normal world came back into focus.
“Stymak,” I murmured, turning toward him.
Carlos had moved over beside him, his hands hovering a scant half inch above the medium’s shoulders. A dim blue glow lay in the thin gap between them as Carlos bent his head and concentrated. The glow sank into Stymak and Carlos moved back, keeping a wary eye on him.
The necromancer turned his head and caught my attention. “Better it be you nearby when he wakes,” he said.
I scrambled across the floor to Stymak’s side as Carlos backed farther away. I felt like death warmed over and mashed flat, but took the man’s hand and felt for a pulse. I sighed in relief when he had one.
“Stymak? Stymak?” I said, patting his hand and bending close to keep my voice low. The sound of music and conversation from the taproom beyond was unchanged, and I hoped no one had noticed any disturbance.
The overhead light came on and I jerked my attention to the doorway. Just Carlos, standing next to the switch and guarding the door.
Stymak moved and groaned, then lifted his eyelids. His eyes were bloodshot and his face was wan. “I think . . . I’m going to be sick.”
I grabbed a box of trash bags off the floor nearby and yanked one off the roll. Stymak turned white and barely snatched the bag quickly enough to save his friend’s floor. He was spectacularly and noisily ill.
When he was done, he looked at me and asked, “What the hell happened?”
“I’m not sure. I think we got an unexpected visitor.”
“God, I feel like I’ve been hit by a combine harvester.”
“I think you’re still intact,” I said. “It’s a bit of a mess here, however.”
Stymak looked around and sighed. “Could be worse. I hope my recorder’s all right. . . .”
Carlos and I started putting the room to rights while Stymak staggered around, looking for his digital recorder. He found it wedged between two boxes of cocktail napkins and brought it back to the table we had just set back on its feet. Carlos shoved a chair toward him, carefully not touching the medium or looking directly at him. I was too tired to be openly amused at the powerful and terrifying necromancer doing housework. I kept my mouth shut and continued cleaning up.
Carlos slipped out into the bar as I dumped the spilled sand into the trash can by the door and went to sit with Stymak.
“How does it look?” I asked.
“Seems OK.” He pressed the Replay button.
A whispering chorus muttered from the device. “Run. Flee. . . . They come. . . .”
Stymak paused the playback. “They? Uh-huh.” He nodded to himself. “I thought there was something else along for the ride.” He looked up at me. “What happened? I saw the beginning of a manifestation—a face formed in the sand—but things got a bit hazy after that. I had the impression of something . . . foreign, something . . . hungry, grasping. I thought it bit me. . . .”
“It was Hunger Incarnate,” Carlos said, a slight frown creasing his brow. “It called itself Limos.”
He had reentered the room silently, carrying a pitcher of beer and three glasses. I tried not to laugh at the sight of the vampire as cocktail waitress, but a snort escaped me anyhow. Carlos set down his burdens on the table and reclaimed a chair, arching an eyebrow at me in challenge. I chose not to accept and ducked my head.
Stymak seemed a bit stunned by what Carlos had said, but he was nodding as if taking the idea in while he poured beer into the glasses. He guzzled a mouthful, making a face before he washed the first taste away with another.
I added my ideas of what had happened. “I think those voices on the recording are the ghosts themselves— the ones that have been attempting to manifest through Julianne and the other patients. I don’t think they ever really got to us—they never spoke up, even after you’d asked several times.”
“They remained at bay,” Carlos said. “I felt them outside, but they didn’t enter the circle—they were restrained.”
“Uh-huh,” Stymak grunted, pushing the other glasses over to us. “I had that feeling, too.” He tapped his recorder. “This sounds like a lot of the other recordings. Some garbled talk, warnings about something coming . . . but this time something came and it didn’t come by itself.”
“It came with Linda Hazzard. I thought they were the same thing at first,” I said, “but I’m pretty sure it’s two separate entities. Hazzard starved her patients, so maybe the sensation of hunger was connected to her. . . .”
Carlos shook his head. “No. Quite separate. Hunger may be what drew one to the other, but the sensation of starving was animate and separate from the ghost of the woman, Hazzard, who killed the voices.”
Stymak and I both stared at Carlos.
“Can you not hear the thread that binds them together? Not all were her victims in life, but they are all in her power now.”
“That’s not what’s giving us the creeps, Carlos,” I said. “It’s the idea of animate hunger.”
“You saw it for yourself.” He glanced at Stymak, but didn’t lock his gaze with the pudgy medium’s. “You felt it tear into you. Did it not seem the embodiment of hunger, feeding on your soul?”
Stymak shuddered and turned his face aside. “Ugh . . . I’d like to forget that feeling.”
“You would do well to remember it,” Carlos suggested, his voice resonating through me. Judging from Stymak’s wince it had the same effect on him. “That way you will not fall victim to other hungers, to temptations that consume you in the same unremitting need that burns you to a shell but never lets you go.”
Stymak, wide-eyed, gulped beer too fast and coughed, doubling over until the fit passed. “I . . . hope I never go wherever you’ve been, man.”
Carlos inclined his head, but said nothing.
“What did the ghost . . . thing say while I was . . . out of it?” Stymak asked, looking at me and very much
I thought back before I spoke. “She . . . or it . . . said something about tribute—that I had disturbed the tribute. And something about the wheel turning to feed the damned.”
“‘When the wheel turns, when the hunger of the damned is sated.’ That is what the creature said,” Carlos quoted. Leave it to a necromancer to have a perfect memory for the horrible.
“There’s some connection to the Great Wheel,” I said. “It’s come up before. It appeared as dermographia on my skin and other spirits have mentioned the Wheel. Though I’m not sure how turning a Ferris wheel sates the damned. Or what this business about tribute means.”
“The souls that are bound together would be the tribute,” Carlos said. “They were gathered by Hazzard, but for what purpose?”
“Given to Limos,” muttered the voices from the recorder. Stymak self-consciously pushed the button and turned it off. “I didn’t do that,” he said. “It just came on.”
Carlos and I both nodded.
“Typical ghost crap,” Stymak continued, glaring at the recorder as if it understood his discomfort.
I tried to think aloud. “No. No, it’s not. The ghosts were all people who died of starvation. They were gathered by Hazzard, who starved her victims to death, so she has an affinity for them, even in the afterlife. Gathered as tribute for Limos—some kind of otherworldly manifestation of hunger. And in return for tribute, this . . . thing is going to turn the Great Wheel and sate the hunger of the damned. Does that sound as totally loony as I think it does?”
Stymak nodded vigorously, but Carlos grinned. I glared at him. “What?”
“It’s no wonder she likes you.”
“Who? What?” I demanded.
“Hazzard. She said she wants you for her own.” His wolf grin struck me cold. “Because you are thin. She believed, did she not, that fasting was healthful? She would find a thin but healthy woman like you to be very attractive. Ideal, even. A paragon. She touched you, marked you. And then the messages began, because you were tied to her just like the starved ghosts she had gathered for Limos.”
“Hang on . . .” I said. “If I’m tied to Hazzard and therefore to the ghosts she gathered, why are her messages appearing on
