Ghost Money E-Book

Stephen Blackmoore

• Herausgeber: JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Serie: Eric Carter
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 414

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Necromancer Eric Carter returns in this noir urban fantasy in which an unspeakable cataclysm has turned the City of Angels into the city of the dead. And there are more of the dead on their way… In his attempt to bely the wrath of the ancient Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, Carter unknowingly lit the fuse on what is now known as Los Angeles Firestorm. The massive explosion and its toxic aftermath killed over 100,000 people, sparking mass riots and turning the area into a kill zone. The city is slowly healing its shattered heart, but for Carter the guilt is crushing his soul. But soon enough, the situation threatens to get even worse. There are ghosts gathering—more than is safe. Because if the ghosts somehow works their way through the barrier separating them from the world, they have only one way to survive: feed off the living. And Carter realizes that the ghosts aren't acting on their own. Someone is calling to them. A fellow mage looking for more power is using the ghosts as weapons against anyone who stands against them. And unfortunately, that's what Carter needs to do. Because if any more people die from Carter's actions, he might just willingly join them… Praise for the Eric Carter series: "Blackmoore employs Chandleresque prose to smoothly incorporate a hard-boiled sense of urban despair into a paranormal plot, with occasional leavening provided by smart-aleck humor." — Publishers Weekly on Dead Things "In a world where Aztec Mythology, dark magic and grim reality blend together, nothing is what it appears to be... Best of all, Blackmoore's chillingly good storytelling skills ensures that fans will enjoy every step of this adrenaline fueled journey." — RT Book Reviews (Top Pick) on Broken Souls "This series is so fucking good. Blackmoore can't write these books fast enough to suit me. BROKEN SOULS is hyper-caffeinated, turbo-bloody face-stomping fun. This is the L.A-noir urban fantasy you've been looking for." — Kevin Hearne, Author of The Iron Druid Chronicles "Carter's wry voice is amusing as ever, but the grief he carries is palpable, adding depth and a sense of desperation to this action-packed adventure. Readers will be eager for more after this thrilling, emotionally fraught installment." — Publishers Weekly on Ghost Money, Starred Review Series Order: 1. Dead Things 2. Broken Souls 3. Hungry Ghosts 4. Fire Season 5. Ghost Money 6. Bottle Demon 7. Suicide Kings 8. Hate Machine 9. Cult Classic

Leseprobe

GHOST MONEY

Copyright © 2020 by Stephen BlackmooreAll rights reserved.

Published as an ebook in 2021 by Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.

Originally published by DAW in North America in 2020.

Cover design by Tiger Bright Studios.

ISBN 978-1-625675-31-6

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

About the Author

Other Books by Stephen Blackmoore

Acknowledgments

You ever leave something to the last minute? You know, a paper, car repairs, colonoscopies . . . or, as I have discovered, acknowledgments!

Yeah, so I got like two minutes to throw something together and I had this whole thing planned where I would wax philosophic of the need for support and the collective effort of friends and editors and artists, and it was going to be fucking awesome. Like, I had illustrations, charts, fucking Voltaire quotes ready, too. VOLTAIRE. IN FRENCH.

Instead you get this.

My wife, Kari. That’s a gimme. Betsy Wollheim and Sheila Gilbert and everyone else at DAW. Friends Kevin Hearne, Delilah Dawson, Chuck Wendig, Kace Alexander, Meghan Ball, Kelli Butler, Annie Lynsen, Jeff Macfee, Peter Clines, Lish McBride, ML Brennan, Teresa Frohock, Paul Weimer, Margaret Dunlap, and basically anybody I happen to see in my Twitter feed right now.

Assume if you’re not on here, you actually are. AS A ROAMING GHOST UNSEEN AND TORTURED BY THE VOID.

Wait. No.

Look, if I know you and you’re not an asshole, guess what, you helped. The support I have gotten from fans and friends has been mind-blowing.

Thank you. You complete me.

Now go read the book.

Chapter 1

Dying is easy. Grieving is hard.

Necromancers get a lot of questions about where the dead end up. Did Auntie Fiona go to Heaven? Is that Nazi being ass-fucked by demons? Are they getting what they deserved? Happiness? Peace? Punishment? My answer is usually along the lines of, “I dunno. Let’s ask ’em.” So far nobody’s taken me up on the offer.

It’s probably just as well that they don’t. Actually contacting a soul in its afterlife? Hardly ever works and fuck knows I’ve tried. Maybe that’s by design. A small kindness in a universe that doesn’t give a good goddamn about any of us.

Grieving is about not knowing, not having answers. Answers collapse possibilities, bring out unpleasant truths. Who wants to risk that? No, sorry, Auntie Fiona is burning in a pit of liquid hellfire. That murderer who took out a school with an AK is in Valhalla yukking it up with Odin and Thor. Yes, your true love is being reborn right now, but come on, stop obsessing about them. They’re a baby, that’s just creepy. Get over it already.

Like it or not, souls go where they’re supposed to go. Heaven, Hell, Mictlan, Elysium, whatever. Not even their ghosts, if they’ve left one behind, know. The ghosts are just cast-off shells, a thin veneer of the person who’s gone.

