Hungry Ghosts (Eric Carter #3)(41)

Younger me drags Boudreau away from the wreckage, bunches his fists in the man’s shirt collar. I remember that moment. The spell I’d only tried a few times before. I knew it was possible the way I knew I could tie my shoes when I was a toddler, but I still had trouble doing it.

But that’s how most magic works. We don’t write much shit down. There’s no point. We learn from experimentation, picking up tips from other mages, doing what feels natural.

And much as it strained me and took forever to cast as I tried to get it right, I remember it feeling like the most natural thing in the world.

Then they’re gone. No flash of light or weird noises. Just there one second and gone the next. I took him over to the ghost’s side. Took him there and called to any ghost who cared to listen.

And then I fed him to them like I was chumming sharks.

“I’d do it again,” I say. And I would. Hell, I did. When I came back to L.A. a shred of Boudreau’s soul had somehow reconstituted itself, sucking ghosts in to rebuild. I put him down pretty much the same way. Only I’m the one who ate his soul.

“No regrets?” says the voice. It’s changing. Becoming more feminine. Out to the side of the warehouse, standing among the shipping containers I can see someone. Blurry, like the woman who got out of the car.

“Not a one,” I say. “Why do you care, anyway? If you’re trying to make me feel remorse about this, that’s not happening.”

“Not even for the consequences?”

“Me leaving L.A.? Small price to pay to protect Lucy and my friends.”

“But it didn’t. What do you have left, Eric? You got a short-term gain for a long-term loss. You won the battle, but you lost the war.”

I can’t take my eyes off the figure in the distance. It’s becoming more distinct, more solid, but I still can’t make out enough detail to know who it is.

“Is that you over there?” I start walking toward the figure. She, he, it’s hard to tell, is standing in the shadows, watching me, not moving. I pull the obsidian blade from its sheath in my pocket. This whole thing is bullshit and I’m tired of it. I’m tired of gods and afterlives and getting dicked around. I’m tired of cryptic non-clues.

“Actions have consequences, Eric,” says the voice. It’s all around me. Louder now. Definitely a woman, but there’s a distortion to it.

“Yeah, like my boot up your ass.” The figure still hasn’t moved. If I shank this observer, or concierge, or whatever the hell it is, maybe it’ll pop me out of this place.

The scene shifts again, shimmering around me like water rippling after a stone thrown in. The warehouse, the parking lot, the figure in the distance, they all fade away to be replaced with a brightly lit house. White walls, white carpet, modern lines. The art on the wall a series of black and white photos, the decor modern and minimalist. I can smell sea air wafting in through an open window and the slight sewer scent of the canals off Venice Beach.

I know this house and everything inside me starts screaming.

The last time I was here it had been a crime scene. Furniture shattered, blood on the walls. The white carpet was so soaked through with blood it crunched under my feet as I walked across it.

I saw Lucy’s Echo here. Forced myself to watch her murder replay itself so I could find some clue to who killed her. She lasted a long time before finally dying and I sat there and witnessed the whole thing with no way to do a goddamn thing about it.

When she finally died after being beaten and tortured and brutalized, the murderer wrote a note in her blood using her body as a paintbrush. Then they wiped it out so the only way anyone could read it would be if they could see her Echo. If they could watch her die.

In other words, it was tailor-made for me. I spent the next half-hour being violently ill in the sink.

I walk down the short hall and come to a den that fits the same motif as the rest of the house and stop dead.

Lucy sits curled up on the couch wearing yoga pants, her brown hair dyed black. She walks a familiar looking silver dollar back and forth across the back of her knuckles with a practiced air. I’ve only ever seen her dressed like this in a handful of photos and when I watched her Echo. I left L.A. too early to see her grow up into this woman.

“Hi, Eric,” she says. “Come to murder me again?”





When Lucy was a kid I tried to help her find her magic. Pretty much a pointless endeavor. She didn’t have enough to register, but we did it anyway. I bought her an old silver dollar and we worked day and night trying to see if she could manipulate a coin toss.

For most mages that’s dirt simple. Pretty much the first thing we learn. It’s also one of the reasons we don’t usually lack for things like money. But she couldn’t get it. She’d get frustrated, have a tantrum for a bit, cry about it. But then get back to it. She’d gnaw at it like a dog with a bone. Never giving up. I found out after she died that she finally got that coin toss. Took her years to do it, but she got there.

I wasn’t around to see it.

“You’re just pulling out all the stops, aren’t you?” I say.

“What, this?” she says, tossing the coin in the air with a flick of her thumb and catching it in the palm of her hand. She smiles and it’s a smile I remember from when we were kids. Seeing her with the coin hurts. Seeing that smile hurts more.