Only I didn’t think she needed to. With a sort of horrified inevitability I looked down at myself. I might be sitting up, but my body wasn’t sitting up with me. It was laying stock-still, eyes closed, naked except for the electrodes and a funny-looking cap with a thicket of wires trailing from it back to the first machine. My face, neck, arms, chest and stomach were covered in scratches from my run-in with the dryads.
Okay, looked like the out-of-body experience had escalated to worse. I was dead—and not only that, I was a ghost too.
Fuck. I clenched my fists and built the wall higher against my panic.
My body was still there, and that meant I wasn’t truly gone, just separated.
So all I needed to do was to work out how to pull myself together again.
‘I told you, Janet,’ Hannah’s tone was long-suffering, ‘she might be sidhe fae, and she might heal quickly, but I can’t wait for that. I need to use the body straight away to get the Fabergé egg out of the bank.’
Use my body?
‘It’s bad enough I’m going to be walking round flat-chested’—Hannah grimaced—‘and looking like I’ve been attacked by a litter of angry cats without being incapacitated by a knife-wound in the heart. Although if this so-called doctor doesn’t hurry up, it’ll be his heart with a knife in it. Are you listening, Doctor?’
‘Yes.’ He pushed his glasses back up his nose, his finger trembling.
My mind clicked into place: so Hannah was planning on using the equivalent of my Disguise spell—except Iwas the one being evicted from my body, and shewas gong to be the one walking round in my skin.
Fuck.
Janet walked up to Hannah and looked down at my prone self. ‘But I should be able to heal you now I’ve got Granny’s powers,’ she pouted. ‘Granny was always good at healing things.’ She rubbed her hands together eagerly. ‘That way I get to stab the sidhe slut here. I’ve always wanted to do that.’
No way was I going to let this happen—only I couldn’t see how to stop it.
‘ Genny.’
I jerked towards the whisper, but couldn’t see anything.
‘Janet, dear,’ Hannah sniffed, ‘you’ve had Granny’s magic for a week now. So far, you’ve managed, what?’ She ticked them off on her fingers. ‘An invisibility shield that reflects in shop windows, an exploding flour-storm, and whatever that disgusting smelly spell was that you attached to Granny’s door—a spell which, incidentally, did nothing at all to stop dear Genevieve from getting into Granny’s flat while you were out buying children’s comics and nail polish.’
Her words registered in the part of my mind not panicking: Dumpy Janetwas Witch Wilcox’s granddaughter? The one who was staying with her?
‘Fairycakes kept on whingeing and crying. It was bugging me.’ Janet’s mouth turned down. ‘And it’s not my fault the dryads were waiting for the sidhe slut.’
‘Of course it was,’ Hannah said briskly. ‘The only reason they were chasing her was because you couldn’t stop that addlebrained sidhe from killing your baker boyfriend. All you had to do was get her to bespell him, just enough to put pressure on Genevieve, but oh no, you decide to have your own little orgy, Genevieve ends up wanted for murder, London’s fae think she’s ready to break their curse and you put all my plans at risk.’
‘ Genny,’ came the whisper again, closer this time, and a small, cold hand crept into mine and tugged. I looked down into the big dark eyes of Cosette, the ghost, and felt a shiver of fright crawl up my spine. ‘ You need to come with me, Genny,’ she whispered.
Did I? She’d helped me twice before, and sitting here wasn’t getting me anywhere, was it? I slid off the stone slab and followed her—stepping over a line of red sand that marked the edge of a circle—towards a dark corner.
‘Do you know how many strings I’ve had to pull to sort that murder charge out?’ Hannah carried on. ‘And how many promises I’ve had to make? If you hadn’t made such an almighty mess of things, we’d have had this spell done days ago, instead of having to rush things at the last minute.’
‘I didn’t mean to,’ came Janet’s sulky reply. ‘It all just got a bit out of hand.’
We reached the corner and stopped. It was just a corner. I was a little taken aback that it wasn’t some sort of help, or an escape route. I frowned down at Cosette. ‘What happens now?’
‘Now we watch,’ she said, amusement lighting her eyes. ‘Oh, and Genny, think some clothes on, please.’
Huh? I looked down and as I did, my missing jeans and T-shirt materialised around me.
Cosette patted my hand. ‘That’s a good girl.’ She didn’t sound like an eight-year-old, even one born a hundred years ago.
‘Start using your brain instead of worrying about who to let into your knickers,’ Hannah snapped at Janet. ‘If it wasn’t for the fact that you’re my little sister, I’d have offered your soul up to the demon long ago. And stop eating those bloody sweets; you don’t need them now. Granny’s magic is powerful enough without you adding sugar to it. You need to lose some of that fat you’re carrying round with you. Do that and you could have your pick of boyfriends instead of having to moon about after those ugly trolls all the time.’
‘Trolls are not ugly,’ Janet huffed.
Ugly! Pieces of the jigsaw started slotting together in my head.
‘You’re the Ancient One, aren’t you?’ I said to Cosette, looking down at her. ‘So what happened to the old crone look?’
‘You have a phobia about ghosts, Genny.’ Cosette gave me a knowing smile; it sat oddly on her little girl’s face. ‘I thought this would be a more acceptable manifestation with which to approach you.’
I shuddered. She was right; the chest wounds had been bad enough—if I’d met her ghost with its yellowed skull and maggot-filled eyes ...
‘I will explain,’ she continued, ‘but first we must watch the proceedings.’
‘Well, each to their own,’ Hannah was saying, drawing my attention back to the squabbling women, ‘but I’ll tell you what, after we’ve finished you can have a look at Darius, my pet vamp. I’m not going to need him any more after tonight, so you might as well have him.’
‘I don’t want your cast-offs,’ Janet pouted.
‘Sure you do,’ Hannah said firmly. ‘Darius is almost as big as a troll anyway, so he’ll be right up your street.’ She arched a perfectly drawn brow at Joseph. ‘Now, Doctor, are we done yet?’
‘She’s dead,’ Joseph said quietly, turning away to fiddle with a medical trolley next to his machines.
‘Right, now stay out the way, but don’tleave the circle, and remember what I told you. Make sure you do it, otherwise come midnight yours will be one of the souls going to the demon.’
Joseph crossed himself, his face pale.
It looked like he might be a goodie, which begged the question how in hell had Hannah got her claws in him?
Hannah loosened her robe and let it fall to the ground, leaving her wearing nothing but a gold locket on a chain around her neck. She stepped up to the altar and used a small step-stool to climb up and onto me, swinging a leg over until she was straddling my thighs. She stared down for a minute then cupped her own full breasts and sighed. ‘I’m going to miss my curves’—she gave my own smaller breasts a prod—‘but thank goodness for silicone.’
Shock slammed into me as I realised she wasn’t just going to be borrowingmy body. She was taking it over.
Permanently.
Hannah lifted her arms and removed the gold locket, opened it and placed it on my stomach, where it sat like a frozen butterfly. She waved at Janet, who hurried over, holding out a black embroidered cushion like a tray. ‘Your athame, Mistress.’
‘It’s not an athame, Janet,’ Hannah rebuked her. ‘It’s a very special knife, forged by the northern dwarves from cold iron and silver.’ She picked it up and ran a finger carefully along the thin blade. ‘It was tempered in dragon’s breath. The handle is carved from a unicorn’s horn, and this’—she smiled as she stroked the oval of clear amber set in its handle—‘this is a dragon’s tear.’