“Mr. Caphree,” she called in two voices: the one of the ghost she inhabited, and her own. She wanted to be familiar to him. She’d regarded him as reasonable, once.
Mr. Caphree took a moment to register her, then shook his head as if the entire matter couldn’t be helped. He stood before a roaring mob with a flare gun in his hand.
“No masters!” he barked, and the city echoed after him. The squadron of ghosts remained eerily silent.
“No tyrants!” Caphree raised the flare gun and fired into the air. It showered them all in eerie green light and set off a chain of flare lights spaced out along the canal.
“Ever forward!”
In a gesture ofso be it, Yemi calmly raised her arms, and the whole of her forces pressed forward, a sea around the rock of her. Waves of ghosts clashed with furious citizens along Broad Street. Explosions rumbled as they scaled walls to eliminate grenadiers on rooftops.
Yemaya did not have to move through the crowd herself to enact her violence. She stood in the street and cast her mind into the bodies of ghosts sent before her, watching from behind their eyes as they slaughtered her enemies. She ensured that she held the blade when it finally went through the tongueless heathen’s jugular, though by now he bored her. Truthfully, she had little interest in the faithful now. She was searching for familiar faces: senators, leaders who would answer the One Question correctly and be left in peace or dragged past her to the basilica with the other traitors. There was no one left to tell her which she should prefer.
The blood and smoke and ember felt like music in her blood. All the parts of her that knew war was not something to be enjoyed had been removed, replaced by a promise of victory—the fulfillment of a dream she’d held quietly in her heart since the day her father was murdered. She was now the part of her mother glorified in battle stories, more god than creature.
Mr. Caphree had not been felled yet. She was looking for himwhen he appeared in her periphery, much too close. He held a calm fierceness in his eyes as he dodged a ghost and came dangerously close to her face with a hatchet, when a ghost appeared before her as a towering shield. In one swift move, the ghost disarmed Caphree by breaking his arm at the elbow. He screamed, and the hatchet clattered to the ground. Caphree reached for it, but the ghost got to it first, wielding it in one hand and the back of Caphree’s head in the other. The two would meet in mere moments.
“Stop,” Yemaya commanded, and the ghost halted with what appeared to be some reluctance, instead pushing Caphree to his knees and holding him there by his hair. She stepped closer and waited for Caphree to look her in the eye.
“Bring this one to the basilica. He’s special.”
It was Lirik who had given her the idea: A siren’s power might be able to change their minds. She was inclined to test it, and if it didn’t take… Well.
The ghost brought Caphree to his feet and helped him follow her back toward the Rock. Others were being led from throughout the city in pairs or small groups, all terrified, all regarding her with some trepidation or regret. Even the faithful seemed fearful.
The Gold Guard had the basilica and its grounds secured with a contingent of ghosts. Nearly two hundred people knelt in neat lines across the ornate brick promenade, organized according to how they’d answered the question and the voluntary or involuntary manner of their capture. Lips moved in silent, rapid prayer. Eyes gazed out over the shaken city, the plumes of red dust and smoke drifting upward into what had been a beautiful night sky.
The ghost pushed Caphree to his knees just before the entrance, not far from where the Bear King had met his end.
“Is this how you command loyalty?” Caphree winced. “You’d burn the capital to the ground? For what?”
“Iam not the one who came here with fire,” Yemaya replied. “Ibrought the power of water.Ibrought the fish back.Iam the validation of our faith.” She turned to see what he saw, but likely with adifferent interpretation. To her eyes, this night was a beginning, not an end. She smiled down at him. “You will see how the ones committed to the queen’s peace are rewarded. Or not. That will be up to you.”
Shiro appeared, coming down the mountain pass where the Ixian army would have streamed into the city by now.
“Shiro,” Yemi summoned with a pointed look. He glanced around for her familiar form before making quizzical eye contact.
“Queen Yemaya?”
She nodded. “How are we?” she asked, as if she didn’t know.
“Your base is secured,” he replied, approaching apprehensively. “No small thanks to your…friendshere.”
“Youare the friends,” she told him.
He shrugged his discomfort. “Thoughts on if we run out of room here?”
“I’m not sure we’ll have that problem.”
Shiro hesitated before nodding once and moving away to see to his men.
Yemaya jumped back into the bodies of ghosts to take stock of their progress. The explosions had all but died away, but the ground fighting was still fierce. Hers was a country of warriors, after all. She returned, ready to try the siren game on Caphree, but grew distracted by an interaction between a ghost and a woman, set against the smoldering ruin of a bakery nearby.
The ghost was a man, tall, spindly, with heavy keloid scarring down his left arm. He peered down lovingly, placing his face into the trembling hands of a small woman. It was impossible, of course, to tell who was older or from when in their lifetimes they’d known each other. Whatever the chaos around them or the cause of it, whatever the impossible odds, they’d found one another again.
For a moment, fleeting and vulnerable, she felt pain. Not the warring kind, but heartache. Hadn’t the last time Nova touched her been something like this? Back when she’d found her on the beach? Hadn’t the last time she’d seen love and longing like this on display been when both her parents were alive?
It was here she was jarred back into her own body. She felt her blood stop moving and fell to her knees in the cabin. For a span of a heartbeat, breath wouldn’t come, and an unsettling sensation carved at her core, as if the stone in her gut had grown sharp spider legs. She beat a fist against the wood and muck once, twice until air dragged into the body she occupied at a wheeze and she was back behind a giant’s eyes again.
