shart are the right words? Please?” I yelled, fear and anger about the only things keeping me upright as my energy level sunk with my body. What little magic I had left seemed to curl around me and the wraith, and it was as if I could see my words forced into the critter.
The wraith blinked down at me, its mouth moving even though it didn’t seem to want to speak. “Go and harm no more,” it finally said, writhing like a fish on a hook. “Damn youuuuu.”
I couldn’t find my knife. But my fingers brushed against the piece of leather I’d taken from the mansion. I pulled it out and the whip appeared in my hands, ethereal and shimmering. I snapped it forward and it wrapped around the wraith far tighter than it should have by my swing. The wrath screamed, body flailing against the hold of the whip. I yelled the words he’d given me. “Go and harm no more.”
He shrieked and fell away from me, and I was left there, puffing for air as the ground began to harden. The whip shrunk once more to a single piece of leather.
Shit, shit, shit! What was left of my strength was used to pull myself out of the hole I’d been stuffed into by the wraith. Covered in bits of dirt and tiny granules of rock, I lay on the pathway breathing hard. I could still hear Clovis and Louis chanting away, working on the tomb. I scooped up my gran’s amulet and tucked it into my pocket, but left Louis’s ring. Just in case.
I sat up with a groan in time to see a bolt of lightning arc out of the sky and strike the statue. The marble angel cracked right down the middle, falling as if in slow motion to either side.
Clovis laughed, his hands above his head as Louis crouched at his feet.
The necro wouldn’t find what he was looking for, and once he realized that, he would turn on me again. This was my chance to stop him. I just didn’t know how.
Breathing hard, sweating enough to make my own little ocean, I wobbled up to my feet. It had worked with the wraith, why not with the necromancer?
Flipping the knife into a throwing position, I snapped it toward Clovis with all I had as I spoke the same simple words. “Go and harm no more.”
The only problem?
Someone else stepped into the path of the spinning blade.
27
I yelped out a warning—too late—as Louis, who’d apparently seen this as his opportunity to run away, took my spinning blade in his right shoulder. He screamed and flung himself at Clovis, hugging the robed necromancer to him. The two of them tumbled into the gaping pit the lightning bolt had created when it split the angel statue in half. If this tomb was anything like its sister in Savannah, that hole went down a long, long way.
I didn’t know if I dared to go forward and check on them. I was out of weapons, out of strength, and limping worse with each step. I swallowed hard. “Jinx, you around?”
She did not answer me.
A ghost did.
Three of them to be exact.
They floated toward me, dressed in clothing that suggested they’d died in the mid-eighteen hundreds if I were to guess.
“You drove the necromancer away. Protected us.” The first, an elderly bald man, stopped right in front of me.
The middle ghost, a woman in a big hoop skirt, bobbed her head as she curtsied. “You stopped him for now. Well done, and with our apologies, you are welcome here.”
I clutched a hand around my middle. “Yeah, I just need to make sure he’s—” Dead? Gone? I wasn’t sure which would be better.
The third ghost, smaller than the other two, looked as if he’d died in his early teens. He had on short pants and shoes with giant buckles on them. “The necromancer is gone, but he is not dead. He will come for you again. You surprised him. Do not think to have that opportunity a second time.”
And without another word the three ghosts faded.
“Great,” I muttered, then drew a slow breath and tried again. “Jinx?”
There was a scuttling behind one of the tombstones, and she peeked up over the top of it. Once more a giant spider, she shook an appendage at me.
“You better run. They aren’t done with you.”
I twisted around and glanced toward the hole that Clovis and Louis had fallen into. I forced myself to limp