Through the mass of their bodies, the tigerish pattern of light and darkness, he saw other shapes, the thick outlines of furniture. Not too much, thankfully, but enough to make his heart sink further. Across the attic space were more porthole-like windows; through one of them a streetlight shined like a single star in a clouded sky.
Chess crouched not far from the hole. She’d already marked off a large square around it with salt, and apparently the ghosts realized it, because Rick had barely seen the line when glass shattered above his head, raining chips on him that stung his shoulder and arm.
“Chess! You right up there?” Terrible shouted from below.
“I’m fine,” she called back, digging around in her bag.
She glanced at Rick. “It’s definitely here, the portal. I have no idea how it got here or what the deal is or why, but it’s here.”
“Is that going to be hard to fix?” A chunk of wood came flying at them. They jumped back and it clattered against the wall.
“Don’t know.”
“What? What do you mean?”
Bluish light moved across her face like a reflection of water, making her features seem to shift and change shape a little as he looked at her. “I mean I don’t know. Until I know how it happened, I won’t know how to close it. Or even if I can close it.”
Great. Just great. He’d come up to help “clear debris” or whatever, and now he was on the front line of some sort of portal that this girl who may or may not be a witch may or may not know how to fix. Oh, and don’t forget the huge, very scary guy below them who looked like he ate babies and had just promised to kill Rick if anything happened to the aforesaid maybe-witch.
This night just kept getting better and better. And he had no—“Ow! Fuck!”
A shard of glass had embedded itself in his arm, thrown by an angry ghost.
Chess’s eyes narrowed. “Did you just get cut?”
He lifted his arm to show her.
“Damn it! They’re going to sense that, it’s going to make them mad.”
Witch or no witch, she was starting to piss him off. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to let myself get injured after risking my life to come up here and help you. How careless of me.”
To his surprise, she smiled. “You would have risked your life more if you hadn’t come up to help, and I kind of think you know that. But yeah, I guess you’re right. Sorry.” She lifted her hand, the black crayon in it. “Come here. I want to mark you.”
He wanted to ask what the hell that meant, but he was tired of saying “What?” over and over like some sort of idiotic parrot.
So he scooted over, closing the few feet between them. “Would Terrible actually have killed me if I hadn’t agreed to come up?”
“It’s entirely possible, yeah.” She said it like it was no big deal. Like it was normal or something, rather than psychotic. Who the hell were these people?
Her fingers touched his jaw, cool and light. “Close your eyes.”
She smelled faintly of shampoo and a sort of herbal scent, with a little cigarette smoke mixed in. The crayon wasn’t a crayon at all, he realized, but some sort of woodless grease pencil, and it moved across his forehead in a tingly line. Circles, maybe, some kind of swirl with an angle? He wasn’t sure. It made his head buzz, though, enough that he opened his eyes a crack to try to shake the dizziness.
The pencil moved down to his cheek; another little symbol there, and then she lifted his hand and drew on the back of it. It looked almost like a crab, but he couldn’t seem to really trace the pattern.
Instead he looked up at her. He’d thought before that her eyes were dark, but they weren’t. Inside the thick black eyeliner and mascara they were lighter than that: hazel, almost blue but not quite. Pretty.
He opened his mouth to tell her so, driven by some sort of imminentdeath impulse, but she dropped his hand and pulled back before he could speak.
“Those should help keep you safe.” She tucked the pencil back into her pocket. “They won’t be able to drain power from you, and you won’t feel the cold as much when they touch you. Okay?”
He would have nodded, but ducked instead when a large chair flew at them.
She grabbed his arm with her left hand, grabbed his eyes with her own. “But listen. They like fear. They can sense it, it excites them. You need to try to sublimate that. You cannot show them you’re scared. You cannot let them see when they hurt you. Now take off your shirt.”
“What?”
“Take off your shirt. Give it to me. We need to bind that wound of yours to try to mask”—a crash broke through her voice, as what looked like a table leg hit the wall—“the smell of your blood.”
He tried to smile. “You know, if you wanted to see my bare chest, all you had to do was ask.”
Terrible’s voice cut into her reply. “Chess! What’s on up there?”
Damn it! He’d finally managed to say something funny, too.
“We’re fine,” she called.
Rick peeled off his shirt and handed it to her. The attic was so damn hot it barely made a difference.
She wiped his cut with it, ducked as glass smashed behind her, and wound the fabric into a bandage, which she tied around his arm with the air of someone used to dealing with such things. “I need to get out there and look around. So you need to start grabbing stuff, okay?”
He glanced out again at the sea of ghosts, at the way the light they cast reflected off the naked ceiling boards and patchy walls and somehow thickened the air.
“They can’t hurt you unless they have a weapon,” she said, in a softer tone. “Without magic powering them they can’t solidify themselves without an object to solidify around, remember? And those sigils will help protect you. So just keep your eyes open, and get everything you can behind that line. And for Truth’s sake, do not break the line, okay?”
The sound of wood scraping wood drew his attention; a team of ghosts, four or five of them, were pushing what looked like an enormous wardrobe.
Chess saw it, too. “We’ll worry about that when we have to. Just go, and go as fast as you can.”
She stepped over the salt line and into the mass of ghosts, who whirled around her, grabbing for her with impossible white hands that failed to take hold.
Rick’s breath rattled in his chest. Ghosts out there. Terrible downstairs, probably with all sorts of weapons and eager to kill someone. He could move, or he could die, and while neither of them really appealed, he figured moving seemed like a better idea.
They were so cold. So damn cold. He’d never really thought about it. He’d been brought up to think of death as something peaceful, something that meant you got to go live in the City below the earth forever, that it was simply another stage of existence.
And he did believe it. Hell, he didn’t have to believe it, because it was Fact and that was Truth, and he’d spent hundreds of Saturday Holy Days at Church and didn’t even have to think to know that Fact and Truth were what really mattered, and it was comforting and right.
But apparently it was Fact and Truth that ghosts were cold, too, and that made him wonder if the City was cold, and if the dead spent their time there milling around in angry silence the way they were in that attic.
A lamp flew past his head and hit the wall beside him with a heavy thud. He scooped it up and ran with it, dropping it on the “safe” side of the line. Same with a large book bound in moldy leather, and a rusty frying pan. There wasn’t as much small stuff in the attic as he’d originally feared, but he kept circling the floor, scanning it, almost getting used to the sensation of being dipped in ice over and over again.
Something heavy slammed into his shoulder. He spun around to see a ghost raising another chair leg high over its head, preparing to bring it down again.
He reacted without thinking, grabbing hold of the leg and pulling, turning so he could put his back into it. Damn, that ghost was strong. The edges of the wood dug into his fingers, into his ribs when he tucked it under his arm to get a better grip and leaned forward.