Something impacted my chest. A hand was pressing against me, somehow breaking through the pressure that threatened to crush my neck, back, and legs.
“Ray!”
The voice sounded far away but I recognized Annalise’s voice.
She was pressing a ribbon against me.
“Ray, you asshole, wake up!”
The trance faded like a fog, and the predator’s silent song suddenly felt and sounded thinner. I held out my hand, and my ghost knife fell into it.
Turning it vertical, I moved it upward as though I was drawing a line on a chalkboard. The song split like a river on a rock, and I was focused again on the world outside of me—the tarmac, the jet, the people, the stairs….
And the predator. It stood above me, and above the stairs, too, its bare feet resting on thin air. I could still make out the outline of Lauren Woo’s victim, but within that shape I saw only pulsing, writhing, neon color, moving as if something inside was trying to burst through.
A rainbow disk spun over its head like a halo, and two more hovered a few inches from its splayed hands. Another, much larger disk spun at its back where an angel would have carried wings.
Shit. Milton Hardy had asked Lauren Woo to summon the predator that killed his own family.
Its mouth gaped, unmoving, as that hallucinatory chorus poured out of it into the world. An angel would have worn robes, but this predator had burned away its host’s clothing, leaving a bright glow shining out of her wasted torso and withered limbs.
Annalise was clutching at my shirt. The ribbon she pressed against me held a spell that turned a magical attack on the one who cast it, but it was like holding up an umbrella in a hurricane. My ghost knife helped, cutting through the predator’s attack, and I pulled Annalise close to me so it could protect her, too.
“Boss, didn’t you kill one of these before?”
“I caught it by surprise then and I was carrying more spells, so shut up.”
A bundle of laundry rose up behind the predator, and only when I saw long black hair hanging from it did I realize it was actually Lauren Woo’s body, bent and molded into a sphere. Jagged bones cut through the skin. Where she bled, the fluid clung to her skin and clothes as though held in place with an invisible film.
A black balloon floated over me, moving slowly toward the predator. It took a second glance for me to realize I was looking at a shattered, deformed person wearing a police tactical vest, not inflated black canvas.
More passed over us, the thick soles of their boots turned at awkward angles, or their arms and hands broken backward to wrap around their backs. Annalise had shouted for the airport cops to keep back, but they didn’t listen to people like us, and now they had become… this.
Only my ghost knife and Annalise’s spell kept us from dying the same way, but that awful song still blasted at us like the winds of a hurricane.
And the song was growing stronger. I could feel it spreading as the predator fed, and I had no idea what limits this thing might have. Could it reach the pilots at the back of the hangar? Could it reach into the city behind me, crumpling people up like an old grocery list and floating them into the air? Could it reach across the bay into San Francisco? Across state lines?
How hungry was this thing?
It wasn’t enough for me to just barely protect myself. If I didn’t stop it, this predator would eventually overwhelm me and kill everyone behind me, too.
I willed the ghost knife to fly from my hand, aiming for the thing’s gaping, unmoving mouth.
Almost immediately, one of the cop’s crushed corpses moved to block the attack.
But the ghost knife didn’t come close to touching either the predator or the corpse. Instead, a flood of emotion and memory blasted into me. I felt grief and love and fascination. I remembered last year’s victory at fantasy football, even though I had been trapped inside the Show during last year’s Super Bowl. I was hit with images of my son fishing off the back of a boat in the middle of the ocean. The sound of sixties R&B. The feel of a shovel as it upturned the earth for an illegal unmarked grave. The weight of an aging collie resting on my leg as I watched a John Wayne cowboy movie.
I was being hit with a man’s life, and the power of it knocked me off my feet and made rainbow colors flash through my vision. I had no idea what happened to Annalise. I only knew that I could not put up with more of this bullshit. I held up my hand—having no idea where my ghost knife was—and called it.
