“Me too,” Fell said. “Used most of the stuff I had in the back to make a barrier, keep the Eye back.”
“There’s a fuckton of salt on the road,” I said. “It’s not stopping the ghosts like it should.”
“Shepherd’s implement is the shepherd’s crook. Guides things,” Fell said. “Normal rules don’t apply for his ghosts.”
“Why is the Eye not approaching?”
“I bound it, kind of. It won’t hold.”
He slammed the car door. I saw the headlights flare as the engine started, then stopped short. Smoke billowed from the hood.
The ghosts were getting closer.
Fell rolled the window down. The car was old, and he had to manually crank a handle to roll it down.
“Slow them down,” he ordered.
“How? No salt.”
“Figure it out!”
He scrawled something on the dash in chalk, tried the car again. It didn’t start up.
Evan swooped by the ghosts. More snow and salt moved, a delay.
“I need something more,” I said.
“I’m trying to concentrate, Thorburn,” Fell said.
“This isn’t working. We need a tool. Do you have anything?”
“Can’t help you,” he barked out. He adjusted the rune, another failure to start.
“The Eye is making it worse faster than you’re making it better,” Rose said. “Leave the car?”
“I don’t need one of you fucking up my concentration, let alone the two!” Fell shouted. “Without the car, we won’t all be able to keep running! They will catch us! They don’t ever stop.”
I looked at the Eye of the Storm. It stood there, still, still burning in places from the fire earlier, eye glowing.
“Give me that powder?” I asked.
Fell glanced at me, annoyed, then grabbed a handful from his coat. He slapped it down into my hand.
I turned the bike around and accelerated, lurching as Tiff moved the wrong way and we went less than gracefully into the turn. I looped around the back of the car, towards the Eye, and I let the powder trail from my hand as I went. A thin cloud of Fell’s dust between the car and the Eye.
Trying to break the connection. A line of power to block the flow of things.
The effect was negligible. The car didn’t suddenly start, the smoke still billowed.
I used what remained to bar the path of the nearest group of ghosts. It was weak at best.
A woman-ghost screamed at me. Not the usual sort of scream, but the kind of howl that threw all caution and social grace to the wind. The kind that usually preceded an accident.
Fell’s powder seemed to dampen the effect. Pain still rocked through me, and Tiff slipped, hurling herself forward, her chin driving into my shoulder.
This was messy, stupid, and we were dealing with nigh-on inevitable forces. An immortal abomination and a whole lot of things intrinsically linked to death, which was about as inevitable as it got.
The spirits were crowded at the sidewalk, to the point that they were shoulder to shoulder. Only the strongest seemed able to make it over what was very hostile terrain to them. It was good we only had a few to deal with, it sucked that they were as potent as they were.
“Didn’t work!” I called out, as I pulled up to the passenger window.
“I know it didn’t work!” Fell shouted.
It was Rose who spoke, “How’s he doing this? The Shepherd?”
“I asked myself the same question,” I said.
“Still concentrating!” Fell said. His rune was now sprawled almost all the way across the dash. Interconnecting images.
“He’s got to have a weakness,” Rose said. “You don’t control this many Others this easily, even if they’re weak ghosts.”
The ghosts drew nearer, and as they did, they lowered our level of functioning. Distraction, disorientation, pain, panic, all flashing through our minds. It only ratcheted up the level of panic.
I could see Fell struggling, his hand shaking as he drew one line, licked his thumb to erase it, and drew it again.
“Uneasy departed!” Rose called out. She spoke from the car and bike mirrors. “In the name of the Thorburn Bloodline, with all the respect and history that name commands, I order you to cease!”
The ghosts around us stopped in their tracks, no longer drifting left and right to navigate a path. They were still, and the area was silent.
One even disappeared, frayed and worn enough that it couldn’t stand up to simple words.
“Was worth a try,” Rose said.
“It worked,” I said.
“It was still worth a try,” Ty said. “Keep going!”
But the Shepherd did something, eliciting a loud clack, and the ghosts resumed their movement.
“Stop!” Rose commanded.
They didn’t listen this time.
“Almost,” Fell said. “Almost done.”
I looked at the engine. If someone had raised the hood to reveal that the engine block was literally on fire, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
What the fuck was he doing?
“By the name of the Thorburns, by my ancestors, greater than me, I order to to be still!” Rose cried out.
I could see the momentary hesitation, as if the spirits were people who’d stepped out of an air conditioned house into oppressive heat, but they resumed movement all the same.
“Different tack,” I said.
“Okay,’ Rose said.
“What you did when you tried to bind the Abstract-”
“I know!” she said.
The vibration of my bike shifted. I looked down.
The temperature gauge was rising.
The Eye had set his sights on me.
“Four times, I will bid you to throw off the shackles your master has used to bind you!” Rose called out. “Let this be the first, spirits! I, Rose Thorburn, urge you to rebuke him!”
The Shepherd wasted no time. He dismissed the spirits. One by one, each ghost that that might have been in earshot disappeared. It only left one.
An apparent cancer victim. Bald, shirtless, with only pyjama bottoms on, staring at the ground.
Light began to streak towards it. Ghosts all being used to supercharge this one. To get it to explode, and visit us with it’s essence and means of death.
“For the second time, I rebuke you! Let my words have more power for the repeating!”
It’s not going to work fast enough.
The effect the spirits had on us was ratcheting up. I was hurting everywhere, but they were phantom pains. I felt like shit, but it was phantom feelings at play.
I knew because my feelings tended to hit me harder, a little more unforgiving.
I’d wanted to experience the kind of anger I could fight through and use it to fight harder.
This was as close as I’d get.
“Ty,” I said. “Sword.”
“That sword?”
“Yeah,” I said.
He had to twist around and reach down to the floor of the car behind the driver’s seat to grab it. He maneuvered it through the window.
“Tiff, off. Ride in the car.”
I pulled off my backpack and turned it around. Sword lying across my lap, salt-box over the handle so I didn’t gouge my thigh, my backpack at my chest instead of my back, pressing the flat of the blade down against my thighs as I leaned forward, hands on the handlebars.