Grieving is about being in the question and looking for the answers. Sometimes that means denial, alcoholism, sex with strangers, Ouija boards, phone psychics, talking to guys like me. If you’re lucky, it means acceptance and moving on.

In the end a soul’s destination is all uncertainty and doubt. And ultimately nobody really wants to know.

The air inside the house smells like grief and smoke. Everything smells like that now. A month and a half on and though most of the fires are out, the smoke hangs heavy and thick over Los Angeles like angry clouds threatening to rain down flames. Most of the freeways are still collapsed, or impassable, like parts of the 110.

When the small industrial city of Vernon exploded all at once, so many toxins got thrown into the air that they blanketed South L.A. The place is still toxic. It’ll be months before the air is breathable and years before anyone can live there.

It’s not just the stink of smoke that fills the air, it’s the rot underneath it. It’s that back-of-the-throat taste of shit and piss and Febreeze. Cholera waiting to happen. I doubt this house has running water. There’s sure as hell no electricity beyond the handful of portable solar chargers they’re using to keep their phones working and the LED camp lanterns lit.

“Didn’t know you ever came out this way,” Keenan says. A wiry man with skin like teak, Keenan Mitchell has taken up in an abandoned two-story Craftsman off Figueroa in Highland Park. From the look of things it started as a flophouse, or maybe a hotel in the twenties. Now it’s a run-down apartment building with shoebox-size studios on both floors. It’s one of the few buildings on the block that isn’t a charred ruin.

Two of Keenan’s cousins, Aaliyah and Indigo Wayne, twins, hover on either side of his chair like an honor guard. They’re younger than Keenan by about ten years or so, a little lighter skinned, but the family resemblance is obvious.

The only way I can tell the twins apart is the attitude. Indigo is all spiky-edged, don’t-fuck-with-me energy, Aaliyah is more—subtle’s not the word—coiled, like a spring, or a snake on the hunt, waiting.

“What can I say? I’m a roamer.”

When the towers came down in Manhattan on 9/11, killing almost three thousand people and injuring more than six, the sheer number of people in the tri-state area who knew one of the dead or were close to someone who did was staggering. Twenty-eight million people were suddenly playing a game of Six Degrees of Holy Fuck What Just Happened. The grief was like a lead blanket crushing everyone under its weight.

How do you grieve for that many people? How do you even process it? Surrounded by that much heartache, that much sorrow? Some people buckle under the weight, some prop up others and damage themselves in the process. Grief grinds you down, leaves you in shock. Even the professionals, the people who get paid to deal with it, they’re hammered by it, too. Three thousand deaths in an afternoon is going to break people.

Now up all that by a factor of thirty.

The Los Angeles Firestorm, or Firepocalypse depending on which news sites you read, swept across the entire county, from Long Beach to Lancaster, Malibu to Claremont. Almost a hundred thousand people died in one night, three times that many injured. Not enough hospitals, beds, doctors, medical supplies—a guarantee that the death toll was going to increase in the coming days, and it did. First responders were spread too thin, or dead at the scenes. The fires hit men, women, boys, girls, infants. Straight, queer, black, white, Asian, Latino, it didn’t care. Fire is an equal opportunity killer.

Worse, it was magical fire. Fire that the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl stole from Xiuhtecuhtli during the invasion of the Spanish five hundred years ago, when Quetzalcoatl betrayed his brothers and sisters. Fire so hot it burns bodies to ash, melts steel, tears through concrete, destroys buildings, freeways, lives.

And why did Quetzalcoatl do it? Why did he burn a city that he shouldn’t care a rat’s ass about? He did it partly because he wanted to goad me into bringing him an artifact I didn’t even know I had. Almost worked, too. Which would have been a whole other kind of nightmare.

But mostly he did it because I defied him. I refused to burn Mictlan, the Aztec land of the dead, to ash and destroy all the souls there for him. For that act of disrespect he wanted to hurt me, so he burned L.A. to the ground.

He didn’t care that it killed a hundred thousand people. He didn’t care that the people he murdered were innocent. He didn’t care that he left behind ash, corpses, and heartbreak.

Gods are assholes.

“Somehow I don’t think you just roamed on over to our neighborhood. So, to what do we owe the pleasure of your company, Mister Carter? Or can I call you Eric?” I showed up on their doorstep about half an hour ago and announced myself from the street by taking a small draw from the local pool of magic. Mages can feel that sort of thing, and they’ll know where it’s coming from. It’s the magical equivalent of ringing the doorbell.

“Eric’s just fine,” I say. They didn’t want to talk to me at first, but instead of simply ignoring me, they upped the challenge by drawing more power from the pool. I was just trying to say hello and be all non-threatening about it. But since this had suddenly turned into a dick waggling contest, I saw their bet and raised them. I pulled more power. And kept pulling more power. A lot of power.

You’re only going to know a mage when they do something with magic. We don’t walk around with pointy hats that say MAGIC BOY in neon letters. But once you know they’re there, a few things can give one mage an idea how powerful another is.

How much power can they draw? How fast can they draw it? How much can they hold on to? If you’re really unlucky you might find out how much they can disperse, like, say, with a really big fucking fireball.

