The beseeching dark eyes, over-large in the pinched face, might have been her own from so long ago. That thin frame, shivering in the cold, could’ve belonged to the child she had once been.
Arabella’s heart constricted and she stood up. “Oh, you poor child! It’s so frigid. Come here and I’ll—” She stopped, her fingers still resting on the cloak she’d been trying to take off.
Her spectral cloak. With her incorporeal hands.
For the child who could see her.
The child she’d just invited nearer.
“You’re so pretty, miss.” The girl drifted closer, feet skimming over the short hoary grass without bending a single blade. “So pretty. I’m so hungry.”
Arabella jumped up, hands out. “Stay away! Stay away… please.” Her words ended on a waver.
“Feed me,” murmured the child. “… so hungry…” Her eyes grew larger, sockets stretching, pupils swallowing up the irises and whites. Her face was a flimsy paper mask, with holes torn into it.
And through the holes, Arabella could see…
… a grey city glistening with frost… towers frozen in mid-collapse… domes melted into oozing shadow stuff… a cracked bell with no tongue swinging and tolling, still tolling…
“Pretty lady,” crooned the girl, reaching out. Her thin fingers were overlong, capped with sharp nails. “Pretty lady will feed me.”
Arabella slapped the hands away. She gasped as stinging pain burned up her arms.
The girl stopped, mouth gaping open into a maw as her jaw unhinged like a snake’s. “… lady?”
And then her face began to melt.
Her features softened and ran like wax, shriveling away from her eyes and mouth. Darkness, gleaming with red eyes, took their place.
“Lady?” said a chorus of voices, high and low and medium, the whole cacophony of it shredding Arabella’s every nerve. “I’m hungry, lady. Feed me, miss.”
The girl’s form unraveled. For one moment, she stood on one foot, a half-being. For an instant, the person she had been peeped out from the remaining part of her face. “Please, miss?” she whispered.
Then she swayed, tottered, fell forward.
And disintegrated into shadow substance, inky blackness splattering everywhere.
Arabella stood rooted, unable to look away.
Dark blobs showered on to her skirt and stuck. They writhed, leach-like. “Feed me!” came that ragged chorus once more.
“No!” Arabella beat the stuff off her. Blobs stuck to her hand, wriggled, clamping teeth into her.
Arabella pulled them off and threw them away, shuddering at the way they felt, fat and slimy. Her substance burned where they had latched on.
The blobs on the ground wriggled blindly towards each other and her. Whenever they bumped against each other, they merged. Then they turned hungry mouths in her direction.
“I am not your dinner!” Arabella yelled. Something white-hot blazed inside her.
She recognized what it was.
The desire to live.
Once, she had taken her courage in her hands and fought back. Once, she had taken her life back.
She wouldn’t let that go to waste. She wouldn’t let her younger self down.
Arabella forced the heat into her hands. A leech jumped at her, toothed maw aiming for her face.
Arabella snatched it with both hands and squeezed. A flash, and the leech crumbled to ash that blew away in the wind.
“I won’t let you take me,” she promised the blobs.
They took that as a challenge. They charged.
It was like fighting off an army of fast-moving slugs. Arabella flung them off her in scorching handfuls. She stomped on their smoldering comrades, feeling them squish as they burst into pinpoints of white fire.
Fire which affected nothing in the mortal plane. Last year’s dried brown grass stood unscorched, untrampled.
The last of the demonic leeches burst into a cloud of black motes. Arabella dropped her glowing hands to her sides, with a weary triumph, an odd sort of peace.
For the first time in this whole nightmarish episode, she felt as if she could do something about her problems.
As if she wasn’t some helpless ghost.
“There’s the Trent constitution for you,” Arabella informed the world. “If we had a family motto, it would be something suitably martial, like Never surrender.” She giggled at the thought.
She’d find that ring, if she had to scour all of Lumen’s streets for it. She’d start at the place her body had been found, poke her nose in every nearby house, look over the shoulder of every suspected thief.
Arabella turned to go.
The attack missed her by a hair’s breadth.
Something sharp and curved, glistening black, streaked past her shoulder. The air bled blue where it cut through it.
Arabella squeaked and jumped away, fear lending her wings.
A huge insectoid shape, thrice her size, faced her. Trapped colors struggled in the bulging black of its eyes. Its multi-jointed body was covered in an obsidian carapace. It stood on its back four legs; its front two were curved into the wicked blades that had nearly pierced Arabella a moment ago.
It swung its head in her direction and lunged.
The creature moved fast.
Arabella leapt into the air, fleeing across the Teme. The phantasm launched itself after her, its shape blurring into a shadowy mass.
It can fly too? Arabella felt a strong sense of injustice.
It could, and well, too. Now it arrowed into something long and lean, with huge wings and a beak that snapped at her ankles.
And change shape. Arabella misjudged her landing and sank ankle-deep into water-logged mud at the river bank. A slimy feeling, like being covered in slug trails, wriggled all over her.
She wrenched herself loose just as her pursuer, now a tentacled blob, landed where she had just been.
Too close! Arabella flung herself forward. Her mind complained that she was tired; she countered it by pointing out that she had no body to be tired with.
Still, there was that dragging feeling of being stretched thin, of being unraveled.
Hadn’t
