I flick it on and get closer to the wall. The room is dark, but even so, the light is feeble. I hold the lighter up higher, looking for the best angle. The next second, the ghosts are all over me, whirling around my head and flying through the lighter flame. It goes out. I spark it again. They come back, blowing through the flame like a fucking annoying breeze, snuffing it out. I try cupping my hand around it, but they squeeze between my fingers and douse it again. I put the lighter back in my pocket. It was never going to work anyway. It just wasn’t bright enough.
The ghosts are cackling up a storm. An easy crowd. And I wasn’t even using my A material.
“You invaded our home and now you’ll die here.”
“Yeah, you keep saying that.”
“You can starve slowly over weeks or you can end things quickly. Use one of the stones or pieces of metal to cut your wrists.”
“I’m going to go with door number three. The year’s supply of car wax and a weekend in Hawai’i away from Spooky Town.”
A rock hits the side of my head. Someone shoves me so hard I almost fall. Pieces of drywall and metal slam into the wall around me. Some of these dead pricks are tougher than others. Not just specters but full-on poltergeists. Some scratch my face, going for my eyes. I duck and get my arms up to block them, but their spectral bodies flow around them like fog with talons. Dropping an arm to my side, I manifest my Gladius, an angelic sword of fire. I swing it in front of me, turn and raise it overhead, bringing it down again right through the thickest part of the ghostly crowd.
They burst out laughing. Big, nasty belly laughs.
“Look, everyone. The mighty wizard is using magic against us.”
“I hope he doesn’t kill us, don’t you?”
The ghosts drift away like they’ve lost all interest in me. They move around the room, full-body specters now, chatting and telling jokes about what an idiot I am. I drop down onto one of the beanbag chairs.
The dead creeps are right, of course. Practically all my hoodoo is about hunting and killing. Not much use against someone who’s already dead. I take out a cigarette, but when I try to light it, they again blow out the flame.
“You are the worst dead people I’ve ever met.”
They go on with their little coffee klatch, hoping I’ll go nuts and off myself.
I put the cigarette away.
“Hey, do any of you spooks know about a crazy ghost? I mean crazier than you. He’s in some kind of Roman bath or something.”
A couple of them nod. One says, “No one talks to him. He’s mad.”
“Yeah, I think I already said that. Thanks for nothing.”
So far, Kill City is living up to its name. I have no intention of letting Casper and company kill me, but I’m seriously stuck here. And I don’t like cemeteries. Not one little bit.
I was around fourteen when it happened. Balthazar Roszak, the spoiled little prince of a powerful Sub Rosa family, decided he didn’t like me. It had nothing to do with family rivalries or magician envy. It was just one of those dog-pack bully-and-victim games that young boys play. Balthazar played harder than just about anyone. His clan was rumored to practice heavy Baleful magic on the sly. Maybe he was out to make his bones in the family or maybe he was just a stone bastard, but when he came after me one night, I knew he was going to kill me.
I had a lot of power even when I was fourteen, but it was mostly show-off stuff. Unfocused tricks to amuse friends or impress girls. It was nothing at all like Balthazar’s hoodoo. He’d been training since he was a goddamn fetus. If he wanted me dead, I knew there wasn’t much I could do to stop him.
I hid in the Golden Hills Cemetery not far from my house. Golden Hills had been a big deal in the fifties, but that was a long time ago and now it was barely hanging on. The grounds were kind of weedy and the place was generally starting to fall apart.
I went inside through a place in the wrought-iron fence where I knew a post was missing. Headed straight for the trees and the big tombs where the families with money had planted Grandma and Grandpa years before. I was hoping if I stayed in the shadows, Balthazar wouldn’t be able to follow me through the wet December grass. But the fucker came right along where I’d run. He wasn’t even moving fast. He knew some kind of tracking hoodoo that I’d never heard of. All I could do was keep moving and hoping that he’d get bored and go home.
After an hour, I was running out of steam. It wasn’t that I was tired. It was that Balthazar was relentless. No matter what I did—running straight, doubling back, climbing trees—he’d always find me. And he’d let me go to run some more. He wanted me to give up and offer myself to him. I wasn’t that far from doing it.
I ran into the hills that gave the cemetery its name. The oldest part of the place. All the families that could afford the view had long since moved to better neighborhoods with better places for their dead. No one ever went up to the hills anymore. The grass was long and slippery. Some of the gravestones were beginning to tilt in the soggy ground. A lot of the mausoleums had cracked foundations and walls. The far end of the hill was a straight hundred-foot drop to the freeway. The other end faced down the slope to where Balthazar was coming. I’d cleverly run myself right into a dead end.
I crept across the top of the hill trying to spot where Balthazar was coming up, but he was nowhere in sight. There weren’t any trees up there, so I climbed on top of one of the tombs.
From somewhere below me, someone said, “Boo.”
It was Balthazar. I was so startled that I started to slide off the slanted roof and only stopped myself by jamming my heels into the raised edge. There was a crack and a crash and the whole tomb seemed to drop a few feet. I thought the roof was going to collapse and take me with it. But it held together. I couldn’t hear Balthazar anymore. It was a perfect moment to finish me off, but nothing happened.
I climbed down and there he was, lying under a marble pillar from the tomb. It had come down across his chest. His head and arms flailed and pushed at the pillar, but his legs were at a funny angle and didn’t move. When he saw me he tried to yell, but it came out rough and wet.
“You. You did this. You’re dead.”