We go back and forth a bit. There’s more than one mage in the house and they’re all getting in on the act. But I’m tired and just want this over with, so I end the contest by pulling so much, so fast, that it blocks them from getting any more.

That’s when they opened the front door and let me in.

I lean back on the couch. I came here with no weapons; no straight razor, gun, or pocket watch. I have my messenger bag, but there’s nothing in it that could be considered an immediate threat. Everybody here knows who everybody else is and bringing weapons would just send the wrong message. I won the pissing match. That’s humiliating enough. There’s no need to be insulting, too. I’m here to have a conversation.

I can tell they’re on edge, and in their position I would be, too. Keenan and his cousins are all largely untrained mages. Born to normal parents, they’ve had to scrape whatever they can from the mage community, too many of whom see them as some kind of normal / mage half-breeds, which should tell you pretty much all you need to know about the mage community.

For all their lack of training they’ve done remarkably well for themselves. They finally got the attention of some established mages when they made what was basically a DMZ around their neighborhood in South Pasadena. Crime pretty much disappeared within a two-mile radius. They won’t start a fight, but you bet your ass they’ll finish it.

After the fires and the riots calmed down a little, they pulled together a caravan of family, friends, and neighbors looking for someplace a little more defensible amid all the chaos. They found this empty stretch before the National Guard came in to lock down chunks of the city that were deemed uninhabitable, shutting off the grid, turning off the water. The Guard makes periodic patrols, but L.A.’s a big place, and they’re easy to avoid.

“I hear you’re having some trouble,” I say. Indigo stiffens, Aaliyah looks away from me. Keenan merely nods.

“A bit. Some folks want to . . . what was it that guy said?”

“Bring the flock into the fold,” Indigo says.

“Yeah,” Keenan says. “Man came here saying we need ‘protection.’ And then showed us what we needed protection from.”

“How many died?”

“Three,” he says.

“One of them was our momma,” Indigo says. She’s been getting steadily angrier, puffing up, hands a little shaky. It’s like watching the Incredible Hulk in slow motion. I know that feeling. It’s powerlessness and sorrow, and no idea what to do with it all, so it just comes out as anger.

“Any survivors?” Indigo’s laugh is filled with bitterness and rage. She shuts off like a light switch when Keenan gives her a look. Keenan cocks his head at me and frowns.

“What do you want, Mister Necromancer?” he says. “I don’t see anything here that might interest you. I hear you don’t care much about the living, and all the dead are outside.”

“I want to know if there are any survivors,” I say. “And how they’re doing.”

“Why? What are you looking for?”

“I’m not sure,” I say.

“Not sure to which question?”

“Both.” I’m not lying to him. I’m not sure what I’m looking for, or why exactly I’m looking for it. I’ve got a lot of suspicions on what I’ll find, but certainty’s in short supply these days.

Keenan takes a deep breath. “Two,” he says. “We got a boy in the back named Damien. We don’t know what’s wrong with him. Had a doc come by and look at him, said she needed to call in a speciali . . . Shit.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I’m the specialist.”

“She never told us who.” Probably a good idea. They might not have let me in if they’d known.

“I’m not a real popular guy these days,” I say. “So thanks for seeing me.”

“With what you were doing out there? Shit. If half the stories we hear about you are true, you’re not somebody to piss off even on a good day.”

Huh. I hadn’t realized my reputation had gotten to the “let me in or I’ll blow your house down” level.

“Okay. So there’s the boy. Who else?”

“Sonofabitch who tried to make us pay for protection,” Indigo says. “He’s in even worse shape.”

“Exactly what happened?” I say.

“Guy comes in,” Keenan says. “Asian. Some lawyer type. Suit, briefcase. We didn’t even spot him until he was already in the front room. Had one of those ‘Don’t Look At Me’ spells up. Dropped it inside and we felt the magic go. Figured that was his version of a calling card.”

That’s just rude. At least I stayed outside.

“Then he starts making demands,” Aaliyah says. “Like we’re fucking peasants. Not even giving us time to figure out who the fuck he even is.”

“First he made offers,” Keenan says. “Get us someplace with electricity on, running water, medical attention.”

“He give you details? Where it was, who’s footing the bill, that kind of thing?”

“Nope. Just a clean, safe place.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad. Not to criticize, but you seem to be lacking some basics.”

“Yeah, but there was this tone to it. Felt like a trap. And the offer was only for the talents. He didn’t come out and say it, but I think he wanted us to kill the normals and come with him. No way that was gonna happen. So we respectfully declined.”

“He wasn’t happy,” Aaliyah says.

“Asked us to reconsider,” Keenan says. “Our decline was . . . less than respectful that time.”

“We told him to go fuck himself,” Indigo says. “I was gonna kick his ass. But then he lights up a cigarette and, fuck, I don’t know what happened after that.”

“Lots of noise,” Keenan says. “All these wispy-looking nightmares with claws and teeth just explode out of his face.” He smiles. “And man did they fuck his shit up.”

“You saw them?”

