Hexed (31 page)

“They want to possess her like one of those demons.” Buck gripped the edge of the tub with a thick hand, his knuckles turning white as he squeezed.

“No,” Lucifer said as she slipped out of her jeans. “Possession means there are two people in one body. That's not what they want. They want to sacrifice Gina's spirit, her soul, and then take over her body. Then they send the body back to our world, only it will no longer be Gina inside. It will be one of the Sisters. And with a Sister of Witchdown alive again, it'll only be a matter of time before she's able to get the rest of her Sisters back here as well.” Lucifer reached out and grabbed his hand. “But I'm not going to let that happen.”

Buck grabbed her hand and squeezed back, giving her a short nod. Lucifer could tell that he was barely hanging on. She knew the only reason he was even willing to entertain this crazy plan was because he was so desperate to get Gina back. That and because he hadn't slept in days and wasn't thinking very clearly.

The big man looked at Trish. “You know what you're doing? You know how to do this?”

Trish shrugged her shoulders. “Well, I've never killed anyone before if that's what you're asking. But yes, technically, I know how to do it. I've had plenty of training in CPR and I know how the meds work. But Lucifer, your brain can't go very long without oxygen. More than a few minutes and, even if I can bring you back, you'll have serious brain damage.”

“That's what the ice is for,” Lucifer said. “It should slow down my body functions enough so I can stay longer without that happening. Like when someone gets trapped under ice for a long time and they're still able to be brought back.”

“I understand that, but your body temp needs to be brought down in a very deliberate way for that to work. Ice is just too variable.”

“Ice is all we've got. I don't know what I'm going to find there and I'll need all the time you can give me. Five minutes, at least.”

“Five minutes?” Trish said. She looked at Buck, but when he only returned a puffy-eyed stare, she threw up her hands in resignation.

What little Lucifer knew about the Shade came from texts that relied on speculation. Few people who traveled there ever returned. She knew the Shade was a ghostly image of the living world and that it served as a way station of sorts for the dead passing through on their way to whatever afterlife awaited them, but some of those spirits got lost along the way. Others chose to stay. Beyond that, all she knew was that the spirits of the Shade hated life and would do anything to destroy it. It was one of the reasons she had to die to go there.

Lucifer was now stripped down to her underwear and T-shirt. She wrapped her arms over her chest, though not out of modesty. She was cold. Her teeth were already beginning to chatter because of the unnatural coolness of the room. It reminded her too much of Minnie Hester's cold spell.

She took a note of the moon's position in the sky. It would be at its zenith soon. There wasn't any time left to find her courage. She was going to have to start without it. Lucifer took several deep breaths and then stepped into the tub.

Trish and Buck used their hands to scoop the ice over her body, encasing her until only her head was above the ice. Lucifer's teeth chattered together in a frigid drumroll. The cold was almost too much, but if she could handle the cold spell at Cape Vale, she could handle this. Only she didn't handle the cold spell. Not without help anyway. She had David. It was David's kiss that finally broke the spell. His kiss had saved her life.

Lucifer would have given anything to have him there at that moment, to look up and see his sweet, crooked smile. But all she saw now were the wavering shadows from the candlelight and the worried, mortified faces of Buck and Trish.

“Lucifer . . .” Buck said, his voice breaking before it trailed off.

“It's ok-k-kay, B-b-buck.” Lucifer couldn't feel her fingers or toes, but the parts of her body she could still feel were in agony. Lucifer marveled at how freezing to death felt so much like burning.

The swollen moon kept on its steady march across the sky. Trish placed an electric thermometer in her ear. “Your core temp is dropping. Just a few more degrees and we'll be ready.”

Buck was kneeling next to the tub, flexing his fists over and over again. His face was locked in a painful grimace, too ashamed to watch, too ashamed to look away.

“T-t-t-tell m-m-me ab-b-b-b-bout G-g-g-ina. Remind-d-d-d m-m-me why I'm d-d-d-doing th-th-th-this.”

