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“You ready for this?”
He doesn’t say anything for a full minute.
“This Death has taken my place, but he has no idea what he’s doing,” Vincent says.
“What do you mean?”
“He handles souls like a butcher handling sausages. You don’t pull them from life. You escort them, giving them their dignity and easing their fears.”
“I don’t think dignity and good vibes are high on McCarthy’s agenda.”
Vincent looks at me like he’s never seen me before.
“Yes” is all he says.
As we get closer, I see what he means about manhandling the dead. Souls hang in the sky. Row upon row of them, as far as I can see, a whole nation of uncollected spirits. The dust devil sends out whirling tendrils to the souls, yanks them out of the sky, and drops them, like a drunk picking apples. The stunned souls wake up on the ground having no idea what’s going on. With no one to guide them, most of them probably don’t even know they’re dead. There are thousands of them, wandering the desert. Fucking McCarthy has figured out how to get the dead out of their comas, but not what to do with them yet. He’s just collecting them like porcelain thimbles.
The dust devil plucks a few more souls from the sky and drops them. Then it stops moving. It just swirls, kicking up the dry Tenebrae soil high into the sky. I have a feeling it knows we’re here. I look at Vincent.
“He’ll move soon. Get ready.”
He looks at the whirlwind.
A moment later he says, “I’ve never had a fight.”
He turns to me.
“I’ve argued, but in all the universes I’ve lived through, I’ve never had to fight anyone.”
“It’s easy. You just make a fist and put it in the other guy’s face as fast as you can before he can do it to you.”
He looks at me like I’m suddenly speaking Urdu.
“I don’t know how. This was a mistake. I’m useless.”
“Calm down, man.”
The dust devil lurches and the sky fades to moonless dark. It whirls faster and skims across the desert in our direction. Lightning flashes. I swear I can see the vague outline of Edison Elijah McCarthy’s stupid face in the flashes.
Vincent says, “I don’t know what to do.”
I move my right arm, testing my right shoulder. It’s stiff but moves.
“That’s okay. I do.”
I take the black blade from my boot, start cutting a magic circle in the dusty plain. The vacant souls have seen us and are following the dust devil as it skims forward.
I work fast, cutting runes, spells, and sigils into the ground.
The dust devil bears down on us, a Mack truck of whirling crystal dust that will cut skin—my skin in this case—to beef jerky. When it’s still fifty yards away I pull Vincent into the circle and shout Hellion hoodoo as loud as I can.
The dust devil convulses, like I kneed it in the balls. Lightning goes mad, cuts across the sky, explodes into the ground. Panicked souls scatter. The dust devil recovers, whirls in place, puffing itself up bigger than ever, and heads for us again.
Vincent takes a step back.
“What do we do?”
“First off, we don’t step outside the circle.”