“For a bit,” Keenan says. “Some of them disappeared right away, a few lingered before they did the same thing. But I could tell they were still there because they were fucking this guy up good. Whatever those things were, he didn’t have any control over them. Seemed like since he was the closest target they mostly went after him. Few other people got tagged.” He lifts his shirt and shows me a long, familiar-looking wound on his abdomen that looks like freezer burn. “Saw a few of them fly out the windows.”

Terrific. “And the boy? Damien?”

“He was sleeping upstairs. His momma said she saw five, maybe six of those things converge on him and then went all up his nose, down his throat. He woke up screaming, then passed out. You want to see ’em? We got the lawyer type in the same room.”

“If I could.” My next question’s always touchy. I haven’t figured out a good way to ask it and I never know the kind of reaction I’m going to get. I watch Indigo out of the corner of my eye. If it’s gonna piss off anybody, it’ll be her. “What happened to the ones who died?”

I see Indigo start to turn that rage on me, but Aaliyah touches her shoulder, barely brushes it, and she simmers down like boiling water taken off the stove.

“Nobody saw,” Keenan says, “but when we found ’em, looked like they’d been sucked dry. Freeze-dried mummies. They started to crumble when we moved them. Took a while, but we buried them in the back.”

“And soon as we can we’re going to dig them back up and give them a proper burial,” Indigo says.

“We talked about this,” Keenan says. “We agreed we wouldn’t do—”

“You agreed. Nobody asked me shit.”

“Enough,” Aaliyah says, and the others quiet down. “We’ll talk about it later.” She turns to me. “You want to see them, right?”

“If I could,” I say. I’m not sure about the dynamic in here. One second I think Keenan’s in charge, then I think it’s Aaliyah, but I get the feeling that when the shit hits the fan everybody looks to the biggest badass, and that’s Indigo.

“I’ll take you,” Keenan says, getting up. “It’s at the end of the hall.” He leads me through the house to the back. There’s a sound in a place like this that’s full of misery. It’s not crying or wailing for the dead. It’s not even quiet. I can hear almost everyone in the house moving around, floors creaking, doors opening and closing. But it all sounds hollow, empty. Like everything good has been scooped out of it. It’s the sound of too much taken away too soon.

“What’s the story with you and the doc?” Keenan says.

“Vivian?” I say. “We used to be friends.” And a lot more, but I don’t get into that.

“Used to be?”

“I killed her fiancé,” I say. Who also happened to be my best friend growing up. “It’s complicated.”

“Complicated. I had a girl who was complicated,” Keenan says. “Shot me in the leg. We made up.”

“I wish it were that easy.”

We stop at a door at the end of the hallway. The smells of bad sanitation have followed us here, but they stop at the door and are replaced with the smell of meat left in the freezer too long. The temperature is several degrees lower here than the rest of the house. I touch the door. Frost spreads out from my fingertips at the contact.

There are definitely ghosts in there, I can feel them, but I’m not sure how many. Since the firestorm killed so many people the ghost population has exploded, making it harder to separate them all. In some places the concentration’s so thick it’s like trying to see a star when you’re looking at the sun.

“When did this happen?”

“Two days ago. Doc came out here yesterday. She’s been doing the rounds and we got lucky, or maybe she just knew we needed her. She got Damien hooked up to an IV. Left the other guy alone. She brought us some basics we hadn’t been able to scrounge up ourselves. Water, food, blankets.”

“Yeah, she’s good that way.” At least I assume she is. I haven’t seen Vivian in over a month. At the time she’d been, not broken—I don’t know that anything can break that woman—but bent. More cynical than I’d ever seen her before. Chain smoking, not sleeping.

Whatever was going on with her wasn’t helped by my presence. She’s made that abundantly clear on several occasions. So once I didn’t need to be around her, I made sure not to be. Right now any communication is strictly through third parties.

“Anybody go in there besides Vivian?”

“Sure,” he says. “We go in three, four times a day to check on things. So far, nothing’s changed.”

“The kid a talent?” I don’t ask about the guy. I’m going to operate on the idea that he’s a mage and dangerous until I see otherwise. Safer that way.

“Nah,” Indigo says. “He’s a normal. Neighbor of ours. I’d watch him sometimes when his mom needed to go out, but he’s twelve now. Doesn’t need a sitter. Good kid.”

“What about the guy? He got a name?”

“I’m sure he does,” Keenan says. “But when the shit hit the fan everything he had sort of . . .”

“Froze,” Aaliyah says. “It was like he’d been left out in the ice for a couple of years. His whole wallet disintegrated when we tried to pull it out. Briefcase, too, when we tried to open it. Leather, locks, screws and all. Just flaked away.”

“Huh. That’s new. If it’s what I think it is, better if nobody else is in the room but me.” Indigo and Aaliyah share a look and a terse nod of the head.

“Nah, man,” Keenan says. “I need to know what the fuck happened.”

“It’ll probably get messy.”

“Since when is anything not messy?”

“Fair enough.” I grasp the doorknob—it’s bitingly cold—and open the door. The inside of the room feels like a meat locker. My left hand starts to throb from the cold immediately, particularly around the three through-and-through puncture scars where I took three shots from a nail gun. I got it taken care of by a mage doc I know in Venice, but he could only do so much. It’s functional, but parts of it are numb, stiff. Hard to make a fist, and when it gets cold, it aches.

