Staying Dead - Laura Anne Gilman [121]
“I don’t want to kill anyone,” he told the voice. “I just want to go home!” Home, with its polished wood furniture, and the white gauze his Sarah insisted on coating every window with. The heavy rugs, and the soft bed he so hated to get out of every morning…
Sarah was gone. The house itself was gone. Everything was gone, save the building he had given his last days to. The building which had taken everything from him. And the man in front of him, his features, his name a direct inheritance from the man who had ordered this building created. Had ordered one life taken to protect his own miserable, worthless one.
The tiny portion of what was left of Jamie Koogler went up the stairs of a long-gone townhouse, drew the curtains, and took his beautiful wife by the hand.
And the ghost bared suddenly-sharp teeth at his victim. “See what granddaddy left you?” he asked, his voice horrible and stained with madness.
Wren managed to grab Barbie Doll by the arm and drag her away from Frants. The ghost ignored them both, the current breaking around them harmlessly as they moved toward the door. The woman’s flesh was cold, almost as though she were dead, but the farther they got from Frants, the more vitality Wren could feel inside her.
In the hallway, Wren propped her against the wall and knelt down so she could look into the woman’s eyes. Sure enough, there was still a bare spark of awareness there.
“Stay here,” she told Barbie Doll. “You got that? Stay here, stay low, don’t move or blink or whimper or anything, no matter what, and you may just live through this. Okay?”
A faint, jerking nod was all the answer she was going to get. Wren patted the woman’s head once, then got to her feet and stared at the door. A man’s scream, and the soft thump of flesh hitting something hard came through the open doorway.
Oh damn it, damn it, damn it…
She couldn’t do this.
Charging back through the door, she pulled deep within, to the places Neezer had shown her back in the first days of their training. The cells that made up her body, the current which animated those cells. She reached deep and down and into herself, dragging everything out and shaping it into a ball, stretching it out until it was man-sized, and throwing even as she yelled “Stop!”
twenty-one
Agony! All there was in the universe was agony. Absolute, endless head-spinning pain that had no beginning, no end. All that existed, all that was, was agony.
Empathy was another so-called magical ability that was more common in fantasy novels than among Talents, but the moment she passed through the doorway, Wren was on her knees with the overload of emotions. A second longer, and it sorted out into distinct threads: a wave of pain: sharp talons, digging into the flesh of his throat. Hot bile, burning his gut. Crashing tides of aching loneliness, a bowel-tightening yearning that could never, ever be soothed….
Fight it, Valere! A stern voice commanded in her head. Sergei’s voice, his inflection, but her own brain. It took Wren precious seconds to realize that she was getting it from both sides of the combat, ghost and mortal. And a few more seconds to bring up enough of a barrier that she could only feel herself in her skin.
Seconds that, if her blast of current hadn’t worked, could have stopped her from worrying about the job—or anything else, for that matter—forever.
Raising her head slowly, fighting off the surge-headache that felt like a thousand hangovers, Wren blinked the tears away from her eyes and tried to see why she was still alive.
The two figures hung in place, still held immobile by her blast of current. The ghost hovered over its victim, a recognizable human form zizzing and shorting with current, a hazy yellow-green tinting its unreal flesh. Frants had fallen in front of it, one arm up to shield his face, the other reaching behind him as though searching for a weapon. She saw the glint of dark metal against the carpet, and recognized the