The Cold Kiss of Death

I watched, bemused. ‘Where did they all come from?’

‘’Mazin’, i

I spotted the ghost knife lying at the side of Rosa’s stone altar; if I could reach Cosette before Joseph noticed—

‘C’mon, then.’ I snatched up the knife and rushed round the altar. ‘Let’s see how much disruption we—’

‘Stop.’ Joseph’s voice reverberated through me, pi

Joseph’s brown eyes were blinking fast above his face-mask. He held up the hypodermic in one hand and pushed back his glasses with the back of his wrist as he watched them leave. I stared at Moth-girl’s retreating back. I wanted to tell her it was a good try, that no way could she have known Joseph was a necro, or how powerful he was, but I couldn’t move. Joseph’s command to go back to the other tu

He looked over at me, frowning. ‘I don’t know how you did that, Ge

I stared up at him from my frozen, half-bent stance, fingers inches away from the knife. He’d asked me a question. I discovered I didn’t have to answer.

‘Tell me,’ he commanded.

‘Friends,’ my mouth blurted.

‘The police? Tell me.’

‘No.’

‘Who then—?’

A dark blur dropped from the roof as if gliding on black-leather wings and landed on the sacrificial altar, crouching in front of him. Joseph jumped, a startled, high-pitched cry issuing from his mouth. He stabbed at the black blur with his needle, embedding it in the blur’s chest. The blur shook itself, snarled and leapt at Joseph, ploughing them both into the machines—which crashed in a crescendo of noise, sparks showering upwards in bright tracer-like arcs. Amidst the chaos, the blur hunched over Joseph and buried its head in his throat and a short, pain-filled scream resounded through the tu

Had the demon come early?

I launched myself towards the blur, knife still in my hand then stopped to stare down at a blood-drenched but vaguely familiar tawny head of hair. The owner was now gnawing its way through Joseph’s throat. The sounds of tearing flesh and muscle and the quick snap of bone and the metallic scent of blood made my stomach roil, and brought the snakes hissing and slithering in agitation over my skin.

‘My Daryl got ’im!’ Moth-girl fluttered to my side, punched her arm in the air and whooped, ‘My Daryl got that fucker ghost-grabber!’

Darius the lap-dancing vampire lifted his head and gave her a gore-covered grin. ‘Your plan worked great, didn’t it, Shaz?’ he said, pushing himself up on all fours and rising to his feet in an oddly inhuman move.

He unzipped his black leather coat and slipped out of it; underneath he wore just his sequi

I looked down.

Joseph was lying there, his glasses askew on his mangled head, the white of his spine glistening in the bright red abstract of his neck, his legs at an odd angle. I was still puzzled by Joseph. He’d seemed ... well, nice, and strangely naïve when I’d first met him. But evil doesn’t always show its face as ugliness, or fangs, or strangeness. That would be much too easy.

And yeah, Moth-girl’s plan had worked real great! It might not have been pretty, but Joseph was gone, and I couldn’t feel anything other than satisfaction.

But now there was the rest of it to finish.

I looked over at my body, still lying on the sacrificial altar, wondering why Cosette hadn’t put in an appearance. Then I saw the reason for her absence: sticking out of my body’s chest was the handle of the soul-bonder knife, the oval amber of the dragon’s tear winking in the candlelight. Darius must’ve have attacked Joseph mid-ritual, so Cosette was trapped—

‘Ge

I clutched anxiously at the ghost knife as I turned. Grace peered at me as she hurried through the archway, her pink-check jacket flapping over her blue doctor’s scrubs, her frizz of black curls flattened and tangled with cobwebs on one side, dust streaking the dark skin of her left cheek like a half-finished war stripe. She carried the open Fabergé egg in one hand and led the tearful florist’s lad with her other, her backpack slung over her shoulder. Heartfelt relief flooded into me. They were both still alive.

Bobby stalked behind Grace like some sort of übergoth warrior in his all-black Mr October outfit, his hair neatly pulled back in his trademark French plait. He carried Moth-girl’s body in his arms. ‘Hey, Sharon,’ he called, ‘are you getting back in here, or do you want me to keep carrying you around?’

Grace dropped the lad’s hand and rushed up to me—the ghost me—and flung her arm round me in a tight hug. ‘Thank the Goddess you’re okay, Ge

I hugged her back just as hard, keeping the ghost knife safely pressed to my thigh, breathing in her comforting floral perfume with its faint underlay of antiseptic. ‘Thanks for coming to the rescue, Grace,’ I murmured, totally inadequately, ‘and I’m fine now—but what on earth happened to you?’

She trembled slightly, then sniffed and gave a nervous laugh. ‘That Souler chap, Neil, jumped out at me when I went to help the lad here. Stupid really, I should’ve checked for someone guarding him first.’ She gave another hiccoughing laugh and hitched up her backpack. ‘I don’t think I’m cut out for this action-rescue business. Although I did bring spells.’ She pulled away and looked back at Bobby, a slightly scared expression on her face. ‘But Bobby took care of him.’

Bobby had laid Moth-girl’s body down on a clear patch of floor and was now staring at Rosa where she lay on her stone slab.

‘Took care of him, how?’ I asked, frowning.

‘Oh, he didn’t bite him.’ Grace blinked, her pupils nearly eclipsing the dark brown of her irises. ‘He just threw him against the wall.’ She did that hiccoughing laugh-thing again and I realised she was suffering from mild shock ... but then, treating victims in a nice bright clinic like HOPE, even the violent ones, took a different type of courage to venturing underground with a couple of vamps and a sometimes ghost girl. ‘He’s dead—broken neck. I checked,’ Grace added with another blink.

Good riddance, he’d certainly got what was coming to him. But Grace didn’t need to hear that right now. I hugged her again and murmured, ‘Hey, it’s okay, you’re doing brilliantly, and the lad’s safe now, thanks to you.’ I looked at the boy in question, who was standing there shivering, hunched over—

Then a thought hit me like a sucker-punch to my stomach.

Grace had broken the circle to get the florist’s boy and the Fabergé egg out.

And that meant there would be no magic to contain the demon when it turned up. And without even the tenuous boundaries of a graveyard to hold it, it would be free to roam anywhere! And it would be free to take anyone—not just the dead!

I had to get everyone out.

And I had to get the circle closed again.

‘You need to get out of here, Grace,’ I cried, letting her go, ‘and take the lad with you. MOVE! Now!’