Possession (31 page)

“We come . . .” the faces whispered. “We are gathered.”

Something swooped in, screaming and clattering, and dragging a tail of the floating sand across the table to swirl around the edges of the room. The remaining sand billowed upward, coming back together into one large face that glared at us.

“Why do you trouble me?”

Even with his eyes closed, Stymak was frowning and looking slightly ill. Carlos glared at the apparition, his hands rigid and digging into the tabletop, but he didn’t move or speak. The sand outside our circle continued whirling around the room, drawing into the shape of a skeletal wolf that stalked the table, watching us.

“We wish to speak to those who are crying out for help. You aren’t one of them. Who are you? What is your name?” Stymak said, his voice now choked and rasping as the white energy in his corona faltered and flickered. He’d begun sweating and I saw a slight tremor in his hands on the table.

“Why should I tell you?” the ghost demanded, firming within her shell of sand and rising higher above the table. She was tall, almost stately, and angry, her scowl reddening the hazy world of the Grey.

Stymak was struggling, having difficulty speaking, the far-reaching clouds of his aura diminishing and pulling inward. I didn’t think this was how he’d intended the séance to go, but I wasn’t sure what to do aside from distracting the ghost’s attention from him.

“I know who you are,” I said, recognizing her now. “You’re Linda Burfield Hazzard. We don’t want to talk to you, Mrs. Hazzard. We want to talk to the others—”

“
Doctor
Hazzard!” she roared.

The skeletal wolf howled in chorus, stalking around us faster, hunching closer to the ground.

“Doctor. As you like,” I said, letting my disdain for her unwarranted title color my voice.

She turned all of her attention on me. Stymak remained as he was and the circling wolf-thing nipped at him as it passed. He shuddered and made a gagging sound, but nothing more.

“I thought you would be useful,” Hazzard said, looking me over. “So thin, so pretty . . . You should be mine, for all I’ve done.” She put out a hand to touch my face and I saw a thin streamer of ghost-stuff rise off my chest and yearn toward her—this must be the tie Carlos had seen. The skeletal wolf rushed toward me from behind her. I ducked aside and felt the strand between Hazzard and me pull uncomfortably tight.

The two forms clashed in a spray of white grit and a crash of bones. The tugging sensation in my chest broke off. Stymak and the sand collapsed to the table, leaving the ghost behind. Hazzard’s face deformed, twisting and tumbling, then re-formed as a skull more like the wolf’s than the woman’s, the illusion of flesh clinging in melting strands over it. The terrifying creature spun and scattered the items remaining on the table, then turned back to me, snarling.

“You disturbed the tribute. Had I known you before, you would have been mine,” the monstrous thing said. This was no ghost. It was something else—something much more dangerous. “Perhaps you still shall be, when the wheel turns, when the hunger of the damned is sated.”

The creature took another bite at Stymak, who twitched and jerked away, eyes still closed, uttering a small cry of distress. His energy collapsed toward him and he writhed as if it were crushing him, forcing a word out on his expelled breath. “Who . . . ?”

“I am Limos, the Insatiable! You shouldn’t meddle in my affairs!” the creature spat, biting at me, now, too.

I ducked again, but not fast enough and the ghostly teeth ripped loose a shred of light from my shoulder. I cried out from the rending pain that seemed to tear deep into my gut.

Carlos pushed hard against the table and stood up, knocking the furniture over. Notebooks, pens, and the recorder scattered around the room and the dish of sand shattered on the floor. “Enough!” he roared. “It is time for you to go back where you came from.” He put one hand out toward me as he kept his eyes on the dreadful thing between us. “Give me your hand,” he ordered.

I didn’t want to touch him, but if I didn’t do something the monstrous, incorporeal thing would tear more pieces out of me or Stymak, and I could see Stymak’s light dimming with every nip the creature took. I grabbed Carlos’s hand, shuddering at the touch.

“Push!” he commanded. “We cannot tear it apart, but we can force it back. Push!”

I felt rocky and sick, my feet unstable on the shifting sand that covered the floor, but I reached down toward the grid, trying to anchor myself to the energy of the Grey and draw it up through me like I had before. I pulled with mind and will and thrust the rising energy toward the horrifying thing. I could hear Carlos, dimly through the ringing in my ears, muttering words that bled and sparked in the Grey, sending growing ripples outward that tore through the phantasm before us. The power I shoved upward became a tsunami carrying the barbed, coruscating words into the creature, tearing it in two and tumbling the parts away into the blackness between the hot lines of the grid.

