Winter Lost

“What brings you here?” the old woman asked.

“A mutual friend who now owes me a favor.”

The old woman smiled, and the wrinkles in her face deepened. “Oh, that scoundrel,” she murmured. “Better that you don’t collect favors from him. They don’t turn out quite the way you expect.”

“He says that you’ve been bored. He said, ‘Perhaps she might consider decorating a fae tavern for the season. The green man who runs it has agreed—and something interesting might drop in her web.’ ”

“Well, now,” said the old woman.

9

Mercy

I awoke to a finger drifting over my cheek. According to my inner clock, it was early morning—still dark this time of year. I smiled at the gentle touch and pressed my face into it.

But both of Adam’s arms were wrapped securely around my waist, holding me against his chest.

The hand on my cheek was icy.

Adam’s hands, like his body, were usually a few degrees warmer than a human’s would have been.

I opened my eyes and there was a stranger’s face not an inch from mine. If he hadn’t been dead, I’d have been breathing his air, he was that close. Panic held me frozen as he lowered his face and pressed his chill, hungry lips to mine.

I don’t know how a hungry ghost is made. There are stories, but they are told by the survivors, people trying to explain the inexplicable.

Gary once told me a tale he had heard from an old man at a pub in Yorkshire. A ship had capsized and the crew escaped on a boat. They drifted, lost at sea, for a very long time. After the food and water were gone, they ate each other—the last one starving to death.

Eventually, the boat washed ashore at a small fishing village. The ghosts of the sailors had nearly consumed the whole town before some bright person burned the boat and buried the ashes in holy ground. Hungry ghosts are dangerous.

Other ghosts could and would feed from the living. Once, when I’d been rendered defenseless, I’d had a ghost feed on me without consent. But hungry ghosts are different. They kill their victims.

Some kill in a single feeding, but others drain their prey for weeks or months before they die. Having fed once from a particular person, a hungry ghost can follow that person across oceans and continents. They don’t stop until their chosen quarry is dead.

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.