Chapter Sixteen

It was dark in the fire lookout atop the ridge but moonlight came in through the windows and made dappled patterns on the walls. It curled around the broken radio, glistened on the peeling finish of the enameled chairs and table. It just barely reached into the bathroom where the dry toilet had become home to thousands of spiders. From time to time, putting aside all squeamishness, Ayaan reached through another stratum of ancient webs and scooped out a handful of them from the darkness inside. The wriggling on her tongue wasn’t so bad—it was the legs that got caught in her teeth that bothered her.

With every tiny life she took her body vibrated with joy. The hunger came back almost instantly but the shivering ecstasy of each new morsel was like nothing she’d ever felt before. She wondered, in the most private part of her mind, if it was what sex felt like for a living girl.

She had little to do but sit, and think, and wait. The fire lookout station offered few other opportunities to entertain one’s self. She had a small telescope with a scratch on one lens. It let her study the valley below. Nothing had happened since she’d arrived, her legs aching and rubbery as she powered her way up to the top of the ridge. Nothing had happened since she’d found the lookout and installed herself. Nothing would happen, she imagined, until dawn.

Erasmus stood down there as if at attention, his spine locked in perfect posture. He stood in the middle of a barnyard. The barnyard lay in the middle of a fenced-off patch of land that sat in the center of the valley. Whatever magic had possessed the undead werewolf had drawn him directly to its dark and vibrant heart.

Ayaan suspected that whoever had laid the trap lived in the tidy little farmhouse down there. Like the barn and the silo it was protected by round wards hung from its eaves painted in bright geometric patterns.

They’re called hex signs, the ghost told her. The ghost who was trapped in a brain in a jar a hundred miles away. He was standing next to her, too, just barely visible in her peripheral vision. She turned her head and there was nothing there. She looked back at the valley and he was next to her. They protect those who live inside, aye, but they need a taste of the life to keep them strong. Life’s blood, that is.

Ayaan nodded. There were plenty of goats down in the pen behind the barn. It could easily be their blood that activated the hex signs, that licked out of them in purple rays.

Magic was everywhere down in that barnyard. Death magic. It pulsed around Erasmus, pinning him like a dart in a dartboard. It flickered from the windows of the farmhouse and lingered like smoke around the tarpaper roof of the barn. Deep, dark beams of it escaped through the vents of the silo. There was something bad in there, something that needed half a dozen hex signs to keep it locked away.

“That’s what we’re here for, isn’t it?” Ayaan asked.

Aye. It’s not what you think, though, lass. Don’t fear it.

“Believe me, it’s rather low on my list of things to be afraid of.” Ayaan leaned forward, her chin resting on her steepled fingers. “You, on the other hand...” She fought the urge to look at him.

I’m your friend. I’m your best friend, under these circumstances.

“Friends don’t hypnotize each other. They don’t leave little commands buried in each other’s minds.” Semyon Iurevich, the mind-reading lich back in Asbury Park, had bound her with a spell. It had been his voice she heard telling her not to kill the green phantom. No, worse than that, his voice had wiped the very idea out of her mind. He hadn’t merely revoked her freedom. He had made it so it never existed.

And he had done so, she was certain, at the ghost’s behest.

Is that what’s worrying you? That I wouldn’t let you throw your life away?

“My life. Mine,” she said. “Do you think I like being this... this thing, this monster?” she gestured at her leathers.

I know better than anyone, dearie. Don’t you come all indignant with me, when I haven’t even a body to speak of. His tone softened, grew soothing and low. Listen, there’s a game here, a deeper game than you know. You haven’t even met all the players yet.

Ayaan let that go for a while. The ghost had power over her. She wasn’t going to talk him into relinquishing it—that never worked, never in the history of the human race had anyone given up power freely once they had it. You had to take it back yourself.

Something else worried her, though. “You want the Tsarevich dead, yet you made sure I would survive long enough to see whatever’s in that silo. You want us to find it, even if it means the Tsarevich gets it. What’s your scheme? At least tell me that much, tell me what you hope to gain from—”

He was gone, of course. She couldn’t sense him anywhere.

She went for another handful of spiders. When she came back she got a shock—something was actually happening down in the valley. A light had come on in the farmhouse. It moved from window to window, then emerged from the door, and revealed itself to be a kerosene lantern. The man holding it glowed a brighter gold than the lamp in his hand. There was no question in her mind. This was the wizard, the magician, the wadad who had enchanted Erasmus.

