Ghost Story (41 page)

I bounced off the door and landed, dazed, staring for a second at the large cracks my head had left in the glass.

“No one will save you.”

I tried to crawl farther away. I made it only far enough to reach the next cabinet, and then a blow struck me in the ribs and flung me into the next glass door. My shoulder hit it this time and didn't break the glass, but I felt something go
pop
in my arm, and the whole limb seemed to light up with abrupt awareness of pain.

The unseen presence of the creature came closer. Its voice lowered to a bare, pleased murmur. “Child of the stars. I will destroy you this night.”

My head was full of pain and fear. I could sense it getting closer again, coming up behind me—always there, I somehow knew, where I was weakest, most vulnerable. That was where it would always be.

I had to move. I had to do something. But the terror felt like lead weights on my wrists and ankles, sapping my strength, making muscles turn to water, thoughts to noise. I tried to run, but the best I could do was a slow, slippery scramble down the aisle of cold drinks.

“Pathetic,” said He Who Walks Behind, growing nearer with every word. “Whimpering, mewling thing. Useless.”

Terror.

I couldn't think.

I was going to die.

I was going to die
.

And then my mouth said, in a damned passable Pee-wee Herman impersonation, “I know you are, but what am I?”

He Who Walks Behind stopped in his tracks. There was a flickering heartbeat of uncertainty in that inevitable presence, and the creature said, “What?”

“Ha-ha!” I said in the same voice, double-tapping my own fear with the character's staccato laugh. A thought came shining through my head:
Maybe I can't stop this thing from coming at my back.

I struggled to my feet and started town the aisle, spinning with every step, whirling-dervish style. The whole time, I heard myself spewing Pee-wee Herman's cartoony laugh—which, in retrospect, was possibly the creepiest thing to hit my ears that night.

I hit the door with a hip and an elbow and blew through it, still spinning, out into the parking lot. Once there, I realized that my escape plan did not have a part two. It hadn't been concerned with getting me any farther than the doors of the store.

I'd achieved the objective. Now what?

The darkened parking lot was a mass of shadows. The nearest lights were a hundred yards away, and seemed somehow dimmer, more orange than they should have been. There was a heaviness in the air and a faint, faint stench of death and rot. Had that been something the creature had done? Had that been what it meant when it said it had made sure of our privacy?

Stan was in the parking lot, out between the two islands housing the convenience store's gas pumps. He looked like a man who was trying to run in slow motion. His arms were moving very slowly, his legs bent as if sprinting, but his pace was much slower than a walk, as if he'd been trying to run through a rice paddy filled with peanut butter. He was looking over his shoulder at me, and his face was distorted with terror, a horrible mask that hardly looked human in the shadow-haunted night.

I began to run toward him on pure instinct. Herd instinct, really, operating on the assumption that there was greater safety in numbers. My feet pounded the parking lot's asphalt at normal speed, and his eyes widened with almost comical slowness and amazement as I ran toward him.

“Is that what you are?” came the creature's voice, from no direction and from all of them. “One of them? One of the swarm that infests this world?” The origin point of the voice changed, and I suddenly felt hot, stinking breath right on the back of my neck. “I expected better of a pupil of DuMorne.”

I whirled, throwing my arms up defensively. I had time to see everything in the reflection of the convenience store's broad front windows.

He Who Walks Behind emerged from the shadows in front of the terrified Stan. Broad, horrible arms wrapped around him, crushing him as easily as a man picking up a child. Another limb, maybe a tail or some kind of tentacle, covered in the same growth-fur-scales as the rest of the creature, joined the two arms, so that Stan was wrapped at the shoulders, at the bottom of the ribs, and at the hips.

And then with a slow smile and a simple, savage twisting motion, He Who Walks Behind tore Stan the convenience store clerk into three pieces.

I'd seen death before, but not like that. Not terrible and swift and bloody. I spun back to Stan in time to see the three pieces fall to the ground. Blood went everywhere. One of his arms waved in frantic windmills, and his mouth opened as if to scream, but nothing came out except a vomiting gurgle and a gout of blood. Wide, terrified eyes stared at mine for a second, and I jerked my gaze away, desperate to avoid seeing Stan's soul as he died.

Then he just sort of . . . changed. From a person in hideous pain and fear to an empty pile of . . . of meat. Parts. Soiled cloth.

I had never seen death come like that. As a humiliation, a reduction of a unique soul to nothing more than constituent matter. When the creature killed Stan, it didn't simply end his life. It underscored the underlying futility, the ultimate insignificance of that life. It made a man, albeit a fairly unmotivated one, into less than nothing—something that had been a waste of the resources it had consumed. Something that had never had a choice in its own fate, never had a chance to be anything more.

I had involved Stan in this struggle. It hadn't been his fight at all.

Granted, I had never intended to hurt the guy and never would have. Nonetheless, without my decision to stick up the convenience store, he would have still been loitering behind the counter, killing time until his next joint. He had been caught up in violence that he had done nothing to earn or expect—and it had killed him.

Something in my head went
click
.

That wasn't right.

Stan shouldn't have died like that. No one should. No one—man, beast, or otherwise—should get to decide, in a moment of malicious humor, that it got to end Stan's life, to take away everything he was and everything he might ever be.

Stan hadn't deserved it. He hadn't been looking for it. And that creature, that demon, had murdered him.

I felt my jaw begin to ache as it clenched harder and harder. I could feel my rapid pulse beating behind my eyes. There was a terrible pressure inside my head and inside my chest, and with it came a rising wave of anger, and something darker and deadlier than anger that came welling up like a great wave from an unlit sea.

