Pay Dirt Read online

  I realized the path of our battle was taking us toward the closed tomb door. It would only be a few more seconds before the door was right at my back, and I’d have nowhere left to run.

  Hell, I wasn’t even sure I’d make it that far. The sword, which had once felt so light, was growing increasingly heavy in my hands. Every time I deflected a strike, the clash sent shockwaves up my arms. Sweat dripped into my eyes. I could barely catch enough breath. I was fading fast.

  The wraith twisted through the air, one way then the other. It became immaterial for a moment, changing direction so quickly it defied the laws of physics. I blinked, my eyes stinging with sweat, I heard the hum of the blade come at me from a direction I wasn’t expecting. My guts tightened as I desperately tried to fend off the unexpected attack.

  I brought the sword awkwardly around. Our blades clashed once more, and somehow I kept the wraith from slicing my throat open. But I caught the strike badly. The wraith’s blade slid down my sword, bounding over the crossguard and biting into my wrist.

  It felt like someone had put a blowtorch against my skin. I screamed with pain. The sword flew from my grasp, clattering to the floor a few feet away. The force of the wraith’s blow sent me reeling backward until my back collided with the cold stone of the tomb door.

  I clutched my burning, freezing wrist, biting back another scream. It was all I could do not to slump down to the floor. Panting, I stared at Morley’s Vengeance. It began to close on me, taking its time.

  “I pity you, you know that?” I said in between breaths. “Nothing but a splinter of a soul. Must be an agonizing existence. And you did it all to yourself, didn’t you, Morley?”

  It didn’t respond. The blade hummed as Morley’s Vengeance slowly raised it above its head.

  “Now you get to be the pet of that pathetic little fanatic out there.” I knocked on the door with my knuckles. I tried to pretend I wasn’t shaking. “Him and his band of thugs. Tell me, Morley. Was it worth it?”

  It hesitated. Just for an instant. And then, with a furious hiss, it brought the blade swinging down.

  Suddenly, the wraith screamed in pain. It was a horrific sound that I could feel deep in my bowels. I hurled myself to the side as the creature’s blade fell. Something had thrown off its swing. The blade missed me by a couple of inches, instead biting into the center of the door.

  For the first time, the sword appeared to meet real resistance. The wards that sealed the door were attempting to rebuff the strike. The blade sliced through the already cracked glass window set into the center of the door, and with a groan and a crash the glass shattered entirely.

  I hit the ground, pain flashing up my injured arm and through my bruised ribs. I blinked up through unfocused eyes.

  The wraith had a hole in the middle of its head. Not a big one. It wasn’t like a gunshot. There was no gore, no torn flesh. It was more like the little whirlpool you get when you pull the plug out of a bathtub. The wraith screamed and writhed away, raising a spectral arm to shield itself.

  I hadn’t seen Lilian approach. Neither had the wraith. She’d waited until the last second to reveal the silver mirror. Now she was so close she was practically shoving the mirror in the wraith’s face. At that kind of distance, the wraith’s entire head threatened to be sucked into its reflection.

  The wraith swung its blade wildly. But it seemed blinded by the intensity of the mirror’s reflection. Lilian easily ducked the swing and then continued to push the mirror up against the wraith’s face. Her lips were peeled back, her teeth gritted.

  Taking my chance, I crawled for my fallen sword and wrapped my fingers around the hilt.

  As I got to my feet, I saw a dark shape dart across the floor toward me. Before I could react, Isidora’s rat clambered up my leg and scrambled along the lapel of my coat.

  “What are you doing?” I snapped. “You’ll get yourself killed. Get out of here!”

  The rat paused for a moment, looking at me with its beady little eyes. Its backpack wobbled on its back, almost too big for it.

  Then, with a squeak, the rat leaped from my shoulder. It was an impressive jump. It soared toward the door of the tomb and landed with its two front paws grasping the bottom edge of the broken glass window set into the center of the door. It gave a squeal of pain. Finally, its rear paws found purchase on the black glass and it heaved itself into the hole left by the broken window. Without looking back, it darted through the hole and out of my sight.