Most of the furniture has been moved out of the room, dust and skid marks on the old hardwood floor showing where it used to be. Now there’s just a folding card table, a chair, and two cots with bodies on them. It’s worse than I thought.

It could be easy for someone to think that the boy was asleep. But when I get a closer look I can see that his eyes are open, the irises rapidly changing color. Various shades of blue, green, and brown, in no particular order. Just below hearing I can make out whispers of jumbled sentences.

I had hoped the creatures the guy had released had been imps, minor demons, something like that. When a mage summons one it’s usually for a specific task and when they’re done they’re sent away to whatever hell they crawled out of with whatever payment was agreed on. But sometimes a mage isn’t paying attention, just doesn’t care if they hang around or not, or really screws up and gets eaten. Bored demons do things like possess kids, but looking Damien over I can see that it’s not that simple, and it’s far more dangerous.

Ghosts exist in their own world overlaid on top of ours, or maybe the other way around, with a barrier that keeps them on their side, and us on ours, which is good, because they’re ravenous for life.

Seen from this side of the veil they’re indistinct, jittery, like old film. If I go to their side they’re more solid to me. That barrier is all that keeps them from wreaking havoc, draining the life from everything they can get hold of. They absolutely cannot, one-hundred percent, no way, no how, cross that barrier.

Except when they can. I’ve only seen ghosts cross over three times. Two ended in a ghost possession, and both of those were special situations that had taken me weeks of preparation. This isn’t that at all.

One time in Hong Kong a dozen or so ghosts crossed the barrier over the space of a month. Two, maybe three a week. That might not sound like much, but one ghost alone was responsible for fifteen deaths. By the time it was all over about a hundred people were dead.

I can see four, maybe five ghosts just under Damien’s skin. They flow into each other, faces looking frantically around, some trying to pull themselves away from the unconscious boy, others dragging them back in, holding them in place. The ghosts don’t have that ethereal quality they have when I see them through the barrier. The fact that they’re also very clearly taking up space inside the kid is also kind of a giveaway. This feels a lot like Hong Kong, but there weren’t any possessions. And there weren’t nearly this many escaped ghosts at one time.

I lean in to get a closer look and one of them screams and takes a swipe at me. I back up quickly, barely missing getting ghost-bit. Keenan jumps back when I do.

“What happened?”

“Nothing good,” I say. “Maybe don’t get too close.” There was something wrong with the way that one moved, the way it looked. But I can’t tell what, in the sea of ghosts swirling through one another inside the kid’s body.

“I didn’t see anything,” he says.

“You wouldn’t.” But it’s weird he saw anything at all when they first appeared. I cross over to the other cot, keeping a little more distance.

The man is in much worse shape. He lies covered with a thick blanket up to his shoulders, long black hair falling out in clumps. Sores on his face, particularly around his lips. Like the boy, his eyes are open, but they’re changing color more rapidly.

He has so many ghosts attached to him that I stop counting when I reach twenty. Some of them seem to want to possess him, moving their limbs as if trying to will his to move along with them. Others are feeding off him, taking nips at his soul, as if there isn’t enough to go around. And maybe there isn’t, because some of them look to be fighting with each other.

This kaleidoscope of the dead is giving me a headache. I press the heels of my hands into my eyes in an effort to stave off a migraine. A wave of dizziness washes over me. It’s been happening a lot lately.

“You know what this is?” Keenan says.

“Maybe.” I’m not gonna tell him what I’m seeing, not yet at least, not until I know I can do something about it. Besides, he’ll tell somebody else, and they’ll tell somebody and then somebody who actually understands what the hell it means that there are ghosts breaking through to our side and eating and/or possessing people will lose their shit completely and I’ll have an even bigger headache to deal with.

This is so much worse than Hong Kong. Used to be this place just outside the city proper, Kowloon Walled City. What had started as a collection of squatters in an old fort in World War II had grown over the decades, residents building on top of each other until it grew to fourteen stories, covered about six acres, and held fifty thousand people. Shopkeepers, criminal gangs, doctors, dentists, and on and on. Water and electricity stolen from Hong Kong, it was as real a city as it needed to be.

The government of Hong Kong tore it down in 1993, built a park in its place. Nice, peaceful. Unless you can see all the ghosts, then it’s a fucking nightmare. Kowloon still stands there on the other side of the veil, its psychic footprint so strong that it may never go away. Inside is a rat’s warren filled with the dead. The decades of death, countless murders, assaults, accidents, have left behind thousands of ghosts.

I was traveling through Southeast Asia for a year when I was eighteen, nineteen years old, bouncing from country to country for a bit. It’s easy when you have magic. You don’t even need a passport. I was in Hong Kong just after they finished demolishing Kowloon.

I don’t know if it was the act of tearing down the city that did it, or something else, but I discovered the hard way that when you get that many ghosts in too tight a space the veil thins. Holes appear. Sometimes it just tears completely.

