Where the granules passed through her, her form began to shred. It left holes in her that looked like gaps between the worlds. I didn’t look too hard at the darkness exposed by her fragmenting body.
The salt water still gurgling onto the attic floor from the broken pipe kept her trapped with me. She couldn’t get through it to follow King, and she couldn’t leave through the roof because of whatever spell had summoned her here.
My goal wasn’t to kill her, just to keep her busy long enough to let King get her remains into the trap. But it looked like where the table salt earlier hadannoyedher, being shredded pissed her off.
She came toward me, the sandstorm of salt burning through her cheekbones and forehead, and I could hear her words practically in my head, “They brought me here and you will not send me back.”
I ducked, but her hand brushed my head and a vision hit me hard. Where we’d found her bones sat a group of people in formalwear, drunk and laughing as they called her into existence, using a mess of witchcraft and alchemy. I huffed.
“It was a wedding party?” I bent, brushing my fingers over some granules of salt that had fallen to the floor and pushing enough magic into them to send them back up, hitting her cleanly in the chest. “My money was on ghost hunters.”
She shrieked as the shower of salt burned through her, eyes gaping black and fingers growing into long claws that promised a lot of pain and blood if they caught me.
Then, abruptly, she stopped. Her whole being flickered, and I thought she’d found an escape, but as the salt continued to blow throughout the attic, she melted. She was ice left out in the sun, her form disintegrating into a puddle that disappeared in waves of vapor.
My shoulders relaxed. King must have gotten to the trap. Gently, I let the magic out of the room and the water that made up a giant cloud against the roof beams, crashed to the floor. The salt storm splashed down into it, making salty water again.
I looked around at the soaked attic and winced. There was going to be significant water damage.
Luckily, my client, with his five thousand dollar holiday decorator, had fantastic home insurance. I hoped.
Climbing down the ladder, I found a panting King rushing back to me. He raised his eyebrows. “We good?”
“She’s gone,” I said. “You ready to admit that she was?—”
“Summoned by a human, some vestigial part of the spell that they did. I’d bet that one of the casters is still feeling the drain from it, a headache that they can’t get rid of because they were still powering the spell,” King said. His eyes crinkled in the corners. “That was spellcraft, not a ghost.”
“That was asummoningspell,” I argued. “They weresummoningaghost. You know, we could continue this argument over dinner.”
He smirked, the expression twisting his lips attractively, and I was curious to see what other expressions I could get him tomake. Then his mouth dropped open, and he flew backwards through the wall.
I swore, and pulled the salt out of my bag, hands clumsy. It couldn’t be Bowman. With her remains inside the containment spell, she was bound. She should be whatever the ghost equivalent of dead was. I’d seen her disappear.
There was a giggle right next to my ear, and I blindly threw the salt and heard a hiss. The ghost dodged down the hall, doing the same flickering thing that Bowman had done. But when I got a good look at her, she was different. Everything about her was white, except where blood lined her eyes. It looked like she was crying the stuff, and fat drops of it hit the new wood floors.
Each droplet hissed and burned like acid, popping and sizzling the wood, leaving charred marks behind. I jumped through the hole in the wall that King had made, expecting to find him dead. The small bedroom was charmingly decorated—a Christmas quilt covered the double bed, the fabric featuring stylized Christmas trees and reindeer. From the bedside table, a Santa figurine stared at us blankly.
King was on the floor, and I bent to check if he was alive. He was gasping and pushed himself up on his elbows. Reaching down, I helped him up, running my hands over his back, my eyes wide.
Even a werewolf, with their healing and strength would have been laid out by being shoved through a wall. I managed a, “What—You?—”
“It’s a protection circle,” he said. He pulled his uniform shirt down a couple of inches to reveal a black circle drawn on his white undershirt. The circle glowed green, and the magic crackled. After taking that hit, the spell looked like it didn’t have much protection left.
“You put protection circles on your clothes?” I asked.
“My mom does,” he said. “She gets worried about me.”
“Does she do your laundry, too?” I couldn’t help tease. My brain was shorting out. This guy could have been dead, and then I would have ended up in the sort of trouble that ends with a life sentence. Who’s going to believe thata ghost did itwith a dead officer and another headed for the nuthouse?
Rolling his eyes, he said, “No, Ferro, I can do my own laundry. What was that?”
“I think it was another ghost,” I said. “We have to get to your partner.”
“Another one? But the only bones we found are in that binding circle,” King said. He gave me a suspicious look, and I glared back at him.
“My binding circle is fine,” I said. “It just means that we have to find more remains.”
He raised an eyebrow, and I shook my head. “We need to get downstairs. Maybe if Bowman was the one who locked us in, we can at least get out and call for reinforcements.”