He wore a baseball cap low on his brow with the name JOHN DEERE on the front. Old bloodstains decorated a white t-shirt and faded blue jeans; more recent stains discolored his tan leather work boots. His face was ringed with a fringe of beard and hidden behind a pair of mirrored sunglasses, even though the sun had yet to rise.

His left arm was missing entirely. It had been replaced with a tree branch covered in rough gray bark. It ended in three thick twigs less like fingers than the tines of a pitchfork. Dark energy surged through the wooden arm and it twisted like a snake. The tines reached up and scratched the magician’s chin. He studied Erasmus, moving around the werewolf, tapping his sternum and the back of his skull. With his human hand he plucked a hair from the paralyzed lich’s cheek.

The wooden arm slapped at Erasmus’ chest and tore a strip of skin away from the rigid muscles beneath. They were pink and grey and they didn’t glisten at all. No blood emerged, but she could clearly see the edges of his skin where it had been torn open. In the midst of all that fur the wound looked like a sickly orifice, a new and monstrous genital.

Ayaan pushed the telescope away and stood up. It was a long way down the ridge and for all she knew there were mines planted all around the little barnyard but she couldn’t wait any longer. She stumbled out of the lookout station and practically threw herself down the side of the ridge, grabbing at tree branches to slow her descent, her feet barely touching the ground. A torrent of pine needles and rustling leaves swept around her while bits and pieces of rock and soil pattered and bounced down before her like a miniature landslide. She skidded to a stop in a copse of trees near the floor of the valley and pushed the branches away from her to take a look. Nothing had changed in the barnyard. Ayaan moved forward until she was standing before a seven foot high fence of thin wooden palings, the only barrier between herself and the barnyard.

Maybe, she thought, maybe she still had the element of surprise. She would need it—this wizard had more power than any living man was supposed to. Careful to be as silent as possible she climbed up one side of the fence and jumped down on the other.

Her foot barely nudged something round and hard as she landed. She looked down and saw a human skull there, bleached white with all its delicate nasal bones still intact. Other skulls littered the ground just inside the fence. Dark energy flickered inside every cranium.

The skull she touched gave off a blood-curdling shriek. Whether it actually made a sound or it was just inside her mind—and presumably the wizard’s—she couldn’t say, but the scream made her clutch her ears and duck her head.

At the center of the barnyard the wizard looked up. His wooden hand dropped a ball of fur and skin on the ground and Ayaan felt his attention hit her like a spotlight.

“This a friend a your’n, monkey-boy?” the wizard asked, looking over at Erasmus. The furry lich didn’t move an inch. “You shoulda said somethin’. I coulda redded up the place.” The wizard’s face cracked in a wide, toothy smile.

Ayaan wasted no time. She dropped into a shooter’s crouch and flung her hands in wide arcs. Energy spilled from her core and sizzled as it cut through the air. The wizard turned, far too fast, and put his wooden arm up. The bark there cracked and snapped and the wood underneath creaked and groaned. He reached inside the back pocket of his trousers and whipped out a pocket knife. Ayaan saw that the palm of his remaining hand was one smooth callus from fingers to wrist. He slashed the callus with his knife and then squeezed his fist until blood dropped onto the dry grass of the barnyard.

The door of the barn rattled on its hinges. Ayaan shot another bolt of death energy at the wizard but he caught it easily in his wooden hand. He absorbed the darkness into his own body with a visible shudder of delight. Ayaan raised her hands to attack a third time but then the door of the barn slammed open.

Dead people came slouching out. They were skin, skeletally thin. They were missing pieces. Very few among them still had four limbs. A few were missing all the flesh from their heads and all but the sinews of their necks. All of them had chunks of their torsos and abdomens carved away. Their ribs stuck out from denuded sides or were cut away entirely leaving them horribly lopsided. None of them had body hair of any kind. None of them had eyes, nor much skin.

Ayaan had seen plenty of decomposing bodies in her time. She’d seen human flesh gnawed on, torn apart, burned, hacked, eaten away by disease. She’d never seen human bodies systematically butchered, though. Not butchered for their meat.

“Just like prime aged beef,” the wizard chuckled. “If you sauce it just right, it gets so you hardly can tell.” He squinted at Ayaan. “Now, I figger I could do with a nice skirt steak for breakfast.”

The carved dead shuffled toward her, their faces unmoving, their hands up to grab and claw and tear.