Hong Kong was invaded by ghosts that summer. Not too many, but more than enough to cause havoc wherever they went. Like mages everywhere, the mages of Hong Kong didn’t really care. It didn’t affect them, so fuck it, right? Besides, only a handful understood how to handle the dead. Nobody else stepped up, so I did.

Pissed ’em off, too. Here’s this tourist who’s spent the last several months hanging out in the seediest red-light districts getting tattooed and smoking as much Thai stick and Afghan heroin he could get his hands on coming in and solving their little ghost problem. It was messy, it was ugly, and I never, ever wanted to see anything like it again.

Yet, here we are.

Chapter 2

“So that bit I said about how it’s better if nobody is in the room but me?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m thinking maybe out of the house. Or a few blocks over,” I say. The look on his face tells me he thinks I’m joking. “No, really.”

“Jesus, seriously? The hell happened?”

I weigh the pros and cons and finally decide to tell him the truth. Pretty soon one of the more knowledgeable mages out there is going to hear about this, put it together, and realize just how deep the shit is. But on its way there the message is going to bounce through a lot of other people who might take the hint and leave town.

“Keep a secret?” I say, guaranteeing that, of course, he won’t. He nods. “Ghosts. A fuck-ton of ghosts.”

“I—But . . . Okay, you’re the expert, but I heard somewhere they existed in some freaky ghost world we couldn’t see. I mean, people who aren’t like you.”

“Yes.”

“And that they couldn’t get over to our world.”

“Also yes.”

“Then how—”

“I don’t know yet,” I say, taking off my coat and rolling up my sleeve. “But if I don’t take care of these ones right now the kid’s dead. Worse, there won’t be anything left of him but meat. Do you understand what I’m saying?” Not every mage believes in souls, oddly enough. These are the ones who have no problem with summoning demons, working with nature spirits, and bending reality to their will, but believing in gods and souls is a bridge too far.

Keenan’s face goes serious. “Yeah, I get it.”

“Then give me a hand, or get out of the way.”

“What can I do?”

“I need a bunch of containers,” I say. “Ones I can close. Jars, Tupperware, anything.” I open my messenger bag and rummage around until I find a sealed paper packet, a handful of vacuum stoppered test tubes, a syringe, and a roll of duct tape. The syringe needle is crusted over with old blood, but that’s fine. It’s not going into anybody.

“Would one big container do it?”

I think about that for a second. It’d certainly cut down on the amount of bleeding I’m about to do. “Iffy, but I think that’ll work. If I can close the lid fast enough, I can—” Before I get any further he bolts out the door, yelling to his cousins to give him a hand. Whatever he’s getting, I hope it’ll work.

One of the things about necromancy is that it often works better with blood. Part of that, I think, is psychological. Some of it’s tradition. A lot of it is that you’re connecting with death on an intimately visceral level. For necromancers death is as an obstacle to overcome, a door to open, a friend to betray, an enemy to seduce. It takes a part of you whether you want to give it or not. It’s usually easier to do it willingly.

One thing all ghosts have in common is that they’re starving for life. That’s what makes them so dangerous to me when I’m on the other side of the veil. They’re hungry sharks and I’m the idiot scuba diver who was stupid enough to get in the water with them. They see me as a walking smorgasbord. And now that these ones are out here on this side, it’s a lot more dangerous, and even more so for everyone else. At least I can see them.

I have protection spells inked into my skin from throat to wrists to ankles, except for one heavily scarred-up patch on my left forearm. Normally, I’d use my straight razor to make a quick cut there for some blood. Only a few drops will get a ghost’s attention, but for what I’m going to try I’ll need a hell of a lot more than that.

While I’m getting things prepped, I’m keeping one eye on the ghosts. A couple of them try to break free, but something’s got them anchored. At first I thought it was the other ghosts that were pulling them down, but I don’t think that’s it. Whatever it is, I don’t think it’s going to hold them in place for long. Each time they pull, they get a little bit farther.

I’m not one to depend on things I don’t understand, so I pull a can of red Krylon out of my messenger bag and spray a circle around each cot, then pour a mixture of salt, grave dust, and ground-up bone along the edge. I push a little magic into it and I can feel the circle close. Until I break it, they’re not going anywhere.

Something rattles down the hall. Keenan and his cousins throw the door open and wheel in two black, plastic trashcans with hinged lids. Huh. Okay, yeah, that might actually work. I spray paint some sigils on the inside of each lid, on each of the external sides, and at the bottom of the cans. I toss in some of the salt, grave dust, and bone mixture.

I tear open the paper packet and pull a rubber tourniquet and a venipuncture kit out of it. Tourniquet goes on, tap the arm, find the vein, slide in the single-use needle. Long time back when I was learning how to do this shit, this is how I got blood for spells. Didn’t occur to me that most of the time I only needed a drop or two. Every time somebody saw my arms they figured from the needle tracks that I was shooting up.

Please. Like I’m gonna pump shit into my veins to get high like some street junkie. I take pills for that.

I pop a tube into the holder and release the tourniquet, letting the blood flow in. The ghosts can smell it, stop to stare at me. That’s right, you little bastards, it’s lunch time. I fill two more. Should be enough. I pull the needle and wad it up with the packet and toss it into one of the open trashcans. A cotton ball for the bleeding and I’m good to go.

