Shimmering white tentacles erupted from the beam. They were glassy and featureless, with stubby tips. They uncoiled with ferocious speed—some aiming high for George; some striking low at Lockwood and me.
“Just about now, really,” Lockwood said.
Down swung the tentacles. We scattered, Lockwood diving toward the window, me toward the hatch. High above, George jerked away, dropping the chain net, losing his balance. The ladder toppled back. It wedged against the angle of the roof behind, knocking George’s feet clear, leaving him dangling by two hands from the topmost rung.
A tendril flopped against the floorboards next to me, merged with them, went through. It was made of ectoplasmic matter. Unless you wanted to die, you had to prevent it touching your bare skin. I gave a frantic jump sideways, tripped, and dropped my sword.
Worse than dropped it—it vanished through the open hatch to fall among the ghosts below.
High above, things weren’t much better. Letting go of the ladder with one hand, George tore a magnesium flare from his belt and lobbed it at the coils. It missed them completely, erupted against the roof in a brilliant explosion, and sent a cascade of white-hot burning salt and iron down on Lockwood, setting his clothes aflame.
That’s how it went with us, sometimes. One thing just led to another.
“Oh, good start!” In the ghost-jar, the face had visibly perked up; it grinned cheerily at me as I bounded past, dodging the lunges from the nearest tentacle. “So you’re setting each other on fire, now? That’s a new one! What will you think of next?”
Above me more tendrils of ghostly matter were emerging from the crossbeam and the rafters of the roof. Their nub-like heads protruded like baby ferns, blind and bone-white, before whipping outward across the breadth of the attic space. On the other side of the room, Lockwood had dropped his rapier. He staggered backward toward the window, the front of his clothes feathered with darting silver flames, his head craned back to avoid the heat.
“Water!” he called. “Anyone got some water?”
“Me!” I ducked under a glowing tentacle and reached inside my bag. Even as I found my plastic bottle, I was shouting a request of my own: “And I need a sword!”
There was a rush of air through the attic, unnatural in its strength. Behind Lockwood, the window slammed open with a crash of breaking glass. Rain gusted through, bringing with it the howling of the storm. Lockwood was only two steps, maybe three, from the dreadful drop to the street below.
“Water, Lucy!”
“George! Your sword!”
George heard. He understood. He gave a frantic wriggle in midair and just about avoided the blind thrust of another coil. His rapier was at his belt, glittering as he swung. He reached down, ripped the sword clear.
I jumped over a slashing frond of plasm, spun around with the water bottle, and hurled it across to Lockwood.
George threw his rapier to me.
Watch this now. Sword and bottle, sailing through the air, twin trajectories, twin journeys, arcing beautifully through the mass of swirling tendrils toward Lockwood and me. Lockwood held out his hand. I held out mine.
Remember I said there was that moment of sweet precision, when we jelled perfectly as a team?
Yeah, well, this wasn’t it.
The rapier shot past, missing me by miles. It skidded halfway across the floor.
The bottle struck Lockwood right in the center of his forehead, knocking him out the window.
There was a moment’s pause.
“Is he dead?” the skull’s voice said. “Yay! Oh. No, he’s hanging on to the shutters. Shame. Still, this is definitely the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. You three really are incompetence on a stick.”
Frantically dancing clear of the nearest tentacles, I tried to get a view of Lockwood. To my relief, the skull was right. Lockwood was hanging out over the drop, his body a rigid diagonal, clinging to the broken shutters. The wind howled around him, tugging his hair across his long, lean face, seeking to pluck him away into the November night. Happily, it was also buffeting his burning coat. The silver flames were dwindling. They began to die.
Which was what we were all in danger of doing. Any second now.
George’s sword was only yards away, but it might as well have been in Edinburgh. Ghostly coils swirled around it like anemones waving in a shallow sea.
“You can get it!” George called. “Do a cool somersault over them or something!”
“You do one! This is your fault! Why can’t you ever throw things accurately?”
“Coming from you! You chucked that bottle like a girl!”
“I am a girl. And I put Lockwood’s fire out for him, didn’t I?”
Well, that was sort of true. Over at the window, our leader was hauling himself back inside. His face was green, his coat gently smoking. He had a neat red circle on his forehead where the bottle had struck. He wasn’t exactly tossing thanks my way.
A particularly long and silver tentacle had homed in on me; it was steadily pushing me back toward the hatch, among cobwebs large as laundry.
“Faster, Lucy!” That was the skull in the jar. “It’s right behind you!”
“How about a little help here?” I gasped as a tendril brushed my arm. I could feel the stinging cold right through the fabric of the coat.
“Me?” The hollow eyes in the face became hoops of surprise. “A ‘dirty old pile of bones,’ as you call me? What could I do?”
“Some advice! Evil wisdom! Anything!”
“It’s a Changer—you need something strong. Not a flare—you’ll just set fire to something. Probably yourself. Use silver to drive it back. Then you can get the sword.”
“I don’t have any silver.” We had plenty of silver Seals in the bag, but that was near Lockwood, on the other side of the room.
“What about that stupid necklace you always wear? What’s that made of?”
Oh. Of course. The one Lockwood had given me that summer. It was silver. Silver burns ghostly substances. All ghosts hate it, even powerful Changers that manifest as ectoplasmic coils. Not the strongest weapon I’d ever used, but it just might do.
Squatting back against the angled roof, I put my hands behind my neck and undid the clasp. When I brought my fingers around, cobwebs hung from them in greasy clumps. I held the necklace tight, and whirled it around and around my fist. The end made contact with the nearest tendril. Plasm burned; the tentacle snapped upward and away. Other coils flinched back, sensing the silver’s nearness. For the first time, I cleared a safe space around me. I stood up, supporting myself against the rafter behind.
As my fingers touched the wood, I was hit by a sudden wave of emotion. Not my emotion—this feeling came from all about me. It seeped out of the fabric of the attic, out of the wood and slates, and the nails that held them there. It seeped out of the flailing coils of the ghost itself. It was a vile sensation—a sickly, shifting mix of loneliness and resentment, speared with cold, hard rage. The strength of it beat against my temples as I looked across the room.
A terrible thing had happened here, a terrible injustice. And from that act of violence came the energy that drove the vengeful spirit. I imagined its silent coils slipping through the floor toward the poor lodgers sleeping in the rooms below….
“Lucy!” My mind cleared. It was Lockwood. He had stepped away from the window. He’d picked up his sword. One-handed, he slashed a complicated pattern through the air, shearing through the nearest tentacles. They burst like bubbles, scattering iridescent pearls of plasm. Even with his coat all charred and crispy, even with that red circle on his forehead, he had reasserted himself. His face was pale in the spectral light as he smiled across the attic at me. “Lucy,” he called, “we need to finish this.”