The world collapsed on us, bearing me to the floor. Carlos knelt beside me, peering into my face. His touch made me cold and I imagined black coils of stinging vines curling up my arm and digging at the torn part of my shoulder.

I stifled a sob of pain and tried to pull away from him. He stared at me a moment longer, then let go. Heat flooded back into my body as soon as his hand left mine. I gasped in air that tasted of dust and spilled beer as the normal world came back into focus.

“Stymak,” I murmured, turning toward him.

Carlos had moved over beside him, his hands hovering a scant half inch above the medium’s shoulders. A dim blue glow lay in the thin gap between them as Carlos bent his head and concentrated. The glow sank into Stymak and Carlos moved back, keeping a wary eye on him.

The necromancer turned his head and caught my attention. “Better it be you nearby when he wakes,” he said.

I scrambled across the floor to Stymak’s side as Carlos backed farther away. I felt like death warmed over and mashed flat, but took the man’s hand and felt for a pulse. I sighed in relief when he had one.

“Stymak? Stymak?” I said, patting his hand and bending close to keep my voice low. The sound of music and conversation from the taproom beyond was unchanged, and I hoped no one had noticed any disturbance.

The overhead light came on and I jerked my attention to the doorway. Just Carlos, standing next to the switch and guarding the door.

Stymak moved and groaned, then lifted his eyelids. His eyes were bloodshot and his face was wan. “I think . . . I’m going to be sick.”

I grabbed a box of trash bags off the floor nearby and yanked one off the roll. Stymak turned white and barely snatched the bag quickly enough to save his friend’s floor. He was spectacularly and noisily ill.

When he was done, he looked at me and asked, “What the hell happened?”

“I’m not sure. I think we got an unexpected visitor.”

“God, I feel like I’ve been hit by a combine harvester.”

“I think you’re still intact,” I said. “It’s a bit of a mess here, however.”

Stymak looked around and sighed. “Could be worse. I hope my recorder’s all right. . . .”

Carlos and I started putting the room to rights while Stymak staggered around, looking for his digital recorder. He found it wedged between two boxes of cocktail napkins and brought it back to the table we had just set back on its feet. Carlos shoved a chair toward him, carefully not touching the medium or looking directly at him. I was too tired to be openly amused at the powerful and terrifying necromancer doing housework. I kept my mouth shut and continued cleaning up.

Carlos slipped out into the bar as I dumped the spilled sand into the trash can by the door and went to sit with Stymak.

“How does it look?” I asked.

“Seems OK.” He pressed the
Replay
button.

A whispering chorus muttered from the device. “Run. Flee. . . . They come. . . .”

Stymak paused the playback. “They? Uh-huh.” He nodded to himself. “I thought there was something else along for the ride.” He looked up at me. “What happened? I saw the beginning of a manifestation—a face formed in the sand—but things got a bit hazy after that. I had the impression of something . . . foreign, something . . . hungry, grasping. I thought it bit me. . . .”

“It was Hunger Incarnate,” Carlos said, a slight frown creasing his brow. “It called itself Limos.”

He had reentered the room silently, carrying a pitcher of beer and three glasses. I tried not to laugh at the sight of the vampire as cocktail waitress, but a snort escaped me anyhow. Carlos set down his burdens on the table and reclaimed a chair, arching an eyebrow at me in challenge. I chose not to accept and ducked my head.

Stymak seemed a bit stunned by what Carlos had said, but he was nodding as if taking the idea in while he poured beer into the glasses. He guzzled a mouthful, making a face before he washed the first taste away with another.

I added my ideas of what had happened. “I think those voices on the recording are the ghosts themselves—the ones that have been attempting to manifest through Julianne and the other patients. I don’t think they ever really got to us—they never spoke up, even after you’d asked several times.”

“They remained at bay,” Carlos said. “I felt them outside, but they didn’t enter the circle—they were restrained.”

“Uh-huh,” Stymak grunted, pushing the other glasses over to us. “I had that feeling, too.” He tapped his recorder. “This sounds like a lot of the other recordings. Some garbled talk, warnings about something coming . . . but this time something came and it didn’t come by itself.”

