And then he vanished back into the wall.
“Wait!” Marci cried, slamming her hand against the postbox he’d just passed through. “Where are you—”
Follow,Ghost purred in her mind.Downstairs. Quickly.
Marci swore under her breath and bolted for the stairs, blowing past a pair of curious, off-duty Algonquin security officers who’d clearly been eavesdropping from the next aisle over. Her cheeks burned at the thought of someone overhearing her emotional breakdown, but she didn’t have time to stop or anything she could say to explain, so she just kept going, taking the stairs down two at a time until she spotted Ghost sitting on the ground floor landing.
He stayed still just long enough for her to catch up before slipping through the fire exit.
Follow.
“But I’ll set off the alarm,” she panted.
Ghost’s voice grew irritated.Hurry.
Marci was not about to get fined for what was probably a wild goose chase, but she couldn’t let Ghost go, either. In the end, she compromised, running through the lobby to the post office’s front door and then around the building until she reached the back alley where the emergency fire door let out.
Like most places in the DFZ Underground, the area around the post office was a confusing patchwork of money and abject poverty. The buildings facing the main streets were as bright and jangly as the tourist traps she’d led Julius past the night they met. Once you stepped away from the high traffic areas, though, the lights faded after only a few feet, giving way to an interior network of narrow, pitch black alleys lined with tiny shops and massage parlors that served a seedier, much more desperate segment of the population.
As a whole, the back alley slums of the DFZ weren’t quite as bad as the movies made them out to be, but a few could be worse. From what Marci could see of the tiny crack of an alley that ran behind the massive, windowless post office, Ghost had led her right into one of the latter. “What are you doing?” she hissed, sucking magic out of the moist, polluted air into her bracelets as she hurried after her glowing cat. “Are youtryingto get me mugged?”
Ghost didn’t answer. He just kept going, trotting around a corner into a second, even smaller crevice between buildings that looked like the sort of place where people got stabbed for their organs. With a last, longing glance at the bright, crowded street behind her, Marci followed, using her glowing bracelets as a lantern as she picked her way around potholes that could have swallowed a full-grown cow.
In the end, the only nice thing she could say about it was that she didn’t have to go far. Barely thirty feet after it began, the tiny alley dead-ended into the back of a run-down convenience store. Ghost was waiting for her on the edge of one of the shop’s rusted dumpsters, his tail lashing back and forth as he waited for Marci to join him.
“Okay,” she said when she’d finally made it safely around all the pot holes and mysterious black puddles to the end of dumpster alley. “I’m here. Now, will youpleasetell me what’s going on?”
Ghost gave her the cat equivalent of an extremely unamused glare and tapped his paw down on the dumpster’s closed lid.Help.
Marci blinked in surprise. In the month since she’d bound him, Ghost had never asked her for anything. She wasn’t even aware he had things he needed help with. But he was pawing the dumpster lid with increasing urgency, and so she grabbed it with her finger tips, touching as little of the filthy metal as possible as she flipped it open. Naturally, the lid passed right through Ghost, leaving him standing in the empty air above the dumpster’s open bin. But before Marci could ask why he hadn’t just phased through the thing in the first place, she saw what was inside, illuminated by Ghost’s soft, white light.
She jumped back with a yelp, slapping her hands over her mouth. There was apersonlying in the trash at the bottom of the dumpster. Almost as soon as that thought crossed her mind, though, her brain rejected it. The curled over shape was far too still for a person, which meant she’d just discovered acorpse.
That was infinitely worse. Marci edged forward again, peeking over the dumpster’s edge to make absolutely certain she wasn’t seeing things. Sadly, she wasn’t. Between the glowing spellwork on her bracelets and Ghost’s pale light, she could clearly make out the body of a teenage boy. Averythin teenage boy with ribs clearly visible where his filthy, oversized shirt hung down from his slender neck. Malnourished as he obviously was, though, hunger wasn’t what had killed him. The cause of death was a wound on the top of his head—a long, caved-in gash that matched the sharp metal support bar that ran across the dumpster’s base.
As soon as she saw that, Marci’s fear turned to overwhelming sadness. “Poor kid,” she whispered. “He must have been looking for food and fallen in, or fainted.”
Either way, it was a tragedy, and not an uncommon one. People slipped through the cracks all the time in the DFZ. Stuff like this didn’t even make the news. Still. “We need to report this.”
Why?Ghost looked down at the boy.Still dead.
“That’s not the point,” Marci said angrily. “He has family somewhere, people who care about him. They’ll want to know.”
No. No one.
“How do you know that?”
The cat looked back up at her.Calls to me. Help.
“What do you mean, calls to you?” Marci asked. “Was he a mage or—”
Not mage,Ghost said firmly.Dead.His eyes flicked to her glowing bracelets.Give.
Before she could ask what he meant by that, Ghost pulled on the connection between them, his cold presence reaching in to tug on the magic she’d gathered for self-protection.
“No way,” Marci said, grabbing the magic tight. “You’re not getting a drop until you tell me what you’re doing.”
Ghost flicked his tail.Helping. You help, I help. Together, power.