  I didn’t have time to peek through the hole after it. From behind me, I heard a humming that quickly grew louder. I ducked automatically as another of the wraith’s wild swings went flying over my head.

  I rolled away from another blind strike just as Lilian forced Morley’s Vengeance up against the wall. She was looking drained. Even though she hadn’t been hit by the wraith, just being so close to it was taking its toll on her. As it shrieked in pain, I almost thought I saw a glimpse of its true form reflected in the silver mirror: that strangely beautiful face of the witch-finder he’d once been.

  The wraith blindly swung its blade again. Lilian reeled backward. She kept the mirror raised, but for a moment the wraith was able to regain its composure. It darted forward and struck again, this time with its shining eyes fixed on Lilian.

  I drove my sword into its side. It wasn’t like cutting into flesh. But I wasn’t just slicing through air, either. There was resistance that grew stronger the deeper I forced the sword into it. The wraith shrieked, its blade sweeping harmlessly over Lilian’s head. She got back in its face and brought the mirror up again.

  Morley’s Vengeance twisted and wailed. It glared at Lilian. The black hole that formed its mouth opened once again.

  “I remember you,” it hissed.

  “Remember this,” Lilian snapped back. She brought the mirror even closer. The wraith shrieked and tried to escape. It nearly ripped my arms out of their sockets trying to pull free of my sword.

  “I…remember!” it screeched. “Cursemaker. Deathspeaker. Soulcleaver.”

  Lilian didn’t respond. She snarled wordlessly at the wraith. But in her eyes I saw a pained, haunted look—a reflection of the wraith’s pain.

  From outside the tomb, I heard a shout of surprise. Through the hole in the door I could make out shadows staggering about. A moment later, screams of pain followed. The boom of a gunshot rang out.

  Something in the wraith’s demeanor changed. It was only the smallest shift. But I saw it. I felt like I’d spent so long fighting this wraith I was beginning to understand it on a deeper level. Its attention left Lilian, like it was distracted by something happening outside the tomb.

  As the commotion continued outside, I noticed another presence in the room. Ursula had emerged from the side passageway. She moved cautiously through the tomb toward us, stepping over sections of stone cubes damaged in my fight with the wraith. She looked with barely contained horror at the wraith twisting between me and Lilian.

  Another gunshot went off outside. Ursula’s eyes darted from the wraith to the door.

  “Where’s Sheila?” she asked.

  I grunted with the effort of keeping the sword dug into the wraith’s side. “Who?”

  “The rat.”

  I jerked my head toward the hole in the door. “Fighting for your dumb, grave-robbing ass.”

  She swallowed, then started for the door. I growled.

  “You want to help? Then help us here.”

  “My sister—”

  “Is on the other side of that door,” I said. “She can handle herself. We can’t.”

  She scowled, her eyes darting between the wraith and the door.

  The wraith twisted again, nearly pulling free. Lilian moved quickly, shifting the mirror’s position to cut off its escape. Every muscle in my body ached.

  “We need a circle,” I said through gritted teeth. “You can make a circle, can’t you?”

  Ursula glared at me. “Of course I—”

  “Then do it!”
/>   She cast one last look at the door. Then, with a muttered curse, she started pulling supplies out of her pockets.

  “I’m out of silver,” she said.

  “Check my breast pocket. Left side.”

  With a little hesitation, she edged closer to us. The wraith continued to screech as she cautiously approached.

  “This isn’t getting any easier,” I said.

  Swearing under her breath, the witch darted forward and reached into my pocket. As soon as her hand closed around the vial of powdered silver she backed away and made her preparations.

  It only took a few seconds. It seemed like hours. She mixed a few vials together and muttered a couple of incantations. Then she dipped her index and middle fingers into a jar of ash suspended in fluid and began to draw out a circle on the floor around us.

  It wouldn’t last long. Without some real connection to the wraith, the circle’s powers over it were limited. But it might be enough to trap the wraith in place for a short time. Long enough for us to catch our breath. Long enough to figure out what to do next.