Just as it landed in my hand, I was hit with another wave of power. It was a flood of pride, love, triumph and fear. I was hit with a memory of an extended family—looming over me the way all adults do—filling my kitchen with applause as I demonstrated a science experiment. A rush of funerals passed through me, a sharp pang of grief stealing my strength and will at each auntie in each casket. I felt the thrill of a first kiss, and the terror of sprinting down a dark street to avoid the upperclassman stalking me. Next was the determination to not only succeed, but to have my success recognized, and the quiet fury at how much harder I had to struggle for the same recognition my classmates got. I felt a flood of reflected glory that came from being allowed into rooms with billionaires and movie stars. The sight of months-old corpses in my boss’s house—in a bedroom I had never even seen before, let alone entered—sickened me, and so did the certainty that the sketchy bitch beside me had to be the real cause of their deaths, even if that made no logical sense at all. I felt the loneliness and terror of the sight of my sister, dying of cancer before she was even twenty-five, wishing I could figure out what she did to make this happen to herself, and hating the instinct that made me think her illness was some kind of moral failing.
This was Lauren Woo’s life. This string of incident and emotion, connections of love and duty and revenge, was the sum total of her life. And the predator …
I’d been right. The sickly woman that Lauren Woo killed was her own sister, in a misguided attempt to save her life. And the predator that stole her body had gathered up all the parts of Lauren Woo that made her a distinct person, and then expelled them. Wasting them to attack me. To make me forget who I was and mix my thoughts and memories with hers. But I was not going to give in to…
Aunt Eunice came to mind, suddenly, leaning over to give me a cookie, then making me promise not to tell my mother. But had that happened to me? Did I have an Aunt Eunice?
And what about the greatest day of my life, when my first and only child had been born? Janet and I agreed to name him Ben, after her father, but he looked so much like my own dad, with his wide mouth and pointed chin.
Except I didn’t have any kids. I’d never been fondled at a frat party. I’d never bought and read a book of short fiction specifically so I could bring it to a meeting with Tom Hanks and ask him to sign it. I’d never told a group of my middle school friends to lay off Wally King when they were pelting him with rocks. I’d never beaten a junkie half to death because he’d laughed at me when I slipped on a bag of dirty diapers.
Had I?
How could I fight back if I couldn’t even be sure who I was?
It occurred to me that I had dropped my ghost knife, and I seized on that memory. Whoever I was, I had a magic spell, and it would come to me when I called it. I did. And just as it came into my hands, I sent it back into that unfelt hurricane blast.
My ghost knife clipped the predator itself. The song suddenly stopped, and I saw the thing lift its right hand. Two fingers were half gone, and the circle of light behind it was now lopsided.
And my thoughts felt clear.
The predator straightened again, raising its head to raise its voice. More dead bodies had floated toward it, slowly falling into an orbit that passed over its head and under its feet. I called the ghost knife toward me, this time sending it through the back of the thing’s head and out of its gaping mouth.
The predator’s song faltered even as it began. I tried to stagger to my feet and stumble toward it, but Annalise recovered more quickly.
She leaped forward, landing on the lower part of the rolling stair. Then she jumped nearly straight up, a dozen feet or more, to grab hold of the creature itself.
Annalise grabbed the predator’s neck, then dug her fingers into its shoulder.
Then, with a shout of anger and exertion, she tore it in half down the middle.
The crumpled-up corpses flew at her, but they were coming apart even before impact. Silence blasted out of the predator’s throat, and I heard nothing as the bodies hit the tarmac and the metal stairs. I heard nothing from Annalise as she screamed with absolute wild-eyed fury at the creature, or when they tumbled down the stairs.
What was I doing, staggering around while Annalise was doing all the work? I rushed to join her, called up my ghost knife, and attacked the creature with her. She was literally pulling the body apart, and I had nothing to aim at but the circles of light at its head, hands and back. I slashed the shit out of those, and I knew we’d won that fight when I could suddenly hear Annalise’s rasping scream and the impacts her hands made on the predator’s neon flesh.
