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“Lizzie!” I screamed, but it was too late. Her head had just been sheared completely off her body. It rolled like a kicked soccer ball into the wall of slowly moving corpses, the dead eyes fixed and staring, the headless corpse collapsing onto the dirt. Jo turned to me, a snarl on her lips.
“Chimera,” she said, in Lizzie’s voice.
And then there were two.
I burst out laughing, a hysterical giggle, and stumbled back a step. Even Jo seemed taken aback. I guess she’d forgotten: she was in Lizzie’s body. If one half of the Chimera spell died, the soul merely snapped back into the other. Like I had done after my duplicate was killed in Gertie’s training salle.
The new Lizzie smiled at me, like nothing surprising had happened. And I guess, for her, it hadn’t. If Agnes had used Gertie’s style of training for her court, this was probably old hat to them. The only difference was that they were working without a net this time.
I was working to keep down my dinner.
“Jonathan found this book, right?” Lizzie said. “In that fey king’s library. It was a copy of some old scroll from the age of the gods, giving the names of their children—all their children. The fey had never paid it much attention, but he realized: he had a complete list of the monsters the demons call Ancient Horrors.
“And if you have the name of something, you can summon it.”
“Holy shit,” I said, and she nodded, but not at me. She was keeping an eye on Jo, who was pacing like a caged animal. Probably trying to figure out what to do now.
Or maybe, like me, she was starting to wonder if she’d underestimated Lizzie. Because intentionally or not, she’d created the perfect trap: if Jo stayed in her body, she limited her power to what a human could channel—specifically the human she was now facing, because they were twins. But if she came out of it, to use the full scope of her power, her ghost friends would fall on her like the ravening horde they were.
Dinner bell or no dinner bell, no ghost could resist a feast like that.
I glanced upward, at the surreal wave slowly breaking over us, and when I looked back down, Lizzie was watching me.
Way underestimated, I thought, as she kept talking.
“He came up with a plan to summon the Ancient Horrors, which would get them past the barriers the demon council had put up to contain them, then place them under a compulsion using fey magic, which they don’t know. Then hey, presto! A force tailor-made to fight the army you’ve been creating.
“In fact, it might have been what gave creepy mage his next big idea. ’Cause demons can’t really fight in Faerie. Sure, he could turn them loose to terrorize earth and keep you guys busy, but you might still invade. One of his early test subjects, from a Horror whose name was already known, was sent to disrupt the invasion force, but you lot took it down—”
“Kulullû,” I said, as Billy poked a sleepy head out of his necklace.
And cursed vividly.
But he’d learned a few things since last time, and I didn’t have to tell him to slip inside my skin. I just had to tell him what I wanted, and feel his shock and then agreement before he shot out of me again. Off on an errand that I wasn’t sure even he could do.
“Yeah, that was it,” Lizzie agreed, her eyes flickering slightly as she watched him go. But she did nothing to draw Jo’s attention, whose eyes never left her face. “So they came up with the idea to put them in the manlikans, to make huge golems out of them. Then your demon army would be met by their demon army—and they had bigger demons.”
A lot bigger, I thought sickly.
“So everything was great, except for one small problem: creepy mage couldn’t open the book!”
“It was guarded by an Ancient Horror,” I said, thinking of the gaseous cloud that had shredded the fey forces in the shopping mall. And then went on to terrorize the Shadowland.
Lizzie nodded. “Yeah, a pretty nasty one. The mage didn’t think he could take it, but he couldn’t read the book until it was out of the way. So they thought, you know what? Maybe a goddess could open it. So creepy mage disguises himself as this shop owner—”
So evil Santa really was evil, I thought.
“—and gets the book to you. They hoped you’d open it there and then, and fight the demon while they made off with the book. But instead—”
“I took it to the covens,” I said, remembering.
“Yeah, it was awesome. You take it to some hidden fey enclave that nobody can find, and then you leave it there! And while they’re looking for it, you go tell the demons all about it—who of course send one of their people to retrieve it. And get this—this is the best part. The demon they sent thought, you know what? Why take this thing to the council and get a pat on the head when I could take it to Aeslinn instead? So he did! Creepy mage was furious.”
“But . . . wasn’t that what he wanted to have happen?” I asked, confused.
She laughed. “Hell, no. Jonathan had delusions of grandeur. After all, if he had an invincible army, what did he need with the fey? Or the Black Circle? Or anyone?”
“He was a fool,” Jo suddenly snapped. “Thought he was going to rule Faerie and use all its magic for himself—”
