Mercy Thompson 01-05 - THE MERCY THOMPSON COLLECTION

no one challenged him for territory.
    He shook his head. “No. And she’s dead, so he can’t borrow her talents anymore. She can still kill if he feeds her blood. But he can’t use her now like he used to before that old Indian man died. It’s not that she minds the killing, but she doesn’t like to do what he wants. Especially exactly what he wants and no more. He uses her for business, and business”—he licked his lips as if trying to remember the exact words Blackwood had used—“business is best conducted with precision.” He smiled, his eyes wide and innocent. They were blue. “She prefers bloodbaths, and she’s not above setting up the killing ground to point to James as the killer. She did that once, before he’d realized he wasn’t still controlling her. He was very unhappy.”
    â€œBlackwood had a walker,” I said, putting it together. “And he fed from him so he could control her—the lady who was just here.”
    â€œHer name is Catherine. I’m John.” The boy looked at a bucket, and it moved. “He was nice, Carson Twelve Spoons. He talked to me sometimes and told me stories. He told me that I shouldn’t have given myself to James, that I shouldn’t be James’s toy. That I should let myself go to the Great Spirit. That he would have been able to help me once.”
    He smiled at me, and this time I caught a hint of malice. “He was a bad Indian. When he was a boy, not much older than me, he killed a man to take his horse and wallet. It made him not able to do the things he should have been able to do. He couldn’t tell me what to do.”
    The malice freed me from the distracting pity I’d been feeling. And I saw what I’d missed the first time I’d looked him in the eye. And I knew the reason that this ghost was different from any I’d seen before.
    Ghosts are remnants of people who have died, what’s left after the soul goes on. They are mostly collections of memories given form. If they can interact, respond to outside stimuli, they tend to be fragments of the people they had been: obsessive fragments—like the ghosts of dogs who guard their masters’ old graves or the ghost I’d once seen who was looking for her puppy.
    Immediately after they die, though, sometimes they are different. I’ve seen it a couple of times at funerals, or in the house of someone who’s just passed away. Sometimes the newly dead keep watch over the living, as if to make sure that all is well with them. Those are more than remnants of the people they’d been—I can see the difference. I’ve always thought those are their souls.
    That was what I’d seen in Amber’s dead eyes. My stomach clenched. When you die, it should be a release. It wasn’t fair, wasn’t right, that Blackwood had somehow discovered a way to hold them past death.
    â€œDid Blackwood tell you to kill Chad?” I asked.
    His fists clenched. “He has everything. Everything. Books and toys.” His voice rose as he spoke. “He has a yellow car. Look at me. Look at me!” He was on his feet. He stared at me with wild eyes, but when he spoke again, he whispered. “He has everything, and I’m dead. Dead. Dead.” He disappeared abruptly, but the buckets scattered. One of them flew up and hit the bars of my cage and broke into chunks of tough orange plastic. A shard hit me and cut my arm.
    I wasn’t sure if that was supposed to be a yes or a no.
    Alone, I sat down on the bed and leaned against the cold cement wall. John the Ghost knew more about walkers than I did. I wondered if he’d told the truth: there was a moral code I had to follow to keep my abilities—which now seemed to include some sort of ability to control ghosts. Though, with my indifferent success at it, I suspected it was something that you had to practice to get right.
    I tried to figure out how that talent might help me get all of us prisoners out of there safely. I was still fretting when I heard people coming down the stairs: visitors.
    I stood up to welcome them.
    The visitors were fellow prisoners. And a zombie.
    Amber was chattering away about Chad’s next softball game as she led Corban, still obviously under thrall to the vampire, and Chad, who was following because there was nothing else for him to do. He had a bruise on the side of his face that he hadn’t had when