Ghost Story

I’d seen death before, but not like that. Not terrible and swift and bloody. I spun back to Stan in time to see the three pieces fall to the ground. Blood went everywhere. One of his arms waved in frantic windmills, and his mouth opened as if to scream, but nothing came out except a vomiting gurgle and a gout of blood. Wide, terrified eyes stared at mine for a second, and I jerked my gaze away, desperate to avoid seeing Stan’s soul as he died.

Then he just sort of . . . changed. From a person in hideous pain and fear to an empty pile of . . . of meat. Parts. Soiled cloth.

I had never seen death come like that. As a humiliation, a reduction of a unique soul to nothing more than constituent matter. When the creature killed Stan, it didn’t simply end his life. It underscored the underlying futility, the ultimate insignificance of that life. It made a man, albeit a fairly unmotivated one, into less than nothing— something that had been a waste of the resources it had consumed. Something that had never had a choice in its own fate, never had a chance to be anything more.

I had involved Stan in this struggle. It hadn’t been his fight at all.

Granted, I had never intended to hurt the guy and never would have. Nonetheless, without my decision to stick up the convenience store, he would have still been loitering behind the counter, killing time until his next joint. He had been caught up in violence that he had done nothing to earn or expect—and it had killed him.

Something in my head went click.

That wasn’t right.

Stan shouldn’t have died like that. No one should. No one—man, beast, or otherwise—should get to decide, in a moment of malicious humor, that it got to end Stan’s life, to take away everything he was and everything he might ever be.

Stan hadn’t deserved it. He hadn’t been looking for it. And that creature, that demon, had murdered him.

I felt my jaw begin to ache as it clenched harder and harder. I could feel my rapid pulse beating behind my eyes. There was a terrible pressure inside my head and inside my chest, and with it came a rising wave of anger, and something darker and deadlier than anger that came welling up like a great wave from an unlit sea.

It.

Wasn’t.

Right.

No, it wasn’t. But the world wasn’t a fair place, was it? And I had more reason to know it than most people twice my age. The world wasn’t nice, and it wasn’t fair. People who didn’t deserve it suffered and died every single day.

So what? So somebody ought to do something about it.

My right arm and shoulder burned like fire as I felt my right hand slowly form a tight fist. The knuckles popped one by one. They hadn’t ever done that before.

I turned to face the creature’s image in the reflection. It was crouched over Stan’s corpse, its talons tapping lightly on the dead man’s open eyes, its mouth still stretched into that horrible, wide smile.

And when it saw the look on my face, its smile widened and its eyes narrowed. “Ahhhh,” it said. “Ahhhhh. There you are.”

I was not a victim. I was not a powerless child. I was a wizard. I was furious. And I was finished running. “This isn’t your world,” I whispered.

“Not now,” He Who Walks Behind murmured, its smile widening. “But it will be ours again in just a little time.”

“You won’t be around to see it,” I said.

I had never used my power in anger. I had never consciously tried to harm another being with my magic.

But this thing? If anything I had ever seen had it coming, if ever a being was deserving of receiving my violence, it was the bloodstained creature crouching over Stan’s mangled body. Everything had been taken away from me in the space of a single afternoon. My home. My family. And now, it seemed, I was about to lose my life. Well, if that was how it was going to be, if I couldn’t run without getting more innocent bystanders killed, then I would make my stand here—and I had no intention of going quietly.

I reached into that deep well of anger and began drawing it together into something as hot and violent and destructive as what I was feeling inside.

“There’s something you should know,” I said. “I skipped sixth hour today. Spanish. Which I’m not very good at anyway.”

“What is that to me?” asked the creature.

“Flickum bicus just doesn’t seem appropriate,” I replied. The heat in my right arm and shoulder concentrated into my right hand. The scent of burned hairs crept up to my nose. “And you really don’t understand where you’re standing, do you?”

The creature’s reflection looked left and right at the gas pumps on either side of it.

I kept my eyes locked on its image in the windows, extended my right hand back toward it, and formed my little fire-lighting spell into something a thousand times bigger, hotter, and deadlier than anything I had ever attempted before.

I met the thing’s eyes in the reflection, reached down to the well of energy and pure will I’d built inside me, extended my hand toward the creature, and screamed, “Fuego!”

My rage and fear poured out of me. Fire lashed out from my open hand like water from a broken hydrant. It spilled all over He Who Walks Behind and over Stan’s body, and lit up the darkness with angry golden light.

The creature let out a scream, more surprise and anger than pain, clutching at its eyes with its huge hands. The light changed the reflection in the glass and I could no longer see what was behind me. I swept the torrent of fire left and right without turning away or changing the direction my back faced. I hoped it would slow He Who Walks Behind long enough for my modified fire-starting spell to do its thing.

Gasoline pumps have all kinds of safety mechanisms built into them to reduce the odds of accidentally igniting them. They’re pretty good. I mean, how many times have you touched off an explosion while filling your car? But as reliable as they are, those measures are made to stop accidents.

And no engineer in the world ever thought about building them to stop angry young wizards.

It took a couple of seconds, but then there was a screaming sound, something metallic strained past the breaking point, and the first tank went up in a bloom of spectacular fire.

The explosion flung me back, scorching my skin and burning away the hair on my eyebrows. I landed on my ass—again—and lay there, stunned, for a few seconds. Sudden weariness, deeper than anything I had ever known, flooded over me in reaction to the energy I’d expended on my economy-sized ignition spell.

And then the second tank went up.

Hot wind and pieces of smoking metal showered against the front of the convenience store. I’m glad the first blast knocked me down. If I’d been standing, the metal shrapnel that punched out the entire front wall of windows would have gone through me first.

I stared at the flames and saw a shape within it—or, rather, I saw a creature-shaped void where the smoke and fire should have been. A voice emerged from the fire, something huge and terrifying, a voice that belonged to gods and monsters of myth.

“HOW DARE YOU!” it roared. “HOW DARE YOU RAISE YOUR HAND AGAINST ME!”

Then that not-figure crashed to its knees and fell limply onto its side.

The roaring flames swept in and consumed it.

And my first true battle was over.

Chapter Thirty-three

“That was my first fight,” I said quietly to my godmother. “I’d never used magic to hurt anything before.” I rubbed my hand over my head. “If I hadn’t cut class that day . . . I don’t know. I might never have become what I did.”