  As Ursula worked, I noticed another figure emerging from the side passageway. Holden crept out, his eyes darting back and forth. He reminded me of a caged animal being released into the wild.

  He took one look at us struggling with the wraith. Then he turned his attention toward the artifacts spilling out of the damaged stone cubes. With a sudden burst of speed, he darted to the nearest broken cube and started shoving the contents into an empty duffel bag.

  I didn’t even have the energy to be disgusted with him.

  Ursula was adding some symbols of power to bolster the circle. She’d nearly completed it now. I cast a quick glance across her work. It looked decent enough. Not the way I’d have done it, of course, but magic was always something of an individual thing.

  The circle was only just large enough to surround me and Lilian and the wraith. A circle like this quickly loses its power the larger you make it. As she started to paint the last line that would complete the circle, I stopped her.

  “Wait.” I looked at Lilian. “You have to be on the outside before it’s finished.”

  Ursula looked confused, but Lilian nodded. She understood. The circle would be no barrier to me. Lilian, though, was not strictly human.

  I turned to Ursula. “Are you sure this will hold?”

  “Yes,” Ursula replied after a split second’s hesitation. Her tone didn’t exactly fill me with confidence.

  “All right,” I said. “As soon as Lilian jumps back, you complete the circle. Got it?”

  The witch still didn’t understand, but she nodded anyway.

  I met Lilian’s eye as the wraith writhed between us. “On three. One…two…three!”

  Lilian withdrew the mirror and leapt backward across the line of black painted on the floor. At the same moment, Ursula drew her ash-stained fingers across the floor, completing the circle.

  With a wail, the wraith tugged itself free of my sword and turned toward me, its blade raised. I leapt back across the circle as the creature charged.

  It got about two feet before it collided with the invisible barrier rising up from the circle. Thin tendrils of smoke started to trail from the lines painted on the floor. The wraith hissed with fury and struck the barrier again.

  The sword in my hands suddenly felt too heavy to hold. It slipped from my grasp and landed with a clatter on the stone floor. I grabbed at a stone cube to keep myself from collapsing with exhaustion.

  Lilian looked pretty beat as well. She stared at the wraith with hollow eyes as it hammered against the barrier.

  “That circle won’t last,” Ursula said to me.

  “How long have we got?”

  “Twenty minutes. Maybe less.”

  I nodded. I tried to think of a plan, but my thoughts had turned to sludge. I stared blankly down at the sword I’d dropped. Every inch of steel on it was completely blue now. The small silver mirror I’d given Lilian was the only thing we had left with any significant amount of reflectivity. But even that would be useless if we were too exhausted to hold it.

  There was silence now from outside the tomb. I didn’t know if the rat was dead or alive. If it was dead…well, Ursula would next see her sister when Isidora was hooked up to a life support machine, braindead.

  From across the tomb I could hear the clink of metal and the rustle of fabric as Holden hurriedly stuffed every artifact he could get his hands on into the duffel bag. It was bulging now, but he didn’t stop.

  “Urs!” he called out. “Grab the other bags. Quick!”

  Ursula hesitated for a second, casting a glance at me. Then she hurried away, heading for the side passage.

  “You released this thing, you know that?” I called after her. I pointed at the wraith. “This is on you. Stuckey…Habi…they’re on you.”

  She didn’t look at me. Neither did Holden. They had treasure to claim.

  I sighed and looked at the wraith. Its fury hadn’t abated. Perhaps there was something here in the tomb that would help us contain it. Some magical artifact that Morley and his retinue had turned to their own ends. Something that the first conclave had buried with him as they tried to eliminate every trace of him.

  But I had no way of knowing. It would take months to go through all the artifacts that Holden was collecting and figure out what they were for. Even longer to learn how to use them safely. That wouldn’t help us now.

  I looked at Lilian. She stood a couple of feet from the circle, staring at the wraith as it fought to free itself. A mix of emotions clouded her features. Confusion. Pain. Fear. And…pity?