“It came with Linda Hazzard. I thought they were the same thing at first,” I said, “but I’m pretty sure it’s two separate entities. Hazzard starved her patients, so maybe the sensation of hunger was connected to her. . . .”

Carlos shook his head. “No. Quite separate. Hunger may be what drew one to the other, but the sensation of starving was animate and separate from the ghost of the woman, Hazzard, who killed the voices.”

Stymak and I both stared at Carlos.

“Can you not hear the thread that binds them together? Not all were her victims in life, but they are all in her power now.”

“That’s not what’s giving us the creeps, Carlos,” I said. “It’s the idea of animate hunger.”

“You saw it for yourself.” He glanced at Stymak, but didn’t lock his gaze with the pudgy medium’s. “You felt it tear into you. Did it not seem the embodiment of hunger, feeding on your soul?”

Stymak shuddered and turned his face aside. “Ugh . . . I’d like to forget that feeling.”

“You would do well to remember it,” Carlos suggested, his voice resonating through me. Judging from Stymak’s wince it had the same effect on him. “That way you will not fall victim to other hungers, to temptations that consume you in the same unremitting need that burns you to a shell but never lets you go.”

Stymak, wide-eyed, gulped beer too fast and coughed, doubling over until the fit passed. “I . . . hope I never go wherever you’ve been, man.”

Carlos inclined his head, but said nothing.

“What did the ghost . . . thing say while I was . . . out of it?” Stymak asked, looking at me and very much
not
at Carlos.

I thought back before I spoke. “She . . . or it . . . said something about tribute—that I had disturbed the tribute. And something about the wheel turning to feed the damned.”

“‘When the wheel turns, when the hunger of the damned is sated.’ That is what the creature said,” Carlos quoted. Leave it to a necromancer to have a perfect memory for the horrible.

“There’s some connection to the Great Wheel,” I said. “It’s come up before. It appeared as dermographia on my skin and other spirits have mentioned the Wheel. Though I’m not sure how turning a Ferris wheel sates the damned. Or what this business about tribute means.”

“The souls that are bound together would be the tribute,” Carlos said. “They were gathered by Hazzard, but for what purpose?”

“Given to Limos,” muttered the voices from the recorder. Stymak self-consciously pushed the button and turned it off. “I didn’t do that,” he said. “It just came on.”

Carlos and I both nodded.

“Typical ghost crap,” Stymak continued, glaring at the recorder as if it understood his discomfort.

I tried to think aloud. “No. No, it’s not. The ghosts were all people who died of starvation. They were gathered by Hazzard, who starved her victims to death, so she has an affinity for them, even in the afterlife. Gathered as tribute for Limos—some kind of otherworldly manifestation of hunger. And in return for tribute, this . . . thing is going to turn the Great Wheel and sate the hunger of the damned. Does that sound as totally loony as I think it does?”

Stymak nodded vigorously, but Carlos grinned. I glared at him. “What?”

“It’s no wonder she likes you.”

“Who? What?” I demanded.

“Hazzard. She said she wants you for her own.” His wolf grin struck me cold. “Because you are thin. She believed, did she not, that fasting was healthful? She would find a thin but healthy woman like you to be very attractive. Ideal, even. A paragon. She touched you, marked you. And then the messages began, because you were tied to her just like the starved ghosts she had gathered for Limos.”

“Hang on . . .” I said. “If I’m tied to Hazzard and therefore to the ghosts she gathered, why are her messages appearing on
my
skin? Shouldn’t I be just like another of the ghosts?”

Carlos shook his head. “You can’t be like them—you’re alive. Hazzard said, ‘You should be mine for all I’ve done.’ She thinks you should be her prize once their plan is successful. A victim to torment and starve forever.”

I shivered. “I really don’t like that idea, but it implies that there’s some plan between Hazzard and this Limos to ‘sate the damned,’” I said.

Carlos nodded.

Stymak watched our conversation with horror clearly writ on his face. “Who or what is ‘the damned’?”

“It must be Hazzard herself,” Carlos said, looking not quite convinced of his own argument. “The ghosts are not damned, merely unable to leave this place. The other entity is not human—it cannot be damned, but it can be fed.”