Staying Dead - Laura Anne Gilman [120]
Concentrate. Control. She exhaled, inhaled, letting the energy she had taken in sink lower, until her legs felt like lead weights, like part of the steel of the building. A mantra, taking her back to those early days of basic channeling…“As I will it, so let it be. As I see it, so let it be. As I channel it, so let it be.”
The chant soothed her, twined the power with her own signature until her body hairs stood on end, and her spine tensed and arched from the pressure building within.
“Now, let’s discuss this properly—” she started to say to the ghost when a sharp suction of energy from behind her pulled Wren off balance. She whirled to face Frants, completely forgetting the ghost for a dangerous instant. “What the hell are you doing?” she demanded, feeling her grounding shudder under the two-pronged assault. He ignored her, forcing his lips to form words that didn’t want to come through his throat. Wren grabbed at him, latching on to his shoulders and shaking him until he lost his last threads of concentration and fell silent.
“What the hell are you doing?” she yelled at him again.
“Damned spell won’t work without the sacrifice. That’s what I’ve been doing wrong; they don’t want blood, they want everything.” He shook free of her grip and reached down behind him to haul the woman to her feet, obviously intending to pick the spell up from where he had left off. The woman’s eyes were aware and terrified, but she seemed unable to help herself.
“Blood to blood, bone to bone!
Soul to soul, spell contain!
Take this gifting, double hold—”
Bastard, Wren thought, realization dawning as she tried to make sense out of what he was saying. He was trying to force the ghost’s energy into the woman’s body. But how? A spell was only a recipe—the magic had to be done by someone with Talent. He would have to be letting someone else channel Talent through him while he said the words. Stolen Talent. Some of the bodies…they must not have been complete Nulls. It wasn’t the ghost—the bastard killed them and stole what little current they maintained!
Wren howled in conjunction with the ghost’s scream. It was an abomination, a travesty of everything she had been taught, to rip current that way from unwilling innocents. And in order to actually recreate the spell that way, he’d have to—
“Bastard!” She screamed at him, the ghost completely forgotten at this point. In order to recreate the spell, he would have to use the same elements. Suddenly the woman’s presence made sense: he would kill the woman as well, releasing not one but two souls into the magic. Repeating the sins of the father—grandfather—and adding a half-dozen more to the mix.
Screw you, Frants. And screw the paycheck you rode in on. All her concentration narrowed to the man in front of her. The woman sagged in his arms, nobody at all home in her eyes. And it wasn’t likely she was a willing participant, not the way she was hanging there like a broken Barbie Executive Dress-Up doll. Wren dropped the threads of current binding the ghost, and cast them toward Frants. If the ghost wanted to take revenge, goody for him. She was getting Barbie Doll the hell out of there. She balled that thought up into a tight little wad, and shoved it with all her slight empathic talent into the ghost’s aura. Either he’d get it, or he wouldn’t. She couldn’t worry about it anymore.
He had woken up that morning, the world in his hands. Stopping by the pier mirror in the entranceway, he’d tipped his hat at a rakish level and grinned at his reflection, then adjusted it to a more sedate, respectable position. His coat just so, his hat just so, his world just so, he’d stepped out the door of his home…
A voice, from out of nowhere. A woman’s voice. Kill him if you want. I will not let you have the girl. No more innocents.
In the depth of his madness, the man who had once been