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Fortunately, they are rare. I’d only encountered a few of them, and they usually left me alone. I wasn’t food for them; my natural shields kept them out.
This one frightened me because he’d caught me asleep. That was all. I didn’t get scared by ghosts just because they touched me.
All I needed to do was move or push it away. But somehow, I couldn’t. It wasn’t panic holding me still—it was the ghost. But that was impossible. I was immune to them.
His lips grew warm as gooseflesh rose on my skin. He wasn’t stealing body heat, but the theft of spiritual energy chilled me to the bone as it warmed him.
I thought of what I’d done to myself last night to save Jack. I’d ripped off the hard-won bandages protecting me from what the Soul Taker had done. But I hadn’t needed to do that, had I? It had seemed necessary at the time, but when I had a chance to look back on it, what I had done for Jack I could have done without all the drama.
Vulnerable, Zee had called me in my kitchen. I’d chosen to believe Adam’s pack-magic kiss had fixed what I’d done, brought me back to where I’d been before I’d been stupid.
Demonstratively not, if I couldn’t send this ghost packing.
Frustrated in my efforts to move, I thought maybe I could wake Adam up. He was a light sleeper. If I could so much as tense a muscle or change my breathing, he’d wake up.
But I couldn’t move. Maybe I could reach Adam through our bond—I stopped that thought before it went any further. I wasn’t absolutely certain that wouldn’t give the ghost a way to attack Adam through me. And if I couldn’t defend myself, when ghosts were my bailiwick, I didn’t know what Adam could do against it.
If I didn’t figure out something pretty freaking quick, I was going to die.
What did you expect to happen, with you displayed like a lantern in the night, a picnic for any passerby? asked an impatient voice. She was a dozen words in before I realized I wasn’t actually hearing her with my ears.
One of Coyote’s get makes a rare meal for a spirit eater, she chided. That poor starveling likely traveled miles to feast upon you.
I couldn’t see her. I couldn’t blink or shift the direction of my gaze away from the dead man’s predatory eyes. But I recognized that voice.
Change, child, the spider told me in the tones of a disappointed teacher dealing with a willfully dim pupil. They can’t feed upon animals.
I had changed into a coyote before I could crawl. It was as basic to me as breathing. I couldn’t hold my breath or twitch a finger, but when I tried to shift, the familiar zip of magic shot through me.
The ghost jerked away from me with a hoarse cry that sounded more like a flutter of dry bones than any sound a human might make. I squirmed out of Adam’s hold and hit the floor, putting more distance between me and the ghost, which was flailing soundlessly on the floor as if the brief contact with my coyote self had been damaging. The dead usually had no physical presence, but a brass lamp on a table about ten feet from where the ghost held his solo struggle fell to the ground with a loud clatter.
Adam didn’t move.
That meant he was held as I had been. Helpless.
The thing writhing on the ground didn’t look dangerous anymore, but I put myself between Adam and the ghost anyway.
Now that he wasn’t touching me, I could get a good look at him. He was all bones and rags, a gray and off-white mass on the Persian carpet, smaller than he’d felt when he’d been feeding, barely recognizable as human.
The damage he’d suffered trying to feed from a coyote lessened after maybe thirty seconds. For a moment he lay motionless, then he rolled to hands and knees and looked at me.
I felt a buzz of my magic and I saw him, not the ghost but the man he’d been before he’d become this monster.
I’d expected him to be Native because the land we were on had been occupied by Indigenous people, by my people, for a long time before the white settlers had come. But now, even in the dark room, I could tell that his hair had been several shades lighter than mine was. His features were Anglo, with a narrow chin and a prominent nose that had been broken at some point. His body was so thin that although he was clothed in the flesh he’d worn in life, I could see both the radius and ulna bones between his wrist and elbow.
The Cabinet Mountain Range was a dangerous and difficult area to try to survive in. There was a reason that it had still been largely uninhabited when it was made a protected wilderness in the middle of the twentieth century. Starvation was only one of the weapons the great mountains had used to kill interlopers.
I blinked, and the man the ghost had been vanished, with only the monster left behind. And then it, too, disappeared, because ghosts don’t need to move like real people.
I knew what that thing wanted. I was moving before the ghost reappeared on top of Adam. One hand gripped my mate’s bare shoulder, and the other caressed his cheek as the ghost kissed Adam’s lips.
I vaulted onto the bed and opened my jaws to grab the back of the ghost’s neck and wrest him away—my instincts working before my brain reminded me that he was probably not something that tooth and claw could affect. My teeth sank into something that was not flesh. But because ghosts are not limited to moving like normal creatures, something caught me under my ribs. My teeth couldn’t hold on as the blow propelled me across the room until I hit the chest of drawers with enough force to rock it back on the wall with a crack.
I rolled to my feet and bolted back to Adam.
The second time the ghost threw me, I hit the wall next to the bathroom.
I am curious why you are running around unprotected, like an invitation to any spirit-predator you happen by, the spider said.