The cop nodded. He opened his mouth to speak but was only able to produce a sob. “I'm sorry,” he mumbled. “I can't . . . I just can't. We have to stop this. We have to—”

“N-n-n-n-no . . . on-n-n-nly w-w-w-w-w-way. P-p-please, t-t-t-trust me.” Lucifer did her best to smile, but she couldn't feel her face and had no idea if it looked reassuring or like a painful grimace.

Buck pressed his fist against his lips as if he were physically restraining a scream in his mouth.

Lucifer started getting sleepy. The burning of her limbs felt far away, like they were trying to remember the pain but could only recall a fraction of the memories. Every instinct she had told her to get out of the tub, find warmth, survive. But David was trapped in the Shade. She couldn't leave him there. He had rescued her with a kiss. If only she could do the same, she would have covered him with a thousand kisses, each with the power to gift him immortality.

Trish pulled the thermometer out of Lucifer's ear and said, “Okay, I think you're ready.”

Lucifer was too tired, too frozen to respond.

“This is all levels of wrong,” Trish said.

Lucifer felt a slight pinch in her neck and caught sight of Trish pulling away a glistening metal syringe. She saw Buck's twisted, tear-stained smile looking down at her. Lucifer wanted to smile back, but her mouth wouldn't obey. The weight of her eyelids became too much, and they closed, plunging her into darkness. All that was left now was the cold.

And then there was nothing.

CHAPTER 27

There was nothing.

And then there was . . . something.

Lucifer opened her eyes to darkness, but it was a darkness she had never known before. It was a darkness she could see. It had form. It had shape, substance, depth. It was the darkness of void, of emptiness, but it was neither of those things. It was something tangible, something familiar. She was in a world constructed of shadows.

Lucifer was in the Shade.

It took a moment for Lucifer to recognize the form around her. She was inside the room of the Worcester House, or at least the Shade equivalent of that room. The walls, the ceiling, even the floor appeared identical except they were all made from that ethereal darkness. But unlike in the living world, the Sister's Wheel was visible. It spread out across the floor in a vast circle, the giant seal of pale orange light glowing in defiance against the all-consuming blackness of the world.

Lucifer looked down at her body, only it wasn't her body. It was a Lucifer-shaped mass of the same nothingness that made up everything around her. She examined herself, noting the familiar contours and lines she always saw when she looked at herself. But now they were formed by this substance of absence.

Lucifer walked toward the vanity in the center of the room. When she moved, tiny wisps of dark drifted from the edges of her spectral body, trailing off like steam. As she gazed into the mirror, Lucifer expected to see her shadow-self in the glass, staring back at her. Instead, the mirror was a window into the world of the living.

She saw Trish sitting next to the bathtub, looking at the timer on her phone, while Buck knelt with his hands in his lap, his head hanging in defeat. But it was Lucifer's own body lying dead in the tub that terrified her.

The lips of her corpse were blue and its skin ashen. Black, limp hair floated next to the ice in the pooling meltwater. It was the most disturbing thing Lucifer had ever seen. But it wasn't simply seeing her own dead body that bothered her so much. It was how small she looked. How fragile. To see herself reduced to such a tiny, insignificant thing filled her with a profound sadness.

But Lucifer didn't have time for self-pity. The clock was running. If she didn't act now, both Gina and David would be just as dead. And as much as Lucifer wanted to be with David, she didn't want it to be as ghosts heading hand-in-hand into the great beyond.

She turned and headed for the stairs. But once outside of the house, Lucifer was taken aback. What she saw was like smoke poured into a mold of the world. Buildings rose in dark slabs against the darker sky as spirits meandered over the landscape in between the towering shapes. Most of the structures were just as they were in the living world, though several lay twisted or collapsed in defiance of any laws of physics. There were even a few buildings that had no living counterpart.

Lucifer watched as spirits floated through the air like aimless, sentient clouds. The denizens of the Shade were every form imaginable, from the horrible to the stunningly beautiful. Some appeared merely human, while others were vile and monstrous. Lucifer had no idea if it was a result of a violent death, a reflection of their inner selves, or simply how they chose to appear to the other spirits in this world.

