaviness compressed my chest. Pain and blackness were eating at the light in my mind. A brief thought flickered in the encroaching darkness: being dead wasn’t much different to being alive; there were still some who could hurt you if they wanted to badly enough.

‘Have you managed to get her into the locket yet?’ A woman’s voice, far away.

‘I told you I’d let you know, Hannah.’ Anger and frustration, and something fervent in the male’s voice.

‘Hurry it up,’ the woman said, ‘there’s less than an hour to midnight.’

A tug on my hand. ‘Into the locket, Ms Taylor. Now!’ The command came again.

‘ No— ’ I whispered, the same answer I’d given him before. The fingers squeezed my throat tighter, squeezing out the light.

‘We wouldn’t be having this problem if you’d waited for me in the first place, Hannah,’ the voice said curtly.

‘Why don’t you put her in the Fabergé egg with all the others?’ the woman asked.

‘Because if I open the egg to put her in, I’ll let the rest of them out again.’ The voice was scathing this time. ‘You stick to your spells, Hannah, and leave me to worry about the shades and souls.’

‘I would do, if you could handle your side of things efficiently.’ She was closer, sounding suspicious. ‘You’ve been trying to persuade her for so long that I’m beginning to wonder if you’re not enjoying this a little too much.’

The light narrowed to a pinhole and panic fluttered in my mind like a terrified flock of garden fairies. The skeletal hands weren’t going to—

‘Stop.’ I heard the command and the pressure on my throat eased up.

Relief flooded through me, pushing back the darkness, letting the light in, and though the weight on my chest still pressed me down, I drifted like a feather, the voices rising and falling around me, indistinct and unimportant.

Gradually I settled back into myself.

I kept my eyes closed. There was no point opening them, not when it would only encourage fucking Necro Neil to get his tame ghost torturer to have another go—and if I didn’t open my eyes, I didn’t have to look at my torturer’s plague-eaten face—its missing nose and rotten black stumps of teeth were still freaking me out. I lay there, trying to ignore Scarface the ghost sitting on my chest, pretending to be more dead than I was, thankful that at least the ghost’s pain-inflicting skills were limited to strangling and suffocating me; he hadn’t enough personality left to implement Necro Neil’s more inventive—and considerably less wholesome—ideas.

Never mind giving myself nightmares from trying to posses my own body, as Moth-girl had predicted: if I got out of this I would have more than enough of them to last until I hit my third century.

Of course, that was if I got to see another dawn.