  Lilian sensed me watching her. Without taking her eyes off the wraith, she said, “I think…I think I did this.”

  “Did what?”

  She licked her lips. “I think I helped create it.”

  I shook my head. “That’s a pretty big stretch, Slim.”

  With a grunt, she pressed the heels of her hands against the sides of her head. “God. I can feel the memories pounding to get out. So many of them. I feel like my skull is splitting in two.”

  It had been a mistake bringing her here. I saw that now. She wanted answers, of course, wanted to know who she was. Who wouldn’t? But we hadn’t stopped to figure out what would happen if she got the answers she sought. There was a reason the hag had been forced to suppress Lilian’s memories.

  This was tearing her apart.

  But I supposed it was all moot anyway. Soon enough the wraith would break free. We could try to flee, but that tomb door wouldn’t be opening in a hurry. We’d try to fight it as long as we could. It wouldn’t be enough.

  I looked at the wraith again. It was still fighting against the circle. But its eyes never left Lilian. And her eyes never left it. Something passed between them. An understanding, maybe.

  “It’s tired, isn’t it?” I said.

  Lilian nodded slowly. “It’s fractured. Torn.”

  I looked at the creature. “It barely exists. Look. Reality itself tears at it.”

  “I think it’s in pain. The rest of Morley’s soul is long gone, right? All except for this splinter, still bound to the world, more than a century later. It must be agony.”

  As we spoke, the wraith’s movements grew less violent. As if it was listening to us.

  I moved alongside Lilian and stepped up to the edge of the circle. The wraith’s glowing eyes shifted to me.

  “Are we right, Morley?” I asked.

  It didn’t answer. It just stared at me.

  “This was something you had up your sleeve,” I said. “A last fuck you to whoever killed you. One piece of your soul would survive even if you didn’t. And it could continue to terrorize the monsters you fought. Of course, there’s a problem in that, isn’t there? Because look at you. How could anyone look at you and not see a monster?”

  The wraith let out a low growl.

  “Your daughter was the anchor, wasn’t she?” I asked. “Sigrid. That was why you couldn’t bear to
be far from her. You’d tied this splinter of your soul to her.” I glanced at Lilian. “With a little help, maybe.”

  Lilian didn’t say anything, but I could read her well enough to know that she believed the same thing. Even now, with most of her memory gone, Lilian retained some strange power over death. She could manipulate it, tease out its secrets. How powerful she must’ve been with all her experience and memory to back her up. How horrifying.

  So maybe she was right. Maybe she’d had some hand in the creation of Morley’s Vengeance. I didn’t know what that meant. Had she been in league with him? Had she been coerced? Did it matter, if those memories stayed locked away and everyone involved in the matter was dead?

  “Sigrid’s dead,” I said. “Has been a while, I imagine. But you’re still bound to her. Her bones tie you to reality. You didn’t think that one through, did you? Tying your soul to a living creature is dangerous enough. Tying it to the dead…”

  “It will be keeping her from rest,” Lilian said. “As long as the wraith exists, Sigrid can’t be at peace.”

  “But if we held the bones?” I looked at Lilian.

  “We might be able to sever the connection. If the wraith allows it.”

  I met the wraith’s eyes. They still pulled at me, sapped my strength. But the effect was weakened. The wraith’s form seemed more solid now, less tempestuous.

  “Morley the Profane is long dead,” I said to the wraith. “What remains of him is in that sarcophagus over there. But you still exist. So tell me. What do you want now?”

  Morley’s Vengeance didn’t answer. Hell, it barely even moved. I wasn’t even sure it understood me. It wasn’t a complete entity, after all, with all the thoughts and memories and logic of its predecessor. It was just a splinter of a soul given form, designed to punish those who lived when Morley had died.

  And whatever little sliver of a mind it had retained after Morley’s death had almost undoubtedly been shredded by the intervening years. Especially after his daughter’s death. No matter whether Sigrid’s demise had been violent or peaceful, the backlash would have been overwhelming. No wonder the creature had gone mad.