I fill up the old syringe with one of the vials and squirt a long line of blood from the edge of the circle around Damien’s cot and over to the trashcan. I empty the rest of the vial inside the can and repeat the process with the other two at the circle surrounding the dead man’s cot. What’s left in both vials goes into the second trashcan.

“Okay,” I say. I’m feeling a little woozy, but that goes with the territory. “Everybody hold hands. This part’s gonna suck, but without it you’re going to be more vulnerable. At least with this you can get out of the way.” Nervously, they do until we’re in a small circle, each holding the hands of the people next to us. I don’t do this often. It won’t be fun for any of us.

“Nobody lose your shit.” It’s a parlor trick. A terrifying parlor trick, and fortunately it doesn’t last very long. I snap off a quick spell. At first it’s like nothing’s happened. Then Indigo gasps as she catches sight of Damien and the dead man.

“What the fucking fuck is that?”

“Those are the ghosts,” I say. “You’ll be able to see them for a little bit. Honestly, I don’t know how long, so let’s do this quick.”

The last time I did this was to a serial killer cab driver who was screwing and murdering street kids. I showed him the other side, all the Wanderers who’d come far and wide to see this man when I called. Some of them, I’m sure, were ghosts of his victims. After that I bled him like a black ram at midnight and let the ghosts sup on his blood. But I keep that to myself.

Blood and the dead are a weird situation. They’re not crossing the barrier when they feed off a sacrifice, whether it be drops in a cup, a bleeding ram, or a serial killing sociopath with his throat slit. It’s an energy transfer, but I’ve never understood how.

“This is the shit you see every day,” Keenan says.

“Twenty-four seven.”

“Great. We can see them. If something goes to hell, can we do anything about it?”

“Run. Okay, this is what’s gonna happen.” I point to the circle and trace the path in the air with my finger. “I’m gonna break the circle, the ghosts are gonna go for the blood, and dive into the can for the rest of it.” I point to Aaliyah and Indigo. “When I tell you, slam the lids shut. There’s gonna be a lot of noise and shaking, maybe some screaming. I’m pulling ghosts out of these two and they’re not gonna want to go. But you need to ignore it and just keep the lid closed while I finish the spell.

“Keenan, take the duct tape and wrap the shit out of those lids as soon as they close. Do not let them open. I don’t care how you do it, but if those cans open before I finish, we’re all fucked. Damien here is probably going to look like he’s having the mother of grand mal seizures as the ghosts leave, but no matter how much he bounces around, leave him alone. Got it?”

“What about him?” Aaliyah says, gesturing at the man on the other cot.

“He’s already dead. Been that way since he set off his spell. The ghosts are trying to animate him, but they’re not very good at it. They have him breathing and his heart pumping but that’s about it. It’s a good thing the ghosts in him were too busy chowing down; otherwise when you moved him in here they might have gotten you, too.” That’s right, kids. Don’t play with ghost-possessed corpses without a trained necromancer around.

“You sure this is gonna work?” Keenan says.

“Oh, hell no. I’m making this shit up as I go.”

“Wait, what?” Keenan says.

“Everybody good?”

“What do you mean you’re making this up?” Indigo says.

“Then let’s get this party started.” If I give them time to back out this whole thing’s going to fall apart. Don’t question it, just do it. Let it be what it is, shift, improvise, ride the magic and see where it takes you.

“Wait, I—” Keenan starts, but before he can get any more out I throw out a spell that blows the powder of the circles away, leaving bare floor.

Everything explodes at once.

At first the ghosts do exactly as I expect them to. They burst out of both of the bodies like water from a firehose, a deafening shriek filling the air. The temperature in the room plummets a good ten degrees as they slam into the lines of blood leading to the cans, traveling along it like fire on gunpowder. I had thought about doing one set at a time, but some ghosts are smarter than others, and I didn’t want to take the risk that the remaining ones would catch on and stay put.

The kid, Damien, is bucking on the bed like he’s lying on a fallen power line, the ghosts tearing themselves free. They’ve had their hooks into him for two days now. It’s a miracle he’s even alive. It looks like they’ve been feeding on him slowly, though why, I couldn’t tell you. I honestly don’t know how much of him will be left once this is over. Damien collapses as the last ghost leaves his body. I signal Indigo to slam her lid shut, which she does, and secures by jumping on top of it. Keenan’s right there with the duct tape, wrapping fast as he can.

The dead guy is, well, dead. He doesn’t so much as twitch as the ghosts come pouring out of him. But I’ve been so focused on Damien that I haven’t noticed that the firehose of ghosts coming out of the corpse has turned into a busted dam. There are so many of them that they almost look like a single long blur of shrieking color hitting the blood and traveling into the can.

Aaliyah is holding it together, but barely. Her can is bucking as the ghosts fight each other for the blood in the bottom. Indigo, her trashcan taped up, jumps over to her sister and helps keep it steady.

