“The salt will contain the effect?”

“Not completely,” the Ghoul said. He didn’t sound worried. “But as before, claiming mastery of the other Hands will bring us into sync with it, make us family. Make us not-food.” He grinned at Wright, teeth surprisingly white and bright in his sallow face. “It’s like being a kid again. As long as you hold on to Daddy’s hand, you’re protected. But we’ll be lighting them all this time.”

“Great,” Wright said. Whether it was the Ghoul’s none-too-subtle name-calling, or just fatalism, he bent and picked up the Hand Demalion had dropped earlier.

Sylvie took up Zoe’s Hand of Glory, still tacky with milk, and Wales began making a single-occupant safety zone around her. The circle was barely wider than her outstretched arms, but better that than to run out of salt halfway through and have to brush it into shape; doing that risked adding in impurities. Sucked to have a spell get botched for a misplaced piece of carpet lint.

Wales chucked his lighter in just as he poured the last of the salt; she caught it and took a steady breath. Her skin crawled like a thousand ants were making themselves at home. She really, really didn’t want to do this. The Hand flared hot and furious at the first touch of the flame, shot fiery cinders toward the ceiling, before it settled to a steady hellish blaze. And Sylvie wasn’t alone in the circle any longer.

A woman blurred into shape, stiff and straight with age; her white hair streamed out around her, caught in the heated draft made by the flames. Unlike Marco’s hollow-eyed form, this ghost’s eyes glittered beneath her brows. And unlike Marco, equal parts menacing and drifting, she rocketed from confusion to sheer rage in a millisecond, drew herself up even straighter, hair streaming, and shrieked. Translucent teeth bulged like rat fangs, and her tongue elongated, rolled out, questing, utterly serpentine.

Sylvie’s every hair on her body stood up, screaming in silence for her to get out, to run, to flee.

Instead, she got one finger in her ear, trying to shake off that bone-rattle cry, sharper than a stooping hawk, and thrust the Hand as far from her as she could.

“Wales? A little help?”

The ghost shrieked again, still wordless, and every latch in the room snapped open. Wales tried to get Marco’s Hand lit with trembling fingers, and Wright was on his knees. Something lashed across her skin, gelid, sinuous, painful; the ghost’s tongue licked and stung and struck, forked at the tip, barbed the length of it. It drew her close, pulled at something beneath her skin.

“I lit you,” Sylvie gritted out. “Obey me.”

The tongue coiled around her skin again, questing for her soul, left frostbite and dizziness in its wake, and Sylvie thought she was going to die here, stuck in a circle with a ghost that refused to be mastered.

The salt circle was only salt. She could step out of it, fall out of it, but she’d drag the ghost free also. Free to attack the others in the room.

Two dead souls and a necromancer, her little dark voice said. Not a loss.

Sylvie stutter-stepped, dodged the ghost as she charged; she pivoted and felt the edge of her sneaker grit against the salt. “Wales!”

“Working on it!”

She panted, near panic—the Ghoul was right; the dead and the living shouldn’t interact—and told her inner voice to shut up, that she wasn’t saving herself at the cost of their lives, and hell, she wasn’t even sure their deaths would save her.

They might.

Distracted by her own adrenaline, by fighting her own desire to survive at any cost, she was too slow to dodge the next blow, and the ghost reeled her in, the tongue burning about her waist, caught her by the shoulders, and pressed against her. Sylvie went rigid in horror and repulsion, clawed at the intangible, then . . .

Cold.

Shock.

Cold.

Breathless.

Pressing.

Not breathing.

Something pressing on her face, through her mouth, through her nose, smothering her, and though she tried to drag it off with her free hand, all she did was claw her own skin bloody. The ghost was untouchable.

Implacable.

Sylvie, vision swirling, got a strange overlay. A hospital ceiling. White perforated tiles, stiff-bleached sheets, needles in her arms, and a smiling woman putting a pillow over her face. She kicked and struggled, and her voice said, It’s not your death you’re remembering.

She sucked in a thread of air, rank with dead flesh, but sweet in her lungs. Sucked in another, cold as the clay as she fought it through the ghost’s efforts to smother her. That hungry tongue, so like a succubus’s, lashed and stung and struck, but . . . couldn’t penetrate deeper than her skin. Couldn’t plug itself in. Couldn’t devour her soul. Holding the Hand gave her at least that much protection.

“You killed him,” she said. An old man in a hospital bed, his arms knobby and white-furred. Not her. Him. Like Bella’s dreams, it was a vision of the past. The ghost’s memory. Not hers.

“Of course I did,” the ghost said, a cold kiss in her veins. “A life’s such a little thing when it’s not your own. Where is my vessel?”

“Get off me, and I’ll tell you.” Like she could. She didn’t even know what the hell the ghost was talking about. But she’d say anything to get that cold invasion out of her bones. Was it like this for Wright? Did Demalion feel like this to him? How had he held on for so long?

The ghost withdrew to the very edge of the spell circle. Beyond her, Wales fumbled his spray bottle, Marco’s flaming Hand, and Wright’s slack form. The Hand of Glory that Wright was supposed to be mastering was slipping from his lax grip. On my own, Sylvie thought, gritting her teeth. Just like always.

She scraped up a little salt and tried to put out the flames with it. Shortsighted. She should have brought the milk carton in with her.

The ghost shrieked and attacked again, not slowed at all by the salt; the rat teeth chittered near her ear. Cold lanced through her arm; Sylvie’s fingers spasmed; she dropped the flaming Hand, and that snake-tongue lashed around and sank through her ribs.

It was a bright burst of pain, frigid and sharp, and she had the distinct and unpleasant sensation of feeling her heart miss a beat. Her vision was gone, just like that, that vertigo from before coming back, stronger than ever. She’d thought she was immune to this?

On her knees, and when had that happened, and her ears ringing, her lungs aching—was she still breathing?—and something being drawn out of her. No, she thought, no. Not like this.

Then human hands clamped down, hard and hot on her shoulders, the circle broken, the ghost whipping away from her, freed and exultant for a shared heartbeat as the tongue withdrew from its attack on Sylvie’s soul.

A moment later, the raging shriek started up again—thin, high, wavering. Nails against the chalkboard of her bones.

When Sylvie’s vision cleared, the shakiness faded; she found herself in Wales’s arms, Marco encircling him, in some horrifying parody of a three-way embrace. Wright slumped against the wall, the Hand in his lap alight, and a looming ghost sheltering him, a dead ex-con so large he almost had to be called Tiny.

The woman’s ghost battered at the walls, bounced back, wailed, hit the door with no better result. In Sylvie’s ear, Wales said, “Paranoia comes in handy. As does concern for the neighbors. My home’s a ghost trap.”

“We’re inside the trap,” Sylvie muttered back. “We’re here and we’re tasty and I’m out of ideas. You got anything?”

“She’s a lich ghost,” Wales said.

“A what?” Sylvie shook her head, regretted it when the dizziness swung back around. “No. Never mind. Lesson later. Fix the problem now.”

“Which one?” He shivered against her back; his hands trembled, bare against her flesh.