No, it wasn't. But the world wasn't a fair place, was it? And I had more reason to know it than most people twice my age. The world wasn't nice, and it wasn't fair. People who didn't deserve it suffered and died every single day.

So what?
So somebody ought to do something about it.

My right arm and shoulder burned like fire as I felt my right hand slowly form a tight fist. The knuckles popped one by one. They hadn't ever done that before.

I turned to face the creature's image in the reflection. It was crouched over Stan's corpse, its talons tapping lightly on the dead man's open eyes, its mouth still stretched into that horrible, wide smile.

And when it saw the look on my face, its smile widened and its eyes narrowed. “Ahhhh,” it said. “Ahhhhh. There you are.”

I was not a victim. I was not a powerless child. I was a wizard. I was furious. And I was finished running. “This isn't your world,” I whispered.

“Not now,” He Who Walks Behind murmured, its smile widening. “But it will be ours again in just a little time.”

“You won't be around to see it,” I said.

I had never used my power in anger. I had never consciously tried to harm another being with my magic.

But this thing? If anything I had ever seen had it coming, if ever a being was deserving of receiving my violence, it was the bloodstained creature crouching over Stan's mangled body. Everything had been taken away from me in the space of a single afternoon. My home. My family. And now, it seemed, I was about to lose my life. Well, if that was how it was going to be, if I couldn't run without getting more innocent bystanders killed, then I would make my stand here—and I had no intention of going quietly.

I reached into that deep well of anger and began drawing it together into something as hot and violent and destructive as what I was feeling inside.

“There's something you should know,” I said. “I skipped sixth hour today. Spanish. Which I'm not very good at anyway.”

“What is that to me?” asked the creature.

“
Flickum bicus
just doesn't seem appropriate,” I replied. The heat in my right arm and shoulder concentrated into my right hand. The scent of burned hairs crept up to my nose. “And you really don't understand where you're standing, do you?”

The creature's reflection looked left and right at the gas pumps on either side of it.

I kept my eyes locked on its image in the windows, extended my right hand back toward it, and formed my little fire-lighting spell into something a thousand times bigger, hotter, and deadlier than anything I had ever attempted before.

I met the thing's eyes in the reflection, reached down to the well of energy and pure will I'd built inside me, extended my hand toward the creature, and screamed,
“Fuego!”

My rage and fear poured out of me. Fire lashed out from my open hand like water from a broken hydrant. It spilled all over He Who Walks Behind and over Stan's body, and lit up the darkness with angry golden light.

The creature let out a scream, more surprise and anger than pain, clutching at its eyes with its huge hands. The light changed the reflection in the glass and I could no longer see what was behind me. I swept the torrent of fire left and right without turning away or changing the direction my back faced. I hoped it would slow He Who Walks Behind long enough for my modified fire-starting spell to do its thing.

Gasoline pumps have all kinds of safety mechanisms built into them to reduce the odds of accidentally igniting them. They're pretty good. I mean, how many times have you touched off an explosion while filling your car? But as reliable as they are, those measures are made to stop
accidents
.

And no engineer in the world ever thought about building them to stop angry young wizards.

It took a couple of seconds, but then there was a screaming sound, something metallic strained past the breaking point, and the first tank went up in a bloom of spectacular fire.

The explosion flung me back, scorching my skin and burning away the hair on my eyebrows. I landed on my ass—again—and lay there, stunned, for a few seconds. Sudden weariness, deeper than anything I had ever known, flooded over me in reaction to the energy I'd expended on my economy-sized ignition spell.

And then the second tank went up.

Hot wind and pieces of smoking metal showered against the front of the convenience store. I'm glad the first blast knocked me down. If I'd been standing, the metal shrapnel that punched out the entire front wall of windows would have gone through me first.

I stared at the flames and saw a shape within it—or, rather, I saw a creature-shaped void where the smoke and fire should have been. A voice emerged from the fire, something huge and terrifying, a voice that belonged to gods and monsters of myth.

“HOW DARE YOU!” it roared. “HOW DARE YOU RAISE YOUR HAND AGAINST ME!”

Then that not-figure crashed to its knees and fell limply onto its side.

The roaring flames swept in and consumed it.

And my first true battle was over.

“T
hat was my first fight,” I said quietly to my godmother. “I'd never used magic to hurt anything before.” I rubbed my hand over my head. “If I hadn't cut class that day . . . I don't know. I might never have become what I did.”

“Is that the lesson you took from the memory?” Lea asked, her smile spreading. “You were clearly being prepared to be an enforcer.”

“It seems that way,” I hedged, trying to read her expression. “But Justin never actually tried to get me to hurt anyone.”

“Why would he wish you to be armed against him before he was certain of your loyalty?” Lea asked. “He would have. It was inevitable.”

“Probably,” I said. “But there's no way we can know, really. It's a long way from breaking boards in practice to breaking bones in life.”

“Quite. Because convincing a young mortal to believe that it is right and proper to use magic for violence is a delicate process and one that cannot be rushed.”

I grunted and leaned my head back against the wall of my grave.

“All the wishing in the world will not change the past, my godson,” Lea said. “You would like to believe that perhaps Justin had hidden good intentions of some sort. That what happened between you was some kind of misunderstanding. But you understood him perfectly.”

“Yeah. Probably. I'd forgotten how much it hurt—that's all,” I said quietly. “I'd forgotten how much I loved him. How much I wanted him to be proud of me.”

“Children are vulnerable,” Lea said. “They are easily deceived and notoriously subject to such delusions. You are no longer a child.” She leaned forward slightly and said, with slight emphasis, “I am bound to answer two more questions. Will you ask them now?”

“Yes,” I said. “Give me a moment to consider them.”