The stream is becoming unstable. There’s only so much life contained in blood, and with this many ghosts going after it, it’s going to be exhausted soon. When that happens there’s gonna be trouble. I channel magic into a barrier that circles the body and the stream of ghosts, stabilizing it and forcing them into the can. It’s like sticking a cat in a box. The ghosts slam against the barrier, clawing and chipping away at it as they go past. Seeing them all, I’m noticing that they all have the same feral expression, the same talon-like hands. That’s not normal for any ghost. It’s something to think about later, because as the final one comes through, it claws at the barrier where its buddies have been carving a weak spot and the whole thing collapses.

“Close the lid.” Aaliyah slams it shut and Keenan starts to run over and freezes. The final ghost is free. A little stunned, very confused from the look of things. That won’t last long. Any features that identified it as a person are almost completely gone. Its ectoplasmic mouth is full of awfully sharp-looking teeth, and those claws are even bigger and sharper than I thought when I saw them all passing through. There’s a void where its eyes should be. Whoever it used to be is gone. It might as well be a wild animal.

“You hungry?” I yell. “Come on. Come get me. I’m right fucking here.” I don’t have my razor on me to cut myself and get some blood, so I’m gonna have to do it old school. I bite at the scarred patch on my forearm and spit out a chunk of blood and flesh onto the floor in front of me. The effect is immediate. The ghost homes in on me, ignoring the chunk of skin on the floor for the bigger meal in front of it, and dives straight for the wound in my arm like a shark smelling prey.

It doesn’t realize that I’m a much bigger fish.

I channel a spell that pulls on it like a vacuum cleaner. It doesn’t notice at first. Then, as bits and pieces of it keep tearing free, it turns its attention from the blood to my face. I open my mouth wide and inhale. The single ghost, clawing at the air and shrieking, gets pulled in and I swallow it whole.

Silence.

Then puking. Vertigo sweeps over me and my stomach lets go of whatever food it had and doesn’t stop until I’m on my knees, dry-heaving over a pool of vomit. The ghost is still in me. It’s not like I physically swallowed it. It latched onto my soul. For lack of a better term, it’s dead. I catch glimpses of memory, bits and pieces from its life, but nothing after. Its entire existence as a ghost is wiped clean.

The last time I did something like this, the fallout was terrible. I had devoured a ghost that had managed to protect itself in pieces of hundreds of other ghosts all stitched together and wrapped around it like bubble wrap. They all came with it.

It was too much, and I couldn’t break them down fast enough. For the next few months I kept waking up in new places, or having blackouts only to find that some stray bit of personality had taken over. Coming to in the middle of the Mojave desert in a burnt out shack, naked, covered in blood, and screaming is not a great way to wake up. Especially when you can’t remember any of the events leading up to that, and have no idea where the blood came from.

But this one’s easier. For a given value of easy, of course. I hadn’t puked the last time, but then I don’t know how this really works. Maybe this ghost was so twisted that it gave me some kind of existential food poisoning. But I can’t just lie here in my own sick. I’ve still got shit to do. I get to my feet, vertigo swimming up to pull me back down, but I fight until I can stand without falling over.

“Cans,” I say, voice rough, breath ragged, “Outside. In the street. Now.” Complete sentences are not exactly my jam at the moment. While I was puking my guts up, the others were doing what needed to be done, sealing the second trashcan.

They don’t need to be told twice. They wheel the cans down the hall and out of the house, careful not to let either of them tip over, but not taking their time about it either. I stagger behind, feeling like shit, but I’ve had worse. I almost fall down the stairs when a spike of pain lances through my skull, but I fight through it and it fades away by the time I reach the bottom of the stairs.

They get the cans out to the middle of the street, their wheels making tracks in leftover ash from the fires. I wave them aside. My stomach is still pissed off at me, but that’s okay, the feeling’s mutual. I stand between the cans, one hand on each. I’ve done this variant of the spell before, and that was while hanging on to the side of a speeding SUV with the people inside shooting at me. This should be a piece of cake.

I can move over to the other side, but it wasn’t until the SUV that I realized I could send things over without me, too. I concentrate, the spell harder to construct because of my queasy stomach and skull-piercing headache, but after a few seconds I have it. I let it loose and the trashcans disappear with a loud pop. The ghosts are on the other side now. Back where they belong. Okay, stuck in a trashcan and thrashing around like pissed-off alley cats isn’t exactly where they should be, but it’s the other side of the veil, so I’ll take it.

I stagger when the cans disappear, not realizing I was using them to hold myself up. I fall backward into the street looking up at a sky of gray clouds and ash. This is my fault. The whole thing. If I hadn’t defied Quetzalcoatl, so many people would still be alive. All of these buildings would be just fine. We wouldn’t be invaded by all the ghosts created when a hundred thousand people died.

I’ll get up in a second. I just need to rest here a minute. I feel awful. I—

Chapter 3

My eyes snap open to the same gray clouds I closed them to. I try to sit up and my head tells me that no, really, lying down is my only option here.

“It’s all right.” Indigo. She’s pulling me out of the street and onto the burnt patch of grass at the edge of the sidewalk. “You did it. You’ve only been out for less than a minute. Everything’s fine.” Is she telling me that, or is she telling herself?

“Damien—” I start.