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My borrowed head fell back against the floor. I concentrated, and after a moment, my spirit glided up and the face on the body below me went slack. I’d gotten a little better at this sort of thing in the last month, meaning that I no longer rocketed around like an out-of-control comet. So it would have been easy enough to drift over to Pritkin, if he hadn’t kneed Marsden somewhere sensitive and taken off for the stairs again. Damn it!
I floated after him and caught him as his foot hit the lowest step. But catching him and getting inside were totally different things. My body’s shields were back up and operating at a level I hadn’t known they could reach. I shield with fire, not water, but it was Pritkin’s spirit projecting the mental barrier, and I splashed down into an endless ocean of gently undulating waves.
I surfaced, sputtering and coughing, but Billy was nowhere in sight. And I didn’t know how to get past armor this advanced. Unlike with most shields, there were no rips or tears—no chinks at all. Just blue, blue water spreading to the horizon in every direction.
Diving, I discovered, only made things worse: now I was in a featureless indigo world with no reference points. Hovering blindly in the dark, I could feel the crackle of my spirit’s heat start to war with the ocean, churning up vast amounts of water that bubbled around me in a frothy tide. Then the ocean began swirling, a hard current took me and I rocketed back toward the surface in what I vaguely realized was a giant water spout. I tore through out into the open, thrust upward at a dizzying rate—and kept on going right back into the kitchen.
It took me a moment to realize that I’d just been exorcised from my own body.
“Got him!” Billy said. And the next moment, the pale, glimmering form of a man was pushed out of my skin and into the kitchen.
Most new spirits are hopelessly confused for a few moments at least, trying to depend on the senses of the body they no longer have to understand the world. And despite being half demon, it appeared that Pritkin was no different, hovering exposed and terrified in what probably felt like complete solitude. I tried to grab his insubstantial hand, but he shied back, horror passing over his hazy features.
He couldn’t see me, I realized. He didn’t know if the spirit who had touched him was that of a friend or a predator. I tried to reach out with my senses, to let him know who I was, to tell him to follow me, and a feeling of presence slammed into me that left me shaking. But it wasn’t coming from him.
Something was moving toward us, stirring up the spirit world with the force of a swift-moving storm. It shuddered across my awareness, filled with the spark of lightning and the hungry mutters of thunder. There were stray flickers at the edge of my vision, and a cold, brittle scent in the air.
A jolt of fear hit me like a punch. I froze, my entire form tightening in terror. Rakshasas. They had seen him, felt him, and they were coming. We had to get out of here, get of here now—
I grabbed for Pritkin, but his spirit form flitted off like a leaf in the wind. I followed, knowing what would happen if we didn’t get back inside the protection of a body. But before I could reach him, the tenuous membrane between worlds shuddered around us and something stepped out.
My first glimpse was of a red-haired creature maybe six feet tall that appeared suddenly out of the darkness at the top of the stairs. He’d assumed the basic form of a man, but the illusion wouldn’t have fooled anybody who’d been able to see it. Of course, anybody in that position wouldn’t have been hanging around for a second look.
Delicate bones underpinned a face with liquid black eyes and an elegant Roman nose. It was difficult to tell more than that because most of the features were hidden behind a mask of blood. It also gleamed wetly on the powerful, naked body, staining his golden skin in dark streaks, as if the blood ran in never-ceasing streams over his flesh. Gore was trapped under his nails, painted his lips and matted his long, tangled hair. And the expression in those eyes wasn’t human, wasn’t even animal. It was pure, ravenous hunger.
Another one appeared behind the leader’s shoulder and then four more in rapid succession. They were males and females with human forms but the smiles of beasts, all of them a nightmarish cross of wild beauty and absolute savagery. They spilled down the steps in a writhing tangle of bloodstained skin, fanning out around me and cutting me off from both my body and Pritkin’s.
“Here’s a pretty one,” the leader crooned, reaching out to me. A tender hand brushed across my cheek and I shuddered with revulsion. He smiled and his hand cupped my nape, drawing me close to that terrible face.
“This one lives,” one of the creatures purred. “I smell its breath.”
“Yes.”
“Forbidden,” another said. “Protected.”
“No.” The leader stroked a hand down my spirit form, and a clawed nail sharp as a blade tore into me. For a moment, I felt nothing. Until a writhing agony ignited my spine as every vein was traced with fire, burning and tearing and all-pervasive. “Like the traitor, this one is ours.”
“We taste its blood.” Parched voices cried from all sides. “We hunger. Give it to us. . . .”
“Mine first,” the leader snarled. And I knew without asking that there would be no dealing with these things, no bribes accepted, no pleas heard. I had only one thing they wanted—and they were already taking it.
I looked down and saw that he’d ripped a gash in my spirit, and that something pale and completely unlike blood was starting to seep out. Power, I realized through the haze of pain. He was going to drain me.
The pack mewled hungrily but didn’t move. The leader ran his tongue down my chest like a lover, licking at the spilled power. But it was the laughing hiss that followed that drove my panic beyond the bounds of reason. If I’d still had a body, it would have caused the adrenaline in my veins to congeal, turned my breath to ice in my lungs. As it was, I suddenly couldn’t move, even when the leader tilted his head down, closed his lips over the wound he’d made and sucked.
It hurt, oh, God, it hurt, like acid on raw nerves, like barbed knives turning into bone. But more than the pain was the first bitter hint of loss. The knowledge that some part of me had been stolen, lost like a drop of water dissolving in a cold, dark sea. Forever gone.
The leader looked up at me and licked his bloody lips. “It tastes better alive,” he said, and released the pack.
It felt exactly like having a body again as they bore me to the floor. The cold stone at my back
only magnified the hot agony as they tore into me. I screamed at the grinding bites, twisting mindlessly, trying to claw out of their grasp, but everywhere I turned was another leering face. Within seconds faint curls of mist were coiling up from a dozen wounds. They seeped slowly outward, flowing away from my form to cling to the pack’s hands and wind around their arms.
I watched, horror-struck, as they lapped it up, licking their fingers like kids with a half-melted ice cream. But it wasn’t enough. They were starving, and this was only a taste. They wanted it all.
“She is not lawful prey!” I heard someone call and looked up to see Pritkin stumbling into the middle of the feast, still half blind and probably extremely confused.
“Lord Rosier gave her to us,” the leader said, crouched over me jealously. “As he did you.”
