Black London 05 - Soul Trade

pouring into her eyes and nostrils and down her open gullet, choking her scream before it had a chance to be born.
    “Shit,” Pete said, only able to watch as the ghost of Mickey Martin poured itself like black, oily water into a brand-new body. She’d only met a few ghosts that could do that, and none of them had anyone’s best interest in mind. Exorcisms were hard enough when you wereonly dealing with a vapor.
    And yet, Pete thought as Brandi’s eyes clouded over with silver and she let out a choked moan, her limbs jerking and spasming as the ghost took control, it didn’t feel like a ghost. Pete wasn’t a psychic—that was Jack’s game—but ghosts felt like electricity, like lightning striking too close for comfort, like every ion in the room was awake and slamming against herskin. This was cold, and black, and bottomless, giving no sense that the thing inside Brandi Wolcott had ever been alive, never mind human.
    The one thought pounding through her head over and over was that Jack would never have let this happen. He’d have known something was off, and been ready for this thing that was not a ghost.
    Pete sidestepped as Brandi came for her, acrylic fingernails catchingand ripping at the front of Pete’s overcoat. Jack would never have let this happen, but he wasn’t here, so she was just going to have to make do with her own wits. They’d served her well enough for thirty-one odd years; they’d do for a few more minutes.
    Brandi came for her again. She was as fast and mean as a PCP addict, an inhuman sight with black energy spilling out of her eyes and her mouth,her face twisted in a grimace of perpetual agony.
    Pete amended that. If she managed to survive the next few minutes, then she could figure out how to end this.
    A headstone caught Pete at the knees and she fell, feeling her left arm twist under her, the ugly crunch of bone on stone resonating over Brandi’s ragged breathing and Pete’s own heartbeat.
    “Aren’t you pretty,” Brandi growled in theguttural tones of East London. The voice of Mickey Martin, made rough and hot with hatred. “Pretty enough to turn heads.” Brandi crouched over Pete, inhaling deeply at the nexus of Pete’s neck and shoulder. “I can smell it on you,” Brandi intoned. “Wickedness. Sin. The filth of the streets dripping off your skin.” She grinned, black spilling over her tongue and down across Pete’s cheek. “Going toenjoy slicing you open and watching it all bleed out.”
    Pete was glad Mickey Martin was a talker. It gave her time to plunge her hand into her opposite coat pocket and bring out her metal police baton. She tried to snap it open, but the bolt of lightning up her left arm told her that the plan was dead before it began. Her arm was sprained, at best. Shattered, at worst. Later. She could fix herarm later, when she was alive and away from here. Otherwise, they could arrange it in her casket so nobody would know. Either way, she had a more pressing problem.
    Instead, she wrapped her good hand around Brandi Wolcott’s neck and squeezed. Ghosts riding bodies needed life, breath. They weren’t zombies, hunks of corpse revived by a necromancer. So Pete squeezed, with every ounce of strengthleft in her.
    She expected that Mickey Martin would vacate Wolcott’s skin, and then she’d have a fighting chance to send him back to the Bleak Gates and the land of the dead beyond. She never expected the smoke pouring from Wolcott to wrap itself around her wrist and begin the slow crawl up her own arm.
    Not again, Pete’s mind screamed. Not this.
    She didn’t allow herself to give voice to thescream she felt bubbling up in her throat. When a nasty from beyond the beyond was bent on her flesh, panic was a luxury she didn’t have. She let the onslaught of the ghost’s form come, because it was better for her to be Mickey Martin’s victim than Wolcott. Wolcott didn’t know how to save herself.
    “You think this’ll end well for you?” Brandi growled as the black smoke overtook Pete’s hands,her arms, crept toward her mouth and throat.
    “Better than it will for you,” Pete rasped, as the first fingers of cold found their way over her tongue.
    The ghost of Mickey Martin didn’t feel right, as it bled out of Brandi Wolcott in a flood and rushed up at Pete’s consciousness. It didn’t feel like a ghost; it just felt hungry, and cold.
    This is wrong . Pete didn’t have to be a psychic or aprofessional exorcist to know when things had