Page 11 of Cold Sacrifice

“Looks like it,” I said, then quickly explained the situation. “I have no idea how this works, or if it’s possible, but I need it to work. Can you help?”

“Possibly,” he replied. “You help ghosts cross over. You don’t aim them at something, because you don’t really care about where you’re sending them. You just want them out of the realm of the living. But now, you’ll focus on that painting. You’ll see it as though you were standing in front of the actual house. Smell the flowers, feel the heat, hear the birds. And take that poor bastard with you when you go.”

“Yes,” the ghost cried. “At last, at last!”

“He came with the painting,” Joe said. “When Vanessa bought it, he came with it, didn’t he?”

And though his question was for me, Richard answered him. “He surely did, my gruesome friend.”

I lifted an eyebrow. “Joe is hardly gruesome.”

“He called me gruesome?” Joe asked. He puffed out his chest and squared his shoulders. “I’m okay with that.”

I took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “What’s your name?” I asked the ghost, who once again stood on the bed, waiting, hoping that a painted door would open.

“Andrew,” he said, his desperate stare clinging to my face. “My name is Andrew.”

“Okay, Andrew,” I told him. “I’m going to do my best to get you home.”

He pressed his clasped hands against his chest. “Thank you.”

I slid the strap of my bag off my shoulder and set the bag on the bed, then stared down at it for a few seconds, unsure.

“Just do what you would normally do to send a spirit away,” Richard said, his voice surprisingly loud. “The only thing you’re going to do differently is focus on where to send him.”

“Generally,” I said, “I sever their tethers by burning something, finding something, or settling something. I need to know what’s holding him here before I can send him away.”

“The painting is holding him here,” Richard told me, “but you obviously can’t destroy it before putting him inside it. Afterward, you will burn the painting so he can stay there forever and will never return to this realm.”

I frowned, then closed my eyes and focused on my breath for a solid minute before I got to work. “Okay, then,” I murmured, and without another hesitation, I simply followed my instinct. I would send Andrew home.

I placed my phone on the bed, then opened my bag, pulling out a spirit trap and a small, sharp blade. “Joe, get the painting off the wall and lay it on the bed.”

As soon as the painting was on the bed, Andrew knelt beside it. “What do you need me to do?” There was no fear in his eyes. He believed I would help him. He had to believe it.

I showed him the trap. “I’m going to pull you inside the ghost jar,” I told him, avoiding the word trap, “and then I’ll release you into the painting. Are you ready?”

He lifted his chin, then gave a firm nod. “I’m ready.”

I’d never pulled a ghost into a trap and then released him. I wasn’t sure it was even possible, and if I’d thought too hard about it, I might not have done it. Trapping the poor guy in a jar for eternity would have been a horrible thing to do to him.

But I trusted my gut, and I trusted my blade. It was a demon blade, true, but it was magic, as well. And everything about what I was going to do involved magic.

I pulled my blade, and as it began to gently smoke, I wove the red and gray strands of fog and magic around Andrew’s form. When he became twisted with the tendrils of smoke, then became the smoke, I flipped open the trap and guided him inside.

I didn’t close the lid but took the still-smoking tip of the blade and cut a round hole directly in the center of the painting. And then I pressed the tip into the jar, laid the hilt against the hole in the painting, and created a bridge of smoke that changed from red and gray to silver and white.

The colors of my magic—or magic that I’d once held.

Andrew crawled down that bridge and slipped into the hole. When the last of his smoky form disappeared from the jar, I dropped it into the bag and lifted my knife from the painting.

The hole closed up with a sizzling sound, and for a brief, almost disorienting moment, I saw Andrew running through the flowers like a ripple of air.

“He’s in,” I murmured, shocked.

“You did it,” Richard said, sounding like a proud teacher. “You did it, Kait.”

But I heard the disbelief in his voice. “You didn’t think it’d work,” I said. “You expected it to fail.”