That’s why I can’t let you go!she yelled back, clamping down on their bond as hard as she could.Don’t you get it? He’s only doing this to get to Julius. If we kill him, we lose!
If we kill him, he’ll be dead and we won’t. That’s not losing.
There was more to it than that, and Ghost knew it. He’d been there, too. He’d seen how hard Julius had fought for his dream of a clan where things like this didn’t happen. The fact that Gregory was stooping to threaten her now was proof that Julius was gaining ground, and Marci was determined not to be the weak link. The whole reason she’d come to Heartstriker Mountain was to help him, not mess him up by letting some overgrown reptile drag her off to use as a prize like he was Bowser and she was Princess Peach.
But that’s exactly what’s going to happen if you don’t let me crush him,Ghost growled, his pale light washing over her darkening vision.I’m part of you, two halves of the same whole. But while Ican’tdie, youcan.Julius isn’t here now. I am. I amalwayswith you, Marci. Let me help.
She shook her head stubbornly, and her mind was filled with the odd but distinct sensation of a spirit sighing.
What if I promise not to kill him?
The words came out so grudgingly, Marci had trouble believing them, but she was rapidly passing the point where she could afford to be picky. Her body was already shutting down, her limbs going heavy and useless. If she was going to do something to actually stop this kidnapping, it had to benow,and so she gave in, releasing her hold on Ghost’s connection.
The moment she let go, a wind rose in the stairwell.
It was cold as death. A dry, hollow wind that smelled of dust and blew from every direction at once. But while Marci thought the cold air actually felt kind of nice in a creepy way, Gregory snatched his hand off her throat like he’d been burned.
“What the—”
Did you think we had forgotten?
The voice was Ghost’s, but infinitely deeper. Even gasping for breath on the floor, the sound made Marci look up in surprise. But while she saw nothing, Gregory was another matter entirely.
He must have jumped back the moment he’d let her go, because the dragon was now standing against the railing on the far side of the stairs, his green eyes wide and moving wildly. For several seconds, Marci couldn’t figure out why, but as the spots vanished from her own choked vision, she spotted it at last.
The dragon was covered in shadows. They came from nowhere, were cast by nothing, but every time the ghostly wind shifted, they crawled higher, sliding up his massive body like a lover’s hands.
“No!” Gregory shouted, beating his chest and legs with his hands as he tried in vain to knock the shadows off. “What are these things?” He bared his teeth at Marci. “What did you do?”
That’s the wrong question.
The deep, disembodied voice echoed down the empty stairwell, and then Gregory’s shape became hazy. At first, Marci thought this was just another trick of her still not quite recovered vision, but that wasn’t it at all. She couldn’t see the dragon properly because there was another figure standing on the stairs between her and him. A tall, ghostly man dressed like a Roman centurion and wearing a helmet with nothing inside save for two glowing ice-blue eyes that glared at the dragon with pure, hungry malice.
In a move that impressed Marci more than anything else he’d done, Gregory glared back. “What are you?”
“Again, you ask the wrong question,” the soldier said, his deep voice rising as the wind picked up. “The question you should be asking, Gregory Heartstriker, is, ‘Who are they?’”
He extended his ghostly hand, pointing at the shadows that were crawling up Gregory’s legs. The dragon must have thought he was bluffing, because it took him several seconds to actually look down. When he ducked his head at last, the shadows changed, transforming from vague blobs into distinct human figures, and as their shadowy hands moved up his chest, all the bravado fell off Gregory’s face.
“No!” he roared, beating frantically at the shadowy human figures that were now crawling out of the ground all around him like a seething ant hill. “You’re dead! You can’t—Get away from me!”
But it didn’t work. No matter how hard he fought, his hands passed right through the humans like they were shadows in truth.
“You can never escape them,” the spirit said, his blue eyes gleaming in the dark of his empty helmet. “Yours has been a violent, careless life. Even you can’t remember anymore how many corpses you’ve left in your wake, but I do.” He pointed at the crawling shadows, who were now up to the dragon’s neck. “Those are your ghosts, Gregory Heartstriker, and they have come for what is theirs.”
By this point, Gregory looked well and truly panicked, his green eyes moving frantically between the shadows and the ghostly soldier like he couldn’t decide which was the bigger threat. “Whatare you?”
Marci knew there was no mouth inside that empty helmet. Even if there had been, she couldn’t have seen it from where she was, but it didn’t matter. She couldfeelthe spirit’s smile as he answered. “I am the Empty Wind, Spirit of the Forgotten Dead. All who are lost are mine to keep, and to avenge.”
The wind had risen to a gale by the time he finished, pushing the shadowy ghosts crawling over Gregory higher and higher until their grasping fingers were within an inch of his face. What they were going to do once they got there, though, Marci never saw. The moment the first ghostly finger touched his chin, Gregory panicked.
There was no warning, no blast of fire. He simply changed, transforming from an overgrown, beautiful, thuggish-looking man into an overgrown, beautiful, terrifying blue-and-orange-feathered dragon that barely fit inside the stairwell. That was as much as Marci saw before he bolted, half flying, half squeezing his long body down the hole in the middle of the stairwell. By the time she’d scrambled back to her feet and run to the railing, all she could see was the orange-and-blue flash of his tail as he vanished through an unmarked door a dozen floors below.
I told you I wouldn’t kill him.
Marci looked up to see the Empty Wind standing over her.
“That you did,” she said, trying not to wince at the grave-like chill of his hand as he pulled her to her feet. “Good job.”
