Staying Dead - Laura Anne Gilman [122]
Wren hated guns with a passion. You couldn’t outtalk them, you rarely could outrun them, and, as she now knew from experience, bullets hurt like a sonofabitch. A push of current, and the insides melted just enough to make it unusable.
It was stupid waste of current, but she felt better immediately.
Frants stirred slightly, as though he’d felt what she did, and she tightened the freeze-spell. It wouldn’t hold, was barely holding now, but for the moment she’d kept them from doing whatever it was they were going to do to each other.
At least until she could figure out what the hell she was going to do next.
The ghost turned to look at her, and she shuddered. You said I could have him.
A hiss, even without sibilants. A low wind moaning through the trees. Everything of loss and pain and emotions, knotted so tight it could never be undone.
I did. I was wrong. A private correspondence, instinctively. The ghost was as much current as anything else, held together by magic and sheer still-human stubbornness. Talking to it along the current was as easy as talking to herself.
The ghost didn’t like her response, turning its red glare back to Frants. The mortal was on his knees, sweat pouring down his pasty-white skin. The ghost’s normal-looking human hands had grown talons, somehow, somewhen; sharp, black-tipped claws that rested one at Frants’s throat, the other on his face. Like the caress of a rabid tiger.
I’ll have him anyway.
And with a slashing movement too fast to follow, the ghost tore five terrible scores down half of Frants’ face. Shreds of skin clung to the claws, and Wren stared, fascinated, as the ghost raised one hand for another blow. Let him suffer as I have suffered….
Don’t…
She said it out loud as well, she thought. She might even have screamed it. “You’ll regret it,” she said rapidly, getting up off her knees and moving forward as carefully, as non-threateningly as she could. Out loud, to appeal to whatever might be left of his humanity. “You’re not like him. You never were. Not if you were a builder. You were a builder, weren’t you? You created this building. Imagined it. Dreamed it. Drew it.”
She was playing a hunch, the one she and Sergei had shared that moment before all hell broke loose here. For the magic that tied him into the protection spell to work, disgraced, out-of-favor magic that depended not on the caster herself but on taking and making deals with greater forces, there had to be a connection on both sides.
Frants’s grandfather, on one end, desiring protection at any cost. And the victim, with an equal desire to see the building defended, successful.
A builder, maybe. A dreamer, certainly. The architect, most likely. Sergei had almost had it; if he’d only been given a moment longer to get into those files….
At the thought of her partner, she felt the warmth tingle low at the back of her spine. He was on his way, she could feel him racing there on foot, a madman on the street.
Not enough time, and he couldn’t do anything except be in danger too, but he was coming. She could count on him. He wouldn’t leave her alone. That knowledge made it a little easier to coax the current-charged monster in front of her. Affection. Appreciation. Love. The things that bound humans—living things—together.
“You made this building be what it is.”
I did…I did…for this one! The ghost started to turn its attention back from her to the sobbing, bleeding Frants. He did not deserve it.
Wren didn’t have time or energy to explain to a mad ghost that he was two generations too late. “No. Not for him. For them.” She risked a glance over her shoulder. At the poor guard, the dismembered bodies. And then further out, to where Barbie Doll stupidly huddled in the hallway, unable to move any farther away. “For everyone who uses this building. Do you know how many people work here every day? It’s a good building. A safe building, because of you.”
All the things she had learned about the building from her basic research, came tumbling to her lips. The security systems.