2

THAT’S THE SPIRITS!

Sig is stronger, faster, and tougher than any normal human, but the thing that really makes Sig a Valkyrie is her ability to communicate with the dead.

You know what they say: if she looks like a Valkyrie, bench-presses small cars like a Valkyrie, and developed feelings for you after having conversations with the ghost of your dead lover like a Valkyrie, she’s probably a Valkyrie.

Wait. Nobody says that?

Anyhow, consider the nature of ghosts and overpasses. Ghosts are spirits who die unfulfilled or in some particularly traumatic fashion, and people who die under overpasses often do so in unpleasant ways. Homeless people looking for shelter from the weather freeze to death in them, or die from ruptured livers, weak hearts, burst appendixes, thrown clots, or any combination of physical breakdowns that are the accumulation of years of loneliness and desperation. People overdose in overpasses. People are dragged into them to be raped or robbed or set on fire for entertainment. There is a reason that there are so many stories about monsters living under bridges, and it’s not just that some of them are true.

Sig had been spending a lot of time in the overpass for the last few days while guarding Choo’s back, and apparently she had been talking a lot. You know. To the dead.

Imagine what it must be like to be a ghost, to be lonely and desperate and stuck in the same place for decade after decade after decade after the best and brightest parts of you have moved on, suffering and never fully understanding why or how to make it stop. Hopefully, you have to imagine very hard. But imagine that after all that time, someone finally comes around who can hear you and is willing to listen.

Now imagine someone attacking that person right in front of you.

A knight hiding in the open van tried to shoot Sig with a rifle similar to the one that I was using, only to discover that the rifle was disassembling, falling to the ground in a rain of metal while some helpful soul field-stripped it. He tried to hold on to the stock—not a rational impulse—and it suddenly stopped resisting and slammed into his face.

Another knight, this one holding a souped-up cattle prod capable of knocking out a buffalo, suddenly had the sensation of falling. He wasn’t actually falling, mind you. The shadow he was casting on the floor was thickening, rising, moving over him and clinging to him like tar.

A knight with another riot shotgun was simply picked up and tossed aside like a bad idea, hurled through the air, and bounced off a concrete wall in a way that made crunching and snapping sounds.

A knight with a sawed-off shotgun discovered that the barrels of his weapon were unaccountably clogged with ice. A moment later, he realized that he could not feel any sensation in the hand holding the sawed-off. When he finally managed to violently fling the weapon away from him, it took most of his hand with it.

Sig doesn’t control the dead, but she knew the overpass was a hotspot, a breeding ground for paranormal infections that she had been treating for days. And the thing about infections is, as they get better, the bad stuff is pushed closer and closer to the surface, where it can be expelled.

The knight with the katana discovered one of the drawbacks of fighting a western blade; katana have no metal guard to protect their owners’ fingers from horizontal strokes—you know, that thin bar that looks like brass knuckles and covers the middle joints of a saber wielder’s hand. This is great when a katana wielder wants to put both hands on a hilt in a blindingly fast and devastating sword strike. It is not so good when he or she is facing someone who is faster than they are and waving a heavy long sword around as if it were a fencing foil.

The katana-wielding knight lost half his fingers. The upper halves. His yell was also cut off, and quickly, by an abnormally strong elbow to his jaw.

I really didn’t see the rest because a mist was manifesting, a swirling fog that somehow looked cold, although I would be hard-pressed to explain why, since it was rising instead of drifting downward. It just didn’t look like a fog that cared a lot about physics. The fog seemed to muffle nearby sounds, but it also seemed to conduct vague and disharmonious noises from some faraway place. I heard laughter, then chanting, then cries. There was definitely a muffled explosion and a lot of yells, but the shouts were from the knights in the overpass, and they sounded a lot more distant than they should have.

Emil was not one of the shouting knights. Emil was walking calmly out of the tunnel and toward me without looking back, speaking clearly and distinctly.

“That explosion was a wall coming down,” Emil explained genially. “Right now, two of us are entering Chauncey Childers’s bolt-hole from an adjacent heating duct.”

This actually made me smile. My hearing was a lot better than Emil’s, and that explosion had been a concussion grenade. Emil’s two knights were trying to break into the lair of a man who had a passion for designing weapons and traps, and it wasn’t going as well as Emil thought. But any momentary flash of satisfaction I felt was wiped out by his next words.

“There’s also a team outside the cabin where your friend Molly Newman is nursing the police detective, Ted Cahill.”

Yeah, I know, I’ve barely mentioned those two. They had gotten into the same fight with a vampire hive that had scarred the rest of us. Ted was either dying or becoming undead, while Molly, the group’s priest, was keeping vigil over him.

“And even if you all escape us today, your friends will never be safe again,” Emil went on relentlessly. “They might win this battle, but we’ll never stop until they’re dead, and there are thousands of us. Thousands of us who know how to use explosives and poisons and long-distance weapons. You know that, I think.”

I really wanted to shoot this asshole.

“Shoot me if you want,” Emil added. “But if you do, your friends start dying. I am offering you a one-time deal. Turn yourself in to me, right now, and we will never bother your friends again unless they do something that violates the Pax. On my honor.”

Sig came walking out of the tunnel behind Emil, her sword held in one hand. Her hair was wild but her eyes were focused. She was staring at the small of Emil’s back as if she could rip the bones out of it by willpower alone.

Behind Sig, the ghosts began to quiet and the fog slowly dispelled. Even small supernatural manifestations take a lot of energy. That’s why temperatures drop and lights flicker when ghosts appear; like sprites, spirits have to absorb energy from the environment in order to pull themselves all the way on to this plane.

Sighting my rifle, I did the only thing I could. I shot Sig on the left side of her skull.

Oh, relax. Silver bullets are softer than normal bullets, and Sig’s bones are harder than normal bones. She had recently survived a bullet directly to the back of her head and woke up with nothing more than a migraine to show for it. I was a good enough shot to crease her skull, and even if I wasn’t, the bullet wouldn’t penetrate, anyhow. Sig didn’t heal as fast as I did, but her ability to recuperate was more than human, and I wasn’t worried about any permanent brain damage. The bullet’s impact did slosh Sig’s brain around enough to drop her, though.

I threw the rifle down.

Emil had paused at the sound of the shot, perhaps watching a mental film reel of his life’s greatest hits, but after a moment he realized that he was still breathing.

“You’ve made the right decision,” he assured me.

Uh-huh. My right hand shot out into midair and my fingers sank into slippery, translucent flesh. Sprites are very curious, and this one had thought itself safe because it wasn’t willing itself to reflect light. It had no way of knowing that my senses were sharp and my reflexes fast. I won’t say my heart was pure, but I did have the strength of three men.

The sprite started to ooze between my fingers, and I brought the top of my fist to my mouth and bared my teeth. The slick organic wriggling stopped.

“We need to talk,” I growled.