The moon was high in the sky, ten times bigger than in the living world. It looked down on her like the engorged eye of a curious god, its light filling the sky with a cardinal glow. But the blood-red moonlight paled next to the blinding beacon rising to meet it. Not too far away, a spotlight of golden light rose straight into the air until it was swallowed by the impossible darkness directly above it.

The strange light originated from a collection of smaller structures that sat in a clearing just at the edge of the horizon. Each of the structures connected to the other with a strange latticework. Though the light prevented Lucifer from seeing all of the structures in the tiny village, she knew that there were seven.

She had found Witchdown.

The light rising from the town pulled at Lucifer, beckoned her, as if it were calling her home. Something about that incredible light made her want to bask in it, revel in it. The strange pull even seemed to be affecting the other spirits as well. Ghosts ambled and floated in the same direction, all heading toward Witchdown.

She ran, covering more ground than she could have in the living world. Part of her wanted to study her fellow spirits, examine them, study this world. But there wasn't time. The full moon was nearly overhead as it quickly approached the vertical beam of light. Minutes was all she had.

Lucifer stopped when she reached the edge of Witchdown. The town was protected by an invisible dome of magic, preventing the thousands of ghosts and spirits from getting inside. They swarmed over the magic dome, crawling over one another as they tried to claw their way inside. Lucifer understood their desire. The source of the light was coming from inside, and the light pulled at them, filling them with an incredible need. The closer they were to the light, the more desperately they wanted to feel its radiance.

The ghost of a man with impossibly wide eyes and very little flesh still left on his bones pushed past Lucifer and forced his way into the throng of swarming spirits. Lucifer couldn't see beyond the swirling mass into the town, so she followed his lead.

As soon as she approached the gathered mass, it swallowed her, pulling her under like an ocean current. It was odd, touching other spirits. Neither she nor they had actual bodies, but they all seemed to adhere to the same physical laws of the living world. But Lucifer could see that a few ignored those laws, allowing themselves to pass through one another, float, even fly. It made sense. Such physical laws didn't apply here, so why should she confine herself to them?

Lucifer relaxed. If she could fly, she could reach the top of the dome and get a better view of what was happening inside the town. She rolled and tumbled as spirits jostled to get a look inside, swimming closer only to be pulled away again. They moved in waves like the undulating thermal currents of a black star.

But as she concentrated, the unrelenting pressure slowly eased. Hands and arms now passed through her. She was a ghost among ghosts. With a thought, she was able to rise through the swirling mass until she was above it, floating at the top of the dome over Witchdown. Only a few other spirits were with her now, all focused on the source of the light beneath them. Lucifer could see it clearly.

David and Gina.

Lucifer's heart sang with joy at seeing David again, but his imprisonment in this hellscape filled her with horror. David and Gina huddled together in a cage made of bones, their bodies shining with blinding light that emanated in all directions. The force of their life burned like twin suns in this world of death and shadow. They were the source of the great beacon in the sky, the light that called to her and every other spirit in the Shade. At that moment, Lucifer realized that she had been wrong about the Shade. The spirits here didn't hate life. They
craved
it. Though she had been dead for only a few minutes, she could feel the undeniable need to be close to them, to be alive again, to bask in their light. She could only assume that the longer one stayed in the Shade, the stronger that need became. Any living thing that traveled here would be torn apart by all the ghosts desperately trying to feel life one more time.

From this vantage point, Lucifer could see the entire layout of the Sisters' grand spell, recognizing it from the book. The whole of the town was covered in symbols, seals, picts, every possible magical notation all intertwined to form an intricate design that glowed with the same pale orange light of the Sister's Wheel.

The latticework that joined the seven structures together were made of bones arranged in specific geometric patterns that connected to the glowing lines of the spell. Several whole specters were entwined in the bones to finish out some of the more intricate shapes, each writhing against their restraints and trying to free themselves so they could get closer to David and Gina.