This had not been a good twenty-four hours, and before that I’d been dead.
I wasn’t exactly at the top of my game.
So I was going to keep one thing ahead of me, one single thing I was going to get done: kill Eli. Nothing else would get in the way of that.
Shame? a voice whispered from behind me.
Not Sunny. Not Eleanor.
I glanced in the rearview mirror.
Terric sat in the backseat, no blood on his face, no pain in his eyes. He just looked annoyed.
Pretty much how I expected his ghost would look once it found me.
Eleanor and Sunny were ignoring him, staring out the window on either side. So either they couldn’t see him, which was odd, or they didn’t want to deal with him, which was more likely.
“Don’t do this, Ter,” I said, looking away from the anger that flickered across his face. “I didn’t tie you to me. You can move on.”
You idiot, he whispered.
I glanced in the mirror again. He was gone. Eleanor and Sunny hadn’t even moved.
Okay. Apparently I was tired enough to be hallucinating.
My heart flopped painfully in my chest, slamming against bone. I swore my way through the agony. Heart attack?
Terric had died and decided to haunt me. Painfully.
Figured.
I blinked sweat out of my eyes and kept my foot on the gas. I was less than an hour away from Portland.
The highway took a bend, following the river. Dawn was wiping the stars out of the sky and leaving behind a swath of pale yellow and gray. Traffic, which had been sparse, thickened the closer I got to the city.
I didn’t have time for a morning commute. I had a man to kill.
Traffic crawled down to a dead stop. The highway was blocked, a dozen black cars and a bulletproof box van parked across the road. Police walked between the cars, flashlights in hand, getting IDs. Looking for something. Maybe looking for me.
Krogher had connections. Police would be just the beginning of what he could throw at me.
The cops were headed to the truck in front of me. Which meant I’d be next.
Goddamn. If they thought they could stop me, they were wrong.
I took a breath, put the car in park, and got out.
Killing would be easy. But it would also be messy. I didn’t have time for messy.
What are you doing? Sunny asked. Shame, what are you doing?
My stocking feet on the cold asphalt made no sound. In the pale light of morning, strangely unnecessary details stood out for me. The hole in my left sock heel, the smell of asphalt and tar, the I LIKE IT DIRTY written in the dust on the side of the truck.
And the Death magic that sat like a dangerous, but also nearly endless source, of magic in me.
I didn’t have to be seen if I didn’t want to be.
I didn’t want to be.
I drew a quick Illusion, pulled on the magic within me, poured it into the spell. Asphalt cracked, growing things alongside the road turned brown, withered, died as Death drank them down.
And the Illusion caught silver fire, then fell around me like a spider-silk cloak.
No one saw me as I walked by. No one even looked my way.
I strode past the barricade of cars, past the armored van, to the last car on the other side of the roadblock.
The car was empty and convenient. I checked for keys. Got in, expanded the Illusion spell to cover the car—to make it look as if the car stayed behind.
The level of magic and skill it took to pull off a spell like that wasn’t taught in kiddie school. It also wasn’t easy.
Pain stabbed through my brain and I cussed and rubbed at my eyes until I could see some of the road ahead of me. It hurt like hell, but I didn’t let go of the Illusion. Not yet. I turned the car toward Portland.
... you shouldn’t be driving, Eleanor said. If you pass out on the road, you’ll kill yourself . . . probably.
“Do you think I care?” I asked her. “Do you really think I give a damn about that anymore?”
How about car accidents? she said. You could kill other people too. Innocent people. You can’t tell me some part of you doesn’t care about that.
I looked over at her. “If I’d thought, for one second, that killing every man, woman, and child in a mile square, either side of that road, would have gotten me what I wanted, I would have drunk them down like cold water.”
You don’t mean that, she said. You can’t—
“Shut up, El.”
Just listen.
“Don’t. Talk.” I wiped the sweat off my face, swerved back in my lane, trying to hold that double Illusion spell just a little longer.
Shame! Eleanor screamed. Look out!
Terric stood in the middle of the highway. His ghost, anyway. He was not annoyed anymore. He was furious.
Turn back, he said, and I heard him even though I shouldn’t at this distance, at this speed.
Hallucination?
I was going to hit him. Run him over unless I did something pretty quick to avoid it.
Would a ghost survive the impact of an automobile?
I lost the Illusion spell.
All I heard was Eleanor screaming.
And all I saw was Terric.
No time to avoid a collision. I drove right at him, braced for the hit. Ghosts don’t offer a lot of physical resistance.
The car went right through him. More than that, he went right through me.
A stream of light and color and blinding pain flooded me, claimed me. Terric and I shared the same space for a split second, shared the same body.
I’d lived with a ghost for almost four years. Was living with two now, one of whom liked to punctuate her sentences with knives. I knew what it was like to be hit by a spirit, knew what it was like to be touched, knew what it was like to be stabbed.
This was nothing like that.
Everything that made Terric . . . well . . . Terric slammed into me. Memories, thoughts, fear, joy, hope, anger, a whirling cascade of faces, buildings, conversations, sensations of his life, the good, the very good, and the very, very bad.
Like taking down an entire bottle of whiskey in one shot.
He left me reeling.
Left me wanting. Wanting him.
Unfortunately I was still driving.
And then I blacked out.
Chapter 21
SHAME
I smelled bubble gum and cigarette smoke.
Opened my eyes. My lashes scraped across fabric. Blindfold. I tried moving my hands. Bound at the wrists with . . . I wiggled my hands . . . silk? Something that felt like a woman’s scarf.
This wasn’t right. I lifted my hands, ran into metal above me. Dragged my fingers across it, then out to one side, then the other. I was in a box. A metal box. Tied and blindfolded. The vibration of an engine transferred through the box along with the smoky bubble gum smell. Where the hell was I?
“Morning, sunshine,” a woman’s voice called out. “Are you awake?”
I knew that voice. Beatrice. One of Allie’s, well, Sunny’s Hounds. Which explained the bubble gum. And the smoke probably belonged to Jack, her partner.
I licked my lips. At least I wasn’t gagged. I couldn’t tell if Eleanor and Sunny were shoved in here with me. I couldn’t feel them. Didn’t hear them.
“Why am I in a box?”
There was some rustling around and then Bea’s voice was just on the other side of the metal.
“We’re taking you to St. Johns,” she said, slowly and carefully as if I had a concussion.