you can trust me to turn around?" I asked.
It was Black who had put the idea in my head, when he had suggested that he and I were somewhere near the same stratosphere in terms of ability. I had always seen death magic in one, fixed way, too much through the eyes of someone who had magic but wasn't completely comfortable with it, and didn't completely understand it. I tried to follow the laws of nature and physics, when magic was the third side of the triangle. All related, all connected, but not always in agreement.
There was more power in death than I realized. I was the old dog with plenty of new tricks to learn.
The bone vanished from my grip, fingers digging through soft earth at my intense urging.
I felt nauseous and dizzy as the thread that bound the soul to the bones and the bones to me began to stretch, from the skull still buried beneath the ground, to the hands that were now churning away on impossible missions of their own.
"What are you going to do? Throw a skeleton at me?" He chuckled, and I heard two men and a woman chuckle with him. There were more ghosts back beyond the hole, waiting in reserve in numbers too great for the dice to take them all.
I started turning. Slowly. My hand was still in the inside coat pocket, and I exchanged my grip on the mask for the handle of a gun.
Timing was everything.
I kept turning, pushing the magic, feeling the thread stretch. I could sense where the hands were, climbing upwards just beyond the lip of the hole, more than ready to do my will. Eager. Was that because of the age of the soul, the simple-mindedness? Or was it because of something else, like a spirit who resided in a pair of ancient artifacts?
My breathing was heavy, my urge to cough almost beyond my ability to control. My body was sore, my hands raw from digging, my head pounding from the effort of the magic. The chaotic orchestra of the magic surrounded me, screaming and whining and feeding me. I gripped the handle of the gun tighter, beginning to remove it from my coat. The two zombie hands reached towards the surface.
A shot echoed, and then one of the ghosts next to Tobias was thrown forward into the hole, almost on top of me. A second shot and the woman followed him. She did crash into me, knocking me backward, causing me to lose my grip on the gun, and on the magic. The thread remained, but the hands lost their power source and stopped moving.
Tobias whirled around, at the same time raising his hand in front of him and whispering something. Two more shots came, both pausing directly in front of the wizard before they could make contact.
You couldn't kill someone like Tobias with bullets without catching them completely by surprise.
He wasn't caught by surprise. In fact, he had reacted to the attack as though he were expecting it.
I didn't have to wonder who was shooting at him. There was only one answer to that.
The real question was: how the fuck had she gotten past Amos?
FIFTY-SIX
One foot in the grave.
I didn't have much time to think about it. Tobias reached back towards me, wrapping me up in his magic and pulling me roughly from the hole. I was held fast in empty air, carried to a position in front of him and then forced to my knees. He put his hand on my shoulder, and only then could I see what was happening.
Jin.
She was standing at the edge of the trees with all of the assembled ghost's guns trained on her. She held a gun in one hand, the Hua in the other. She was floating two feet off the ground, surrounded by flame.
"I was waiting for you," she said. Her voice was deeper, darker, and angrier than I had ever heard it. It was the power of the artifact, leaking out through her, making her into a force powerful enough to keep her House alive.
"And I, you," Tobias said. "I didn't think you would be able to let him wander off on his own. Not now."
What did that mean? "Jin, where's Amos?"
"Unconscious. Alive. He wouldn't let me come. I had to come, Baron."
"I have everything under control," I said.
"Let him go, and you can have it," Jin said. She dropped the gun and held out the Hua.
Tobias laughed. "I'm not stupid, Ms. Red.