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No.
All the bullshit I’ve been wallowing in ever since Pax became a former ghost seems so utterly pointless when my friend is bleeding out in front of me. Pax, who might drive me to thrust my head into the liquor cabinet with his incessant…Paxness, but who is more loyal a friend than anyone I knew when I was alive.
And when that monster is done with the Roman, he’ll turn on Brianna. I might be able to hide her for a while, but he will find my weaknesses. Everyone always does. He will get past me and Ambrose and he will rip into Brianna’s body with that horrid knife of his and I can do nothing to stop him because I am a godforsakenghost—
An idea comes to me then. A desperate, doomed-to-fail idea, but I am nothing if not attracted to the forlorn and hopeless.
“You won’t hurt him!” I yell as I hurl myself at the monster.
“Edward, no!” Bree cries, her voice breaking with pain. I don’t know why she’s so upset. Unlike Pax, the monster can’t do anything to me.
I’m already dead. And after all the wretched things I’ve done, I should stay this way.
The Ripper turns toward me as I come for him. His eyes are twin red windows into hell itself. He throws back his head and laughs and laughs, and the pure evil of that laugh makes my knees buckle as I grab his cloak with both hands.
It’s only because of Brianna’s powers that I manage to keep hold of him. My face is inches from his. This close, I cansmellthe putrid, rotting scent of his demonic breath. My skin burns from the heat of the red steam that leaks from his eyes. His thin, inhuman lips twist into a grin and everything about him is soutterlywrong that I briefly forget what I was about to do.
“You think that you can hurt me, spectre?” he roars, his body trembling with a full belly chortle. “I am no longer on your side of the Veil, and I have no master to control me. I am flesh and blood once more.”
“Good,” I growl.
I surge forward.
I fallintohis skin.
Inside him.
“Edward, what are you doing?”
Brianna’s cry reaches my ears, but it’s muffled by the screams that assail me as I slip inside the Ripper. After all those times I have accidentally slipped a little too deep inside Brianna (although never in the way I most wish to), and dwelt within her memories, I had hoped this ghostly possession might work.
But I never expected it to feel so…horrid.
I gasp at the rudeness, the wrongness, of it. I am within the creature, my ghostly body slipping through his veins and organs, occupying every atom that is already filled with his being. I am squeezed on all sides, hemmed in with the pain of being part of something physical and Living that does not belong to me.
And the memories…
I see and feel and smell all those brutal crimes the Ripper committed over a century ago, and all those he has committed for Father Bryne since…as if I am the one who wielded the blade. The Ripper’s victims scream as one as he tears – as I tear – into their flesh. Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, the beguiling Mary Kelly, and Vera…
The pain isexquisite. Compared to this, walking through a wall or falling into the sofa feels like an annoying itch. Squeezing myself inside the Ripper reminds me of lying, broken and bloody and bitterly cold, in the garden for three days while my friends partied inside.
It reminds me of my father abandoning me, my friends betraying me.
But pain has always been my muse. I can sculpt agony to my will, make it beautiful as well as harrowing. And so, I slip deeper into the Ripper’s skin, allowing the memories of his horrific deeds to wash over me, to make me strong.
“What…” the Ripper gasps as I reach to the very edges of his psyche. “What is this? What are you doing?Get out of me!”
“Edward, where did you go?” Brianna cries to me. “I can’t see you. Edward!”
My fingers are inside the monster’s now. I feel myself gripping Pax as the last of his life drains from his body. I feel my fingers closing around the hilt of my beloved knife. I feel pain like Guy Fawkes has lit a hundred fuses inside me.
You must endure, Edward.
I have dwelt on for hundreds of years after my pathetic demise with only a Roman oaf and a Victorian golden retriever for company. I know a thing or two aboutenduring.
I push through the pain and focus on the hand holding the knife. I peel one finger from the blade. The monster’s will wars with my own. I blink, and through the haze of the Ripper’s memories, I seeher.
My Brianna.