Annalise sprang to her feet, gasping for air, and we looked down at the body of the destroyed predator. There was no blood or gore. There was only a weave of graying meat, slender strands that curled around each other in layers like a stack of carpets that had been torn apart.
I glanced at the thing’s head lying motionless on the asphalt. It was as featureless as the face of a mummy but with a gaping mouth that had been neatly sliced along one side. I was staring at it, trying to remember the face of the woman it had once been, when Annalise stomped on it.
She turned toward me, and I was startled by how pale she looked. I stepped over the predator’s body and took hold of her elbow. Even though I had never met her before this moment, I could tell that she—
Wait. Of course I’d met her before. She… I helped her stay upright, thinking she looked so slender and frail but knowing that she was absolutely not either of those things.
She studied my face as though trying to work out who I was, exactly.
We both stood there, sifting through our memories, trying to figure out who we really were. These dead cops lying all around me, they were my friends—my team—and I could have named all of them, but I could also name the sickly woman I’d stabbed with the sigil-carved wakizashi that Milton gave me. She was Zoe, my little sister, and she loved Taylor Swift and funny rubber stamps. I’d thought she’d beaten her cancer when she was eleven, but she collapsed from exhaustion on vacation in Ireland, and it was clear it had come roaring back. Milton told me this enchanted blade would cut the disease from her and give her the life and vitality of an angel, but instead, it had killed her all the quicker. I killed her, even before these strange people with the tattoos…
Someone was calling me but not by my name. The pilots were edging toward us, uncertainly approaching the jet.
What a pair of morons. Did they not see what was happening here? Why weren’t they crawling under a fence and stealing a car to fuck off to another part of the world?
“That thing put…” Annalise said, then faltered. “That thing put other people into me. I’m part Lauren Woo now. And I’m part Nick Szymanski. I killed my sister because she had cancer, and my doctor told me before Thanksgiving that I had cancer, but I haven’t even told my wife.”
“Fuck,” I blurted out. “I forgot that I have cancer.”
“But you don’t.” She pointed to a black-clad corpse with silver hair cropped close. “He did. What the fuck, Ray? Why did it do this to us?”
“First, it attacked by twisting space,” I said, the words coming into my head at the same time I was thinking them, “but we resisted. The thing wanted us confused and distracted so it could overwhelm us and feed. If not for our spells….”
“It would have worked. How long…” We were both having trouble finishing our thoughts. There were competing impulses inside us, urging us to be more direct, more diplomatic, to focus on facts or needs or who the fuck knew what else. And they didn’t feel like voices in my head. They were more like instincts. And they kept clashing. “Ray,” she finally managed, “is this shit permanent?”
The pilots had come nearer, almost to the edge of the hangar. I beckoned them closer with a big wave of my arm. We needed to get into the air. We needed to catch up to the flight that already departed for… We had no idea where it was going.
“Buenos Aires,” I blurted out. Lauren Woo knew where that other flight was headed. Buenos Aires, which was in Argentina, apparently. Hardy had picked both locations for herself and… Golnar. That was who was flying in the other plane.
We’d planned to kill Lauren Woo for helping her boss, but she’d gotten herself killed instead. And now her thoughts and memories survived in us. That meant something, but I wasn’t sure what.
“Golnar, the woman Woo called from the back of the van, is in the other plane, and they’re going to Buenos Aires.”
“That’s right,” Annalise said. “But I don’t know who she’s going with or what she’s going to do when she arrives. Milton swore us to secrecy.” She took a deep breath. “Fuck. He swore them to secrecy. Ray, can you feel these other memories fading? I don’t, and I don’t think I can live with this new status quo.”
Status quo? Annalise didn’t talk that way. “I’m sure this effect will fade, boss.” I glanced again at the dead predator lying in the sunlight. Maybe it wasn’t dead, not all the way. “We’ll make sure of it.”